Category: Science
Motivation and IQ, incentives matter
There is an excellent new paper by Angela Lee Duckworth, et.al., and here is the punchline:
…material incentives in random-assignment studies increased IQ scores by an average of 0.64 SD, suggesting that test motivation can deviate substantially from maximal under low-stakes research conditions. The effect of incentives was moderated by IQ score: Incentives increased IQ scores by 0.96 SD among individuals with below-average IQs at baseline and by only 0.26 SD among individuals with above-average IQs at baseline.
Here is one popular summary of the results. I interpret the finding to suggest some mix of a) conscientiousness is more important than we think (when we think we are measuring the importance of IQ), and b) there are some smart people, smarter than we often think they are, and they pick and choose their spots.
For the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson.
A convincing smile is difficult to fake
Here is a new paper by a few authors, including Paul Seabright:
We test the hypothesis that “genuine” or “convincing” smiling is a costly signal that has evolved to induce cooperation in situations requiring mutual trust. Potential trustees in a trust game made video clips for viewing by potential trusters before the latter decided whether to send them money. Ratings of the genuineness of smiles vary across clips; it is difficult to make convincing smiles to order. We argue that smiling convincingly is costly, because smiles from trustees playing for higher stakes are rated as significantly more convincing, so that rewards appear to induce effort. We show that it induces cooperation: smiles rated as more convincing strongly predict judgments about the trustworthiness of trustees, and willingness to send them money. Finally, we show that it is a honest signal: those smiling convincingly return more money on average to senders. Convincing smiles are to some extent a signal of the intrinsic character of trustees: less honest individuals find smiling convincingly more difficult. They are also informative about the greater amounts that trustees playing for higher stakes have available to share: it is harder to smile convincingly if you have less to offer.
Here is another paper by Paul and co-authors, about the end of low-hanging fruit in the pharmaceuticals market.
Serenity Parenting
I wasn’t surprised that Bryan Caplan’s Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids has the clearest explanation of the science of behavioral genetics that I have ever read (even clearer than the excellent discussions in Harris’s The Nurture Assumption or Pinker’s The Blank Slate.) Frankly, I was surprised that Bryan’s book is also the most useful parenting book that I have ever read. Selfish Reasons isn’t just clever, it is also wise. Bryan’s views on parenting are often simplified down to “parents don’t matter.” But that’s wrong. Bryan knows that parents matter for all kinds of things, most of all for how parents and children enjoy childhood. Here is some of Bryan’s wisdom:
Once I became a dad, I noticed that parents around me had a different take on the power of nurture. I saw them turning parenthood into a chore—shuttling their kids to activities even the kids didn’t enjoy, forbidding television, desperately trying to make their babies eat another spoonful of vegetables. Parents’ main rationale is that their effort is an investment in their children’s future; they’re sacrificing now to turn their kids into healthy, smart, successful, well-adjusted adults. But according to decades of twin research, their rationale is just, well, wrong. High-strung parenting isn’t dangerous, but it does make being a parent a lot more work and less fun than it has to be.
The obvious lesson to draw is that parents should lighten up. I call it “Serenity Parenting”: Parents need the serenity to accept the things they cannot change, the courage to change the things they can, and (thank you twin research) the wisdom to know the difference. Focus on enjoying your journey with your child, instead of trying to control his destination.
Vaclav Smil
His books are excellent, you probably should read them all.
His Energy Myths and Realities: Bringing Science to the Energy Policy Debate is depressing, excerpt:
A world without fossil fuel combustion is highly desirable, and, to be optimistic, our collective determination, commitment, and persistence could accelerate its arrival. But getting there will be expensive and will require considerable patience. Coming energy transitions will unfold, as the past ones have done, across decades, not years.
And this:
…do not underestimate the persistence and adaptability of old resources (remember that coal is still more important globally than natural gas) and established prime movers, particularly those that have been around for more than a century, including steam turbines and internal combustion engines. Recall that the latest incarnations of the internal combustion engine, the new DiesOtto machines, have the potential to be more efficient than the best hybrid drives on today’s market.
My favorite book by him is Prime Movers of Globalization: The History and Impact of Diesel Engines and Gas Turbines, a better title and subtitle there never was.
Total Factor Productivity
“Ethos of the Unit”
This is from a child and adolescent mental health group at University College London, but it could and should also count as “Ethos of the Blogger”:
•All research is provisional
•All research raises as many questions as it answers
•All research is difficult to interpret and to draw clear conclusions from
•Qualitative research may be vital to elaborate experience, suggest narratives for understanding phenomena and generate hypotheses but it can’t be taken to prove anything
•Quantitative research may be able to show hard findings but can rarely (never?) give clear answers to complex questionsAnd yet, despite all the challenges, it is still worth attempting to encourage an evidence-based approach, since the alternative is to continue to develop practice based only on assumption and belief.
For the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson.
Mandelbox
A trip through a Mandelbox, a mathematical object akin to a Mandelbrot set. Hat tip to Metafilter which has more links.
Beware the estate of James Joyce
J. Craig Venter and his fellow scientists managed to replace the genetic code of a bacterium with a synthetic code they made on a computer. Which is how they got sued by the estate of James Joyce.
In order to distinguish their synthetic DNA from that naturally present in the bacterium, Venter’s team coded several famous quotes into their DNA, including one from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist of a Young Man: “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.”
After announcing their work, Venter explained, his team received a cease and desist letter from Joyce’s estate, saying that he’d used the Irish writer’s work without permission. ”We thought it fell under fair use,” said Venter.
That is from Jessica Crispin.
Professionalism vs. amateurism
Here was one MR reader request, from Philip W:
Professionalism vs. Amateurism, the merits and demerits of each. And the relationship of these to science, or “science.” How large is the role of “common sense” in your way of thinking about the world? Should we wish that policymakers would have more professionalism, or more common sense?
Amateurism is splendid when amateurs actually can make contributions. A lot of the Industrial Revolution was driven by the inventions of so-called amateurs. One of the most revolutionary economic sectors today — social networking — has been led by amateurs. Maybe it is stretching the concept, but you can interpret Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as amateurs too.
Amateurs are associated with free entry and a lot of experimentation. Barbecue quality is very often driven by amateurs, and in general amateurs still make contributions to food and cooking. The difficulty of maintaining productive amateurs is one of the reasons why scientific progress periodically slows down. Specialization, however necessary it may be, can make big breakthroughs harder at some margin. (There is a good recent paper on this.) This is one aspect of the division of labor which Adam Smith did not fully grasp, though he hinted at it.
Through computers, and the internet, the notion of amateurs working together is becoming more important. This includes astronomical searches and theorem-proving, plus collection and collation of data, and Wikipedia; this is Shirky’s “cognitive surplus.”
On the latter part of the question, what is “common sense”? Most common sense, if one can call it that, is a highly refined product of a lot of trial and error. The real question is how to refine one’s common sense.
Policymakers need more of a sheer willingness to do the right thing, even if it means sacrificing reelection. Selection mechanisms, however, do not much favor that bravery. For a sane, well-adjusted person, the job is neither fun nor well-paying, so the job attracts people who love being in office and thus who fail to do the right thing.
When specialization proceeds very, very far, the difference between a professional and an amateur is sometimes no longer well-defined.
Who predicts well?
…what separated those with modest but significant predictive ability from the utterly hopeless was their style of thinking. Experts who had one big idea they were certain would reveal what was to come were handily beaten by those who used diverse information and analytical models, were comfortable with complexity and uncertainty and kept their confidence in check.
That is from Tetlock and Gardner, here is more. On that general, theme, here is Dan Gardner’s new book Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions are Next to Worthless, and You Can do Better.
Nuclear power reactors: a study in technological lock-in
The interesting Robin Cowan has a well-cited paper with that title:
Recent theory has predicted that if competing technologies operate under dynamic increasing returns, one, possibly inferior, technology will dominate the market. The history of nuclear power technology is used to illustrate these results. Light water is considered inferior to other technologies, yet it dominates the market for power reactors. This is largely due to the early adoption and heavy development by the U.S. Navy of light water for submarine propulsion. When a market for civilian power emerged, light water had a large head start, and by the time other technologies were ready to enter the market, light water was entrenched.
Here are some recent articles on light water reactors in Japan.
What is the consumer surplus of the internet?
Annie Lowrey asks:
But providing an alternative measure of what we produce or consume based on the value people derive from Wikipedia or Pandora proves an extraordinary challenge–indeed, no economist has ever really done it. Brynjolffson says it is possible, perhaps, by adding up various "consumer surpluses," measures of how much consumers would be willing to pay for a given good or service, versus how much they do pay. (You might pony up $10 for a CD, but why would you if it is free?) That might give a rough sense of the dollar value of what the Internet tends to provide for nothing–and give us an alternative sense of the value of our technologies to us, if not their ability to produce growth or revenue for us.
Here is much more.
Genetic Enhancement v. Artificial Intelligence
Will robots and artificial intelligences take human jobs? Perhaps but the nature of humanity is not carved in stone. Genetic enhancement (GE) is within a hairsbreadth of reality.
It's true that the practical applications of AI are moving faster than GE but GE has a head start of over a billion years. Moreover, although GE is still impractical, the costs of GE are falling fast. The costs of sequencing a genome (shown at right, click to enlarge), for example, are falling far faster than even Moore's Law would predict. Sequencing takes us only part of the way towards H+ but it's an important part.
Genetic engineering already works wonders, even when used haphazardly. My own efforts at GE (I had the help of a PhD microbiologist) have produced two promising NIs. When used in a more controlled manner the results of GE will be even better ("it's still us, only the best of us.")
I used to worry that religious objections would prevent the evolution of H to H+, especially in the United States. But should courage fail us, the Chinese, the Indians, the Russians or perhaps even the Singaporeans will move humanity forward. In this case, the slippery slope works in favor of progress: from avoiding genetic disease towards making improvements will prove irresistible. You can't keep a better man down.
The contrast of GE and AI in the title is meant to remind us that AI is not the only technology relevant to debates about future jobs but the opposition of GE and AI is obviously false. AI is helping to create GE, of course, but it's deeper than that. In the not so long run it's not about computers substituting for labor or even complementing labor, it's about designing labor to complement computers (and vice-versa). Think about how quickly the phone has migrated from the desk, to the hand, to the ear, to the ear canal. The technology to enhance humanity with access to the internet is literally burying itself into our heads, call it I-fi. There is more to come.
And now for some music.
*The Philosophical Breakfast Club*
The author is Laura J. Snyder and the subtitle is Four Remarkable Friends Who Transformed Science and Changed the World. This is an excellent book about the history and status of science in 19th century England and in particular the contributions of Charles Babbage, John Herschel, William Whewell, and Richard Jones, the latter an economist and of course Whewell debated induction and scientific method with Mill. Babbage too had writings on economics. Here is an excerpt from Snyder:
De Prony had been commissioned to produce a definitive test of logarithmic and trigonometric tables for the newly introduced metric system in France, to facilitate the accurate measurement of property as a basis for taxation.
De Prony had recently read Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations…Smith discussed the importance of a division of labor in the manufacture of pins…
De Prony was the first to see that a Smithian division of intellectual labor could be equally valuable in the work of computation of mathematical tables — although his idea had been anticipated by Leibniz, who believed that talented mathematicians should be freed from tedious calculations that could be done by "peasants."
If you enjoy the history of science, this book stands a good chance of being the best one in that genre to come out this year. Here is one good review of the book.
It’s time to reread Robin Hanson
Isn't it always?