Der VIP-Raum

Yeah, sort of.

(It worked on reload.)

Social Scientist of the Month

The best answer in quite a while to the question, "Why do people look down on social scientists?" comes from Roger Matthews, professor of criminology at the University of Kent. The context is the idea that the removal of lead from gasoline may have played a role in falling crime rates, given that higher lead levels have been linked to aggression at the individual level. Here comes Matthews, as quoted by Dominic Casciani (via):

"I don't see the link," he says. "If this causes some sort of effect, why should those effects be criminal?

"The things that push people into crime are very different kinds of phenomena, not in the nature of their brain tissue. The problem about the theory is that a lot of these [researchers] are not remotely interested or cued into the kinds of things in the mainstream.

"There has been a long history of people trying to link biology to crime - that some people have their eyes too close together, or an extra chromosome, or whatever.

"This stuff gets disproved and disproved. But it keeps popping up. It's like a bad penny."

If you tried to come up with a parody of the daftness of those mushy-heads in the social sciences, could you think of anything better?

So That's the Way Scholars of Literature Write These Days

I went over to Google Scholar to test my hypothesis that there must be some scholarship on Dan Brown by now. And indeed there is. Among the first hits is an article by Victoria Nelson entitled "Faux Catholic: A Gothic Subgenre from Monk Lewis to Dan Brown", published in a cultural studies journal called boundary 2 (No, I don't know what boundary 1 is). It begins thus:

We’ve seen it on the big screen any number of times: the possessed woman writhing, screaming, face morphing (courtesy of computer-generated imagery) into a hideous leer as despairing relatives edge prudently away from the imminent prospect of projectile vomiting.

Demon possession, open-and-shut case. Who you gonna call?

Not your rabbi, imam, or Methodist minister. No, you want that Roman Catholic priest with his collar, cross, holy water, and Vulgate Bible—all the papist trappings that Protestant Americans shun in real life but absolutely demand for a convincing on-screen exorcism. A mild-mannered Episcopal reverend, a Southern Baptist preacher in a Men’s Wearhouse suit reciting the Lord’s Prayer in English over that tormented soul? I don’t think so.

If you think the writing style is an ironic take on pop culture, you're mistaken. The topic of Dan Brown is introduced with the phrase, "Looming over it all like the proverbial nine-hundred-pound gorilla is the Dan Brown phenomenon." And if you think that's a parody as well, this time of Brown's writing style in particular, I disagree. Brown would have written something like, "Nine-hundred-pound gorilla Dan Brown phenomenon was looming over it all, his eyes glowing like icicles in the mist."

It's been a while since I've read CultStud, but I don't remember authors aiming to write like sixteen-year-olds. But this just seems to be Mrs. Nelson's style. And, guess what? She teaches creative writing of all disciplines. Here's the somewhat unsettling opening bit from her teaching philosophy: "Teaching writing at the MFA level for me is an empathic act that amounts to entering my students’ imaginations".

Um, thanks, I'd rather not.

The Best Blog Posts of 2013

It's about time, so here.

As usual, 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 other years' lists, use the tag.

15. Offsetting Behaviour: "Social Costs and HPV", by Eric Crampton

14. Discover: "Why Race as a Biological Construct Matters", by Razib Khan (L; HB; N)

13. The Power of Goals: "Home Sweet Home", by Mark Taylor (L; MB; N)

12. Crooked Timber: "New Tools for Reproducible Research", by Kieran Healy (S; MB; F)

11. German Joys: "The Metamorphosis (US Summer Movie) Elevator Pitch", by Andrew Hammel (S; MB; F)

10. Code and Culture: "You Broke Peer Review. Yes, I Mean You", by Gabriel Rossman (L; MB; N)

9. EconLog: "The Homage Statism Pays to Liberty", by Bryan Caplan (M; MB; N)

8. Scatterplot: "Annals of Self-Refuting Tweets", by Jeremy Freese (S; MB; F)

7. Overcoming Bias: "Future Story Status", by Robin Hanson (M; HB; N)

6. Gulf Coast Blog: "Defamiliarization, Again for the First Time", by Will Wilkinson (L; MB; N)

5. Armed and Dangerous: "Preventing Visceral Racism", by Eric S. Raymond (L; MB; N)

4. Askblog: "It Is Sometimes Appropriate . . .", by Arnold Kling (M; HB; N)

3. EconLog: "Make Your Own Bubble in 10 Easy Steps", by Bryan Caplan (M; LB; N)

2. Armed and Dangerous: "Natural Rights and Wrongs?", by Eric S. Raymond (M; HB; N)

1. Falkenblog: "Great Minds Confabulate Like Small Minds", by Eric Falkenstein (L; HB; N)

Thanks and congrats to all above.

Pebbles, Vol. 46

1. Against the argument that science is just another religion (Jerry Coyne)

2. The latest Bulwer-Lytton results are out (Eddie Pensier)

3. Newsflash: Presenting your criminal acts on Twitter is unwise (Tim Johnson)

Pebbles, Vol. 45

1. Disagreement about the effects of violent video games on aggression (Michael Venables)

2. Vielleicht wäre die angemessene Antwort: "Überweisen Sie mir doch 500 Euro, ohne dass ich etwas für Sie tue." (Harald Martenstein)

3. How science is not like faith (Jerry Coyne)

4. Apparently, the case against "too much choice" is not solid (contains link to meta-analysis) (Matt Ridley).

5. "Since the end of 2007, police in the UK have run a secret network of fully-furnished fake apartments and townhouses, solely for the purpose of capturing local burglary suspects" (Geoff Manaugh).

6. Short research article: Evidence against the hypothesis that red sports clothing causes winning (Thomas V. Pollet and Leonard S. Peperkoorn). If I read that correctly, though, assignment is not random.

7. 15 types of movie posters (Houke de Kwant). Arguably, this is a rational business strategy. If you have a way of signaling "This is an action movie with lots of explosions", that's what you should do. After all, posters are marketing devices first.

8. Health advertising: The Corman strategy; the "cute hypocrite" strategy.

9. Another good illustration of how hard it is to do social science research; nominal question: is stop and frisk effective? (Benjamin Wallace-Wells)

10. "10 highly embarrassing photos of visitors freaking out in an Ontario haunted house" (National Post)

11. Syntax is hard: A tublr dedicated to data visualizations gone beautifully wrong (via)

12. Correlates of polygamy in Africa (James Fenske) (via)

13. "12 Unusually Placed Sports Venues"

14. "We suggest that a psychoanalytic approach based on conflict/compromise model put forward by Freud, then articulated by Brenner, and unconscious group functioning models integrated with Keynes’s psychologically minded views can provide a framework towards explaining the recent housing bubble" (Şule Özler). You read the paper so I don't have to.

Paging Fritz Heider

Meine Ehre heißt miau: Nazis with cats (via).

Around the Blogs, Vol. 102

1. The experiment Milgram chose not to publish (Tom Bartlett/Gina Perry) (via)

2. Disagreement on the bellicosity of stateless societies (Larry Arnhart)

3. Velvet glove, iron fist, or: How government force works. (Bryan Caplan)

4. The "forced rider problem" and disutility from "public goods" (Eric Crampton). Useful concept!

5. The view that TV shapes people's thinking by not mentioning aspects of topics (Steve Sailer/NOTA)

6. Why people dislike photos of themselves: Mirrors meet the mere exposure effect (Robert T. Gonzales). But don't miss the link in the last paragraph.

7. 26 great words from the OED (Carolyn Kellogg/Ammon Shea)

8. Differences in preferences for competitiveness as an explanation of the male-female wage gap (John List and Uri Gneezy)

9. "This must be the strangest publicity still ever taken." (Sherbrooke)

10. Three by Tim Harford: Why pro-free-market arguments don't work well for finance; banks are relying less on leverage; how to use e-mail efficiently at work.

11. Paging Quetelet: Why song lenghts are not normally distributed (Gabriel Rossman) (via)

12. People respond to incentives, giving to the poor edition (Eric Crampton/Jillian Keenan)

13. Feelings of extreme bliss produced by targeted brain stimulation (Christian Jarrett/Fabienne Picard, Didier Scavarda, and Fabrice Bartolomei). Gimme, gimme, gimme!

14. Why wages don't fall during recessions (Bryan Caplan/Truman Bewley)

15. How to make voters better informed (Bryan Caplan)

16. Another bonkers graphic presented by Kaiser Fung.

17. The impact on wages of: height; smoking; testosterone (Economic Logician/Petri Böckerman and Jari Vainiomäki/Julie Hotchkiss and Melinda Pitts/Anne Gielen, Jessica Holmes and Caitlin Myers).

Around the Blogs, Vol. 101: Long Wait, Long List

Because I've been collecting for so long, it's so many links. Because it's so many links, I'm posting it early.

1. If the effect in question was found in a particularly small sample, should that strengthen or weaken your belief in the effect? (Eric Falkenstein) From the same author: A critique of Stevenson and Wolfers' happiness research.

2. Thoughtful, personal essay by Eric S. Raymond about the emotion and cognition of racism.

3. A body-mind theory of lefties and righties (Agnostic)

4. "Annals of Self-Refuting Tweets" (Jeremy Freese presents the American Sociological Association make an ass of itself)

5. Wie intensiv werden die Deutschen eigentlich von der eigenen Regierung ausgespäht? Man weiß es nicht. (Niko Härting) (via)

6. "A conservative estimate is that we’re spending a million dollars per year per terrorist, maybe more – that’s not even counting Iraq and Afghanistan." (Gregory Cochran)

7. The case against (eating lunch) outside (Matthew Yglesias) (via)

8. Matthew Desseem reviews Rififi.

9. Person fixed effects and psychological testing.

10. The theory that Marcia Lucas contributed more to Star Wars' quality than is usually acknowledged. (Fabio Rojas)

11. A discussion of reviewing and reviewers (with a focus on sociology) (olderwoman and commenters)

12. Is US violent crime actually down? Looking at non-police data. (Steve Sailer)

13. "William Boyd’s Taxonomy of the Short Story" (Will Wilkinson)

14. How not to get published. (Andrew Gelman/Brian Nosek, Jeffrey Spies, and Matt Motyl)

15. Getting the priorities straight (Foseti) (on this blog)

16. Male feminists: Demand and supply. (Nick Borman)

17. Real life cases of amnesia that are stranger than fiction. (Christian Jarrett)

18. Season of birth is endogenous (Eric Crampton/Kasey S. Buckles and Daniel M. Hungerman)

19. A model of how the internet works (Marco Arment) (via)

Around the Blogs, Vol. 99

1. What happens to CEOs who don't want to hand over their customers' data to the NSA? (Jason Kottke/John Gilmore)

2. This looks like it might be a useful equation for stratification researchers, if they allowed themselves/dared to use it. (Gregory Cochran)

3. Robin Hanson and Bill Dickens develop a theory of fertility.

4. ". . . and if you be drunke annoint your privie members in vineger, and ye shall waxe sober." Advice from 1628 (via).

5. A graphical test for whether time trends moving in parallel suggest causality (Kaiser Fung)

David Brooks on Johann Georg Elser

Strangely enough, New York Times columnist David Brooks today writes about failed Hitler assassin Johann Georg Elser:

The Solitary Assassin

Based on the historical record, it appears Johann Georg Elser was the ultimate unmediated man. Though obviously a talented craftsman, he could not successfully work his way through the social process of his apprenticeship as a lathe operator. Then, when his wife gave birth to his child, he failed to marry her.

Though thoughtful, morally engaged and deeply committed to his beliefs, he appears to  have been a product of one of the more unfortunate trends of his age: the atomization of society, the loosening of social bonds, the growing share of young men in their 30s who were living craftsmen's existences in the fuzzy land between their childhood institutions and adult family commitments.

If you live a life unshaped by the mediating institutions of Nazi society, perhaps it makes sense to see the world a certain way: Life is not embedded in a series of gently gradated authoritative structures: family, neighborhood, religious group, state, nation and Führer. Instead, it’s just the solitary naked individual and the gigantic and menacing state.

This lens makes you more likely to share the distinct strands of pacifism that were blossoming in his fragmenting age: the deep suspicion of warmongers, the strong belief that military hierarchies and organizations are suspect, the fervent devotion to peace, the assumption that human lives have value.

It’s logical, given this background and mind-set, that Elser would sacrifice his career to assassinate Hitler. Even if he did not publicize any manifesto explaining his rationale, he was bound to be horrified by what he saw as a coming war. And, of course, he was right that there was a war coming.

But war was not the only danger facing the country. Another was the rising tide of distrust, the corrosive spread of cynicism, the fraying of the social fabric and the rise of people who were so individualistic in their outlook that they had no real understanding of how to knit others together and look after the common good.

This was not a danger Elser was addressing. In fact, he made everything worse.

For society to function well, there have to be basic levels of trust and cooperation, a respect for institutions and deference to the Führer. By deciding to unilaterally assassinate Hitler, Elser betrayed all of these things.

He betrayed honesty and integrity, the foundation of all cooperative activity. As a German citizen, he was bound by the Führer's will. He rose up against that will.

He betrayed the cause of peaceful government. Every time there is an assassination attempt like this, the powers that be get a little more enraged.

He betrayed the German state. The Führer did not unite the German people under him so that some solitary 36-year-old could make unilateral decisions about who should be Führer. Snowden self-indulgently undermined the will of the people, putting his own preferences above everything else.

Elser faced a moral dilemma. On the one hand, he was convinced that war was imminent. On the other hand, he had certain commitments as a citizen, as a member of the German people. Sometimes assassins have to assassinate. The situation is so grave that it demands they violate the law.

But before they do, you hope they will interrogate themselves closely and force themselves to confront various barriers of resistance. Is the situation so grave that it’s worth betraying your loyalty to the Führer, circumventing the established decision-making procedures, unilaterally causing a death that can never be undone?

Judging by his comments recorded in the interrogation protocols, Elser was obsessed with the danger of war but completely oblivious to his betrayals and toward the damage he did to social arrangements and the invisible bonds that hold them together.

Complication of the Day

The president, who today begins a two-day retreat in California with Chinese president Xi Jinping, immediately faces complications from the disclosure of the programs, however. Obama planned to press Xi on China's use of cyber-attacks and hacking against US targets.

Dammit!

Around the Blogs, Vol. 97: Heritability, Indians, Blotzheim [delete commas to obtain band name]

1. "The national news media appears to be turning into a giant conspiracy to feed me material." A rather funny post by Steve Sailer. From the same author: A good example of environmental influences on heritability (estimates), as a part of musings on the height of actors.

2. "Close friendships appear to counteract genetic vulnerability to depression in girls, but not boys" (Christian Jarrett/Brendgen et al.). Suggestive, but correlation-not-causation/endogeneity alert.

3. German name of the day (Andrew Hammel)

Enjoy your weekend!

Pebbles, Vol. 42

Rolf Dobelli explains why you shouldn't follow the news.

Arnold Kling makes the argument that states are better than clans.

"A founder of the anti-GM food movement on how he got it wrong: Mark Lynas in conversation with Charlie Gillis"

Naughty logos (mildly NSFW) (via)

Preface and Chapter 1 (Abraham Lincoln) of Edward Jay Epstein’s book, Annals of Unsolved Crime (via). Don't be put off by the trashy graphics.

Paris in 1900 vs. 2013 photos (via)

Startup ideas that looked stupid but weren't (via)

Small island problems (via)

New journal called Porn Studies founded. Sounds interesting, but the Call for Papers/Mission Statement suggests it's some cultural studies crap.

Around the Blogs, Vol. 95

1. The problem with macroeconomics: uninformative data (Noah Smith)

2. In the recent blog genre of Reinhart-Rogoff bashing, Kieran Healy wins the prize. May seem a bit cruel, but that's what you get for using Excel for your data analysis. And a weighting scheme that is so bonkers that people may well think it's politically motivated. But it's mainly for using Excel.

3. Audio of BBC interview with Vladimir Nabokov (presented by Maria Popova). If the answers sound written rather than spoken, that's because they are.

4. How quickly do cultural works depreciate? (Matthew Yglesias)

Pebbles, Vol. 41

1. What was it like to be Vladimir Nabokov's research assistant? (Edward Jay Epstein) (via)

2. Ist Gewalt gegen Polizisten wirklich angestiegen? (Friederike Haupt) (HT: Christian)

3. "Accused of being gay, Spanish priest challenges Church to measure his anus" (Barry Duke)

4. The history of Pulp Fiction (Mark Seal) (via)

5. Pictures of the old main library of Cincinnati:

Pebbles, Vol. 40

1. Are Greenpeace et al. responsible for the death of eight million children? (Bjørn Lomborg)

2. The very low external validity of social science experiments (Jim Manzi)

3. An academic review of high-quality studies estimating the effect of police on crime (Jonathan Klick and Alexander Tabarrok)

4. Software programs for diagnosis (Katie Hafner)

5. Michael Chabon reads Finnegans Wake.

6. The rare xkcd foray into the humanities is a highlight. Bonus: The Aumann impossibility theorem.

7. Wives appear careful not to outearn their husbands (C.O./Marianne Bertrand, Emir Kamenica and Jessica Pan).

8. The famous "Broken Windows" article by George Kelling and James Wilson is back online.

9. An essay on memory by Oliver Sacks (via) (A good read, but contains nothing new if you have a fair grasp of the research literature)

10. Jonah Lehrer: Mistakes were made (by me).

11. "World's craziest freekick?" (video)

12. Earning money the hard way (video) (Cory Jones)

13. "13 Book Covers You Won't Believe Are Real" (Lauren Passell)

From the Archives of LiberTrash

Via Eric Crampton comes a short 1978 libertarian propaganda film called Libra. It's unknown to imdb, but at the Smithonian, Matt Novak explains:

Produced and distributed by a free-market group based in San Diego called World Research, Inc., the 40-minute film is set in the year 2003 and gives viewers a look at two vastly different worlds. On Earth, a world government has formed and everything is micromanaged to death, killing private enterprise. But in space, there’s true hope for freedom.

The film explains that way back in 1978 a space colony community was formed using $50 billion of private funds. Back then, government regulations were just loose enough to allow them to form. But here in the year 2003, government regulators are trying to figure out a way to bring them back under their oppressive thumb through taxes and tariffs on the goods they ship back to Earth.

The film's fascinating to watch because it's a textbook case of how not to write a screenplay: The film ends just when one would expect the conflict to really get going; until then, it's little plot and lots of exposition - almost all of which is delivered by actors talking. Indeed, listening the agressively educational dialogues reminded me of the film Street Wise, which they made me watch in my first week at Anglia Polytechnic ("Hey, everybody, I won 50 quid at the pub quiz! I'm gonna put it on my desk in my room and not lock the door!"). There is one exception to this, however: Right at the beginning of the film, we see that New York City in 2003 looks exactly like New York City in 1978. We instinctively understand that this is due to guv'ment regulations stifling innovation in cars, clothing, and even hairdressing.

The entire film can be watched here. Recommended for fans of 70s trash and liberals who like making fun of the enemy.

Around the Blogs, Vol. 91

Is openness to experience responsive to environmental conditions? (Gwern)

All hail Wisconsin! (Tyler Cowen)

The Metamorphosis (elevator pitch) (Andrew Hammel)

How much do economists really agree? (Dan Klein)

"The average middle-class American is driven about 90% by a desire for more money, and most of these people will come right out and tell you that. A similarly-situated German will be motivated 40% by money, 20% by job security, and 40% by the desire for officially-bestowed, external signs of high social status -- especially involving education or heredity. However, they will only admit the desire for job security, and will half-heartedly deny or rationalize the other motivations." (Andrew Hammel)

Innovation: Do incentives play a noteworthy role? (Tyler Cowen)

Note to journalists: Asking expert can help get stuff right. Assuming that's what you're after. (Jason Kottke)

How to be persuasive (Eric S. Raymond)

Now that's what I call paternalism! (Jason Kottke/Laura June)