MyATMPinIs1234

For a long time I have been horrified yet fascinated by the concept of Meta-Cognitive Dissonance (MCD). MCD is the term that I either made up, or heard somewhere, that describes the gap between peoples' intellectual capacity, and their self-perception of those abilities. There is a large body of research indicating that the more incompetent we are, the more we think we are superstars (or at least above average).

We all know these people. It's hard to watch sometimes. But the question is, since they obviously don't know they are the intellectual equivalent of a Jewish basketball player, how can we be sure that we are not one of them?

It's an extra dimension on top of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Not only is our analytical reasoning flawed because of defects and biases in our sensory apparatus, but even if we were able to sense the true nature of something, we might shank the analysis into the rough, but then wander around the middle of the fairway looking for it.

Fortunately, I have devised a test you can self-administer to diagnose MCD. Please answer the following questions:

1) Do you think you are smarter than George W. Bush?
2a) If no, you do not have MCD.
2b) If yes, do you think you could have been a fighter pilot and breeze through Harvard Business School while massively high on cocaine?

If you answer Yes to 2B, further testing will be required. If you answered No to 2B, you are at severe risk of MCD.

Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, hates poor people, old people, and America. The man takes an annual salary of $1, which conveniently allows him to skirt the 7.65% FICA tax that everyone else has to pay. When counting the employer contribution, he is stealing at least $15,000 from your grandparents. Is that the kind of person from whom you should be buying your cellphone or MP3 player? I think not.

In case you're worried about Mr. Jobs' ability to travel around the country on that low salary -- don't be. Apple reimbursed him $776,000 last year for operating his private plane. Remember that next time that shitbag talks about global warming.

Just in case there is any confusion, any item described during a television commercial as "clinically proven," is not clinically proven. That statement, is what's known in the advertising industry as a "lie" and is designed trick the consumer into buying something by implying there was science involved in its design or manufacture.

Some lame dude's blog said:

"My site is powered by Tumblr. The blog system for busy people"

Uh, isn't the whole point of blogging that you are totally bored out of your mind and not busy? If I was busy, I wouldn't be blogging, douche.

EHarmony: The worst case of false advertising since The Never Ending Story?

I haven't been on any dating websites, but I frequently see commercials on TV for a site called Eharmony.com. They profess to have a sophisticated algorithm that will match you with your soulmate. Unfortunately, Math disagrees.

I doubt Minister Thomas Bayes set out to prove that finding true love is next to impossible in his work, Essay Towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances (1764), but the application of his theorem has the potential to crush the hopes of lonely people everywhere.

You might wonder, as I did when I watched the EHarmony commercial, if I fill out that whole profile and they find a match for me based on 29 dimensions of compatibility, what is the probability that this match is actually my soulmate? Fortunately this is a straight-forward math problem.

But first, the assumptions:

1) The Eharmony algorithm is 95% sensitive. Given a soulmate, they will identify them as such 95% of the time.

2) The Eharmony algorithm is 95% specific. It generates only 5% false positives.

3) Your soulmate(s) are 1 out of every 1000 people.

(I'm probably being way too generous, but you'll see it doesn't matter. Specifically, this would mean you have something like 40k soulmates in the USA)

And now, the calculation (Bayes' Theorem):

P(SoulMate | Matched) = P(Matched | SoulMate) x P(SoulMate) / P(Matched)

P(Matched | SoulMate) = .95 (the sensitivity of the test)
P(SoulMate) = .001 (1 out of 1000)
P(Matched) = Valid Matches + False Positives = .95(.001) + .999(.05) = .0509

P(SoulMate given EH Match) = .95 * .001 / .0509 = 1.9%

So don't get your hopes up too much for the date, because if Eharmony says you are a match, they have a 1.9% chance of being right. The chances of getting laid are much higher, but dependent on a completely different set of variables.

I would like to propose the following reasonable step to fix the housing market, and in turn the mortgage backed securities market, and the general economy:

Pass a law allowing X number of foreigners to get an immediate green-card and expedited citizenship if they come and buy a house.

The increased demand for housing would stabilize prices, and as we know, it's the deflationary aspect that's really hurting us right now, as people refrain from purchasing with the expectation of lower prices in the future. The other proposed solutions would require huge taxpayer bailouts, or the trampling of contract and property rights, and probably wouldn't work anyway, since they would have no effect on prices.

Senator Clinton is like a modern day Canute, who thinks she can just legislate the tides of the housing market to obey.

"There's a long list of what I would've done" about the housing crisis, New York Sen. Clinton told reporters. She mentioned proposals to place a 90-day moratorium on home foreclosures, an interest-rate freeze on adjustable-rate mortgages and an expansion of the Federal Housing Administration.

You know what they say about the difference between theory and practice? There is no difference, in theory.

This needs to be kept in mind next time you decide to purchase the services of a prostitute. In theory, it's a great idea. For a reasonable amount of money you get to have sex with a woman more attractive than anyone you could land a date with, and then she leaves you alone in peace and doesn't stick around nagging you to go apple picking.

In practice, however, you pay a lot of money to have sex with a moderately attractive, formerly homeless, Jersey Shore piece of trash, who before she got to your hotel probably just got finished being railed without a condom by a disgusting sleezeball like Elliot Spitzer.

Help Wanted

Looking for college student who is "in the know" about new and cool musical acts. You should be the kind of the person that delights in being a fan of bands that no one has heard of yet, and then deriding them as being "too commercial" when they start to gain a fan-base outside of Brooklyn, Austin, or Seattle. Your tasks will include keeping the music section of my Facebook and Myspace profiles up to date with the latest and coolest bands. This should only take a few hours a week and can be done remotely. Please respond with your current Ipod playlist and salary requirements.

How an Engineer Would Solve the Housing Crisis*

There have been many horrible proposals for fixing the housing crisis. Most of them involve forcibly changing the terms of the mortgages and some measure of taxpayer bailout. These solutions are great if your goal is to encourage moral hazard, reward excess risk taking and greed, and to emulate Argentina's view of the sanctity of a contract.

So I began to think how this would be solved if it were an engineering problem.

Say a community has 100 houses of varying values that are currently in default and will soon be foreclosed. Give each family the choice of moving into their defaulted neighbor's cheaper house and have that mortgage assigned to them. In the optimal scenario, 99 families shift to a cheaper house they can afford at the same time, and turn 99 of those defaulted loans into performing loans again. The poorest family of the cohort is placed in an apartment and the most expensive house of the lot is sold off normally. Problem solved.

[* Disclosure: This is a sponsored post, paid for by the Moving Van Association of America]

I was in the elevator with very high level technology manager at the company. He was proudly telling his lackey about how another lackey completely re-wrote a Java library because the original one had "poor" performance. The original one, while not incredible, is being used by almost everyone else in the world.

This is what pisses me off about this place. Some idiot developer is probably here until 10pm every night making at least THREE of the worst mistakes in software development, and his boss (who is my boss's boss) thinks he's the greatest thing since sliced and quick-sorted bread.

What are the three mistakes this superstar is making?

1) The part of the code he's optimizing is probably not the bottleneck in the system. And it's almost certainly not the bottleneck in the entire business process (which includes all the human inputs and outputs and connections to other systems). Obviously, if it's not the bottleneck then improving it will not have any effect on the overall throughput.

2) He is spending relatively expensive developer time in order to save relatively cheap processor time. Having a programmer write and maintain this code costs a TON more than buying a bigger server.

3) The code he is re-writing has already been redone by many others and exists all over the internet for free. He is re-inventing the wheel, and probably for the worse.

This is exactly why there is 100x productivity gap between great developers and good developers. This guy probably spent weeks taking a late night car service home doing this. I would've downloaded the free version created by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and been done with everything by 11am Monday.

In 1999 we were in a technology bubble. Everyone knew it. When the bubble burst and NASDAQ crashed, it was the end of the world.

Except it wasn't the end of the world. Almost immediately the real estate bubble happened. Everyone knew it. By 2007, school crossing guards making $18k had 3 houses in California. Now it's crashed, and it's the end of the world.

So this time is it really the end of the world? Are commodity prices going through the roof because we are going into stagflation? Or are we about to enter the newest bubble in oil and gold?

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Hi, it's me again. You know this huge trade deficit that is causing us to have to sell everything that's not bolted down to China and The Middle East? The one that's caused by us consuming more than we produce? The one that's probably going to be exacerbated by these ridiculous stimulus checks whose goal is to have us consume even more and produce even less? Why don't we fix the problem by PRODUCING MORE instead?

Hey, what was the name of that type of economic policy that is aimed at increasing our production? It's been quite a while since it's been used so my memory is a little rusty. Oh that's right. It's called SUPPLY-SIDE ECONOMICS.

Great, now I just lost my remaining two readers.

I took a marketing class once and it was a fiasco. It was about 15 minutes worth of common sense onto which they overlayed 12 weeks of fake intellectual rigor. Yeah, I'm sure all the girls in the marketing departments are really decomposing the DuPont Model to figure out how to best boost ROA. Well maybe the ugly ones are, but the rest are just worried about how cute the product is.

But I'd really like to meet the chicks that did the advertising campaign for Propel fitness water. Their pitch is that it has 100 less calories than Vitamin Water, so you don't have to work out nearly as long to burn off the drink you consume during the workout. Of course by that lack of logic, you could just drink regular tap water, which has even fewer calories and will probably save you $2 to boot.

Or you could just do Linda, and the calories in your water will be the least of your problems.

Some times a phrase is so over-used it is clearly not funny anymore (see: Meyer, Andrew, 2007 Don't tase me, bro). Other times, the line in question slowly loses it's comedic punch due to gradual overuse and/or diminution of the talent level of users. An example of the latter is stating that an item or action "made me puke in my mouth a little bit." I was never a huge fan of this line in the first place. Based on my experience, puking in your mouth a little bit is usually the result of a poorly executed burp, not caused by seeing something unpleasant.

So the key is to pick a line that is not especially popular, waiting for an opportunity where it is particularly germane, and not going to the well so often it loses it's poignancy. That is the fine line I have been trying to walk for many years with the line, "I was told there would be no math."