The Church of Rationality

Echo Chambers Reconsidered

2012-01-31T20:45:00.004+01:00

Steve Sailer remembers

the kind of problems I used to run into when socializing before the Internet gave me a better outlet for the corrosive side of my intellect. At a party, I'd start out popular because I knew enough about most things to be able to ask other guests intelligent questions about their personal field of interest. But I tended to get really interested in what they told me and kept asking questions, which at first they found flattering. But I'd eventually get carried away thinking about the topic and get to the point where I'd ask some extremely unsettling question that the other guest didn't want to think about at all (e.g., So, if the Efficient Markets Hypothesis that you studied at B-School is correct, how do you people in the stocks and mutual funds business add value?).

Yeah. I, too, needed a surprisingly long time to realize that, as a blogger more popular than myself would put it, conversation is not about exchanging ideas. In particular, it was only fairly recently that I realized that when someone tells me how X is a wanker because he did y, it is not my job to contribute my assessment of the situation, let alone go and specifically try to see the other side of the story. It is to agree that X is totally a wanker - for having done y, but more generally, too, sure, everyone knows that! (Wish I could heed my own advice.)

More generally, truth is a valuable value, but so is being agreeable. Always giving the former the upper hand over the latter is the wrong strategy.

Ever since the internet became a mass medium, people have worried that it would cause their fellow citizens to communicate less and less with others unlike themselves. Let's call it the Hyperhomophily Hypotesis (HyHy). (I think I developed that hypothesis myself, only to find out from blogs that lots of people had thought of the same idea.) And indeed; most people who spend substantial amounts of time on the internet have probably come across blogs the comments sections of which are best described as echo chambers. I believe there was some economic study a few months back which claimed to have found that the HyHy was overrated, but let's, for the sake of the argument, assume that study was wrong. Would that really be so bad? Three counterarguments.

One, some of the concern about HyHy seems to be based on comparing societal outcomes against an overly harmonious ideal of Let's All Agree on Everything. Me, I like harmony, too, but I also recognize that disagreement between people is a natural ingredient of social relationships, in part because many games just happen to be zero-sum or mixed motive. It's inherent in social life. Any collection of people had better find ways of dealing with that, but using Let's All Agree on Everything as the leading ideal for a society seems to lead to poor results. We tried, here in Germany. Twice. Didn't work out so well.

Two, people tend to like spending time with others like themselves and dislike spending time with others unlike themselves.

Three, perhaps Sailer is right that congregating with like-minded people on the web serves as a valuable outlet for tendencies that don't go down so well in the offline world (where you don't have as much choice regarding who you'll communicate with). Underlying this idea is a steam boiler model of the psyche: once you've released some of that steam, there's less pressure left. That model has been thoroughly discredited for aggressive behaviour, but is quite appropriate for others (e.g., sexual, at least in the short run). What about an overemphasis of truth vs. agreeableness? More research is needed, but for the time being, I'm inclined to agree with Sailer.

P.S.: I would like to point out that this post is not, although it would have been the obvious choice, called "Beyond Universal Agreement: Rethinking Echo Chambers".

The Older Paper: The Limits of Fixed Effect and Inverse Probability of Treatment Weighting (2009)

2012-01-29T20:51:00.000+01:00

David Bjerk's "How Much Can We Trust Causal Interpretations of Fixed-Effects Estimators in the Context of Criminality?" is the kind of stats paper I like: applied, short on Greek letters, and written in a crystal-clear style. In it, Bjerk demonstrates the limits of fixed effects and inverse probability of treatment (aka inverse propensity score) weighting in terms of establishing causality. (In Bjerk's usage, IPT weights are a kind of fixed effect, which is kinda strange, as the IPT weights he uses are time-varying. But never mind.)

As for fixed effects proper, he simply illustrates something every reader of a textbook should have learned, but which is quickly forgotten in practice: fixed effects do not account for influences on the dependent variable which vary over time. His demonstration is rather neat, though. The background is that some papers use fixed effects estimation to establish the effect of an independent variable such as alcohol consumption on a dependent variable such as aggressive behaviour. He first replicates this effect in a sample of adolescents and then shows that, using this method, we can also "show" that smoking causes aggression. This seems implausible, however - if anything, nicotine consumption may be expected to reduce aggression. The plausible explanation for both results is that both the outcome and the supposed "treatments" change in response to unmeasured variables, such as adolescents' decisions to rebel.

The portion about IPT weighting is even more interesting. The author focuses on a well-known paper by Robert Sampson, John Laub and Christopher Wimmer who use dynamic IPT weighting to establish that marriage causes a reduction in criminal involvement. Again replicating this result, Bjerk goes on to argue that such results are not very trustworthy (my emphasis):

[O]ne must assume that whatever the changes are that induce an individual to obtain the treatment (i.e. marriage) at a given point in time have no direct effect on his underlying propensity to commit crime at that point in time. In other words, one must assume there is no dynamic selection. As discussed above, this assumption may be problematic with respect to marriage and crime [...].

The remaining question then is whether IPT weights lessen or exacerbate any dynamic selection bias? To answer this question it is again crucial to think very closely about the processes through which individuals obtain the treatment of interest and whether these processes may differ between those who have a high likelihood of obtaining the treatment at any given point in time based on their other observable characteristics, and those who do not. In particular, if one believes that the changes that induce individuals to obtain the treatment at a given point in time are more generally orthogonal to any concurrent changes in criminal propensity for those with a low likelihood of obtaining the treatment at any point in time than for those with a high likelihood, then IPT weighting will indeed lessen the dynamic selection bias of ﬁxed-effects estimates. However, if one believes the opposite is true, then IPT weighting will exacerbate the dynamic selection bias of ﬁxed-effects estimates.

[...] Consider marriage. What would prompt an individual whose observables suggest a high likelihood of getting married at a point in time to actually get married? The high empirical likelihood of marriage at a given point in time means that such an individual already has many of the characteristics of responsibility and adulthood (e.g. steady employment, a weak criminal history, perhaps already in a cohabiting relationship). Therefore, it actually seems reasonable to think that a very small event or change in attitudes could trigger a marriage decision for these men, and moreover such changes could very plausibly have nothing to do with changes in their underlying criminal propensity. On the other hand, for individuals with a low empirical likelihood of marriage at any given point in time, it is likely that reasonably large events or changes in attitudes must occur for them to enter into a marriage, and it is less clear that such large events or changes in attitudes would not also affect these individuals’ underlying criminal propensities. Hence, it is actually quite plausible that the sequential ignorability assumption is more problematic for the low likelihood of marriage men than the high likelihood of marriage men, meaning IPT weighting will increase the dynamic selection bias with respect to ﬁxed-effects estimates of the direct effect of marriage on individual criminality.

That hadn't occured to me. Recommended, including for teaching (as a supplement to a textbook treatment of the techniques in question).

Around the Blogs, Vol 74: Stamps and Trees and Memories

2012-01-23T23:32:00.000+01:00

1. Eric S. Raymond taxonomizes anti-intellectualism. Self-recommending, as they say.

2. Will Wilkinson reflects on the Occupy movement. Not sure I agree, but the post is excellently written. In fact, I have an inkling Wilkinson wasn't so sure he agreed with himself and hence took extra care with the wording.

3. A blog on football-themed stamps. Thank you, internet!

4. Seth Roberts goes to Tokyo.

5. Eric Crampton knows the solution to unemployment.

6. How long does it take schemas to distort your memories? Not very.

7. Keith Humphreys speculates on why self-involved people are overrepresented in the arts. Too much treatment, too little selection for my taste, but still. (via)

8. Tim Harford explains that government employees may create value, too.

You Heard It Here First: Rubinian Turn in Sociology

2012-01-18T21:31:00.004+01:00

Quantitative empirical sociology is in the early stages of a Rubinian turn. Rubinian as in Rubin causal model. There was a long article by Markus Gangl in the 2010 volume of the much-read Annual Review of Sociology, which basically equated the counterfactual concept of causality with the Rubin Causal Model. Sure, Winship and Morgan already had a pretty similar paper in the 1999 edition, apparently without much immediate effect, but now you also see Rubinian analyses more and more in the top journals (heck, there's even one coming up in the leading German-language journal). I think the model and its applications do have their shortcomings, but it's certainly a huge improvement over the "let's throw all variables that may also influence the outcome onto the right-hand side" approach and its cousin, the "let's put variables from three approaches into the regression and see who wins" school of theory testing.

I expect lots of papers getting published in good journals just because they use propensity score weighting. Or, as Robert Sampson once put it, "remember LISREL?" Nonetheless, best thing that has happened to the field in my lifetime.

Around the Blogs, Vol. 73: Special Celestial Edition

2012-01-16T23:59:00.000+01:00

1. Oh Lord!

2. Oh Lord!

3. Oh Lord!

Current Affairs: Is It Wrong to Piss on the Dead?

2012-01-16T19:47:00.006+01:00

Is it just me or is there anyone else who feels it suggests warped moral standards that pissing on people you killed is seen as despicable, but the killing itself is not? It seems to me that's getting things backwards. I'd rather be pissed on than killed, and if I'm already dead when I'm pissed on, hey, at least I won't mind. I'm not saying pissing on victims suggests a noble mind on the part of the pisser, but that kind of behaviour is really one of my last concerns when it comes to war.

It's Always the Other People Who Are Biased

2012-01-11T19:06:00.004+01:00

Inspired by Daniel Kahnemann, Bryan Caplan presents an answer to the question, "Why are so many people so economically illiterate?" Caplan speculates that people confronted with an "economic literacy"-type question substitute a simpler question for it. For example,

Does the minimum wage help low-skill workers? (1)

get translated into

Would I be happy if employers gave low-skilled workers a raise? (2)

which often elictits the answer "yes". If it is then interpreted as an answer to question (1), we have an economically illiterate view, according to Caplan.

I guess there's a lot of truth to his model of constructing answers to econ questions, but perhaps it's worth pointing out that, according to what I've read and heard from him, Caplan also uses a simplified question translation, namely

Does a rise in wages lead to less demand for work, according to a supply-and-demand graph? (3)

to which the answer is yes. As for the truth, I haven't delved into the literature and won't, but according to this piece by Eric Crampton, not known as a raving socialist and opposed to minimum wages on grounds of liberty, minimum wages may not negatively affect employment if they are set at less than 45% of the average wage.

Lesson: When scoffing at other people's heuristics, be aware that your mind, too, may be working with a simplifying model. Disclosure: My heuristic in this post is, "trust what Crampton writes is roughly true".

Best Blog Posts of 2011, Vanity Edition

2012-01-10T20:28:00.001+01:00

Yeah, I know, one is supposed to do this kind of thing while the old year is still on, but I didn't want to publish three linklists in a row. Anyway, here are ten posts from 2011 that I found more worthwhile than most, in no particular order.

The Tree of Life: Eine Filmkritik
Why Don't Academics Do More Cocaine?
The God Delusion: What Bryan Caplan Might Be Overlooking with Respect to Having (More) Kids (I really like this post, but it would be a little more convincing if I had actually read the book)
Two Underappreciated Perspectives on Alcoholism
Divas, Tweets & the Phil Collins Approach to Human Relations
Die wissenschaftliche Methode
Porn & Booze: Two Counterarguments
Can You Vent Your Anger? Why Psychologists and Laypersons Disagree
Signaling Power Is Cool
A Proposal for a New Rule, with the Aim of Improving the Social Sciences and the Humanities

As for "popular", I don't know, if by "popular" you mean "liked by many". Concerning traffic, it seems that's largely driven by how close to the top the post comes in on Google (relative to searches for that term, I guess). If you want to increase your blog's traffic, I suggest you write a post the title of which combines the terms "10,000 hour rule", "best alternative rock songs" and - surprise entry at no. 3 - "Bruno Gröning".

(Best blog posts of 2011 by other people)

The within-between Fallacy

2012-01-04T23:09:00.000+01:00

Most "reasearch" is done by casual observation, and the most-observed object of such research is oneself. Trivially, this may lead to misleading views when oneself isn't all that representative of the universe in question. But I think there is also a more interesting systematic bias introduced by this procedure.

I submit that when thinking about what leads to different outcomes between people, casual observers (more or less consciously) turn to themselves and ask: "What differentiates between those different outcomes within myself [e.g., between different days]."

For example, when you observe the quality and quantity of your work output, you are going to find that you are much less productive on days on which you are (i) tired; (ii) plain lazy. In contrast, your general talent is, by definition, constant between days. It is hence tempting to conclude that what differentiates productive from unproductive people is energy and work ethic, while talent is rather unimportant. This explains the popularity of the received wisdom about inspiration and perspiration.

Some data: In the U.S. General Social Survey, variance in the answers to a question measuring energy explains less than 4% of the variance in education and income.

How "Social Distance" Is Misleading

2012-01-02T10:05:00.002+01:00

Models are wrong because they abstract away from reality. If they didn't they wouldn't be models, but the actual things. They can be useful because they describe some properties of the real things accurately enough. There are also properties of the real things they don't describe accurately enough. The trick is to notice when you leave the realm in which the correspondence of the model and reality is high. This isn't all that easy because you're thinking not in terms of reality, but in terms of the model.

Case in point: For some reason that's not entirely clear to me, people find it useful to think about social relationships as though they were thinking about geography: "I'm closer to Timmy than I am to Tommy." The distance metaphor breaks down once you enter the realm of social relationships involving more than two persons: The geographical distance from A to C cannot be larger than the sum of the geographical distances from A to B and B to C. This is not true, however, for social "distances". Failure to understand this is the source of much misunderstanding.

The Best Blog Posts of 2011

2012-01-01T00:02:00.001+01:00

Eagerly awaited by all of the world wide web, here is the list of the best blog posts of 2011. For your convenience, brackets are appended to each link to indicate that the post is Long, Medium lenght or Short; High-Brow, Mid-Brow or Low Brow and Funny or Not.

If I counted correctly, economists take only four spots in the list below, which is much of an improvement over last time. This includes the two authors we met on last year's list. Which is still available, as is the 2009 edition. Without further ado -

15. Orgtheory: "Your ASA Vegas Bingo Card", by Kieran Healy (S; MB; F)

14. Dr. Boli's Celebrated Magazine: "Advertisement", by H. Albertus Boli (S; LB; F)

13. Dalrock: "Should I Divorce Him?", by Dalrock (L; LB; F)

12. Eli Dourado: "Peace through Political Assassination?", by Eli Dourado (M; MB; N)

11. Decision Science News: "Five Books That Changed a Statistician", by Dan Goldstein (M; MB; F)

10. Core Economics: "English Language Requirements for Immigration", by Joshua Gans (L; LB; F)

9. kenodoxia: "What Ancient Greek Philosophy Was Not Like . . .", by James Warren (S; HB; F)

8. EconLog: "The Overlords of Immigration", by Bryan Caplan (M; HB; N)

7. PJ Media:"The Myth of the ‘Ethical Vegan’", by Ward Clark (L; MB; N)

6. Overcoming Bias: "Why Men Are Bad at 'Feelings'", by Robin Hanson (M; HB; N)

5. Forbes: "The Moral Default Setting: Liberal or Conservative?", by Will Wilkinson (L; HB; N)

4. Less Wrong: "Working Hurts Less Than Procrastinating, We Fear the Twinge of Starting", by Elizer Yudkowsky (L; MB; N)

3. Armed and Dangerous: "What 'Privilege' Means to Me", by Eric S. Raymond (M; HB; N)

2. [Companion Pieces:] Pileus: "Cheap Sex as Collective Action Failure", by Sven Wilson and Armed and Dangerous: "Reconsidering Sexual Repression", by Eric S. Raymond (M; MB; N)

1. iSteve: "Racehorse Haynes", by Steve Sailer (L; LB; F)

Operation Blank Slate, 2011 Edition

2011-12-30T10:06:00.002+01:00

As usual around this time of year, a list of links I was going to comment on here but didn't (in the order in which I bookmarked them). Lots of interesting stuff, as well as lots of stuff I hardly remember.

Robin Hanson: Control Variables Avoid Bias
Tino Sanandaji: The Spirit Level Is Junk Science
Various: When Science Goes Psychic
Bryan Caplan: The Overlords of Immigration
Daniel Read et al.: Mixing Virtue and Vice: Combining the Immediacy Effect and the Diversification Heuristic (pdf)
Eric Barker/Francesca Gino & Francis J. Flynn: Are the Best Gifts Surprises or Things the Recipient Specifically Asks for?
Fabio Rojas/Duncan Watts: Duncan Watts in Scientific American
Angela Lee Duckworth et al.: Role of Test Motivation in Intelligence Testing
Statsquatch: A bad apple in Duckworth's IQ-Motivation meta-analysis?
Lovisa Stannow: Rape Factories
Mark Liberman: Ask Language Log: One = Only One?
Eric Crampton: Rationality and Economists
Andrew Potter: Art, Alcoholism, Amy Winehouse
Steve Hsu: Heritability 2.0
Will Wilkinson: What's the Big Idea?
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva: The Linguistics of Color Blind Racism: How to Talk Nasty about Blacks without Sounding “Racist” (pdf)
Charles Kurzman: Why Is It So Hard to Find a Suicide Bomber These Days?
Arnold Kling: Act Libertarianism and Rule Libertarianism
Bits & Pieces: What Is Something You Realized Embarrassingly Late in Your Life?
Will Wilkinson: Did Steve Jobs Give Good Advice?
Seth Roberts: Grandmother Knows Best about Crohn's Disease
Ross Douthat: Democracy's Collateral Damage
Sven Wilson: Cheap Sex as Collective Action Failure
Dr. Φ: Corporations Will Do Anything for Profit (as Long as It's Bad)
Ann Althouse: System One and System Two: The Brain's "Two Independent Systems for Organizing Knowledge"
Will Wilkinson: Success as Pollution: Layard Meets Coase
Bryan Caplan: Usually Look on the Bright Side of Life
Matt: More Linky, Less Thinky: Special Edition on Income Inequality

Auteurs in Film and Academia

2011-12-23T10:59:00.004+01:00

Last night I watched Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, the documentary about New Hollywood based on Peter Biskind's book of the same name. A main point I take away from the film (and which I don't remember taking away from the movie) is that maybe giving directors more or less complete control may not be such a good idea after all. The narrative is that it worked for a few years, giving us The Conversation and Taxi Driver; but then, the treatment directors received, coupled with excessive cocaine consumption, got to their heads, which gave us films like Scorsese's New York, New York (I haven't seen that one, but there seems to be a general agreement that it's, um, not a masterpiece.). The general argument need not be restricted to U.S. cinema. I certainly wouldn't have minded if some money men would have told Godard, "Er, Jean-Luc, can't you give us something that's a little more À bout de souffle?"

So perhaps artistic freedom isn't that hot after all. From a theoretical standpoint, that shouldn't be too surprising. Artists are good at creating original ideas and are almost bound to exhibit a certain amount of self-absorbtion; moreover, going against the grain is pretty much part of the job description. No wonder they'll pursue crap ideas from time to time, scoffing at the proles' ignorance.

I am writing this as I am in the middle of revising an article for resubmission. (In fact, I'm procrastinating). The main ~~insult~~ challenge is to cut its length by about 30%. No fun. But then, would I rather read a shorter or a longer article? Well, we all know the answer to that one. If you think that peer-review is the work of the devil whenever you're on the receiving end, but think, "Thank god there's peer-review" whenever you're asked to act as a gatekeeper, be aware that there's an inconsistency.

Around the Blogs, Vol. 72

2011-12-18T23:00:00.000+01:00

1. "When a person is placed under cognitive load (by having to memorize a string of numbers while making a moral evaluation), the individual does not express the usual bias toward self." (Robin Hanson/Robert Trivers)

2. "[T]here are a non-trivial number of potential states of the world in which all human life is extinguished. It's not immediately clear how we ought to expend resources in insuring against all of the different risks." (Eric Crampton)

3. "Questionable Research Practices Are Rife in Psychology, Survey Suggests" (Christian Jarrett/Leslie et al.)

4. "How to Fix Science" (Neuroskeptic)

5. "On Famous People Telling You to Become Who You Really Are" (Nick)

6. "First-hand Experience of Kitchens" and other fun conference papers (Eric Crampton/various authors)

7. 'The very existence of a sovereign regulatory body suggests that powerful actors (occasionally) need to be bullied into behaving themselves, but the only provision for bullying that sovereign body into behaving itself is a vague wave of the hand at "elections" and "democracy".' (Matt)

8. "Here’s an interesting general way in which a group of people can start burning all kinds of utility." (Paul Gowder)

Christopher Hitchens, a Life Worth Living (1949-2011)

2011-12-16T20:50:00.005+01:00

All the time I've felt that life is a wager. And that I probably was getting more out of leading a bohemian existence, as a writer, than I would have if I didn't. So, writing is important to me and if it helps me do that or enhances and prolongs and deepens, and sometimes intensifies, argument and conversation, it's worth it to me. Sure. So I was knowingly taking a risk. [...] It's impossible for me to imagine having my life without going to those parties, having those late nights. [...] I wouldn't cut any of that out.

Interviewed by Charlie Rose (ca. 18:00-19:15)

(Photo "John Lennox and Christopher Hitchens debating" by stepher, embedded from Wikipedia)

Blogging Outsourced: The Lazy "Irrational Regulators" Argument

2011-12-14T23:41:00.003+01:00

Given my general laziness and the fact that blogging isn't my first priority in life, it can take a very long time between the appearance of an idea for a blogpost and the arrival of the actual post. And sometimes I come across roughly the post that I would have written on someone else's blog before I get round to it. Less work for me!

In this spirit, I am delighted to point readers towards Leigh Caldwell's discussion of the argument, "But if people are irrational, regulators are irrational too - so how can they make rules to counter citizens' irrationality?" It's better than what you could have expected from me.

Can You Vent Your Anger? Why Psychologists and Laypersons Disagree

2011-12-13T23:32:00.001+01:00

When you pick up a book on the psychology of aggression - one informed by actual research, not some Freudian claptrap - it is going to tell you that you can't vent your anger. Yet many laypersons are going to tell you that you can. Is it just because laypersons fail to understand counterfactuals or can't randomize? I think not.

I think the disagreement stems simply from semantic confusion. Psychologists have found that people who are made angry and then given an opportunity to vent their anger do not show less aggression than people who are made angry and are then put into some control condition in which they cannot vent their anger. Laypersons who say that they can vent their anger mean that after venting they feel better because the unpleasant feeling that comes with unvented anger is reduced. In other words, psychologists and laypersons are talking about different dependent variables.

Pebbles, Vol. 35

2011-12-11T23:56:00.000+01:00

1. "The asymmetric nature of the bonus (an incentive for success without a corresponding disincentive for failure) causes hidden risks to accumulate in the financial system and become a catalyst for disaster."

2. Is Julian Assange a force for freedom?

3. Who are the most ruthless capitalists in the western world?

4. For those who think Germans don't have a sense of humour. (via)

5. "It's Time to End the War on Salt?"

6. South African football team misses out on the African Cup of Nations due to misreading the qualifiers rules. Coach: "Africa is a jungle, my friend." Uh-oh.

7. Return of the Jedi never made any profit

8. "Bread and Peace": A very simple model of U.S. presidential elections

Signaling Power Is Cool

2011-12-10T10:08:00.004+01:00

According to Terrie Moffitt's famous theory, much of delinquency can be understood as an attempt by adolescents to gain mature status. Judith Rich Harris disagrees*:

If teenagers wanted to be like adults they wouldn't be shoplifting nailpolish from drugstores or hanging off overpasses to spray I LOVE YOU LISA on the arch. If they really aspired to "mature status" they would be doing boring adult things like sorting the laundry and figuring out their income taxes. Teenagers aren't tring to be like adults: they are trying to distinguish themselves from adults.

But I don't think that critique makes much sense. Harris would probably agree that some people would like to be like Hollywood stars, but that doesn't mean they dream of learning lines from screenplays by heart. They want to drive big cars and wear expensive dresses. They only want the fun parts. Likewise, teenagers want the nice parts of adulthood (like money and booze), but not the others (laundry, tax forms).

But that doesn't distinguish teenagers from others: who doesn't want nice things? The core idea of Moffitt's theory is that teenagers are adults biologically, but children socially ("maturity gap"). And it is not other teenagers or children who treat teenagers like children, it is the adults. To use Harris's own, somewhat exaggerated, metaphor, adults are to teenagers as prison wardens are to prisoners. And I think it's fair to say that prisoners want to be like prison wards in terms of holding the power, but that doesn't mean they're going to go and imitate everything the prison wardens do.

On the contrary: that would be brown-nosing. Instead, what you want to do as a prisoner to signal your power is defy the wardens as often as you can. Likewise, if a teenager wants to signal to his peers that he has power, he ought to do lots of things that adults don't want him to do. That's why it makes sense to steal even stuff you don't want, as is common among delinquents. Much human behaviour that otherwise doesn't seem to make a lot of sense, I submit, can be understood as signaling power, the ability to have one's way even in the face of opposition**.

Andy McKenzie has submitted the view that those behaviours are seen as cool that "emphasize short run outcomes over long term outcomes". I think that's true, but it's only a special case of a broader theory. These behaviours, I think, are seen as cool because they signal that you're not intimidated by the negative consequences of your behaviour, such as ruining your teeth when you use them to open a bottle. (The authority you're defying in this case is nature.) For teens, there's an additional payoff: adults want them to behave in a far-sighted manner. This explains why both adults and teens enjoy not thinking about long-term consequences, but teens more so. It also suggests teens shouldn't do the laundry even if they enjoy it: adults certainly wouldn't mind.

The view of teenage cool as emphasizing short-run outcomes vs. being disapproved by adults are not that easy to test against each other because the two typically go together. But I predict that at given levels of shortsightedness, things will be seen as more cool the more adults disapprove of them. Or perhaps it's adult disapproval of behaviour by teens divided by adult disapproval of same behaviour by adults. I'm not sure which.

_____

*The Nurture Assumption, p. 264

**My loose translation of Max Weber's famous definition

Predictions and ad Hominem Attacks

2011-11-28T08:45:00.005+01:00

Eric S. Raymond's recent post on "Eight Warning Signs of Junk Science" (written in the context of climate science, but applicable more generally) is recommended, but the best bits are in the comments. First, from Raymond himself, a distinction between ad hominem and not really ad hominem attacks:

There is an important difference between saying “I think person X is lying about global warming because person X has often been caught lying before in similar circumstances” and saying “I think person X is lying about global warming because he likes to bugger sheep.” In the latter case, the claim that X likes to bugger sheep is probably irrelevant to X’s truthfulness about global warming; in the former, the specific claim about a pattern of lying is relevant. The latter is ad hominem; the [former] is not.

A handy one to keep in the arsenal.

Second, from commenter Contemplationist, an answer to the important question, How can a layperson evaluate the accuracy of claims made by scientists:

A lay man need not know anything about a scientific field to intelligently evaluate it other than whether the humility (or lack thereof) of the practitioners of the field calibrate with the success (or failure) of their models’ predictions.

According to the data I've seen, climate scientists's prediction record is poor indeed.

On the Margins

2011-11-25T21:30:00.003+01:00

I wouldn't be surprised if some future dissertation featured a section about the bits of text placed above blog comments sections as a venue for political protest. If so, our Ph.D. candidate should not miss Eric Crampton's recent contribution, which is why I am presenting it here:

For context, look here and here. The law, by the way, seems pretty yuck to me, especially the bit about not being allowed to speak out against voting on election day. That's got a mildly GDRish feel to it.

In Defense of Boring People

2011-11-24T20:03:00.004+01:00

Some people - let's call them redistributionists - think that this country's welfare system is not generous enough. Though I tend to disagree, that's a respectable opinion. It is curious, however, that this view often comes coupled with a deep-seated disdain for regular nine-to-five workers. This is curious because it is these people who, after checking into work every morning, create the bulk of the wealth that the redistributionists would like to distribute differently. In other words, if it weren't for the disdained sheeple, the redistributionists' argument would be void, as there wouldn't be an awful lot to redistribute. While a large-scale demonstration praising office workers may be a little too much to ask, a bit of gratitude would seem to be in order.

Another group of people who tend to look down on the nine-to-fivers is artists. This is particularly inappropriate in the case of those artists who get paid by subsidies, because: see above. An argument that is often made in this context is that art is not a luxury, as can be seen from the fact that even cavemen, who certainly were poor, practiced art. Let's accept this argument. It does not invalidate the view that paying specialists to create art is a luxury. I believe it is - people tend to put food on the table first, and then, perhaps, contemplate whether it is worth shelling out to see another staging of Hamlet. I'm sure the cavemen's priorities were similarly structured: dead men don't do sculpture.

Die wissenschaftliche Methode

2011-11-24T19:04:00.000+01:00

Rumsitzen und Kaffee trinken.

Porn & Booze: Two Counterarguments

2011-11-20T22:02:00.004+01:00

I An Argument for Female Adolescents' Access to Porn

Here's an answer to the question "What in life did it take you a surprisingly long time to realize you've been doing wrong all along?":

I didn't realize until my early twenties that if a man would have sex with me, all it meant was that he wanted to have sex with me, not that he liked me as a person or found me attractive. This is the one thing that was left out of the sex talk that my mom had with me that really would have been helpful to include.

This predicament, presumably not uncommon, could have been avoided if the answerer's views about the strength of the male feelings-lust link had been informed by access to porn. While I think that porn exaggerates the primitivity of male sexuality, it makes for a nice counterweight to the bullshit about really caring about her soul and stuff that males give females when all they want is get into the womens' knickers.

II An Argument for Reducing Barriers to Alcohol Consumption

Low birth rates are considered a problem in many affluent countries, and perhaps Germany especially. This is an argument for making people drink more (e.g., by reducing taxes). I am not referring to cases in which people spontaneously have sex they otherwise wouldn't and, on top of that, forget all about contraception - although such cases surely exist. Rather, I am thinking of alcohol's extraordinary ability to turn even your average German into an audacious extrovert, which enables people to get to know each other sufficiently well to later get married & have children. If it weren't for the booze, Lord knows what this country's birth and marriage rates would be.

Soon you'll die: time rushes by

2011-11-14T09:00:00.002+01:00

Strange scenes caught by Google Street View (may contain violent and/or sexual content). Have a great week!

Causes, Interactions

2011-11-11T07:52:00.003+01:00

The context is the causes of unemployment. Tyler Cowen:

The general form of the argument is: “only x changed, therefore x is the cause.” A supply and demand graph, with the shift of one curve, shows that argument to be false. The net effect of the shift will depend, for one thing, on the slope of the other curve, plus whether the other curve has been shifting (more slowly) all along.

He's right, of course. Supply and demand, person and situation, genes and environment: the real world is all interactions. Yet the regression models you see in social science publications are almost all main effects. Ponder.

Around the Blogs, Vol. 71

2011-11-03T23:49:00.002+01:00

1. If you care about animals, does that mean you should go vegan? (Ward Clark)

2. Speculation about a causal connection between eating trends and violence trends (Phil Lees) (via)

3. Questions concerning AGW (Aretae)

4. Axes of evil (funny) (Grant Snider)

5. The sociology of learning behavioural genetics (Gregory Cochran)

6. Mental health and happiness: not as much of a connection as one might think (Christian Jarrett)

7. The theory-driven way of developing theory (Bruce Charlton)

8. OWS protester has a good point (some lady)

As usual, but this time especially, apologies to the people whose pointers I forgot to bookmark!

How to Write a Negative Referee Report

2011-11-01T19:47:00.004+01:00

Put differently, you should present clearly the reasons for recommending rejection, but there's no need to exploit your anonymity in order to go medieval: at the other end of your report, there are real live people with vulnerable souls who put a lot of work into their text and almost certainly acted in good faith.

Newsflash: People Experience Pleasure and Pain

2011-10-27T09:23:00.004+02:00

This month's prize for a harebrained/evil idea presented in a blog post goes to Edward Boches, who is concerned, perhaps correctly, about 'the “us versus them” mindset that permeates our country and our politics'. His solution? Here's the gist:

We require every 18-year-old in America to participate in mandatory social media service as part of a daily or weekly routine for one year.
We assign our young adults to a racially diverse online social group comprised of 12 people from different regions, backgrounds, income brackets. (Google+ is a potential platform.)
We present each group with a social challenge – obesity, jobs, poverty, high cost of education, even the problem of young men getting their sex education from watching online porn – and we ask them to solve the problem.
We give them benchmarks, goals, and require an outcome in the form of an idea, a program, a new policy or maybe just a video.
Finally we aggregate all of the solutions on one public website where the press, our legislatures, businesses and educators can access, rate and maybe even implement the ideas.

I don't have the time to point out everything that's wrong with this idea and the rest of his post (see here and here for some remarks). Instead, I'll focus on a very general point.

It is hard to tell from his post, but I hope Mr. Boches is not labouring under the misconception that "our society" is a living, breathing entity with a mind of its own. If this hope is warranted, it may further be hoped that he thinks his proposal will ultimately increase people's well-being by decreasing divisions in society. If we suspend disbelief for a moment and assume this would actually be the effect of forced networking, we still have good reason to think that people's net well-being would be decreased.

People tend to choose to hang out with people roughly like themselves. You can look at scores of sociology and psychology papers or look all around you or indeed simply trust Boche, who points out that we use social media to "find more people just like us". Sociologists call it "homophilic selection", everybody else calls it "birds of a feather flock together". Combine this with the revealed preferences methodology, which gives the right answer about 99% of the time, and you arrive at the conclusion that people hang out with others like themselves because this is better for their well-being than hanging out with people quite different from themselves.

And this is a danger in thinking about "what's best for the community": People have the ability to experience pleasure and pain, communities don't, and it's kinda easy to forget that.

P.S.: I'd really, really like to see some evidence backing up the statement that juries work like this: "We stick 12 strangers in a room, present them with a very serious responsibility, and in most cases they fulfill their duty with the utmost of diligence." His cite is a link to imdb's page for 12 Angry Men. No, really.

Not a John Holmes Biography

2011-10-26T08:36:00.003+02:00

I thought that the distinction of The Worst Translation of an English Book Title into German would forever belong to the person that had the splendid idea to translate Sense and Sensibility as Sinn und Sinnlichkeit. The latter's most obvious translation back into English would be Meaning and Sensuality. Other back-translations would also be possible, but an argument about that would presuppose an idea about what the person responsible had in mind when he or she came up with that one. Other than sound, I mean.

But I have now learned that the German publishers of Chris Anderson's The Long Tail had the good sense to keep the original title and add, as a literal German translation, Der lange Schwanz (as well as two additional subtitles). That translation is not, strictly speaking, wrong, but at least in the general readers that the book is aimed at it is bound to conjure up the image of the gentleman I mention in this post's title.

If we broaden the competition to any medium, however, that prize is still held by the German distributors of the film Mo' Money.

Around the Blogs, Vol. 70: Snark & Compassion

2011-10-19T08:55:00.004+02:00

1. I had long suspected that saying something like "sight of food activates the same brain area in overweight people as sight of alcohol does in alcoholics" is just the neuroimaging way of saying "anticipation of positive stuff activates same brain area in all kinds of people." So it's nice to see someone knowledgeable (called Tal Yarkoni) say something roughly along these lines. (via)

2. At Ian Leslie's place, my theory of penalty shootouts confirmed.

3. "I don’t think we can rule out the possibility that bioethicists are simply really bad people — that they delight in the idea of sick and injured people suffering and dying on months-long waiting lists for organ transplants, and of impoverished would-be donors forced to ever more desperate measures in the absence of an open and well-regulated legal market for donor organs, and spend their days dreaming up ever-more-absurd justifications for their sadistic tendencies." Matt adds a valuable perspective to the discourse on organ donations.

4. Mean! Sociologist Fabio Rojas takes cheap shot at economists.

Don't Press People for Their Reasons

2011-10-17T11:42:00.004+02:00

An interesting cognitive psychology result from the 1970s onwards is that if you ask people about their reasons for liking or disliking something, you cannot trust the answers. This can be demonstrated by subliminally priming subjects to like or dislike a neutral stimulus, ask them for their evaluation of that stimulus, and then ask them for their reasons. People give all kinds of reasons, but not the priming - unsurprisingly, given that it was subliminal.

A lesson from this research is that the valuation of a stimulus we experience can be based on reasons unknown to us. A corollary, I think, is that pressing people for their reasons will often be unwise. If a person says "I don't know why I like this", that is probably an accurate answer. If you get a different one after repeating your question, the reply is unlikely to be a reflection of the reasons behind the valuation - what you get is probably an answer that the person thinks is socially acceptable and/or easily understood, so that it's likely to shut you up; also, easily accessible patterns of explanation are more likely to be delivered than less accessible ones. You have hence measured something, but you don't know what it is, and it likely isn't what you intended to measure. If you take these answsers at face value, you are probably going to become stupider: Replacing uncertainty with certainty about an inaccurate assumption removes you from the truth by about as much as replacing certainty about an accurate assumption with uncertainty.

Jonathan Haidt uses an argument roughly along these lines to point out that much of the research on peoples' moral reasoning is misleading; this is also true of everyday conversations involving people who want to know why.

Short Friday: Tairiki Taro No Mucha Shugyo (1928)

2011-10-14T21:09:00.002+02:00

Another one from Japan. Manages to pack a lot of violence into 90 seconds, and a killer soundtrack, too!

And with that one, this series concludes. It may resume at some point in the future, but before, I'll have to watch a few more public domain shorts.

Question of the Day

2011-10-13T13:01:00.003+02:00

Nassim Taleb describes [Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahnemann] as “in the same league as The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith and The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud”. What does this tell us about Taleb?

That's a comment at Marginal Revolution by Ian Leslie; here's his blog. I'm halfway through The Black Swan, and it's got interesting ideas, but, man, it's wordy. Extrapolating from the first half, it seems that a hundred pages instead of the 400 he managed to fill would have done fine.

Capitalists and Capitalism (from the archives of Language Isn't Logical)

2011-10-09T14:28:00.005+02:00

As Bryan Caplan once said, the reason that economists quote Adam Smith on the baker, butcher and brewer over and over again is that people don't get it. This inability to understand the point is not all that surprising: one person's self-interest bringing about another's welfare is counterintuitive, probably because in many situations one person's self-interest brings about another person's misery.

Likewise, people fond of market solutions often complain that others think they (the people fond of market solutions) are big fans of big business, which they're typically not. Also, it is commonly believed that businessmen and -women are huge supporters of the free market; common observation suggests that instead they like lots of protection for themselves (which is just what you would expect if you assumed they act out of rational self-interest). I just developed a very simple hypothesis about why this belief is so common when it is so obviously false. I did so while reading a post by Shamus Khan. I'll get back to the point after a short detour.

Khan isn't happy about the recent reverence extendet to Steve Jobs. When that's the general direction your post is going, I'm almost certain to like it, but of course Khan, a U.S. conservative's caricature of a lefty, manages to blow it. Khan has multifaceted beef with Jobs, but most of it is related to manufacturing:

Manufacturing was exported to China, where minimal worker and environmental regulations meant that production processes could employ techniques that were effectively sweatshop-like and at times deployed child labor — leading to the mass suicides and suicide attempts within workplaces as well as the unnecessary poisoning of countless workers. And Apple has had one of the worst environmental records — both in terms of the production process and their products themselves.

Some of the worker poisonings were the product of a decision to use N-hexane instead of alcohol to clean products in the production process. While alcohol is relatively safe, N-hexane is known to damage the central nervous system. But it’s a faster cleaning process. So Jobs and those at Apple decided to use it. Long before these poisonings were made public, Jobs was made aware of them. And he didn’t really care until it became a PR problem. The same can be said of the environmental problems of the production process and the products themselves.

Does Khan offer good reasons for not buying Apple products? Well, I, for one, don't have to think about this, because I'm not considering buying any. Nor have I ever. You would think the same is true of Khan. Is it?

I presently own three Macs and an iPhone (I’m actually on my 3rd such phone, and have owned other Macs in the past). I bought my mother an iPad2 for her birthday this year.

Which leads me to conclude that maybe Khan doesn't care all that much about the exploited Chinese workers after all. It's called "revealed preferences".

As for the main point, consider this bit:

He [Jobs] was also a capitalist, par excellence.

Marx called the capitalists capitalists (Kapitalisten) as they were the ones who had and used the capital. He called capitalism capitalism (Kapitalismus) because in this mode of organizing the economy, capital is the most important resource (at least that's what Marx thought). That both makes sense. But it can easily lead to misunderstandings. Think about it:

Socialists: those who like socialism
Racists: those who like racism
Segregationists: those who like segregation
Capitalists: HONK!

Contra Marx*, symbols matter. Now, it's not as though I think this is the only reason for the common fallacy of thinking that entrepreneurs like free markets and free marketers like entrepreneurs, but I do submit it makes a nontrivial contribution.

_____
*Or perhaps that's just my simplified understanding of Marx's views? My knowledge of his work is not deep enough to know for sure.

Around the Blogs, Vol. 69: Fights and Nerves and Pain

2011-10-07T23:32:00.005+02:00

Before we get started: It seems that recently an unusually high number of people googles how many sociologists does it take to change a light bulb or some variant thereof, which in many cases takes them here. Some of these people come from Britain or the U.S., but most are from Canada. What's going on? Anyone?

Now, your reading for the weekend:

1. Jeremy Freese, man of no shame

2. Why is moral philosophy so weird? (Eric Schwitzgebel) (via)

3. Why "Hit a nerve, have I?" is a stupid reply (Adam Kotsko) (and see here)

4. What does it feel like to win a fight? (Jules Aimé) (via)

5. Community vs. collectivism, a Rothbardian take (Eric S. Raymond)

6. Cochran and Harpending now have a blog, West Hunter.

What Knowledge Is Good For

2011-10-05T22:02:00.003+02:00

Not that long ago I found myself in the position of having to inform someone I know by full name that, no, Portugal is not a part of Spain, but rather a country all of its own. Which reminded me of the summer of 2002, during which I explained to someone else that Japan and South Korea, in contrast to Trinidad and Tobago, are different nations, despite hosting the World Cup jointly.

Hilarious, no? But then, my father was mildly shocked when he recently found out that I didn't know who Tilmann Riemenschneider was and dissed me accordingly. Thing is, pretty much everybody thinks that their level of knowledge is, by and large, at least adequate.

It comes in handy that the phrase "level of knowledge" is somewhat misleading - there is no objective hierarchy of knowledge so that you start out with the most basic stuff and subsequently acquire information from the agreed-upon next module. As a consequence, it can rarely be said that one person is generally more knowledgeable than the other. I could easily have countered my father's disbelief by asking him whether he knows who Kurt Cobain is.

People make this big song and dance about having or not having knowledge, but I cannot remember a single instance in my life in which knowing that Japan and South Korea are different countries was of any practical use to me. But knowledge is great because it gives everyone an opportunity to feel superior to someone. If it didn't exist already, you'd have to invent it.

Short Friday: Manhatta (1921)

2011-09-30T00:37:00.000+02:00

Even to call this short a documentary would be misleading. It is, rather, a moving picture in the literal sense of the word, to be looked at as though it were a photograph. The cards show quotes from Whitman's Leaves of Grass (10 mins.).

Around the Blogs, Vol. 68

2011-09-21T10:09:00.003+02:00

1. Why are women ambiguous about sex? Why are men ambiguous about marriage? (Robin Hanson)

2. Does it take a theory to beat a theory? Lawrence Solum, Paul Gowder.

3. A prediction about the near future of Howard Schultz and Starbucks (Troy Camplin). Let's check back in two years' time, shall we?

4. Houses, clocks and trains (Eric S. Raymond).

5. External validity (teageegeepea).

6. "It's the meta-decisions of what to look at, what to control for, that fall outside any formal statistics that determine most interesting conclusions" (Eric Falkenstein). Yes and no.

7. How to lead a meaningful life (Jeremy Dean).

8. What if households were treated like businesses? (Coyote)

9. Paul Samuelson and the invention of the index fund (Alex Tabarrok).

10. What many people don't understand about tax brackets but should (Dean Baker).

From the Social Science Toolbox: The God of the Gaps Method

2011-09-19T23:21:00.000+02:00

Abstract. Drawing on a wide array of evidence ranging from historical databases of homicide convictions to psychological laboratory studies of essay writing, we develop the hypothesis that men will behave more aggressively in salary negotiations than women and will, as a consequence, receive higher salaries, holding other influences constant. We test this hypothesis using data from the National Study of Carreers. We find that a significant difference in income remains after numerous other influences have been controlled for. This is strong evidence in favour of our hypothesis. Despite the fact that we did not measure aggressiveness in salary negotiations. At all.

Kanazawa Affair: Findings of LSE Internal Review and Disciplinary Hearing Are in

2011-09-18T13:09:00.003+02:00

My earlier take on the issue is here. The LSE's "findings" are here, complete with a letter of self-degradation by Kanazawa. The main difference I see between the LSE's practice and that typical of, say, Stalinist Russia, is that Kanazawa is free to leave the LSE. Well, at least I suppose he is. But then, you never know.

(Pointer)

Short Friday: Opus I (1921)

2011-09-16T01:39:00.000+02:00

Another abstract short, this one by Walter Ruttman, of Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt fame. 10 mins. (with music).

The Law of Solidarity

2011-09-11T23:59:00.001+02:00

People sometimes complain that the solidarity they once experienced in their society is now gone. Rather, they should be happy about it.

Meager amounts of solidarity are quite normal: after all, the way the world is set up, lots of games are zero-sum or mixed-motive. People have hence conflicting interests. This is not a fertile breeding ground for solidarity.

In-group solidarity appears when there is a threat, real or merely perceived, to the group as a whole. When zombies attack your house, it doesn't make much sense to bicker over who'll have to do the dishes once it's over.

This kind of behaviour is quite rational. By that I don't mean that the solidarity that flames up spontaneously in groups of humans when an external threat appears is the result of cold-hearted cost-benefit calculations. Rather, I think we're predisposed by nature to act like that, because throughout evolutionary history, this way of behaving maximized inclusive fitness. It's nature's way of concentrating the mind on the essentials.

Perhaps people who long for the warm glow of solidarity should instead be thankful that they live in a society that is not subject to a serious external threat. If you look at human history, it turns out such a state is rather rare.

Three Kids and a Flute: Utilitarianism Defended

2011-09-10T23:50:00.003+02:00

Eric Falkenstein blogs on the following thought experiment from Amartya Sen's The Idea of Justice:

Take three kids and a flute. Anne says the flute should be given to her because she is the only one who knows how to play it. Bob says the flute should be handed to him as he is so poor he has no toys to play with. Carla says the flute is hers because she made it.

I've never read the book, so I'm going to take Falkenstein's depiction of Sen's take on it at face value. It is as follows:

Sen argues that who gets the flute depends on your philosophy of justice. Bob, the poorest, will have the support of the economic egalitarian. The libertarian would opt for Carla. The utilitarian will argue for Anne because she will get the maximum pleasure, as she can actually play the instrument. Sen states there are no institutional arrangements that can help us resolve this dispute in a universally accepted just manner.

Falkenstein comments:

Instead of asking how to allocate the flute between the three children, why not ask first under which rules would the flute have come into existence? If Carla knew she would not get the flute, she would not have made it. Therefore, just add a time dimension to the puzzle, and there's no puzzle at all: only a libertarian form of justice is consistent with the flute existing.

You see the mistake he made there? Once we add a time dimension, our appreciation of the libertarian solution does indeed change, as Falkenstein points out. But so does our appreciation of the utilitarian solution. Under reasonable assumptions, and weighting everyone's utility equally, the utilitarian solution is exactly the same as the libertarian solution, and for the same reason: Carla should have the right to keep the flute, because otherwise she would not make it, in which case overall utility would be less. In fact, if I understand Falkenstein correctly, the reason he gives for preferring the libertarian solution is, implicitly, a utilitarian one.

Things only get interesting once we make the example more akin to real life and ask what happens if Carla can make a hundred flutes: how many of those should she have the right to keep?

Pebbles, Vol. 34

2011-09-10T08:56:00.003+02:00

1. Making the unthinkable thinkable

2. What's it like to be a homicide detective?

3. Connoisseurship explained

4. Many kids are not cut out for school, but what are you going to do with them?

5. The disease load theory of intelligence (Steve Sailer comments)

6. Who are the most ruthless capitalists in the western world? (via)

7. Filmmakers diss filmmakers

8. Problems with microfinance

9. Free academic books!

What's the Deal with Peak Oil?

2011-09-04T23:00:00.002+02:00

Having come across the term "peak oil" quite a bit in recent months, I've decided to poke around the internet a little in an attempt to reduce my ignorance about what's behind the phrase. The denotation of the term is clear enough, of course: It refers to that moment in history at which the extraction of oil from the earth is at its maximum. But there's more to it. That is, there is a noteworthy number of individuals and organizations that think this is a problem that should be a focus of everyone's awareness and of politics. Insofar as it is legitimate to summarize the standpoint of various individuals and groups based on limited research, the peak oil activists' position seems to boil down to the following:

1. We are at or near peak oil, which means that in the near future the same amount of oil will not be available at the same prices, and sooner or later it's going to be used up.

2. Therefore, we must change our way of living now: sustanable cities, less use of cars, local production, etc.

But there seems to be a huge disconnect there. If it is indeed true that in the near future the same amount of oil will not be available at the same prices, then the problem solves itself: Raising prices will cause changes in lifestyles. For example, the more expensive petrol is, the more motivated you are to take the bike rather than the car. Also, the higher the price of petrol, the more companies are motivated to offer machinery that uses alternative sources of energy.

As a consequence, if the empirical assumption is true, then there is no need whatsoever to campaign for lifestyle changes, because they will be brought about automatically, via the price mechanism. If you see these lifestyle changes as desirable anyway, you should be quite happy about peak oil, no need to panic.

So, what am I missing?

Short Friday: Herzoperation

2011-09-02T01:01:00.001+02:00

Below is weird silent footage I stumbled upon, showing "some surgery on the heart. It is then cut out and connected to a machine." Indeed. I can't tell you anything else about this. Readers with a knowledge of heart surgery are encouraged to leave a comment and tell us what we see.

Some people may find the video gross.

The Kafkatrap

2011-09-01T10:22:00.003+02:00

An excellent essay by Eric S. Raymond on one of the most hideous techniques used by those practicing aggression in the name of freedom and equality:

“Your refusal to acknowledge that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…} confirms that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…}.” I’ve been presented with enough instances of this recently that I’ve decided that it needs a name. I call this general style of argument “kafkatrapping”, and the above the Model A kafkatrap. [...]

My reference, of course, is to Franz Kafka’s “The Trial”, in which the protagonist Josef K. is accused of crimes the nature of which are never actually specified, and enmeshed in a process designed to degrade, humiliate, and destroy him whether or not he has in fact committed any crime at all.

[...]

The particular species of fallacy is sometimes called “panchreston”, an argument from which anything can be deduced because it is not falsifiable. Notably, if the model A kafkatrap is true, the world is divided into two kinds of people: (a) those who admit they are guilty of thoughtcrime, and (b) those who are guilty of thoughtcrime because they will not admit to being guilty of thoughtcrime. No one can ever be innocent.

You really ought to read the whole thing, which is hard to excerpt or summarize. All I have to add is the following. Raymond points out that this argument used to be employed in religious contexts a lot, but I have a suspicion that its current use by people on the far left was in fact inspired by psychoanalysis: "The patient wants to fuck his mother; if the patient denies this, this is evidence for the proposition, as denial is typical."

As is true of this psychoanalytical variant of the trick, the use of Kafkatrapping by secular zealots can be countered by the same question: "If what I said were actually true, what [verbal] behaviour would I exhibit?" If the other party replies that no such behaviour is conceivable, they've made your point.

Around the Blogs, Vol. 67: Choice, Uncertainty & Lack Thereof Edition

2011-08-29T23:59:00.001+02:00

1. So you wanna talk about privilege? (Eric S. Raymond) (via)

2. Paul Krugman vs. the scientific method (John Althouse Cohen)

3. In defence of blogging (Katja Grace)

4. The downside of choice (Noah Smith), but also see: In defence of choice (Matt)

5. Does stuff on the internet "go viral"? (Sharad Goel)

(Jesus, quoted in God [ca. 80] 1989: 567)

2011-08-28T10:34:00.005+02:00

Paul Gowder:

One of the oddest law journal practices is insisting on a footnote for everything, even the most trivial facts. Like “The sky is blue [footnote: see Looking Up, 2011].”

For a long time, I thought my personal experience with this was the worst. I was once asked by a journal that will remain nameless to provide a citation to the specific part of Plato’s Republic where he talks about education. (Seriously.)

But now I’ve seen the ultimate. The following text and footnote appeared in a law review article that I’m reading for my dissertation, in a major law review (formatting changed in obvious ways).

Indeed, a written constitution may have the force of law.*

* See, e.g., Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137, 176–77 (1803) (treating the Constitution as legally enforceable and as the highest law of the land).

Yes, that’s right, someone actually felt the need to:

a) cite the oh-so-controversial proposition that constitutions are law;
b) cite Marbury v. Madison as authority for this; and
c) explain, in a journal whose readership is almost entirely people with U.S. law degrees, that Marbury v. Madison treated the Constitution like it was (shock!) law or something!

That reminds me. My niece once wrote an essay for school in which she quoted a bit from the bible, naming the book, chapter and verse. When she got the essay back, something was scribbled on the margin in red ink:

Page number?

(Earlier)

Why Is Colourblindness Racist?

2011-08-27T23:47:00.003+02:00

Some claims are just plain bonkers. For example, the least racist behaviour towards someone conceivable is behaviour that does not take that someone's race into account at all, right? This way of behaving is known as "colourblind". Yet some people will tell you that colourblindness is racist. I once read a book that simply asserted this and read on and on in the hope of being given the reason why we should see colourblindness as a bad thing, but to no avail. Today, we have Wikipedia to fill us in on arguments against colourblindness. If you find a good one, let me know.

I don't think there is a good one, I think it's time for a diagnosis. So, why would people spout such nonsense? Three reasons I can think of:

Groupism. Some people think the unit of justice should be the group rather than the individual. So, given that members of minorities in the past suffered a lot of injustice, to put it mildly, these wrongs can be righted if other members of these minorities alive today are given more than their fair share. Or rather, a more-than-average share is fair. The idea that people today should be rewarded for other people suffering in the past just because they share certain characteristics with them is so hard for me to even wrap my head around that I have considered I may be suffering from a lack of imagination and empathy. For the time being, though, I prefer the interpretation that it's the proponents of this view that have something to answer for.

The Outcome Fallacy. Assumption: If there were no racism, each group would, collectively, attain the same outcome as all the others. Observation: Colourblind policies do not lead to different groups attaining the same outcomes. Conclusion: Colourblind policies are racist. (Hint: the assumption may be wrong.)

Identity Politics. This is the biggie, I think. You're not much of a punk rock insider if you like the Ramones. Everyone likes the Ramones. If you're an expert concerning some Portugese band whose whole output consists of flexidiscs published with Greek fanzines in the late 1980s, then we're talking. Likewise, you're not much of an anti-racist if you're simply against racism. Even the conservatives are against racism these days. You'll have to offer a little more. The more extreme, the better.

Bonus moderator: Plain old self-interest. Flavour A: Person is member of minority group. Flavour B: Person is professional protector of minority group.

(Note: Is also applicable to other -isms.)

My, my, I'm starting to sound like an old curmudgeon on this blog. In real life, I am a sensitive and tender person! So let me finish by recommending Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen's latest, which is extremely charming. Even better, seen for the first time today, and also set in Paris: The 1956 Le ballon rouge. Most lovely. Most lovely indeed.

Short Friday: The Original Movie (1922)

2011-08-19T08:35:00.002+02:00

The eternal struggle between creative people and moneybags (8 mins.). If you think this is the first depiction, you haven't read your Faust.

Understanding the Old Fart Syndrome: Age vs. Cohort Effects

2011-08-17T08:00:00.005+02:00

Often you will hear older people complain about the knowledge and behaviour of the young, who, it is said, are ill-educated and rude. It is sometimes coupled with the conclusion that the world is generally going downhill. This pessimistic view is sometimes countered by a more optimistic one. The optimists like to point out that complaints about the young have appeared throughout history, starting with either Aristotle or Plato (I forget which). This is supposed to be a reductio ad absurdum. The implication is that the complaint can't be correct, as the steady downward trend that is implied by the steady stream of complaints would seem to imply that by now we're somewhere below hell, which we're not. In the optimists' view, the pessimists simply suffer from a condition called old fart syndrome.

Both optimists and pessimists are wrong. If the complaint about the young is defensible, it does not follow that the world is going downhill, contrary to what everybody believes. The distinction between age and cohort effects comes in quite handy here.

Let's start with complaints about the young being ill-educated, meaning that they don't know things "one ought to know". Obviously, what "one ought to know" is pretty subjective. Once generations disagree about that, the stage is set for generation A's complaint about generation B's lack of what generation A deems to be essential knowledge. If they cared enough, the young might as well chastice the old for their ignorance. For example, my father could teach me quite a bit about European history, but I'm pretty sure he has no idea who or what Kurt Cobain or Darth Vader were or are. I think these are things one ought to know. So, that's a cohort effect.

Complaints about the behaviour of the young come in two flavours. One refers to behavioural standards it is easy to disagree about. Some people think, "no brown after six", others don't. But you'd have a hard time arguing that there's something inherently wrong about wearing brown shoes to a formal evening event. So this is basically like the problem above - cohorts disagree, and no one is objectively right.

The point is that in both cases complaining about the young and the observation that such complaints have always existed lead to no contradiction. You might well think that it is exactly your generation that got everything right. In which case you should wake up every morning shouting, "I'm so grateful for being part of my generation!"

But not everything is a cohort effect. The other complaint about the young - the one heard most often - is that they're loud, boisterous, aggressive and generally unruly. Let me submit that this observation is, and always has been, totally correct. An extreme manifestation of this is that in almost all places at almost all times that we have data for, we see a massive overrepresentation of the young, and especially young men, among the perpetrators of homicide (see pp. 109-15 of this academic paper). The error that both pessimists and optimists make is to mistake age effects for cohort effects. Pessimists think that the behaviour of the young is indicative of the behaviour they will show throughout life, and conclude that we're doomed. Optimists accept this general logic and argue that it ought to follow that we're already doomed, as people have always complained about the young. They conclude that the observations about the young must be wrong.

But both are mistaken. Applying their logic, pessimists should predict massive lifelong hygene issues in the current cohort of babies. They all shit in their pants! They'll need diapers all of their lives! Optimists should counter that the observation about the low hygene standards of babies compared to other humans may be found throughout history, which should lead us to conclude that by now we're in hygene hell. As we're not, the observation that current babies all shit in their pants must be inaccurate.

But it's not. Babies shit in their pants, young men are aggressive. That's the human condition in a nutshell for you.

Around the Blogs, Vol. 66

2011-08-16T23:38:00.001+02:00

1. Kieran Healy's 2011 ASA (in Vegas!) Bingo. I especially liked F5, but you probably have to know your sociology to appreciate it fully.

2. Fun with films and posters: 2001; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

3. The wisdom of Krauts.

The law, in its majestic equality,

2011-08-09T08:21:00.001+02:00

forbids the rich as well as the poor to smash a shop window with a cricket bat and take a plasma TV without paying.

The Boring Heuristic

2011-08-07T23:10:00.000+02:00

When you've been reading a certain set of blogs for a while, you can sometimes anticipate future comments. Let's say that contributor A - it doesn't matter whether it's the original poster or a commenter - extols the virtues of letting people choose for themselves rather than having their choices made for them by the government and contributor B expresses reservations given the many behavioural biases that have been shown to exist, then the likelihood is about 88% that a contributor C (or perhaps A) will post a reaction to B's view in which he makes the argument that "bureaucrats are biased, too" and hence B's point cannot possibly be used as an argument against A's view. (Strangely, C-type commenters seem to think that this is the end, rather than the starting point, of an argument, much like people chanting "correlation ain't causation" think that this should be the last word on a matter.)

Likewise, if commenter A on some blog calls a view "a conspiracy theory", commenter B is going to show up and point out that calling something a conspiracy theory is not a strong argument as conspiracies actually exist and then C (or A) is going to say that the term "conspiracy theory" is meant to highlight the unlikeliness of an explanation not because it refers to a conspiracy per se, but because the kind of conspiracy A was referring to would require a large group of people to share knowledge about their conspiracy while keeping outsiders in the dark about what they're doing.

I would think that latter argument is a good one (although if it weren't I wouldn't know, as I don't know about the things I'm being kept in the dark about). We should hence be skeptical if someone offers a conspiracy theory in C's sense. For example, we should be skeptical about Robin Hanson's view that teachers use the educational means of homework not because they believe it to be an effacacious means of learning or because making people do stuff is fun, but because politicians, educators and businesses are colluding to produce another batch of serfs for businesses big and small by means of schooling, all the while leading the public to believe that education is actually about taking in knowledge. (Hanson would never put it in those terms, which would preclude him from falling back on the position - which comes in handy when dissenters present arguments - that his argument is merely that the discipline learned by pupils in school is an outcome of school, an observation bordering on the trivial. Also, one wonders whether spelling out the argument in its full Marxian glory might harm carreer prospects in George Mason University's staunchly libertarian econ departement, where Hanson is employed. But that's his argument nonetheless.) It seems rather unlikely that the hundreds of thousands of people who would have to be involved in that conspiracy would be able to keep the secret for any extended period of time.

Hanson describes himself as having "a passion, a sacred quest, to understand everything, and to save the world" (bold type his), but perhaps it's more accurate to say that his passion for finding The Real Truth behind well-known patterns is as Freudian as his grandiosity.

As is the accuracy of his explanations in some cases. So why is this kind of writing so popular among people who aim to be much more enlightened than the average Joe? I believe it was Jean Paul who came up with the idea that the success of Freudianism came about because it gave people what they wanted: sex and crime. Likewise, you could say that Hanson's idea about the aim of education has potential because people like stories about powerful people conspiring against us little people (and most disliked school).

I think there's a heuristic in there. All other things equal, people are going to dislike boring explanations in favour of those that are interesting. When encountering an explanation, ask yourself whether a film containing the same ingredients could have a shot at becoming a blockbuster. If the answer is yes, discount a theory's popularity as an indicator of its being correct. You can also use this principle when trying to devise a popular theory. Make sure it goes boooom and whoooosh a lot!

(Related posts: one, two)

Short Friday: Le songe d'un garçon de café (1910)

2011-08-07T10:28:00.002+02:00

Bit late, I know, but here is the film that, strangely, is known as The Hasher's Delirium in the English-speaking world, although it is clearly about the effects of alcohol. Someone write a thesis about the pro-alcohol bias in the Anglosphere, or something! Anyway, the one-minute film goes like this (and don't miss the bit where he kicks himself in the arse):

All the benefits of drug consumption without the negative health effects. Only at the CoR!

Around the Blogs, Vol. 65: Sneering, Snickering and General Bemusement

2011-07-31T22:37:00.004+02:00

1. "Racehorse Haynes" (Steve Sailer explains why, if you absolutely must get killed, you shouldn't do it in the U.S.A.)

2. "The question was to describe a job that I believed helped the world and to explain why I thought that. Of course, my first thought was 'well, not your job because this is clearly a waste time in some broad sense.'" (Joshua Gans, Australian, takes an English language test so he can immigrate to Canada) (via)

3. "Should I Divorce Him?" (Dalrock studies the female psyche) (via)

4. "What does this graph convey? It doesn’t tell us much about phone calls, but it does tell us that some people can make colored maps with lots of lines. It also tells us that someone has a bunch of telephone call data." (Andrew Gelman has another one of those graphs)

5. Do skeptics complain about the right things? (José Silva develops a signaling theory) (via)

Possibly the Shortest Time from the Start of a Conversation to the Moment I Knew I Wanted to End It, Based Only on What Was Said

2011-07-30T15:58:00.003+02:00

- You know, in England, those insurance companies, they charge you a higher price for insuring your house when it has a tall tree standing next to it!

- Well, that's probably because the tree might fall on the house when there's a storm.

- Oh, so you're with them?

***

It has been hypothesized that artists and intellectuals tend to dislike markets because the measure of status in the market is income, and artists and intellectuals tend to do rather poorly on that measure, but they do well in terms of the currency "products of the mind". I like that theory because I find reductionism aesthetically appealing: Many phenomena explained by few first principles = Yummy!

If the status theory of artists and intellectuals' political preferences is right, it would explain this phenomenon by the same principle that also explains why you rarely hear a good word from a Pepsi spokesperson about Coke and why women say much nastier things about other reasonably attractive women's looks than men: They're badmouthing the competition. The same perspective also explains why women so wildly overestimate the attractiveness of their best friends: They're showing solidarity to their allies.

People. Once you start thinking about them, they seem pretty pathetic. I guess that's why they call social psychology The Dismal Science.

Short Friday: The Fall of the House of Usher (1928)

2011-07-22T00:17:00.001+02:00

No time for blogging proper, but here's the 1928 Fall of the House of Usher (13 mins.), not to be confused with the film of the same name from the same year by someone else whose name escapes me right now. It's from the abstract/expressionist school of storytelling, so some people say that it's best to brush up on the plot of Poe's story that it is based on. Fair enough, you otherwise won't know what's going on. But then, do you really have to?

Around the Blogs, Vol. 64

2011-07-13T08:46:00.003+02:00

1. "What early Greek philosophy was not like" (James Warren), plus: "Philosophy referee hand signals" (Landon Schurtz)

2. A general rant against the U.S.A., worth reading for the forceful prose alone (Andrew Hammel)

3. "The Good, the Bad, and the Cell Type-Specific Roles of Hypoxia Inducible Factor-1 in Neurons and Astrocytes": Academic's sorry plays on movie titles in journal articles (Reto Schneider)

4. "What techniques do police use to get suspects to confess?" (Eric Barker)

5. E-mail, as predicted in 1960 (Matt Novak)

Human Mating Hypothesis of the Day

2011-07-10T23:32:00.001+02:00

Right off the bat let's simplify things and say that human attractiveness as a mate has only two components: "Looks", by which I mean looks, and "charm", by which I mean all the rest - not only what is commonly called charm. The dependent variable is mating opportunities. The hypothesis refers to both short- and long-term mating, although the coefficients for the variables will differ between the two. Here's the hypothesis:

Charm has the largest influence on the mating opportunities of people with about average looks.

The basic idea here is that if you look like Naomi Campbell, you can afford to behave like Naomi Campbell, people are still going to want to mate with you. Conversely, if you look like Jabba the Hut, you may well be able to impress people with your wit, but that won't make people want to mate with you ("I'm seeing us more, like, friends."). When you look o.k., people are going to be sort of indifferent on the basis of your looks, so it's charm that tips the scales.

That isn't that original an idea, so I would be kinda surprised if it weren't in the research literature. But only kinda. That's because the hypothesis posits a nonlinear moderator effect. Just sticking the two as controls into your regression won't make you find such an effect (if it exists). Even if you go through the trouble of looking at scatterplots: positive linear effect for looks; positive linear effect for charm (I presume). Linear interaction between charm and looks? Probably exists, but that's not the effect we're talking about. You're not going to find this effect unless you go down The Popper Path: thinking first, testing later. It's sorta demanding.

In case it hasn't actually been tested, I'm giving away this hypothesis for free. All you'll have to do is cite LemmusLemmus (2011). Yeah, I know. Some people can't even bring themselves to cite people with real names, such as Steve Sailer (2006). It's sorta demanding.

Short Friday: Le mélomane (1903)

2011-07-08T23:30:00.002+02:00

By Georges Méliès, who clearly smoked a lot of dope in his day.

Fun with Copyeditors

2011-07-05T23:50:00.000+02:00

My father, a legal scholar, recently quoted Douglas Hofstadter on the phrase "the whole is more than the sum of its parts" and referenced the quote thus:

Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach. 1988, p . . .

which the copyeditor changed to:

Hofstadter/Gödel/Escher/Bach. 1988, p. . .

My, that would have been an interesting book with Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher and Bach collaboratin'. Though I daresay the whole might have been less than the sum of its parts.

Wheeeeeeee!

2011-07-04T18:54:00.001+02:00

I guess it's considered lame to simply repost videos you found at someone else's blog, but I'm doing it to combat stereotypes! Everyone says the Swedes are sissies, with their feminism and their socialism and all of their assorted isms. But look what they do to toughen up their kids:

Man, if I were a parent living nearby, I'd be up in arms against this thing. But my eight-year-old self would certainly try to sneak out at every opportunity to take another ride on The Magic Wheel.

Around the Blogs, Vol. 63: Psychology, Broadly Conceived

2011-07-03T23:38:00.002+02:00

1. A new perspective on procastination (Elizer Yudkowsky). Rarely has something sounded so true to me.

2. Jonathan Haidt meets Abraham Maslow (Will Wilkinson). As a theory, this is rather elegant.

3. "It would be one thing to get worked up over politics if by doing so, you could affect political outcomes. But the odds of casting the decisive vote in any election of consequence are vanishingly small." (Eli Dourado). Also, the less you know, the less likely you are to get into political arguments, which have wildly negative average expected value.

4. On the view that fictional characters take on "a life of their own", bossing around their creators. (J.R. Lennon). I always like having my views confirmed by someone who's actually qualified to have an opinion.

5. Would you rather be diagnosed by a computer or a human? (Alex Tabarrok). I'm inclined to agree. People have an irrational pro-human bias.

6. Are expressions of shame and pride innate? (Jessica L. Tracy and David Matsumoto, via Eric Barker). Full text here.

7. Dept. of really bad incentives (Andrew Hammel). Arts experts section.

Wouldn't It Be Nice?

2011-06-30T22:24:00.003+02:00

Here's an argument you often hear: One reason that X should be provided by government, not private businesses, is that if government provides stuff, that's cheaper. That's because government doesn't skim profits off the top.

That sounds reasonable, but I think it's wrong. Needless to say, I haven't read any scholarly literature on this, but instead conducted a thought experiment, which is much less work. Here's the thought experiment: If it were really true that government provision of X (prisons, water, education, whatever) is cheaper, then we would expect the same to be true of other stuff, like TVs, haircuts, or peaches. If that were true, then we can imagine that for some nonessential goods and services, government decides to actually make a small profit and compete in the market with private companies. We should expect government to make healthy profits overall. In a few years' time, government could abolish taxes.

Yeah, that would be great. But it seems that's not the world we live in.

To end on a positive note, here's a funny post on how to translate book blurbs into plain English.

Short Sunday: Entr'acte (1924)

2011-06-26T09:00:00.003+02:00

More dada nonsense!

A Proposal for a New Rule, with the Aim of Improving the Social Sciences and the Humanities

2011-06-21T23:56:00.002+02:00

If you submit to a journal or conference a paper the title of which starts with the word "Beyond", the paper gets desk-rejected immediately. If you submit a paper the title of which starts with the word "Rethinking", a graduate student is made to give you a total of three (3) anonymous, vaguely threatening calls. If, however, you have the cheek to write a paper the title of which includes both the words "Beyond" and "Rethinking", like, oh, "Rethinking Gentrification: Beyond the Uneven Development of Marxist Urban Theory" or "Beyond the Binary: Rethinking the Social Model of Disabled Sexuality", then you get hit over the head with the complete works of Marx and Engels until you have managed to explain the difference between nominal and ordinal variables, i.e., in your case, probably until you're dead.

Around the Blogs, Vol. 62: How to Do Social Science Wrong

2011-06-18T09:23:00.000+02:00

1. Randomized field experiments

2. Case control studies

3. Graphs

The Tree of Life: Eine Filmkritik

2011-06-17T22:24:00.001+02:00

Terence Malick, Autor und Regisseur von The Tree of Life, hat in den siebziger Jahren mit Badlands einen Film vorgelegt, der vielen als Klassiker gilt, vielleicht, weil er es schafft, über seine gesamte Länge auf dem gar nicht mal so schmalen Grat zwischen Schönheit und Langeweile zu wandeln. Der neue Film, so viel ist offensichtlich, war gleich von vornherein als Meisterwerk angelegt; das Thema ist Gott (unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Erdgeschichte). Das ist zunächst mal ein angenehmer Gegensatz zu den Ambitionen der meisten zeitgenössischen Künstler, die gerne z.B. von der kleinen bis mittelgroßen Liebe im Buchhaltermilieu erzählen. Doch wer hoch springt, kann tief fallen, und Malick fällt sehr tief. Er fällt und fällt, und während er fällt, geht ihm die Hose auf, der Pimmel kuckt raus; dennoch versucht er ein vorbeifallendes Weltgewicht zu stemmen und klemmt sich dabei den Ischias, weshalb er nicht bemerkt, dass er zwischenzeitlich eine Zwölffinger- und Enddarm-Kreuzverschlingung entwickelt hat, und als er schon längst auf der Erde angekommen und in zahlreiche Teile zerplatzt ist, da explodieren ihm auch noch die Schnürsenkel.

Es geht eigentlich ganz vielversprechend los: Die U.S.A., fünfziger Jahre, ein Kind stirbt, die Eltern trauen. Aber dann kommt erst mal Kontext per Rückblende, und dabei holt Malick ganz weit aus: Los geht es mit dem Urknall. Ich denke mir das nicht aus: Es geht wirklich mit dem Urknall los, Sterne explodieren, Lavaströme, trallala. Das ist drei Minuten lang ganz nett anzuschauen, aber diese Vorgeschichte dauert, schätze ich mal, etwa 40 Minuten; und spätestens als er in der Evolutionsgeschichte bei den Fischen angelangt ist, kommt sich der Zuschauer vor, als sei er eingeschlossen in einem Kabuff mit allen alten Ausgaben der Reihe GEO Spezial Natur & Kosmos, die er für immer durchblättern muss, und von links säuselt ihm eine gutmütig lächelnde alte Frau ins Ohr: "Gott ist Liebe" und zwei Minuten später: "Glaube mir, Gott ist die Liebe und das Licht!"

Nicht nur mir ist aufgefallen, dass das Modell für dieses Endlosvorspiel der erste Teil von Stanley Kubricks 2001 ist, in dem Kubrick die Raumfahrt in den menschheitsgeschichtlichen Kontext stellt, indem er erzählt, wie unsere Vorfahren das Prinzip des Werkzeugs entdecken: Ein Knochen wird nutzbar gemacht, um die Schädel von Konkurrenten um ein kostbares Wasserloch zu zertrümmern, triumphierend wird der Knochen in die Luft geworfen, und im bekanntesten Schnitt der Filmgeschichte scheint er sich in ein Raumschiff zu verwandeln. Bei seinem Versuch, mit Kubrick zumindest gleichzuziehen, hat Malick freilich etwas ganz entscheidendes übersehen: Kubrick, eine Art Ernst Happel des Kunstkinos, hat seine Sequenzen mit einer außerordentlichen Formenstrenge komponiert; Malicks Erdgeschichte wirkt wie eine Zufallsauswahl aus Sequenzen derjenigen Filmchen, mit denen die Hersteller von Plasmabildschirmen dem potentiellen Käufer zu demonstrieren suchen, dass die alte Röhrenkiste jetzt aber echt ausgedient hat. Zum Niveau der Bilder passt die Musik: Es steht zu vermuten, dass sämtliche zu hörenden Stücke einer CD namens "Die 20 schönsten Klassikmelodien" entnommen sind, die Malick per Telefon erstand, als er 1995 während eines Besuches auf unserem Kontinent nachts besoffen die Dauerwerbesendungen auf Eurosport gekuckt hat. Nicht so leicht erhältlich wie schlechte CDs sind bei uns Feuerwaffen, so dass man nicht Gefahr läuft, sich spontan im Kino zu erschießen.

So schafft man es bis zur Kerngeschichte. Also: Die Suburbs von Waco, Texas, in den fünfziger Jahren, eine Familie: Er Ingenieur und Pater Familias, sie Hausfrau mit großem Herzen, drei Söhne. Sein Erziehungsstil schwankt zwischen konservativ und sadistisch. Er erzählt den Söhnen, wie Leben geht: Immer besser werden wollen, sich nie auf andere verlassen, und immer wieder das Motto aus der Praktiker-Werbung: "Geht nicht gibt's nicht!" Wir erfahren auch bald, warum: Er wäre lieber Musiker geworden, hat aber als Kind nicht genug geübt, und jetzt müssen sich die Söhne sein Geschwaller anhören. Zwischendurch werden sie von ihm schickaniert, dass die Schwarte kracht, wahrscheinlich zur Abhärtung.

Der älteste der Söhne, selbst Inhaber eines nicht geringen Aggressionspotentials, lehnt sich auf. Dass das nicht direkt ins Happy End führt, wissen wir daher, dass er zwischendurch als Erwachsener gezeigt wird, wie er sich in einem grauen Büroturm umherbewegt. Sprechanteile hat der erwachsene Sohn, soweit ich mich erinnere, überhaupt keine, und daher muss man sagen, dass die Rolle mit Sean Penn idealbesetzt ist. Wenn der seine Furchenfresse in die Kamera hält, denkt jeder gleich: "Kombiniere! Vom Leben gezeichnet!"

Einen richtigen Plot hat der Film nicht, er ist vielmehr nach der Methode "Schlaglicht und Ellipse" erzählt. Dagegen wäre nichts zu sagen, wenn die Schlaglichter denn interessant wären. Mancher Kritiker hat den Film dafür gelobt, dass er das Phänomen Jungskindheit total authentisch darstelle. Das ist nicht unbedingt falsch, ich habe mich in meiner Kindheit zum Beispiel auch an Sachen erfreut, die Krach machten und verboten wären. Das heißt aber nicht, dass ich es rasend spannend finde, Kindern dabei zuzukucken, wie sie Fensterscheiben einwerfen.

Mitunter keimt im Zuschauer Hoffnung auf: Es könnte interessant werden! Der Vater fährt mit den Söhnen in ein Schwarzenviertel und ermahnt sie zur Anständigkeit gegenüber Schwächeren. Strafgefangene werden in Ketten durch die Stadt geführt, ein Sohn fragt: "Kann das jedem passieren?" Und dann bricht es ab.

So ist es auch gegen Ende der Geschichte: Der Vater wird, man kann es sich denken, entlassen. Dies führt bei ihm zu einer Art Nachdenken über seinen Erziehungsstil. Auch das währt aber nur zwanzig Sekunden. Dann wird der Bildschirm schwarz, ein Licht (Gott?) flackert, Sterne, und der Zuschauer denkt: Nich schon wieder! Diese Hoffnung ist vergeblich.

Das Gottes- und Schöpfungsbrimborium im letzten Teil des Films mündet in eine Szene, in der der erwachsene Sohn seinen nichtgealterten Vater an einem wolkenüberhangenen Strand trifft und entweder umarmt oder dies nur "mit den Augen tut", ich kann mich zum Glück nicht erinnern. An dem Strand wandeln, suchend, noch eine ganze Menge anderer Leute, vermutlich stellvertretend für die gesamte Menschheit: Symbolik auf dem Niveau von Lieschen Müller und ihrem Sohn Kevin-Justin. Das Ganze wirkt wie eine Parodie auf Religion aus der Bullyparade.

Man muss vielleicht religiös sein, um den Film gut zu finden, oder zumindest, vielleicht sogar noch besser: spirituell. Es darf aber nicht irgendeine Religiösität sein. Vielmehr:

"Du, kuck mal, der Käfer auf dem Blatt da!"

"Ja, schön, nicht? Irgendwie ist in dem Käfer Gott!"

"Ja, stimmt! . . . Au, au, kuck doch mal!"

"Oh, jetzt hat der Spatz den Käfer gefressen!"

"Ja, traurig. Aber irgendwie hat das auch seinen Sinn."

"Ja, stimmt. Komm, wir trinken noch einen Merlot."

"Ja. In Merlot ist Gott auch, irgendwie."

Ungefähr so.

The French Theory of Reasoning

2011-06-15T08:44:00.004+02:00

For centuries thinkers have assumed that the uniquely human capacity for reasoning has existed to let people reach beyond mere perception and reflex in the search for truth. Rationality allowed a solitary thinker to blaze a path to philosophical, moral and scientific enlightenment.

Now some researchers are suggesting that reason evolved for a completely different purpose: to win arguments. Rationality, by this yardstick (and irrationality too, but we’ll get to that) is nothing more or less than a servant of the hard-wired compulsion to triumph in the debating arena. According to this view, bias, lack of logic and other supposed flaws that pollute the stream of reason are instead social adaptations that enable one group to persuade (and defeat) another. Certitude works, however sharply it may depart from the truth.

The idea, labeled the argumentative theory of reasoning, is the brainchild of French cognitive social scientists, and it has stirred excited discussion (and appalled dissent) among philosophers, political scientists, educators and psychologists, some of whom say it offers profound insight into the way people think and behave. The Journal of Behavioral and Brain Sciences devoted its April issue to debates over the theory, with participants challenging everything from the definition of reason to the origins of verbal communication.

“Reasoning doesn’t have this function of helping us to get better beliefs and make better decisions,” said Hugo Mercier, who is a co-author of the journal article, with Dan Sperber. “It was a purely social phenomenon. It evolved to help us convince others and to be careful when others try to convince us.” Truth and accuracy were beside the point.

I totally believe this. Every time I get into an argument with someone, it soon becomes obvious that he only wants to win the debate rather than listen to my superior arguments. Next time this happens, I'm going to point out that he is stuck in the caveman stage of human evolution, while I have advanced to the scientific stage, as evidenced by my citing an academic. That should shut him up!

Pebbles, Vol. 33: The Ugly Edition

2011-06-13T23:48:00.001+02:00

1. Ugly beards

2. Ugly tattoo (German football championship 2010/2011 edition)

3. Ugly thief

4. Ugly prose

Fireworks, or, How Is Michael Bay Like James Joyce?

2011-06-12T23:05:00.002+02:00

I've grown amazed over the years by how condescending many high-toned people are towards storytelling -- storytelling as in narrative, plot, etc. Can they really think that the creation of a galvanizing-or-amusing narrative is a minor achievement? Can they really take the existence of a story that holds your attention and delivers a few satisfying surprises for granted? [...]
Though I now marvel at this attitude, I confess that I once shared it. During college, grad school, and for a few years after -- when else? -- I thought of storytelling as a kind of unfortunate necessity that, perversely, fiction required. In this view, story is the clothesline you hang your artistry on; further, the "art" in a given work is to be found in deploying the artistry, not in creating the clothesline.

Michael Blowhard, "Story"

[T]he key thing about Michael Bay movies is that they are not designed to tell stories. The narrative elements in The Rock, character, plot, dialogue, are there as signals in a sort of cinematic aggressive mimicry. He's making amusement park rides that look like movies.

Matthew Desseem, "#103: The Rock"

Short Friday: Princess Nicotine; or, The Smoke Fairy (1909)

2011-06-10T00:49:00.000+02:00

Directed by J. Stuart Blackton and starring the wonderfully-named Paul Panzer, the version below has music and sound effects added by Matthew Hawes. You might think that sound is one of the rare cases of something that's so bad it's good, or you might prefer to turn the volume down, though for those in the latter group, there is a silent version online that has better picture quality.

Let me warn our younger readers in particular, though, that nicotine isn't nearly as psychoactive as the film suggests. If you absolutely must get addicted to a drug, at least choose one that does something for you!

The Lesson from the Kanazawa Affair

2011-06-07T00:05:00.004+02:00

You may already have heard about this, or you may not: The University of London Union Senate, which represents more than 120,000 students, recently voted unanimously to dismiss Satoshi Kanazawa, a professor at the London School of Economics. 'Sherelle Davids, anti-racism officer-elect of the LSE students' union, said: "Kanazawa deliberately manipulates findings that justify racist ideology."' In The Guardian, Nanjala Nyabola also called him racist and didn't fail to mention the Nazis. There's more along these lines to be found around the web.

What on earth had happened? Kanazawa, a sociologist-turned evolutionary psychologist who teaches at the LSE's School of Management had published a post at his blog hosted by Psychology Today. The post started from the assumption that there is such a thing as "objective" physical attractiveness - that is, some people look objectively better than others. It then went on to analyze interviewer ratings of interviewees' physical attractiveness from a large-scale survey of young Americans. Result: African American females (but not males) are rated as less attractive. Interpretation: African American females are objectively less attractive. Explanation: People of African descent are high in testosterone, which is bad for female looks.

Given the reaction to the post, it is unsurprising that Psychology Today has since taken it down; it is also unsurprising that you can still find it online nonetheless.

Now, I find the idea of objective quality of looks nonsensical - but no more nonsensical or, indeed, objectionable, than the idea of objective quality of movies, held by famous movie critic Roger Ebert and blogger extraordinaire Andy McKenzie. A number of people have made reasonable arguments that the data should have been analyzed differently and that such different analyses lead to different results. I personally wonder about interviewer race and sex and how it affects the ratings. But as far as I can see, Kanazawa made no decisons that were outlandish. Also, it was just a friggin' blog post.

There's a curious disconnect here. Given the reactions, one should think Kanazawa at least defended slavery, but all he did was argue that women of African descent, on average, are less attractive. I have my own personal (i.e., totally nonobjective) views on the relative looks of women from different countries. If such things are included in your concept of racism, your concept is too inclusive.

More fundamentally, people calling for Kanazawa's head would do well to heed Steven Pinker's warning that basing legal concepts of equality on empirical claims is unwise "because it makes our values hostages to fortune, implying that some day discoveries from the field or lab could make them obsolete." The outrage that Kanazawa's post caused makes sense if you hold the view that if the claim were true, that would make it o.k. to treat people of Sub-Saharan descent worse. That, of course, would be wrong, wrong, wrong.

I probably wouldn't have written about all of this if the journal Evolutionary Psychology hadn't decided that it is a good idea to make its homepage an outlet for an open letter to the general public signed by 68 researchers which informs us that "Kanazawa's research should not be taken as representative of the evolutionary behavioural science community." It's an interesting document for students of rhethoric because the authors want to give lip service to the idea that researchers "who publish work that may be unpopular with some sections of the media or general public should not be condemned on those grounds", but at the same time want to condemn Kanazawa. They exploit the fact that Kanazawa's work has attracted more than the typical amount of criticism in academic journals, as it is often, um, low in rigor - I called him "The Malcolm Gladwell of Evolutionary Psychology" on this blog not so long ago, and if you prefer the opionion of someone more respectable, Andrew Gelman declared in public that he'd read another paper by Kanazawa "only if you'd pay me a lot. I'll do lots of things for free, but reading anything more by this dude isn't one of them!". So their main excuse is that Kanazawa's work isn't good enough; moreover, malice on Kanazawa's part is implied. This aspect finds its climax in the hurt feelings section of the letter:

Those of us who have reviewed his papers have had experiences where we have rejected papers of his for certain journals on scientific grounds, only to see the papers appear virtually unaltered in print in other journals, despite the detailed critiques of the papers given to Kanazawa by the reviewers and editors of the journals that rejected his papers.

Bastard! Had his papers rejected, and instead of being thankful for the detailed critiques he received, he went and submitted the papers, virtually unaltered, at another journal. It's unheard of in the worlds of scientific publishing!

Of course, all of that isn't funny. When some wannabe dictators from the institute of Africa studies in Münster called German psychologist Heiner Rindermann a racist after he had given an interview on the radio about his research on international differences in IQ, the German psychological association quickly shot back on behalf of its member. That's how you do it. You don't go and kick your fellow researcher when he's on the ground because, now that you think about it, maybe hypotheses can be immoral after all. The signatories of the letter (including none of the big names in the field) should be ashamed of themselves. They don't belong in the scientific community. Come to think of it, I believe their employers should consider firing them. They simply have the wrong attitude concerning "wherever the evidence may lead me".

All of the above might make you think I'm sorry for Kanazawa. I'm not, here's why. In March 2008, when it still seemed like Hillary Clinton might be the next U.S. president, he published a post on the "war on terror". After a bit of throat-clearing, he came up with an interesting hypothesis . . .

It seems to me that there is one resource that our enemies have in abundance but we don’t: hate.

. . . and then went off the rails:

This has never been the case in our previous wars. We have always hated our enemies purely and intensely. They were “Japs,” they were “Krauts,” they were “Gooks.” And we didn’t think twice about dropping bombs on them, to kill them and their wives and children. (As many commentators have pointed out, the distinction between combatants and civilians does not make sense in World War III, and the Geneva Convention -- an agreement among nations -- is no longer applicable, because our enemies are not nation states.) Hatred of enemies has always been a proximate emotional motive for war throughout human evolutionary history. Until now.
Here’s a little thought experiment. Imagine that, on September 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers came down, the President of the United States was not George W. Bush, but Ann Coulter. What would have happened then? On September 12, President Coulter would have ordered the US military forces to drop 35 nuclear bombs throughout the Middle East, killing all of our actual and potential enemy combatants, and their wives and children. On September 13, the war would have been over and won, without a single American life lost.
Yes, we need a woman in the White House, but not the one who’s running.

So, I guess it's fair to say he is indeed a bastard. But here's the thing that's interesting sociologically. You can find a number of critical comments around the web concerning the bloodlust displayed in the paragraphs above, but resolutions to get him fired? Colleagues stabbing him in the back? No. Apparently, calling for the death of millions of innocents is not nearly as bad as stating, on the basis of data, that black women are, on average, unattractive.

So now you know how to get your priorities straight.

Added:

(1) Believe it or not, as I am writing, the top item in the "Evolutionary Psychology in the news" column on the journal's front page is a link to a press release entitled "People more strongly condemn bad behaviour when cued that they are being watched".

(2) For a less enraged assessment, with many links to reactions, see Eric Crampton.

Guess the Movie

2011-06-05T23:21:00.000+02:00

So, this is the Polish poster for which well-known U.S. film from the 1980s? Hint: It's not Out of Africa. Answer and more hilariously ugly posters here. Or you might want to start with the first part.

A Cloud on Which You Catch No Cough

2011-06-02T23:16:00.003+02:00

Eric Crampton links to an article by David M. Levy and Sandra J. Peart on the origins of the phrase "the dismal science" to describe economics. That's a question I had wondered about on and off, but not enough to spend 15 minutes with Google to come up with an answer. Anyway, according to Levy and Peart, the phrase has nothing to do with Thomas Malthus's "gloomy predictions" (as is popularly believed, apparently), but was coined by Thomas Carlyle in reaction to economists' view that Africans were not inferior, a hypothesis contrary to the one held by Carlyle.

Now, if that's right, one might wonder why such a tainted phrase is so immensely popular, especially on the left. But then, many Germans like "quoting" Churchill's ostensible insight "I don't believe any statistic that I have not fabricated myself", despite the phrase probably having been put in Churchill's mouth by the Nazis (link in German). People don't know about these things.

What I find more surprising is the phrase's popularity despite its lack of qualities that one might think make for a popular phrase, such as wit, insight or alliterations. What's more, it often doesn't seem to fit particularly well. While "dismal" is just the word to describe an Introduction to Macroeconomics lecture, the use in other contexts often seems a little laboured. Economists failed to predict the housing bust? Dismal! Lab experiments falsify Savage axioms? Dismal! Econ students can't get laid? Dismal! That poor adjective is allocated more work than it was cut out for.

We clearly need more derogatory terms for economics. I hence propose that economics is Farting by Numbers. While I'm at it, sociology is Compassion with Significance Tests and Ethnology is Tourismplus. Spread the word, oh readers! Or come up with your own. It's not that hard.

Around the Blogs, Vol. 61: Love & Hate

2011-06-02T08:57:00.003+02:00

Love

1. Low expected value mating strategies

2. Measurement alert!

Hate

3. Assassinations as alternatives to wars

4. Sarah Palin doesn't meet William Ockham

5. Quote of the month

Not Quite Clear Which

6. British vs. Chinese Parenting

7. Better than the movie

Short Friday: Ballet mécanique

2011-05-28T10:12:00.003+02:00

Ah, Friday, it's a vague concept . . . and days of the week, they're all social constructions anyway, right?

O.k., maybe not. But to make up for the lateness, here's an extra-long short, Ballet mécanique, directed by Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy and scored by George Antheil. The visuals are pretty standard dadaist fare, but the music! I don't work out, but if I did, this is the music I'd put on.

Aligned Preferences Are Suspicious

2011-05-25T22:13:00.003+02:00

I don't like complaining to businesses. I find that whole process mildly degrading and would rather silently take my money elsewhere in the future. When a girlfriend doesn't like the clothes I'm wearing, she's welcome to shut up about it; after all, she can leave me if she doesn't like the package deal. I was once threatened with dismissal by an employer if I didn't agree to new conditions and found that totally morally unobjectionable, given that I was free to look for a better job. In Hirschleiferian terms, my preferences are low for loyalty, low for voice, high for exit.

I also often favour more market-like solutions than most people; that is, the kinds of solutions that promise to deliver good outcomes by making exit relatively attractive due to an abundance of alternatives. I like to think that that's based on a cool-headed appreciation of the information available to me, yadda, yadda. But that view would be more convincing if it did not align so neatly with my general preference for exit options. Now you go and think about your own views.

Short Friday: Mephisto Waltz (2008)

2011-05-13T19:58:00.001+02:00

Hey, if the comments I'd already written reappear, I'll post them, but for now it seems that The Great Blogger Timeout ate them. And I'm not going to write them again. The artist's name is Eric Lindell.

Why Don't Academics Do More Cocaine?

2011-05-11T17:57:00.001+02:00

As a data point, here's what a friend told me about the only experience he had with the drug. His cognitive process went roughly like this:

Yay! I'm the coolest motherfucker on the planet! I'm the master of the universe! Wait, wait . . . ten minutes ago I wasn't thinking that. That's when I hadn't done the coke yet. There may be a causal connection. Most likely I'm only feeling like that because of the coke. The hypothesis that I'm the master of the universe seems totally implausible anyway, once I think about objective indicators. Ugh, this is weird. Can I come down now?

Lesson: Works best for people who need it the least.

Me, I've never done cocaine. Life's too short anyway, why would I want to do a drug that makes me faster?

(Another coke-related anecdote)

Short Friday: Kuro Nyago (1931)

2011-04-29T00:34:00.003+02:00

Some say it's 1929, some say it's 1931, I say it's certainly cute in the utmost. Use full screen mode to watch (as the frame is reduced for reasons unknown to me), but if you're prone to earworms, don't say you haven't been warned.

Why did Tigers evolve into cats? So as not to scare little boys and girls!

Harold Garfinkel (1917-2011)

2011-04-27T08:37:00.003+02:00

Kieran Healy reflects.

(Photo by Arlene Garfinkel, embedded from Wikimedia)

The Residual Fallacy

2011-04-25T22:56:00.004+02:00

Man, this is starting to get on my nerves. It's obviously wrong. It's even a special case of a fallacy well-known as such: the false dichotomy. I'll call it the residual fallacy. Here comes an example, from the famous paper "Age and the Explanation of Crime" by Hirschi and Gottfredson, published in the world's most renowned sociology journal (p. 571):

The factors Greenberg adduces to explain desistance offer a plausible account of crime rate differences between adolescence and early adulthood, between, say, 19 and 24, but they do not provide a plausible account of the similar decline in crime rate [sic] between, say, 29 and 34.

Case closed! The fallacy here is to argue that if a variable or set of variables does not explain 100% of the variance in a dependent variable (i.e., if there are residuals), then we may conclude that it explains 0%. Of course, we may not. There are a lot of numbers between 0 and 100.

(This is rather surprising from authors who correctly argue, in the same paper, that theories which distinguish between offenders and nonoffenders can be useful even if they do not simultaneously account for the age effect on crime.)

One sees this quite a bit. Watch out! Fallacy! That's my service announcement for today. You're welcome. And here's a funny link on mating strategy.

The Unreasonable Criminal

2011-04-22T21:59:00.008+02:00

L.A. gang member convicted of homicide because he had a depiction of the offense tatooed on his chest.

No, really:

Chalk one up for Gottfredson and Hirschi.

Added: And here's a source in English with an unpixeled photo.

Around the Blogs, Vol. 60: Sex and Drugs and Decapitation

2011-04-18T20:21:00.004+02:00

Sex

1. There goes my theory of the female orgasm.

2. Can men tell when a lap dancer is ovulating?

Drugs

3. A summary of evidence on marijuana and mental illness

Decapitation

4. Funny jobs, funny comments

"Sonne, Wind und Wasser schicken keine Rechnung"

2011-04-18T20:09:00.003+02:00

Vielen Dank, dass Sie das nur scheinbar komplexe Thema "Kosten des Atomausstiegs" so prägnant auf den Punkt gebracht haben, David McAllister. Hinzuzufügen ist nur noch der Grund, aus welchem die drei keine Rechnung schicken: Sie haben nämlich keine Zungen, um die Briefmarken anzulecken.

Short Friday: Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906)

2011-04-15T08:26:00.007+02:00

As promised two weeks ago, here's a film about what happens to you when you drink too much, kids! Nine minutes long, Dream of a Rarebit Fiend was apparently more or less a ripoff of a French film called Rêve à la lune, which I haven't seen (I have been unable to determine whether it's lost). Anyway, the first two minutes or so are exposition and not all that interesting, but after that things take off and you can learn where William Friedkin got his ideas for The Exorcist from. Great soundtrack, lots of fun!

Pebbles, Vol. 32: Ordered from the Old to the Very Old

2011-04-14T23:41:00.003+02:00

1. Wisdom about phones

2. Euphemisms (via)

3. Great news if you like films

4. So, what's a mental illness? Constructing the DSM-V

5. Questioning the attenation span concept (Can't say I'm convinced.)

6. In the unlikely case that you haven't read Tyler Cowen's piece on inequality yet, but are interested

7. Failure to replicate one of the Bem reverse causality experiments

8. Anti-big business sentiment vs. scientific method: Who's going to win???

9. In praise of free trade: The feelgood argument

10. I also bookmarked this article called "A market for movies." You check out what it's about.

Unpacking Karl Smith on Experiments and Regressions (An Introduction to Causality and How to Measure It), Part III

2011-04-13T23:46:00.001+02:00

Part I, Part II

Internal Validity (Part C)
Smith writes: "Notably, double-blind experiments are an attempt in medicine to go beyond simple randomness because simple randomness not enough." If I understand Smith correctly, he brings up a very interesting problem here, namely that the difference between the independent variable you're actually interested in and the treatment you are in fact administering. The two can be different, which can bring about new confounding issues. I've never heard a general term for this problem, let's call it treatment confounding. The classic example is from medicine, as mentioned by Smith. Researchers are actually interested in the consequences of introducing a medical agent into the body. But if subjects in the treatment group are given a medicine, while subjects in the control group are given nothing, there are differences between the two groups other than the introduction of the agent into the body: They now also differ on the expectation of getting help, the act of taking a medicine, etc. Using placebos means matching treatment and control on these aspects. Making the administering person blind means matching treatment and control group on the expectations of that person. Randomized double-blind means that treatment and control group differ on nothing but the introduction of the agent into the body (the independent variable of interest).

The treatment confounding problem is not confined to medicine. For example, you might do a psychological experiment on aggression in the lab. You're interested in the effect of aggressive affect on aggressive behaviour. To instil aggressive affect in the treatment group you make them write essays on "a situation in the past that made you feel really aggressive;" the control group write essays about something else. You measure aggressive behaviour afterwards. Did you really measure the effect of aggressive affect? Perhaps what you actually measured was the effect of signaling that it is o.k. to express aggression (an experimenter effect) or the accessibility of aggressive scripts.

So, there's a potential problem to keep in mind. But our topic is comparing lab experiments and regressions with respect to the treatment confounding problem. Where do you think the problem is bigger, in multivariate regressions on observational data or randomized lab experiments? That's not such a tough one, is it?

Zombie Economics! Rape and the Internet Again

2011-04-13T17:19:00.003+02:00

The view that the easy availability of porn on the internet has contributed substantially to the recent decline in U.S. rape rates is making the rounds. It is based on a 2007 paper by Todd Kendall; so you might be interested in an old post of mine includes a swift critique of that paper and concludes that the results are inconclusive. That referred to an earlier (2006) version of the paper, and one can see that a lot of work went into the revision, but by and large it's still valid.

As for the more general point of the post, here's Kieran Healy saying the same thing (pdf, p. 124), so it must be true.

Largin' It with Mr. Fish

2011-04-11T23:24:00.002+02:00

19th century Japanese woodblock prints of catfish, believed to be the causers of earthquakes (via). The image above shows construction workers partying with the fish that brought them great wealth. Much more at the link.

Unpacking Karl Smith on Experiments and Regressions (An Introduction to Causality and How to Measure It), Part II

2011-04-10T23:38:00.002+02:00

Here's where we left off.

Internal Validity (Part B)

So, multiple regression is an attempt to establish a causal connection between X and Y by controlling for everything that may have an influence on Y besides X. This will never work perfectly. One, there are variables that you would like to have measures for, but don't. Second, there are the ones you haven't even thought of, but which in fact do have an influence on Y. In the social sciences, you typically have both these problems.

Then there's the problem of overcontrol. The textbook example here is the influence of IQ (which we may have measured early in life) on earnings (which we may be measuring at age 40). Education has an influence on earnings, so we want to control for that, right? Well, given that education is itself influenced by IQ (it is a "mediating variable," to use the technical term), you would underestimate the full effect of IQ on earnings if you controlled for education. That's the problem of overcontrol.*

So, you don't control for education. But that might be wrong as well. If education does have an influence of its own on earnings (over and above IQ), and if it is not simply a function of IQ, then you have what Angrist & Pischke call a "proxy control" problem. That is, you want to control for education, but at the same time, you don't want to. There's not really a way out of that dilemma. The best you can do is report estimates with and without education controlled for and call one "upper bound" and the other "lower bound." Let's hope they're similar!

There is also the problem of causal direction. The setup of a multivariate regression does nothing to establish that, but it might be that you have information about your variables that help. For example, if you try to establish an effect of the weather on violent crime rates, you can be pretty sure that an association between the two does not represent an effect of violent crime rates on the weather.

Compare & contrast with the randomized experiment. If your sample is reasonably large, randomization takes care of all other variables that might have an influence on the outcome, whether you had thought of them or not. (Because you've randomized, the treatment and control groups are very similar on other variables.) Plus, you establish causal direction because you know that you have manipulated one variable, but not the other. Voilà: Causality established.

So you can say that "[t]here is no fundamental difference between performing a regression on data collected in the field and data generated in the lab," but that's like saying that there is no fundamental difference between the broken-down, rusty Lada with no wheels in my backyard and a brandnew Porsche. They're both cars, right?

As far as I can see, that takes care of the first two of Smith's sentences that I quoted. Which leaves us with one post about the very interesting bit about "double-blind" and the failure of controls, one about external validity, and perhaps an appendix post about assorted issues. I'm confident I'll be finished by the end of summer!

_____

*You might want to know whether an effect of IQ remains after you've controlled for education, but then you'd be asking a different question.

Around the Blogs, Vol. 59: An Andrew Gelman Special

2011-04-06T23:51:00.001+02:00

1. A hole in Tyler Cowen's argument about threshold earners.

2. "Even if you're a heavy smoker, your chance of dying of lung cancer is not 50 per cent, so therefore, even with something as extreme as smoking and lung cancer, you still have lots of cases where people don't die of the disease. The evidence is certainly all around you pointing in the wrong direction." The statistics of anecdotal evidence.

3. A summary of the it can be rational to vote argument.

4. No more Mr. Nice Guy.

The God Delusion: What Bryan Caplan May Be Overlooking with Respect to Selfish Reasons to Have (More) Kids

2011-04-04T09:23:00.005+02:00

Bryan Caplan's Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids is one of those books I feel I don't need to read as I've already heard the whole argument. In other words, this is a disclaimer. Perhaps he addresses the argument below in the book. But if so, he hasn't put it center stage in his writing and talking about the book.

Caplan reviews the literature on the effects of nurture, as provided by parents, on the long-term development of children and concludes that they are very modest, at least as long as we restrict the sample to two-parent middle-class homes. (I agree.) Caplan thinks that this makes the case for having more kids. If, for example, your kid's piano lessons have no effect on her except for her learning how to play the piano, then you might as well not bother. Making your kid play the piano is costly in both financial and, often, nonfinancial terms. If it has little effect to speak of, you can avoid that cost. This raises the expected value of having kids.

That is, knowledge about the ineffectiveness of parenting should make you want more kids compared to a world in which you believe that parenting has huge effects. That's because if your costly parenting is ineffective, you need not do it. Hence you incur lower cost. Like so:

Hence:

The claim is not that everyone should have lots of kids, but that the average person should have more kids. More than what? More than they were otherwise planning to have. If you live in a tiny urban apartment and love fancy foreign vacations, this might mean one kid instead of zero. If you live in a suburban McMansion and love theme parks, this might mean five kids instead of three.

In a recent presentation about the book, he challenges the audience to point out what's wrong with the graph. Here's my answer.

We can think of two ideal-typical models of what parenting means:

God: Your child is putty in your hand. You can shape her as you please.

Caretaker: Your job is to provide basics, such as three meals a day and a reasonably stimulating environment. There is nothing else you can do to shape your kid's character or life outcomes. She's just going to turn out the way she's going to turn out.

Caplan argues that the truth is much closer to model 2, and further away from model 1, than people think. I think he's right. But it doesn't follow that you should have more kids.

The problem with the graph above is that it doesn't tell you that expected value is not just a function of price, but also of the benefits you get at that price. And if you move your model of parenting away from the God model, this obviously reduces the expected benefit of having kids. The less influence you have on how your kids turn out, the lower the benefits of having them.

I am not arguing that desire to mould, to coin a proper variable name, is the only reason for people to have kids. But if it plays a noteworthy role, this weakens Caplan's argument. His book is aimed at people who think that parents must exhaust themselves if they have kids, so as to guarantee the optimal upbringing. These are exactly the people that are high in desire to mould. If they didn't want to mould, they wouldn't go to all of the trouble anyway, would they?

Let's think about parents who read Caplan's book and accept his interpretation of the reasearch findings on the ineffectiveness of parenting. Should they increase, decrease, or not change their desire to have kids? Simple: They should increase their desire to have kids if the reduction in anticipated cost brought about by reading Caplan's argument outweighs the reduction of anticipated benefits. If the two even out, they shouldn't change their desire to have kids. If the reduction in anticipated cost is smaller than the reduction in anticipated benefits, they should lower their desired number of kids.

In other words, you could have read the same research as Caplan has, interpreted it the same way, and written a book called Selfish Reasons to Have Fewer Kids.

Short Friday: Old Man Drinking a Glass of Beer (1898)

2011-04-01T09:40:00.004+02:00

Never mind L'Arroseur arrosé; this is the first great comedy. It's forty seconds long and pretty darn silly.

As you may have noticed, the bloke gets drunk unrealistically quickly. That is, it's like the film is sped up, only it's not sped up! A proper humanities major could extract a well-sounding concept from this and tell you how that yields some deep insight into the human condition. I can't. Sorry. What I can is tell you that in two week's time I'll post a short that shows you what happens if you drink too much beer. And it's not pretty.

Evidence for Progressive Approaches to Crime Control in 1922 Australia

2011-03-23T23:47:00.001+01:00

1920s mugshots from Australia, via, via. The original source appears to be this blog, which I'll have to check out some more. For example, try this Roberfrankesque composition.

Type I and Type II Errors: A Trick to Remember Which Is Which

2011-03-22T23:12:00.000+01:00

In statistics, a type I error is when you reject the null hypothesis when you should accept it; a type II error is when you accept the null hypothesis when you should reject it. No owner of a normal brain can remember which is which without problems. Ethan Fosse posts a mnemonic which is supposed to help, but it doesn't work for me. Neither do any of the alternatives suggested in the comments. So I came up with my own. Here it comes.

The null hypothesis is often represented as H₀.* Although mathematicians may disagree, where I live 0 is an even number, as evidenced by the fact that it is both preceded and followed by an odd number. Even numbers go together well. An even number and an odd number do not go together well. Hence the null hypothesis (even) is rejected by the type I error (odd), but accepted by the type II error (even).

Yes?
______
*Also, "null" means "zero" in German, but you don't really need that.