Category: Science

Run for the Border

by  Alex Tabarrok in

By perceiving state borders to be physical barriers that keep disaster at bay, people underestimate the severity of a disaster spreading from a different state, but not the severity of an equally distant disaster approaching from within a state. We call this bias in risk assessment the border bias.

More here.  Amusingly, the authors show that making the border more salient by darkening the border lines on a map can make people feel even more protected.   

Hat tip: Paul Kedrosky.

Gay Sex Statistics

by  Alex Tabarrok in

OKTrends has another great post, gay sex v. straight sex, analyzing data on millions of customers who use the dating site OKCupid.  Here is one piece of the long post that I found surprising.

Another common myth about gay people is that they sleep around, but the statistical reality is that gay people as a group aren't any more slutty than straights.

Median Reported Sex Partners

  • straight men: 6
  • gay men: 6
  • straight women: 6
  • gay women: 6

Here's how the distribution curves compare:

  • 45% of gay people have had 5 or fewer partners (vs. 44% for straights)
  • 98% of gay people have had 20 or fewer partners (vs. 99% for straights)

It turns out that a tiny fraction of gays have single-handedly two-handedly created the public image of gay sexual recklessness–in fact we found that just 2% of gay people have had 23% of the total reported gay sex, which is pretty crazy.

Maurice Allais

by  Alex Tabarrok in

French physicist and economic Nobel Laureate Maurice Allais has died at age 99.  Allais is best known among American economists for the Allais paradox but Allais was a polymath with contributions (and JSTOR here) in a huge number of areas many of which were often overlooked because his work was not translated into english (an unfortunate fact which is still true today).

One thing that few people know about Allais was that he was a big proponent of the gold standard and Austrian business cycle theory, even citing Mises and Rothbard in some of his work.  See in particular his paper in English, The Credit Mechanism and its Implications (1987) in Feiwel (ed), Arrow and the Foundations of the Theory of Economic Policy.  See also here for further citations in french.

As might be expected from a polymath, Allais's views are difficult to pigeonhole.  He was a strong proponent of private property and the market economy, for example, but to create the consensus necessary to produce such a society he also favored immigration restrictions and protectionism.

Amazingly, Allais also conducted ground breaking experiments on pendulums which earned him the 1959 Galabert Prize of the French Astronautical Society and which may have revealed an anomaly in general relativity that physicists refer to as the Allais effect.

How recognizable will humans be in five hundred years?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Alex reports:

Tyler and I argued recently about whether or not humans will be recognizably human in 500 years.

Let us assume that scientific progress continues.  My view is that parents don't so much like "difference," unless it is very directly in their favor.  Using technology, parents will select for children who are taller, smarter in the way that parents value, better looking, and perhaps also more loyal to their families.  The people in the wealthy parts of the world will look more like models and movie stars, but they will be quite recognizable.  These children may also be less creative and some of them will be less driven.  It's a bit like the real estate market, where everyone wants their house to be special, but not too special, for purposes of resale or in this case mating and career prospects.

Assortative mating can increase the variance of appearance (and other characteristics), but a) assortative mating is not obviously a dominant effect, b) not necessarily doing much over the course of five hundred years, and c) future science is more likely to reverse the boost in variance than to support it.  One short person could marry another short person, without having such short children because of genetic engineering.

People will in various ways be cyborgs, but more or less invisibly from the outside at least.

Dogs look different than they did five thousand years ago, but that is because humans controlled their breeding and opted for some extremes.  How would they look today if the dogs themselves had been in charge of the process?

The pricing of in vitro fertilization

by  Tyler Cowen in

Robert G. Edwards has just won the Nobel Prize in medicine for his work on in vitro fertilization.  So I searched for "economics in vitro" and found a recent paper on pricing IVF, by Anthony Dukes and Rajeev Tyagi:

This paper examines the economics of pricing practices at artificial reproductive clinics, which have introduced money-back guarantees (MBGs) for in vitro fertilization. We identify incentives for clinics to offer MBGs and evaluate the impact on couples' choices and on social welfare. Introducing MBGs allows a clinic to (i) segment couples simultaneously on their relative fertility and on risk preferences; (ii) offer quantity discounts to relatively infertile couples; and (iii) offer some risk-sharing to couples for this costly procedure, whose outcome is uncertain. Our results also show how the addition of MBGs can affect the overall social welfare.

In other words, price discrimination.  (As it is applied, IVF succeeds one time out of five.)  Low-fertility couples are made better off by the implied discount, some high-fertility couples may be worse off from the higher prices they face, and overall social welfare goes up from the money back guarantee, which also may signal provider quality.

Here is a recent critique, claiming that the money-back guarantee damages the nature of parenthood.  Yet it is believed that four million people have been born, thanks to IVF.

Is there any economic basis to homophobia?

by  Tyler Cowen in

William Alexander Johnson asks:

I always make sure to read your blog, and a while ago a Marginal-Revolution-type question popped into my mind:

Is homophobia the only form of hatred that doesn't have an economic component?

As far as I can tell, most hatreds between different peoples are caused to a great extent by economic conflicts.  Whites vs. blacks in the U.S., Europeans vs. natives in former European colonies, Christianity vs. Judaism vs. Islam, locals vs. immigrants in countries across the world, animosity between different castes in India, and even killings of supposed witches in tribal societies all have very important economic dimensions.

But homophobia seems to have absolutely no economic component.  I've heard that homosexuals are on average a little more economically successful than heterosexuals, but I very seriously doubt that that has the slightest bit to do with anything.

I can't think of any other form of hatred so divorced from "rational" conflict, so to speak.

…What do you think?

Bryan Caplan predicts greater tolerance in the future and Andrew Sullivan sees positive trends.  I do favor both gay marriage and other advances in gay rights, but when I scan the evidence, I am a bit pessimistic.  The positive short-run momentum is clear, but what about the longer run?  I see the following:

1. Prejudice and bullying against gay individuals is often brutal and unreasonable and it is applied where there is no evidence of harm from gays.  The prejudice is often strongest among teenagers and young males, and it weakens somewhat with age and socialization.

2. Strong prejudices against gay men and women are found in every culture I know of, past or present.  And yet in many cases homosexuality "limits the competition," so to speak.  This potential gain finds little appreciation.

3. There is a common and sometimes strong "disgust reaction," especially to gay men.

4. We learn from John Boswell that high levels of gay tolerance, in antiquity, were followed by a counter-reaction and higher levels of prejudice.

5. Religion, conservative morals, and sexual traditionalism make periodic comebacks.

Looking at the overall pattern, I wonder whether many individuals have a natural, innate proclivity to dislike gay men and women and to feel discomfort with the entire idea of homosexuality, bisexuality too of course.  Those preferences are not universal and they can be mediated by positive social forces, but left to their own devices, they will periodically reemerge in strength.

Opinion warning signs

by  Tyler Cowen in

Robin Hanson makes a list of "Signs that your opinions function more to signal loyalty and ability than to estimate truth:"

  1. You find it hard to be enthusiastic for something until you know that others oppose it.
  2. You have little interest in getting clear on what exactly is the position being argued.
  3. Realizing that a topic is important and neglected doesn’t make you much interested.
  4. You have little interest in digging to bigger topics behind commonly argued topics.
  5. You are less interested in a topic when you don’t foresee being able to talk about it.
  6. You are uncomfortable taking a position near the middle of the opinion distribution.
  7. You are uncomfortable taking a position of high uncertainty about who is right.
  8. You care far more about current nearby events than similar distant or past/future events.
  9. You find it easy to conclude that those who disagree with you are insincere or stupid.
  10. You are reluctant to change your publicly stated positions in response to new info.
  11. You are reluctant to agree a rival’s claim, even if you had no prior opinion on the topic.
  12. More?

I would add: You feel uncomfortable taking a position which raises the status of the people you usually disagree with.

Justin Wolfers on trade across the disciplines

by  Tyler Cowen in

What is interesting to think about are the terms of trade between economics and all these other disciplines. We are clearly a net exporter to political science and sociology. But at this point the trade with psychology is almost all one way. We are a near-complete importer. I wonder why we haven’t been bigger exporters to psychology. I think it has to do with the research method. Like political scientists and sociologists, economists are almost all about the analysis of observational data. And then there are second-order differences. Formal political scientists write down a model before they observe data; informal ones don’t. Ethnographers observe four people; survey researchers observe 4,000. But it’s all observational. But when I watch and speak with my friends in psychology, very little of their work is about analyzing observational data. It’s about experiments, real experiments, with very interesting interventions. So they have a different method of trying to isolate causation. I am certain that we have an enormous amount to learn from them. But I am curious why we have not been able to convince them of the importance of careful analysis of observational data.

Here is the much longer interview.  I would cite an additional factor.  We as economists can export models to political science and sociology and at least pretend that maybe those models work.  Even if they don't, someone can publish by knocking those models down.  When we try to export models to psychology, it's too obvious, too early on, that our models are limited in their ability to deal with context-dependent phenomena.

Serial hyperspecializers, and how they think

by  Tyler Cowen in

The highly-regarded-but-still undervalued Elijah Millgram has a paper on this topic, and he seems to be preparing a book.  Here is one good short bit:

So one reasonable strategy for a hyperspecializer will be to divide its energies between activities that don't share standards and methods of assessment, and let's abbreviate that to the fuzzier, problematic, but more familiar word, "values." It will be a normal side effect of pursuing the parallel hyperspecialization strategy that its values are incommensurable. The hedonic signals that guide reallocation of resources between niches do not require that niche-bound desires or goals or standards be comparable across niches. If you are a serial (and so, often a parallel) hyperspecializer, incommensurability in your values turns out not to be a mark of practical irrationality, or even an obstacle to full practical rationality, but rather, the way your evaluative world will look to you, when you are doing your practical deliberation normally and successfully. Evaluative incommensurability is a threat to the sort of rationality suitable for Piltdown Man. Serial hyperspecializers gravitate towards and come equipped for incommensurability.

Here is a good review of Millgram's latest book, which argues, among other things, that truth is messy in nature.

Adam Phillips serves up a Bob Dylan quotation: "I have always admired people who have left behind them an incomprehensible mess."

Gorillas and Girls

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Ireland's science minister has pulled out of the launch of a book branding evolution a hoax after the event became mired in controversy.

Yes, that's right Ireland's science minister questions evolution. But, he says Mr May the author of the book he was to promote, "Just because you are anti-evolution doesn’t mean you are anti-science."  I suppose this is true if one doesn't count as science biology, molecular biology, botany, paleontology, zoology and a host of other fields that rely on evolution as a key concept.

So the controversy is obvious, right? Not quite. What would a controversy about science be without sex?  It turns out that the author of the book, non-ironically titled "The Origin of Specious Nonsense," is,

Mr May, a self-proclaimed marriage counsellor, writer, poet and philosopher, [who] has presented on various radio stations and once owned a public relations company.

But the ex-Christian evangelist teacher was also the one-time editor of Ireland’s first magazine devoted to sex.

All of this makes the name of the launch party that science minister Conor Lenihan was to attend even more interesting, 'Gorillas and Girls'. Hard to make this kind of thing up.

Hat tip to Dan Cole at Law, Economics, and Cycling.

What is the most likely source of doomsday in 2012?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Alek has a request:

1) While I'm far from a doomsayer, I'm wondering what is the best way to bet in favor of the world ending in 2012? Betting against is pretty obvious.

I am taking this to ask what is the most likely cause of the destruction of all civilization, circa 2012, and not how to collect on the bet, in which case he should read Pascal.  (If the 2012 end of the world won't be a total surprise, any leveraged short position should do, but spend the money quickly!)

Here are some hypotheses, but my answer is: destruction of the earth by space aliens.

Here are previous MR posts on The Fermi Paradox.  Rampaging space aliens would explain why we don't see more civilizations out there, plus predatory ways imply that contact is short-lived, thereby making our current lack of contact more likely in the Bayesian sense.

We could be living in some kind of "branching/splitting" theory where the highest number of branches come right before everything ends and for Bayesian reasons we expect to be right up against that final point.  Still, why should we think that maximum branching/splitting is coming in 2012?  After a Lakers threepeat, are there no more possible worlds to create?  

The overwhelming probability from a nuclear exchange, at least circa 2012, is that it would remain limited, albeit highly destructive.  A pandemic is unlikely to kill more than a billion people.  A very large asteroid or a super-volcano explosion can be considered other leading contenders for world-enders.

A few nights ago Natasha and I saw The Day the Earth Stood Still, 1951 version.  It's more a tract on foreign policy than science fiction and Klaatu of course is a stand in for the United States.  I hadn't seen it in over twenty years and I'm astonished how well the movie captures and presages today's current mix of paranoia and utter unpreparedness, vis-a-vis "aliens."  It works poorly when Klaatu dons the rhetoric and tactics of the United States in galactic affairs, combined with equally clumsy implied threats, backed by no moral authority but superior hardware.  It's one of the scariest, and best, movies to watch in 2010, with a superb Bernard Herrmann soundtrack and it also has good shots of WDC in 1951.  I won't give away the ending but a careful listen shows it's as pessimistic about the aliens as anything.  Supposedly the movie deeply influenced Ronald Reagan and brought him to the arms control table.