The Toilet Door

So there's an election due in September and this means that both major political parties are starting to have some 'serious' debate about the state of the economy, debt, policies and so forth. One thing that I've noticed is the way all parties use numbers as talking points as metrics for success or failure.

A hypothetical example would be, "We've created 150,000 jobs and unemployment has dropped to 5.2%". At face value this seems like a good statement to make, but the more I think about it, the more it seems meaningless. Creating jobs is obviously a good thing but it's the numbers they throw around in a debate that concerns me. What does creating 150,000 jobs mean? Did the public service grow by 150,000? Are the jobs in industries or fields we should be investing in or pulling out of? Are they full time jobs or is this casual work? Similarly with the unemployment rate dropping to 5.2%, what was it before? What is the underemployment rate?

These are all questions I'm thinking of when I hear someone mention something with numbers, what do those numbers really mean in the larger context of everything else. Now obviously numbers are important, having any metrics, even flawed ones are better than having no metrics, part of the issue I realise now is that people don't really understand numbers.

A study was performed testing if people would behave differently for a reward if it was $3 or 300 cents. The results, surprisingly indicated that some people preferred 300 cents. Even if  cents and dollars were switched around, people were more easily swayed by the larger number.

This knowledge has some interesting consequences for looking at political discourse. Are the politicians aware of this effect and use it to mislead or confuse citizens about the state of things? It's possible, there's limited time in media segments to accurately and adequately describe what a number truly represents, it's probably more important that the reader or viewer simply remembers that it was 150,000 jobs created or that a policy will cost $94 billion.

Speaking of policy costs, it's interesting to observe that the cost of everything is often put in vacuum. $94 billion sounds like a lot and it rightly is for an individual to own, but in the context of an entire country that has a yearly GDP in the order of $1.5 trillion ($1500 billion), it doesn't seem as large, it'll seem even smaller if instead of stating the total cost over 10 years and comparing to a yearly GDP, we state the yearly cost $9.4 billion.

I'm going to keep an eye on how it progresses and see if there's a correlation between the way the numbers are presented and how they are meant to be viewed. Obviously positive achievements would be promoted and negative achievements downplayed.

So one thing I enjoy is games and exploring the core concepts and skills they test when taken to high levels. One thing that nearly all games have in common is the concept of trading.

Now trading in a traditional sense could be two parties coming to a mutually agreeable set of terms to net benefit of both parties. In most competitive games however, trading isn't mutually agreeable. In Chess say, both players start with the set of pieces. Each turn a player is trading positional advantage for material advantage, or vice versa. Sometimes a player may initiate a trade by taking a piece. The opposing player may even the trade up by taking a piece back of equal value. The most common example of this is in Chess, where it's rare to not trade Queens. You don't want to give up your queen without getting a significant material or positional advantage out of it.

So onto Monopoly, it has a trading element core to the rules of the game. Players can make trades for property, cash at any time. The main reason to do this, is to gain a cash advantage or material advantage over your opponent. Now, a lot of people when they play monopoly use a flow of logic when it comes to trades along this line. "I don't want to trade with you, because you're making this trade to get an advantage over me, no matter how much you are seemingly offering me". So if there's no trading, then monopoly is really a game of chance, you're hoping that your dice rolls are favourable on average, and the opponents are unfavourable on average.

Where it gets interesting, is that monopoly is what I'd call a 'solved' game. A number of people have calculated the probabilities of landing on any given square, the average number of rolls for a certain investment in a set of properties to pay off. The limitations on human players would to be to remember and evaluate all the tables of data to know the likelihood of winning from a given board position. So taking it to the next level, let's suppose that we have perfect players that know all the probabilities for any given game state to calculate a winner. Trading properties then becomes simply betting. Investing heavily into mayfair and boardwalk has a low probability of paying off, so most people wouldn't make it, but it essentially becomes an agreement between players that in the next x dice rolls Player A thinks they wont land on it, and Player B thinks they will.

http://www.amnesta.net/other/monopoly/

http://www.tkcs-collins.com/truman/monopoly/monopoly.shtml

I think it's interesting that many games and sports rely on limitations in various skills or abilities to make them fun. Monopoly can be fun because most people are incapable of correctly evaluating the probability of any given player winning from a certain position, but even taken to the extreme, it's betting on dice rolls.

So I've been playing around a bit with LaTeX because I like the idea of what it can do. It sorts out all the tricky formatting depending on how you want to present your work. It's not ideal for collaborative editing though. Microsoft Word wins in that department with comments and tracking changes.

One of the ways I'm going to investigate using LaTeX is with some custom tags. This xkcd comic illustrates which characters interact with each other as a function of time over a story. Now that was produced by reading the books, and manually going through and making note of which characters are where and with who at each time. Ideally though, if that information is put into custom tags at various chapters or at points in the story it can be invisible to the reader, but a simple program or script could extract the information and produce a plot like that. Similarly, if we could generate one for characters, we can also do it for action, or emotional content.

Having the ability to produce graphs to demonstrate the action during a story or comedy say gives an author new tools with which to view the overall story. Is the front action heavy? Is it too dry? Is there enough story progression? Humans are visual creatures, so I'm hoping I can make something to produce these graphs, so that when I begin writing, I have a large number of tools available to guide my story.