Category: Science

Ogi Ogas is a doctoral student in cognitive neuroscience at Boston University.  He got a spot on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and used his knowledge of neuroscience to win $500,000.   And no, none of the questions were about neuroscience.

Hat tip to Paul at Truck and Barter.

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.

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.

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 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.

James Acevedo is a "genius," though he admits no one at the
elementary school in Ridgewood, N.J., where he teaches third grade,
knows it.

But the Web site where he competes nightly,
PicksPal.com, was so taken by his record at forecasting sporting events
that it included him last month in a newly compiled list of 30
super-achievers culled from about 100,000 members and began selling
their "genius picks" to the public.

The obvious critical rejoinder is that someone from the group has the lucky touch, but only for a while.

"I go with my gut," he said. "It doesn’t feel like I’m a genius."

James is reluctant to take his wisdom to Las Vegas.  Here is the story, and thanks to Robin Hanson for the pointer.

Gregg Easterbrook says yes, citing this new study.  Here is part of the abstract:

…we empirically investigate the hypothesis that early childhood television viewing serves as such a trigger [for autism].  Using the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey, we first establish that the amount of television a young child watches is positively related to the amount of precipitation in the child’s community.  This suggests that, if television is a trigger for autism, then autism should be more prevalent in communities that receive substantial precipitation.  We then look at county-level autism data for three states – California, Oregon, and Washington – characterized by high precipitation variability.  Employing a variety of tests, we show that in each of the three states (and across all three states when pooled) there is substantial evidence that county autism rates are indeed positively related to county-wide levels of precipitation.  In our final set of tests we use California and Pennsylvania data on children born between 1972 and 1989 to show, again consistent with the television as trigger hypothesis, that county autism rates are also positively related to the percentage of households that subscribe to cable television.  Our precipitation tests indicate that just under forty percent of autism diagnoses in the three states studied is the result of television watching due to precipitation, while our cable tests indicate that approximately seventeen percent of the growth in autism in California and Pennsylvania during the 1970s and 1980s is due to the growth of cable television.  These findings are consistent with early childhood television viewing being an important trigger for autism.

I am unconvinced.  Precipitation, in these states, is a coastal phenomenon and is proxying for heterogeneity in the gene pool.  Perhaps the coastal areas attract a more "autism-ready" group of individuals.  In fairness to the authors, they do try to control for income and education and population density and diagnosis capacity, among other variables.  Note two worrying features in the results: in California precipitation is not correlated with autism rates at all (there is a north vs. south split for rain, rather than the coast vs. inland), and precipitation is a better predictor of autism than cable viewing is directly. 

Here is the latest autism news on the genetic front.

Addendum: Steve Levitt is also skeptical.

The two main lessons, as I read this paper, are a) pain is less bad when the sufferer can see the endpoint, and b) pain is less bad when the sufferer feels in control to some measure.

The concluding discussion of "happiness economics" is on the mark:

…my personal reflections are only in partial agreement with the literature on well being (see also Levav 2002).  In terms of agreement with adaptation, I find myself to be relatively happy in day-to-day life – beyond the level predicted (by others as well as by myself) for someone with this type of injury.  Mostly, this relative happiness can be attributed to the human flexibility of finding activities and outlets that can be experienced and finding in these, fulfillment, interest, and satisfaction.  For example, I found a profession that provides me with a wide-ranging flexibility in my daily life, reducing the adverse effects of my limitations on my ability.  Being able to find happiness in new ways and to adjust one’s dreams and aspirations to a new direction is clearly an important human ability that muffles the hardship of wrong turns in life circumstances.  It is possible that individuals who are injured at later stages of their lives, when they are more set in terms of their goals, have a more difficult time adjusting to such life-changing events.

However, these reflections also point to substantial disagreements with the current literature on well-being.  For example, there is no way that I can convince myself that I am as happy as I would have been without the injury.  There is not a day in which I do not feel pain, or realize the disadvantages in my situation.  Despite this daily awareness, if I had participated in a study on well-being and had been asked to rate my daily happiness on a scale from 0 (not at all happy) to 100 (extremely happy), I would have probably provided a high number, probably as high as I would have given if I had not had this injury.  Yet, such high ratings of daily happiness would have been high only relative to the top of my privately defined scale, which has been adjusted downward to accommodate the new circumstances and possibilities (Grice 1975).  Thus, while it is possible to show that ratings of happiness are not influenced much based on large life events, it is not clear that this measure reflects similar affective states.

As a mental experiment, imagine yourself in the following situation.  How you would rate your overall life satisfaction a few years after you had sustained a serious injury.  How would your ratings reflect the impact of these new circumstances?  Now imagine that you had a choice to make whether you would want this injury.  Imagine further that you were asked how much you would have paid not to have this injury.  I propose that in such cases, the ratings of overall satisfaction would not be substantially influenced by the injury, while the choice and willingness to pay would be – and to a very large degree.  Thus, while I believe that there is some adaptation and adjustment to new life circumstances, I also believe that the extent to which such adjustments can be seen as reflecting true adaptation (such as in the physiological sense of adaptation to light for example) is overstated.  Happiness can be found in many places, and individuals cannot always predict their ability to do so.  Yet, this should not undermine our understanding of horrific life events, or reduce our effort to eliminate them.

Here are Dan’s papers, and here.  Here are Dan’s riddles.

Here is this year’s list.  Example:

Ornithology – Ivan R. Schwab, of the University of California, Davis, and the late Philip R.A. May of the University of California, Los Angeles, for exploring and explaining why woodpeckers don’t get headaches.

The funny thing is that just about all of these, even the hiccups one, represent real research.  Seriously.  Here is further background.

Today’s headline reads:

Milky Way teeming with earth-like orbs.

They don’t have to visit, they can manipulate star patterns for an advertising campaign or a fundraiser.  Not to mention solar-powered self-replicating probes.  They don’t seem interested.

The obvious conclusion is that highly intelligent species do not last very long and are also not very common.  Here is my previous post on the Fermi Paradox.  Here is Geoffrey Miller on the Paradox.

Psychopaths cannot process clues of context very easily:

The key deficit in psychopaths, he [Newman] says, is an inability to process contextual cues, which makes them oblivious to the implications of their actions, both for themselves and for their potential victims…

Newman has published several studies showing this inability to consider peripheral information.  In 2004, Newman reported in the journal Neuropsychology one study in which subjects were presented with mislabeled images, such as a drawing of a pig with the word "dog" superimposed on it.  Newman’s researchers timed how long it took them to name what they saw.  They found that people in the control group — non-psychopaths — were confused by the mislabeled images, while the psychopaths answered swiftly and barely noticed the discrepancy.

"Although it is somewhat counterintuitive that superior selective attention be associated with psychopathology, it is consistent with the importance of incidental contextual and associative cues for regulating behavior," Newman wrote.

The main point of the article, with which I agree, is that we should feel sorry for psychopaths.  Here are Robert Hare’s results on psychopaths.  Here is a summary of some neurological evidence.

Addendum: Speaking of neurology, here is Will Wilkinson on whether neuroeconomics implies paternalism.

The utterly charming Seth Roberts, best-selling author and paragon of scientific  self-experimentation, visited GMU last week.

Seth told us how to be happy.  "See other people’s faces in the morning."  Faces on TV work as well as real faces.  Conversational distance is ideal.  In his view, seeing faces at night makes people unhappy.

The best way to sleep better is to stand all day.  Also you should stop eating breakfast.  Seth claims we are programmed to wake about three hours before our usual breakfast time.  (Oddly this started happening to me about two weeks before his visit.)

Most college professors have too few skills to be useful teachers and we should reward diverse kinds of achievement.  Given the importance of division of labor in modern economies, there should be many ways get an "A."  Students should receive more individualized attention.

Here is Alex’s earlier post on Seth, and here.  Here is Seth’s blog.

On the bottom of Seth’s home page is some fascinating Powerpoint on economics: "In the beginning, hobbies.  Diversify expertise: procrastination."

Here are three things statistics textbooks don’t tell you.

Seth is a true American original and his work deserves the attention of every thinking person.