Some fluff, some info

topics covered:

Y'know, there's nothing wrong with being a one-hit wonder if your one hit is a real contribution to the musical canon. Not that all of these guys are one-hit folks, but if this were their sole contribution to music, they'd be doing OK. If you add up the time I've spent listening to these songs, it'd be well over a month.

As everybody ever has noted, music reviews are dumb if you can't hear the song, so I've put samples up at the gmail.com account (user: some.files, password: caring). Again, I'm sorry that gmail forces me to put each item in a separate file, meaning that you'll need to do more clicking than you really should.

Silo, Scud Mountain Boys. The version on Pine Box; somehow the one on Dance the Night Away doesn't do it so much for me. It's a guy on the guitar, with somebody harmonizing here and there; when I hear it I think about the guy at the guitar composing it, and deciding at some point that he should stop noodling on the guitar and just call it done. At first the lyrics sound kinda dumb and overalternatyve, but once you pass on that they're heartfelt. The song is very much in my range, so I sing along comfortably.

Brand New Love, Sebadoh. A song about the endogeneity of social relations. `Any thought could be the beginning/a brand new tangled web you're spinning./ Anyone could be a brand new love./ Follow what you feel,/ `cause you alone decide what's real./ Anyone could be a brand new love.' As with the numbers below, the noise at the end fits perfectly.

Ana Ng, They Might be Giants. OK, I just felt obliged to include at least one vaguely perky/bounceable song. I put this one on repeat every time it comes up if only to hear that opening guitar lick over and over. Somewhere on their web site, the duo explain that the line `I don't want the world, I just want your half' came up in an argument over money. I wish the people I argue with were so well-humored.

Miss Sarajevo, The Passengers (which consists of U2 and Brian Eno), featuring Luciano Pavarotti. This in no way makes up for anything Bono does as a human being, but it shows that these guys really are good musicians and can produce something which is more than just well-formed pop. I somehow keep losing the album, but I don't care `cause I still have this track and Your Blue Room. It was used at the end of the documentary Miss Sarajevo, about hipsters living in Sarajevo during war time. The movie all seems so normal until you realize that those popping noises are snipers firing at people.

Collected songs where every verse is filled with grief, Alfred Schnittke (only version I've seen performed by the Kronos Quartet). The Kronos Quartet is famous in my mind for picking good pieces. I guess they play them OK and all too, but it's really their selection of repertoire which is off the beaten path but which is not just annoying atonal weirdness which causes me to buy lots of stuff with the Kronos name attached. Anyway, I don't have much to put to words about this track. Um, it's emotive and fun to listen to over and over again.

Resemblances, Arto Lindsay. Oh, what a synthesis of everything. Arto had this period playing skronk guitar, in which he treated the strings in the style of treated piano (i.e., made noise), and he had a long string of bossa nova numbers which were all beautiful and heartfelt. Then this track here is the synthesis of it all: it starts all calm and quiet, then by my count a dozen instruments come in, culminating in this blob of noise which completely and totally fits in with the song, except that it's noise. Or, for example, I saw this one painter (whose name I've forgotten; perhaps Ms ZK of Canberra, Australa can help) whose backgrounds were abstract art pieces in the standard abstract tradition, but by painting a few characters in here and there, he made them into perfectly concrete, normal-seeming paintings. You have to look at it for a while before it hits you, `Oh, if that background were by itself, I'd be dismissing it as too-abstract art for art's sake.'

Now and then, somebody will tell me something like `I never get much into music; it's nice in the background but generally all a blur.' I play them Resemblances and try to get subject to follow one of the dozen instruments and work out its specific role in the song. Subject is usually impressed with how much there is to be found. Of course, such an exercise is standard music appreciation advice, but I think it works especially well for Resemblances.

Sunken Treasure, Wilco. It's fun to see Wilco get more offbeat with every album. They started off with AM as pretty much straight country. There are a few subtleties that made them hip country, like underuse of pedal steels and details of the lyrics; then on Being There they started to add some noise to the mix; then Warner Brothers kicked them off the label for not making Yankee Hotel Foxtrot e-z enough. [Haven't heard A Ghost is Born yet, but I hear it follows the trend.] So Sunken Treasure is a crossover song of sorts, where they were still doing straight songs but indicated that something was going on in the background. They go for the same effect of noise-as-composition-element as Arto did with Resemblances (or even Radiohead did with How to Disappear Completely; it'd be on the list but there's a fluke in the editing which I can not f.ing stand. Maybe they meant to do it, but it still takes me out of their world.).

Magnetic Fields, The Death of Ferdinand de Sassure. In contrast, this is entirely stripped down. Bass, synth, vocals, period. See, Ferdinand de Sassure was a linguist, so the chorus conjugates verbs (except it's English, so there's no conjugation to speak of). I like to sing along pronouncing everything as if it rhymed with the exaggerated French pronounciation of Sassure. By the way, if you're gonna buy an entire Magnetic Fields album, get The Charm of the Highway Strip. It's about vampires.

Quiet American, Antarctica. I can't plug this guy enough. For the story to this piece, search this page for Antarctica. Then listen to everything else on the page. This is what I'd expected Modest Mouse's `A life of arctic sounds' to sound like; was disappointed when their arctic sounds were so far from it. [Was also disappointed when I found out the band's name isn't really any sort of reference to Modest Moussorgsky.]

Some runners up, any one of which I'd be happy to put on repeat for an hour. Most of them are slower songs, because I'm clinically depressed, and because it's easier for a composer to create a new world if he/she isn't worrying about being danceable.

David Bowie: Space oddity. So when did you first work out that Major Tom's a junkie?
Gonzo the Great: I'm going to go back there some day. Probably just because it's one of the first songs I really, really empathized with. It brought tears to my six-year old eyes.
Motels: Suddenly last summer.
Till Tuesday: Voices carry. Yes, that's Aimee Mann.
Speedway, Morrissey. I'm not sure what I like about this song. See html comments.
Radiohead, Creep. When this came out everybody thought Radiohead would be a one-hit wonder, `cause this one track was so incredible.
Smashing Pumpkins, Soma. Maybe if I didn't live in Chicago in 1993 I wouldn't be including this one, but I did, so here ya go.
`Rebekah del Rio', Llorando. This is the cover of Roy Orbison's Crying from Mulholland Drive; I assume the name is a pseudonym. The DVD doesn't have chapters, so I had to mode shift this to MP3 so I could put it on repeat; see gmail.
Eagles, Hotel California. I think this one counts, as a piece that creates its own little world. A bit out of fashion, I guess, but all of Latin America still loves this song, even though they collectively don't understand the words.
Grandaddy: Miner at the Dial-a-view. Another song that builds its own mythology.
Chris Isaak, Wicked Game. The first time I'd heard it, I thought it was a classic which had played on the radio for decades; it just sounded so logical (in a not-derivative way. It's nothing like 99% of country songs).


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Here's some music that I like and play reasonably often but which other human beings have given me flack for listening to. There's lots of other stuff which I like but which is just uncool, which I won't bore you with (Stevie Wonder, Faure, Concrete Blonde, &c).

Jimmy Buffet, Margaritaville. It percolated in my head for a while, just the mis-remembered phrase, `One more day/ in Margaritaville' which I would mumble to myself from time to time. [The correct line is actually more despondent: `wasting away again/ in Margaritaville'] It was emblematic of life in LA and a few other choice locations I have lived in: tourists pay lots of money to come here; when they draw pictures of paradise, they look like this; I have lots of pals and am paid to think about things that interest me; and yet it's all covered in a patina of ennui anyway. The song asks: when everything is perfect and you're still not happy, what do you do? Somebody once told me it's just about an alcoholic, which is a valid interpretation (`That frozen concoction that helps me hang on') but to me passes up the more important existential issues raised by the song.

Philip Glass, Einstein on the Beach. Sitting in the dorm room in London, my roommate's clubber pals were all playing tapes of the usual repetitive club music, and I said, `oh, that reminds me of Philip Glass' and I put this on. To me it was incredibly similar: repetitive keyboards, lots of layers, but they gave it this confused look, since they knew in a way I'll never understand that this is artsy weirdo music, whereas their stuff is properly hipster club music. If you backed me to the wall, I could list the differences for you, but I don't care. Glass rocks, and had an immense influence on modern music. E.g., go listen to the keyboards on your Grandaddy CD again. If you're still scared of him, find some of his stuff post-1998 or so. [How about the Fog of War soundtrack?]

Coldplay. My idea of tempo is somehow slower than everybody else's; fast for me is is everybody else's mid-tempo. So Coldplay, which is cursed with the insult-title of `mid-tempo rockers', is OK by me. I think they're great at writing music to set mood. Of course, the music ain't rocket science, and you get it on the first listen, and they play it at fast food restaurants, but they definitely know how to play their instruments. Last time I used a McBathroom, they were playing Pete Yorn on the McPA, but `On your side' still makes me happy in a cozy kind of way (despite lyrics which make zero sense).

The Bossa Nova. I've written a personal ad on this before, how I think it's the most misunderstood genre out there. In the section on rhythm exercises in the music textbook, the bossa nova rhythm is always the difficult one that stops you up and keeps you from thinking it's all easy. It's wonderful and counterintuitive. It's sad that all the people who cover the Girl from Ipanema just give up and play it in 4/4 time.

Radiohead, Pablo Honey. I really think it's their best album. I got tired of Kid A pretty quick (except the Pyramid Song and How to Disappear Completely; are those on there or on Amnesiac?), and always skipped tracks on The Bends even though I had a tape copy so skipping tracks involved lots of effort, but I play all of Pablo Honey over and over again. There is nothing innovative in the instrumentation or the song structure, but the songs are all really fun nonetheless, and Mr. TY of Oxford, UK still shows himself to be an emotive badass. Mr. GK of San Diego, CA, calls them `The band that did Creep,' and I still agree, even though they've gone through all their reinventions and changes since then.

Should I mention the Beach Boys? They've become the hipsters' darling, so one doesn't have to defend liking them anymore. But it's a chance to mention a dumb trick that I saw online somewhere: try looking at Amazon reviews of the Great Works of Our Time sorted by lowest rating first (Go to the end of customer reviews on the main item page, click on See All N Reviews, then you get the little Sort By box on the review page). Here are the reviews for Pet Sounds. Or, here's Lolita.

So that's my list of things that make me happy despite persecution. Please leave your own in the comment box below.

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First, I apologize that the book will not be free (as in beer). In fact, it's the opposite of free: $28.95, paperback, 150 pp. It seem the publisher is shooting for business schools and people with expense accounts. Authors and presses are always at cross-odds on this one, I imagine, in that the author always wants as wide a readership as possible while the press wants to maximize profits. My press, which has a lot of really smart people who work full time on coming up with prices, decided that the profit-maximizing scheme is to ignore all the thousands of people out there in Internet-land who wouldn't think twice about buying the book for ten bucks in favor of scoring a few good business school reading lists.

I apologize that the book will not be free (as in speech). I don't think I'm allowed to put a copy online, and will have to ask nicely about doing so when the book is out of print. You'll probably see about three out of nine chapters soon, though. It certainly won't be in any hip new formats like a wiki any time soon, since I don't know how to set one up and am not in the mood to try right now. I like PDFs.

I apologize that the book is in Word format. This would have been a wonderful opportunity to try to talk [name of Institution] into not using a Microsoft product for just once, already. But [name of Institution] has drunk the Kool-ade and come back for seconds. I mean, it's sort of offensive how many things they do manually because Word doesn't do it automatically, but they stick with it anyway. I'm just happy that editor finally broke down and did some of the formatting for me, probably after I mucked it up so much. [Seems that Word has both character styles and paragraph styles, and applying one of each to the same section is an ordeal which was too much for me.]

I apologize that the book won't be out before May. The fight over software patents is going on in Europe now, but I can't really contribute. On a brighter note, it's modestly likely that the debate will be reopened on 2 February, meaning that the full debate will last up to another year. But the whole thing might get resolved next week. Just another source of anxiety in my life.

I don't apologize for choosing a paper book format over faster and freer e-media. You may place equal weight on well-written words regardless of the media, but there are stodgy people who just don't trust it unless it's bound, and a lot of those people are legislators. If 100% of the anti-software patent propoganda is in digital form, the team does itself a disservice.

There's also some logic to the paper book format which we hipsters sometimes pass over. By publication, [Name of Institution] will have given the book to four peer reviewers, two editors, a proofreader, and a fact checker. They're gonna try their darndest to ensure that the book you get has no errors, on both the mechanical and the conceptual scales. For my part, I am totally paranoid about writing the book in a way that I am not about a PDF that I'd put online. It's trivial for me to fix something dumb that I say in a PDF, but there's nothing the future me can do if he cracks open my future book and finds a stream of embarassing I can't believe I said that statements, and that affects how cautiously the current me writes. I've re-read the entire book cover to cover at least two dozen times, and re-read each individual chapter at least that many times again. By contrast, I think I read my dissertation cover to cover about twice.

As a digression, this has a few implications for journals and other presses that are on their way online. The paper is entirely expendable, and good riddance to it, but the effort that goes in to the paper--the author's paranoid revisions, the peer reviews, the editor--all still need to be there to make for a work of lasting relevance and credibility. The fast publications have their place, and I think the people who discredit g>Wikipedia just because it's Wikipedia are morons, but good academic literature requires having people who dedicate themselves to an article and focus their best efforts upon it. [As a further digression, notice how far removed this is from the idea of the peer reviewer who is entirely anonymous and writes only one response to the article and then answers no questions. When the revolution comes, the current peer review system will be the first against the wall, paper or not.]

Readers need to recognize this as well: lots of people assume that if a paper is online, then it hasn't been vetted properly, but a good journal can indeed do good editorial work and then put the results online. We need to train readers to do the basic research to determine whether a journal is well-reviewed or not instead of just assuming paper=good editorial and computer screen=bad. It's hard because it's not black-and-white.

But in the mean time, here in a world of readers who don't put out the effort, I've got a paper book coming out which will impress lots of readers who normally wouldn't take my side of the debate seriously. For the rest of you who would take me seriously to begin with, I apologize that the book has been made relatively inaccessible for the sake of increased credibility to the stodgy.

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IBM has announced (PDF from a Word document) that it will be granting free use of 500 of its over 30,000 patents to open source development. The Economist announces that it is a "bold step". Groklaw, the place for geeks who are into law, has effusive commentary about how wonderful this is, including pages of comments from people writing things like “I praise IBM for taking this bold step!” and “All I can say is Wow!”.

Parade-raining time: it's nothing but PR. IBM has been vocally and actively pro-open source for a few years now; it's run the Postfix project, contributed lots of stuff to Linux, and has generally been pushing the paradigm from all directions. They sell hardware; what do they care if you paid for the software or not.

So in this context, what does this statement mean? It's a mere formal announcement of a position they've already had, which I guess may have some benefit, perhaps in talking other patent holders into switching to a more open regime as well. But look at what the announcement didn't say. It didn't say that IBM would use these patents to defend open source, meaning that if another patent holder sues an open source project over a patent, then that plaintiff would lose its right to these 500 patents. IBM won't do that.

It only specified at most three or four percent of its software patent holdings [ballpark figure; I have yet to find somebody who will make a firm statement about how much of IBM's patent holdings are software. Part of the problem is that the USPTO denies that there is such a thing as software, just `computer-implemented inventions' of all sorts, so others need to do their own classifications.] Why not all of them? Given that it's a purely PR step, and any open source developer with his/her/its head up knows that IBM will never sue, I guess only listing a token set of patents is good enough.

One giant brain

We all know, in a rational superego kind of way, that International Business Machines does not have a unified will, and that the actions of one of its arms has nothing to do with the actions of others. I mean, IBM killed my great grandaunt. [I'm sorry if that sounds flip.] To hold all of today's IBM employees accountable for this would be silly, and it would be equally silly to reward its server division with sales because its legal division is agreeing to a pro-free software strategy.

One more example, from the world of software patents. From this testimony: “My name is Douglas Brotz. I'm Principal Scientist at Adobe Systems, Incorporated, and I am representing the views of Adobe Systems as well as my own. [...] Let me make my position on the patentability of software clear. I believe that software per se should not be allowed patent protection. [... T]he emergence in recent years of patents on software has hurt Adobe and the industry.”

That was in 1994. A decade later, Adobe Acrobat's splash screen lists forty patents. These are not just defensive: they have sued their competitor, Macromedia, over and over. Adobe had one man put in prison for violating its intellectual property. So is Adobe our friend or not?

The Standard Story

Those books we read and stories we were told when we were kids all had the same format: person takes action, and then if that action is bad person is punished and if that action is good then person is rewarded. Often, the punishment isn't even causally linked to the initial bad action by a mechanism in the story, but in our minds it is causally linked anyway, perhaps by an omniscient overseer who directly observed the action and meted out the punishment/reward.

Now, when we read a news story, the kid in the back of our brains is constantly trying to push it into the good/bad causal story; it is emotionally satisfied only when the facts fit the story. If the bad guys see no punishment, the story is incomplete to the point of being frustrating. Worse is when the bad guy gets a good reward, because our causal expectations are so shattered--and still worse is the case where there is no causal story at all (or equivalently, one too convoluted for us to really piece together). That's where we stand with IBM: they are far too huge to be a character in a story. If they were, they would be the good guy and the bad guy at the same time, and then what sort of final payoff should they see?

Everything in our brain is wired into the standard causal story, and it's a real struggle to read news about a corporation or a person without trying to jam it into that form. But fighting the urge is worth the effort.

E.g., I think my book is better for it. On one page, Microsoft would be evil for trying to patent its DOC format, and on another, it's the hero in its struggle against Eolas, who would screw up the entire Internet if they won. Eolas wears a black hat, but is backed by the University of California, which we like. The story can't fit the Standard Form, and even if it could, Microsoft's happy or sad ending wouldn't say much about the overall questions that the book is dealing with.

E.g., George Soros made his fortune partly by single-handedly destroying a currency or two. He's got a lot of shady political dealings all through Eastern Europe. But he's also possibly the largest benefactor to the progressive side in US politics. By ignoring any stories about the person or the money and focusing on the causes he supported, those causes moved forward.

E.g., Richard “Dick” Cheney is unquestionably evil in a hundred ways, but he is the highest-ranking Republican who opposes a homophobic constitutional amendment. We can focus on the emotionally satisfying storytelling in which we declare that Cheney should get what's due (and I plead guilty of this), but we do so at the detriment of the issues we want to push forward.

I don't want to imply that it's just about my kitchen floor. [The sudden start should indicate to you that this one won't make sense unless you've read the last item.] There are much more significant things at stake here. For example, black folk lower housing values.

Why? Because, academic studies show, people really are fucking racist. Emerson et al [1] called 1,663 white folk, and asked them about their choices of home. Their focus was race, but they tried to bury race under a long list of other issues: school, race, recent changes in property values, crime, the relative value of your house vs the neighborhood average. It hurts how unsurprising the results are: controlling for those other factors, a primarily Asian neighborhood had no significant effect on choice (a one SD downward shift), a primarily Hispanic neighborhood had no significant effect (half an SD upward), and a primarily black neighborhood had a way significant negative effect (five SDs down). People who currently live in a hispanic neighborhood are more likely to be OK with living with hispanics, and similarly with blacks.

I could find you more citations about how people are fucking racist, but this is one of those deals where academics just confirm the obvious.

[In non-confirmatory news, I'm told that the white flight thing is a bit mis-stated. You don't have to believe me on this one, `cause I don't have a citation and am not in the mood to look it up, but whites are not more likely to move out of a neighborhood that's become racially mixed. However, new residents are more likely to be minority, meaning that in a few decades, the natural turnover makes it look like white flight.]

Back to the beauty contest: say you're not a racist. You were bit by a radioactive chameleon and are no longer capable of perceiving people's race in any way. But you're still familiar with Emerson et al, and you know that 51% of the country voted for Dubya. As you go house shopping, you do the calculations on the value of a proposed house in a black neighborhood, and you have no choice but to take into account the fact that you're likely to get a lower value for the house when you sell. As long as there are some racists in the market, everyone will price in a racist manner.

Now say that radioactive chameleons secretly sweep the nation, and one day everybody wakes up color-blind. You don't know this, so you still believe that others are racist, and so you will still value the house less. Maybe I overstated the level of racism in Emerson et al's survey: maybe the respondents are not fucking racist; so long as they believe that others are, they may still value a house in a black neighborhood less.

The same is true everywhere that people can agree on dumb assumptions. If we read in books that there are people who think that women are less productive because they're always birthing babies, then it makes sense to offer a lower salary to women. If you know others are offering a lower salary to women (even if you've entirely forgotten the reason why), it makes no sense for you to offer an above-market salary.

Value-by-fiat, or the destruction of value by fiat, is a coordinated equilibrium: when everybody sees the female signal, everybody knows to offer a lower wage. This is indeed a proper Nash equilibrium, where nobody has an incentive to defect.

I'm frankly not sure about the policy implications for housing. But it makes for a tough row to hoe for a black person: if you buy the same house as a white guy, it'll have less value because you're you. What is likely to be the number one largest and most significant investment you ever make just won't get as high a return.

For employment, this is a solid justification for overhiring those who have traditionally been discriminated against---affirmative action. As long as there are racists or sexists anywhere, minorities and women will be paid less, and the market will not correct this. Shifting people out of a bad equilibrium is one of the roles of government; in this case it does so by breaking the significance of the signal used for coordination. Under a proper AA regime, people won't know if others are offering a lower wage when they get the `girl' signal, so it is not necessarily optimal for them to also offer a low wage.

In the mean time, there are still racists and sexists out there who will continue to offer a lower wage just on principle, meaning that even if the affirmative action regime is correctly implemented, there will still be pressure to shift back to the discriminatory coordinated equilibrium.

@journal{citation1,
author="Michael O Emerson and Karen J Chai and George Yancey",
title="Does Race Matter in Residential Segregation? Exploring the Preferences of White Americans",
journal="American Sociological Review",
volume=66, number=6,
month="December", year=2001
pages="922--935"}
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People often ask me: Mr. BK of Baltimore, MD, what do you do when you're not pontificating and overintellectualizing? Well, lately, I've been tiling my kitchen floor.

It used to be crappy linoleum, and Ms. DH of Ann Arbor, MI had asked me if she could do something decent with it. She had done several small-scale mosaics in the past, and so had the experience with tile and the enthusiasm to do something better with my floor than linoleum. It turned out that this was a bit larger of a task than she had expected; most notably, she had not thought to lay the backer board which needs to go under the tile---not until we had already spent two days ripping up the linoleum. The floor now consists of the subfloor, the plywood on which the linoleum used to sit, a layer of cement, the backer board, another layer of cement, and then the tile. By the advice of a friend who is a professional in these matters, we didn't lay backer board in the bathroom, which gives the bathroom a centimeter or so drop from the hallway next to it. Further, we went with a mixed medium concept: a ceramic tile border, and then slate in the center. The ceramic is about 3 mm thick, and slate is about 6 mm.

What I'm getting at here is that it's very much a creative, multi-level experience. There's a border of blue tile, which spills into the bathroom (which is all blue), and collects in pools around the edges. Floating in the center of this is the island of slate, which is occasionally interrupted by small mosaics of mirror and tile, which have a sort of river theme.

Below are a few a photos of the kitchen and hallway, just before we placed the grout. The grout leaves a dolorous haze on everything, which I'm still trying to get off so it will be photogenic again.

Reactions to the new tile floor have been mixed. First, all but one person either agreed that it's better than the linoleum, most giving me a quizzical look in the way of `why would you ask me such a question; it's so obviously better'. [The one exception, Ms. RK of Silver Spring, MD, is famously negative.] Some thought the color scheme was a bit dark, and a number of people pointed out `it isn't level', which I take to mean `I don't know how I feel about your design decision to have a multi-level kitchen/bath/hall area'. Some thought the mosaics a bit fancy for a kitchen floor: `I'd expect to find this hanging on a wall, not on a kitchen floor.' I'm relieved to say that my roommate unequivocally likes what is now his kitchen floor.

The painted ladies I don't recall how much I'd told you about the house, dear reader, but maybe I should mention a few things. It's a Victorian-style townhouse, which the City of Baltimore tells me was built in 1900. The whole row was clearly all built at once, by a developer who bought three blocks of a street in Baltimore and worked its way down producing cheap houses. The townhouses are clearly much more sturdy than the average McMansion, but they were nonetheless mass produced and cheap---after all, they all share their side walls with their neighbors. I'm sometimes curious whether the rhetoric around these houses a hundred years ago was the same as the rhetoric people say now about mass-produced people storage solutions. Unfortunately, such information is pre-Internet, so I'll never know. In the present day, now that the house has sat in one place for a century, it's become quaint and valuable.

There's a painted lady contest on the street every year. A painted lady, the neighborhood newsletter defines, is a house whose facade is meticulously painted in three colors. I bring it up because most of the people around here like the look and think it raises the value of the house, while I think it just looks butt. The social norm is to paint right up to your property line, which means that if there is a little arch that crosses between the houses, exactly one half will be painted taupe and the other half will be painted purple.

Y'know, I'm failing to indicate what I'm pontificating about here, and I expect that I'll continue to do so for the rest of the essay, so let me just spell it out right here and leave your neurons to make the appropriate links. Everything here is about my favorite econ question, what I would call the fundamental question of economics: where does value come from?

Beauty contest So a few months ago, I'd written about the two beauty contests I'd run in class; I've run a third, and here are the results. On this one, I reported to the students the means and 2/3rd of the mean for the first and second runs. I'd used my Amazon associate account on the class website, and made $25 from selling textbooks to my students, and I made this the prize for this one, so it's not dumbass points but cold hard cash they were fighting for this time.

	1st day	midterm	final
mean	259.54	100.08	66.79
2/3 mean	173.03	66.72	44.53
% of ones	3%	25%	10.3%

As a group, everybody moved forward exactly one step from where they'd been last time: the winning bid was two-thirds of last time's winning bid. The equilibrium is to bid one, and you can see that the class sort of backslid away from believing that everyone was going to play that. 18% of the bids were between five and twenty.

But back to the subject of me, there is the several thousand dollar question: will the tile floor raise the value of the house? This is the beauty contest all over again, since the question is not whether I think the floor looks nice, but whether I think other people think the floor looks nice. In fact, when potential buyers check out the house, they will all have in mind the resale value of the thing, meaning that I need to consider whether other people will think that other people will like the floor.

Ms. RK thought the linoleum worked better because the only safe strategy to selling a house is to make it as boring as possible, removing all features that may indicate creativity. The risk-minimization approach says that only one or two people will like the house more due to a fun feature, but lots of people will be turned off by it. Obviously, the designers of the typical McMansion have taken this advice: those places have only those features which are universally liked, like skylights and giganticness. After all, they're called McMansions because they match the lowest common denominator characteristics of a certain restaurant chain---which had a net income of $1.47 billion in 2003. We may think we're above it, but the lowest common denominator pulls down a lot of cash.

I tend to be less risk-averse myself, and feel that I'm in a different position than the McMansion builders. After all, I have one and only one house to sell. If I turn off a dozen buyers but get two or three who recognize the kitchen floor as a functional work of art, then I'm done.

But this doesn't solve the beauty contest problem: even if people think it's a work of art, they have to think that other people will agree. We have the same problem as before: if they believe that future buyers will be turned off by the floor, then they will decrease their bids accordingly. Since there are going to be so many more buyers who won't get it than buyers who do, the beauty contest reasoning is only going to push sales prices down further.

Notice, further, that many people didn't necessarily hate the kitchen floor per se, but were thrown because it didn't match their expectations. There is the Platonic ideal of the kitchen floor, and it's level and simple and generally pretty boring. It takes cognitive effort to accept and enjoy something that breaks expectations, and further, we generally assume that everybody is dumber than we are. [This has been verified in the lab a hundred times over. Think attribution bias or the Lake Woebegone effect.] So we'll assume that others are less likely to be able to exert whatever cognitive effort it took us to decide we like it---I've already committed this presumption above, and every buyer will probably do the same. The Lake Woebegone effect conspires with the setup of the beauty contest to push us to conform to expectations.

So why'd I do it? I was at a gallery opening at which a friend of a friend had two paintings on display, and the curator offerred a few pieces of advice to a gathered crowd. Never buy from a gallery in an expensive part of town, never buy from dealers who push the investment value of the piece, and more generally, the only reason to buy a work of art is because you like it. In the context here: forget the beauty contest, and go with what you deem to be beautiful.

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