Negative Externalities

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

Overjoyed, yet slightly appalled that Richard would even think of, let alone do, such a thing, the man gave him ten thousand dollars for the contract, and a second ten thousand dollars for the incredible suffering the mark had experienced.

"You did a good job," he said. Richard liked to please his customers; that was how his business had grown over the years.

 Philip Carlo, The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer

Virtual Reality, or, What's So Great about Knausgaard?

I've only read the first two volumes so far, but here's the best answer I've yet seen to the question Why is Knausgaard so great - when really, with all the detail and mundane plotlines, he should be boring:

The answer lies not in Knausgaard’s depth of revelation so much as the intensity of focus he brings to the subject of his life. He seems to punch a hole in the wall between the writer and reader, breaking through to a form of micro-realism and emotional authenticity that makes other novels seem contrived, “made up”, irrelevant. As [Zadie] Smith put it: “You live his life with him. You don’t simply ‘identify’ with the character, effectively you ‘become’ them.”

There's so much talk about literature's ability to put the reader in someone else's head - this is often portrayed as the feature that most differentiates writing from other forms of art, and Steven Pinker even singled out the increase in putting-yourself-in-other-people's-heads caused by the invention of the printing press as the trigger that started the long-term decline in violence ca. 1500-2000. I've read a fair bit of fiction and some memoirs, but have never seen anyone doing it like Knausgaard does.

Florian Illies, Shamelessly Jumping on Angrist & Pischke's Train

Good books both.

Screamers Gone Awry: The Availability Heuristic Meets Selection on the Dependent Variable

I've just finished Soccernomics by journalist Simon Kuper and sports economist Stefan Szymanski. Skipping the matter of the title, I can say that the authors oversell plausible ideas and the results of multivariate regressions, seem to believe in best practice analysis, have already been shown wrong by developments that happened after the book was finished, and yet, I read its 400 pages in three days (which is very quick by my standards). It's so entertaining! But let's not give the authors too much credit. After all, what could go wrong when you pack football and econometrics into one book? It's almost as irresistible a combination as topless darts.*

An interesting factoid from the book is that only about two percent of shots from outside the eighteen-yard-box result in goals. The players are trying to score one of those spectacular "screamers" that they remember from televised matches, Kuper and Szymanski guess, and hence fall prey to the availability heuristic. But perhaps it's not simply that players remember spectacular goals better than failed attempts. Watching many live matches takes a lot of time, and matches to watch cluster on certain days, so much of football coverage is watched in the form of summary highlights of five to ten minutes. Perhaps that's especially true of professional footballers who will often themselves be at work when there are live matches to watch on the telly. And the highlights don't show all the attempts from outside the box, but they certainly show all that result in goals. In contrast, attempts from inside the box (I'm guessing) are shown at a much higher rate. Selection on the dependent variable. To be precise, that's even differential selection on the dependent variable.

On top of that, when live matches are watched, the teams that are on will often be way above average, including at converting long-distance attempts. Selection on the dependent variable again. Hence, some professional watches Gareth Bale hammer the ball into the top corner on Wednesday night and tries the same next Saturday, only to watch it sailing into the stands.

What coaches should do: Show their players a truly random sample of shots from outside the area. Ten minutes once a week should help.

_____

*Best sentence from the link: "When L!VE TV was Millwall FC's shirt sponsor, they originally wanted to advertise this show on the shirts, but club bosses nixed that idea because they were worried it might encourage fans to throw darts." The sentence is funnier if you know a bit of context. A fine link, that one. It does not, however, mention my favourite episode "Topless Darts on the Titanic" ("Oh, no! An iceberg! Let's hope it melts before we hit it!").

Scarily Scathing: Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, by Thomas Nagel

Having read Mind and Cosmos, in which Thomas Nagel argues that evolutionary theory must be supplemented with teleology because Nagel feels that current Darwinism is kinda iffy, and can assure you that it's every bit as shoddy as the most negative reviews around the web would have you believe. Here's a selection:

Not only doesn’t Nagel deliver: he strikes out three times, with three distinct arguments as to why we should reject natural selection in its current, materialist form. Each of the book’s three main thrusts – involving consciousness, theoretical knowledge, and morality – begets a unique species of error. [...]

Teleology is certainly possible, and Nagel is not wrong to ask us to set aside our materialist presuppositions to consider radical alternatives. But he also needs to provide us with good reasons for believing that such radical alternatives are necessary. Nagel is unconvincing on this score, because it is not clear that the we must amend scientific theories to solve philosophical problems, in such a way as to guarantee the maximal intelligibility of the world; or that intelligibility must be linked to probability; or that an evolutionary origin for cognition is self-undermining; or that moral realism and natural selection are incompatible (and if so, that it is the latter rather than the former that must be amended).

Wes Alwan, "Evolution is Rigged! A Review of Thomas Nagel’s 'Mind and Cosmos'", The Partially Examined Life

Nagel never explains why his intuition should count for so much

H. Allen Orr, "Awaiting a New Darwin", The New York Review of Books

The sufficiency of genetic variation to drive natural selection has been a central theme since R A Fisher’s great book, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. Nagel, a philosopher, tells us there’s not enough. Big result! But it’s completely unsupported by argument. Nagel says that he would “like to defend the untutored reaction of incredulity to neo-Darwinism … It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection”. This is just irresponsible. It is simply wrong to adjudicate the probability of mutations by an “untutored reaction of incredulity”.

Mohan Matthen, "Thomas Nagel's Untutored Reaction of Incredulity", The Philosopers Magazine

Are we really supposed to abandon a massively successful scientific research program because Nagel finds some scientific claims hard to square with what he thinks is obvious and “undeniable,” such as his confidence that his “clearest moral…reasonings are objectively valid”? [...]

We may, of course, be wrong in having abandoned teleology and the supernatural as our primary tools for understanding and explaining the natural world, but the fact that “common sense” conflicts with a layman’s reading of popular science writing is not a good reason for thinking so. [...]

Nagel’s arguments against reductionism are quixotic, and his arguments against naturalism are unconvincing. He aspires to develop “rival alternative conceptions” to what he calls the materialist neo-Darwinian worldview, yet he never clearly articulates this rival conception, nor does he give us any reason to think that “the present right-thinking consensus will come to seem laughable in a generation or two.”

Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg, "Do You Only Have a Brain? On Thomas Nagel", The Nation

When Can You Trust (Expert) Intuition?

I read Malcolm Gladwell's Blink when it came out. It's a deeply dissatisfying book. He starts out more or less proposing that intuition, or at least expert intuition, is this kind of superpower, then he starts slipping in anecdotes about how quick decision making fails instead of succeeding, which naturally makes you wait for Gladwell to give you the rule or rules which let you distinguish between the two situations, and then the book's finished. As Steve Sailer paraphrased the message: "Go with your gut reactions, but only when they are right." You're left with a bunch of anecdotes.

I'm currently reading Daniel Kahnemann's Thinking, Fast and Slow, which is - how to put it? - a better book than Blink. In one chapter, he summarizes the results of antagonistic collaboration on the topic of the trustworthiness of expert intuition with a researcher called Gary Klein (Klein trusted expert intuition, Kahnemann didn't). They found that experts need the following to develop trustworthy intuitions (p. 240):

• an environment that is sufficiently regular to be predictable
• an opportunity to learn these regularities through prolonged practice

 That may sound a bit obvious (once you know about it), but has a number of interesting implications.

One, this explains why you cannot predict growth or crime rates: the environment's just too darn irregular. Or when the next large-scale terrorist attack on U.S. soil is to be expected: perhaps they will turn out to be highly regular, but if so, there's been no opportunity to learn that.

Two, these are exactly the conditions under which systematic prediction (say, using a regression model) also works. That is, there seem to be no cases when intuition works, but deliberation cannot. Intuition may be quicker, but it's not some magic pipeline into otherwise inaccessible truths.

Three, this gives you a rule for when to trust your own intuitions. You are probably an expert in something, such as your wife's facial expressions. If they have a stable relationship to your wife's psychological states and you've had ample opportunity to learn about that relationship, your intuitions about what they mean are probably trustworthy. On the other hand, your intuitions about what your newly-acquired lover's facial expressions mean may be off the mark.

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.

Pebbles, Vol. 39: Fingers 'n' Pipes

1. Rushdie remembers the Rushdie affair

2. Knuckle cracking does not lead to arthritis (n=2) (via).

3. Evidence that the unconscious can work on math problems (via)

4. Popular science book cover of the year

5. Cool photos of Google's data centre

Why You Shouldn't Borrow Books from Acquaintances

Sometimes people will suggest that you read a certain book they happen to own. Of course, they won't just recommend anything, but one of their very favourites. They will offer to lend it to you. Should you accept? Perhaps not. Consider:

1. If you're like me, the baseline probability that you will enjoy a given book (film, song, painting) is low: most stuff isn't that good.

2. What's really interesting is not whether it's good, but whether using your time to read that book (watch that film, etc.) will yield more utility than the best of the other possible uses of your time. And there are a lot of interesting books out there that you haven't read yet.

3. Borrowing a book is not like borrowing a hammer or a car. When people offer to lend you a book, they are asking you for an assessment of their soul. Yes, I'm exaggerating, but only a little.

4. It is impossible to simply return a book with a thanks. Try it one time. You will find that you cannot get out of that situation without an assessment of the book.

5. If you loved it, fine. But there is quite a chance that you didn't (see point 1). What now? You can lie, but that's bad, because (a) you don't want to lie, and (b) in order to spin a convincing lie, you might feel compelled to finish the book first, which you don't want to do if you don't like it. Or you might offer a truthful assessment. But remember what that really is an assessment of.

6. If you go for the truth, on top of hurting people's feelings, you'll subject yourself to their reaction to having their feelings hurt. In the present context, this often comes in the shape of interpreting your not liking the book as a defect of yours: "Oh, it was probably too far out for you, right?" "Oh, now I remember, you did tell me you enjoy John Irving. No surprise, then, I guess." Do you enjoy listening to what a mediocre mind you have? I don't.

All of this suggests you shouldn't borrow books from mere acquaintances. If you think a book they're describing sound intriguing, (i) proactively mention how many books are sitting on your shelves, unread ("If only I had more time!"); (ii) get a copy without letting them know. If you enjoy it, tell them about it; otherwise, never bring the topic up again.

What about borrowing books from friends? Chances are that they'll be cooler about it, as they already know that you have a firmly positive assessment of them, and if they were oh so touchy, you might not have selected them as friends. So, should you borrow books from friends? That's your decision, after all, you know them better than I do. But borrowing books from acquaintances? That seems like a bad idea.

Around the Blogs, Vol. 83: Braces Special

Andrew Gelman writes about the perils of before-after comparisons and writing research articles

The Marginal Revolutionaries find evidence of women responding to incentives* and Germans having humour**.

Bryan Caplan informs us about the behavioural genetics of saving money and clarifies the relationship between views on education and predictions about online universities (my take on the latter here).

______

*I'm inclined to buy it.

**To really appreciate this one, you need to know that Chemnitz used to be called Karl-Marx-Stadt.

How Good Is Good Reads?

A while back, Andy McKenzie wondered where "the imdb of books" is. By which he means a site that presents an authorative ranking of books on the basis of a large sample of votes, combined with a clever algorithm for scoring these. One of the candidates he considered for such a role was the site Good Reads:

Upside: As far as I can tell, this is the largest "bookshelf" site with the most user ratings. Huge potential. Downside: They've made no attempt to publish a list of the highest rated books across the site! All I can ask is, what is holding you back, GoodReads editors? Qualms about alienating authors whose works won't make the list? Fears of being labelled imperialistic? These are both hogwash. Our time is scarce and in order to be informed consumers we need to know what the best books are. If you are worried about the arbitrariness of the minimum votes cut-off, then publish multiple lists with different scaling parameters. You will thank me later when the list gets out-of-control traffic. Indeed, a group of passionate GoodReads users recently called for such a list. To this valiant effort I can only say, Viva la Résistance!

As it turns out, Good Reads has now come round to providing such lists. Andy won't be to thrilled, however, and neither am I. That's because they're doing it all wrong. Two big problems: One, if you want to calculate a score on the basis of multiple votes, your measure needs to be metric. But Good Reads provides labels for each point of its five-point scale, and if voters take those labels seriously, the scale is decidedly nonmetric (the labels are "it was amazing", "really liked it", "liked it", "it was o.k.", "didn't like it"). Second, and worse, their scoring method is quite obviously not a variant of the ingenious Bayesian formula used by imdb. I don't know how exactly the Good Reads algorithm works, but it seems to give a lot of weight to the total number of votes, so you won't be surprised to find that their Best Books Ever list looks like this.

Now, I'll admit I have an Aspergery fascination with lists (including references sections in academic texts. Really.), but their main use is giving recommendations that I like. Good Reads has hence a chance to redeem itself because it's heavy on recommendations. That system doesn't look to hot either (it seems to be based simply on matches with books one has rated 3 or higher), but there's no need to speculate on its quality: let's make it empirical! Here are six books that the site has recommended to me, that hadn't been on my mental "to read" list and that looked interesting:

• The Man Who Was Thursday, by G.K. Chesterton
• The Speed Queen, by Stewart O'Nan
• If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, by Italo Calvino
• Hawksmoor, by Peter Ackroyd
• Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson
• The End of the World News, by Anthony Burgess

In order to test how useful Good Reads is for me, I'll read five of those and see how much I like them. If the average rating will be 3 or above, I'll consider the site's recommendations a failure, as I can easily do that well without it. If the average rating will be 4 or above, I'll consider the system a big success. In between will be, well, in between. Ratings will be conceived of as metric. Half points are allowed. If I don't like a book enough, I'm going to put it down and rate it on estimated overall quality.

To wit, these are books I picked from the recommendations list on the basis of anticipated enjoyment. While it might seem "fairer" to pick a random selection of recommendations, such a test would have very low ecological validity: I want to know how useful the site will be to me in the future, and in the future I will not be picking books at random from the list.

Testing will be finished when I've rated five of the six books on the list. Given that I won't restrict my reading to these titles, and have other stuff to do as well, this will probably take a few months' time. I'll keep you posted. Anyone reading this is invited to play along.

And now, a literature review: I finished James Joyce's Dubliners today. The last two pages are really good.

The Mystery of Holiday and Airport Reading

Americans have coined the term "airport reading" for books that are easy, trivial reads. Here in the more densely populated Europe, a more illustrative term would be "train reading". The phenomenon's the same, though: Just check any bookstore in a train station, and you'll find that the books they have on offer are easier reads than the ones on display in your average bookstore. A related phenomenon is holiday reading - again, these are books that are easier than the avearage book.

It is somewhat puzzling that one should choose easier reading for travel and holidays, as has been noted by quite a few authors over the years. For example, Andrew Gelman writes: "I’ve never really understood the idea that a 'beach read' should be something light and fluffy. On the beach, you can relax, you have the time to get into anything." Likewise, I find a silent long-distance train carriage the ideal reading environment, superior even to a silent home. (Admittedly, not all train carriages are silent.) So why should station's book stores carry more trivial matter?

I guess this way of looking at things is an instance of the within-between fallacy: You look at your own reading choices on the beach or train and conclude that beach and train reading should be harder, not easier, books. But actually, a different kind of selection is going on. Beach and train reading is mainly reading by people who otherwise don't read a lot. That is, we are not talking of cases in which an easy book is chosen instead of a harder one, but those in which a book is chosen instead of none. Naturally, such choices will be slanted towards the easy-to-consume. Regular readers actually take the demanding stuff on trains and holidays.

But that seems to make the wrong prediction about the books on offer in the station's book store: we should expect the station's store to carry books that are about as demanding as those in a regular store; furthermore, we expect some of the really tough stuff on offer in the station. Yet they don't seem to sell much Joyce and Kant there.

I think this is explained by the fact that people who read regularly typically have quite a number of unread books at home, and will bring them. In contrast, people who don't read a lot think: "Got four hours to kill on the train, will pick up a thriller before departure." The train station's book store is hence dominated by the tastes of those who don't read regularly.

This suggests that these stores have been, and will be, hurt a lot by the new option of bringing your laptop to watch movies on it.

Pebbles, Vol. 37

1. All hail the Brits: This is how politics is supposed to be done (Tim Harford)

2. Martin Amis' disowned book: Invasion of the Space Invaders, including a cameo appearance by Christopher Hitchens (Mark O'Connell) (via)

3. Advances in interrogation techniques (xkcd)

4. No link found between junk food availability in schools and pupils' obesity (Nicholas Bakalar)

Pebbles, Vol. 36

Your weekend reading:

1. In praise of economic inequality (Paul Graham)

2. Harald Martenstein über das Sammeln von Büchern

3. Killian Fox explains pretty well why 2001 is the best film ever made.

4. "Unfortunately, bypassing the need to articulate the conditions and assumptions on which validity of the construct rests, may lead to bypassing consideration of whether these conditions and assumptions legitimately apply." The Deceibo Effect (Beatrice Golomb)

5. Are false rape accusations widespread? (Wendy McElroy)

6. Carreer advice: How to selectively report procedures and findings for publishability in psychology journals. Short, accessible academic paper (pdf) by Joseph P. Simmons, Leif D. Nelson and Uri Simonsohn.

7. What is it like to have an understanding of very advanced mathematics? (via)

8. Environmental catastrophe forecasts that didn't pan out. (Maxim Lott)

9. Insanity as rational choice given unusual preferences. Academic paper (pdf) by Bryan Caplan; of philosophical interest.

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

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)

Not a John Holmes Biography

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.

Question of the Day

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.

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

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.

Pebbles, Vol. 29: Stuff Other People Linked to Half a Year ago

1. Hebrew "translations" of Latin logos (Pointer: Kottke)

2. Askers vs. guessers

3. The most intimidating baby ever

4. Nasty piece about Christopher Hitchens from before the news about his illness. Nice demostration of the techniques you can use if you want to make a case against someone but don't have one.

5. God vs. Satan: Who killed more (according to the bible)?

In Defense of Sophistication

Soon turning into a rant against pundits

Via Andrew Gelman come a piece by American Enterprise Institute writer Steven Hayward on "The Irrelevance of Modern Political Science" and a response from John Sides. I am in no position to defend current Amercian political science, but Hayward's point is of relevance for the social sciences, and indeed epistemology, more generally.

Hayward writes:

The real problem with academic political science is its insistence on attempting to emulate the empiricism of economics and other social sciences, such that the multiple regression analysis is considered about the only legitimate tool of the trade. Some regressions surely illuminate, or more often confound, a popular perception of the political world, and it is these findings Klein rightly points out. But, on the other hand, I have often taken a random article from the American Political Science Review, which resembles a mathematical journal on most of its pages, and asked students if they can envision this method providing the mathematical formula that will deliver peace in the Middle East. Even the dullest students usually grasp the point without difficulty.

The silliest stuff first. Responds Gelman:

[T]he U.S. Army didn't deliver peace in the Middle East either, and at a far higher budget than the American Political Science Association!

More to the point, first, it is a bit mysterious why multiple regression analysis, which Hayward seems to consider the latest in statistical sophistication, should be less appropriate for political science than for "economics and other social sciences". (Is he thinking of Queer Studies?) Second, if maths is used, that's somehow not okay, though he never explictly says why. Third, the ultimate test for the veracity of a statement is whether the dullest students - not the brightest, the dullest - agree with it.

I have no doubt that there is an overuse of fancy mathematical methods in some social science work and have derided such excesses on the pages of this very blog. But to conclude that something must be wrong, or at least irrelevant, because it is hard to understand is utterly silly. Even when the topic is something relatively simple as the weather, scientists reach for the simplifying tools of mathematical modeling; shouldn't we expect these tools to be even more needed when the topic is a system as complicated as a polity? Should the criterion for using a method be whether Steven Hayward can understand it?

The fact of the matter is that some stuff is genuinely hard to understand. Students don't spend a lot of time learning stuff for no reason. Political scientists, hopefully, are the experts for understanding the methods that are deemed appropriate for the study of politics by their peers. No wonder Tom, Dick or Steven Hayward can't understand them - presumably he doesn't understand the contents of your average condensed matter physics journal either.

The right has no monopoly on the if-it's-hard-to-understand-it-can't-be-right heuristic. Here's Barbara Ehrenreich on a paper on the development of female happiness:

Only by performing an occult statistical manipulation called "ordered probit estimates" do the authors manage to tease out any trend at all

Comments Justin Wolfers, co-author of the paper in question:

O.K., so her first criticism is that we use an appropriate statistical technique for dealing with ordered responses

One might, of course, want to criticize the use of ordered probit regression on the data at hand. But Ehrenreich is in no position to do this. All she knows is that she's never heard of it, which is what "occult" means in the sentence above.

This leads us to a strange phenomenon to be observed in the US media. It is common over there to employ writers as pundits who churn out opinions on everything from evolutionary psychology to global warming. I have a hard time thinking of anyone who would be qualified to write on both topics, let alone all of those in between. Yet this appears to be of no concern to the writing hands.

If they were honest, pundits in papers and on the web would routinely have to produce paragraphs like the following:

So, what about the death penalty - am I for or against it? Well, an important question in this respect is whether or not it saves lives. This question is studied by scholars from a number of social science disciplines, and I had a look at some of their research. But, frankly, their debates soon turn to questions such as the assumptions behind "exclusion restrictions" for "instrumental variables regressions", and this stuff is over my head. So I declare ignorance. As a consequence, I don't have any strong views on the death penalty.

But a pundit - a glorified bloke at the bar - knows no uncertainty. On and on and on he opines. Ignorance is bliss. Finis.