Category: Philosophy

What is the point of replication?

by  Alex Tabarrok in

No experiment can ever be replicated so each attempted replication must assume that the things which differ don’t matter. The more and the more important the things that we can plausibly assume don’t matter, the stronger is the original study. Chemistry students have done the same experiments for hundreds of years and that’s useful because we can plausibly assume that who and when the experiment is conducted doesn’t matter. The recent brouhaha between Nosek et al. and Gilbert et al. illustrates a weaker case.

In their critique of Nosek et al., Gilbert et al. say that some of their replications failed because things were different.

An original study that asked Israelis to imagine the consequences of military service was replicated by asking Americans to imagine the consequences of a honeymoon

Now that sounds like two very different studies but Nosek provides important context. The original study in question wasn’t about military service or honeymoons it was about the conditions that promote reconciliation between victims and injurers after an injustice has been committed. The original study asked Israelis what they would do and how they would feel about a specific injustice. Namely you and a co-worker have been working on a project for a long-time but just before submission you are called away for reserve duty [male]/maternity leave [female]. Your co-worker takes credit for all the work and gets promoted while you later get demoted. The study then went on to ask questions about the conditions necessary for reconciliation. The reserve duty/maternity leave bit was just the story element needed to explain the situation not the focus of the study.

Nosek et al. tried to replicate the study in the United States where being called up for reserve duty is less common than in Israel and where being demoted for taking maternity leave could raise legal issues so they substituted ‘had to leave for honeymoon’. Everything else was the same. One of the original authors approved the new design.

Nosek et al. were not able to replicate the original findings. Is this because they didn’t replicate the study or because the study failed to replicate? Gilbert et al. say Nosek et al. failed to replicate the study.

In my view, Gilbert et al. are caught on the horns of a dilemma. If the studies don’t replicate they aren’t interesting and if the studies replicate but only under extremely precise conditions they also aren’t interesting. We are interested in general features of the human condition not in descriptions of the choices that 75 female and 19 male Israeli students made at a particular point in time. Moreover, if changes in wording matter then surely so does the fact that the original study was on Israeli’s in 2008 and the replication used Americans in 2013 (a lot has changed over these years!) and so must also a hundred other differences. But if so, what’s the point?

Hat tip: Andrew Gelman who has more to say.

Does personality cause politics?

by  Tyler Cowen in

In the first stage of our analysis, we demonstrated that there are several substantively significant relationships between the personality traits and political ideology dimensions. Most notably, P [a complex variable, but derived from “Psychoticism”] is substantially correlated with conservative military and social attitudes, while Social Desirability is related to liberal social attitudes, and Neuroticism is related to liberal economic attitudes [emphasis added by TC]. Our findings at the phenotypic level are highly consistent with similar explorations in an Australian population (Verhulst, Hatemi, and Martin 2010).

The results are generated from twins data.  I found this discussion very interesting, as it shows the standard personality-to-politics chain is only part of a richer story:

These findings directly challenge the causal pathway assumed in the extant literature (e.g., Gerber et al. 2010; Mondak et al. 2010). Rather than personality traits causing people to develop liberal or conservative political attitudes, the current results suggest two alternative relationships. First, the combined Cholesky and DoC analyses suggest that a common set of genes mutually influences personality traits and political attitudes, implying the relationship between personality and politics is a function of an innate common genetic factor rather than a sequential personality to politics model (see the right panel of Figure 1). The results from the DoC analysis also suggest an alternative causal model. That is, the latent set of genes shared between political attitudes and personality traits directly influences attitudes and indirectly influences personality traits. In other words, the genetic component of political attitudes partially mediates the genetic influence on personality traits. This finding is completely opposite from the basic assumption in the most recent literature (e.g., Gerber et al. 2010; Mondak et al. 2010). Thus, it appears the genetic component of political attitudes measured relatively later in an individual’s life contributes to the development of an individual’s personality along the way. In this view, attitudes are more than what is expressed in adulthood, but part of one’s disposition which guides behavior and selection into environments, which later are recognized and measured as attitudes in adulthood. Regardless of whether the final analysis supports a latent genetic source of covariance or a mutual causal structure, both perspectives require a major revision to the prevailing assumptions about political attitudes and personality traits.

That is from Verhulst, Eaves, and Hatemi.

Do conservatives prefer to use nouns?

by  Tyler Cowen in

The researchers, led by Dr Aleksandra Cichocka of the School of Psychology, also established that conservatives generally, to a greater degree than liberals, tend to refer to things by their names, rather than describing them in terms of their features. An example would be saying someone ‘is an optimist’, rather than ‘is optimistic’.

This use of nouns, rather than adjectives, is seen to preserve stability, familiarity and tradition – all of which appear to be valued more highly by conservatives than liberals.

Because nouns ‘elicit clearer and more definite perceptions of reality than other parts of speech’, they satisfy the desire for ‘structure and certainty’ that is common among social conservatives, the research authors found.

The research was based on studies carried out in three countries – Poland, Lebanon, and the USA. The US study compared presidential speeches delivered by representatives of the two main political parties. The sample included 45 speeches delivered by Republicans, considered to be more conservative, and 56 speeches delivered by then Democrats, considered to be more liberal.

The (gated) paper is here, and for the pointer I thank Charles Klingman.

Jonathan Haidt seeks a hire

by  Tyler Cowen in

From an email, via Dan Klein:

We are seeking a talented and experienced researcher with some tech skills to help run two projects that use social science research to improve major American institutions. Your main job would be research director for HeterodoxAcademy.org, a collaboration of social scientists trying to increase viewpoint diversity in the academy. You would also be part of the team at EthicalSystems.org, a research collaboration that uses behavioral science to “make ethics easy” for businesses.

The ideal candidate will be a recent Ph.D. or ABD in the social sciences with both technological sophistication and excellent writing skills.

To Apply: Send a CV, writing sample, and cover letter explaining why you would be a good fit for the job to Jeremy Willinger, Communications Director, at  [email protected].

“Are Choosers Losers?”– the value of control and the propensity to underdelegate

by  Tyler Cowen in

This is one of the more understudied behavioral biases, so I was pleased to see this new paper by Bobadilla-Suarez, Sunstein,and Sharot:

Human beings are often faced with a pervasive problem: whether to make their own decisions or to delegate decision tasks to someone else. Here, we test whether people are inclined to forgo monetary rewards in order to retain agency when faced with choices that could lead to losses and gains. In a simple choice task, we show that even though participants have all the information needed to maximize rewards and minimize losses, they choose to pay in order to control their own payoff. This tendency cannot be explained by participants’ overconfidence in their own ability, as their perceived ability was elicited and accounted for. Rather, the results reflect an intrinsic value for choice, which emerges in the domain of both gains and losses. Moreover, our data indicates that participants are aware that they are making suboptimal choices in the normative sense, but do so anyway, presumably for psychological gains.

I believe this is one reason why individuals can be so tribal, because otherwise they fear losing control to outsiders.

Why Do We Kiss?

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Smithsonian: [K]issing helps heterosexuals select a mate. Women in particular value kissing early on. Saliva is full of hormones Gustav-Klimt_The-Kiss_ArtExand other compounds that may provide a way of chemically assessing mate suitability—that’s the biological brain stepping in.

…While kissing, couples exchange 9 milliliters of water, 0.7 milligrams of protein, 0.18 mg of organic compounds, 0.71 mg of fats, and 0.45 mg of sodium chloride, along with 10 million to 1 billion bacteria, according to one accounting.

Women are also more likely to say that a first kiss could be the decider for selecting a mate. Can the biological drive overcome the perception that your chosen one is a bad kisser? Wlodarski says it’s hard to separate the two, but that “I would hazard a guess that if someone thinks someone is a bad kisser it’s because their smell wasn’t right,” he says. Women have to be more selective because they face greater consequences when they make a poor mating decision—like having to carry a baby for nine months, says Wlodarski.

…Not every culture is down with the full-on mouth kissing enlivened by a wandering tongue. That seems to be a modern, and Western, convention, perhaps from the last 2,000 years, says Wlodarski. A study published in 2015 found that less than half of the cultures surveyed engage in romantic, sexual kissing.

There’s evidence—at least from written history—that in the past, kissing was primarily mutual face or nose rubbing, or even sniffing in close proximity. In Hindu Vedic Sanskrit texts, kissing was described as inhaling each other’s soul.

Antonin Scalia on economic rights

by  Tyler Cowen in

From 1985 (pdf):

But still, that seemed to me a peculiar way to put it — contrasting economic affairs with human affairs as though economics is a science developed for the benefit of dogs or trees; something that has nothing to do with human beings, with their welfare aspirations, or freedoms.  That, of course, is a pernicious notion, though it represents a turn of mind that characterizes much American political thought.  It leads to the conclusion that economic rights and liberties and qualitatively distinct from, and fundamentally inferior to, other noble human values called civil rights, about which we should be more generous….On closer analysis, however, it seems to me that the difference between economic freedoms and what are generally called civil rights turns out to be a difference of degree rather than of kind.

He worries, however, that conservatives want a non-activist Court, but then want the Court to do what they want on economic issues.  Ultimately Scalia worried that if the Court gave too much credence to economic rights, it would end up with economic rights which are not sensible, and thus he wished to abide by a literally more conservative approach.  He closed his beautiful essay with this:

…the task of creating what I might call a constitutional ethos of economic liberty is no easy one.  But it is the first task.

I disagreed with him on many issues, but his presence on the Court was an important stepping stone for law and economics, and for philosophy as well I might add.

Addendum: “…justices die far more often when a member of the opposite party holds the White House.”

“If you could recommend only one book for me to read…”

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is a question from a very smart person, over thirty years of age, who claims not to have read very much (I don’t know how much).

So which book should I recommend?

Conditional on the person knowing me, the idea of simply introducing economics is not going to win, even if that would be the correct recommendation for many others.  And “Collected Works” are not allowed.

How about a broadly philosophical novel, such as Don Quixote or Homer’s Odyssey or In Search of Lost Time?  Moby-Dick?  A play of Shakespeare?  A current favorite, such as Ferrante or Knausgaard?

How about a perfectly constructed travel book, touting the virtues of a new and magical place?  But most travel books I find dull, unsatisfying, and too scattered with wasteful, overly subjective sentences about sunsets and train trips.

A didactic, moralizing book, perhaps on charity or Effective Altruism?

For many people music may be more powerful than the written word, so perhaps the recent Jan Swafford biography of Beethoven, or John Eliot Gardiner’s book on Bach, or any number of good books on Mozart.  A critical guidebook to some of the best movies available?  Almost everyone can glean new ideas for their Netflix queue, even if they already have seen lots of films.

I don’t know of a biography which is inspirational for everyone or even most people, and I figure an intelligent person older than thirty already has been exposed to the world’s major religions.

How about a book which is a compendium for a hobby, such as a bird watcher’s guide, a Sotheby’s auction catalog, or a Fuchsia Dunlop cookbook?

I keep finding myself drawn to recommend a book which leads the advice recipient away from books, rather than toward them.  Is that a strength or weakness of the book medium?

Toward a savanna theory of happiness?

by  Tyler Cowen in

We propose the savanna theory of happiness, which suggests that it is not only the current consequences of a given situation but also its ancestral consequences that affect individuals’ life satisfaction and explains why such influences of ancestral consequences might interact with intelligence. We choose two varied factors that characterize basic differences between ancestral and modern life – population density and frequency of socialization with friends – as empirical test cases. As predicted by the theory, population density is negatively, and frequency of socialization with friends is positively, associated with life satisfaction. More importantly, the main associations of life satisfaction with population density and socialization with friends significantly interact with intelligence, and, in the latter case, the main association is reversed among the extremely intelligent. More intelligent individuals experience lower life satisfaction with more frequent socialization with friends. This study highlights the utility of incorporating evolutionary perspectives in the study of subjective well-being.

That is from Li and Kanazawa, via Neuroskeptic, file under speculative.

If you could know one asset price twenty years out

by  Tyler Cowen in

Dennis Shiraev emails me:

You are an investor with $10 million planning to cash out in 20 years. A genie appears and offers to send you the price of one but only one asset 20 years from now to inform your investment decisions (a stock, currency pair, commodity, equity index, etc.). What do you want to know? The genie also gives you 20 year cumulative inflation (or exchange rate change for non USD assets) so you won’t need to worry about price/value disentangling.

I said the price of Bitcoin but also considered the IBOVESPA or Shanghai composite index prices.

This isn’t as simple as it might seem at first.  You might look for the most volatile price among the liquid assets whose trading you can access.  But knowing the price only twenty years out then tells you little about what is happening in the meantime.  Which price twenty years out gives you the most information about the global path of prices along the way?  That may suggest looking for a price with some persistence, and which contains lots of information about other prices too.

For purposes of tractability, let’s assume that prices are not rescaled in the meantime, through say major changes in currency names or index definitions, and that knowing the future price of a variable is in some way commensurable with the current understanding of that same variable.

Then I would opt for the Shanghai composite.  I don’t see Bitcoin prices as correlated with enough other facts about the future state of the world.  Plus, if it turned out that price would fall to zero or undefined, you might find it hard to short significant quantities of Bitcoin in the meantime.

What book that you have NOT read has most influenced and shaped your life?

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is from Venkatesh Rao, retweeted by Ben Southwood, a version of “Questions that are rarely asked.”

I suppose if you haven’t read the Bible or Quran those are easy answers, but let’s say you have.

I’ve only read snippets of Mein Kampf, so that has to stand as a contender.  But has the book really influenced and shaped my life?  Maybe you can attribute the relevant marginal product to the life of Hitler, with the book being intermediated by Hitler himself.  Therefore I am not sure that answer is true to the spirit of the question.

How about a training manual of some kind, which perhaps my early teachers read but I have never seen or even heard of?  Might my mother have read Dr. Spock or other parenting books?  That would be my best guess.

My conversation with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the video, the podcast, and the transcript.  Kareem really opened up.  Here is the summary:

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar joins Tyler Cowen for a conversation on segregation, Islam, Harlem vs. LA, Earl Manigault, jazz, fighting Bruce Lee, Kareem’s conservatism, dancing with Thelonious Monk, and why no one today can shoot a skyhook.

Maybe you think of Kareem as a basketball player, but here is my introduction:

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is one of America’s leading public intellectuals. I would describe him as an offshoot of the Harlem Renaissance, and what he and I share in common is a fascination with the character of Mycroft Holmes, the subject of Kareem’s latest book — and that of course, is Sherlock Holmes’s brother.

Here is Kareem:

I did know Amiri [Baraka]. I think the difference is I believe in what happened in Europe during what they call the Enlightenment. That needs to happen to black Americans, absolutely a type of enlightenment where they get a grasp of what is afflicting them and what the cures are.

I think that the American model is the best in the world but in order to get everybody involved in it we have to have it open to everyone. That hasn’t always been the case.

The most under-appreciated Miles Davis album?

For me [Kareem], the most under-appreciated one is Seven Steps to Heaven. And that shows, I think, Miles’ best group. There’s a big argument, what was Miles’ best group, the one that had Cannonball Adderley, Coltrane, Bill Evans, and Philly Joe Jones and Red Garland or Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Tony Williams, and Wayne Shorter?…number two is Porgy and Bess.

He cites Chester Himes as the underappreciated figure of the Harlem Renaissance.  And Kareem thinks like an economist:

It [my instruction] was going well with Andrew Bynum, but Andrew finally got to sign his contract for $50 million, and then at that point Andrew thought that I didn’t know anything and that he didn’t have to listen to me, and we don’t know where Andrew is right now.

Read or hear also his very interesting remarks on Islam, and where its next Enlightenment is likely to come from, not to mention Kareem on the resource curse and of course his new book (and my Straussian read of it).  And Kareem on his favorite movies, starting with The Maltese Falcon.  Self-recommending!

Kareem