Category: Science
Sentences to ponder
At Cardiff University, students found it easier to pretend to be gay than Christian.
Here is more, from Evan Selinger, interesting throughout.
“Scene of the Verge of the Hay-Mead”
That is a chapter from Far From the Madding Crowd, which remains a much underrated Thomas Hardy novel. This chapter is a masterpiece of behavioral economics, most of all on matters of courtship and romance. It is difficult to excerpt, because it relies so much on the sequence of events and dialog. You can read it free here. There are other sources, including MP3s, here.
Why were we obsessed with flying cars?
David Graeber has a fascinating albeit uneven essay about our changing visions of the future, here is one excerpt:
Why, these analysts wonder, did both the United States and the Soviet Union become so obsessed with the idea of manned space travel? It was never an efficient way to engage in scientific research. And it encouraged unrealistic ideas of what the human future would be like.
Could the answer be that both the United States and the Soviet Union had been, in the century before, societies of pioneers, one expanding across the Western frontier, the other across Siberia? Didn’t they share a commitment to the myth of a limitless, expansive future, of human colonization of vast empty spaces, that helped convince the leaders of both superpowers they had entered into a “space age” in which they were battling over control of the future itself? All sorts of myths were at play here, no doubt, but that proves nothing about the feasibility of the project.
And this bit:
The growth of administrative work [in universities] has directly resulted from introducing corporate management techniques. Invariably, these are justified as ways of increasing efficiency and introducing competition at every level. What they end up meaning in practice is that everyone winds up spending most of their time trying to sell things: grant proposals; book proposals; assessments of students’ jobs and grant applications; assessments of our colleagues; prospectuses for new interdisciplinary majors; institutes; conference workshops; universities themselves (which have now become brands to be marketed to prospective students or contributors); and so on.
As marketing overwhelms university life, it generates documents about fostering imagination and creativity that might just as well have been designed to strangle imagination and creativity in the cradle. No major new works of social theory have emerged in the United States in the last thirty years.
Interesting throughout, as they say. For pointers I thank Umung Varma and Kevan Huston.
*The Ocean of Life*
The author is Callum Roberts and the subtitle is The Fate of Man and the Sea. It is an excellent look at the environmental problems associated with oceans. Here is one bit:
European seas are far less productive than they once were. The fact that the UK bottom trawl fleet lands only half the fish today that it did when records began in 1889, despite a massive increase in fishing power, says all we need to know about how we have squandered natural capital.
…In 1889, there were ten to fifteen times as many large bottom-living fish like cod, haddock, and halibut in the seas around the UK as there are today.
The book is interesting throughout and very readable, without losing its fundamental seriousness.
The real inflation problem
Competitors are said to pump air to deliberately inflate the udders before sealing the teats with superglue to stop the air or milk leaking out. The procedure gives the cattle the appearance of having full udders, an attribute believed to be desirable in show cattle. The practice, which leaves cows in “severe discomfort”, is understood to be an attempt to win agricultural prizes for their animals. Champion animals can fetch up to £100,000 at auction and are highly prized for breeding. The RSCPA has promised to investigate complaints, although no prosecutions have yet taken place.
Here is more, courtesy of Rahul.
Driverless car update
Getting lawmakers in the seat of a self-driving Prius has become Google’s M.O., according to Matthew Newton, editor of DriverlessCarHQ.com, a site dedicated to covering autonomous cars. “Google has been giving free rides to policymakers in California, Nevada and Florida,” Newton told Wired from his home base in Melbourne, Australia. “So it makes sense that they would do it in D.C.”
Eric Cantor, for one, was given a ride.
Genoeconomics
An interesting piece from the Boston Globe on “genoeconomics”:
Though the name wasn’t coined until 2007, genoeconomics flickered briefly into existence once before. In 1976, the late University of Pennsylvania economist Paul Taubman published the results of a study in which he followed the financial lives of identical twins, and found there were curious similarities in how much money they made as adults. Taubman concluded that between 18 percent and 41 percent of variation in income across individuals was heritable.
It was a startling conclusion, and one that Taubman’s fellow economists didn’t quite know what to do with. One joked that Taubman’s findings meant the government might as well shut down welfare, since clearly some people would remain poor no matter what.
….After Taubman, the idea that genes had an important role to play in decision-making was largely abandoned in the world of economics. But with the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2000, the first full sequence of a human being’s genetic code, people started wondering if perhaps it would be possible to push past broad heritability estimates, of the sort that Taubman generated, and figure out what part of a person’s genome influenced what aspect of his behavior.
…Over time, social scientists started coming to terms with the fact that even the most heritable of traits, such as height, were influenced not by one or two powerful genes, but by a combination of hundreds or even thousands—and that environmental factors, like a person’s upbringing, play a complex role in determining how those genes are expressed. “Every single direction has proved to be less promising than people originally expected,” said Laibson.
… hope lies in a new approach to data-gathering that is only just getting underway, wherein researchers look for patterns among thousands, and even millions of people—numbers that are only just becoming possible thanks to massive collaborations linking gene studies being conducted all over the world.
The researchers in question, Daniel Benjamin, David Laibson, David Cesarini and others, seem worried about the possibility of tracing attributes and behavior to genetics. Most of the big news is out already, however, and more easily observed in phenotype than genotype.
For more on the new approach see The genetic architecture of economic and political preferences.
Genoeconomics
Here is one paragraph of an interesting-but-treads-quite-lightly story about what is possibly a new field of economics:
To talk to the genoeconomists about their vision for the field is to listen to people acutely reluctant to overpromise, or to come off as naive. Much of their forthcoming paper in the Annual Review of Economics, in fact, describes how the vast majority of studies that appeared to link individual genes to specific outcomes—the amount of education people receive, whether or not they are self-employed, how they invest their money—have turned out to be impossible to replicate. Their hope lies in a new approach to data-gathering that is only just getting underway, wherein researchers look for patterns among thousands, and even millions of people—numbers that are only just becoming possible thanks to massive collaborations linking gene studies being conducted all over the world.
Jeff, the source, offers some discussion here.
Addendum: I now see in the blogging software panel that Alex has a post on the way, covering this same article, it should be up later today and maybe his take is different than mine.
NPR interview with Ronald Coase
It is here, at age 101. Excerpt:
China’s rapid emergence as a global economic power — one of the most important developments of the past generation — took him completely by surprise.
“I thought it would take 100 years, if not more,” Coase said.
It seemed striking that an economic legend could be so wrong about such an important subject. I asked Coase what he made of this.
“I’ve been wrong so often I don’t find it extraordinary at all,” he said.
For the pointer I thank Daniel Klein.
Claims about gelotophobia
The fear of being laughed at (gelotophobia) was examined in its relations to concepts from positive psychology in Austria, China, and Switzerland. It was related to satisfaction with life and Peterson et al.’s (2005) three orientations to happiness; the life of pleasure (hedonism), life of engagement (related to flow-experiences), and life of meaning (eudaimonia). Participants (N = 744) completed self-report measures of gelotophobia, satisfaction with life, and orientations to happiness. The results revealed that gelotophobia could be found in all three countries. The participants exceeded cut-off points indicating gelotophobia in Austria (5.80%), China (7.31%), and Switzerland (7.23%). The fear of being laughed at was negatively related to life-satisfaction in all three countries. Gelotophobes described themselves with lower overall estimations of their lives. Gelotophobia was negatively correlated with life engagement (i.e., flow experiences). In China, gelotophobia was also related to a lower life of pleasure and life of meaning. Overall, the results show that gelotophobes do not pursue any of the three orientations to happiness. Interventions from positive psychology (e.g., enhancing satisfaction with life, strengthening the routes to happiness) are discussed as possible treatments of gelotophobia.
That is from the International Journal of Humor Research, here is more. Hat tip goes to the always-excellent @udadisisuperior.
The economics of geoengineering
“The odd thing here is that this is a democratizing technology,’’ Nathan Myhrvold told me. “Rich, powerful countries might have invented much of it, but it will be there for anyone to use. People get themselves all balled up into knots over whether this can be done unilaterally or by one group or one nation. Well, guess what. We decide to do much worse than this every day, and we decide unilaterally. We are polluting the earth unilaterally. Whether it’s life-taking decisions, like wars, or something like a trade embargo, the world is about people taking action, not agreeing to take action. And, frankly, the Maldives could say, ‘Fuck you all—we want to stay alive.’ Would you blame them? Wouldn’t any reasonable country do the same?”
Jim Manzi’s *Uncontrolled*
The subtitle is The Surprising Payoff of Trial-and-Error for Business, Politics, and Society, with an emphasis on RCT.
This is a truly stimulating book, about how methods of controlled experimentation will bring a new wave of business and social innovation. Here is an Eric Posner review. Here is a Kirkus review. There will be more. Kevin Drum offers good remarks.
Questions that are rarely asked
“Do studies about publication bias themselves suffer from publication bias?”
That is from MR reader Kevin Burke, who refers me to this post from the excellent Andrew Gelman.
Outcome Unbiased Journals
Chris Said, a neuroscientist, prods the NIH to support outcome-unbiased journals:
The growing problems with scientific research are by now well known: Many results in the top journals are cherry picked, methodological weaknesses and other important caveats are often swept under the rug, and a large fraction of findings cannot be replicated. In some rare cases, there is even outright fraud. This waste of resources is unfair to the general public that pays for most of the research.
The Times article places the blame for this trend on the sharp competition for grant money and on the increasing pressure to publish in high impact journals. While both of these factors certainly play contributing roles…the cause is not simply that the competition is too steep. The cause is that the competition points scientists in the wrong direction.
…scientific journals favor surprising, interesting, and statistically significant experimental results. When journal editors give preferences to these types of results, it is obvious that more false positives will be published by simple selection effects, and it is obvious that unscrupulous scientists will manipulate their data to show these types of results. These manipulations include selection from multiple analyses, selection from multiple experiments (the “file drawer” problem), and the formulation of ‘a priori’ hypotheses after the results are known.
…the agencies should favor journals that devote special sections to replications, including failures to replicate. More directly, the agencies should devote more grant money to submissions that specifically propose replications….I would [also] like to see some preference given to fully “outcome-unbiased” journals that make decisions based on the quality of the experimental design and the importance of the scientific question, not the outcome of the experiment. This type of policy naturally eliminates the temptation to manipulate data towards desired outcomes.
Exponential economist meets Physicist
Here is an imaginary dialogue between a physicist and an economist who is not Georgescu-Roegen. The physicist is skeptical about the prospect for continued exponential growth, excerpt:
Physicist: Well, we could (and do, somewhat) beam non-thermal radiation into space, like light, lasers, radio waves, etc. But the problem is that these “sources” are forms of high-grade, low-entropy energy. Instead, we’re talking about getting rid of the waste heat from all the processes by which we use energy. This energy is thermal in nature. We might be able to scoop up some of this to do useful “work,” but at very low thermodynamic efficiency. If you want to use high-grade energy in the first place, having high-entropy waste heat is pretty inescapable.
…we’re too close to an astounding point for me to leave it unspoken. At that 2.3% growth rate, we would be using energy at a rate corresponding to the total solar input striking Earth in a little over 400 years. We would consume something comparable to the entire sun in 1400 years from now. By 2500 years, we would use energy at the rate of the entire Milky Way galaxy—100 billion stars! I think you can see the absurdity of continued energy growth. 2500 years is not that long, from a historical perspective. We know what we were doing 2500 years ago. I think I know what we’re not going to be doing 2500 years hence.
For the pointer I thank Sam Penrose, Jim Nichols, Jason Ketola, and Mark Weaver. It is interesting throughout, though I expect war to intervene at some point to break the exponential growth.
Addendum: Here is a related paper by Robin Hanson.