Why the Pope Hates the Condom

„Nun sag, wie hast du’s mit der Religion? Du bist ein herzlich guter Mann, allein ich glaub, du hältst nicht viel davon.“– Gretchen, Faust: The First Part of the Tragedy

In J. W. von Goethe's Faust, innocent Gretchen is seduced by Heinrich Faust, a depressed nihilist scholar in business with the devil.
Before she gives in, she asks him a question of vital importance for aroused Gretchen: "Now tell me, how do you take religion?".
Here is why it matters:

1. She has a 'significant apriori' probability of getting pregnant during intercourse
2. Her benefit if she becomes pregnat has to be differentiated:
1. If Heinrich marries her, she takes the social lift to upper bourgeoisie 
2. If Heinrich lets her down. Big big trouble for her: social decline, economic free fall.
3. Her benefit if not getting pregnant: a sweet night with Mr. Right.

So pious Gretel makes the famous litmus test known as Gretchenfrage: "Now tell me, how do you take religion?"
What can lush Dr. Faust do?

1. Consume, hope for the best, and walk away if she is pregnant
2. Marry her if she is pregnant.
3. Getting a cold shower, immediately!

Gretchen tries to hedge against 1.) with this question. Now if Faust is not religious and wants to get laid tonight, he has to cheat.
We have modeled a game that can be analyzed with Decision-trees and Bayesian Networks. I made an Influence Diagram with some speculative guesses on the value system of each character

The overall equilibrium of the Gretchen decision problem (with some bold guesses).
To maximize total benefit of all actors, Faust should withdraw. But cheating is a priori the best for him.

You knew it: the story ends in misery and grief.
The underlying assumption though, is thrilling: with Gretchenfrage, Religion resembles an insurance against the negative consequences of a unwanted pregnancy. God would punish Faust for his debaucheries, a faithful Faust therefore will not let her down, Gretchen expects.

Game theory comes into play. Religion acts as a trust warranter to find a equilibrium that allows intercourse. Without the religious contract of matrimony, no sexy time - to speak with Borat. It minimizes the chance of Gretchen losing.

The church as an institution becomes a central role in the mating game. Becoming the guarantor of sex means big power and influence. But the influence came to be threatened.

Reliable contraceptives, developed in the 20th century, wiped away the need for church in order to fuck. Its like the atomic bomb was thrown over Vatican state. Now, is it sensible that the pope hates the condom or not?

Miss Atomic Bomb, 

from the decade when the contraceptive bomb hit the church

Improper Linear Models are Better than Intuition

I was always was fascinated by people who don't care if their judgment is true. To maintain control over this process, you have to ban evaluation, and explain away errors by shifting goals at hindsight. Thats the "intuition" approach. "ci arrangiam", how Italians say and do. For the rest of us, there is the possibility to construct models and use them as predictive tools.

Improper linear models are those in which the weights of the predictor variables are obtained by some nonoptimal method; for example, they may be obtained on the basis of intuition, derived from simulating a clinical judge's predictions, or set to be equal. This article presents evidence that even such improper linear models are superior to clinical intuition when predicting a numerical criterion from numerical predictors. 

http://heatherlench.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/dawes2.pdf

How to trick your emotional apparatus?

To shout again into "device null" as the long tail of bloggers do: the current developments: because I discovered that a genius named Chrilly Donninger (also in english wikipedia) writes phantastic Amazon reviews on "all things prediction, etc.", I ordered 'Forecasting', a book I bluntly like to call a Grand Œuvre of forecasting literature.
Since then, I hack some piece of R code, and I feel fresh and near to the topic.


In a broader sense, I had a big questions obsessing me:
The dichotomy between emotion and reason: It seems to be the key to understand society: emotions comes first. Therefore literature over tractatus, therefore love over job, therefore fear over reason. The cognitive avarice, as somone told, over deep analysis. You can not argue with people, you have to seduce them. This seems the greater insight of the 20th century. We know, and we can argue with great passion ;-), that we can not overthrow this kind of man. We might need to fix it, this is where the judgemt and decision theory comunity aims at. We live in an age where the most safest intuition (= heuristics) is "resemble the 'nature', therefore bio, hence the green  party. Yes, I do not have an answer but a question: Since emotions are what nature imposed on us, can we once overthrow them in favor of modern processing devices of information? 
d

The Time Bias, an Example

A scenario to illustrate http://objektorient.blogspot.com/2011/01/benefit-of-driving-fast-deadly.html

Mr. P. drives every day from Meran to Bozen, approximal d=26 km, to work.
Normally he drives down the Autobahn with V1=110 km/h, just the speed limit.

Bigger Map

But one day his Boss calls him: "Get down immediately", he shouts, "we have big troubles".
P. puts himself in the car and decides to speed up +30 km/h to V2=140 km/h. He gets a meager ~3 min time saving.

Now he decides to really challenge his destiny and speeds up again +30 km/h to V2=170 km/h. But this additional flooring gives him only ~2 min more.

So in total he saves ~5 min for risking to lose his driver licence or worse. Further, as a rule of thumb, gas consumption is 1:1 proportional to speed. This gives a 5 min gain a huge price tag.

The benefit of driving fast, a deadly counterintuition

The misperception of the time savings when driving faster cost lifes.
Actually your benefit diminishes with increased base velocity.

The counterintuitive curvilinearity shown in red screws you badly. You sure always thought its linear. Wrooooong! The higher your initial speed the lower your benefit from flooring it.

Need for speed? How many hours do you gain?  Distance is 100 km, increased speed to V2 = V1 + 30 km/h at various base speeds V1. After approx V1= 50km/h you get diminishing returns [try here].

Together with another non-linear behavior: the quadratic increase of crash energy as a function of velocity

should show you one thing: Driving fast is deadly stupid.

As a heuristics:

Drive faster when you drive really slow, don't speed up on the Autobahn.

Inspired by http://journal.sjdm.org/10/10816/jdm10816.pdf