David Hugh-Jones' blog

Modelling

2009-07-12T11:28:00.006+01:00

(Apologies for the rhymes...)

Malaysia’s as black as a coalface;
So’s Iran; and our own democrats
Fly in victims to fill Bagram airbase.
I think my epsilons need hats.

I can’t turn the world with a letter
Or integrate beatings with bats,
Explain things till worser seems better:
But I can give my epsilons hats.

While I construct castles of sand art
From the stylized and hideous facts,
The world’s off to hell in a handcart.
Best give those epsilons some hats!

Work in progress

2009-07-06T15:20:00.003+01:00

I've also just uploaded some early "work in progress" on political competition. This is much more mainstream political science, asking the question: how might increasing competition between states for footloose citizens affect democratic institutions within each state? We've got a very simple model and some initial empirics. Still, I'm pretty excited about the paper. Take a look here, but be warned, it's not very polished!

The anonymity paper

2009-07-06T14:50:00.006+01:00

I thought I'd fulfil my promise to blog about the paper on anonymity, with David Reinstein, which we updated a few days back. It starts from a worry about the "costly signalling" theory of religion and ritual - the idea that people take part in collective activities, like rain dances and church fetes, so as to show their commitment to a particular group. Costly signalling theory comes out of game theory and has had a big impact in both social and biological sciences.

Fine... but if the penalties for not taking part are high, perhaps because the group excludes you, then there are big incentives to take part even if you aren't really committed. We propose that in some cases making the activity anonymous solves this problem. The example in the paper is "Secret Santa", which I saw for the first time at Essex. My fellow PhD students gathered together and drew names out of a hat, then each of us set off to spend £5 on a present for our name. Come Christmas, we all got our presents, but nobody knew who was the giver. The nice thing about Secret Santa is that when other people get you something thoughtful, it's truly anonymous: there's no selfish motive to show off. So you end up (hopefully) learning that your peers really are nice people.

This paper owes something to my undergraduate SPS degree, which included a year of anthropology. In fact, the original idea for the paper came from the Kula Ring institution, though we've dropped that example. But we include other examples from small-scale societies (which are especially likely to need collective solidarity): in particular, song and dance. The main interest of the paper, for me, is the insight it may offer into these very ancient forms of culture, and how they support human cooperation.

At a less exotic level, we think that the model offers some insight into why anonymous donations might be the norm in certain collective projects. When my mother's village raised money to turn the field in front of the church into a village green, they put up a sign with the amount raised so far, but they did not announce individual donations. That's not the sort of thing you do in Kingsland.

I and David Reinstein decided to test this in the lab: we ran some two-stage public goods games, in which small groups are asked to donate money to a common cause which benefits all group members. In one treatment, the first stage was anonymous so players didn't know who gave what. In the other, "revealed" treatment, amounts given were linked to player numbers. Both treatments allowed for certain players to be excluded by the others' choice.

Not surprisingly, in the revealed treatment, the lowest givers often got excluded, and as a result, stage one donations went up. But more surprisingly, stage two donations went down. Our theory explains it like this: in the anonymous treatment, players could observe stage one donations and figure out whether their fellow group members were likely to make big donations in stage two; if so, then they too would do that. (People are prepared to play nice so long as others play nice also - in the jargon, they are conditional cooperators.) In the revealed treatment, on the other hand, everybody was giving a lot in stage one just to avoid being excluded. But then nobody knew what to expect in stage two, and not wanting to be the sucker in a group full of meanies, they gave less.

Here's my favourite plot from the paper, showing stage one and stage two donations in each treatment. (Bubble size shows how many people made each combination of donations.) The anonymous treatment is on the left: you can see that guys who donated a lot in stage one did the same in stage two. On the right this is much less true: in fact many people gave 2 or even the maximum 4 in stage one, then nothing in stage two.

(The paper is on my website. My Secret Santa present was a rubber stamp, for marking students' essays, with the words "COMPLETE AND UTTER BULLSHIT". It was just what I needed. Thanks, guys.)

New working paper

2009-07-01T17:57:00.003+01:00

I and David Reinstein have got a working paper out for our project on anonymity and cooperation. See here or download the paper directly here. I'll post more about it soon.

Am I missing something?

2009-06-18T08:03:00.003+01:00

So what's the actual evidence that the Iranian elections were fraudulent?

The National Post reports a poll that put Ahmadinejad ahead by 2 to 1. There's a statistical analysis here which basically gives no answer. (It looks for evidence of made-up poll numbers and finds none; it finds deviations in favour of Ahmanidejad compared to a model based on 2005 election results, and on growth in turnout, in certain areas. That could be for a hundred reasons (think about trying to estimate a model of the recent Euro elections, based on turnout and 2005 results).

I can't stand Ahmadinejad and I wouldn't be at all surprised if the election was rigged, but where is the evidence?

Pop quiz

2009-06-16T23:18:00.002+01:00

Which brilliant young evolutionary economist said the following recently?

XXXXX: 13.30-15.00
Motion: Let it be resolved that this conference believes that the notion of prediction has high value as a criterion for research in social sciences.
[00:12:01] … i'll tell you who will win...
[00:12:29] David Hugh-Jones: go on
[00:12:53] XXXXX: ?
[00:13:01] David Hugh-Jones: who will win?
[00:13:13] XXXXX: well, that is the motion
[00:13:27] … the conference vote about it at the beginning
[00:13:44] … i'll vote against, of course

Presentation

2009-06-13T08:04:00.005+01:00

I put up the presentation that I gave at the M-BEES conference on my website. The first slides are a bit cryptic. In order:

Title slide.
Families watch striking miners return to work. Strikes are a good example of the need to cooperate outside of a contractual framework.
Worshippers at a church in Virginia. Religion and rituals have been explained as costly signals of commitment to a particular group.
Simeon Stylites, who spent 37 years on top of a pillar. Costly signalling can be very costly.
Still from There Will Be Blood. But if it's not costly enough, it fails to deter selfish people from entering the community. (You'll know what I mean if you've seen the film.)
Examples of anonymous rituals: marching and uniforms.
Examples of anonymous rituals: music. Gertrude Bell has a fabulous quote on this which is in the powerpoint notes.
More examples: church donations, Secret Santa, anonymous voting.
... and applause. (Spot the Stalin connection.)

After that it gets more ordinary.

The guardian's data blog is quite fun

2009-06-12T17:41:00.009+01:00

I did this as a break from the actual real empirics I'm doing. Needless to say, you'd be crazy to take this seriously. I was hoping to see the opposite: Mum's a strong UKIP supporter and I figured they would be substitutes. Maybe in the individual voting calculus they are (the data points are constituencies).

Life imitates Facebook

2009-05-25T18:36:00.002+01:00

I've been given a piece of yeast in order to make a cake. After I bake it I have to hand on the yeast to 3 other people. The process takes five days, and you're not allowed to do it more than once. So if 4^16 = 4 billion roughly, in about 3 months everybody in the world will have had this yeast.

It says it's from the Vatican and will bring me luck and fulfilment. I suppose I will be filled full of cake so that is a kind of fulfilment. Anyway I am obeying its instructions, only wooden spoons, no fridge.

My conclusions are thus:

1. Surely it's highly hypocritical that Church leaders criticize the greed of hard-working business executives. And yet here they are endorsing a cake-based Ponzi scheme. It seems there's one law for us and another for the Reverends.

2. If you are Al-Qaeda, don't bother flying planes into buildings. Just stick some slowacting Anthrax into a bag of yeast and send it on with a message saying "send this cake to 5 dear loved ones for happiness". Civilization destroyed in a jiffy.

haircut

2009-05-25T18:33:00.002+01:00

I went to the hairdresser today. She gave me a pitying look and said "shall we leave it long around the top?" That's the second time that's happened.

I guess there's some conspiracy among hairdressers to keep balding men's hair long. To keep us kidding ourselves, so we don't go and shave it all off with a Number One.

I'm not going to go back there again. Those people are so tactless.

plastic

2009-04-25T13:30:00.003+01:00

Very interesting Daily Telegraph article about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. I think a lot of us have virtuously given up plastic shopping bags, but simultaneously started to drink mineral water in plastic bottles, which end up in the ocean. I will try to cut down on that.

Hmm, songs about plastic:
Plastic Fantastic Lover - Jefferson Airplane
Plasticman - Kinks
How I Wrote Plastic Man - The Fall. Actually it's called How I Wrote Elastic Man but he sings "plastic man".

New paper up on my website

2009-03-13T14:31:00.003Z

... at davidhughjones.googlepages.com (or download directly). This is an early draft which I'll present at MPSA. It tackles the question of why people go to war. Essentially it provides microfoundations for thinking that the decision to fight is like a Stag Hunt, rather than a Prisoner's Dilemma. (Stag Hunts are relatively benign collective action problems, in which everyone is willing to cooperate so long as everybody else does.) Most people's intuition is that war is a PD. I try to show this is not always the case. Along the way, I provide a very simple model of the social construction of ethnic identity, handwave vaguely at endogenizing ethnic boundaries, and say mean things about Social Dominance Theory.

3 years for throwing a shoe?

2009-03-12T15:45:00.001Z

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/4979586/Shoe-throwing-Iraqi-journalist-sentenced-to-3-years-in-prison.html

Compare and contrast

2009-02-21T06:49:00.001Z

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7902107.stm

http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/1893554546/ref=sib_fs_top?ie=UTF8&p=S043&checkSum=O17Z5DlhpdF6N9bp%2FHpvGrSuS61eb%2F3xjfEXUdD8gOQ%3D#reader-link

"and so I appeal to your fatherly feelings to forgive me"

2008-12-18T18:04:00.001Z

Hurrah, I'm incredibly proud of the awesome democracy we've created in Iraq.

Go sign this petition!

2008-12-13T13:29:00.000Z

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/Overseasstudent/
via
http://blogs.ft.com/maverecon/2008/12/sleepwalking-into-a-police-state/#more-383

Peter Simple is writing for the Press Association

2008-12-04T18:17:00.004Z

Bad news from Stretchford, as Santa Punch-up Park is closed.

Was this a seasonal amenity of lovely, sex-maniac haunted Sadcake Park?

Coalitional signalling

2008-11-24T11:21:00.001Z

There at the top, on the edge of the castle moat we found a group of Druzes, young men and boys, standing in a circle and singing a terrible song. They were all armed and most of them carried bare swords. "Oh Lord our God, upon them! upon them!" I too joined the circle with my guide. "Let the child leave his mother's side. Let the young man mount and be gone." Over and over again they repeated a single phrase. Then half a dozen or so stepped into the circle, each shaking his club or his drawn sword in the face of those standing round. "Are you a good man? are you a true man? are you valiant?" they shouted. "Ha! ha!" came the answer, and the swords glistened and quivered in the moonlight. Then several came up to me and saluted me. "Upon thee be peace" they said "the English and the Druze are one." I said: "Praise be to God! we too are a fighting race." And if you had listened to that song you would know that the finest thing in the world is to go out and kill your enemy.

Gertrude Bell, Letters

2008-11-22T16:53:00.000Z

Tibetans Stay With Conciliatory Approach to China

Meme

2008-11-22T10:07:00.002Z

Rules:
* Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
* Turn to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post that sentence along with these instructions in a note to your wall.

For me: "Very probably the occupational, ethnic, and other subgroups that combined to form Sumerian (and other subsequent) cities and civilizations danced together among themselves on appropriate occasions" (a classic evolutionary Just So Story from Keeping Together In Time by William H. McNeill.)

A million?

2008-11-15T17:03:00.001Z

UK's 'secure' child protection database will be open to one million

ContactPoint is now scheduled to launch in January. It will store and share data including every child's name, home address and school, and information about their legal guardians...

Quantum frigidum estne illud!

2008-11-10T19:10:00.001Z

Wikipedia in Latin. Scilicet!

Nothing new under the sun, part II

2008-11-09T11:09:00.003Z

At one point in the proceedings, Bishop Turner rose to the podium and thundered a diatribe against legalized U.S. racism, prompting the Constitution to report "He Prefers Hell To United States; Calls American Flag Dirty and Contemptible Rag." ... Turner wrote to the Constitution a letter accusing them of misquotation but reiterating, "there was more color babble in the United States than in hell itself."
-- Mark Bauerlein, Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta 1906

2008-10-30T20:37:00.002Z

Dammit, even the Economist is against me.

When Obama wins, I'll probably feel kind of excited. But every time I read his election plans and McCain's, I think "McCain's are better".

As for Obama: well I'd call it 55-45. 55% he's a Clinton. 45% he's a Carter. What worries me about the guy is that he's got ideas. That's a terrible thing for a politician. Politicians should just have instincts.

Royal prerogative

2008-10-23T09:44:00.002+01:00

Once a harmless and colourful anachronism. Now, AKA "we can do what we like".