Category: Science

In Defense of Mess

When Nobel Laureate and University of Chicago economics professor Robert Fogel found his desk becoming massively piled he simply installed a second desk behind him that now competes in towering clutter with the first.

That is from A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder, by Eric Abramson and David Freedman, an intriguing defense of…um…mess.  Here is my previous post on this topic.

Global Orgasm Day

Today is global orgasm day.  Why?  Well, why not?  But the organizers do have a larger goal: "To effect positive change in the energy field of the Earth through input of the largest possible surge of human energy, a synchronized Global Orgasm."

Lest you think this is purely prurient, do note that there is an interesting scientific component.   The Global Consciousness Project  is a peculiar project run out of Princeton University that has for many years been running experiments correlating random output devices with human consciousness.  Results from 12 years of experiments show small but highly statistically significant results.

Beginning in 1998 the group started to record data from "eggs" (non-deterministic random number generators) located around the world.  The data show or seem to show higher than random correlations with "global events" such as the funeral of Princess Diana (the events are designated in advance or before examining the data).  The eggs will record whether today’s global orgasm is associated with a perturbation in the global consciousness field.

Do I believe any of this?  No.  Will I participate in the experiment?  Anything for science.

Poorly designed objects

Bruce Charlton asks:

What is the worst designed everyday object?

Bruce Charlton answers:

My vote would go to the standard, hard plastic, hinged CD case.

Its functionality is terrible at best, and it breaks way too easily;
especially the hinge – upon which functionality depends.  And I have
hundreds of them!

That was my answer too.  I am also frustrated by the prevalence of non-sharp knives, although perhaps this is best for the children.  Do you all have other answers?

The power of suggestion?

According to Patric Bach and Steven Tipper of Bangor University, the mere sight of Wayne Rooney
[a soccer player] inhibits the control you have over your feet.  Apparently, looking at
Rooney automatically triggers football-related activity in the movement
control parts of your brain, leading to the paradoxical effect of
impairing your own foot control.  By contrast, Bach and Tipper found the
sight of the British tennis player Tim Henman impairs observers’ hand
control, but not their foot control.

Here is the full story.

Mistakes, or behavioral economics for babies

Hiding

Young children aged between two and four years believe that you only
have to hide your head to become invisible – if your legs are on view,
it doesn’t matter, you still can’t be seen.

That’s according to Nicola McGuigan
and Martin Doherty who say this is probably because young children
think of ‘seeing’ in terms of mutual engagement between people. It
explains why kids often think they can’t be seen if they cover their
eyes.

Here is further discussion.

Politically incorrect paper of the month

Many studies have shown that women are under-represented in tenured ranks in the sciences.  We evaluate whether gender differences in the likelihood of obtaining a tenure track job, promotion to tenure, and promotion to full professor explain these facts using the 1973-2001 Survey of Doctorate Recipients.  We find that women are less likely to take tenure track positions in science, but the gender gap is entirely explained by fertility decisions.  We find that in science overall, there is no gender difference in promotion to tenure or full professor after controlling for demographic, family, employer and productivity covariates and that in many cases, there is no gender difference in promotion to tenure or full professor even without controlling for covariates.  However, family characteristics have different impacts on women’s and men’s promotion probabilities.  Single women do better at each stage than single men, although this might be due to selection.  Children make it less likely that women in science will advance up the academic job ladder beyond their early post-doctorate years, while both marriage and children increase men’s likelihood of advancing.

Here is the NBER version, here is a non-gated version.  Alas, I have not had time to read this piece, although I know and respect the work of Shu Kahn, one of the authors.

Addendum: Matt Yglesias comments.

Department of Oh-Oh, a continuing series

The explanation [of chevron deposits] is obvious to some scientists.  A large asteroid or
comet, the kind that could kill a quarter of the world’s population,
smashed into the Indian Ocean 4,800 years ago, producing a tsunami at
least 600 feet high, about 13 times as big as the one that inundated
Indonesia nearly two years ago.  The wave carried the huge deposits of
sediment to land.

Most astronomers doubt that any large comets
or asteroids have crashed into the Earth in the last 10,000 years.  But
the self-described “band of misfits” that make up the two-year-old
Holocene Impact Working Group say that astronomers simply have not
known how or where to look for evidence of such impacts along the
world’s shorelines and in the deep ocean.

Scientists in the working group say the evidence for such impacts
during the last 10,000 years, known as the Holocene epoch, is strong
enough to overturn current estimates of how often the Earth suffers a
violent impact on the order of a 10-megaton explosion.  Instead of once
in 500,000 to one million years, as astronomers now calculate,
catastrophic impacts could happen every few thousand years.

Here is the full story.  I should add there are reports that a tidal wave (not nearly of this size) may hit Japan today.  Here are our posts on asteroid deflection as a public good.

The Stern report on global warming

1. Stern never says what discount rate he is actually using.  I find
this bizarre, to say the least.  One account from the FT estimates he uses a
figure between 2 and 3 percent.

2. The correct rate depends on a society’s rate of investment.  If
government regulates, taxes, or otherwise pulls resources from the
private sector, we need to estimate how much of these resources would have gone
into investment and how much would have gone into consumption.  Stern
never does this.

3. The resources that would have gone into investment should be
discounted by the (risk-adusted) rate of return on investment.  This will be much higher than two or three percent, although of course it does not apply to the entire gross upfront cost.

4. The resources that would have gone into consumption are harder to discount, especially if we are comparing those resources across
the generations, and if the change in question is "large"
rather than "small."  I tend to favor a very low or zero discount rate in these settings, if only because there is no pure time preference across the
generations.  (Before you are born, you are not sitting around impatiently, waiting, unless of course you are a character in Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird.)  In any case this is predominantly an ethical question, and no correct answer follows directly from examining marginal analysis and market prices. 

If the change is "small" for the affected people, in the precise sense of not much affecting their marginal utility of wealth, we should discount by the market rate of interest, adjusted for risk, taxes, transactions costs, etc.  I don’t find Stern very clear on such matters. 

5. Since the Chinese save and invest more than do Americans, the
correct social discount rate should be higher for China than America. 
If the Chinese are earning ten percent a year on savings of fifty
percent, that gives a rough discount rate of about five percent.  Don’t
tell me that US and A is saving zero percent a year (no way), but we are saving less than the Chinese.

All other things equal, that means we should invest more to stop global warming than should the Chinese, and that is not even considering our higher income. 

6. Stern argues that if the environment is worsening, this might
justify a negative discount rate for some environmental amenities.
This is theoretically possible, but with substitutability between
environmental and non-environmental goods, it is unlikely.

7. Cost-benefit analysis works best for small changes which can be
evaluated at market prices.  I don’t think it tells us much about
evaluating the costs of, say, one hundred million poor "climate-change"
refugees.  Under my ethical views, which refer to a notion of property rights, the true costs of those refugees are
higher than market prices/incomes will indicate.

8. Lower discount rates don’t always make global warming costs more important.  Say the rate of discount is zero.  This implies that one-time adjustment costs fade into insignificance, compared to ongoing gains from economic growth.

9. For this entire exercise, the results are very very sensitive to
the choice of discount rate.  Some of this requires ethics, not just economics.  Stern
notes this clearly, but the relevant caveats don’t seem to find their
way into his final presentation of the estimates.

The bottom line: Stern avoids many of the common mistakes in
this area.  He stresses that a multiplicity of discount rates is required.  But his treatment of discount rates is far from transparent and it is in some regards incorrect.  That said, the "mistakes" slant the analysis in both directions, rather than confirming any prior that global warming is a significant economic problem.

The other bottom line: I do understand, and accept, the case for doing something.  But I don’t yet see how this report adds to that case.  Maybe I’ll read on.

Here is a critique from The Economist, and here.  Here is Cass Sunstein on the study
It also seems the report
relies on excessively high estimates of econoimc growth.  Here is one critique of the science.  Here is a detailed Bjorn Lomborg critique.  New Economist blog points to these supporting materials.

Why we talk

How much is communication of information the main purpose of speech?  I can think of other reasons to speak:

1. We talk to signal loyalty, or disloyalty.

2. We talk to bond with others.

3. We talk because we are not very self-aware and we need an audience if we are to learn our own thoughts or make up our minds.  Clark Durant points to Hamlet.

4. We talk so people may judge us, leading to efficient sorting.

5. We talk to see who will leave the room.

6. We talk because we are restless, nervous, or bored.  Speech may relieve anxiety, or give the pretense of doing so.

Of course it depends on context, but I’ll put information communication at no more than fifteen percent of our chatter.

Claims about my friends

Robin Hanson will like this one:

The more fiction a person reads, the more empathy they have and the
better they perform on tests of social understanding and awareness.  By
contrast, reading more non-fiction, fact-based books shows the opposite
association.  That’s according to Raymond Mar and colleagues who say their finding could have implications for educating children and adults about understanding others…

If you, like Robin, are fond of signaling theory the causality can run either way.

Bryan Caplan will like this one:

In general, the students and experts believed mental disorders were
less ‘real’ than medical disorders.  For example, most of the
participants agreed that you either have a medical disorder or you
don’t, but that this isn’t true for mental disorders (although a third
of the experts felt it was).  The experts and students also believed
more strongly that medical disorders exist ‘naturally’ in the world,
than do mental disorders.  The familiarity of conditions didn’t make any
difference to the participants’ views.

Dr. Curry and the future of mankind

Dr Curry warns…in 10,000 years time humans may have paid a genetic price for relying on technology.

Spoiled by gadgets designed to meet their every need, they could come to resemble domesticated animals.

Social skills, such as communicating and interacting with others, could be lost, along with emotions such as love, sympathy, trust and respect.  People would become less able to care for others, or perform in teams.

Physically, they would start to appear more juvenile.  Chins would recede, as a result of having to chew less on processed food.

There could also be health problems caused by reliance on medicine, resulting in weak immune systems.  Preventing deaths would also help to preserve the genetic defects that cause cancer.

Dr. Curry also claims:

Further into the future, sexual selection – being choosy about one’s partner – was likely to create more and more genetic inequality, said Dr Curry.

Only his third paragraph — about less sociability — fits my basic model of future human evolution.  Genetic engineering aside, won’t greater choosiness favor physically fit partners?  And given the ease of birth control, I expect that people will come to love their children more, even though they will care less about everyone else.  Who needs allies for quality child care when per capita income is very high? 

Here is the full story.  Thanks to Jason Kottke for the pointer.