Can We Punish the Mentally Ill?

Instead of guilty, sometimes a trial returns a verdict "not guilty by reason of insanity." What does this mean?

To understand it, you have to consider the whole edifice of our criminal justice system. Guilt and punishment are linked together. Because you are guilty, you must be punished. But punishment and reform are also linked together; any punishment must also reform the criminal by teaching them the moral principles of right and wrong. If the process works then criminals released from prison will bring a different moral awareness to their decisions and not repeat their crimes.

For insane people this process does not work. Insane people do not know they are committing a crime and so they are not really guilty. Since they are not guilty they do not deserve punishment. If we punish them anyway, then this would not rehabilitate them or teach them a moral code.

But our process for handling normal criminals and the mentally ill have the same basic goal. They both want to make people practice common moral principles of right and wrong so that they can fit in society. Mentally ill people must be cured. If they are cured then they will again have access to moral principles of right and wrong, and can be released and live among us.

I mention all of this because I think that our personal morality should also follow the same pattern. If we ever choose to punish a friend, it can only be justified if we are attempting to teach them a moral lesson. If they learn the lesson then the friendship will live; otherwise that friend cannot fit in your society.

A Proper Apology

People are apologizing all the time, but sometimes it's not enough, and only a proper apology will do. There are four parts to a proper apology.

But first a little etymology. The word "apology" was originally a rhetorical term, and meant a self-justification or defense of one's actions. The meaning has shifted and today and apology means a frank expression of regret for wrongdoing. 

People often get upset nowadays if you say you're going to apologize but end up explaining and justifying your actions. But the fact that this happens so often suggests that self-justification is still an integral part of an apology. 

I think that we resort to this older meaning of apology when we are seeing the situation from our own perspective. But to apologize in the modern sense, to frankly admit wrongdoing, you have to be able to see the situation from the other person's point of view.

And with that preamble, let's move on to the four parts of a proper apology, by which I mean an apology in the modern sense, where we admit wrongdoing. First, you have to say you're sorry. Second, you have to say what you did wrong. Third, you have to explain why your actions were wrong. And fourth, you have to promise you won't act this way in the future.

While people apologize all the time, they do so easily. They might not intend to apologize at all, but merely to smooth over hurt feelings. On the other hand, a proper apology is very much like swearing a vow; it's a serious thing. 

Five of Apple's Faults

The great pendulum keeps swinging. Apple is falling out of favor. I'm pretty frustrated with the Podcast App, and with general problems when syncing to iTunes.

The process of syncing has gotten steadily worse for the past few years, ever since Genius results were included, which doubled or tripled the time to sync. Who's bright idea was that? Maybe a USB 3.0 cable would have mitigated the problem, but Apple fans will have to wait months or years for it to arrive.

The latest sync problems stem from wireless syncing. I'm totally confused. It just doesn't work. While the sync is on, all my songs are grayed-out and can't be played. Quite often when I leave my home (and wi-fi network) and try to play music on my iPhone 5, I'll see that most of my songs are grayed out. I'm quite sure this is because of auto-syncing.

For Podcasts, I don't understand where I'm supposed to make podcast playlists, in iTunes or in the Podcast App? The "auto-subscription" feature, where new podcasts are loaded to my phone without needing to sync to iTunes, doesn't work very well. Podcasts that are availabe on my computer will not be available via auto-subscription until a few hours have passed. Even worse, my apple devices no longer seem to notify each other when a podcast is listened to.

 This article identifies five core problems with Apple. Number 4 is a bit weak, but otherwise it's a pretty fair list. Are you listening Tim Cook?

1. Relatively weak cloud services
2. A less than optimal approach to Internet services: MobileMe, Apple Maps 
3. A bad track record with social products
4. Difficulties with big acquisitions: Siri
5. An apparent lack of awareness that Apple has some big problems

Facebook Search

I am waiting for FaceBook to grant me access to their new "Graph Search" feature. In the meantime, I torture myself by reading about its conceptual differences compared with Google Search.

With a typical Google search, the objects we search for are web pages, with the connections (or graph) that help determine the pages that rise to the top primarily being links from across the web. Links, simple form, are like votes, helping Google decide which are the most popular pages to show for a particular topic.

With Facebook Graph Search, the objects we search for aren’t web pages but instead virtual representations of real world objects: people, places and things. The connections are primarily Facebook Likes. Did such-and-such a person like a particular photo? A particular doctor? A particular restaurant? Those likes are the ties that bind the information in Facebook together.

 

Inside the Mind of a Gun Nut

Here is a very interesting video interview with a gun nut. He seems to say that the conditions of the American Revolution have returned. He seems to be saying that he's a combination of Washington and Jefferson, reborn, and it all flows from his certainty that the 2nd Amendment is the "clearest" of all the Amendments. He reminds me of religious nuts who take such pleasure in imagining the "end times" and how only a few people, who believe the same things they do, will survive.

I, Government Budget

Isaac Asimov wrote his famous "Robot Series" of novels in the 1950's. It is one of my favorite sci-fi series of all time. Each novel is structured like a detective story in which a human police investigator, Elijah Bailey, is paired with a robot named R. Daneel Olivaw. Like any mismatched pair of fictional characters, their sum is more than their parts.

The Robot Series introduced Asimov's famous Three Laws of Robotics, which are elegantly stated as follows:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

A recurring plot device is that, when Det. Bailey is faced with a hostile robot, he can manipulate them using the Three Laws. For example, if the robot was ordered to arrest Det. Bailey, it would be an example of the Second Law to obey orders. But if Det. Bailey asserted that he was sick and arresting him might cause him to die, then this would be an example of the First Law, to not injure a human. When faced with these choices, the robot would weigh the (weak) violation of the First Law against the (strong) violation of the Second Law. The robot's movements and thinking would slow down as he grappled with this contradiction, allowing Det. Bailey to make his escape.

In the political debate about the US Government's debt ceiling, I see a strong analogy with the Three Laws of Robotics. The constitution gives Congress the power to "lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts...." In a later paragraph, Congress is granted the power to "borrow Money on the credit of the United States." In my analogy there is a robot named US Government. The robot is controlled by someone named US Congress. The Three Laws of Budgeting are:

1. US Government must obey orders given by US Congress to spend money.
2. US Government must obey orders given by US Congress to raise money through taxes.
3. US Government must obey orders given by US Congress to raise money through issuing debt.

You will notice that these laws omit some of Asimov's language from the Three Laws of Robotics; namely, they do not structure these rules as a hierarchy. Specific to our political debate about the debt ceiling, Law #3 does not helpfully say "as long as such issuing of debt does not conflict with the First or Second Laws."



How much trouble would we be spared if the Constitution had limited Congress's power to issue debt? Let's return to the analogy with the Three Laws of Robotics to find out. Det. Bailey was able to confuse and befuddle the poor robot by playing the Laws against each other. Today we are in a situation where the Congress is trying to confuse and befuddle the poor US Government by playing the Three Laws of Budgeting against each other.

The US Government has been told by Congress to do three separate things that, taken together, contradict each other. The US Government must spend money as directed on the military, roads, agriculture subsidies, food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, etc. The US Government must raise money through taxes by collecting 15% of capital gains, 15% of dividends, estate taxes, income taxes, tariffs, and various fees.

These two functions do not contradict each other as long as the Third Law, to issue debt, is flexible. But Congress now wants to tell the US Governement that it must not raise money through issuing debt.

Great job Congress, you sure did teach that robot who's boss.

It makes me wonder if the Supreme Court has ever had to review a law for logical contradictions, and made a ruling on that basis? What if the Executive Branch brought a case to argue that Congressional acts, which are known to be logically contradictory at the time they are passed, can be ignored by the Executive Branch?

Android vs. iOS

Android vs. iOS is one of the most exciting battles for market share in the history of tech companies. It surpasses the IBM vs. Apple battle from the 80's because that battle was lost as soon as it began, when the IBM PC immediately overtook Apple for market share.

One mystery of Android vs. iOS is whether we can trust the market share numbers. As one blogger recently pointed out, Android's ecosystem is more fragmented:

Using the word 'Android' to describe these devices is somewhat problematic. The great majority of them come with no Google services: no Google Maps, no Google Play and no Gmail or Google Calendar. These cannot be installed by the user either, without a great deal of fiddling with ROMs. Google Search is of course largely blocked in China, and those devices that do have Google Play can only download free applications: purchases are not supported.... In other words, these devices are 'orphaned' from Google in an analogous way to the Kindle Fire. They provide no Adsense revenue and, equally importantly, give Google none of the signalling information about user behaviour and intention that, for example, feeds Google Now.

Android is a very popular operating system, but its users don't seem to care about Apps, search, or browsing the web. Perhaps they use it primarily as a phone and mp3 player?

Why Management Consultants?

I'm not a management consultant, but I have acquired some knowledge about them. Many college friends entered that profession and have shared anecdotes from their work life. Also, over my fifteen year career in software development, I've interacted with a number of consultants, some talented, some average, and some below average. The question I always ask myself is... why? Why go outside the company? Why pay so much money to someone who is not really any more skilled than a top performing FTE?

This Freakonomics article goes a long way towards articulating my doubts. A quote:

Fellow consultants and associates … [said] fifty percent of the job is nodding your head at whatever’s being said, thirty percent of it is just sort of looking good, and the other twenty percent is raising an objection but then if you meet resistance, then dropping it.

Even more mysterious, is the way that the money spent on a consultant can provide momentum to a new initiative:

The second thing that [consultants] provide is legitimacy, and that’s the one that seems a little bit strange. So you’ve made a decision or you think you might know what you’d like to do about entering those markets or making a new product. And instead of just going ahead and doing it, you hire the consultants to confirm what you already thought. And those consultants come in and they say yes you’re right.

Profile of an Individual Investor

This article gets it exactly right:

I had a fascinating lunch, a couple of weeks ago, which lodged in my mind the idea that stock picking, at least when practiced by individuals, is best analyzed as an upper-middle-class hobby rather than as purely profit-focused investing activity. Once you start looking at it that way, suddenly a lot of behavior, which looks irrational under most lights, starts making a lot of sense.

I've been picking stocks for 15 years and, while I've been spectacularly successful on some trades, those wins have been more than offset by the losses. But to look at this activity as a hobby puts a whole new light on it. Maybe I will strike it rich someday, but in the meantime I enjoy picking stocks very much.

History of Internet Dating

A collection of links about the business of Internet dating companies, and their various methods of putting people together.

Emily Witt writes a comprehensive history from match.com to OkCupid. An excerpt:

I went to a lecture by the novelist Ned Beauman who compared the OK Cupid experience to Carl Sagan pondering the limits of our ability even to imagine non-carbon-based extraterrestrial life, let alone perceive when it was beaming signals to us. We troll on OK Cupid for what we think we want, but what if we are incapable of seeing the signals being sent to us, let alone interpreting them?

Another great excerpt:

Internet dating alerted me to the fact that our notions of human behaviour and achievement, expressed in the agglomerative text of hundreds of internet dating profiles, are all much the same and therefore boring and not a good way to attract other people. The body, I also learned, is not a secondary entity.

Bianca Bosker focuses on how to meet people in the larger ecosystem of social web sites.