On increasing individual costs in an era of decreasing social costs

This is a response to an article by my friend Noah Baron. His middle name is Butch. It's the most ostentatious yet plausible name ever. The link can be found here. Essentially, he worries over the state of free academic discourse. His primary nettle comes from the possibility of "cascades" of opinion, a case in which everyone agrees with everyone else because someone they trust told them to agree.

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Noah, as an addendum to your article, I propose some examination of the benefits column of the general term dissent. I'll try and keep pretty words about how the world is fundamentally now thanks to the Internet to myself, but to say less than it has radically changed the information landscape would be deception of the highest order. So let us consider dissent for a moment. For this little discussion, I want to split people into two groups: the dissenters and nondissenters. I assume nondissenters have very few formed opinions regarding issues and that dissenters value a large following. Within dissenters, there are extremists and moderates.

I postulate dissent becomes less beneficial for a given dissenter due to a variant of crowding out leading to increased opportunity cost of information for nondissenters. This is doubly true when open dissent is discouraged.

Say we have a policy proposed by the government or members of government. Who dissents? Well, logic dictates that, ceteris peribus, those with greater disagreement with the policy are more likely to dissent for an equal or lesser level of difference. As such, someone who is extremely opposed is more likely to make the effort. Moderates, on the other hand, feel less pull to dissent due to less inherent disagreement. All well and good, but what about nondissenters?

Nondissenters face a sort of nightmare of demand smoothing which only a malevolent djinn could conjure up. Normally, variety is a social good. However, thousands upon thousands of opinions bombard the nondissenter via the Internet. As the number of stated, seemingly legitimate opinions increases, the opportunity cost of information for any given page view or absorbed opinion increases. Unfortunately then, all other things equal, the nondissenter will receive the greatest benefit from the opinions of more extreme dissenters than from those that are close to marginal on a given policy. This makes common sense, after all, as it's very easy to evaluate the binary choice of agree/disagree when faced with an opinion with few nuances. Thus, extremists offer a clear opposition for a low cost, while moderates, due to parsing time, offer an unclear opposition or assent at a higher cost.

Compounding this, each individual dissenter is less likely to be heard due to the numbers of other dissenters. As the probability of winning a nondissenter's favor decreases, the potential rewards for dissent must increase. Outside of the little model discussion, as the most accessible political dissent is confined to large, corporate bodies (cable news and book writers come to mind), the rewards of a large following seem even more unlikely for the individual dissenter given these barriers to entry. As such, we likely see falling benefits within the Internet age. Given these trends, we are probably more likely to have more cascades, rather than less, as many move to make dissent costlier (see the Obama administration's defense of "anti-blasphemy" laws in the UN). If we factor in the predispositions of nondissenters, it becomes unclear exactly what they will do. Given the search and opportunity costs are lowest for extremists, we may see even greater degrees of polarization. Although more extreme dissenters have greater benefits, increased social costs of dissent may put pressure on them to not voice their opinions. However, many dissenters outside of this hypothetical believe it is their normative duty to express their opinions, which likely increases as extremism increases.

Thus, we can see an era of falling benefits to moderates and unclear changes to extremists. Thus, social costs ("you're either with us or against us.") may actually affect moderates more strongly than extremists . There is some historical precedent for this in the G. W. Bush administration. In an age when benefits to individual dissenters are falling due to increased search costs and opportunity costs of information, decreasing the individual cost borne by the dissenter is the only way to balance out the increased costs. As Noah points out, decreasing the overall level of dissent in society probably has negative external costs in the future, which we would want to avoid. Thus, somewhat paradoxically, in this age when access to and transmission of information is easier than ever, we ought to exert more effort toward allowing the active participation of dissenters in discourse.

Woo expansion!

Clearly the real cataclysm will be the hundreds of thousands of functional geeks losing their girlfriends within the same week. I just really, really, really hope I'm not among them. I rather like mine!

This Just In

According to sources scattered throughout the Internet, "lol" is now an acceptable substitute for all punctuation marks.

Of Logs and the Backing Thereof

People often ask me, "how come you play so much WoW?" Well, the answer is multifaceted, but suffice to say three sub-answers can sum up the issue:
A) I actually don't. (Denial feels so good)
B) I find the world, environment, etc. particularly charming and I enjoy the game mechanics a great deal. It's nice having a source of entertainment be so dependent on number crunching and strategizing.
C) HAVE YOU SEEN MY BACKLOG?

In case you have not, realize this: for me, at the moment, entertainment is a job. I have a very short attention span of the medically relevant variety and I have a flair for being interested in things. Not only that, but I am aware of so much good material, especially in the popcorn variety of Science Fiction. I pick up a lot of books. So, without further ado, I present my lists.
In the vainest of attempts at a particular order

Books:
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
Ilium by Dan Simmons
The Eisenhorn Omnibus by Dan Abnett
Deadhouse Gates by Steve Erikson
Fallen Dragon by Peter F. Hamilton, grandmaster pulpy-smart sci fi writer
Animal Spirits by Akerlof and Shiller
The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons (and actually finishing it this time).
Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson
The Lost King by Margaret Weis
Night of the Dragon by the ever hamfisted Richard Knaak
and the following things that wish they were a real artform like literature...comic books!
Only War
Blue Beetle--Reach for the Stars
And World of Warcraft volume 1 (I can feel you judging me from here, reader).

Video Games
The World Ends With You
Castlevania DS
Disgaea DS
Braid
More SF4
Renegade playthrough of Mass Erect
Lego Star Wars for the 360
I would say Lost Odyssey, but that game looks like utter tripe of the worst faux-metaphysical variety

Apparently the 5-6 game JRPG backlog that I had on my PS2 now stands again since I got the thing working. It's a great story really. Upon arriving in China to visit, I was informed by a person I trust who will remain anonymous that "over there" they use the same voltage as us red-blooded, meat eatin', Republican votin', war startin' Amurricans. I must have been one hell of a slow learner, because in my haste to show her all the things she had missed during a semester abroad, I not only blew out every single fuse on my 360's power brick, but I also tripped the circuit breaker in my hotel room several times. Clearly, I make good choices. I also tried to plug in the PS2 and each time I tried, the light would flash on, until it wouldn't. I was quite sad about all of this. Turns out that even though I practically turned my 360, or at least it's adapter, into a paperweight that my PS2 weathered the storm perfectly and now works. I don't even remember my backlog, but it is very, very, very long.


I suppose I should include a perfunctory attempt at a cultural observation like "just goes to show you how overwhelmed we are by entertainment. We're so obsessed with leisure as a culture that we can't even finish all our entertainment material." Sure, you can't read/watch everything, and that's why someone shouldn't settle for anything but the best. Plus, in sheer defiance of the odds, I might actually chew through said list of horror. At worst I will only read what I know to be the best going in. That all said, I remember a time when video games of the console variety were my big escape, fueling my imagination, letting my 10 year-old self do really cool things and all that other escapist fun. It's somewhat bittersweet then, that I find myself worried about how best to efficiently move through my entertainment material.

But what else would you expect from an economist?

So as you can see, I am an expert in procrastination while often procrastinating. That's right, I can delay having fun.

Plus there's the steampunk dragons with ace fighter pilots and heavy-handed homosexuality fantasy novel that "avoids all the tropes." Yeah fucking right. All we need are Kirk and Spock awkwardly making out and undressing each other after being imprisoned to run the entire gamut of fanfiction.