Album Review: The Winery Dogs - Hot Streak

I've been struggling for about a week now to figure out how to write a review of the new Winery Dogs album, Hot Streak. The struggle I'm having is that the album is so good that I don't just want to write "a" review, I want to write the review that needs to be written.

If I wanted to write "a" review of the album, then I'd do what other reviews appear to be doing: I'd start with a brief synopsis of how the band came together (there's a bit of music history in that story), mention the respective band members' musical pedigrees, make a big deal about their musical chops, mention that this is their second album, and then say something to the effect of, "The Winery Dogs continue on a hot streak, indeed! Yuk yuk yuk..."

I don't fault other reviewers for writing that sort of thing, but my criticism is that nothing in those reviews gives the reader any incentive to take an involved and critical journey into Hot Streak and come to a real appreciation for what they've managed to accomplish here.

I'm not even sure that I myself can write a review like that - hence my aforementioned struggle. But, I'm going to try, so here it is...

And Now, For The Review...

People write a lot about Richie Kotzen, Billy Sheehan, and Mike Portnoy, because all three musicians are famous for being technically proficient players. Furthermore, it's not as if any of them has worked very hard to reduce their reputation for being that way - and why should they? But their reputation for technique follows them, and makes up part of the "context" in which the listener hears new Winery Dogs music.

However, there is another part of the "context" that doesn't get written about quite as often: all three players, in addition to being some of the most gifted players in rock music, happen to have some serious jazz chops. Kotzen and Sheehan have explicitly explored jazz fusion on previous records and in prior bands. While Portnoy may not have done so, there's no denying that he has referenced jazz music many times in the course of his prog-metal career. 

I bring this up because, when you really dive deeply into Hot Streak, you start to notice its strong jazz underpinnings.

Nowhere is this more evident than on the album's title track. While the crux of the song is a set of straight-ahead, crashing power chords and rhythms, the band uses the spaces between the "important parts," to jettison into some admirably crazy jazz soloing. This culminates in what might be the standout solo of the album - maybe "solo of the year," if they gave awards for this sort of thing - from Richie Kotzen, near the end of the song.

Then there's the explosive, improvisational character of the music, an attribute that is driven home, song after song, by the drumming. While it's easy to criticize Dream Theater's back catalogue for being a little over-rehearsed, Mike Portnoy seems to have overcome all that with the Winery Dogs. This is especially true of the new album. The other criticism Portnoy recieves is that he "over-plays," and while those who are inclined to make that criticism will find plenty to object to on Hot Streak, the band really wouldn't "work" if he played any differently. He injects each track with an explosive energy that seems to elevate (no pun intended) the other members of the band to a degree of explosiveness that is not always there in their prior work. But, more than that, the improvisational feel in his drumming makes each song unfold like a controlled explosion the likes of which I have only really heard before in that other jazz-inflected rock band, Living Colour.

Just when you think that this is all Mike Portnoy has in his tool kit, however, he takes things way down for songs like "Fire" and "Think It Over," keeping the spirit of the songs in mind. In particular, his work on "Think It Over" is some of the most thoughtfully under-stated work of his career, involving some tasty hi-hat work that punctuates rhythm and lyrics alike.

Richie Kotzen, for his part, is in fine jazz form. I really enjoy the fact that he doesn't hesitate to play some deliciously jazzy electric piano and keyboards all over Hot Streak, especially since my favorite track on the previous record was the piano-inflected "Regret." Still, he never over-does it, so the band keeps their feet planted firmly in the kind of hard rock that appeals to their audience. As for his guitar playing, Kozten breaks out some phrasing we haven't heard from him since his work with Virtu and the Kotzen/Howe albums. I love this side of Kotzen's playing, so it's a delight for me to hear him break it out. Kotzen's having ditched the pick for a few years now, has managed to really develop his finger-style playing. His touch on the strings, combined with his Telecaster-into-a-Plexi setup gives his playing a bright top-end sparkle that we don't typically hear from shredders these days.

One great upshot of this, is that it leaves a midrange wedge large enough for Billy Sheehan's bass playing. This is so important, and so different from some of Sheehan's previous work, which I feel has often been diminished by a guitarist dominating the band's midrange spectrum and decreasing the listener's ability to really appreciate the Sheehanisms going on at the bottom-end. Indeed, Hot Streak, even more than the Winery Dogs debut album, manages to put Sheehan's tone right where it needs to be, and the result puts us in a better position to love what he's bringing to the table.

And what he happens to have brought is a groovy, R&B or maybe funk vibe to the overall sound. The contrast between Sheehan's overtly rock bass tones and the sort of jazzy, soul-music vibe in the bass lines on this album plays against type and expectation, and that very much works in the band's favor. It's like a series of pleasant surprises that unfold with each subsequent track.

This jazzy quality is present in each of the players' performances throughout the Hot Streak album. It is such a delightful surprise from a band that one expects to deliver straight-ahead, 80s-inflected hard rock. On one level, it makes each song more explosive, and on another level, it makes things so much tastier than they would be if they just stuck to the basic rock songwriting that made each of them individually famous.

Explosive and tasty - that's what you get with Hot Streak. The deeper you dive, the tastier it gets. There is no question that this is the best album I've heard this year. The Winery Dogs have put together a really great record, and I look forward to catching their nearest stop on their nation-wide tour.

Stop Writing Articles Like This

Today I read - partially, at least - two different articles on two different topics, both with the same problem. I'm not going to do the authors of those articles any favors by linking to them here, instead, I'll just tell you was that one article was a subjective rating of fast food sandwiches, and the other was an argument against buying an Xbox One. If you want to go hunt these piles of garbage down and read them for yourselves, that's the only hint I'll give you.

Both articles were written in a sort of, "Oh my god, I'm so hilarious, I'm so fed up with the way the world is, I just can't take it anymore" rhetorical style. It's supposed to be funny, but it's not. It's weirdly self-absorbed, containing, as it does, the assumptions that the reader cares about the subject matter in exactly the same way the author does, that the reader is largely incapable of coming up with as many "hilarious" sarcastic comments about the subject matter as the author is, and that the reader cares more about the author's commentary than information about the purported subject matter.

People just need to stop writing articles like this. Readers don't read articles to collect a list of tepid zingers about the Quarter-Pounder With Cheese. They might care about the Quarter-Pounder With Cheese, but the zingers are beside the point.

Now, you could argue that people don't care about my opinion, either, so why put it on my blog? Well, for one thing, my blog doesn't appear in anyone's Google News feed - not even my own. For another thing, nobody reads my blog, so that's a red herring.

Anyway, if you have information or analysis to share with the world, please do so. But I'm not reading your news articles for the affectation, I'm reading for the information and analysis. Behave accordingly.

Musical Existential Crisis - Part Two

Part One here.

Lady Gaga has a lot of musical integrity. We used to know this because she ripped off Bjork's award ceremony wardrobe. Bjork has artistic integrity, and Lady Gaga is doing the same kind of stuff, so it stands to reason that if Lady Gaga is dressed in the trappings of a great artist, she must be a great artist, too.

But these days, Lady Gaga isn't wearing food. Instead, she's all dolled-up in throwback glam and making records with Tony Bennett, and this is what tells us she has musical integrity.

The pairing of Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett isn't lost on me, but unless you keep up with these things, you probably haven't considered how bad this new, third flavor of the old grift really is. The record companies can only survive by insisting that there is no musical existential crisis. What they don't realize is that the very fact that Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett would un-ironically record an album together is all the proof anyone needs of the existential crisis.

Tony Bennett: A Primer

The success of this marketing campaign hinges on the audience's belief that Tony Bennett is a "jazz singer." No one who happens to know otherwise is young enough to care about popular music anymore, except for weirdos like me, and Wikipedia, which states (emphasis added):

...Bennett began his career as a crooner of commercial pop tunes. His first big hit was "Because of You", a ballad produced by Miller with a lush orchestral arrangement from Percy Faith. It started out gaining popularity on jukeboxes, then reached number one on the pop charts in 1951 and stayed there for ten weeks,[31] selling over a million copies.[30] This was followed to the top of the charts later that year[31] by a similarly-styled rendition of Hank Williams's "Cold, Cold Heart", which helped introduce Williams and country music in general to a wider, more national audience.[32] The Miller and Faith tandem continued to work on all of Bennett's early hits. Bennett's recording of "Blue Velvet" was also very popular and attracted screaming teenaged fans at concerts at the famed Paramount Theater in New York (Bennett did seven shows a day, starting at 10:30 a.m.)[33] and elsewhere.

It wasn't until later that Bennett got into jazz, evidently because his musical director didn't think his [Bennett's] career would last long otherwise. What happened next?

The result was the 1957 album The Beat of My Heart. It used well-known jazz musicians such as Herbie Mann and Nat Adderley, with a strong emphasis on percussion from the likes of Art Blakey, Jo Jones, Latin star Candido Camero, and Chico Hamilton. The album was both popular and critically praised.[8][44] Bennett followed this by working with the Count Basie Orchestra, becoming the first male pop vocalist to sing with Basie's band.[8] The albums Basie Swings, Bennett Sings (1958) and In Person! (1959) were the well-regarded fruits of this collaboration, with "Chicago" being one of the standout songs.[8][10]

In other words, in order to establish his reputation as a "jazz singer," Tony Bennett didn't actually decide to play some jazz. Instead, he simply hired a bunch of real jazz artists to play on his albums - to dress himself up in the trappings of jazz integrity - in order to lend him the reputation of having played with a bunch of jazz greats while merely churning out another couple of albums of pop standards.

What followed was a series of disappointing decades for Bennett, but in the 1990s he was able to capitalize on the New York club scene's brief fascination with swing dancing (probably fueled by the success of Harry Connick, Jr.). Remember "Jump, Jive, and Wail?" This was very good luck for Bennett, and he made a good PR move by booking a performance on that TV show that used to be big with the grunge crowd, MTV Unplugged, during which he sang duets with a bunch of then-popular artists like K.D. Lang and Elvis Costello.

When his career again started to slow down, guess what Bennett did. If you guessed, "He released an album of duets with then-popular singers," you're absolutely correct. He released the aptly named Duets album. Five years later, he followed-up with another aptly named album: Duets II.

Lady Gaga appeared on Duets II. We can consider Cheek to Cheek to be, essentially Duets III. No word yet on Duets IV, but don't count him out yet.

At this point, I hope you are sensing a pattern. The most obvious pattern here is that Bennett has a tendency to latch onto popular contemporary artists and use their popularity to boost his own ticket sales. This is not the mark of a musical innovator. This is also not the mark of a jazz singer. It's the mark of someone whose music career is based on adorning the trappings of great musicianship.

Now, I'm not going to say that Bennett is a terrible singer. He has a nice voice. But "having a nice voice" is not really the same thing as "being a jazz singer." Bennett doesn't write his material, he sings essentially a list of cover songs called "the great American songbook." These songs, however much you might enjoy them, are not representative of jazz as a genre. They're basically old pop songs, like "Camptown Races."

Or "Born This Way."

The Grifters

Lady Gaga could have recorded an album with Rosie Gaines or Lalah Hathaway, but she didn't. There is no shortage of famous jazz singers out there, many of them absolutely brilliant. But if Lady Gaga recorded an album with Lalah Hathaway, it would have lacked something important: the widely held opinion, based mostly on a marketing deception, that Tony Bennett is a jazz singer.

In other words, even though there are a lot of great jazz singers out there who genuinely could have helped Lady Gaga establish her artistic credibility (and from whom she could have actually learned something), none of those singers are "famous for being jazz singers." I mean, they're famous among jazz fans, but the public doesn't really know who they are.

The public does know who Tony Bennett is, and the public has been told - mostly by Tony Bennett - that he is a jazz singer. So that's what they believe. And if Lady Gaga does an album with someone who we're told is a jazz singer, then that gives her the reputation boost she's looking for.

What exposes the existential crisis here is that Lady Gaga's attempt at establishing artistic credibility isn't a genuine attempt to gain some, but simply an attempt to capture the trappings of artistic credibility. It's more important to Lady Gaga that you think Tony Bennett is a jazz singer than the veracity of that claim. The Last Psychiatrist might suggest that this is a narcissistic move. But he's not blogging anymore, so I can't know for sure.

The press for this album was full of quotes like this one, from NPR: "Frere-Jones also points out that Lady Gaga is more than pop spectacle; she can really play piano and sing." Think about that. One of the most important elements propping up Lady Gaga's claim to musical integrity is the fact that she, a professional musician, can "really" play an instrument and sing.

And in case there were any doubt, she recorded an album with Tony "I'm-a-jazz-singer-honest!" Bennett to prove it.

Behold, The Existential Crisis

None of this would matter in a world in which people understood that this was just a couple of saccharine pop artists putting on big-kid clothes and pretending to be real artists. That's not new - remember when The Moody Blues released Days of Future Past and tried to shock the world into believing that they were more than just a pop group? 

No, of course you don't remember. The Moody Blues aren't part of Rolling Stone Magazine's official anthology of rock and roll. The record companies, Lady Gaga, Tony Bennett, and the part of your soul that secretly needs you to believe that "it's all subjective" are all counting on the fact that you don't remember any of the many past instances of pop stars trying to pretend to be artistically credible. The moment you realize that you fell for the same cheap trick - again - is the moment the existential vacuum opens and gobbles you up.

Wait, think about it for a second. If it all really were subjective, then why the hell would Lady Gaga need to convince you of her artistic credibility? If it were all a matter of personal taste, then what's with all of those Duets albums that Bennett keeps pumping out? Why is Rob Thomas' biggest hit the same as Carlos Santana's biggest hit?

The secret part of your music fandom really wants musical integrity to matter, it needs that in order to function properly. You need your music to be more than a matter of personal taste because, to you, it really.

And all I'm saying is that there's nothing wrong with the fact that you want your music to have real integrity; but that you need a theory of aesthetics if you want that musical integrity to be real.

But, piece-by-piece, your sense of aesthetics has been picked apart by calculated marketing propaganda... Tony Bennett is a jazz singer... The Beatles were not a boy band... The Moody Blues were such good writers that they could score symphonies.. The Strokes are "amazing"... Elvis Presley invented rock and roll... no one had ever played guitar like Jimi Hendrix until Jimi Hendrix... and so on, and so forth, until now you're forced to actually believe all this crap because the integrity of your own personal music collection depends on it.

...And yet, if I subject your music to my (personal, private, individualized) theory of aesthetics - thereby threatening its integrity - the only response you can muster is, "It's all subjective!!!"

Which, by the way, is the one thing the record industry needed you to believe in order to convince you buy whatever the hell they wanted to sell you today.

Musical Existential Crisis - Part One

Ask anyone the following question, and you're sure to get an obvious answer: Who is the more brilliant musician: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, or Tove Lo? I'd say Mozart, wouldn't you?

There is a follow-up question, however, that is much more difficult to answer: Why is Mozart a better musician than Tove Lo? To answer that question, you'll need a fully functional system of aesthetics. If you don't have one, you're part of the problem.

Oops, I just implied another follow-up question: What is "the problem?" The answer to that is...

The World's Aesthetic Existential Crisis

An existential crisis occurs when a person ends up questioning the very foundation of his or her being. When one has an existential crisis, one is forced to analyze the purpose of one's life, the significance of one's actions and thoughts, the ultimate value of things that once appeared priceless. 

Suppose, for example, a person were an avid distance runner, running north of 100 miles per week, going on weekly runs of 30 miles or more, in the mountains, making running a spiritual experience for himself. He sure did dedicate a lot of his time - and much of his personal identity - to being a runner. Suppose one day that person became a type 1 diabetic and could no longer run like he used to, through no fault of his own, and thus a major part of his identity basically disappeared overnight. (Clearly a hypothetical example, right?) He might have to think long and hard about what else in his life has the kind of value that provides him with a sense of self and a sense of purpose. That would require some analysis. That would be an existential crisis.

The general pattern of an existential crisis is that one has an identity, or else one is so preoccupied by life that one never has to examine what one's identity and existence are all about; then, one day, something cataclysmic happens, forcing one out of an old identity, or out of the comfort zone of the preoccupation, and forcing one into a process of establishing that identity. Failure to establish a new identity results in either nihilism - the ultimate conclusion of which is self-destruction - or a psychic vacuum in which nothing really means anything anymore. The latter state is kind of like nihilism, except that instead of a viable conclusion, it leaves one with the paralysis of helplessness.

So, my contention is that society is currently having one of these existential crises with regard to music, and we are failing to establish an identity for what we think music is. We're failing, and some of us are turning to a kind of "musical nihilism," while the others have become musically helpless.

The solution to a personal existential crisis is the establishment of a robust working philosophy and a strong personal ethic. The solution to an artistic existential crisis is the establishment of a working theory of that branch of philosophy that deals with art: Aesthetics.

A Note On Subjectivity

I believe the root cause of this musical existential crisis is all you people who keep saying "music is all subjective." Really? So then Tove Lo is every bit as brilliant as Mozart.

And here is the point where most people are forced to shrug and say, "Yeah, I guess so. Because it's subjective, so I guess the only thing separating Tove Lo from Mozart is personal taste. To some, Tove Lo might be as good as Mozart."

Poof! Nihilism.

Now, look, there are many differences between Tove Lo and Mozart. For one thing, Mozart didn't need help writing his material. For another thing, Mozart was a child prodigy. For another thing, writing a symphony for a full orchestra is a lot harder than writing a pop song. For another thing, Mozart's music involves some of the most mature and accomplished use of compositional ideas the world has ever seen. And so on, and so forth. If ultimately what we're saying here is that the only real difference in musical value between the two of them is personal taste, is pure subjectivity, then we are effectively making the case that nothing about writing music matters at all.

You could, for example, place a dollop of mayonnaise on top of a vinyl disc and put it on a turn table, just to see what happens. You could call whatever comes out of the speaker "music," and if someone decided it was all they ever wanted to hear, well, that's pretty much Mozart for that one mayonnaise guy.

Meanwhile, she who slaves over every note, chord, cadence and beat for years, in a grand symphony the likes of which has never before been written is basically no better than a dollop of mayonnaise on a vinyl disc. Because, hey, I don't really like classical music.

Here you have a couple of options: 

(1) You can admit that, okay, some music is a lot more artistic than other kinds, and those things that make music "artistic" are part of some underlying idea you, personally, have about the value of music. You can begrudgingly admit that you possess a theory of aesthetics that works for you, and that theory of aesthetics forces you to conclude that Mozart is a lot more brilliant than Tove Lo, even though you'd rather listen to the latter than the former. You can realize that this sense of aesthetics, however implicit and however subjective it may be to you, somehow leads you to conclusions that are fairly widely held and uncontroversial, such as "Edward Van Halen is a master guitar player" and "Yo Yo Ma is fun to listen to, even if classical music isn't really my thing" and "Tove Lo might have a hit song, but that doesn't mean I'll remember it four years from now, and it doesn't mean she's as good as Mozart."

...or...

(2) You can double down. You can say, no, music is entirely subjective. It really is true that the only reason we don't call a dollop of mayonnaise music is because no one has actually published that song yet. You can say, Sorry, Ryan, but I would seriously rather hear a dollop of mayonnaise than Mozart because I really hate classical music and I'd rather be doing anything else than listening to it. 

Why People Double Down

I think a lot about this. 

I think, for some people, clinging to the notion of "absolute subjectivity" enables them to think of themselves as being more open-minded. The problem with that is that it forces them to be close-minded about everything related to an artistic endeavor. If, for example, these folks hear a Shostakovich symphony, its beauty will almost certainly be lost on them (because no one in the "it's all subjective" camp actually knows anything about music composition, but that's a tale for another blog post); if you try to explain some of the technical details of the composition, they'll say, "Just because it's complex doesn't mean it's good." And that, my friends, is the secret motive revealed: They're scared. They're frightened of having to analyze the technical details of a composition that doesn't immediately move them, and they're frightened that their favorite song won't pass muster on that level. Even if it's not fear - if instead it's something else, like patience or time or effort - their minds must remain closed to the prospect of a technical analysis, otherwise their belief that "it's all subjective" crumbles.

You can say, "But people who like technical music are just as close-minded!" Maybe so, but they're not the ones insisting that all music is subjective.

I think a few people out there have a genuine interest in the musical possibilities of a dollop of mayonnaise. They want to hear what it sounds like - what everything sounds like - in order to push the limits of musical expression. Some of these folks fall into the "it's all subjective" camp. But they're wrong for a different reason: A dollop of mayonnaise might be musically interesting, but only in reference to traditional music. This was the same for, say, Arnold Schoenberg, who created music that was radically different from anything that had ever been made before it. He wanted to test the limits, yes, but sitting in the background of the listener's mind during a Schoenberg composition is all the artistic biases that come with hundreds if not thousands of years of Western musical innovation. That's precisely what makes Schoenberg's music innovative, that implicit reference to what we're "used to." 

Tove Lo doesn't have that kind of a reference. Tove Lo is just writing synth pop. It might even be good by synth pop standards, but again... STANDARDS. Once you start applying standards, you're forced to admit that you're working with a system of aesthetics.

Part Two here.

The Dark Side Of Bryan Caplan's Betting Norm

Bryan Caplan is promoting his "Betting Norm" axe again at EconLog today. He writes:

Why are proponents of government action so prone to hyperbole? Because it's rhetorically effective, of course. You need wild claims and flowery words to whip up public enthusiasm for government action. Sober weighing of probability, cost, and benefit damns with faint praise - and fails to overcome public apathy. 

Now suppose my Betting Norm were universally accepted. Any public figure who refuses to bet large sums on his literal statements is an instant laughingstock, a figure of fun. What happens? Political hyperbole ends for politicians and pundits alike. Hysterical doom-saying and promises of utopia vanish from public discourse. No one serious can afford them! As a result, it becomes very rhetorically difficult to make the case for government to do anything - or at least anything new. Without an inspiring case for government action, government sits still.

I'm sympathetic to this point of view, because it appears prima facie to be an attractive and harmless way to reduce hyperbolic claims and improve the overall level of honesty out there.

But is it really harmless? Perusing one of Philip Zimbardo's websites yields this quick guide to "resisting influence" when it comes in the form of a manipulative demand for consistency.

The Basics

• People desire to look consistent within their words, beliefs, attitudes, and deeds 
• Good personal consistency is highly valued by society
• Consistent conduct provides a beneficial approach to daily life
• Affords a valuable shortcut through complex decision-making; being consistent with earlier decisions reduces need to process relevant information in future decisions

How It’s Exploited

• Profiteers exploit the principle by inducing people to make an initial commitment, take a stand or position that is consistent with requests that they will later ask of them
• Commitments are most effective when they are active, public, effortful, and are seen as not coerced and internally motivated – influence professionals will try to make it difficult to renege on your previous position
• If they are successful, abiding by this rule may lead to stubborn commitment to an initial position and to actions contrary to one’s best interests
• The rule may become self-perpetuating – people will seek to add new reasons and justifications for their behavior even after conditions have changed

At its best, Caplan's Betting Norm is a noble attempt to enforce honest dialogue. At its worst, however, it becomes a tool of manipulative influence designed to allow only one kind of dialogue, a Caplan-approved dialogue.

If this seems like a rather severe critique, here's an experiment you can do at home: Whenever you notice that you've said something hyperbolic or claimed something that you don't immediately have a stack of well-structured empirical research to support in great detail, write down the statement and the situation you were in. Then, at the end of the day, go back over your list of "transgressions," and imagine what your day would have been like had you limited yourself only to unexaggerated, evidence-based statements. Answer the following question: Would your day have been better or worse?

Naturally, I'm not suggesting that we lie or exaggerate as a matter of habit. Instead, I'm suggesting that a vitally important part of effective human communication involves rhetoric. If you see rhetoric as being universally bad, then good luck enjoying a Shakespearean sonnet, good luck writing a love letter, good luck proposing marriage to a future spouse, good luck raising imaginative children, etc.

Let me end by remarking that I have no problem taking politicians to task for using lies and unsupported rhetoric to promote dangerous policies. But this kind of social value-enforcement should never be used in a manipulative way, otherwise it will quickly result in political dialogue that is undesirable for entirely new reasons. For example, the "betting norm" might create a perverse incentive to manufacture empirical data even when cool-headed scientific reasoning would argue against it. Soon we'd all be "lying with statistics," and every argument would ultimately reduce to pedantic quibbling over the theoretical integrity of the model being used.

...Which, come to think of it, is more or less the substance of every major debate in Economics, ever. So what we have here is really just an economist arguing that all debates should follow the pattern with which he is most comfortable and in which he stands to have the most success.

Not such an unambiguously fine practice after all, is it?

Philip Zimbardo And Prison Recidivism

Source: www.prisonexp.org

By now, you must surely have read the recent Slate.com piece on the increasing prison population. In it, researcher John Pfaff provides data suggsesting that the major driver of this increase is a doubling of the rate at which district attorneys bring felony charges against inmates:

What appears to happen during this time—the years I look at are 1994 to 2008, just based on the data that’s available—is that the probability that a district attorney files a felony charge against an arrestee goes from about 1 in 3, to 2 in 3. So over the course of the ’90s and 2000s, district attorneys just got much more aggressive in how they filed charges. Defendants who they would not have filed felony charges against before, they now are charging with felonies.

The remainder of the article is more speculative in nature, and since I'm not married to the theory expounded upon, I'll omit it here. Read the whole thing, if you're interested.

I came back to this Slate article, however, after reading something interesting today in Philip Zimbardo's The Lucifer Effect, about the impact of situational forces on social psychology, especially as it relates to systemic oppression. As a lead-in to a section on lessons that can be gleaned from Zimbardo's infamous experiment, he writes:

From one perspective, the [Stanford Prison Experiment] does not tell us anything about prisons that sociologists, criminologists, and the narratives of prisoners have not already revealed about the evils of prison life. Prisons can be brutalizing places that invoke what is worst in human nature. They breed more violence and crime than they foster constructive rehabilitation. Recidivism rates of 60 percent and higher indicate that prisons have become revolving doors for those sentenced for criminal felonies.

Zimbardo's position is that the "defects" present in both the prisoners themselves and especially the prison environment compound each other, having all the more deleterious effects on the prisoners.

His point about recidivism is an interesting one. If true, we would expect that yesterday's convicts would return to prison at ever-increasing rates, as the situational forces infect their psychology more and more. We already know that total prison populations are increasing in the United States, but what about recidivism rates?

According to a study conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics, the actual recidivism rate at the time Zimbardo wrote The Lucifer Effect was 71.6% over a 3-year time horizon (using rearrests as the measure of recidivism). So Zimbardo's "60 percent and higher" was actually a conservative estimate.

In 1994, according to the same study, the recidivism rate was 66.9%, and the authors indicate that the difference was, in fact, statistically significant. In other words, recidivism rates have increased independent of the overall prison population increase.

Thus, there is some evidence to suggest that there are situational forces impacting how district attorneys proceed against accused persons, which then leads to an increase in the total number of convicts. This, in turn, leads to an increase in the total population of people exposed to the nefarious social psychology of the prison system, which subsequently damages their psychology and sets them on a path toward a return-trip to prison after they've "paid their debts."

If this explanation is valid, then it means, once convicted, a person is unlikely ever to have paid his or her debt to society.

Stages

I had a small epiphany over the weekend.

There I was, holding my daughter in my arms and walking out across a hotel courtyard to breakfast. As she softly pointed out things that she found interesting and tried to mimic the names of each object as I told her what they were, I was suddenly overcome by an intense love for her and a desire to just hold her close to me.

Babies, of course, don't understand those feelings in others, only themselves. A nature walk is no time to go running into daddy's arms for comfort, so she was mostly oblivious to my feelings. She simply kept pointing out interesting objects and trying to name them. My fatherly emotions were flying right over her head.

This underscored for me the fact that this stage of her life - and of mine - is fleeting. In a few short months, she'll be walking around by herself. The opportunities to scoop her up in my arms and carry her around will be sparse...

For a brief moment, this felt so unfair to me. How could my time holding her so closely and loving her like this be so brief? How could it be so near to its end? How could I prolong it as much as possible? How could I hold on to her - and this feeling - for as long as humanly possible?

At that point, I reached the following conclusion, naive as it may be, as I am still only a new parent. I concluded that this wonderful time of holding her close, carrying her around with me, loving her like that must necessarily end, but that it will be replaced by a new stage. That new stage will require that I spend less time just cuddling her, and more time actively playing with her. I'll be teaching her games, taking her on hikes, answering her questions. I'll be allowing her to play a more active role in deciding what we do together next. I'll be including her in minor chores and helping her learn skills that she'll need for the rest of her life.

That stage, too, will end sooner than I want it to. That stage will likely be replaced by a stage in which she wants to spend less time with me. She'll push me away, roll her eyes at me, test my patience, learn the boundaries of her independence. I'll have to find a new way to love her, rather than showing her amazing things or cuddling her. I'll have to forge a new kind of bond with her, one that fosters our mutual trust of each other and sets the stage for the last round, in which my job of rearing her will be over and we'll both settle into an adult relationship.

I can't help but think about people I have known who resisted this evolution. Some chose to keep having babies rather than evolve beyond the cuddling. Some refused to treat their young children as anything other than babies, eventually losing interest in their own children just as the children were developing interests of their own.

Some made it to the second stage, but then resented their children for "growing up" into teenagers who wanted to be adults. If those teens wanted to play, then the parents were interested; if not, the parents became distant and receded into their own minds, unable to relate to their teenage children.

It must be difficult to watch your children turn into adults. I'm inches deep in that ocean of emotions, and already I feel the first pangs of loss. But a true, loving relationship between a parent and a child requires our embracing the fact that, from the moment a child is born she is slowly aging.

As my child ages, so must my relationship to her. That, at least, is my conclusion.

Sub-Sonic Charmer

Because it is relevant to the ancient history of Stationary Waves, I am compelled to point out that Sonic Charmer AKA The Crimson Reach AKA etc., etc. appears to have stopped blogging. I haven't been following his blog closely for at least a couple of years, but I had noticed that he was adding new posts as recently as five weeks ago. If anyone is aware of the story here, please feel free to leave a comment.

In the meantime, the search function provides a trip down memory lane...

Bryan Caplan On Homeschooling

Bryan Caplan has decided to home-school his children during their middle school years. In rationalizing his decision, Caplan anticipates possible criticisms based on his noteworthy views on behavioral genetics and the signalling model of education, and then responds to each. (Read the whole thing.)

Caplan does indeed seem to have thought through some valid criticisms, and I believe he answers them effectively. What's striking to me, however, is the list of criticisms he has not answered at all. In that spirit, here are a few angles Caplan may not yet have considered:

First, what if homeschooling proves to be such a pleasant experience for his children that they find it difficult to adjust to "normal school" when they are reintroduced to it in high school? This could plausibly set them back in the long run. A basis for my thinking here is the difficulty most college educated people have when they work for a few years and then attempt to go back to graduate school. Having enjoyed the full liberties of an adult life and an adult income, they often struggle to readjust to academic life, in which studying is seemingly the most important thing in the world, and every penny must be mercilessly pinched.

Second, I'm genuinely surprised that Caplan has not fused his views on workplace conformity with his views on education. In fact, in this most recent blog post, he calls himself a "strategic non-conformist" and links to a previous blog post on the topic. But Caplan has stated before that education is mostly a signal of conformity. Well, what could be more non-conformist in today's American society than home schooling? Caplan makes his own case against his decision as follows:

An interesting implication is that high-IQ people who don't go to college are actually signaling that they are unusually lazy and/or weird. It's easy for a high-IQ person to breeze through school. If one fails to do so, a sensible employer will naturally ask "What's wrong with him?" It's not surprising, then, that few employers will give an eighteen-year-old genius a responsible job. The very fact that you refuse to go to college suggests that you aren't going to be as good at your job as your test scores would normally indicate. 

I hasten to add that I don't mean to disparage my self-taught readers. I'd probably really enjoy meeting you. But I'd be lying if I said I'd be eager to hire you. No offense intended - if I were running a business, I wouldn't hire myself either!

I myself am an ardent critic of conformity-as-a-value, but Caplan seems not to be, hence I wonder about the cognitive dissonance here.

Third, and further to the conformity angle, kids need opportunities to learn to communicate with their fellow children. I don't think public schooling is the best or only way to achieve this, but other home-schoolers I know provide their children with a robust faith-based community in which to be socialized. Caplan is such a fan of his self-described "bubble" that I wonder if he is perhaps compromising his children's own ability to choose a "bubble" of their own.

That said, if I had the opportunity to include my child in a peer group that included Bryan Caplan, Robin Hanson, Alex Tabarrok, Tyler Cowen, Garett Jones, and Nathaniel Bechhofer, I must admit that I would jump at it. I echo EconLog commentator "Ben's" hope that Caplan continues to blog about it.

Album Review: The Darkness - Last Of Our Kind

Image courtesy Wikipedia.org

Album reviews typically start with some basic biographical information about the band. But, I'm not going to do that with a band as well-known and written-about as The Darkness. Everything interesting that could possibly have been written about the history of the band has already been written. Besides, I did the biography thing when I reviewed Hotcakes.

I must remark, however, that Permission to Land was such a landmark album on so many levels that anything and everything the band has done since is inevitably compared to it. "Oh, The Darkness have a new album? How does it stack up to Permission to Land?" The answer is: It's different.

No artist wants to be pigeonholed, but when you wear catsuits, play Les Pauls through cranked Marshalls, and deliver the most earnest falsetto screams in the business, it's kind of hard to branch out. So, there will always be a contingent out there that just wants "all 'Stuck in a Rut,' all the time." If that's your bag, then The Darkness has plenty for you... on their other albums. On this one, you'll have to settle for "Hammer and Tongs," which, it must be emphasized, is classic Darkness to the bone.

The rest of the album seems to answer a question that I'm certain I asked, but that perhaps never would have occurred to anyone else, excepting the most rabid Darkness fans: What would it sound like if the band took the general concept of "Trojan Guitar," from the relatively obscure Hot Leg album, and fleshed it out to the length of a full album?

• Medieval imagery - check.
• Progressive song structures - check.
• Soaring vocal melodies - check.
• Irony and humor - check.
• Great performances - check.

Last of Our Kind delivers the cargo, even as it allows the band to explore some (for them) uncharted waters. There are enough new additions to the Darkness' arsenal that each deserves a brief discussion.

First, guitar sounds. By now you must know that The Darkness has always been reliable for exploring the many great sonic possibilities of the electric guitar. Last of Our Kind finds the band exploring even heavier sounds, huge, chunky, absolutely gain-saturated modern Marshall grind. This isn't a Plexi cranked to 11, it's the most modern, bass-heavy grind available in contemporary hard rock. And it's gorgeous. Electric guitars layered on top of acoustic ones has always been a band staple, but here the band ups the ante, allowing either track to enjoy the "aural spotlight." And, of course, the mandolins.

Next, and possibly the most pleasant surprise for me, personally, is bassist Frankie Poullain's lead vocals on "Conquerors." This must have taken an admirable dose of courage, sort of on the order of sitting in with Eddie Van Halen and playing a guitar solo, or giving a physics lecture with Stephen Hawking in the audience. Gulp. But his vocals are great, soulful, rich, and - would you believe it? - he actually has an admirably broad vocal range. Now, typically, when "the other guy in the band" sings lead vocals on a track, it feels jarringly different. But Poullain is no Ringo, and the song feels great in the context of the rest of the album.

Finally, let's talk a bit about composition. After all, The Darkness isn't the only band that ever set its foundation in classic rock riffs and falsetto; so why did they ever hit it big, anyway? For my money, a lot of this has to do with Justin Hawkins' remarkable and inventive sense of melody. Somehow, he manages to pull surprising and resonant melodies out of even the simplest of guitar riffs. This just might be the secret to The Darkness' sound. Anyone can play a rock riff, but only a very gifted songwriter can continue to surprise the listener with pleasant melodies twelve years later. That's been the lifeblood of the band's previous albums, but on Last of Our Kind, it enables the band to explore some handedly Queen-inspired prog-rock structures without going full-kimono, 13/8-time-sig, enigmatic scale, etc. etc... While the riffs dance deftly from big, open, arena riffs to fast-and-tight metal lockstep, to soft-and-clean, it never feels complex or pretentious, only pure and earnest, like the best rock is expected to be. Meanwhile, Justin holds it all down with cohesive vocal melodies that take the edge off some of the more challenging changes.

So on their latest album, The Darkness manage to challenge themselves, push themselves into new territory, and deliver a decidedly different Darkness album. And it works. Never once will the listener feel that it's not the Darkness, or that the band has lost its soul, or (god forbid!) its sense of humor.

(Interesting side-note that I haven't seen noted elsewhere: Last of Our Kind is a concept album about medieval battles - why is there a spaceship on the cover? That's the band's classic sense of irony cranked to 11.)

Indeed, Last of Our Kind is something new and refreshing from a band that has always tested the music world's willingness to see them as anything other than a throwback. And every time, song after song, album after album, they prove why they are so much more than that. At least on that level, The Darkness has produced something true-to-form.

Utilitarianism And The Race To The Bottom

One way to troll the internet is to take the favorite moral framework of every intelligent and decent human being I know, and tear it apart. But the truth is that I myself have Utilitarian leanings, so this is as much a self-criticism as it is a criticism of others. That's what happens at Stationary Waves: Illusions are punctured and deflated, mercilessly and repeatedly, until only the truth remains.

How Much Do Warm-Fuzzies Matter?

The Washington Post published an article entitled "Traditional Charity Fosters Love. Effective Altruism Doesn't." Resorting to god-talk, the author writes in favor of the old kind of charity:

To Jews and Christians, doing good through works of mercy was how one became good, and thus worthy to stand in God’s presence. For those inspired by this theological vision, there was obviously nothing wasteful at all about such works, no matter their impact. The result of this new vision was the utter transformation of ancient society. The formerly marginalized became visible, even uniquely blessed actors in a great spiritual drama....

This kind of charity may not change the world in the most “logical” way, but it nevertheless has an important effect: It protects, preserves and grows local economies of love. Effective altruism leaves such economies wholly unaccounted for. And when followed to its logical conclusion, it is their enemy.

You already know I'm not here to defend religion, and I'm certainly not going to suggest that creating a loving, utopian community based on JuChrIslamism is a good idea. That's not the take-away from an article like this.

Instead, the take-away is that the personal perspective of the benefactor matters in a charitable transaction. This should be obvious enough, but the reason I became aware of this article in the first place is because an Effective Altruist on my Facebook feed happened to criticize the article because he felt the author was positing that "warm-fuzzies are more important than actually helping people."

At first, it seems like a fair criticism. Why be overly concerned about your internal constructs of a good society when there are people out there who need help?

But there are clearly limits to this. What if, for example, I decided that I despised my children, and so I cashed-out their college funds and put all that money into an Effective Altruism campaign just to spite them? Clearly, no one in their right mind would say that my children's "warm-fuzzies" weren't an important consideration in that case, and I'm sure almost everyone would agree that doing anything to spite someone, regardless of how many other people benefit, is a terrible source of motivation.

But Effective Altruism itself has no particular response here. As long as sufficiently many poor people benefit, my spiteful motivations or the misery of others are completely beside the point. This is not a conclusion that I think most Effective Altruists would be happy with. Thus, we are forced to acknowledge that the psychology of the giver - i.e., "warm-fuzzies" - do, in fact, matter on some level. The only question is to what extent they matter.

Spoiler alert: There is no right answer to that question. It's entirely subjective. Some of us will be happy donating to the local homeless vet, while others of us will be happier donating to something properly sanctioned as "Effective Altruism." It would be wrong to suggest that one kind of "warm-fuzzy" is more correct than the other, but unfortunately, that is precisely the claim advocates of Effective Altruism make.

Ayn Rand: Only Half Right

Ayn Rand, of all people, correctly identified that Utilitarianism was morally bankrupt. She wrote:

“The greatest good for the greatest number” is one of the most vicious slogans ever foisted on humanity. 

This slogan has no concrete, specific meaning. There is no way to interpret it benevolently, but a great many ways in which it can be used to justify the most vicious actions.

What is the definition of “the good” in this slogan? None, except: whatever is good for the greatest number. Who, in any particular issue, decides what is good for the greatest number? Why, the greatest number.

(Here I would add: Who gets to arrive at the final count? Including or excluding certain individuals from the accounting is the easiest way to manipulate Utilitarian's moral conclusions.) She continues:

If you consider this moral, you would have to approve of the following examples, which are exact applications of this slogan in practice: fifty-one percent of humanity enslaving the other forty-nine; nine hungry cannibals eating the tenth one; a lynching mob murdering a man whom they consider dangerous to the community.

Unfortunately, Rand's taste for polemics left this final paragraph with far less impact than it should have. (To up the moral ante, she resorted to an invocation of Godwin's Law. A little more attention to detail, and she would have hit a home run.) Note that each of her absurd counterexamples rely on the set of questions outlined before it. Utilitarianism's moral failure is that the ends are determined by the horde, even if in error, and the makeup of the horde is determined by the demographics of the moment.

Begging The Question Or Brainwashing Yourself - Part II

So Rand's critique is only half-right. Her problem with Utilitarianism is that it leaves moral decision-making up to pressure groups. The real problem with Utilitarianism is that, no matter how "Effective" or "rational" we try to make it, its rationalizations can always over-compensate for flawed decision-making. It's easy to talk yourself into something when one's ethical reputation is on the line; they even have a name for it: Motivated Reasoning.

What makes Utilitarianism a uniquely egregious scourge is that it is (in its current incarnation) put forth as a remedy to Motivated Reasoning, when it is in fact an example of it.

To see this, just consider the infinitely many ways to save a human life. You could pull someone out of a burning building, or you could give them a successful cycle of chemotherapy. You could give a child in the Malaria zone a mosquito net, or you could buy a war refugee a plane ticket to an immigration-friendly nation. You could clean up a city's water supply, or teach that same town how to properly dispense of fecal matter. You could throw yourself in front of a speeding bullet, or you could talk someone down off a ledge, or you could provide an addict with clean needles.

Those are the obvious ways to save lives. Now what about the less-obvious ways? You could abstain from driving in order to lessen the odds of a fatal traffic incident. You could become more diligent about sanitizing your hands and workspaces to prevent a potentially fatal infection from afflicting an immuno-compromised person. You could stop using anti-bacterial soaps to prevent super-bugs from evolving.

The funny thing is that these less obvious things, if widely promoted, would probably save far more lives than Bill Gates' latest initiative in Africa. But most of us won't accept the concept of hand-sanitization-as-an-act-of-altruism, and in fact most people have a hard time with something far simpler, like hand-sanitization-as-a-moral-imperative. The only apparent reason for our refusal to accept these things is that using hand sanitizer doesn't feel altruistic.

Once again, "warm-fuzzies" matter after all. But wasn't Utilitarianism supposed to save us from that?

That's the first sneaky layer of psychological dishonesty in Utilitarianism, the part where we choose the most Utilitarian policy from a list of things we are already prepared to call altruism. Mosquito nets - yes; defensive driving - no. If that were the only sneaky layer of psychological dishonesty in Utilitarianism, then it would be a pretty easy fix.

But it's not. There are many more, and they are all a little sneakier. For example, some Utilitarians will concede that defensive driving is, indeed, a moral imperative, but that this is beside the point; after all, no one chooses between funding a mosquito net and driving defensively. We can do both.

Except, we can't. If you were to invest the right amount of time minimizing your epidemiological impact on the rest of society, you wouldn't have any time left over for figuring out where to spend your marginal charity dollar. Thoughts, and analysis, and cogitation take time. It's easy for the ethicist to sit back and say, "Well, yes, drive defensively, minimize the amount of time spent driving, and only give to Effectively Altruistic causes." But saying that is about as useful as saying, "Be a millionaire and an amazing lover." We all agree that it would be nice to do it. Utilitarianism is about doing what yields the highest utility of all possible courses of action, not just what, in theory would yield the highest utility.

 Real Utilitarianism dictates that if $500,000 makes me, personally, far happier than extending a year's salary to 20 or 30 sourpusses in the Third World, then we must give the money to me, not to the traditional "needy." The experienced among you will note that this is just a version of the Utility Monster problem - except my version doesn't require that I be a monster and doesn't hinge on inflating moral premises to absurd extremes in order to prove a point. There are probably many people in America who could be made happier with a $500,000 lump-sum payment than a year of income could make dozens of poor Bangladeshis happy. (And vice-versa, for that matter, but let's ignore that for the time being.) These people aren't monsters or conceptual arguments, and their existence should pose a real problem for Utilitarian altruists.

Instead, the Utilitarian's Motivated Reasoning deftly dodges the issue by stubbornly proclaiming - without any kind of theory, data, or argument to back it up - that there is no possible way $500,000 could make anyone in America happier than a year's salary could make a poor person happy. The best argument for this notion is the concept of the diminishing marginal utility of money; but that has some problems that I suppose I ought to highlight in the next section.

Personal Utility Is Not A Continuous Function

At best, it's piecewise-continuous. Here's what I mean: Suppose the only luxury good you're interested in buying is a $7 million luxury home, and the only luxury good I'm interested in buying is a $300 pair of shoes. Suppose we both play a Utilitarian Lottery that promises to pay a grand prize of $1,000.

For a $1,000 grand prize, the only person who stands to experience a significant increase in utility is me: I get my $300 pair of shoes, and $700 leftover to basically mindlessly spend because I'm not interested in anything else. If you win, you don't get your luxury home, so you mindlessly spend the full $1,000. Sure, we both get a small increase in utility from some mindless consumption, but at $1,000, I'm the only one who gets to satisfy my wildest dream.

Now flip it around. Let's suppose that the grand prize is a $7 million luxury home. If you win, you get your dream home. If I win, I get something fancy that never mattered to me until I entered some dumb lottery. 

Dedicated Utilitarians will say, "But Ryan, you could always sell the $7 million luxury home, buy the shoes, and give the remainder to me, which gets me almost to achieving my dream home." True, but I don't know anyone who would actually do this, do you? "But they should do this!" Why? Because we should always be stuck to the set of priorities we have at the outset of thought experiments? Because we should never allow a large, unexpected windfall to change the way we achieve our own happiness?

I guess you forgot to update your prior.

Meanwhile, Scott Sumner - having never read the above argument, or having found it totally unpersuasive - insists that increasing consumption taxes on wealthy people is a great idea, because

Yes, poverty in the US is a modest problem (especially compared to other countries, and other periods of history) but it is still a problem. In contrast, forcing Larry Ellison to downshift from a 500-foot yacht to a 400-foot yacht is an utterly trivial problem. If we can solve a small problem by creating another utterly trivial problem—then do it!

The fatal flaw in all this is that Larry Ellison's utility may decrease more than expected by being forced to live in a world in which he can't even choose to have a 500-foot yacht, versus a world in which he voluntarily "downshifts" for altruistic reasons (or not).

Therefore, once again, psychology matters. Giving a homeless person $100 is a nice thing to do; forcing someone else to give a homeless person $100 is, well, weird. If you want to do a good thing, then just go ahead and do it. Why do you have to chop off the port end of some billionaire's yacht in order to feel like an altruist? Seems odd, no?

(Here's an interesting sidebar: According to at least one website, the price differential between 400- and 500-foot yachts is on the order of 33%. Do you know anyone, no matter how rich, who would consider being forced out of a $15-180 million dollar investment "utterly trivial?" Sometimes just spot-checking an economist's wild assumptions puts some important perspective on what he's actually talking about.)

But here's the coup de grace: Venturing an opinion about Larry Ellison's yacht purchases costs Scott Sumner zip, zilch, zero, nada, and many more values equivalent to nothing. Scott Sumner wrote a blog post articulating which issues are important to him, and among them is the moral imperative of forcing rich people to make different choices.

"And only in America do we want the system to force us to do the right thing so we can take the credit. #behavioraleconomics"

Of course the context of that quote was a discussion of narcissism, of fetishizing the image at the expense of the object itself. Wouldn't it be totally weird if Effective Altruists were only really motivated by the trappings of charity, rather than by a genuine interest in helping others?

That Guy, From University

When Jeremy Beer, the guy who wrote that Washington Post article, wants to engage in charity, he wants to help Pete. Pete is a real, living, breathing person with whom Mr. Beer has real-world, eye-contact conversations. It's easy to say that Beer is helping Pete because Beer knows Pete, talks to him, gives him money directly, and ultimately sees where the money goes. He also offers additional help to Pete, non-monetary help.

How many Effective Altruists know the names of the people who benefit from their altruism? How many Effective Altruists know the name of one of the beneficiaries? If Effective Altruism is really about helping people, then shouldn't the Altruists know a thing or two about the people who receive their funds? A first name seems like a reasonable thing to know. How about the exact number of people (not the average, per-dollar number of people) who benefited from the contribution, and in exactly what way they benefited? This all seems reasonable enough. 

You can argue that the names don't matter as long as the people get help. You can argue that there are other websites out there dedicated to keeping charities honest and tracking the benefits of charitable contributions. You can argue all these things, but think about what it means if you do.

It means the particular individuals you help don't matter as much to you as the pure number of people you help. You're not delivering the help, you're just a donor. You're not keeping track of the charity's effectiveness, you're just reading the website. You don't want to actually do any real work here, you just want to ensure that your money is helping the most people, as measured by quantity. Names, faces, details... who cares? The important thing is that your money was spent in the way you deem most efficient.

Does that sound like charity to you? Because it sounds like signalling to me. It sounds like you don't actually care about the people you're helping, you only really care about help, in the abstract. It doesn't sound like an evaluation of whose lives you wish to improve and how you wish to improve them; instead, it sounds like you're only really interested in the bottom-line number of the total number of lives you improved. It's everyone else's job to worry about the details, you just want to find out which hole to put your wad in.

It sounds like a group of people who have come up with a rationalization scheme that maximizes the signalling value of their charity... er, kind of. In fact, all it does is maximize the signalling value of charity in the eyes of people who think stuff like utilitarian calculus and economic theory are cool, e.g. the Less Wrong crowd, and a few other weirdos like yours truly. 

So, back to the top. I'm pretty sure we agreed that giving to charity to spite somebody was not a particularly moral thing to do. Is giving to charity in order to impress your Bayesian Rationalist friends any better?

Isn't it a race to the bottom to cook up clever rationale in service of your donation strategies in hopes of being That Guy, From University, Who Is So Clever With His Economic Theory That He Even Buys Mosquito Nets For Poor People Instead Of Donating Food To The Local Shelter?

I mean, I thought we were donating for the maximum utility of others, not just to look cool. Or was I wrong about what Utilitarianism was supposed to be about? 

Why Would We Be Less Sensitive To Interest Rates?

Tyler Cowen links to a paper out of the Kansas City Fed, and Scott Sumner discusses it in greater depth. The topic of the day is, has the U.S. economy become less sensitive to interest rates?

I'm not smart enough to say for certain. But, here's a wild conjecture...

Suppose that demand for "necessities" is inelastic; we buy them at almost any price, because we need them. Goods that go in this category are things like "housing" (including rent), "transportation" (including automobiles and bus passes), health insurance, and certain kinds of consumer goods that "everybody has," such as mattresses and large appliances.

Now suppose society made a gradual shift away from cash sales in all of these categories, toward an environment where these things were either leased, rented-to-own, or financed over a period of years. But suppose that, despite this shift, demand for these goods remained inelastic.

If that ever happened, I would expect consumers to be less responsive to changes in the interest rate. Or, more precisely, I would expect consumers to absorb the cost of rate increases as something like "inflation," because they're not going to cut back at virtually any price.

Am I talking crazy-talk? 

Cindy Crawford Is Beautiful... And Smart

Cindy Crawford asks an important question:

"Why would seeing a bad picture of me make other people feel good?" she wondered. "I know my body, and I know it's not perfect, but maybe I have a false body image; maybe I think I look better than I do. I think that most women are hard on themselves."

The facts of this particular case strike me as being somewhat unimportant, but just in case you didn't want to click through to read the whole article, here they are:

Crawford did a photo shoot for a magazine in 2013. Recently, a photo from that shoot was released, and it was purported to be an "untouched" photograph. This photograph (I have not seen it) apparently makes Crawford look like a less-perfect specimen of female beauty. As it turns out, the supposedly untouched photograph was, in fact, a phony. Someone had retouched it to make Crawford look imperfect. She probably is imperfect (what the heck is perfection, anyway?), but she is much more perfect than the phony photo attempts to project.

All of that is neither here nor there. Some of you may not be aware of the fact that Cindy Crawford was the valedictorian of her high school graduating class, and won a university scholarship to study chemical engineering before she decided to pursue modeling full time. In other words: Cindy Crawford is intelligent.

Like the intelligent person she is, she can't help wondering why society would be happy to see a picture that makes a beautiful women look less beautiful.

There are probably multiple explanations, but one of them is this: Maintaining the false belief (the illusion) that beautiful people aren't really beautiful implies that the only thing standing between you and a career as a supermodel is Photoshop. It's not that they're less attractive than Cindy Crawford, it's just that they don't have the benefit of Photoshop.

To be sure, professional photographs found in fashion magazines are digitally altered, This is knowledge that no one celebrates. What they do celebrate is a bad photograph of a beautiful woman.

How sad.

Album Review: The Aristocrats - Tres Caballeros

Image source: Wikipedia (fair use)

As my glowing review of their 2013 Dallas concert attests, The Aristocrats are one of the hottest live bands to come along in years. They're the kind of band teenage boys dream about: "What if you took the best guitarist, the best bassist, and the best drummer, and put them in a room and told them to make a band...?" It's no teenage dream, boys and girls, it is The Aristocrats.

The instrumental trio is now up to three (studio) albums and counting. As the band themselves mentioned at the concert I attended, the first two albums didn't really capture the essence of the band since, after all, The Aristocrats are first and foremost a live band. Any experienced recording artist will tell you what a struggle it is to capture live energy in a recording studio. So while the first two albums were certainly exciting, they lacked that live performance explosion that you'll get to enjoy, should you ever have the opportunity to see the band in-person.

The interesting thing about Tres Caballeros, released this past June, is that the band found a viable way to remedy the "it's not live when it's in the studio" problem: They became a studio band, multi-tracking instrument parts, adding special effects, and creating sonic textures without having to even attempt a "live performance" vibe.

The result is no less spectacular than Aristocrats fans could expect from three of the hottest musicians in the instrumental music world.

Take the elaborate "Jack's Back," for example. The song is a barrage of interesting guitar tones, which dance and weave their way through a song that is alternately soft-and-delicate and heavy-as-a-real-heavy-thing. The band has made a specialty of blending quiet passages with full-on-freight-train passages over the course of its previous albums, but on this tune the ability to leverage multi-tracking and studio effects makes the quiet parts quieter, the heavy parts, heavier, and the overall ambiance of the piece a true listening roller-coaster. At the same time, they maintain the classic Aristocrats personality and spirit that makes them who they are.

Of course, Tres Caballeros is a lot more than just "a normal Aristocrats album, plus studio tricks!" album. The compositions themselves have evolved, and to my ears, the evolution has been along two distinct lines.

First, it seems that guitarist Guthrie Govan has pushed the band toward more rockabilly influences. We hear this both directly, as in the case of true rockabilly tour de force "Smuggler's Corner," and indirectly, as in the case of, say, "Texas Crazypants." The title of this latter tune certainly evokes rockabilly imagery, but unless you're listening for it or paying close attention to track titles, you won't immediately hear the extent of its compositional "rockabilliness."

Meanwhile, in a song like "ZZ Top," we might expect a direct send-up of Texas blues or indeed the aforementioned rockabilly. Instead, what we get is a demonstration of the second way I think the band has evolved since their last effort.

This second strand of evolution is more obvious if you follow drummer Marco Minnemann's work outside of The Aristocrats, specifically the Levin Minnemann Rudess album (which I reviewed here). LMR is very much an old-school-prog, sonic textures album, which until now served as an interesting contrast to The Aristocrats' straight-ahead instrumental explosiveness. On Tres Caballeros, it seems this element of Minnemann's musical personality is in greater focus.

A major upshot of this second development is that it clears a wide sonic birth for bassist Bryan Beller to do his thing. As a fan of his since my mid-teens when he was playing in Dweezil Zappa's band, I am always on the lookout for an opportunity to hear Beller stretch himself and lay down his wonderful and elastic bass lines. Tres Caballeros happily delivers this in spades.

So what do we end up with?

Tres Caballeros is an exciting album that showcases the band's growth together as a band. While fans who prefer all solos, all the time might find fault in an album like this, I find the performances actually more stunning considering the music's compositional complexity. Those who expected more of the same from The Aristocrats will be surprised - and if you're like me, delighted - to discover how much more the band has on tap to offer us fans. The album courses through peaks and valleys of higher and lower energy, delivering something both fresh and classic Aristocrats.

The bottom line: The Aristocrats have crafted another must-own instrumental rock album while subtly evolving into a band that promises more varied, and equally classic future albums. My overall rating: A-.