May 2006 Archives

The valedictorian thingy was today. Everyone was invited to go to the school board for another pointless ceremony. I went to my trumpet rehersal instead. Jon realized that life was too short, and went to see our 2nd-ranked baseball team smash some other team by a wide margin in the first round of the playoffs. Allen decided that baseball was much more fun than sitting in some silly ceremony, so he decided to play in that very game. Some others went, and others had epiphanies about the utility of time.

It wasn't so bad, apparently. Greg and Colin told me that they managed to amuse themselves by not paying attention. Apparently we were, by far, the worst-dressed and had the worst attendence out of all the schools. Greg supposedly gave an extemporaneous speech for our school. I wanted to give the speech before I realized that I wasn't going. It's not often that one has the ears of the entire school board attentively listening. I wanted to give a satirical speech, attacking them for all of their transgressions against sanity, but unfortunately they only allowed speeches that pandered to their self-promoting goals.

It raises an interesting point. Does having seventeen valedictorians--more than all they other schools, except a tie with Grant, apparently--undermine the importance of the distinction? Or maybe it's just our school's characteristic arrogance and eccentricity that led us to treat this ceremony with disdain. Or perhaps the fact that our valedictorians are overwhelmingly (relatively) skewed toward being male, makes us more carefree as a whole? All of these are probably true to some extent. It is certainly true that the quantity of valedictorians degrades the meaning of the honor, but I don't think it really matters. If seventeen students are achieving perfect grades, and all happen to be doing so in the most advanced classes, why should we seek to reduce the number by imposing additional, arbitrary requirements? The only purpose of this would be to inflate the egos of those at the very top, at the expense of those just under them. Realistically, this does not need to happen (think of me, Jon, Leeor, Maxwell, Colin, et al.).

A more substantial issue that has some bearing on this matter is the problem of grade inflation. It is true that there are more students now with outstanding grades than ever before, but in our school I question whether this is the result of an actual lowering of academic standards over time, or merely a reflection of increasing academic competition. I really have no idea whether it has become easier to get an A at Wilson over the past 50 years. With that in mind, I sincerely believe that classes could be made more difficult, particularly by tracking students more and creating more variants of humanities courses. Still, I don't think that increasing the difficulty of classes by a reasonable amount would substantially change the number of valedictorians. Most of these people would be capable of receiving straight As in high school-level courses no matter what--unless some kind of regressive grading curves were instituted.

Anyone who thinks that 17 valedictorians is problematic should travel across the hills and down the slope to Westview where there are 75 valedictorians. And no, it's not because Asians are in the majority there, at least not entirely. Even with weighted GPAs, they consider anyone with 4.0 GPA or better to be a valedictorian, meaning one can get Bs in advanced classes and still make the honor. This kind of system is ridiculous not because it honors so many students, but because it has effectively lowered the bar for valedictorianism (it was instituted just this year). As long as our standards to not degrade like they have there, I see no problem in letting more people have the honor if more people happen to do well enough in school. And even with 17, we look like a class of dolts compared with last year's 21 valedictorians.

Jonathan Kadish brought up an interesting point when he was discussing the pricing of Apple's new MacBooks. The only differences between the $1299 and $1499 model is that the $1499 model comes in a black enclosure and has an 80GB hard drive, while the lower model is in a white case with a 60GB disk. Yet, upgrading the lower-end model to have an 80 GB only costs an additional $50, making the cost of a black enclosure $150. Rather absurd I think.

In the couple of economics courses that I have taken, I have generally best understood the material that was presented to me in a very mathematical way. I was pretty good at understanding all the graphs, and very mediocre at comprehending the material when it was described in long paragraphs. That's probably because I'm disposed to think fairly mathematically, because I'm a visual person, and because I'm pretty decent at connecting the two. The problem, however, is that (I think) many people (perhaps the majority) in the classes that I have taken, are the opposite, and that the economic models we learn at this level are so simple that writing the mathematical formalisms for them is a little silly when a bit of prose will do. Naturally though, I have this desire to turn it all into mathematics, because it's easier for me to understand it that way.

As we all know, the summer is approaching, and I am becoming profoundly unmotivated to work on school-relating projects. Even though my mother is away from home this weekend at my sister's graduation, and no one is home but me, I still get distracted absurdly easily nowadays when I try to work. In response to this, I now walk over to the library at Lewis and Clark and do most of my homework there, so that I can actually get a little accomplished. As you might imagine, I still get distracted there fairly easily because, well, there are hundreds of thousands of books everywhere, and some of them are bound to be pretty interesting. In response to my feelings on maths and economics, I have been taking breaks from writing by browsing the stacks on these subjects. In the process, I have come across the fascinating subject of finance theory. It's essentially the theory of how equity markets function, which is interesting to me because of my peripheral interest in the stock market. Today, I checked out an introduction to this so-called "financial engineering," and it really is fantastic stuff. Instead of being full of graphs and multiple regressions, the book is filled with of theorems and proofs. And it's fairly approachable material too. It seems that one can squeak by (at least in the book I got) with multivariate calculus, and just the tinist bit of differential equations and linear algebra (mostly just at the level of manipulating matrices).

It gets even better though: We all know that physicists are fairly bright people, and also that they're a tad arrogant. So, of course, physicists have marched into the field of finance theory brandishing a bunch of weapons from statistical mechanics, using them to attack the problem of how markets behave. They call this interdisciplinary field "econophysics." There are supposedly lots of problems with much of conventional finance theory, especially in the assumptions it makes. The assumption of rational expectations, for example, can apparently become slightly problematic when you consider that the stock market is replete with irrational exuberance every day. From what I gather, the main premise of econophysics is that financial markets are essentially chaotic systems that don't reach equilibria like conventional theory predicts. Instead, they use things like Brownian motion, Lévy somethingorothers, and various other devices from statistical mechanics to model these financial phenomena. Maybe it's a bit of a stretch to say that investors behave like gas bubbles, but it's very intriguing nonetheless.

When I describe my political philosophy to others, more than anything else, it is characterized as a highly utilitarian form of liberalism. I generally hold ethics in disdain and approve of welfare maximizing activity. Nixon and Clinton are my favorite presidents of the modern era by far, I think the one child policy was a good thing, and I fully support trade liberalization, to name a few examples. Yet, even with this strong utilitarian bias, I am utterly shocked with the degree to which the Bush administration has disposed of civil liberties in recent times. The warrentless wiretapping policy was questionable at best, but the recent disclosure of an NSA program that tracks millions of phone calls in the US is beyond reason.

My logic is fairly simple. In this country, there is a very strong constitutional and legal emphasis on the notion that a person is innocent until proven guilty. This restriction applies even before the government is allowed to employ the police power, per the fourth amendment, which mandates that a probable cause must exist before the government is granted the authority to conduct any sort of investigation. When the government is effectively amassing data for purposes like mining and mass analysis, it is essentially investigating the entire population, for which it has no probable cause. Yet, this sort of thing happens all of the time in reasonable cases. Consider the case of security checkpoints at courthouses and airports. At these locations everyone is searched, even though there is no probable cause. But the crucial difference is the purpose for which the power is being exercised. A security checkpoint has a very limited scope because it only exists to verify that each individual is not violating a short, well-known list of rules. While the NSA data collection efforts are also used to make sure that rules are not being violated, the information is used for broad investigational purposes also. This data can effectively be mined at will for whatever information the government seeks. The security checkpoint can only get the data on each individual that is relevant to making sure that their simple rules are not being violated, whereas the NSA has access to a host of data that most likely has absolutely nothing to do with criminal activity, and they are free to analyze it however they wish. Some may claim that the NSA places restrictions on their analysis of this data so as to not violate civil liberties, but unless there is considerably more oversight of these activities, there is no guarantee that infractions on civil liberties are not occuring.

This is just one more chapter in what I believe to be one of the most disastrous presidencies in the modern era. Bush has created spectacularly unsustainable foreign, social, and economic policy. My economics professor cited an Economist poll of American economists, of whom 80% said that if offered a job to work for president Bush, they would refuse. Bear in mind that economists are among the most conservative of academics. This furthers my theory that Bush does not actually represent true conservatism, but a perverse and intellectually indefensible form of neo-Evangelist popularism. The only bright sign on the horizon is that Congressional Republicans are beginning to correctly distance themselves from this very unfortunate man, hopefully realizing that there is no sanity to be found in supporting Bushism. Perverse indeed!

I'm in the middle of writing this paper on Brave New World using Marxist criticism for English. Firstly, Marxist criticism is a bit dull, but it really was my best option, considering that the other two available for the assignment were feminist and new historicist criticism. I was taking a mental stroll and three interesting thoughts occurred to me in the following succession.

I really like Brave New World, but quite honestly, it is not a particularly good book, and I'm not convinced of its literary merit. Huxley throws a lot of interesting insights into the work, but he does so (as in the rest of his novels) in an extremely didactic fashion that is not conducive to meaningful analysis at all. There is very little beneath the hood, so to speak. There is, however, a great deal above it, but it is primarily in the form of philosophical arguments between characters about the meaning of events that take place in the book. In effect, Huxley leaves nothing up to the reader to figure out. It makes it extraordinarily difficult to write a paper on, and I don't think it makes for an impressive work of fiction. It's more like a very good essay that has been fictionalized. There is little figurative depth, except perhaps at the very end. Sadly the end has little significance from a Marxist perspective.

After thinking through this, I checked myself slightly because I thought of an incisive idea/thesis. The novel portrays a society that is obsessed with happiness over all else. This sounds suspiciously similar to the manner in which our Western society is obsessed with liberty, often to the exclusion of other values. Hence one could make an extremely interesting (although probably not water-tight) argument that Huxley uses happiness in Brave New World to satirize freedom in present-day society. Clearly this was the furthest thing from Huxley's actual intention, but I think that there is a great deal of support for it and that it would yield lots of interesting analysis and perspectives on our current values and how they can be paradoxical. The main barrier to making this convincing is that happiness is far more extreme in Brave New World than it is in the present-day. Regardless, it is a heck of a lot more compelling than writing about the implications of social class differences and interactions.

This leads me to my final observation which is the idiocy of these literary "lenses" that are used in literary criticism. The main lesson that I gained from this assignment is that using these literary lenses is utterly worthless because it forces the reader to come into the book with a preconceived bias about the meaning. The reader thus shifts slightly away from truth-seeking argumentation to a more ideological style of analysis. Instead of looking for some true implication of the book, the reader only looks for evidence to support the pre-chosen topic of inquiry. Maybe this is no worse than my argument above that has nothing to do with Huxley's true intentions. As long as the argument is defensible, I suppose that it shouldn't matter. There just seems to be something aesthetically wrong with critical lenses. The best way I can describe it is by comparing it to general equilibrium and partial equilibrium models in economics. The critical lense seems like a partial equilibrium approach when a general equilibrium model would be more suited to the job. In other words, I think we should just all surrender all of this nonsense and become new critics. Although according to my English teacher, that would be nothing short of "insanity."

It used to be the case that I could belt out some amphigoric pontification whenever I pleased on this blog, and indeed I did. It seems these days, however, that it has been reduced to a mindless rant of ceaseless complaining and self-indulgent misery. In essence, the quality of my blogging has declined markedly since its peak, and this entry shall be another fine example of my pitiful decadence. In point of fact, my decay is nothing short of endemic. Today's failure pertained to two long tests. The first was the much-feared AP chemistry examination. While I did not feel raped by the test, it wasn't an experience I felt particularly good about either. It was one of those obnoxiously ambiguous feelings. Following this, I went to Reed to take my economics final. I did extraordinarily poorly on it--not because it was difficult, but because I am an utter imbecile and because I was a bit shaky on regional trade agreements due to my two days of absence from lecture. Absolutely imbecilic. It was made all the worse by the fact that when I took my test back to my professor's office she was very complementary and congratulatory of my performance and future attendence of Chicago, unaware of my true idiocy on the test despite my allusions to having performed miserably on it. She did mention, however, that I scored 6 out of 8 correctly on the true/false section, which was only the beginning of my stupidity.

I think I shall go for a run and then write. I only have 22,000 words left to go. I figured that writing about an insane person would be the perfect subject for the assignment.

I spent 15 minutes curled up in a fetal position on my bed yesterday, staring fearfully at my computer, trying to hide from my homework. I still have 6 hours of chemistry and economics tests to take tomorrow, and 22,000 words left to write before the term is up.

I have been overcome with an affliction so debilitating that I have lost even my motivation to any work at all. While the scrolling marquee sign in the cafeteria may have been worrying me for the past four years that I was contracting this disease, now I know what it is truly like. Senioritis is complete and total stasis. I can't do anything besides sit around, go for the occasional run, talk, and read. The problem is only compounded by a massive feeling of inadequacy that I have as a result of my desire that work be completed coupled with my stronger desire not to do it. Then I just feel worried and useless, which further reduces motivation. It is awful. AWFUL. To top it off, I have to write a 100-page novella, a 4-6-page paper on Brave New World, and take the chemistry AP test and an economics final, among other things over the next two and half weeks.

This is an interesting analysis, posted to the University of Chicago website, on the less glamorous (although I suppose it depends on one's point of view, to a certain degree) side of the quality of life there.

http://www.uchicago.edu/docs/education/quality2.html

Today was the day. I have spent quite some time working on this silly, coupled climate-carbon cycle model, so it was nice to see it go through to its culmination. Although it ended up being significantly simpler than I had intended, its results gave impressive results when validated against time series CO2 concentration and global temperature data from 1960 to 1996, using historical data for CO2 emissions during that period. I have not performed a rigorous sensitivity analysis, so the historical test was the only benchmark, but the model predictions for 2050 were very consistent with the middle range of other, more complex models, such as the one developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The results you ask? I fit the 1960-2002 anthropogenic CO2 emissions with a simple exponential regression, calculating an annual growth rate of 2.25%. If this pattern continues (perhaps this is unrealistic because of the imminent scarcity of oil, but I'm willing to wager that increases in coal and natural gas consumption are probable to make up the difference, per a substitution effect) then global mean temperature is predicted to increase by 1 degree Celsius, and the atmospheric CO2 concentration is computed to rise from 380 ppm to 616 ppm by 2050. If Kyoto is successful and emissions are held at its levels after the 2010-2012 goal (highly unlikely, at current rates), then the warming could be cut in half to 0.48 degrees, with an increase of CO2 concentration to 485 ppm. I also projected a simple scenario of decreasing carbon emissions beginning immediately, following an environmental Kuznets curve, and the warming is slowed to about 0.42 degrees and CO2 is held to about 474 ppm by 2050. My Kuznets curve projection represents the absolute, best-case scenario in my opinion. Its assumption is that CO2 emissions immediately start to decrease from today, following a pattern of decline that is roughly a mirror image of their increase. Such a scenario is perhaps lunacy, but as a thought-experiment it shows how our excessive emissions and the system's time delays have combined to create a very scary situation. In other words, climate change is here,I believe. While I don't feel comfortable extrapolating beyond 2050 with this model, it's worthwhile to note that the system does not reach equilibrium by 2050 under the Kuznets curve projection or the Kyoto projection.

Silly me! I have forgotten to tell you anything about the conference itself. I'll keep this brief. Essentially, it was a meeting of the Society for Organizational Learning Consortium Group: a group of businesses and NGOs that are interested in implementing environmentally sustainable business and social practices and policies as part of their business and political plans. As society adopts a more accurate view of economic interactions with the environment, and as environmental degradation continuous to come upon us, businesses such as these have become more interested in growth and earnings in a long- and very long-term perspective. Companies are starting to realize the self-evident fact that many environmental practices are linked to efficiency gains. Look at DuPont, for example. Some guy from that company pointed out that between 1990 and 2000, the corporation increased sales/revenue by about 30%, while simultaneously decreasing their total energy consumption. They saved $2 billion because of their energy efficiency gains, $2 billion that can be invested in R&D or further efficiency improvements. Environmentally-friendly practices, especially those focused around efficiency, are frequently capable of saving money and the globe at the same time.

While there were a lot of serious buzzwords and phrases thrown around (my personal favorite being “the communication multiplier”), it was a very interesting fusion of public and business policy. I have great hope that the cooperation between governmental, intergovernmental, and economic players is finally occurring, so that we may approach a more sustainable future. They loved my talk and model, probably mostly because I represented the next generation of people dealing with environmental degradation and I gave a fairly coherent and articulate perspective on it. Nothing I said was really profound (or “paradigm shifting” as they would say), but I think the mere act of having a younger person say it was appreciated most by the participants today.

Lastly, the experience gave me crucial insight on business processes versus the largely academic and political ones with which I have previously been acquainted. One significant observation I had was in relation to they way ideas are transmitted in a business environment, compared with my academic setting. My limited experience in academia is that rigorous criticism is applied to every idea, particularly new ones. So much criticism is often used, that some people (particularly students) interpret it as hostility. But criticism is wonderful. I have already expressed my opinions about that to you all. It seems to me that the academic process is one in which people consistently try to estimate and prove truths in the world, and the only way to find out if these attempts are indeed truthful is by doing everything possible to disprove them. School, and particularly my relationships with Jonathan and Leeor have made me into a fairly skeptical and critical person in this mold. In contrast, ideas in the business world are greeted with a great deal more enthusiasm. Rather than seeking to prove the ideas by trying to destroy them, the business world only cares about implementing things that might make money. Instead of, asking the question “Is it true, and if so, what truths can we derive from it?” ideas seem to be greeted with the question “How can we make it work?” In essence, the intellectual burden of proof for ideas is typically much lower in the business world than in the academic world, I think. The truth (no pun intended) of the matter is that I remain mentally wedded to this idea of hypercriticism and valuing ideas for their own sake, rather than appreciating their implementation. Ergo, I am a bad fit for all of this business stuff in general. I think there are few realms of the business world that are analytic enough for my liking, such as financial modeling and stocks, but these are a minority. Perhaps I am to dry and ponderous for it all.. I suppose that will make me a foolish person—or more probably, a modestly poor one.

Nonetheless, today's events truly opened my eyes to this fascinating and heartening synergy (I'm picking up buzzwords now) of all the elements needed for positive change in environmental and economic policy.