Not everybody knows your rules

Friday, November 10th, 2017

Seinfeld co-creator Larry David did something during his Saturday Night Live monologue that is almost unknown in 21st-century America, Steve Sailer reports. He engaged in Jewish self-criticism in front of gentiles:

It’s hardly surprising that David would be the one to stumble upon this prime directive of contemporary culture: Don’t recognize Jewish patterns.

Both Seinfeld and David’s subsequent HBO series Curb Your Enthusiasm are shows about rules, about the descendants of shtetl dwellers awkwardly adrift in a world without an all-encompassing set of laws itemized in the Talmud. David’s characters are constantly either getting in trouble for violating rules that they didn’t know existed or are outraged that other people aren’t aware of rules that seem obvious to them.

As Larry’s blond wife on Curb explains to him in exasperation after his attempt to enforce his assumption that the cutoff for Halloween trick-or-treating ought to be age 13 ends in disaster:

You know what? Not everybody knows your rules, Larry. You’ve got your own set of rules and you think everyone’s going to adhere to them, but they’re not because nobody knows them.

On SNL, Larry, who is now 70, was appealing to an older Jewish-American rule that the most obvious way for Jews to avoid criticism for stereotypically Jewish failings, such as exploiting shiksas as if they were members of a different tribe, is to try to behave better.

[...]

In other words, show some shame. And don’t try to shame everybody else.

[...]

It’s worth observing that White Guilt and Jewish Guilt are diametrically opposite. White Guilt is the worry that your ancestors were too ethnocentric, but Jewish Guilt, as given its classic formulation in Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, is the concern that you aren’t ethnocentric enough for your ancestors.

[...]

One common explanation for why nobody, not even Larry David, is supposed to joke about Jewish tendencies is because Jews are so powerless.

An alternative and perhaps more plausible answer is because Jews are so powerful.

[...]

Indeed, much of the Late Obama Age Collapse of the progressive coalition into squabbling factions seems to be focused on heavily Jewish institutions such as Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and the universities. There isn’t all that much wealth left in red-state America for identity-politics groups to strip-mine, so their claws are now out for the wealthy institutions of blue-state America, whose leaderships are, of course, quite Jewish.

It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. An intelligent people should be able to sidestep these kinds of self-inflicted disasters. But when you make your highest priority keeping everybody else unaware, you wind up intellectually disarming yourselves as well.

False-flag operations plainly exist

Thursday, November 9th, 2017

False Flags plainly exist, John Schindler notes:

In recent years, I’ve exposed several such cases, including how East German intelligence was behind a notorious “right-wing” assassination in Cold War Berlin, how Yugoslav intelligence masterminded a False Flag bombing in New York in 1975, how a still-unidentified third party was really behind the destruction of a Swiss airliner in 1970, and most notoriously, how the Algerian military regime in the 1990s bloodily defeated jihadists with a massive deception operation employing numerous False Flags.

[...]

Therefore, [the La Penca bombing] was a False Flag terrorist attack — yet the exact opposite of what left-wing activists claimed. Thirty-three years ago, at La Penca, the Sandinistas blew up 22 people, killing seven, to blame it on the Americans and the CIA — not the other way around. Given that Sandinista intelligence was trained by the KGB in provocation and deception, this does not surprise the initiated.

Bacterial fats deserve the blame for heart disease

Wednesday, November 8th, 2017

Heart disease is associated with clogged arteries, but it may be bacterial Fats, not dietary ones, that deserve the blame:

Using careful chemical analysis of atheromas collected from patients by a colleague at Hartford Hospital, they found lipids with a chemical signature unlike those from animals at all. Instead, these strange lipids come from a specific family of bacteria.

“I always call them greasy bugs because they make so much lipid. They are constantly shedding tiny blebs of lipids. Looks like bunches of grapes,” on a bacterial scale, says Frank Nichols, a UConn Health periodontist who studies the link between gum disease and atherosclerosis. The bacteria, called Bacteroidetes, make distinctive fats. The molecules have unusual fatty acids with branched chains and odd numbers of carbons (mammals typically don’t make either branched chain fatty acids or fatty acids with odd numbers of carbons).

Xudong Yao, a UConn associate professor of chemistry who analyzed the lipid samples, says the chemical differences between bacterial and human lipids result in subtle weight differences between the molecules. “We used these weight differences and modern mass spectrometers to selectively measure the quantity of the bacterial lipids in human samples to link the lipids to atherosclerosis,” he says. “Establishment of such a link is a first step to mark the lipids as indicators for early disease diagnosis.”

The marked chemical differences between Bacteroidetes lipids and the human body’s native lipids may be the reason they cause disease, suggests Nichols. The immune cells that initially stick to the blood vessel walls and collect the lipids recognize them as foreign. These immune cells react to the lipids and set off alarm bells.

Nichols and Yao’s team also showed that despite being non-native lipids, the Bacteroidetes lipids could be broken down by an enzyme in the body that processes lipids into the starting material to make inflammation-enhancing molecules. So the Bacteroidetes lipids have a double whammy on the blood vessels: the immune system sees them as a signal of bacterial invasion, and then enzymes break them down and super-charge the inflammation.

Despite the havoc they wreak, it’s not the Bacteroidetes bacteria themselves invading. Usually these bacteria stay happily in the mouth and gastrointestinal tract. If conditions are right, they can cause gum disease in the mouth, but not infect the blood vessels. But the lipids they produce pass easily through cell walls and into the bloodstream.

The next step in the research is to analyze thin slices of atheroma to localize exactly where the bacterial lipids are accumulating. If they can show the Bacteroidetes-specific lipids are accumulating within the atheroma, but not in the normal artery wall, that would be convincing evidence that these unusual lipids are associated specifically with atheroma formation, and therefore contribute to heart disease.

(Hat tip to Mangan.)

Runaway national fragmentation is inevitable

Tuesday, November 7th, 2017

One of the strongest and most consistent geopolitical trends of the past 200 years has been an explosion in national entities, Anatoly Karlin notes:

But it wasn’t always like this. I don’t know if anybody has quantified this precisely, but the number of states or state-like entities in the world must have constituted many thousands during the medieval and Early Modern periods.

historical-number-of-countries

Just the territories of the Holy Roman Empire at times accounted for more than a thousand!

map-holy-roman-empire

Then the rise of the great gunpowder empires and European colonialism rapidly whittled down the numbers of independent states to a few dozens, with even the Latin American independence movements of the 19th century making nary a blimp at the global level.

But then the 20th century saw the collapse of the European monarchic empires, the emergence of national self-determination as a legitimate consideration in international law, the decolonization of the Third World, and the collapse of Communist federative states such as Yugoslavia and the USSR. The number of independent states, including unrecognized de facto polities, now numbers over 200.

[...]

Consequently, under a liberal globalism that is true to its ideals, that is, one free of authoritarian coercion or Malthusian selection for big strong states, it appears that runaway national fragmentation is inevitable.

Americans have never eaten much fruit

Monday, November 6th, 2017

Humans did not evolve to eat modern sugary fruit year round in abundance, Mangan notes, and even in the early modern era it wasn’t a large part of the diet:

In the 18th and 19th centuries, Americans did not eat very much in the way of fruits and vegetables. Meat was abundant, and even the poor ate plenty of it. Fruits and vegetables had a short growing season and were ripe for only a short period of time, and in the absence of refrigeration and transport, spoiled, as Nina Techolz writes:

Even in the warmer months, fruit and salad were avoided, for fear of cholera. (Only with the Civil War did the canning industry flourish, and then only for a handful of vegetables, the most common of which were sweet corn, tomatoes, and peas.)

So it would be “incorrect to describe Americans as great eaters of either [fruits or vegetables],” wrote the historians Waverly Root and Rich­ard de Rochemont. Although a vegetarian movement did establish itself in the United States by 1870, the general mistrust of these fresh foods, which spoiled so easily and could carry disease, did not dissipate until after World War I, with the advent of the home refrigerator. By these accounts, for the first 250 years of American history, the entire nation would have earned a failing grade according to our modern mainstream nutritional advice.

What about apples — fruit, obviously — didn’t Americans eat them? Johnny Appleseed is famous for spreading apple trees around the country. But it turns out that much of the apple crop was turned into apple cider. Not only did cider provide alcohol, but it’s a way to preserve and concentrate apples in the absence of refrigeration and transport.

Wild Bananas

Fruits (and vegetables) are thought to be healthy due to the phytochemicals, namely polyphenols, that they contain:

However, coffee, tea, red wine, and chocolate all generally provide far more polyphenols than fruit. With the exception of chocolate, they have the added benefit of being entirely sugar-free, and even chocolate can be consumed without sugar or in low-sugar forms such as dark chocolate. So, if you want to consume polyphenols, and you consume coffee, etc., then fruit would be superfluous.

From feeling old to feeling young

Monday, November 6th, 2017

At age 72, Dr. Alan S. Green saw miraculous improvement in health, from feeling old to feeling young, after taking rapamycin once per week:

I attended college on a tennis scholarship and ran a marathon in just under 4 hours at age 40. But by age 70 my main physical activity was reduced to walking my two Shiba Innu dogs in the park. Then by age 72, I experienced angina and shortness of breath on small hills. As a trained pathologist I accepted the reality that I was in rather poor shape. My fasting blood sugar was up, my creatinine blood level was elevated indicating renal insufficiency and I couldn’t fit into any of my pants. I then began trying to learn about aging. I discovered a story more extraordinary and improbable than anything I had ever encountered in my lifetime.

[...]

Based upon empirical medicine principles, I decided rapamycin 6 mg once a week would be an aggressive treatment and 3 mg once every 10 days would be a conservative treatment. I decided to go with aggressive treatment. January 2016, I began the rapamycin-based Koschei formula with intent to take it for one year; in what could euphemistically be called a “proof-of-concept” experiment. I didn’t have to wait one year; by 4 months the results were miraculous. I lost 20 pounds, my waist-line went from 38 inches to 33. I bought a pair of size 32 jeans and didn’t have to wear joggers no more. I could walk 5 miles a day and ride a bike up hills without any hint of angina. Creatinine went from elevated to normal and fasting blood sugar went down. I thought I was Lazarus back from the dead. It’s now over 1 year and I feel great. I’ve also had no mouth sores, the most common clinical side-effect. For me, rapamycin is the world’s greatest medicine.

Dennis Mangan asked Dr. Green a number of questions:

PDM: I note that of the drugs you advocate for anti-aging, metformin, aspirin, and ACE inhibitors/AR blockers are cheap, while rapamycin is more expensive. Does any other drug come close to rapamycin in efficacy or is it indispensable? Of the four drugs, what fraction of anti-aging effect is due to rapamycin in your estimation?

ASG: Rapamycin is only $3.50 for 1 mg if you buy it on line with a prescription from Canada; therefore monthly cost might come to $50-100 a month.

My rough guess of the relative value of each as anti-aging drug would be as follows: rapamycin, ACE inhibitor/AR blocker, metformin, aspirin: 75, 18, 6, 1.

[...]

PDM: I was fascinated to learn about angiotensin disruption for anti-aging, which I’m not sure if I had heard of before, and also that it fits the growth vs longevity paradigm. (On second thought, I had heard of it, but I forgot. Must be the effects of age.) Do you think hypertension is a “normal” manifestation of aging and that everyone can expect to have it to some degree as they age?

ASG: The two best characterized systems which promote aging are the mTOR system and the angiotensin-renin system. Angiotensin II is the primary cause of hypertension; but angiotensin II also promotes atherosclerosis, damage to mitochondria and increase ROS in tissues. I think all older persons probably suffer from higher activity from angiotensin II than is healthy. So probably most old people had some degree of hypertension and they would benefit from being on angiotensin blocker/inhibitor (ARB/ACE). The important thing is to use one that crosses blood-brain barrier.

Jocko interviews Jordan Peterson

Sunday, November 5th, 2017

Jocko interviews Jordan Peterson. Self-recommending, although you may not enjoy the gruesome intro:

The fascist that Germany’s baby boomers loathed

Sunday, November 5th, 2017

What if everything you know is wrong?, John Schindler asks:

Back in the spring of 1967, West Germany was enjoying a wave of student protests of the sort then causing annoyance across much of the Western world as the baby boomers came of age, crankily, and acted out in public. On the evening of June 2, a big demo in West Berlin protesting the visit of the Shah of Iran, who was in town that night seeing an opera, got out of hand. Police were jumpy and soon the demo was verging on something ugly. Then a twenty-six year old student named Benno Ohnesorg was shot in the back of the head by a policeman — for no reason, according to his friends. Ohnesorg died at this, his first demo, leaving behind a pregnant young wife.

Outrage ensued, not least because the protestors claimed that the unarmed Ohnesorg had been murdered by the police without cause; no one under thirty believed the policeman when he said that he had seen a knife and had to defend himself. For a generation, the murder became “the shot that changed Germany.” It didn’t help matters that the killer, Karl-Heinz Kurras, was a middle-aged cop of thuggish inclinations who had served in Hitler’s army in the Second World War, and was almost a caricature of the “fascist mentality” that West German baby boomers who came of age in the 1960s so detested about their parents. Kurras was an ideal stand-in for the so-called “Auschwitz generation” that younger leftists reviled and wanted to junk on the ash heap of history as soon as possible.

For the hard Left, Ohnesorg was a welcome martyr, since his death confirmed all their dark fears about West Germany, which they asserted was objectively a fascist state, despite actually being a high-functioning democracy, not to mention a quite prosperous one, with exceptionally stringent protection of civil liberties and dissent. There soon arose the June 2 Movement, a terrorist group dedicated to Ohnesorg’s martyrdom. Next came the far more dangerous Red Army Faction, popularly known as the Baader-Meinhof Group, a terrorist movement dedicated to Ohnesorg’s memory that claimed to be fighting fascism, but whose leaders seemed mostly into fast cars, turgid ideological dissertations, and murder-as-self-actualization. It took the West German intelligence and police agencies over a decade to stamp out the RAF, even though the gang was small and not very adept, a longevity that, it turned out, had a lot to do with the RAF’s close relationship with the Stasi, East Germany’s notorious Ministry for State Security (MfS). The Stasi offered RAF fighters sanctuary, logistical support, training, even weaponry. (The support by East Bloc intelligence services for terrorist groups in the West was another issue dismissed as a “conspiracy theory” by mainstream thinkers in the 1970s and 1980s, but with the collapse of the Soviet empire and access to secret files — whoops — turned out to be quite true.)

Plenty of West Germans to the right of the Baader Meinhof thugs were troubled by the conduct of the German police. Kurras was never seriously punished for the Ohnesorg killing. Twice he was acquitted of major charges and was suspended from the force for four years, working in private security, but after that suspension he was back with the Berlin police and was actually promoted. Kurras continued a normal career, retiring to a pension at age sixty, remaining defiant and unrepentant: “Anyone who attacks me is destroyed,” he explained to a reporter who asked him about the shooting of Benno Ohnesorg.

By 2009, Karl-Heinz Kurras was an elderly pensioner and a mostly forgotten minor hate figure, yet that May he returned to the front pages in a sensational fashion when it was revealed that he had been for years a highly valued agent of the Stasi. Information from the files of the MfS, which German authorities have combed through carefully for over twenty years, revealed that Kurras had volunteered to work for East German intelligence in 1955. He wanted to move to the DDR, but Stasi handlers convinced him to stay where he was and to serve as an agent-in-place inside the West Berlin police. Files indicate that Kurras was a loyal and effective Stasi source, handing over reams of documents and all the information he could find to the MfS. He was decorated several times and was allowed to secretly join the SED, the East German ruling Communist Party, in 1964, a rare honor for a foreign agent. He helped the Stasi and the KGB expose double agents, reported regularly on U.S. and NATO military developments, and during the 1961 Berlin Crisis was informing the Stasi about critical events at Checkpoint Charlie, the heart of the East-West confrontation.

The revelation that Kurras was a long-term and highly valued agent of East German intelligence exploded like a bombshell, turning a generation’s worldview on its head. The man that Germany’s baby boomers loathed as the archetype of fascism, a living symbol of the evil Nazi-ish past, actually was a Stasi hero, a loyal servant of Communism.

You probably can’t force the public to love you

Saturday, November 4th, 2017

Perhaps the best kind of advertising is the kind that doesn’t look like advertising, Steve Sailer suggests:

I’m biased, but I can’t help pointing out that lots of smart rich guys are investing more in opinion journalism than you might expect. For example, Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos, who overtook Bill Gates as the world’s richest man last Friday, spent a quarter of a billion of his own money to buy The Washington Post in 2013.

Bezos claims it’s profitable, but profit and loss is hardly the point. His goal is to shape the climate of opinion in ways favorable to his interests, much as Mexican monopolist Carlos Slim bailed out The New York Times in 2009 with a $200 million infusion.

A bigger purpose is less to change minds than to rule out inconvenient ideas. For instance, Harvey Weinstein got away with decades of bad behavior by controlling the means of production of public sentiment.

You probably can’t force the public to love you, but you can spend money on journalists to make their readers sense that it’s just not done to hate you.

You might notice that you haven’t read a lot in the American press about how Slim made a bundle off charging impoverished illegal aliens exorbitant fees to speak with their loved ones back home in Mexico. Nor have you heard much about how Slim married himself into a genuine Fascist dynasty, the Gemayel clan, founders of the Lebanese Phalange party.

That’s not considered news. The American news media traditionally gets its guidance on what is fit to print from The New York Times, and the Times hasn’t been in a hurry to cause embarrassment to its largest individual shareholder.

Similarly, the U.S. media has in recent years been more interested in topics such as transgender rights than in former staples of debate, such as the need for anti-monopoly enforcement.

In Mexico, Slim was more or less synonymous with the Mexican state since the 1990s, when he offered a $25 million campaign contribution/kickback to the ruling party at the notorious “Billionaires Banquet.” But recently Slim had the misfortune to fall out with the latest presidente, who opened up the Mexican market to an American competitor, knocking tens of billions off Slim’s net worth.

Things could be worse for Slim. He is still the sixth-richest man in the world, in part because he hasn’t had these problems in the United States since investing in the Times eight years ago. Donald Trump always calls it “the failing New York Times,” but from the perspective of Slim, the newspaper is working quite well.

[...]

In summary, while Americans tend to believe they are natural-born advertising geniuses who could create commercials that would outcompete their opponents, the richest, smartest businessmen don’t believe in a fair fight. Instead, own a monopoly and then own a major chunk of the media to protect it.

It may (or may not) pay to advertise, but it pays to look like the news.

Systems demand analysis as systems

Saturday, November 4th, 2017

Techniques of Systems Analysis closes with an appendix on The Essence of Systems Analysis:

An item of equipment cannot be fully analyzed in isolation; frequently; its interaction with the entire environment, including other equipment, has to be considered. The art of systems analysis is born of this fact; systems demand analysis as systems.

Systems are analyzed with the intention of evaluating, improving, and comparing them with other systems. In the early days many people naively thought this meant picking a single definitive quantitative measure of effectiveness, finding a best set of assumptions and then using modern mathematics and high speed computers to carry out the computations. Often, their professional bias led them to believe that the central issues revolved around what kind of mathematics to use and how to use the computer.

With some exceptions, the early picture was illusory. First, there is the trivial point that even modern techniques are not usually powerful enough to treat een simple practical problems without great simplification and idealization. The ability and knowledge necessary to do this simplification and idealization is not always standard equipment of scientists and mathematicians or even of their practical military collaborators.

Much more important, the concept of a simple optimizing calculation ignores the central role of uncertainty. The uncertainty arises not only because we do not actually know what we have (much less what the enemy has) or what is going to happen, but also because we cannot agree on what we are trying to do.

In practice, three kinds of uncertainty can be distinguished.

  1. Statistical Uncertainty
  2. Real Uncertainty
  3. Uncertainty about the Enemy’s Actions.

We will mention each of these uncertainties in turn.

Statistical Uncertainty. This is the kind of uncertainty that pertains to fluctuation phenomena and random variables. It is the uncertainty associated with “honest” gambling devices. There are almost no conceptual difficulties in treating it — it merely makes the problem computationally more complicated.

Real Uncertainty. This is the uncertainty that arises from the fact that people believe different assumptions, have different tastes (and therefore objectives), and are (more often than not) ignorant. It has been argued by scholars that any single individual can, perhaps, treat this uncertainty as being identical t the statistical uncertainty mentioned above, but it is in general impossible for a group to do this in any satisfactory way. For example it is possible for individuals to assign subjectively evaluated numbers to such things as the probability of war or the probability of success of a research program, but there is typically no way of getting a useful consensus on these numbers. Usually, the best that can be done is to set limits between which most reasonable people agree the probabilities lie.

The fact that people have different objectives has almost the same conceptual effect on the design of a socially satisfactory system as the disagreement about empirical assumptions. People value differently, for example, deterring a war as opposed to winning it or alleviating its consequences, if deterrence fails; they ascribe different values to human lives (some even differentiate between different categories of human lives, such as civilian and military, or friendly, neutral, and enemy), future preparedness vs. present, preparedness vs. current standard of living, aggressive vs. defensive policies, etc. Our category, “Real Uncertainty,” covers differences in objectives as well as differences in assumptions.

The treatment of real uncertainty is somewhat controversial, but we believe actually fairly well understood practically. It is handled mainly by what we call Contingency Design.

Uncertainty Due to Enemy Reaction. This uncertainty is a curious and baffling mixture of statistical and real uncertainty, complicated by the fact that we are playing a non-zero sum game. It is often very difficult to treat satisfactorily. A reasonable guiding principle seems to be (at least for a rich country), to compromise designes so as to be prepared for the possibility that the enemy is bright, knowledgeable, and malevolent, and yet be able to exploit the situation if the enemy fails in any of these qualities.

To be specific:

Assuming that the enemy is bright means giving him the freedom (for the purpose of analysis) to use the resources he has in the way that is best for him, even if you don’t think he is smart enough to do so.

Assuming that he is knowledgeable means giving the enemy credit for knowing your weaknesses if he could have found out about them by using reasonable effort. You should be willing to do this even though you yourself have just learned about these weaknesses.

Assuming that the enemy is malevolent means that you will at least look at the case where the enemy does what is worst for you — even though it may not be rational for him to do this. This is sometimes an awful prospect and, in addition, plainly pessimistic, as one may wish to design against a “rational” rather than a malevolent enemy; but as much as possible, one should carry some insurance against the latter possibility.

The greatest trick the advertisers ever pulled

Friday, November 3rd, 2017

We were just discussing whether advertising works, and now Steve Sailer wonders aloud, could advertising in general be over-advertised?

To paraphrase a Kevin Spacey movie:

The greatest trick the advertising platforms ever pulled was convincing the world that advertising works.

One unsettling possibility is that most everybody wants to be tricked into believing in the power of advertising. After all, we get shown all sorts of interesting things for free or low cost that we’d have to pay for if it weren’t a truism among hardheaded businesspeople that Advertising Pays.

I worked in marketing research for eighteen years in the late 20th century and helped write a couple of white papers on whether our internal data showed that paying for more television commercials would sell more supermarket products.

The firm I worked at had constructed the finest test-marketing laboratory in history.

(Even after a third of a century, I want to maintain a certain level of obscurity, so I’ll call the service BehaviorCheck.)

In the first half of the 1980s, BehaviorCheck was wildly successful at being hired by blue-chip makers of consumer packaged goods, such as, I’ll call it, G&Z.

When launched in 1980, BehaviorCheck was a science-fiction wish-fulfillment fantasy for marketers.

Brand managers had always dreamed of proving to their CEOs that if only they’d be given a bigger budget, their brilliant ads would move more product. And now BehaviorCheck was here to provide scientific proof about just how persuasive their ads were if only they were given a larger budget.

A BehaviorCheck test market was run in one or more of the eight small cities where our firm had bought newfangled laser checkout scanners for all eight to twelve supermarkets in town. In return, the grocers had their checkers scan the barcode ID cards of a couple thousand families we had recruited to share with us scanner records of all items they purchased. We then manipulated which commercials they saw on cable television.

In a typical test, G&Z would hire us for a year to show double the normal national level of ads for, say, Crust toothpaste to a test group of 2,500 households, and the regular level of ads to a control group matched for exactly equal toothpaste buying over the previous year.

But in the second half of the 1980s, clients started to complain that very few of our tests showed that increasing TV advertising by 50 or 100 percent would move the needle on sales at all.

In response, we did a couple of meta-studies summarizing hundreds of test markets we’d run.

Occasionally, we found, higher advertising did pay off, especially if you had news to share, such as that your chemists had actually invented a better ingredient. Dave Barry joked in 1988 about one new version of a product that really did benefit from higher ad spending:

The Toothpaste Manufacturers Association, which each year holds a contest to come up with a new repulsive dental substance for Americans to worry about (previous winners: “tartar” and “plaque”) announce that this year’s winner is: “scuzz.”

If you really had invented a scuzz-fighting toothpaste, it could definitely be worth your while to invest in alerting consumers about the menace of scuzz.

On the other hand, if you didn’t have any news to tell consumers, we didn’t find much evidence that you could cajole them into buying more just through the awesomeness of your advertising.

This is not to say that good advertising couldn’t help a new brand, but there tended to be diminishing returns once an identity was established.

For example, we did a long-running test for one famous product that had used the same slogan for so many years that the character who said the catchphrase was as identifiable to the public as Jimmy Carter.

While the control cell saw the standard level of advertising, one cell saw more and another cell saw less. There were no differences in sales among the three cells.

As the evidence piled up, I recommended to G&Z that they pay us to test cutting their advertising budgets. They could start perpetual tests with us to see if reducing ad spending hurt their products’ sales. If it hadn’t after two years, they could cut their commercials nationally. If in later years our forerunner tests picked up a long-term downturn, they could boost advertising nationally back to the original levels before any harm was done.

For $5 million in testing, they might be able to save $50 million (or even $500 million) in advertising. (G&Z currently spends about $7 billion per year on advertising in total.)

This logic seemed unassailable to me. But my contacts at G&Z explained that no brand manager had ever gotten promoted by cutting his ad budget. G&Z believed in advertising. To consider reducing commercials was heresy.

In short, Americans like to advertise.

Our assumption that somebody must have proved that advertising works is reassuring even if nobody can remember the exact details.

An ingenious analyst can often discover exciting and brilliant but “obvious” things

Friday, November 3rd, 2017

Most important of all, Techniques of Systems Analysis says, a study that attempts to influence policy should have a convincing comparison of all the relevant alternatives:

The kind of curves that we draw in our study are sometimes not directly to the point. Usually either with the aid of such curves or by some simple-minded consideration one succeeds in designing what he thinks is a reasonable system. The task is then to show (if possible) that, under any reasonable assumptions, the system designed by the analyst is to be preferred to any alternative systems which are being considered.

[...]

It often happens in practice that people think they disagree on recommendations because they disagree on details of performance, when, in fact, one of the contenders could accept the other contender’s assumptions on performance and still prove his case; that is, the analyst can use an a fortiori argument. It is essential for the Systems Analyst to see if he can do this.

[...]

In other words, in making preliminary expository comparisons, we bend over backwards to hurt our system and to help the alternative system. If it turns out after we have done this that we can still say we prefer our system then we are in a superb position to make recommendations.

One reason the above program can so often be carried through successfully is that many of the most successful and exciting analyses have about them a large element of “the Emperor has no clothes.” (For those who have had no childhood: the phrase refers to Andersen’s story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”) In such cases it is not surprising that one can go t extraordinary lengths in accepting the assumptions of one’s opponents and still prove his point. In other cases people may think of the problem as being a choice between two alternatives when a clever analyst may be able to make recommendations that in effectiv put him in the position of being able to “eat his cake and have it too.” Possibly because our moralistic culture tends to overlook and deny this possibility an ingenious analyst can often discover exciting and brilliant but “obvious” things.

Sometimes we cannot go all the way in satisfying the B, C, or D enthusiasts. If we concede their presumably exaggerated performance claims for the gadgets they like and slo concede their presumably undue pessimism for the gadgets we recommend, then in fact one or more of their systems may look better. Under these circumstances we have two alternatives. We can see how far we can go along with the opposition and conduct a so-called “break-even” analysis. In such an analysis we find just what assumptions we have to make about the important values in order to make the performance of the two systems the same. We can then simply ask people to judge whether these assumptions are unduly optimistic or pessimistic. Or we can try to make a more convincing case on what are reasonable assumptions. The best approach is generally to use both of the above measures.

[...]

More than any other single thing, the skilled use of a-fortiori and break-even analysis separate the professionals from the amateurs. A good analyst should clearly separate the parameters (assumptions) into two parts; those to which he can afford to give quite pessimistic values and those to which he has to give “reasonable” or breakeven values. The analyst can then point out that all one needs to believe in order to accept his recommendations is these few crucial assumptions. If the audience accepts that assumed values of these crucial parameters as being reasonable or at least in the break-even region, then they must accept the recommendations. If the whole briefing is built around this idea, it is very surprising how even extremely unpalatable conclusions can be brought home.

In order to carry through the above program most analyses should (conceptually) be done in two stages: a first stage to find out what one wants to recommend, and a second stage that generates the kind of information that makes the recommendations convincing even to a hostile and disbelieving, but intelligent audience.

Taking turns to contrive a story gives off a radical whiff

Thursday, November 2nd, 2017

In 2017, playing Dungeons & Dragons — outside the realm of the Internet — can feel slightly rebellious, the New Yorker suggests:

This turn of events might shock a time traveller from the twentieth century. In the seventies and eighties, Dungeons & Dragons, with its supernatural themes, became the fixation of an overheated news media in the midst of a culture war. Role players were seen as closet cases, the least productive kind of geek, retreating to basements to open maps, spill out bags of dice, and light candles by which to see their medieval figurines. They squared with no one. Unlike their hippie peers, they had dropped out without bothering to tune in. On the other side of politics,Christian moralists’ cries of the occult and anxiety about witchcraft followed D. & D. players everywhere. Worse still, parents feared how this enveloping set of lies about druids in dark cloaks and paladins on horseback could tip already vulnerable minds off the cliff of reality.

[...]

In 2017, gathering your friends in a room, setting your devices aside, and taking turns to contrive a story that exists largely in your head gives off a radical whiff for a completely different reason than it did in 1987. And the fear that a role-playing game might wound the psychologically fragile seems to have flipped on its head. Therapists use D. & D. to get troubled kids to talk about experiences that might otherwise embarrass them, and children with autism use the game to improve their social skills. Last year, researchers found that a group of a hundred and twenty-seven role players exhibited above-average levels of empathy, and a Brazilian study from 2013 showed that role-playing classes were an extremely effective way to teach cellular biology to medical undergraduates.

Adult D. & D. acolytes are everywhere now, too. The likes of Drew Barrymore and Vin Diesel regularly take up the twenty-sided die (or at least profess to do so). Tech workers from Silicon Valley to Brooklyn have long-running campaigns, and the showrunners and the novelist behind “Game of Thrones” have all been Dungeon Masters. (It’s also big with comedy improvisers in Los Angeles, but it’s no surprise that theatre kids have nerdy hobbies.)

It is not a sign of weakness but of strength to hold certain conclusions tentatively

Thursday, November 2nd, 2017

It is not a sign of weakness but of strength to hold certain conclusions tentatively, Techniques of Systems Analysis argues, particularly if one had indicated a program designed to settle them — insofar as they can be settled:

It is important, of course, to take as firm a position as can be justified in a reasonable way and not to overemphasize the uncertainties. (One of the most common excuses for doing nothing is to say that nothing can be done until more information has been obtained. Sometimes the excuse-maker adds insult to injury by acting as a roadblock to getting more information.) But if a question is really open, then one should say so. While there is always an obligation to set up a program which will answer open questions or indicate that they are unanwerable, there is no obligation for the Systems Analyst to have a policy position in advance of the investigation. After all, he is not an executive.

In addition, most studies have a continuing existence and it is often wise to consider their interaction with the past and the future and to leave room for future development. Some of the recommendations that are made may well be made for the sake of future studies.

Pykrete and Habakkuk

Wednesday, November 1st, 2017

When commenter Sam J. mentioned building ships out of concrete, I went searching for an old post on Pykrete, only to find that I hadn’t ever posted anything on Project Habakkuk:

Project Habakkuk or Habbakuk (spelling varies; see below) was a plan by the British during the Second World War to construct an aircraft carrier out of pykrete (a mixture of wood pulp and ice) for use against German U-boats in the mid-Atlantic, which were beyond the flight range of land-based planes at that time. The idea came from Geoffrey Pyke, who worked for Combined Operations Headquarters. After promising scale tests and the creation of a prototype on a lake in Alberta, Canada, the project was shelved due to rising costs, added requirements, and the availability of longer-range aircraft and escort carriers which closed the Mid-Atlantic gap the project was intended to address.

[...]

Pyke conceived the idea of Habbakuk while he was in the United States organising the production of M29 Weasels for Project Plough, a scheme to assemble an elite unit for winter operations in Norway, Romania and the Italian Alps. He had been considering the problem of how to protect seaborne landings and Atlantic convoys out of reach of aircraft cover. The problem was that steel and aluminium were in short supply, and were required for other purposes. Pyke realized that the answer was ice, which could be manufactured for only 1 percent of the energy needed to make an equivalent mass of steel. He proposed that an iceberg, natural or artificial, be levelled to provide a runway and hollowed out to shelter aircraft.

[...]

The project’s code name seems to have been consistently (mis)spelled Habbakuk in official documents at the time. This may in fact have been Pyke’s own error, as at least one early document apparently written by him (though unsigned) spells it that way. (However, post-war publications by people concerned with the project, such as Perutz and Goodeve, all restore the proper spelling, with one “b” and three “k”s.) The name is a reference to the project’s ambitious goal: “… be utterly amazed, for I am going to do something in your days that you would not believe, even if you were told.” (Habakkuk 1:5, NIV)

[...]

In early 1942 Pyke and Bernal called in Max Perutz to determine whether an icefloe large enough to withstand Atlantic conditions could be built up fast enough. Perutz pointed out that natural icebergs have too small a surface above water for an airstrip, and are prone to suddenly rolling over. The project would have been abandoned if it had not been for the invention of pykrete, a mixture of water and woodpulp that when frozen was stronger than plain ice, was slower-melting and would not sink. Developed by his government group and named after Pyke, It has been suggested that Pyke was inspired by Inuit sleds reinforced with moss. This is probably apocryphal, as the material was originally described in a paper by Mark and Hohenstein in Brooklyn.

Pykrete could be machined like wood and cast into shapes like metal, and when immersed in water formed an insulating shell of wet wood pulp on its surface that protected its interior from further melting. However, Perutz found a problem: ice flows slowly, in what is known as plastic flow, and his tests showed that a pykrete ship would slowly sag unless it was cooled to –16°C (3°F). To accomplish this the ship’s surface would have to be protected by insulation, and it would need a refrigeration plant and a complicated system of ducts.

Perutz proceeded to conduct experiments on the viability of pykrete and its optimum composition in a secret location underneath Smithfield Meat Market in the City of London. The research took place in a refrigerated meat locker behind a protective screen of frozen animal carcasses.

The decision was made to build a large-scale model at Jasper National Park in Canada to examine insulation and refrigeration techniques, and to see how pykrete would stand up to artillery and explosives. Large ice blocks were constructed at Lake Louise, Alberta, and a small prototype was constructed at Patricia Lake, Alberta, measuring only 60 by 30 feet (18 metres by 9 metres), weighing 1,000 tons and kept frozen by a one-horsepower motor. The work was done by conscientious objectors who did alternative service of various kinds instead of military service. They were never told what they were building. Bernal informed COHQ that the Canadians were building a 1,000-ton model, and that it was expected to take eight men fourteen days to build it. The Chief of Combined Operations (CCO) responded that Churchill had invited the Chiefs of Staff Committee to arrange for an order to be placed for one complete ship at once, with the highest priority, and that further ships were to be ordered immediately if it appeared that the scheme was certain of success.

The Canadians were confident about constructing a vessel for 1944. The necessary materials were available to them in the form of 300,000 tons of wood pulp, 25,000 tons of fibreboard insulation, 35,000 tons of timber and 10,000 tons of steel. The cost was estimated at £700,000.

Meanwhile Perutz had determined via his experiments at Smithfield Market that the optimum structural properties were given by a mixture of 14 per cent wood pulp and 86 per cent water. He wrote to Pyke in early April 1943 and pointed out that if certain tests were not completed in May, there would be no chance of delivering a completed ship in 1944.

By May the problem of cold flow had become serious and it was obvious that more steel reinforcement would be needed, as well as a more effective insulating skin around the vessel’s hull. This caused the cost estimate to increase to £2.5 million. In addition, the Canadians had decided that it was impractical to attempt the project “this coming season”. Bernal and Pyke were forced to conclude that no Habbakuk vessel would be ready in 1944.

Pyke was excluded from the planning for Habbakuk in an effort to secure American participation, a decision that Bernal supported. Pyke’s earlier disagreements with American personnel on Project Plough, which had caused his removal from that project, were the main factor in this decision.

Naval architects and engineers continued to work on Habbakuk with Bernal and Perutz during the summer of 1943. The requirements for the vessel became more demanding: it had to have a range of 7,000 miles (11,000 km) and be able to withstand the largest waves recorded, and the Admiralty wanted it to be torpedo-proof, which meant that the hull had to be at least 40 ft (12 m) thick. The Fleet Air Arm decided that heavy bombers should be able to take off from it, which meant that the deck had to be 2,000 ft (610 m) long. Steering also raised problems; it was initially projected that the ship would be steered by varying the speed of the motors on either side, but the Royal Navy decided that a rudder was essential. However, the problem of mounting and controlling a rudder over 100 ft (30 m) high was never solved.