Robin Hanson's Final Words on Signaling

"Falsifiability is just not a very useful concept in social science. Really."

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

Does Altruism Exist? Against the "Warm Glow" Argument

Models of human decision-making are just that: models, not the real thing. Another way to put this is to say that models are wrong. As the famous saying goes, all models are wrong, but some are useful. This leads to the question, useful for what? That is, just because a model is useful in one domain, doesn't mean it's useful in another domain.

Case in point: economists. Traditionally, they have been working with a model of rational, egoistic decision-makers. Pretty much everybody knows that model is wrong because people sometimes act altruistically, but the model is useful model for many purposes. The trouble starts when people forget that it's just a model that is supposed to be good for some purposes (and not others) and start to defend the model as though it were an entirely accurate description - a view that obviously does not conform to the empirical evidence.

Bryan Caplan is not one of those people. He points out that altruism is real. Anticipating counter-arguments, he adds:

Sure, true believers in ubiquitous selfishness can grasp at straws to protect their dogma.  Perhaps people donate blood for the free cookie, join the army because they might run for office one day, or give to charity in order to make business connections.  Or maybe millions of average joes are clueless enough to believe that the blood supply, the safety of the free world, and the availability of charity hinge on whatever they personally choose to do. 

Anything is possible, but that doesn't mean that anything is plausible.  [...] Genuine altruism is all around us.  Benevolence doesn't explain why bakers bake bread for paying customers, but it does explain why blood donors give blood to strangers for free.

Naturally, this prompts his readers to double down on the altruism-is-really-egoism stuff. For example, his reader Caliban Darklock writes:

I suggest that if there exists an incentive, the activity is not altruistic.

If I give a person $10 for drugs, and then I take the drugs and they give me an endorphin rush, that is not altruistic.

If I give a person $10 because it makes me feel good about myself, which gives me an endorphin rush, how is that altruistic?

I traded $10 for an endorphin rush either way. What is the rational distinction between them?

This is generally known as the "warm glow" argument: If you give money to charity, for example, you get a positive feeling ("warm glow") in return. A counterargument to this comes from Jon Elster (cited from memory): If you could raise your future utility by taking a pill that erases all your altruistic motivations, would you do it? Probably not, because you think it would induce you to do things that are morally wrong.

Antoher counterargument that I've just though up: If, for example, giving a person $ 10 makes you feel good about yourself, this already presupposes you're an alturist. If you weren't, it wouldn't make you feel good about yourself. That is, the argument presupposes what it tries to disprove. I guess philosophers have a name for this; I don't.

Biological Reality of Race? What Does It Even Mean? (Also: Free access to Sage journals)

Via Dan Hirschman at Scatterplot comes a debate in Sociological Theory about the nature of race: is it social and/or biological? The new contributions consist of three critical reactions to an article in the 2012 volume of the same journal by Jiannbin Lee Shiao, Thomas Bode, Amber Beyer and Daniel Selvig called "The Genomic Challenge to the Social Construction of Race", and a rejoinder by Shiao. 

The topic isn't new, and the sub-exchange between Shiao in one corner and Daniel Martinez HoSang in the other confirms what something I've long been thinking about this.  

As you may know, variants of cluster analysis can be used to group individuals' genomes on the basis of similarities and dissimilarities, and it has been shown that the resulting clusters correspond to racial categories, as measured by self-identification, for example. One of the two main arguments in the initial Shiao et al. paper is that this clearly shows that the view that race has no biological basis, held by so many sociologists, is wrong.

HoSang's article ends in an attempt at character assassination that stops just short of holding Shiao et al. personally responsible for the gas chambers in Auschwitz, but the earlier portions actually have serious content. HoSang voices misgivings about the validity of the cluster analyses and their interpretation by Shiao et al. and others, but then goes on to say (p. 233):

And even if one accepts the (contested) finding that self-identified race or ethnicity correlates with population structure, this finding does not justify a conclusion that “race” (or clinal class) has a biological basis. At the most quotidian level, the findings suggest that a statistical analysis of genetic ancestry informative markers of a population in the United States that self-identifies as “black” is likely to bear a relationship to an analysis of populations sampled in some region of sub-Saharan Africa. And a population that self-identifies as Chinese is likely to be statistically related with a population in China (Dupré 2008). That a new statistical technique has validated a high probability of such histories of migration is hardly revelatory; it does not establish a biological basis of race.

But  Shiao et al. clearly think just that: These findings show that race has a biological basis.

I suggest that people who wish to have this debate take a step back and start by reaching an agreement on the following:

1. What does it means to say, "Race has a biological basis"? What does it mean to say "Race is a biologically meaningful concept"? Are the two the same?

2. What evidence, if it existed, would show that race has a biological basis/is a biologically meaningful concept? What evidence, if it existed, would refute those claims?

If you don't do that, you'll debate ad infinitum.

Added: Along similar lines, Fabio Rojas comments.

**************

By the way, you can download all of the articles above, as Sage allows open access to all of its journals until October 31st (registration required).

Low Status and Economic Inequality: Two Points Often Overlooked

Lots of talk about economic inequality around U.S. blogs recently, on the occasion of the translation of Piketty's book. Here are two points that I think are often overlooked. Each of the points could hold if the other does not.

1. Let us say we know with certainty that low-status people suffer because most others are higher up the ladder. This suffering may come in the form of envy or of more distal outcomes such as poor health. This phenomenon, considered well-established by many, is often presented as an argument for reducing inequality. But does it follow that high-inequality societies are worse off, all other things equal? Of course not! Presumably, if low-status people suffer because they occupy a low rung, high-status people benefit because they occupy a high rung. The benefit experienced by high-status people might outweigh the suffering experienced by low-status people. Put differently, it is conceivable that, net of the influence of other factors, the avarage utility per person is as high or higher in a high-inequality society as it is in a low-inequality society. You might say that similarity of utility is desirable in and of itself, but then you'd be introducing an additional moral principle that not everybody might share. I'm saying "additional" because, as soon as you're arguing on the basis of people's suffering, you're already arguing on a utilitarian basis, whether or not you're aware of it.

2. Again, let us say people experience psychological costs because others do better than they do. But, clearly, there are positive externalities, too. In any society which uses taxation to pay for free or subsidized goods, poorer people benefit from having rich people around. That's because rich people pay disproportionate shares of the cost of amenities such as public libraries, clean drinking water, and a functioning criminal justice system. Low-income earners pay less than their share, even in flat tax regimes. Put differently, they get more than what they pay for. Would they really be better off if they switched to a regime in which they were less envious, but got Zimbabwe-level sewage and criminal justice systems? Probably not.

The False Dichotomy Fallacy When There Are Only Two States of the World

The term false dichotomy fallacy (or fallacy of the false dichotomy) is typically used when a person concludes that your position is B because you commited to the view "not A", but there is at least one other position (C, D, E . . .) one can take. For example, when you say that a certain human trait is not 100% environmentally determined, people will often assume you think it is 100% genetically determined, despite the fact that there are a lot of numbers between 0 and 100. In so doing, they are committing the false dichotomy fallacy.

This fallacy, or a variant of it, can be committed even if there are only two possible states of the world. Suppose someone was about to toss a coin and declared: "This one will certainly come up heads." You might then say, "I wouldn't be so sure about that" and the person might reply, "Oh, so you think it will come up tails?" In this example it's obvious: You didn't mean that the other state of the world is certain to come to pass, you simply meant to express uncertainty, given that we cannot know the result of the coin toss.

While the example is a bit far from most real-life situations, variants of it seem to come up quite frequently. Generally, your expressing doubt that X is true is likely to be read as your asserting that X is not true. People tend to go about as though one had to take a confident position on as many issues as possible and assume others feel the same way. (In U.S. discourse, "opinionated" is usually meant as a compliment.*) This may be a sign that uttering opinions has little to do with truth-seeking an a lot with positioning oneself in social space by signaling what type of a person one is.

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*Until a few minutes ago, I thought that there was no term in German for the word "opinionated". Now I see that the dictionary I consulted gives two terms that are clearly negative, eigensinnig and starrsinnig.

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)

"Faith" Is Such a Useful Concept

Atheists sometimes point out that there is no reason to believe in god exactly because such a belief is a matter of faith. As faith is defined as "belief without evidence", this is equivalent to saying that you should not believe in god because there is no evidence for his existence. This is obviously based on the presumption that you should not believe in the existence of something if there is no evidence for it.

The concept of faith comes in handy in a few cases in which I personally feel that it's bloody obvious that a certain view is bonkers, but also know that my making the statement "that's obviously bonkers" will not be awfully convincing to you if you do not agree anyway. Take "natural rights". It should be self-evident that they don't exist. Yet there's a famous document, revered by many, which states that it's self-evident people are endowed with "certain inalienable Rights". What if you want to argue that such rights don't exist? You can point out that there is no evidence for their existence. They're a matter of faith.

Closely related, the philosophical position called "moral realism" (which holds that some moral propositions are objectively true, independent of psyches that recognize them as true) is a matter of faith. So is the belief that objects can be said to have an objective quality (in the sense of "higher" or "lower" quality), implying that you can say that movie X is objectively better that movie Y and that if you don't agree you are mistaken. These positions should not be assumed to be true, as there is no evidence for them. You should not say that you're absolutely certain they're wrong either, as evidence for them may come along in the future. I have no idea what evidence for natural rights or moral realism or objective quality would even look like, but that doesn't mean it's impossible it will come along. 

I should add that this post was in part inspired by reading Brad Taylor's post "Natural Rights Don't Exist" (via), which doesn't really deliver on the title, but succeeds in showing that the nonagression principle can lead to very undesirable consequences. Yet once you're arguing in terms of consequences, you've already left the question whether natural rights exist. He tries to weld the two issues together, but does not, I thnk, succeed. Perhaps he should simply have said that there is no evidence for the existence of such rights.

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

Pebbles, Vol. 44

1. When absence of evidence is evidence of absence (xkcd)

2. An attempt to answer the question, "What were Stanley Kubrick's favourite films?" (Nick Wrigley)

3. One more time: Changing football coaches seems to make no sense (on average, within the observed range) (Hannah Barnes)

4. Where does the phrase "I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords" come from?

5. Researching the effect of stop-and-frisk is really hard. (Benjamin Wallace-Wells)

6. Andrew Gelman on Axelrod's interpretive overreach concerning trench warfare and the multiple comparisons problem and expressing uncertainty.

7. Who guards the guardians? Cameras could. (Randall Stross)

8. "Slot machine sounds can manipulate players, researchers say" (Meerie Kim)

Pebbles, Vol. 43

1. "The top secret rules that allow NSA to use US data without a warrant". And: A timeline of NSA domestic spying; also: Bruce Schneier on why whistleblowers are needed. Und: Bespitzelung in den USA und Deutschland.

2. Orson Scott Card on four types of stories.

3. Interview with a two-handed climate scientist (via)

4. Epigenetics and the dissimilarities between "identical" twins.

5. The first issue of the open-source Journal of Causal Inference is out. (via)

6. Photographs of poor New Yorkers in the 1890s.

7. Ein Grund, nicht die SPD zu wählen.

8. There's a beetle named in hounour of Hitler. Not to be confused with the bug that looks like Hitler. Or the goldfish that looks like Hitler. Or the house that looks like Hitler. 

9. When love disappears.

10. Merton's concept of ritualism illustrated (via)

11. The technical trends of the 2012-13 football season

Gender and Causality

As far as I can see, a lot of the astronomical number of citations Paul Holland's article "Statistics and Causal Inference" has accumulated is due to the fact that he coined the term "fundamental problem of causality", describing the fact that you can observe a unit only with or without treatment, but not both. Every time you mention that problem, you're pretty much obliged to cite Holland. I'm not so happy with Holland's coinage of the term, because I would have thought that an even more fundamental problem of causality - or rather, the estimation of causal influences -  than the one Holland referred to is that you cannot observe causality.

Like many others, I am also unhappy with the maxim "No causation without manipulation" that Holland's article spread. Writes Markus Gangl in his pretty good (but not untechnical) review of causal inference with observational data (pp. 38-39; gated link):

The perception that the counterfactual framework would primarily apply to the effects of policy interventions or other explicitly manipulated (or at least manipulable) treatments is perhaps the single most important impediment to its more widespread adoption in sociology. This perception is a major misunderstanding on the part of sociologists (cf. also Heckman 2005, Moffitt 2005, Sobel 1998). Whether nonmanipulable factors such as gender, race, or class affect life courses is a perfectly sensible counterfactual question to begin with [...]. With respect to gender, for example, the counterfactual “manipulation” in question is the determination of fetal gender at inception, which, moreover, is plausibly random (Rubin 1986), so that its causal effect is directly identified from the comparison of mean life-course outcomes among men and women from, for example, the same birth cohort or country. In this specific case, and ignoring SUTVA [...], the main impediment to causal inference is not so much a lack of controls, as a lack of representative samples (see Sobel 1998).

That's right: If you want to look at the causal effects of gender, just compare group means. I don't know, though, what Gangl is getting at with his remark on representative data - there's quite a few representative datasets that contain both men and women. The problem (that Gangl hints at in technical, general terms on p. 39) is rather that nobody really cares about the total effect of assignment to a sex. What people care about are the mediating mechanisms - testosterone, discrimination, that kind of thing.

Speaking of discrimination, feminism is a bewilderingly imprecise term, but I have found the following, very reductionist, model helpful when thinking about the strand sometimes called "radical feminism." You can see it as an ideology that took two figures of thought referring to the interrelationship between groups and applying them to gender. From anti-racism, radical feminism took the idea that differences between groups cannot be based on biological differences. From Marxism came the idea that history is mainly the struggle between groups, which leads to fanciful statements such as the description of rape as "nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear."

Note that the two combine nicely to shut off uncertainty. The no-biology view tells us that all observed differences between men and women must be due to discrimination of one sort or another; the men-against-women view tells us who's doing the discriminating. No further research needed.

Around the Blogs, Vol. 94

1. Deontic or consequentialist ethics? Bayesianism! (Eric Raymond)

2. How to keep your brain clean (Bryan Caplan)

3. Are learning styles a myth? (Mo Costandi)

4. 11 rules for critical thinking (Maria Popova/Peter A. Sturrock)

5. Bonkers infographics (Adam Obeng) (via)

Which Economic Literatures Are the Least Trustworthy? Does Science Put Too Much Weight on the Base Rate?

Those tables (click to enlarge) are from an important paper called "Are All Economic Facts Greatly Exaggerated? Theory Competition and Selectivity" (gated, via) by Chris Doucouliagos and T.D. Stanley that's recently been published in the Journal of Economic Surveys (rather than the AER, where it probably belongs). The higher the beta-value, the more the publications in that literature are estimated to be biased due to selection (what gets published and what doesn't). Hence, the higher the value, the more the literature as a whole exaggerates how homogenous real-world phenomena are. Hypothetical example (mine, not theirs): Imagine you knew with certainty that, on average, a woman's colour of hair had no effect on how attractive men find her. Further imagine that the economic literature consistently showed that "gentlemen prefer blondes". You would then expect this literature to receive a high beta-value in the table. (The computation of the value is somewhat complicated, but based on the idea that literatures are selective if they feature many results that are just significant.)

The authors go on to estimate what predicts beta. Here's the paper's abstract:

There is growing concern and mounting evidence of selectivity in empirical economics. Most empirical economic literatures have a truncated distribution of results. The aim of this paper is to explore the link between publication selectivity and theory contests. This link is confirmed through the analysis of 87 distinct empirical economics literatures, involving more than three and a half thousand separate empirical studies, using objective measures of both selectivity and contests. Our meta–meta-analysis shows that publication selection is widespread, but not universal. It distorts scientific inference with potentially adverse effects on policy making, but competition and debate between rival theories reduces this selectivity and thereby improves economic inference.

Besides being a very important contribution on the trustworthiness of different literatures, this addresses a question that I've been thinking about quite a bit: Everybody knows that implausible results get double-checked more often than plausible ones (I once helped a friend who had found, using matching, that the results were exactly the opposite of what you should expect. Can you guess the reason?). So results that seem plausible get a leg up. Isn't that an unfair advantage for plausible results? Well, that depends on how good your prior theories are. If they're really good, then confirming results should get a leg up. But how do you know that they're good? Only by looking at empirical results. Etc., ad infinitum.

The authors run a regression to see what predicts the selectivity of literatures. It turns out that selectivity is higher when there is only one reigning theory - that is, when available theory makes a clear prediction on which way the results ought to go, the estimates are particularly untrustworthy. This suggests that results that conform to theory are given too much of a leg up, probably due to a number of processes including, but not limited to, double-checking. This, it seems to me, is a very, very important result.

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)

The 'Nonexpert' Challenge

When there is a public debate about a (social) science topic, pitting proponents of view A against proponents of view B, you sometimes encounter a variant of the following statement by someone promoting view A: "The specific person who holds that B is correct has never published original analyses concerning the topic in question in the peer-reviewed literature."

Let's note in passing that people who know the peer-review process first hand are often not as impressed by this institution as many journalists. More importantly, I am not so sure that not having published extensively about a topic makes your view less credible. If you do have a history of publication on the topic, you will probably have a better grasp of the facts, including methodological challenges brought about by the kind of data that we're talking about.

On the other hand, if you don't have such a history, you have some advantages. First, you can look at the issues with a fresh eye. You may, for example, see issues that people trained in a certain field can't, because that is not germane to the way one looks at things in a that field. Second, you are less subject to pressures that come with being a researcher in a field. This comes in two flavours - social disapproval (no one wants to have a beer with you after the conference) and professional disadvantages (no grant money for you). Third, long-standing researchers went on the record long ago with their view on whether A or B is correct. It is painful to state in public that you were wrong. A newbie does not have this problem.

Given this, it's not clear to me that an author's lack of a history of publication should signal reduced credibility of his views. It seems quite clear, though, that if the only rebuttal to A that B-proponents can come up with is that A-proponents have no history of publication in the field, this is a strong signal that there is a lot to be said for A. If that's all B-proponents offer, this suggests they have no good replies to the actual arguments in question.

While I'm at it, let me note that stating (perhaps correctly) that a certain view is "divisive" says nothing about its veracity, just as the claim that being a Christian improves your behaviour says nothing about the existence of god. 

The Best Blog Posts of 2012: Vanity Edition

After my post on other people's 2012 posts that I liked best, here are ten of my posts from last year that I find more worthwhile than the others. In chronological order:

• How "Social Distance" Is Misleading
• The within-between Fallacy
• The Discrimination Fallacy
• The Argument from the Absence of Apocalypse
• Poverty and Life Outcomes: A Theory of the Changing Relative Importance of Resources and Personality
• Why You Shouldn't Borrow Books from Acquaintances
• The Greatest Tracks of the 1990s, Part 3: 30-1
• Testing vs. Matching and the Attraction of the Aphorism
• Sometimes You Need Both Blades of the Scissors
• Why Most Studies of Male-Female Differences Are Useless

This is the last installment of my turn-of-the-year flurry in linklists. I promise the next post will contain substantial blocks of new text written by me.

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.

Criticism Need Not Be Constructive

People like getting constructive criticism. And indeed getting constructive criticism is good, assuming that the "constructive" part is good. Criticism means that someone tells you about your work's weaknesses. Constructive criticism means that the person also tells you what to do about it. For example, Tim Harford writes about getting feedback on a recent talk he gave:

Bruno Giussani of TED, seeing someone praise me for speaking without slides,  immediately got to the point. “You talked about the Spitfire,” he said, “But this is an international audience. Many people won’t know what you’re talking about. You should have shown just one slide: a photograph of a Spitfire. Then everyone would have understood.”

Next time I give a similar speech, I’ll be showing one slide: a photograph of a Spitfire.

That's good advice. (As a commenter pointed out, given the international nature of the internet, it would have been helpful if Harford had included a photo of a Spitfire with his article.) But there's a mantra that criticism must be constructive - that is, don't criticize someone if you cannot also tell them what to do about the problem.

I think that is a harmful norm, for two reasons. First, once a feature of your product is identified as weak, people other than the identifying party may come up with a solution. For example, if Harford had simply been told that the audience didn't know what a Spitfire is, he could probably have come up with a solution himself. Second, even if no one can think of a solution, having a weakness pointed out leads to a more realistic appreciation of your product, which by itself can be very helpful. When several people in your movie production company report vague feelings that a specific screenplay would not make a good basis for a movie if the aim is to make money, you may not want to produce it. If tests show that the brakes on a new car are not working properly, you may not want to start selling it. These are cases where nobody points out how to solve the problem, yet knowing that the problem exists is very important.

This latter argument also illuminates why it is wrong to say, normatively, that "it takes a theory to beat a theory." The reason is that knowing you are ignorant is better than falsely believing that you have a correct theory. For example, if a treatment is actually harmful, the person who says she doesn't know whether the treatment works is closer to the truth, and will hence make better decisions, than the person who is confident that the treatment is beneficial.

"Criticism must be constructive" is the postulate of schoolteachers who do a bad job at preparing their students for the outside world, which is a harsh and nasty place. "It takes a theory to beat a theory" is the mantra of the proponents of the old theory who can't find anything wrong with a critical assessment.