Why do the Academy Awards Exist?

The Academy Awards come around every year, and for better or worse form a big part of our movie culture. Winning an Oscar is a big deal in our society. It is also a big deal for the studio, because it means money. According to the Huffington Post, the money a studio can make off of an Oscar win is substantial

However, it is a common realization that the Oscars regularly snub excellent films, while giving awards to poor films. This is of course a subjective analysis, but the feeling is nonetheless pervasive, even among prominent film critics. The fact that the Academy declares a film the best does not mean it is the best, it does not mean that history will see it as the best, and it doesn't even mean that the critics of the time see it as best. It really only means that a small group of people see it as especially deserving an award.

Does this mean that the Academy Awards are irrelevant and should be scrapped? I don't think so. I think the thoughts above miss the point of the awards.

The purpose of the Academy Awards should not be taken as one of simply honoring the best. This is completely subjective, and would happen anyway in the reviews of critics. The purpose, in my opinion, is to encourage the creation of movies that would not otherwise be made.

The existence of the Academy Awards changes the economic incentives of movie creation. There are certain movies that would make tons of money regardless of any awards. Transformers, Lord of the Rings, Jaws, Star Wars. These are movies that people like, movies that are culturally important. But we don't want them to be the only movies that are made. The academy awards can give a big boost to movies that might not make so much money outside of the award framework. Movies like The King's Speech, or The Artist. Those movies are culturally important as well.

What matters in funding movies is not whether the film will actually win, but rather whether the studio thinks it might win. It changes the risk/reward calculus in an important way. It means many movies will be funded by studios competing for limited award space. A studio is more willing to fund an ambitious art piece when they know there is a culturally important award system for artsy movies.
Also important is the fact that not just winners but also nominees get a lot of recognition. There is even a benefit when a worthy film is snubbed, because critics can make headlines talking about the Academy's mistake, driving publicity for the good movie. The awards system fuels a culture where movies are taken seriously as art, not just entertainment. Even when the people involved screw up, the huge publicity involved in looking for the "best" is a big cultural benefit.

An interesting corollary of this way of thinking is that it makes sense for the Academy to be prejudiced against big budget blockbusters: those movies don't need the help. Of course sometimes they pick big budget movies, which I think is a shame (perhaps the system benefits from a perception of objectivity). They may or may not use this sort of reasoning in choosing the particular films they choose, but this line of thought helps us understand the social value of the oscars. It encourages types of creativity that would not otherwise be encouraged.

The particular movies that come out may or may not be a valuable contribution to culture, but I think diversity of films is something we should value. We will get big budget blockbusters no matter what. The oscars protect the market for weaker art films. Some of them are good, some of them suck, but we all benefit from their existence.

Everyone's a Little Bit Racist

The musical Avenue Q has a cute and funny (and at times terribly offensive) song about, of all things, racism. Its title is "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist", and it talks about the little ways we all act on the basis of racial stereotypes, even those of us who value racial tolerance and reject all forms of racism as unethical.

The song makes the point that its better to admit to our racist faults than to try and hide them. Acknowledgement is the first step to getting past some of our problems. It also demonstrates how deeply entrenched certain types of racial thought our embedded in our ways of thinking. Even when we try our best to not be racist, we often fail.

An assumption that a lot of people, including myself, have had for a long time is that racism is a problem we can solve. Racism is taught to children by their parents. If we can just break that, then we would cure racism. Don't teach people to be racists, and racism will go away.
This logic is similar to the reality of how we wiped out smallpox. Vaccines prevent people from becoming sick with smallpox, and prevents it from spreading from person to person. With an aggressive vaccination program, smallpox was driven to extinction. 

This approach doesn't work against every disease. The flu is a viral infection, similar to smallpox. The flu, however, is not so easily eradicated. The flu comes in hundreds of variations, and is constantly evolving new ways of infecting and attacking people. Almost everyone has had several types of flu. Most people recover quickly, but the flu's sheer ubiquity makes it a major killer even today, particularly in the young, the old, and the otherwise infirm. 

Racism seems to share a lot more in common with the flu than with smallpox. There are hundreds of different flavors of racism. That's one of the points in the Avenue Q song. Racism isn't usually terribly harmful. It is the moral equivalent of having the flu. You are definitely unwell, but it isn't serious. Just like the flu though, when racism finds vulnerable people, it can make terrible things happen.

Racism also has a way of coming back time and again. We eliminated slavery, but Jim Crow laws and exploitative sharecropping arrangements kept black people in effective slavery. We desegregate schools, yet somehow schools remain heavily segregated today, despite the laws saying schools cannot be officially segregated. The law prevents anyone from being officially disenfranchised based on race, yet minority heavy neighborhoods always have the longest lines on Election Day.

It may not even be true that racism is something that has to be taught. A lot of work in psychology has shown that people are powerfully imprinted by the appearance of their immediate family as infants. People throughout their life have a tendency to associate with people who look like their parents. 

On a broader note, we judge each other on physical appearance in all sorts of ways. These judgments are sometimes learned culturally, but other times seem innate. For instance, all people find symmetrical faces more attractive than asymmetrical faces. Is it any surprise that racial stereotypes are formed easily, and are difficult to dispel?

If racism is more like the flu, then our goal should not be to cure it, but instead to manage it. We do not attempt to vaccinate every single person every flu season. Instead, we make a judgement as to which strains are the most dangerous that year, and then make an effort to vaccinate those who are most vulnerable, or are liable to transmit to the vulnerable, such as health service workers. We also do all this with the full knowledge we will do it all again next year, and the year after that, potentially forever. 

A management approach to racism would force us to reconsider some of our policy. For instance, affirmative action programs tend to operate on the assumption that they are a temporary system designed to right a historic wrong. A management approach requires us to seriously consider the idea that affirmative action needs to be a long lasting program. We might not be able to assume that inequality will eventually end. We also need to ask ourselves if we are seriously prepared as a society to accept reverse discrimination as a necessary tool in the constant fight against racism.

It might also mean we should seriously consider deliberate, systematic desegregation. We cannot assume schools will naturally desegregate themselves if we let people choose where to go. White parents don't want their kids in school with black kids, and often black parents share the sentiment. Deliberate, forced desegregation might be the only way to combat racism in our children. This solution tramples the rights of parents in many ways. Is it worth it? I think it might be.

Some people might want to simply give up, and say we should just all live off in our own parts of the world, among people who look like us. I don't think this is a good solution. Racism is just as bad in international politics as it is in domestic affairs. Look at America's far greater willingness to bomb non-white people than white people. Consider also how European colonialism has made all the whitest countries very wealthy, while seriously wrecking all the less white countries. And look at America's history of slavery, which began as a complete disregard for the people of a different skin color who lived somewhere far away. 

Living with people of another race has the potential to make us all better people. Racism is an evil thing, and we become stronger in overcoming it. Diversity makes us better than we were before. Ignoring the bad part of our nature is not a reasonable solution. Better, I think, is to acknowledge the bad parts within us, then work as a society to fight them. We have made real progress on issues of race. Things are still bad, but not as bad as they once were. We might all be a little bit racist, but maybe we can be little less racist next year.

A Defense of Those Who Defended Ptolemy

We have all heard the story of how Copernicus changed the world with his Heliocentric model of the solar system. It's an especially memorable story because of all the drama that went along with the change. Copernicus himself was so afraid of what other people would do in response to his ideas that he didn't allow them to be published until after his death. Everyone knows the story of how Galileo, a brilliant advocate of the Copernican model, was persecuted by the Catholic Church for his beliefs, and was eventually forced to recant.

This is a great story because it presents us with a bunch of underdogs, the Copernicans, and a big bully of a bad guy, the Church. It's a tragic tale too, because so many great men didn't get the honors they deserved in their lifetime. The story serves a valuable purpose, in reminding us that we should listen to science, that science is the great creator of knowledge in a modern world, and that we shouldn't let the establishment crush good ideas simply because it disagrees with them.

One thing that often happens in these stories is that the Church's geocentric model is mocked as dumb, or unnecessarily complex, or as being an article of faith that has nothing to do with reality. This is an idea that I think we should revise. The first thing to realize is that an analysis of the solar system based on a geocentric model was a well-established science at the time of Copernicus, and had been fairly successful. The success of the geocentric model came from a Greek guy who died around 168 AD, known to us as Ptolemy.

Before Ptolemy, we had a conception of the heavens as a sphere around Earth, which spun about us once a day. This model was known to be insufficient though, because it failed to account for these strange stars that the Greeks called the Planets, which translates as “wanderers.” They were called wanderers because they were never in the same place each night, always moving around, sometimes right next to one star then next to another. The weirdest thing is that they seemed to advance in one direction for a while, then all of a sudden switch and go backwards, then return to normal motion a few weeks later.

In Ptolemy's time, there were conceptions that the planets were special types of bodies, different from stars in certain ways. Ptolemy, however, gave people a really good way of understanding what planets are and why they behave the way they do. He proposed that the planets move in circles around the Earth, but also move in circles around an invisible point. Strictly speaking, it is the invisible point that circles the Earth, not the planet itself. The model is easiest to describe with a picture:

[http://www-personal.ksu.edu/~lyman/english233/cosmos4.htm]

Note also that Ptolemy conceived of everything here being tied to the celestial sphere, which rotates around the Earth once per day in addition to all the other slower motion going on.

This model explains rather elegantly why planets appear to reverse direction for a time, then return to normal motion. The planets are reversing when they are in the part of their circle closest to Earth, then returning to normal motion as they circle around away from Earth. This model proved to be reasonably effective at predicting the location of planets in the sky. It wasn't perfect, but good enough for most purposes.

As time went on, it was found more and more to be the case that although the planets appeared roughly where Ptolemy predicted, they were not in the exact place he predicted. Astronomers realized that they could more accurately predict the location of the planets by postulating additional circles, so that planets were modeled as moving in a circle along a circle going along another circle. By the time of Copernicus, they were postulating up to 16 circles in a single model of the motion of the planets.

To us, this model seems pretty goofy. It also seems obvious why the Copernican model is far superior. A heliocentric model explains the motion of the planets quite nicely: the planets move along in the sky as they orbit the sun, but every once in a while either they pass us or we pass them, and they go the other way in the sky. It does this without having to resort to any sort of circles in circles, and greatly reduces the complexity of the system. Scientists like to appeal to the principle of Occam's Razor, the idea that one should not unnecessarily postulate entities where fewer entities would suffice. Occam's Razor seems to strongly suggest a heliocentric model.

However, the model Copernicus gave to the world is not a complete model at all. First off, Copernicus too had to put in some circles within circles to make his model match observation. We know today that the planets don't move in circles at all, but instead move in ellipses, but nobody would realize this until Kepler, well after the death of Copernicus. The Copernican model was no more predictive than the Ptolemaic model, and seemed equally arbitrary.

More importantly, the heliocentric model of the solar system implicitly rejects certain important metaphysical conceptions of the time. The scientists of the Middle Ages and Renaissance had a working understanding of why things fell. They conceived of the world as being made of Aristotle's four elements: earth, wind, fire, and water. Things made of fire naturally rose to the very top of the atmosphere, where they surrounded the earth in a ring of fire (this explains, for instance, why hot air rises). Things made of air naturally came second, rising up and filling the atmosphere. Water naturally came towards the center of the earth, but sat on top of the element earth. Earth naturally wanted to compact itself as closely to the center of things as possible. This worldview had a fair amount of explanatory power. They could explain why certain things floated while other things didn't, they understood how a round earth made sense without things falling off the bottom; it was, overall, a useful way of understanding the physical world. This conception also rejected the idea that the heavens were made of the same stuff as us. They proposed a fifth element, whose natural place was the heavens. Obviously the heavens could not be made of the four normal elements, because otherwise they would be down here seeking their proper place, like all the other things made of those elements.

None of this makes any sense if the earth is rapidly moving, flying through space at a thousand miles an hour. Earth is, as astronomer Tycho Brahe put it, a “lazy element.” It is clearly not in earth's nature to move without a significant force acting upon it making it move. And if the earth is constantly moving, why do we not notice its movement? Today, Newton's laws of motion explain why we don't notice earth's motion. Newton's laws are powerfully counter-intuitive though. Our experience teaches us that an object we push will move until we stop pushing, then will slow down and stop. Science-fiction space battles routinely show us ships with disabled engines slowing down and stopping, the way things work in our normal experience. No force means no movement. Newton actually proposes that the stopping of motion is itself a second force, the force of friction. Doesn't this violate Occam's Razor though? He proposes two forces acting on every object we have ever observed behaving in a totally normal way, when its much more easily explained as just one force that's either acting or not.

My point is not that Newton is wrong. It is that Occam's Razor is a poor criterion for choosing between two theories. Copernicus may have made astronomy simpler, but he made the rest of physics a hell of a lot more complicated. People who rejected the Copernican model were not just fools who refused to see what was obviously true, they were people who were unwilling to scrap an entire metaphysical system to make their model of the cosmos a little easier to draw. It is significant that Copernicanism wasn't widely accepted until people like Galileo and finally Newton created new rules of physical motion that replaced the old Aristotelian system. Copernicanism is not truly sensible until you've postulated all sorts of other complicated, counter-intuitive concepts.

This is why we shouldn't look too harshly on those who defended Ptolemy. Certainly, silencing someone for their views goes against good practice, but it becomes a lot more understandable when their views undermine not just our vision of the cosmos, but our vision of how the world itself works. And most people who argued against heliocentrism didn't use force to make their arguments, they used argumentation, and their argumentation was based on a well-established explanatory theory, not based on pure faith or a blind denial of reality.

A Lottery Thought Experiment

In this post, I'm going to lead you through a thought experiment based on a theoretical game called Tomo. Tomo is pretty simple: you buy any number of tickets at a fixed price, and each ticket has a certain chance of winning and paying out a fixed price reward. In Tomo, the chance of winning is not affected by how many tickets have been sold, and neither is the payout per ticket. So it's not like a 50/50 raffle, in which the total number of tickets bought by anyone in the game decreases the chances of any particular ticket winning, and the payout increases as more tickets are bought. It's more like a slot machine, in which each pull of the lever costs a certain amount and has a certain chance of paying out. As a further simplification, Tomo does not have degrees of success on a single ticket. Each individual ticket either wins and pays out or it doesn't, there is no variability in how much a winning ticket can pay out.

Tomo is a game that, aside from these basic rules, can be played many different ways. The person running a game can decide how much a ticket will cost, what it's chance of winning will be, and what it's payout will be if it wins. The people running Tomo games always have enough resources to cover the winnings other people make, regardless of how much that might be, so they can set these figures however they want.

I'm going to say that in a particular game of Tomo, T = the price of a single ticket, P = the probability of a single ticket winning, and W = the winnings collected from a single winning ticket. 

From these values we can figure out some other important details about the game. The expected value of a ticket is the product of P and W. I'll say expected value = V. As an equation, V = PW. The expected value of a ticket represents how much a single ticket is worth after its already been paid for. If I have ten tickets, each of them with a 50% chance of winning five dollars, then I can expect about half of them to win, thus making me twenty-five dollars. Another way of looking at it is that each ticket has an expected value of $2.50, therefore ten of them are worth 10 x $2.50, or $25.

The expected profit of a ticket is the expected value (V) minus the cost of the ticket (T). I'll say expected profit = E. As an equation, E = V - T. Expected profit represents how much profit you can expect to make on the purchase of a ticket. Note that this number can be either positive or negative. A negative expected profit means you will be expecting to lose money on each ticket. If I have ten tickets, each of them with a 50% chance of winning five dollars, and they each cost me two dollars, then V = $2.50, T= $2.00, and E = $2.50 - $2.00, meaning each ticket has an expected profit of fifty cents. This means that each of my ten tickets can be expected to make a fifty cent profit, which amounts to a five dollar profit in total. This makes sense, because the tickets together cost $20, and their combined expected value is $25.

I know this is pretty boring so far, but stick with me here, I promise I have some interesting stuff coming up (well, interesting to me anyway). Imagine a game where T = $1, P = 1%, and W = 100. In this game, V = 100 x 1% = 1. Therefore E = 1 – 1 = 0. The expected profit is nothing. If you buy a bunch of tickets, you will expect to make no money, but lose no money either.

The interesting question, which is at the heart of this thought experiment, is: who would play a game of Tomo under these rules?

The first group you might expect to play such a game would be gamblers who take chances with their money for entertainment. People often travel to Vegas to play games that generally feature a great likelihood of losing money. This game has better odds than any Vegas game, so its easy to imagine gamblers would play it enthusiastically. A key feature of Tomo, however, is that the more tickets you buy, the less random it becomes. This feature arises from the laws of statistics. With a ticket price of only one dollar, this game would appeal only to low-rolling gamblers. Anyone wanting to gamble a substantial amount of money would find the game boring, as your chances of winning or losing any significant amount of money is minor. If you only buy one ticket, randomness is very high. You have a 1% chance of multiplying your investment by 100! That's a lot more exciting than if you spend $1000 to buy 1,000 tickets, and end up with a good likelihood of only winning or losing a few hundred dollars.

Another group that might want to play Tomo would be people who would value $100 more than a hundred times greater than $1. Money is sometimes used as a measure of objective value, but it's important to remember that value is ultimately a subjective measurement. A house right next door to my best friend is of greater value to me than the same house a hundred miles away, even if their market value is the same. If I need a heart transplant, then a compatible heart is of extreme value to me, but of little value to a dead guy. It is conceivable that someone could value $100 as being more than 100 times more valuable than $1.

A lot of people are probably pretty skeptical of this claim. Allow me to introduce you to my friend Joe. Joe is recently homeless, and he lives in a place that has bitterly cold winters. The city he lives in is rather heartless, and provides no homeless shelters. This city is actually on an island, and he has no way to leave the island without paying to take a boat, which he cannot afford. He is only able to make a dollar a day from begging, which is exactly what it costs him to buy food to keep himself alive. Right now it is autumn, but winter is coming. He realizes that without shelter in the winter, he will almost certainly die on the streets. With $100, he could buy warmer clothing, or perhaps pay for a very inexpensive room, maybe just a warm place to stay the night. As far as Joe is concerned, spending one dollar on a ticket with a small chance of earning him a hundred dollars is a rational decision. If he doesn't get his hands on a hundred dollars, he will die. Even though it is an unlikely gamble, its not really a risk at all. Either he doesn't play and dies, or he plays and has a 1% chance of surviving. In this situation, Joe values $100 as more than a hundred times more valuable than $1. The difference is not just $99; the difference is that between life and death.

Joe is obviously an extreme example. But its easy to see the same sort of principle at work in less extreme cases. If there is something in particular I very badly want and I need a hundred dollars more than I have to get it, then one hundred dollars is more than a hundred times more useful than one dollar. This is especially true if I operate on a very tight budget, and have no ability to save my monthly earnings. In a case like this I can still save windfall money, extra money that I haven't budgeted yet, but this windfall money will only come very rarely. One dollar of windfall money is not all that useful. But if I have a chance of turning that one dollar of windfall money into a hundred dollars of windfall money, it might make sense to take that chance.

This argument can also rationalize playing a game with a negative expected profit. Imagine T = $2, P = 1%, and W = $100. In this scenario, V = $1, and E = $1 - $2, or negative one dollars. If you bought a lot of tickets, you would expect to lose a dollar for each ticket you bought. A small-time gambler might still play this game, but will typically lose money at it. A high-roller will avoid this game, since it offers little excitement and an almost total guarantee of losing money. My friend Joe, however, might still be willing to take this bet (if he could skip a day of eating to afford it). And a guy on a tight budget might find it a reasonable bet too, if he really could use a hundred dollars but has nothing to do with two dollars.

Lets switch it up and imagine a very different sort of scenario. Suppose that someone sets up a game of Tomo where T = $100, P = 10%, and W = $2,000. In this game, V = $200 and E = $100 dollars. This means that each ticket you buy makes, on average, a one hundred dollar profit. It seems obvious that as soon as someone set up such a game, there would be a rush to buy these tickets as fast as possible. Sure, some of them might lose, but it is fairly likely that if you buy enough of them you will end up making considerable amounts of money.

The interesting question to ask here is, who would not buy these tickets?

Some people might avoid these tickets due to extreme risk aversion. They might understand that they will probably make money, but may nevertheless decide that they would rather not take the risk.

Another group that would not buy these tickets would be the people who can't afford it. If you don't have a hundred dollars to spend, you're locked out of this game. This is an especially sad sort of spot to be in, since you'll be surrounded by people making pots of money playing Tomo and you're stuck without any way to even get your foot in the door. Even if you can afford to buy a ticket or two, each ticket alone has only a 10% chance of winning, so most likely you're going to lose all your money trying to play. Even though you have a chance to make a lot of money, there's a 90% chance you'll end up on the street. Nobody likes those odds.

This Tomo scenario is strikingly similar to how our economy often works. A common adage is “you have to spend money to make money.” Another variant of this is you have to risk money to make money. It is a common idea that the greater the risk, the greater the potential payoff should be. This makes intuitive sense. Humans are naturally risk-averse, so we expect a payoff for our risky behavior. However, risk is heavily dependent on your point of view. In the Tomo scenario above, if you have millions of dollars, the game is no risk at all. You can spend your millions and be pretty much guaranteed of making millions more. If you have very little money, then the risk is a lot higher. Your ability to engage in the game is very limited. Even if you could afford a few tickets, most likely you would just lose money and never see any of the profits that the rich guys are raking in. Obviously, the real world economy is far more complicated. This Tomo scenario is, however, a very simple way of seeing how an economy that rewards high-roller risk-taking will naturally lead to the rich becoming richer while the poor sit there unable to participate.