Category: Science

In the past few years, Watts–a network-theory scientist who recently
took a sabbatical from Columbia University and is now working for Yahoo
(NASDAQ:YHOO) –has performed a series of controversial, barn-burning
experiments challenging the whole Influentials thesis. He has analyzed
email patterns and found that highly connected people are not, in fact,
crucial social hubs. He has written computer models of rumor spreading
and found that your average slob is just as likely as a well-connected
person to start a huge new trend. And last year, Watts demonstrated
that even the breakout success of a hot new pop band might be nearly
random. Any attempt to engineer success through Influentials, he
argues, is almost certainly doomed to failure.

Here is the full article.  Here is the home page of Duncan Watts.  Thanks to John DePalma for the pointer.

I have to side with Matt Yglesias’s claim that Russian women have been beautiful for a long time and that it is not the recent advent of capitalism which elevated their looks.  I’ve seen pictures of the younger Natasha, pre-capitalism, and she was beautiful back then too.  I know many of her female friends, or have seen early photos of them, and almost all of them are (and were) beautiful.  I visited Russia in the early 90s, just as capitalism was taking hold.  There was plenty of beauty to go around, although admittedly people dress better now.  Countries don’t develop networks of beautiful women overnight.  Furthermore, once you get past the point of malnutrition, beauty is not related to per capita income in any simple way.  I’ll take Cuba, Croatia, Senegal, and Brazil over Australia and Finland, or to cite a closer comparison Slovakia over Austria.  One hypothesis is that inequality of male income and power encourages female beauty for competitive reasons.  Admittedly much more research needs to be done on this question.

Addendum: Free Exchange weighs in.

Imagine a matching game.  Imagine also that you always get the same outcome.  It might be a happy relationship, a sad relationship, a repeating pattern of dysfunctionality, lots of affairs with librarians, or whatever.

In many models, an unusual similarity of outcomes means that we let partners choose us, rather than choosing partners ourselves more actively.  The other side of the matching process is doing the work.

How can this be?  The intuition is that "you searching for hidden matches in the rough" is a process that will have higher variance in outcomes than "lots of hidden matches in the rough searching for you." 

If you don’t observe that much variance in your outcomes (e.g., lots of librarians), it means one of two things.  Maybe you are choosing the non-varying quality very directly and very intentionally, such as having a fetish.  That possibility aside, maybe it is a sign that you’re not really choosing but rather being chosen and thus you live in a world of thick search processes and low variance outcomes.  Imagine a man who will take whatever comes his way, and spends lots of time in libraries.

If there are recurring outcomes of this kind in your life or relationships, perhaps you are being chosen, whether you know it or not.

A loyal MR reader asks:

I’m reading (grr) a lot of academic papers lately and, to keep myself awake, have wondered: why do they almost always have more than one author? Is it like cops in New York City–they’ve got everyone persuaded it’s too dangerous to go alone? Is there some networking benefit, professional or psychological? Does it just enable everyone to claim more publications? Has anyone studied which fields have the highest and lowest average number of authors per paper?

I thought you could blog something interesting on this. I might add that the papers couldn’t be any duller, and I wonder if committee authorship plays a role in this as well.

I believe that co-authored papers are correlated with:

1. The existence of a laboratory

2. Senior scholars who generate funding and thus gains from trade

3. Empirical work, which tends to be more divisible than theory; co-authored papers are relatively rare in pure economic theory and in philosophy

Co-authored papers are becoming increasingly common in economics, also because the effort requirements for top publications have been rising.  In most cases a co-authored piece is worth at least 2/3 of a singly-authored piece, so the incentives for co-authorship are strong.  Here is an earlier post on co-authorship.

…an analysis of strike outs (failing to hit the ball three times in a
row) in American baseball from 1913 to 2006 showed that players whose
first or last names began with K suffered significantly more strikeouts
than other players. Why? Because in baseball scoring, K is used to
denote a strikeout – "For players with this initial, the explicitly
negative performance outcome may feel implicitly less aversive," the
researchers said.

Next, an analysis of 15 years of MBA students’
grades at a large American University showed that students with the
initials C or D achieved significantly lower grades than students whose
initials were unrelated to grade scores, and students with the initials
A or B.

Was this due to the students’ self-preference for their
initials or was it the examiners showing the bias? To test this, Nelson
and Simmons, asked hundreds of other undergrads to report their liking
for the different letters of the alphabet. A subsequent analysis of
their exam scores again showed that students with the initials C or D
performed less well, but only if they had previously shown a preference
for these letters. This shows that affection for one’s own initials
really is playing a role in the patterns being observed here.

Another
study showed how far-reaching these effects can be. An analysis of
392,458 lawyers who studied at 170 law schools showed that as the
quality of law schools declined, so too did the proportion of lawyers
with the initials A or B who had attended.

Here is more.  When I think of the letter K, I think of Ted Kluszewski, Harmon Killebrew, and brawny Poles who swing for the fences.  Maybe that’s lame, but I don’t see that names with "S" strike out more often, or that names with "H" hit more home runs.  Maybe "K" has special power, just ask Franz Kafka.  The A and B stuff puzzles me too, but it also doesn’t seem consistent with other parameters on the power of suggestion.  I also would expect the C and D names to do better than average, given all the names lower in the alphabet, at least if there is going to be an effect at all.  Are people whose names start with the letter "B" more likely to be bloggers?

I’m not contesting the raw tabulations but my gut feeling is that the letters in your name correlate with physique or education or IQ in some other way.  One paper is here, I don’t see a lot of controls.

Addendum: Andrew Belman seems puzzled too.  Alex has a related post, he doesn’t feel totally puzzled.

…across the eons of time, the standard theories suggest, the universe can
recur over and over again in an endless cycle of big bangs, but it’s
hard for nature to make a whole universe. It’s much easier to make
fragments of one, like planets, yourself maybe in a spacesuit or even –
in the most absurd and troubling example – a naked brain floating in
space. Nature tends to do what is easiest, from the standpoint of
energy and probability. And so these fragments – in particular the
brains – would appear far more frequently than real full-fledged
universes, or than us. Or they might be us.

Here is more, the piece also contains a serious scientific discussion of the possibility of reincarnation.

Researchers from the [California] State Public Health Department found that the
autism rate in children rose continuously in the study period from 1995
to 2007. The preservative, thimerosal, has not been used in childhood
vaccines since 2001, except for some flu shots.  Doctors
said that the latest study added to the evidence against a link between
thimerosal exposure and the risk of autism and that it should reassure
parents that vaccinations do not cause autism. If there was a risk, the doctors said, autism rates should have dropped from 2004 to 2007.

Here is the full story.  Here are many other summaries.

Addendum: Kevin Drum and commentators add more.

People sometime say that UK science is thriving, at other times that it has declined. But both assertions are true, because the UK is thriving with respect to the volume of ‘normal’ science production but at the same time declining in the highest level of ‘revolutionary’ science.

Here is much more, from loyal MR commentator Bruce Charlton.  Note that the data set includes economists.  I have noticed this pattern in UK economics; it no longer feels like UK and US economics are fundamentally different, unlike for instance in the 1980s.

Someday this will be turned into a theory of business cycles.  We’ve already done collapsing sandpiles.

This paper says yes, over the last 40,000 years.  The basic mechanism is that more people result in more adaptive mutations, plus environments have changed rapidly, due largely to technology and culture.  Here is an LA Times summary, it claims that the pace of human evolution has accelerated hundredfold [sic] since the invention of agriculture (some reports indicate "ten to hundredfold").

How about this summary:

Prof Hawks says: "We are more different genetically from people living 5,000 years ago than they were different from Neanderthals."

As far as I can tell this looks legitimate.  Here are one hundred different news summaries, here is Scientific American.

Thanks to several loyal MR readers for the pointer.

Addendum: Read this for explanation, it gets even more interesting toward the end, another implication is that viruses are more dangerous than we used to think.

Our greatest effect on crows is on their survivorship, not on their reproduction…if an adult crow lives near people it is likely to survive, but if it lives more than three miles from people, it will likely die.  Mortality over a two-year period was 2.3 percent near people and 38.9 percent far from people…Populations in remote wildlands are not likely to be self-sustaining…

If urban crow populations are simply self-sustaining, why are so many exploding in size?  Immigration is the answer, we suggest…young crows are moving to the cities to exploit their riches.

That is from In the Company of Crows and Ravens, a fascinating book.  Most of all this volume stresses how much crows have co-evolved with humankind.

The same day, Michael Vassar wrote me: "One problem I have with
Greg Clark’s thesis is that I don’t understand how a Malthusian Earth
could have left so much land forested and unproductive.  If food was
the limiting factor in population why didn’t people clear more land for
farms?"  And here’s Nick Szabo’s challenge to Greg Clark.

Hugh Everett, the originator of the multiple worlds interpretation of quantum physics, was a strange fellow.  He left physics when Neils Bohr refused to take his ideas seriously and went into defense work where he made millions.  His son Mark Everett is lead singer for the Eels.  A BBC documentary, Parallel Worlds, Parellel Lives looks at father and son:

They lived in the same house for nearly 20 years and barely spoke. The first
time Mark touched his father was when he found his stiffening corpse, still in
bed and still in the suit he always wore. Mark himself, unusually for a rock
star, wears a suit on stage. A devout atheist, Hugh told his wife to throw his
ashes out with the trash, which, after keeping them for a bit in a filing
cabinet, she duly did.

Hat tip to MetaFilter.

Addendum: Here’s an interview with Mark Everett about his father.

In a fascinating column, John Tierney writes:

The Yale experiment was a variation of the classic one that first
demonstrated cognitive dissonance, a term coined by the social
psychologist Leon Festinger. In 1956 one of his students, Jack Brehm,
carted some of his own wedding gifts into the lab (it was a low-budget
experiment) and asked people to rate the desirability of things like an
electric sandwich press, a desk lamp, a stopwatch and a transistor
radio.

Then they were given a choice between two items they
considered equally attractive, and told they could take one home. (At
the end of the experiment Mr. Brehm had to confess he couldn’t really
afford to give them anything, causing one woman to break down in
tears.) After making a choice (but before having it snatched away),
they were asked to rate all the items again.

Suddenly they had a
new perspective. If they had chosen the electric sandwich press over
the toaster, they raised its rating and downgraded the toaster. They
convinced themselves they had made by far the right choice.

So,
apparently, did the children and capuchin monkeys studied at Yale by
Louisa C. Egan, Laurie R. Santos and Paul Bloom. The psychologists
offered the children stickers and the monkeys M&M’s.

Once a monkey was observed to show an equal preference for three colors
of M&M’s – say, red, blue and green – he was given a choice between
two of them. If he chose red over blue, his preference changed and he
downgraded blue. When he was subsequently given a choice between blue
and green, it was no longer an even contest – he was now much more
likely to reject the blue.

I would distinguish between self-deception and an endowment effect.  We value more what is ours, perhaps because of our biological programming — to protect our children above those of others — spills over into decisions more generally.  (Or perhaps because of a precommitment strategy to limit violent plunder of our resources.)  Self-deception is then layered on top, but in fact many mothers will argue that their kids are lazier or less obedient than the average.  The endowment effect holds nonetheless, as those mothers care more about their kids.  It is very hard to switch back babies once the hospital makes a mistake in allocation (how much time must elapse?), even if the parents know for sure they did not take home the genetically appropriate little bundle of joy.

I can see that the monkeys behave according to an endowment effect.  I am less sure that the monkeys self-deceive.  The key question, in my view, is whether the monkeys would throw out or downgrade information that some other bundle of food was in fact better than M&Ms.