Category: Science
Relations
The source article is here.
Temple Grandin’s theories on autism
As you probably know, the Temple Grandin biopic, starring Claire Danes, is showing this Saturday evening. Here is Temple on the movie. Grandin has done a great deal to benefit animals, by designing more humane slaughterhouses, stockyards, and encouraging other innovations. She also has promoted the idea of talented autistics and helped raise that notion to a very high profile. I have enormous respect for what she has done and I would gladly see her win a Nobel Prize if the appropriate category for such a prize existed.
That said, researchers disagree with Grandin's theories on autism in a number of ways and my own reading leads me to side with the researchers on some issues. Many non-autistics defer to Grandin on autism because of her life story, her remarkable achievements, and yes because of her autism. I thought it would be useful to offer a more skeptical view of a few of her claims:
1. Autistic individuals do not in general "think in pictures," though some autistics offer this self-description. Grandin repeatedly refers to herself in this context. I don't read her as claiming this tendency is universal or even the general rule, but the disclaimers aren't as evident as I would like them to be.
2. There is little evidence to support her view that autistics "think like animals." Here is one published critique of her theory: "We argue that the extraordinary cognitive feats shown by some animal species can be better understood as adaptive specialisations that bear little, if any, relationship to the unusual skills shown by savants." You'll find a response by Grandin at that same link. I'm not totally on board with the critique either (how well do we understand savants anyway?), but at the very least Grandin's claim is an unsupported hypothesis.
3. Grandin tends to brusquely classify autistic children into different groups. She will speak of "the nerds who will do just fine" (see the eBook linked to below) as opposed to the "severely autistic," who require that someone take control of their lives and pound a bit of the autism out of them. There's a great deal of diversity among autistics, and autistic outcomes, but I don't see that as the most useful way of expressing those differences. Autism diagnoses are often unstable at young ages, there is not any useful or commonly accepted measure of "autistic severity," her description perpetuates stereotypes, and Grandin herself as a child would have met criteria for "severely autistic" and yet she did fine through parental love and attention, which helped her realize rather than overturn her basic nature. That's not even a complete list of my worries on this point; for more see my Create Your Own Economy.
4. Grandin supports some varieties of intensive behavioral therapy for autistics. Many research papers support those same therapies but those papers do not generally conduct an RCT and furthermore many of the said researchers have a commercial stake in what they are studying and promoting. In my view we don't know "what works" but my (non-RCT-tested) opinion is that giving autistic children a lot of fun things to do — fun by their standards — and a lot of information to study and manipulate, gives the best chance of good outcomes. (In any case "spontaneous improvement" is considerable, so anecdotally many therapies will appear to work when they do not; nor is there a common control for placebos.) Many of the behavioral therapies seem quite oppressive to me and if we don't know they work I am worried that they are being overpromoted. Grandin has in some ways the intellectual temperament of an engineer and I am worried that she has not absorbed the lessons of Hayek's The Counterrevolution of Science.
5. Grandin refers to herself as more interested in tangible results and less interested in emotions. She is entitled to that self-description, but it is worth noting that most individuals in the "autism community" would not consider this a good presentation of their attitude toward emotions.
There is a recent eBook (selling for only $4.00), consisting of a dialogue between myself and Grandin, mostly on autism and talented autistics but not just. For instance we also talk about our favorite TV shows, including a discussion of Lost, and there is a segment on science fiction and the future of humanity. I try to draw her out on autism, cognitive anthromorphizing, and attitudes toward religion, but she is reluctant to offer her opinions on that important topic. I would describe the eBook as a good introduction to her thought on autism and society, while also giving an idea of how someone else (me) might differ from some of her basic attitudes.
What is interdisciplinarity?
Maybe not what you think. Louis Menand writes:
Interdisciplinarity is not something different from disciplinarity. It is the ratification of the logic of disciplinarity. In practice, it actually tends to rigidity disciplinary paradigms. A typical interdisciplinary situation might bring together, in a classroom, a literature professor and an anthropologist. The role of the literature professor is to perform qua literature professor, bringing to bear the specialized methods and knowledge of literary study to the subject at hand; the role of the anthropologist is to do the same with the methods of anthropological inquiry. This methodological constrast is regarded as, in fact, the intellectual and pedagogical takeaway of the collaboration. What happens is the phenomenon of borrowed authority: the literature professor can incorporate into his work the insights of the anthropologist, in the form of "As anthropology has shown us," ignoring the probability that the particular insight being recognized is highly contested within the anthropologist's own discipline.
Because professors are trained to respect the autonomy and expertise of other disciplines, they are rarely in a position to evaluate one another's claims. So there is nothing transgressive about interdisciplinarity on this description. There is nothing even new about it. Disciplinarity has not only been ratified; it has been fetishized. The disciplines are treated as the sum of all possible perspectives.
Here is my previous post on Menand's new book.
Do Animals have Animal Spirits?
It's quite easy to see how a "real business cycle" could occur in the natural world. Imagine a pond teeming with life. One year a parasite infects the lily pads. Without the lily pads the frogs can't catch flies, the flies swarm, but the frogs go hungry and the pike have less to eat. If we measured the gross pond biota (gpb) we could see natural cycles. Indeed, if we measured different pond sectors (the frog sector, the fly sector etc.) we could trace out a whole sequence of events as each sector of the pond responds to the initial shock and to changes in every other sector (ala a vector auto regression).
Can there be a Keynesian business cycle in the pond? i.e. Could animal spirits drive a natural business cycle? It's harder for me to see exactly how this would work. We would need "money" or something similar to generate a rush to liquidity and a decline in investment. We could perhaps get a coordination type business cycle (ala Roger Farmer) with herd behavior. Interestingly, the trend in biology–as I read it at least–has been to think of herd behavior as optimal for the herd but this is not necessarily the case. We know that slime molds self-organize and aggregate during times of stress could this process be set off with no or little exogenous shock? Could a natural system provide a model for business cycle behavior? It would be odd if only people had animal spirits. Biology and economics have much to offer one another.
If he could get one idea peer-reviewed
If I could get one idea peer reviewed, it would probably be ‘What percentage of chewing gum sales are due to someone wanting change?’ All I need now is a couple of referees.
Here is the source blog. What would you pick? If I ask myself this question today, I wish for a serious study on how banning the burkha or veil would affect sexual mores and how it would alter the allocation of resources within the family, referring of course to families where such methods of dress are an issue. If such a paper already exists, please let me know and I'll wish for something else.
How signals work on the dance floor
Here is some new research:
The results showed that women gave the highest attractiveness ratings to men with the highest levels of prenatal testosterone. The men with the lowest testosterone in turn got the lowest attractiveness ratings. "Men can communicate their testosterone levels through the way they dance," Lovatt told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "And women understand it — without noticing it."
In women, the link between dancing style and testosterone levels were similar — but the reaction of men was just the opposite. Dancers with high levels of testosterone moved more parts of their body, with their movements being somewhat uncoordinated, while those with lower testosterone made more subtle movements, especially with their hips. The male students found the latter style most appealing…
The men who got the female students hot under the collar danced with large movements which were "complexly coordinated." But it's a fine line between hot and not, however: Those men who made big moves but who were less coordinated came across as dominant alpha males — and were unlikely to win women's hearts. The researchers also found that the size and complexity of the dance moves decreased in parallel with testosterone levels.
The full story is here and the article is interesting throughout. This bit on the researcher caught my eye:
Lovatt knows his subject matter well — he himself was a professional dancer until the age of 26. He performed in musicals in large venues around England and also worked on cruise ships. The thought of an academic career barely entered his head at the time. He wasn't even able to read until he was 23, having left school without any qualifications. When he looked at a page in a book, "all I saw was a big black block."
What is not right in this picture?
How might you improve access to scientific research? Write an editorial calling for greater access…and then put it behind a paywall.
Hat tip goes to Michelle Dawson on Twitter.
Addendum: Registration suffices, you don't need to pay, my apologies!
Is this a big uh-oh for neuroeconomics?
Here's a new abstract:
Reward processing is a central component of learning and decision making. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has contributed essentially to our understanding of reward processing in humans. The strength of reward-related brain responses might prove as a valuable marker for, or correlate of, individual preferences or personality traits. An essential prerequisite for this is a sufficient reliability of individual measures of reward-related brain signals. We therefore determined test-retest reliabilities of BOLD responses to reward prediction, reward receipt and reward prediction errors in the ventral striatum and the orbitofrontal cortex in 25 subjects undergoing three different simple reward paradigms (retest interval 7-13 days). Although on a group level the paradigms consistently led to significant activations of the relevant brain areas in two sessions, across subject retest reliabilities were only poor to fair (with intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) of -.15 to .44). ICCs for motor activations were considerably higher (ICC .32 to .73). Our results reveal the methodological difficulties behind across-subject correlations in fMRI research on reward processing. These results demonstrate the need for studies that address methods to optimize the retest reliability of fMRI.
Hat tip goes to the excellent Vaughn Bell. Here are related criticisms. Here is a related paper, possibly gated for you, "Is There a Method for Neuroeconomics?"
The diamond oceans of Uranus and Neptune
Neptune and Uranus may have diamond icebergs floating atop liquid diamond seas closer to home. The surprise finding comes from the first detailed measurements of the melting point of diamond, Discovery News reports.
Scientists zapped diamond with a laser at pressures 40 million times greater than the Earth's atmosphere at sea level, and then slowly reduced both temperature and pressure. They eventually found that diamond behaves like water during freezing and melting, and that chunks of diamond will float in the liquid diamond.
The full story is here, with pictures, and I thank Gregory Rehmke for the pointer. Don't think, however, that a commercial mission to these planets could pay for itself — elasticity of demand!
Very good sentences
"A Shanghai hospital cultivated and reintroduced human brain tissue in 2002 after taking a sample from the end of a chopstick implanted in a patient's frontal lobe following a disagreement at a restaurant."
The article, on scientific, medical, and regenerative research in China, is interesting throughout. For the pointer, I thank MR commentator JamieNYC.
Projects to ponder, and let’s drink a toast to fixed costs for once
Hans Larsson, the Canada Research Chair in Macro Evolution at
Montreal's McGill University, said he aims to develop dinosaur traits
that disappeared millions of years ago in birds.Larsson believes by flipping certain genetic levers during a chicken
embryo's development, he can reproduce the dinosaur anatomy, he told
AFP in an interview.Though still in its infancy, the research could eventually lead to
hatching live prehistoric animals, but Larsson said there are no plans
for that now, for ethical and practical reasons — a dinosaur hatchery
is "too large an enterprise."
The longer story is here and I thank Bookslut (one of my favorite blogs) for the pointer. Here is Larsson's home page.
Pricing Copenhagen
U.S. President Barack Obama said the climate-change accord he reached with China and most of the 193 attending nations on Dec. 18 was an “unprecedented” first step to slow global warming. Environmental groups such as Friends of the Earth called it a failure…
And the market says?
European and United Nations carbon prices fell the most since February after the Copenhagen climate accord didn’t set targets that would boost demand for permits.
European Union carbon-dioxide allowances for delivery in December 2010 declined 8.3 percent to close at 12.45 euros ($17.82) on the European Climate Exchange in London. Today was the first day of trading since the summit concluded Dec. 19.
The agreed targets in the Copenhagen deal amount to a “bunch of negotiation ranges” that investors had already factored in, Trevor Sikorski, an emissions analysts for Barclays Capital, said in a phone interview after returning to London from the Danish capital. “It seems to be below even our modest expectations.”
Both quotes from Bloomberg. Hat tip to Tyler in Nicaragua.
Are Old Scientists Less Innovative?
Paul Romer is interviewed in From Poverty to Prosperity, an excellent new book from Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz. When asked about threats to progress Romer says the following:
One factor that does worry me a little is the demographic changes. Young people, I think, tend to be more innovative, more willing to take risks, more willing to do things differently and they may be very important, disproportionately important, in this innovation and growth process.
And then he gives an example of his worry in practice:
…instead of young scientists getting grant funding to go off and do whatever they want in their twenties, they're working in a lab where somebody in his forties or fifties is the principal investigator in charge of the grant. They're working as apprentices, almost, under the senior person. If we're not careful, we could let our institutions, things like tenure and hierarchical structures and peer review, slowly morph over time so that old guys control more and more of what's going on and the young people have a harder and harder time doing something really different, and that would be would be a bad thing for these processes of growth and change. I'd like to see us keep thinking about how we could tweak our institutions to give power and control and opportunity to young people.
Here is a graph from Jason Hoyt showing how much the average age of NIH grant recipients has already increased.
Hat tip for the graph to Aleks at Statistical Modeling…. Data here.
A very interesting paragraph
Andrade said more research is obviously needed to find out how doodling helps us maintain our attention. However, her theory is that by using up slightly more mental resources, doodling helps prevent the mind from wandering off the boring primary task into daydream land. This study is part of an emerging recognition in psychology that secondary tasks aren't always a distraction from primary tasks, but can sometimes actually be beneficial.
There is more information here.
Four important ideas from Russ Roberts
These are from Russ Roberts:
Over the last six years or so, since coming to George Mason and in the last three years since conducting a weekly podcast, I’ve been thinking a great deal about the following ideas:
1. Some orderly things are not intended by anyone.
2. The division of labor is limited by the extent of the market.
3. It is easy to fall prey to confirmation bias.
4. Politicians respond to incentives.
These are pretty simple ideas. When you give people the one sentence version or paragraph version they nod and tell you they agree with the essence of the idea. But I find these ideas to be quite deep. They are easy to understand but very difficult to absorb. The more I think about them, the deeper is my understanding.