Category: Religion
Counterintuitive stories
This one is from Canada:
Muslim group moves to ban burka
"Considering the fact that women are in fact forbidden from wearing burkas in the grand mosque in Mecca, Islam's holiest site, it hardly makes sense that the practice should be permitted in Canada, she said."
The proposed ban comes on the heels of reports that Sheikh Mohamed Tantawi, dean of Egypt's al-Azhar university and the country's highest Muslim authority, is poised to issue a fatwa, or religious edict, against the garments.
The economics of placebos for self-remitting diseases
Daniel Carpenter, who just wrote the very impressive FDA book, has an interesting paper on his home page:
I develop a simple stochastic model of inference and therapeutic utilization in the presence of placebo effects, when the underlying medical condition may be self-remitting. In the model, expectations generate a “felt” health state which can mimic the medically cured health state even when the treatment in question has no real curing power. This effect may be augmented by self-limitation of the medical condition for which the treatment is utilized. A human agent then applies Bayes’ rule to the felt history as if it were generated pharmacologically. A more sophisticated agent knows of placebo effects but does not know the precise extent to which they contribute to curing. I describe the bias that attends inference and the under – or overutilization of therapies under such a model. A central result of the model is that human placebo learning is generally subject to greater bias in estimating treatment efficacy when diseases are self-limiting. Human agents may commit several types of decision errors under placebo learning. They may continually choose a more costly (expensive, hazardous) treatment when a less costly one would work as well, or they may continually use inferior treatments for life-threatening illnesses. When diseases are self-limiting, both these types of error are more likely when the human agent has high initial beliefs about the treatment. Possible applications of the model include the patent medicine industry, the robustness of markets for herbal and nutritional supplements, and the contemporary stability of counterfeit drug operations.
Of course this applies a lot more broadly than to medicine. It helps explain why people overuse and underuse "treatments" of many different kinds, including education. Here is Dan Carpenter's page on fly fishing.
Dominance Displays
Compare:
Voodoo bathing ritual
The source article, by Wade Davis on voodoo (I don't agree with everything in it), is here.
*The Cleanest Race*
This is a very interesting book about the ideologies behind North Korea. The author is B.R. Myers and the subtitle is How North Koreans See Themselves — and Why it Matters. Excerpt:
One searches these early works in vain for a sense of fraternity with the world proletariat. The North Koreans saw no contradiction between regarding the USSR as developmentally superior on the one hand and morally inferior on the other. (The parallel to how South Koreans have always viewed the United States is obvious.) Efforts to keep this contempt a secret were undermined by over-confidence in the impenetrability of the Korean language and the inability of all nationalists to put themselves in a foreigner's shoes. The Workers' Party was taken by surprise, for example, when Red Army authorities objected to a story about a thuggish Soviet soldier who mends his ways after encountering a saintly Korean street urchin — another child character symbolizing the purity of the race.
I liked this bit as well:
The lack of conflict makes North Korean narratives seem dull even in comparison to Soviet fiction. Rather than try to stimulate curiosity about what will happen next, directors and writers try to make one wonder what has already happened. Films introduce characters in a certain situation (getting a medal, say), then go back and forth in time to explain how they got there. Nowhere in the world do writers make such heavy use of the flashback. But we should beware of assuing that people in the DPRK find these narratives as dull as we do. The Korean aesthetic has traditionally been very tolerant of convention and formula. (South Korean broadcasters rework the same few soap-opera plots every year). According to refugee testimony, however, most North Koreans prefer stories set either in the "Yankee colony" or in pre-revolutionary times, with real villains and conflict.
I also recommend the new book Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, by Barbara Demick. Excerpt:
North Koreans have multiple words for prison in much the same way that the Inuit do for snow.
From the WSJ, here is a joint review of the two books.
Critique of transhumanism
Here is one sample point:
First, that the Enlightenment project of Reason to which many transhumanists are committed is self-erosive and requires nonrational validation. Transhumanist advocates for Bayesianism and transcending cognitive biases need to confront the repeated implosions of the religion of Reason into romanticism and mysticism, and develop more sophisticated and nuanced defenses of rationality.
And this:
…while most transhumanists are liberal democrats, their Enlightenment beliefs in human perfectibility and governance by reason can also validate technocratic authoritarianism. Even staunchly libertarian transhumanists appear to be blithely unaware that arguments for government by benign superintelligent beings that know human interests better than we do recapitulate arguments for totalitarianism from the French Revolution through Marxist-Leninism.
Etc. I thank Kyle Munkittrick for the pointer. Here is my previous post on transhumanism.
The decline of Christmas cards
Agnostic reports:
Using Lexis-Nexis, I found an estimate of 26 Christmas cards for 1990, so that the number of all holiday greeting cards would have been a bit above — probably around the 1987 level of 29 cards across all holidays. The first big drop is visible by 1994, when the number of cards received per household was about 25% lower than in 1987. There was another drop-off starting in 2003, and during the most recent years of 2007 and 2008, the number is down about 40% from the late '80s / early '90s. This does not merely reflect the fact that there are more households now than then, which would tend to lower the ratio even if the total number of cards stayed the same. In 1987, 2.856 billion holiday greeting cards were received vs. 2.117 billion in 2007 — a decrease in sheer volume of 736 million cards.
And what is the upshot?:
1) The various signals of Christmas have been steadily fading since roughly the mid-1990s, at least a decade before the "War on Christmas" debate erupted. Rather than special interests knocking off Christmas-lovers, the general public voluntarily dropped out. None of the changes in the signals is clearly related to the internet, macroeconomic indicators, etc. The only strong association I see is the larger cultural shift away from sincerity and sentimentality toward affectation and irony.
2) They have not been replaced with new signals. Rather, we're pulling out investment from the holiday altogether and shifting it into other holidays like New Year's Eve and Halloween (which Lexis-Nexis suggests was taken over by adults also in the mid-1990s). Anything that will afford us greater opportunities to make the duckface for the cameras.
Contrary to the author's suggestion, I am inclined to see the internet at work here, even if it doesn't explain the entire series. If you stay in touch by Facebook, what's the point of the yearly reminder? This is another example of how the internet can lower measured gdp yet raise welfare.
If you scroll down on the blog, you'll find other indicators of the decline of interest in Christmas.
“Late believers”: more rational than you think
It's from The Washington Post, but for a moment I thought I was reading Robin Hanson:
Santa's spell hasn't been broken for Fiona Penn, either. A 12-year-old student at Carl Sandburg Middle School in the Alexandria part of Fairfax, Fiona is aware of the ubiquitous shopping mall Santas and the fact that some presents arrive via a UPS truck, not from the sky. But she chooses to believe that her Santa is different.
"The mall Santas, they change. They get hired and fired. But he's the real one," she said.
The full story is here.
Addendum: Fiona responds to critics in the comments section.
Contra Max Weber
Davide Cantoni (who by the way is on the job market, from Harvard) reports:
Many theories, most famously Max Weber's essay on the 'Protestant ethic,' have hypothesized that Protestantism should have favored economic development. With their considerable religious heterogeneity and stability of denominational affiliations until the 19th century, the German Lands of the Holy Roman Empire present an ideal testing ground for this hypothesis. Using population figures in a dataset comprising 276 cities in the years 1300-1900, I find no effects of Protestantism on economic growth. The finding is robust to the inclusion of a variety of controls, and does not appear to depend on data selection or small sample size. In addition, Protestantism has no effect when interacted with other likely determinants of economic development. I also analyze the endogeneity of religious choice; instrumental variables estimates of the effects of Protestantism are similar to the OLS results.
The full paper, and other work by Cantoni, is here. I believe this is the most thorough statistical test of the Weberian hypothesis to date.
Swiss minarets
I have a few points:
1. Sooner or later an open referendum process will get even a very smart, well-educated country into trouble.
2. Given that the referendum came up, it was wise to root for its defeat. The victory of the referendum is a symbol that prejudice can now advance a step.
3. That said, was there not some other way to sidestep this dilemma? Washington D.C. doesn't allow tall buildings to compete with the Washington Monument, yet no one considers that a restriction on political freedom (though it may be a bad idea for economic reasons). The Swiss cantons could have done the same for their town churches. Note that a restriction on a minaret is not a restriction on a mosque.
4. I favor greater Muslim immigration into the United States and I think Muslim emigration to Europe is working better than most people think. I am happy to see that Switzerland has become a more cosmopolitan society, in large part by taking in more emigrants, including Muslims. Nonetheless, call me old-fashioned, but I don't think a Swiss town center should look like the photograph above. I guess the Swiss don't either.
5. I also don't have any problem with Mecca limiting the size of Christian churches in that town, or say if an American billionaire wanted to build a really big cross there. (Oddly Dubai allows it.)
6. The United States is special and thus it allows a very, very large mosque not so far from Bowling Green, Ohio. I am pleased we have the sort of polity which makes this possible, but I also recognize many other countries cannot inhabit this same political space.
7. The overall lesson is that knowing how and when to defuse an issue is one very large part of political wisdom. The Swiss usually pass this test but this time they failed it.
The Big Questions
In The Big Questions, Steven Landsburg ventures far beyond his usual domain to take on questions in metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. Beginning with Plato, mathematicians have argued for the reality of mathematical forms. Rene Thom, for example, once said "mathematicians should have the courage of their most profound convictions and thus affirm that mathematical forms indeed have an existence that is independent of the mind considering them." Roger Penrose put it more simply, mathematical abstractions are "like Mount Everest," they are, he said, "just there."
All this must make Steven Landsburg history's most courageous mathematician because for Landsburg mathematical abstractions are not like Mount Everest, rather Mount Everest is a mathematical abstraction. Indeed, for Landsburg, it's math all the way down – math is what exists and what exists is math, A=A.
Read the book for more on this view, which is as good as any metaphysics that has ever been and a far sight better than most. Moreover, Landsburg's view is not empty, it does have real implications. Since there is no uncertainty in math, for example, Landsburg's view supports a hidden variables or multiple-worlds view of quantum physics.
Speaking of quantum physics, The Big Questions, has the clearest explanation of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle that I have ever read. In fact, this is a necessary consequence of Landsburg's metaphysical views; since it's all math all the way down, the explanation of the uncertainty principle is the explanation of the math and any true uncertainty or mystery is simply a fault of our own misunderstanding.
Turning to epistemology, the theory of beliefs and knowledge, two chapters stand out for me. I learned a lot from Landsburg remarkable clear explanation of Aumann's agreement theorem–and I say that despite the fact that in the office next to mine is Robin Hanson, one of the world's experts on the theorem (see Robin's papers on disagreement and also his paper with Tyler, but read Landsburg first!).
Landsburg's skills of explanation are also brought to bear in a wonderful little chapter explaining the theory of instrumental variables and of structural econometric modeling – and this from an avowedly armchair economist!
Finally for those, like me, who loved The Armchair Economist and More Sex is Safer Sex there is also lots of economics in The Big Questions. Highly recommended.
NASA FAQ 2012
NASA scientists are frequently being asked questions concerning 2012 and for this reason they have created a
Q: Is there a planet or brown dwarf called Nibiru or Planet X or Eris that is approaching the Earth and threatening our planet with widespread destruction?
A: Nibiru and other stories about wayward planets are an Internet hoax. There is no factual basis for these claims. If Nibiru or Planet X were real and headed for an encounter with the Earth in 2012, astronomers would have been tracking it for at least the past decade, and it would be visible by now to the naked eye. Obviously, it does not exist. Eris is real, but it is a dwarf planet similar to Pluto that will remain in the outer solar system; the closest it can come to Earth is about 4 billion miles.
Sigh…. I too fear for our planet.
Markets in everything, Jesus vs. germs edition
A company called Purity Communion Solutions
was founded in 2007 to market "germ-free products that take the worry
out of contracting germs while receiving communion, and ultimately
increasing communion participation and church attendance." Purity
Communion Solutions already has 375,000 client churches, church supply
houses and the like, and its Web site features all sorts of information
about the H1N1 virus, as well as products that aim to keep you in
church, and keep you healthy. They include an automated host dispenser
in gold, silver, or white, as well as wafers infused with wine:
"Improved taste and texture" and "eliminates germs, spills &
waste."
And if you don't already know:
Christians [sic] not only gather together for worship at least weekly, but
they also dip their fingers in common fonts of holy water, pass baskets
up and down the pews to collect donations, exchange handshakes and hugs
at the sign of peace, and — in varying formats — share bread and wine
at communion, sometimes drinking from a single chalice or picking from
a loaf of bread. Those churches in which a priest or minister gives out
individual wafers of consecrated bread aren't much better off, studies
show, especially if the minister is dipping the Host in a chalice or
placing it on each communicant's tongue.
Here is the full story and I thank The Browser for the pointer.
Addendum: Here is a related article.
The countercyclical asset, a continuing series
Religious goods stores have been doing a record business in St. Joseph statues. Buried in the garden of a home for sale, the doll allegedly helps the house to find a buyer.
Here is more information. One seller said:
Some find the notion of magic house sales distasteful. “If you just
bury the statue in the ground, you’re not going to sell your home,”
said Gerard Siccardi, whose family runs a religious-goods business in
White Plains. “You’re supposed to pray. You’re supposed to have some
reverence about this. It’s a faith-based item.”
Assorted Links: God and Mammon Edition
- Art Carden asks can Francisco's money speech be reconciled with 1 Timothy 6:9-10 KJV?
- Can Christians be Capitalists?, AEI wants to know.
- "Accountants and clergy are both well educated and intelligent, yet we
pay accountants a lot more than the clergy. Is this because we care
more about money than about God?" Robert Whaples explains.