Suppose I run a shop selling water.

Suppose further there’s a crisis on and the municipal water supply goes out.

So, as a sensible trader, I jack up the price to $100/litre and make a boat-load of cash. People pay it because well what’s money next to a little not dying of dehydration? as

I mean, sure, they have to deal with the fact that they burned through a significant chunk of their savings after the crisis has passed, but they made a rational and considered choice to participate in this transaction, therefore it’s valid and fair, right?

My neighbour on the other hand believes that raising their prices would be exploitative and continues selling water at the normal price. As a result the first person who comes along goes “Holy shit, water for cheap!” and buys the whole lot just in case. Nobody else gets any.

Which one of us has improved the situation more?

Well, I’ve certainly made sure a lot more people won’t run out of water than my neighbour has. That’s got to be a good thing, even if I turned a tidy profit in doing so, right?

So why are people so angry at me?

My neighbour in trying to do the “moral” thing just ended up making the situation worse, but people are just tutting a bit and saying he should have been more sensible and making helpful suggestions about rationing.

I mean sure, I was charging a lot of money for that water, but people were willing to spend it therefore the water was worth at least that much to them. Should I have sold it at less? I’m not a charity.

And lets not forget that I’m the one who kept the most people in water!

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There’s a meme that I’ve seen a lot recently (probably because I follow a lot of rationalists on tumblr) that people are irrational to get angry at people who provide better options at exploitative rates, because there are two possibilities:

1. Not have any option to fix your major problem
2. Have the option to fix your major problem at an extremely high cost

And the second is obviously better! It gives you options to fix things which you can decide whether they’re worth it.

(Examples of this sort of scenario where this have come up have been PETA’s water thing in Detroit and Uber’s surge pricing. I think there have been a few others).

I have a lot of sympathy for this view. I also think it’s wrong. I think maybe the level of rage is disproportionate, but I think it’s perfectly valid to be angry about these things.

Consider the water sellers above. Raising prices during a crisis is fine. It’s not an unreasonable way to control demand of a limited supply (there are other not unreasonable ways which might be better, but I don’t think it’s intrinsically wrong to treat this as a supply/demand problem given the system we live in). But how high should I raise prices?

Well I could just raise them to what the market could bear.

But the market will bear a lot. People’s alternative is dying. People will pay a lot to not die. As a result I can basically take them for what they’re worth.

In a well-functioning capitalist society (please imagine I said that phrase with a straight face) what would happen is that if I were making an obscene amount of profit someone else would realise that they can basically steal all my customers and still make an only slightly less obscene amount of profit by offering the goods at a lower price. Prices for water would then converge on a sensible value where water sellers still make a profit while people pay a reasonable amount for water that reflects its current scarcity.

But in a crisis we’re not in a well-functioning capitalist society. When this sort of price/value convergence happens it happens over a longish period of time. Crises are happening now and you can’t wait for this price convergence.

And how much will the market bear in a crisis? A lot. When your alternatives are death, major injury, etc. the amount of money you’d be willing to pay is generally very large even if you know it’s going to screw you over later. This means that there is a very large gap between what it will cost to provide your get out of crisis service and what people are willing to pay you for it, and that gap is pure profit.

Is it OK to make a profit here? I mean, sure, I guess. I’m not against people benefiting from helping others – indeed I’m moderately in favour of it because it encourages people to help others.

But by and large I think that if you have a large number of people giving a substantial fraction of their life savings to someone resulting in a very large profit, and you compare it to that person making about half as much profit and people giving about half as much of their life savings, the latter is a much better scenario.

So how do we arrange it so that people don’t exploit crises?

Well, the optimal solution would be to provide good enough crisis support that the opportunity to do so was not there.

But the solution that’s actually available to most of us is to punish people who do by shouting at them, denying them our business, etc. It creates an incentive for people to do better and moves their crisis price point away from the “take them for what we can get” end that it will tend to default to and much closer to the “offer this service which improves matters at a price where we can still make a reasonable profit” end we want them to be at.

So lets do that then. Sure, it’s not the optimal solution, but by adopting the position that anything that improves the situation is better than its absence, you’ve already abdicated the ability to complain about choosing the available solution instead of the optimal one.

So are people improving the situation by offering these options? Generally, yes. Is it OK for us to punish them for this? Yes, because it shifts the incentives so that they will improve the situation more rather than not at all.

(And arguably we should also complain about the fact that we do this, because it makes people think about the motivations and reasoning for this and maybe makes them less likely to punish people who are actually just turning a fairly reasonable profit out of the situation. The recursion never ends)

Note: This is somewhat related to my stance on the correct solution to trolley problems.

I’m relatively unusual amongst my friends in that I actually like my family and enjoy spending Christmas with them.I do however find choosing presents for people very stressful, and I’m not really that interested in receiving them (I’m also really hard to buy for, so I imagine other people find me gifts for me particularly stressful). So, this year my parents and I decided to get each other a great Christmas present: Not having to worry about Christmas presents.

My brother and his girlfriend were out of the country visiting her family for Christmas, so it was just me, my parents, and my sister. My sister opted out of this opting out of presents thing, so basically all the presents under the tree were either to or from her. As a result we basically just had the one round of presents and were done in ten minutes. Normally with 5 of us it takes more than an hour (the present opening algorithm runs in \(O(n^2)\)).

And… you know what? It turns out I missed the experience of us all opening the presents. I really didn’t expect to. It’s not the getting gifts that I missed (I can buy the things I want generally speaking, and I probably tend to spend about as much as I receive), but there’s something pleasant about the shared experience of opening presents together that it felt weird not having.

So, I wondered, how can I combine the lack of stress of not having to buy presents with the enjoyment of giving and getting presents?

And thus I formed a stratagem! Stress can be reduced using tried and tested techniques:

1. Advance planning
2. Constrained options
3. Focusing on my areas of competence

So I have predeclared my intentions for Christmas 2015.

Everyone I buy presents for (which is strictly the set of people present at my family Christmas. Christmas scope creep: Just say no) is getting one of the following:

1. Items of my choosing (parameters accepted) from one of a short list of things I am good at choosing for people: Books, board games, booze, tasty foods.
2. Any extremely specific request they would like me to fulfil (within reasonable price bounds)
3. Socks, if they fail to express a preference amongst the above

In exchange I am of course willing to provide similar parameters to people on request, but will also be sending out a Christmas list at the beginning of October providing a rough “Here is how to buy presents for me if you don’t have any better ideas, but I’m happy to accept anything you want to buy instead” guide.

I have sent out a Google form asking for peoples’ preferences amongst the above (people will be able to edit their responses), and I have created calendar reminders for when to send out my presents guide (October 1st) and when to send people a reminder that they should consider their Christmas preferences and maybe submit/edit them (November 25th).

A slightly belated or extremely premature, yet nevertheless highly organised, Christmas to you all.

I made something delicious last night, but it feels like it was about twice as much work as it should have been and produces results that were about 2/3rds as good as they should have been. Hence this post is notes rather than a recipe. Feel free to experiment on this theme and report back if you come up with a more sensible way to cook it.

The food concept is basically fancy liver and onions with tomato and kale, served with quinoa.

Ingredients list (quantities are so approximate you wouldn’t believe):

• Lots of frozen tomatoes (you can’t buy frozen tomatoes as far as I know. These were from my mother’s garden which she froze back in the summer. I imagine fresh would work fine for this). I think there were about a dozen smallish ones (larger than cherry tomatoes but not too small that I couldn’t close my hand entirely around one).
• A large bunch of kale
• Two medium sized onions
• A small bunch of sage
• About two hands full of chicken liver
• Some flour for coating the liver
• Oh god so much butter
• Four rashers of bacon
• About one and a half cups of quinoa
• Half a lemon
• Some salt

Process:

This is what I did, but it’s pretty far from optimal and could be streamlined a lot. I recommend not following it directly but instead treating it as an inspiration for a better, swifter, means of cooking this.

First roast the tomatoes (I did this in a baking tray with a raised grill). Cut them in half for this (the frozen tomatoes were frozen halved anyway). As they roast, periodically drain off and keep all the liquid. For me this produced about two cups of liquid over the course of the cooking. When most of the liquid has come out of the tomatoes but they’re still quite soft, take them off the roast.

While those are roasting, start cooking the onions. This involved slicing them fairly finely and then cutting the slices in half lengthwise, then putting them in a pan on high heat with lots of butter and some salt (note: This recipe ended up a bit too salty because of this and the bacon. Maybe don’t use too much salt here)

At some point when you have a free moment, finely chop up the sage.

Once the onions are starting to caramelise, chop up the bacon quite finely (it ended up in roughly 2cm by 0.5cm strips for me) and add it to the onions. Continue cooking until the onions are well and truly caramelised, then add the tomatoes and the sage and keep cooking for a bit longer.

At this point it’s time to start cooking the quinoa. Cook this basically as normal – one part quinoa to two parts water – but instead of water use the tomato water we reserved earlier in the cooking process. This probably won’t be quite enough so top it up with enough water to make up the difference.

While all of those are cooking, chop up the kale, removing the stems and slicing the leaves quite finely.

I then transferred the onions, tomatoes and bacon mix out into a serving dish and reused the pan (which was still quite greasy from the previous mix so didn’t need more butter for me but you may wish to add some more) to fry the kale. This should only take a few minutes, you don’t want it overcooked.

While that’s cooking, prepare the liver. Cut it up quite finely (I think I had it at roughly 2cm by 1cm strips) and mix it up with some flour until it’s thoroughly coated.

Once the kale is done, transfer it out to the serving dish. Now it’s time to start cooking the liver.

I made a mistake here, which is that the pan now had lost most of its grease so it needed more butter. I didn’t wait until the butter was hot enough, and as a result the liver did not cook quite as I wanted – you need a good high heat or it tends to boil a bit in its own juices. So don’t do that then.

Anyway, cook the liver until it’s, err, cooked. Then add the things you’ve previously put in the serving dish back to the pan, stir everything together for about another minute or two, and transfer back to the dish.

Hopefully the quinoa is ready at this point. Add the juice of half a lemon to it and mix thoroughly.

Now serve.

I found this made enough food for two people to eat slightly more than they probably should but about as much as they wanted, with not quite enough left over for a third. On the other hand this should be pretty easy to scale up.

Edit: Apparently I have just mostly reinvented the Helmeier Catechism. Oh well, this one is mine.

In a private correspondence recently I presented what I claimed were my “Standard questions”. I’m not actually sure it’s true that they are – I’ve certainly taken this approach before, and asked similar questions, but I’m not sure I’ve ever broken down the thought process into quite such an explicit list of questions. They’re good questions, and I think I’m going to treat them like a check list in future.

1. What does success look like?
2. Are there similar things already out there?
3. If yes, why aren’t they good enough?
4. If no, why not?

(This isn’t actually quite the list I presented – I forgot the “no” branch when presenting it before)

You don’t have to cancel the project if an answer you don’t like to one of these question turns up (although if you discover that there are loads of existing things out there which do the same thing and are plenty good enough, or that the best success could possibly look like is that you’ve spent a ton of time producing something no-one wants you should probably think about it). The purpose of these questions is not to stop you doing the project, it’s to force you to think about its aims and context thoroughly enough that if you go ahead with it then you do the project well.

For those just tuning in, I recently quit my job at Google.

The question I keep being asked is “So what are you going to do now?”. This is an excellent question. I wish I knew the answer!

I do have plans, but a lot of them are centered around figuring out what plans to make. In the short term I’m going to take a few months off paid work (definitely until end of February, probably until end of March), during which time I will be working on a variety of personal projects. I will also be thinking about what I want to do next job-wise and actively looking. This will involve a certain amount of soul searching about my priorities and life goals.

The projects I have planned for this period are as follows in order of roughly decreasing priority:

Self-study

There are a couple of areas of mathematics I’ve been really frustrated by my lack of knowledge in. I’d been thinking about going back to university to do an additional masters to try to brush up on these but then realised that actually I could achieve this by just sitting down and studying some books. So I’m going to do that.

The main thing I want to get good at is statistics, with a mix of linear algebra and optimisation following at a distant but respectable second. I will be doing my best to actually get my understanding of these to a good level. My textbooks of choice will be Theory of Statistics (with Probability: A graduate course pulled out for the bits of probability and measure theory I need to brush up on) for the former and Deterministic Operations Research for the latter. I’ll be reading these and working through the exercises. I can’t really decide whether the goal of getting these to a good level is too easy or impossible for the time frame in question, so these goals may be adjusted upwards or downwards.

Play with some ideas

One of the most frustrating parts of working at Google was how it curtailed my creative programming in my own time. I’m going to enjoy that not being the case, and will probably spend a lot of time chasing random ideas just because I can.

Blogging

I upped my weekly rate on the beeminder goal for this blog recently, if you were wondering why it’s a bit chattier than usual. I’m upping it again. I’ve written 37300 words since I’ve started this goal, and I have now set the goal to reach the 100,000 mark by 1st of April. This requires about 4,500 words per week. So, hopefully you enjoy this thing, because there’s going to be a lot of it.

(Note: If I find this is resulting in blog posts that are the moral equivalent of just writing “I am a fish” four hundred times, I reserve the right to reduce this goal, but I think it should be achievable)

Work on hypothesis

Despite my best efforts at neglect, hypothesis appears to have some users. I plan to do some work on it to clear up a few minor issues, and I’d also like to see if I can get the ideas from testmachine merged back into it. Other work may also occur – e.g. I’d like to see if I can figure out some ways to do smarter data generation.

Get pebblebox launched

Pebblebox is a thing we did at Devfort earlier this year. It’s a system for running online elections with high quality modern voting systems. We’ve… stalled a bit on getting it launched, and I’d like to fix that.

Learn Julia

I’ve been saying for a while that I should learn Julia. I’ve got some time off, so I should actually do that. I will probably try to fit this in with my goal of learning more linear programming stuff as there’s what seems like a good LP package for it.

The rest

Of course, a lot of the question “What are you going to do next?” is not really about what I’m going to be doing in the next couple months. Really what people are asking is:

1. Who will your new corporate lords and masters, the priests upon whose altar you sacrifice your life to the great god Mammon, be?
2. Upon what blasted corner of this desolate hell hole of a world will you make your abode?

(AKA “who will you work for and where will you live?”)

What I’d like to answer is “Screw you guys! I’m going to go build my own socialist utopia! With carefully regulated evidence based laws around gambling and sex work!”, but I don’t yet have a viable implementation strategy for that so it’s more  of a long term goal.

In the medium term, the short answer is I don’t know. The long answer is that I’ve not had a good track record of choosing companies and I’d like to figure out why. There are some safe options I might end up picking, but I’d really like to have a think about things and do some proper examination of what to do rather than just rush into the next job.

What that next job is going to be will determine a lot about where I’m going to live. I will be looking for jobs in both Zurich and London, and I’ll also be considering remote work options. If I find a job in Zurich, I’ll stay in Zurich, if I find a job in London I’ll move back to London. Remote work will probably have me staying in Zurich for most of 2015 at least and then we’ll see. Chances are pretty good that this will involve me moving back to London, but by no means certain.

I’m also not ruling the out the possibility that I’ll say fuck it and take all of 2015 off and go back packing or some similar early mid life crisis nonsense. It’s unlikely but it could happen.