Category: Science
Good sentences
"We originally wrote this article in Word, but then we converted it to Latex to make it look more like science."
The link is here. It is the best analysis of zombification I have seen to date. For the pointer I thank John Chilton.
The strangest sentence John de Palma read yesterday
"(…)Tourists at the Koorana Saltwater Crocodile Farm in Coowonga, Queensland, Australia, including 62 males and 41 females, aged 18–66 (M = 34.2, SD = 13.3), were randomly assigned to play a laptop-simulated Electronic Gaming Machine (EGM) either: (1) prior to entry, or (2) after having held a 1-m saltwater-crocodile(…)"
The link and explanation, if you could call it that, is here.
The role of the blogosphere
New research supports the notion that we fixate on enemies, and inflate their power, as a defense mechanism against generalized anxiety.
The longer article is here. This is another way of putting the point:
According to one school of thought, this tendency to exaggerate the strength of our adversaries serves a specific psychological function. It is less scary to place all our fears on a single, strong enemy than to accept the fact our well-being is largely based on factors beyond our control. An enemy, after all, can be defined, analyzed and perhaps even defeated.
What the brain values vs. what you wish to buy
I have not read this paper (gated full copy here), and I usually get nervous when it comes to brain scan interpretations, not to mention press release interpretations, but even if this has been botched it is still worth thinking about. A new paper suggests the following:
Researchers at Duke University Medical Center found that as participants were watching a sequence of faces, their brains were simultaneously evaluating those faces in two distinct ways: for the quality of the viewing experience and for what they would trade to see the face again.
As the authors put it, experienced value and decision value are not the same. The main test involves heterosexual men looking at the faces of women and thus one concrete implication, or so it seems to me, is that the pornography men enjoy the most is not necessarily what they are willing to pay the most for. The authors also note:
…that decision value signals are evident even in the absence of an overt choice task. We conclude that decisions are made by comparing neural representations of the value of different goods encoded in posterior VMPFC in a common, relative currency.
Hat tip goes to MoneyScience on Twitter.
Questions that are rarely asked
On my electric stove, there are two big coils and two little coils. The big coils, not surprisingly, heat up food much better. Why can't I have four big coils? There seems to be room for them. Is that asking too much? Do the little coils have some special use I am not aware of?
Super-K
Nicholas Kristof on toxins and autism
Kristof is correct to note:
Frankly, these are difficult issues for journalists to write about. Evidence is technical, fragmentary and conflicting, and there’s a danger of sensationalizing risks.
But he falls into these very traps when suggesting that toxins play a major role in autism. Let me pick on two sentences. Try this one:
There are genetic components to autism (identical twins are more likely to share autism than fraternal twins), but genetics explains only about one-quarter of autism cases.
Kristof doesn't note that identical twins both are autistic ninety percent or more of the time (conditional on one of the twins being autistic), yet the concordance is much lower for fraternal twins. That militates in favor of genetic explanations, although the mechanics of transmission are poorly understood. It's wrong to cite genetics as explaining one-quarter of autism cases or to imply that genetics do not explain three-quarters. There are recent studies which look for correlated genes across autistics and find less than overwhelming results and perhaps this is what he has in mind. More accurately, there is a common problem with finding "simple" genetic markers for traits which are very likely or even certain to be genetic. The degree of correlation across genetic patterns we can find should not be taken as a measure of how many autistic cases — or any other condition — can be explained by genetics. By the way, here is one paper with a plausible genetic model of autism.
Kristof also writes: "Of children born to women who took valproic acid early in pregnancy, 11 percent were autistic."
Probably he is referring to Moore et.al. (2000), "A Clinical Study of 57 Children with Fetal Anticonvulsant Syndrome." A total of four (supposedly) autistic children were observed to produce this conclusion. What happened is that some mothers took a potentially dangerous substance during pregnancy, many of their children had problems — of a variety of kinds – and some of these problems ended up resembling some features of autism or at least were interpreted as such. It's unlikely those were four autistic children in the classic sense. The paper also gives no real information on its standard of diagnosis for autism or what it means by autistic traits. It's common that papers like this find some problems in children and simply call those children "autistic," then leaping to false overall conclusions.
There's also a paper on using valproic acid to treat autism. One possibility is that the mothers taking valproic acid already were more likely to have autistic children; more likely our entire body of knowledge on valproic acid and autism doesn't offer real information.
Cross-sectional studies, spanning decades of age groups, suggest a roughly constant rate of autism, even when environmental toxins are changing considerably over those lengthy time periods. Plenty of other studies relate autism clusters successfully to non-toxin factors, such as parental education or supply-side services or standards of diagnosis.
There are likely well over 50 million autistics in the world and most of them have not had significant exposure to the cited toxins. While there are some plausible heterogeneities within autism, it is necessary to ask whether "genes *or* toxins" is one of those and probably it is not.
Epigenetic factors have not been ruled out in autism but the most careful discussions recognize that the relevant epigenetic factors — if indeed any are important – are unknown and also need not fit our usual intuitions about what is harmful in terms of direct dosages. A different way to approach the question is to ask which environmental features raise the rate of mutation. That way the genetic and epigenetic explanations are at least potentially consistent.
I'm not defending the feeding of "toxins" to children, but on examination I think virtually all of the major specific claims in this Op-Ed — at least those about autism — are wrong.
Addendum: David Bernstein scores some telling points.
Jamie Lawrence’s principles for judging books
He writes me an email:
We somehow ended up talking about things we absolutely judge by first impression. We both read a lot and widely in general, and it was a fun topic.
An easy one for me to note was that I skip technical/professional/academic work that is far enough outside of my expertise that I know the baseline knowledge assumptions are beyond me. Imperfect, but in general, a good filter.
I skip nearly all books by politicians, executives, and similar people. Even when people tell me that one is good, it usually isn't.
I really dislike reading music reviews. They almost never seem insightful, and rarely tell me anything I didn't realize I wanted to know.
Sort of the opposite of the above filters, I tend to really enjoy reading applied trade books for things far outside my expertise. An example is that about six months ago, I read a treatise on elevator traffic management that was fascinating.
What other principles can you think of? I go to Mary Riley Styles Falls Church Public Library and check the non-fiction Return carts, to see what other people have been reading.
The economics of placebos for self-remitting diseases
Daniel Carpenter, who just wrote the very impressive FDA book, has an interesting paper on his home page:
I develop a simple stochastic model of inference and therapeutic utilization in the presence of placebo effects, when the underlying medical condition may be self-remitting. In the model, expectations generate a “felt” health state which can mimic the medically cured health state even when the treatment in question has no real curing power. This effect may be augmented by self-limitation of the medical condition for which the treatment is utilized. A human agent then applies Bayes’ rule to the felt history as if it were generated pharmacologically. A more sophisticated agent knows of placebo effects but does not know the precise extent to which they contribute to curing. I describe the bias that attends inference and the under – or overutilization of therapies under such a model. A central result of the model is that human placebo learning is generally subject to greater bias in estimating treatment efficacy when diseases are self-limiting. Human agents may commit several types of decision errors under placebo learning. They may continually choose a more costly (expensive, hazardous) treatment when a less costly one would work as well, or they may continually use inferior treatments for life-threatening illnesses. When diseases are self-limiting, both these types of error are more likely when the human agent has high initial beliefs about the treatment. Possible applications of the model include the patent medicine industry, the robustness of markets for herbal and nutritional supplements, and the contemporary stability of counterfeit drug operations.
Of course this applies a lot more broadly than to medicine. It helps explain why people overuse and underuse "treatments" of many different kinds, including education. Here is Dan Carpenter's page on fly fishing.
The culture that is Japan
“The concept of this restaurant is that Robot No. 1 is the manager, which boils the noodles, and Robot No. 2 is the deputy manager, which prepares for soup and puts toppings,” said Famen’s owner, Kenji Nagaya. “Human staffs are working for the two robots.”
Here is much more, interesting throughout. Here is one more bit:
One entry, Beerbot, detects approaching people and asks for beer money. When it acquires enough, it “buys” itself a beer. Bystanders can watch it flow into a transparent bladder. As for other humanizing behaviors, “like a robot that doesn’t stop short at lighting a cigarette but actually goes ahead and smokes it?” Mr. Wurzer says, “We had that.”
Dominance Displays
Compare:
Formaldehyde
Formaldehyde is a known irritant poison, capable of causing severe internal damage, and formic acid is equally destructive, best known to scientists as an essential part of the venom in bee stings. People poisoned by methyl alcohol would often seem to recover from that first bout of dizzy sickness, feel better while the alcohol was being metabolized, and then ten to thirty hours later by poisoned again by the breakdown products.
First, their vision would blur. The optic nerve and retina are acutely vulnerable to formic acid salts. The nerve, with its continual processing of images, runs in a high metabolic state, causing blood to circulate through it rapidly — which causes poison to be delivered there continuously. Autopsies often revealed a startling atrophy of the optic nerve area, the surrounding tissue swollen, bloody, and spongy. Methyl alcohol and its by-products caused similar damage in the parietal cortex, a region of the brain essential in processing vision. It concentrated as well in the hardworking lungs — the breakdown of pulmonary tissue was what usually killed people.
That is from the new and consistently interesting The Poisoners' Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, by Deborah Blum. Although she has won a Pulitzer Prize, she remains an underrated author.
Sources of funding for Nobel Prize work
Athina Tatsioni, Effie Vavva, and John P. A. Ioannidis have an interesting new paper:
Funding is important for scientists’ work and may contribute to exceptional research outcomes. We analyzed the funding sources reported in the landmark scientific papers of Nobel Prize winners. Between 2000 and 2008, 70 Nobel laureates won recognition in medicine, physics, and chemistry. Sixty five (70%) of the 93 selected papers related to the Nobel-awarded work reported some funding source including U.S. government sources in 53 (82%), non-U.S. government sources in 19 (29%), and nongovernment sources in 33 (51%). A substantial portion of this exceptional work was unfunded. We contacted Nobel laureates whose landmark papers reported no funding. Thirteen Nobel laureates responded and offered their insights about the funding process and difficulties inherent in funding. Overall, very diverse sources amounting to a total of 64 different listed sponsors supported Nobel-related work. A few public institutions, in particular the U.S. National Institutes of Health (with n=26 funded papers) and the National Science Foundation (with n=17 papers), stood out for their successful record for funding exceptional research. However, Nobel-level work arose even from completely unfunded research, especially when institutions offered a protected environment for dedicated scientists.
I thank Michelle Dawson for the pointer.
Revisiting Simon-Ehrlich
Paul Kedrosky revisits the famous Simon-Ehrlich bet:
Without getting into it too deeply, here are some things worth knowing. Given
the above graph of the five commodities’ prices in inflation-adjusted terms, it
will surprise no-one that the bet’s payoff was highly dependent on its start
date. Simon famously offered to bet comers on any timeline longer than a year,
and on any commodity, but the bet itself was over a decade, from 1980-1990. If
you started the bet any year during the 1980s Simon won eight of the ten decadal
start years. During the 1990s things changed, however, with Simon the decadal
winners in four start years and Ehrlich winning six – 60% of the time. And if we
extend the bet into the current decade, taking Simon at his word that he was
happy to bet on any period from a year on up (we don’t have enough data to do a
full 21st century decade), then Ehrlich won every start-year bet in the 2000s.
He looks like he’ll be a perfect Simon/Ehrlich ten-for-ten.
So, what does all this mean? A few things. First, and most importantly, it
means Simon was right but fairly lucky. There is nothing wrong with being lucky,
of course, but compulsive Simon/Ehrlich-citers need to be reminded that it is no
law of nature (let alone of rickety old economics) that commodity prices
(inflation-adjusted or otherwise) trend inexorably downward, even over a
decade.
If the conclusion is that prices go up as well as down, even over a 10 year period, then there isn't much to complain about in Paul's analysis. But I think he misses the key point. The bet was never fundamentally about prices, the bet was about scarcity, living standards and whether we were running out of natural resources–remember that at the time Ehrlich was predicting hundreds of millions would die of starvation and even that England would not exist in the year 2000! Prices were just a convenient but imperfect way to mark the bet to market.
The reason prices have risen in the 1990s is not that things are getting worse but that things are getting better–especially in China and India where things have been getting much better. As China and India have become richer demand has increased tremendously in these countries putting upward pressure on prices. In other words, prices have risen because the value of resources has risen. That's quite different–indeed the opposite–of what Ehrlich was predicting.
To see this concretely take a good which is really fixed in supply, Picasso paintings. Now consider two worlds – in one world the price of a typical Picasso is $50,000; in the other, it's $5 million. Which world would you guess has a higher standard of living?
What happens when you get drunk?
Malcolm Gladwell presents a hypothesis which I hadn't heard before:
Put a stressed-out drinker in front of an exciting football game and he’ll forget his troubles. But put him in a quiet bar somewhere, all by himself and he’ll grow mare anxious. Alcohol's principal effect is to narrow our emotional and mental field of vision.
It causes, “a state of short- sightedness in which superficially understood, immediate aspects of experience have a disproportionate influence on behavior and emotion." Alcohol makes the thing in the foreground even more salient and the in the background disappear. That’s why drinking makes you think you are attractive when the world thinks otherwise: the alcohol removes the little constraining voice from the outside world that normally keeps our self-assessments in check. Drinking relaxes the man watching football because the game is front and center, and alcohol makes every secondary consideration fade away. But in a quiet bar his problems are front and center and every potentially comforting or mitigating thought recedes. Drunkenness is not disinhibition. Drunkenness is myopia.
The gated link is here. One of the associated researchers with this point — Claude Steele — is the twin brother of Shelby Steele. Robert Josephs has done some of the related work with Steele. You can buy their core piece for $11.95. Here is an interesting piece by Steele on how "drinking away your troubles" works. Here is a very useful survey piece by Josephs (and others) on the "alcohol myopia" hypothesis.
Here is an hour-long interview with Steele (which I have not heard). Steele is now Provost at Columbia University.