The Best Blog Posts of 2012

Hmmmm . . . I had had the feeling that it had not been a particularly strong year for blog posts - so only ten this time, to keep up this series' ridiculously high standards.

As last time, brackets are appended to each link to indicate whether the post is Long, Medium lenght or Short; High-Brow, Mid-Brow or Low-Brow, and Funny or Not.

For the rest of this series, use the tag.

10. Scatterplot: "Eight Observations on 'Biology' and Social Science", by Jeremy Freese (L; HB; N)

9. iSteve: "Feminists: Still Making Children Cry on Christmas Morning", by Steve Sailer (L; MB; F)

8. Seth's Blog: "Two Dimensions of Economic Growth: GDP and Useful Knowledge", by Seth Roberts (M; HB; N)

7. EconLog: "My Beautiful Bubble", by Bryan Caplan (M; MB; N)

6. Meteuphoric: "Value Realism", by Katja Grace (L; HB; N)

5. Overcoming Bias: "Unspeakable Arrogance", by Robin Hanson (M; HB; F)

4. Cheap Talk: "Dogmatic Doesn’t Have To Mean Closed-Minded", either by Jeff Ely or by Sandeep Baliga, I don't know which (M; MB; N)

3. The Atlantic Business: "What Is Causality?", by Jim Manzi (L; HB; N)

2. Old School Panini: "The Lumberjack’s Top Ten", by Alex Bourof (M; LB; F)

1. Jaltcoh: "Why do people say, 'Life is too short?'", by John Althouse Cohen (S; MB; F)

Hats off to everyone on the list, and may everybody have a great year! "Everybody" includes people not on the list.

Around the Blogs, Vol. 82

1. Advocating marijuana decriminalization: You're doing it wrong, Sandy Mulqueen! (brought to us by Eric Crampton)


2. Robin Hanson makes an unwise/brave publication decision and channels Goffman.


3. John Althouse Cohen raises an interesting point about moral psychology (will have to have another look at the Sowell book).


4. Andy McKenzie discusses bets on the replicability of research results.


5. Serguei Saavedra, Satyam Mukherjee, and James P. Bagrow deliver the overgeneralization of the month (brought to us by Tyler Cowen)

Confound Alert! Human Capital Formation, the Euros, and GCSE Performance

"Student effort and educational attainment: Using the England football team to identify the education production function" (via) is a recent paper by Robert Metcalfe, Simon Burgess and Steven Proud that looks at a commonsense question. Every two years, either the World Cup or the Euros coincide with portions of the English exam period; does that have a detrimental effect on the test results? Yes, say the authors. Here's the abstract:

We use a sharp, exogenous and repeated change in the value of leisure to identify the impact of student effort on educational achievement. The treatment arises from the partial overlap of the world’s major international football tournaments with the exam period in England. Our data enable a clean difference-in-difference design. Performance is measured using the high-stakes tests that all students take at the end of compulsory schooling. We find a strongly significant effect: the average impact of a fall in effort is 0.12 SDs of student performance, significantly larger for male and disadvantaged students, as high as many educational policies.

They compare the differences in the differences in results between "late" subjects (the exams for which overlap with the tournaments in tournament years) and the "early" subjects (the exams for which do not overlap). Note that the 0.12 SDs result is for all students, including those who don't care about football. How much is 0.12 SDs?

For example, the “Literacy Hour” intervention in England raised reading attainment by 0.06 SDs (Machin & McNally, 2008). A unit SD increase in teacher quality raises test scores by around 0.15 to 0.24 SDs per year, 0.27 in England (Rockoff, 2004; Rivkin, Hanushek and Kain, 2005; Aaronson, Barrow, and Sander, 2007; Kane and Staiger, 2008; Slater, Davies and Burgess, 2011). The effect of major “early years” programmes such as Head Start is 0.147 SDs in applied problems and 0.319 in letter identification (Currie and Thomas, 1995; Ludwig and Phillips, 2007). Crawford et al (2007) have shown that a student’s month of birth has effects on GCSE outcomes: students who have spent their entire school careers as the youngest in the class (Augustborns) score on average 0.116 SDs (girls) or 0.131 SDs (boys) lower than the oldest in the class (September-born students). Substantial effects on pupil progress have been found in “No Excuses” Charter schools, of between 0.10 - 0.40 standard deviations increase per year in mathematics and reading (Abdulkadiroglu et al, 2009; Angrist et al, 2010). More closely related to our focus on effort, Fryer (2010) and Levitt et al (2011a) show that incentivising students to raise their effort (inputbased student incentives) have an effect size of about 0.15 SDs, and Levitt et al (2011b) show that incentives on the day of a test can increase test scores by around 0.2 SDs.

I was a bit knackered when I read the paper, and didn't put all that much effort in it, but even so I am somewhat dismayed that I couldn't find anything wrong with the statistics. I can quibble with the interpretation, though. The authors assume (but do not measure) that the lowered test results are a consequence of students spending less time on preparation. Another possible explanation is that during tournaments, there are more instances of pupils coming to the exams hung over. I don't have a Nobelish-prize winning theory to back it up, but common observation suggests that being hung over has a detrimental effect on test performance, holding everything else constant. That's what really explains the results. Try proving me wrong!

Best Blog Posts of 2011, Vanity Edition

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)

Operation Blank Slate, 2011 Edition

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

Porn & Booze: Two Counterarguments

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.

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

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!

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

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!

Why Don't Academics Do More Cocaine?

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)

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

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

Short Friday: Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906)

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!

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

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.

Two Underappreciated Perspectives on Alcoholism

Below are two points I think people tend to overlook when thinking about alcoholism. It's only based on anecdotal evidence, but I happen to have better access to anecdotes about this matter than your average person. I would think the points also apply to other drugs, but I have no expertise concerning those.

1. When people learn that someone's an alcoholic, they are quick to ask what went wrong: Was he depressive? Lost his job? Did his wife die? Or is he just an all-around lowlife? Even if such explanations do not seem to apply, the legacy of Freudianism - not some deep appreciation of psychoanalysis, just the license to offer speculation about hidden motivations with zero evidence - ensures people feel free to speculate about deep-seated conflicts, a solution to which the drinker meant to provide (unconsciously, of course). Sure, it happens that people seek comfort in drink when something terrible happens to them, and some of them turn into full-blown alcoholics as a consequence. Others self-medicate against depression that has no obvious external root and get hooked. But the simple truth of the matter is that people differ enormoulsy in their ability to enjoy alcohol. If you don't like being drunk, you're never going to become an alcoholic. Many people get addicted to alcohol for the same reason that music lovers amass huge record collections: It just comes with the appreciation.

2. At least in this country, the health care system throws itself at drinkers as if the health care system were a fourteen-year-old boy and the drinker were a blonde with huge boobs, a miniscule skirt, and a questionable reputation. Average waiting time for rehab, according to my small sample from urban areas: less than a week. Cost: ten Euros a day, just like regular hospital stays (welfare recipients pay nought). And then there's self-help groups, anti-alcoholism NGOs, and whatnot. One might hence wonder why not more alcoholics seek treatment for their ailment which so obviously hurts them. There are extreme cases of addiction when people, it seems, have lost the ability to make choices like a regular person, but that's a minority. Now put yourself in the shoes of an addict who is fully capable of making choices and considers going into rehab to get rid of his addiction. Almost any alcohol addict would rather continue his current drinking levels without the addiction and the health and social consequences than with them. But that choice is not on the table. The choice is between current drinking levels with all the nasty consequences vs. getting rid of the nasty consequences and never being allowed to drink again. Ever! Again! If you're a real, serious music lover - the kind of person that owns thousands of records - imagine you could seriously improve your social functioning, life expectancy, etc., but would lose your ability to listen to music as part of the deal. That's not exactly what they call a no-brainer.

It's really the same point twice, innit?

Around the Blogs, Vol. 56

1. A jury member reports (via)

2. Identifying the effects of financial incentives for fertility

3. Does anti-discrimination look like discrimination?

4. Cultural differences in decision making

5. UK binge drinking apparently decreasing

"If It Was Not Rational for Me, then I Would Not Be Doing It" (Updated)

[Follow-up post]

Blogging will continue to be light in the upcoming weeks due to more important stuff to do. Ever heard of RSS feeds?

In the meantime, here's a clip from someone called Ole Rogeberg explaining Becker and Murphy's theory of rational addiction:


(Via Andrew Gelman; the movie's original page is here)

In other news, "I, for one, welcome our new arsenic overlords" currently yields 173 Google hits. I would have expected more.

Update: Turns out the same Ole Rogeberg actually has written a full-blown academic paper called "Taking Absurd Theories Seriously: Economics and the Case of Rational Addiction Theory" on the matter. Not as much fun as the clip above, though.

Assorted Thoughts

1. I wonder how many people do not get treatment for depression although they could benefit from it because they judge their outlook to be appropriate.

2. Though it's been said a million times that parents overestimate the extent to which others are interested in their - the parents' - babies, this knowledge is quickly forgotten by many upon becoming parents themselves - a hormonal thing perhaps? Maybe this helps: Babies are not persons in the standard sense of the word, i.e., you can't have a conversation with them.

3. Ben Casnocha blogs about the dilemma young people face when they meet "the right one" too early: "Do they commit to the girlfriend or boyfriend in their early 20's even if it means sacrificing other goals?" The tragedy here, though, lies not mainly in the situation, but in the fact that concerning the supposedly most private arrangements people's imaginations are as barren as the Gobi desert: Why not continue the relationship and travel the world? (Notable exception, at least given most people's emotional makeup: sexual relations.) W. I. Thomas would have agreed.

4. Tom Wolfe thinks that most people become authors of fiction not because they have "something to say", but because they discover they have a way with words. Here's a different hypothesis: Most people develop the wish to become an artist because they discover they have a way of perceiving that they deem unusual and precious. Possible exception: music.

5. Perhaps the only thing that's as hard to write about as sex: The magic of an alcohol-soaked evening with others, when time and self-awareness slowly disappear.

6. Pauline Kael is said to have said, "I can't believe Nixon won. Nobody I know voted for him!" If everybody who's ever looked down on Kael for saying that had internalized the implication of the quote - your model of the world, too, is subject to sampling bias - the world would be a wiser place.

7. Point often overlooked when making carreer decisions: How much control will you have over who you'll hang out with?

8. It would be useful to have most nonfiction books come in two versions: Standard version for the properly interested; highlights version for the mildly interested. Additional information about a given topic usually has decreasing marginal utility.

9. Reinterpretation for bloggers: Calling laziness "a taste for concision".

Around the Blogs, Vol. 51: Price Theory & Practice

1. Eric Crampton defends price gouging - and responds to criticism.

2. How much does a review article in a medical journal cost a drug company? About $20,000, reports Ben Goldacre.

3. Leigh Caldwell offers an armchair analysis of the effects of minimum prices for alcoholic drinks.

Short Message, plus: Around the Blogs Vol. 50: The Empty-the-Folder Binge

There will be no or few new posts here until mid-month due to lotsa lotsa work. As this blog is probably the only source of reading material for most visitors, for the meantime there's an extra large helping of links.

1. So, what's up with that phrase "begging the question"? Mark Liberman knows.

2. Yvain has a vision of Robin Hanson's funeral.

3. Iconic photos gives us parodies thereof in The Simpsons.

4. Razib Khan on the correlation of the GSS's WORDSUM variable with proper IQ scores.

5. Matthew Rognlie on "The silliness of the Coase Theorem".

6. Scott Sumner reviews how US economic politics have become more libertarian during the last 50 years or so.

7. Andrew Hammel knows why you should binge-drink, at least if you're British.

8. Eric Crampton stops short of wondering whether Tobbacco is the new Child Porn.

9. Steve Sailer accuses Google of mucking up search results for political reasons.

10. Jennifer Rohn says scientists stand on the shoulders of midgets (via).

11. And this is perhaps my link of the year so far: Stefan Szymanski reports why Tony Blair supported the London Olympics, according to Tony Blair.

How Alcohol Prohibition Might Work

Well, in the US, in the early 20th century, it did work somewhat. In line with stuff I've read elsewhere, Tyler Cowen writes in his review of Last Call, a book about the topic by Daniel Okrent:

Alcohol consumption quickly fell to 30% of its previous level; by the time of repeal it was still no more than 70% of its pre-Prohibition level. Most notably, alcohol consumption remained low for decades; the U.S. didn't return to pre-Prohibition levels of per capita consumption until 1973. Alcohol-related diseases fell. It remains the case that high alcohol taxes reduce the incidence of cirrhosis, as reported in the 2007 book Paying the Tab, by Philip J. Cook of Duke University.

We still have prohibition for 87 million Americans under the age of 21, and these restrictions work to some degree. Plenty of studies have demonstrated that lowering the drinking age raises the number of alcohol-related motor vehicle accidents, not to mention assaults and other crimes.

Funnily enough, despite alcohol's tendency to increase aggression, as far as homicides were concerned, this was outweighed by prohibition's tendency to lead to lethal conflict resolution in the absence or the opportunity to turn to the legal system. And a permanent reduction to 70% is hardly overwhelming. Perhaps it's no surprise. Writes Aldous Huxley (in The Doors of Perception):

Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul.

Huxley, of course, goes on to recommend mescaline, a drug I know next to nothing about, but it seems that if you wanted to get serious about making people consume less alcohol, you should legalize a different means to alter one's consciousness that comes with less undesirable side effects, such as THC. True, its effects are different, but it seems to me that, just as people who turn on the telly often do so out of a general desire for diversion rather than to watch a specific programme, the motivation for getting drunk is often not to obtain alcohol's specific effects, but rather a general desire for getting wasted. Or "transcending oneself", as Huxley might have put it.

A Very Simple Theory of Rehab

It goes like this:

Either you really want to quit or you don't.

It is no doubt too simple in the sense that it doesn't explain nearly all of the variance and I hasten to add that it is based on nothing but anecdotal evidence, of which I have seen more than I'd like to have. But the more I see, the more true it seems, and I'm fairly certain it explains a substantial portion of the variance. To the extent it's true, this means that you shouldn't get your hopes up too much once you've managed to talk your spouse or brother into going into rehab.