Category: Science

Market Approaches to Conservation

The Nature Conservancy continues to pioneer innovative, market-based approaches to conservation.

The Nature Conservancy announced today the purchase of six federal
trawling permits and four trawling vessels from commercial fishermen in
Morro Bay as part of a collaborative effort to protect a vast swath of
ocean off the coast of central California and help reform a troubled
fishery. The precedent-setting acquisitions represent the nation’s
first private buy out of Pacific fishing vessels and permits for
conservation purposes.

Thanks to Monique van Hoek for the pointer.

The unit bias

Nominal variables matter, even when we are deciding how much to eat on our plates:

To test [the unit bias], the researchers left a bowl of M&M sweets in the
hallway of an apartment building with a sign that read “Eat Your Fill:
please use the spoon to serve yourself”. Some days they left a
tablespoon-sized scoop, other days they left a quartercup scoop that
was four times as big. Passers-by could obviously help themselves to as
little or as much as they wanted regardless of which spoon was
provided, but on average, 1.67 times more M&M’s were taken on the
days the big scoop was left compared with the tablespoon-sized scoop.

In
another experiment, the researchers found that, measured by weight,
significantly more pretzels were taken by passers-by when a
complimentary bowl of 60 whole pretzels was left in an apartment
building, compared with when a bowl of 120 half-pretzels was left. And
it was a similar story when either a bowl of 80 small Tootsie rolls (an
American snack bar) or a bowl of 20 large Tootsie rolls was left in an
office building.

In other words, throughout the study, people
took more food when the unit on offer was larger. “Consumption norms
promote both the tendency to complete eating a unit and the idea that a
single unit is the proper portion”, the researchers said.

Here is further information.  There is a lesson for macroeconomics in here, somewhere.

The Nutty Professor

Here’s an amazing piece of the life of Timothy Leary from the NYTimes book review of Timothy Leary: A Biography.

…he finally went to jail, and was likely to be kept there for years
before he would be considered for parole. Characteristically, he
compared himself to "Christ . . . harassed by Pilate and Herod." In a
twist that could have occurred only in 1970, a consortium of drug
dealers paid the Weather Underground to spring Leary from the
California Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo – he pulled himself along a
telephone cable over the fence, then was picked up by a car – and
transport him to Algeria. He duly issued a press statement written in
the voice of the Weathermen, the money line of which was: "To shoot a
genocidal robot policeman in the defense of life is a sacred act."

But
when he and his wife, Rosemary, arrived in Algiers, they found
themselves wards of the exiled Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver,
who was probably smarter than Leary, possibly crazier, and had little
use for him. As Leary acknowledged, rather shrewdly: "It was a new
experience for me to be dependent on a strong, variable, sexually
restless, charismatic leader who was insanely erratic. I usually played
that role myself."

Central Planting

The technologies of mass agriculture, including genetic engineering, prevented the mass starvation of humanity in the last century.  But today most of humanity lives on just 12 plant species and some scientists are worried that a lack of variety may prove our undoing.  Some types of banana, for example, have already been wiped out or are threatened (Snopes is more cautious but verifies the basic facts). 

To protect our seed patrimony is the goal of the Svalbard International
Seed Vault
.

The high-security vault, almost half the length of a football field, will
be carved into a mountain on a remote island above the Arctic Circle. If the
looming fences, motion detectors and steel air-lock doors are not disincentive
enough for anyone hoping to breach the facility’s concrete interior, the polar
bears roaming outside should help….

Its precious contents? Seeds  —  millions and millions of them  —  from
virtually every variety of food on the planet.

Thanks to Carl Close for the pointer.

Is a human-chimp chimera possible?

In species where females are promiscuous, there is a big conflict of
interest between males and females over the amount of resources each
child should get. The father of one child probably won’t be the father
of the next (or even of others in the same litter), so his genes —
which he passes on to the child — should evolve to try to get more
resources for his offspring. Genes that come from the mother,
meanwhile, evolve to suppress this effect, so that all her offspring
aren’t fighting each other for resources. In species where females are
monogamous, in contrast, male and female interests are more or less the
same, since the same male is likely to sire many litters with the same
female.

In humans, mice and other mammals of our sort, the
activities of the placenta are — ready for this? — largely controlled
by the father’s genes. Now consider what happens when certain close
species try to mate. Female deer mice are much more promiscuous than
female oldfield mice, so a male deer mouse’s genes are predicted to
fight for resources much more than a male oldfield mouse’s genes would.
Consistent with this, when a male deer mouse mates with a female
oldfield mouse, both placenta and fetus become huge, and the mother
often dies. Any fetus that manages to be born is one third bigger than
babies from either species usually are. When the oldfield mouse is the
father, on the other hand, the pregnancy is much less risky for the
mother — but the baby is a runt.

…female chimpanzees are much, much more promiscuous than human females.
So, assuming you could get fertilization, here’s my prediction: if the
chimpanzee were the father, the pregnancy would be extremely dangerous
for the mother. Probably, few pregnancies could be carried to term. Any
children that did result would be huge. In contrast, if the human were
the father, the children would be small, and both mother and child
would be more likely to survive.

Cads and Dads

Tyler, Alex, Alex’s wife Monique, Bryan (Caplan), Ilia (Rainer) and I had a fun conversation on Thursday.

A standard story says that women like cads for short term relationships, to get good sex (i.e., genes), and dads for long term relationships, to get security and comfort (i.e., resources to raise kids).  Of course some men are good in both roles, but most men are thought to be better at one role than the other.

Woman always want both sex and security, but they seem to prefer "bad  boy" cads more when they are young, and dads more when they are older.  Why?  We were looking less for proximate psychological causes and more for functional explanations.  We came up with these four theories:

1.  Young women must practice having relationships, in part to discover the distribution of guys out there and their own ability to attract guys.  This requires short term relationships.  But it is not clear why these should be more with cads rather than dad candidates.  And this would predict young women avoid sex when practicing, to avoid having kids.  This theory applies to better to young teens than to young women.

2.  Instead of having all her kids with a dad, many women may have enough negotiating power to get a dad to support her even if she has one kid with a cad.   Dads object less to supporting a cad kid created before they met, as a cad kid created during their relationship suggests that it won’t be the last.  A cad kid early in life can be written off to the "foolishness of youth," and she can credibly claim that she didn’t intend for this to be a cad kid; she had hoped the cad would be a dad.

3.  Girls more than women expect parents to help with their mistakes.  A young woman expects a cad kid to be cared for not by a dad but by her parents and extended family.  Since parents die eventually, older women are less likely to have such support available.  This theory predicts that women without living parents would be less attracted to cads, all else equal.

4.  Young people have stronger incentives to signal than older people, since they are still forming long term attachments, and want to attract the best partners.  Young women compete to attract cads in order to signal their attractiveness and social power, and having sex with cads helps to attract cads.   Women compete more for cads than for dads because cad quality is easier to see in young men – it can take many years to reveal who are the best resource providers.  This theory predicts young women have less interest in private unobserved relationships with cads.

The truth is probably a mixture of these theories.   But some are probably more important that others.

TC: Here are related posts on the topic.

What it’s like being shy

"Up until now, people thought that [shyness] was mostly related to
avoidance of social situations," says co-author and child psychiatrist
Monique Ernst. "Here we showed that shy children have increased
activity in the reward system of the brain as well."

Why this
would be the case is still not clear. "One interpretation is that
extremely shy children have an increased sensitivity to many types of
stimuli–both frightening and rewarding," says Guyer. There are other
possibilities as well, says Mauricio Delgado, a psychologist at Rutgers
University in Newark, New Jersey. For example, increased activity in
the striatum may help shy children cope with the anxiety of stressful
situations, although not enough so to help them overcome their shyness.

…Because shy children
appear to be more sensitive to winning and losing, they may experience
emotions more strongly than others, putting them at risk for emotional
disorders such as anxiety and depression. On the flip side, shy
children may experience positive emotions such as success very
strongly, helping them succeed…

OK, that is from scans of only 32 people, 13 of them shy.  But that is actually more than usual for such a study.  Here is the link.  Here is Jonathan Rauch’s famous piece on being an introvert, well worth reading. 

Chris Masse sends me further neuro links, here and here.  Here is a recent neuro study on how women react to erotic images.

I welcome the Ubermensch, pt. 2

My colleague Bryan Caplan does a great Magneto impersonation, "You are a god among insects.  Never let anyone tell you different,"  is one of his favorite lines.  You figure it out.

In anycase, Bryan and others may enjoy this cool article on implanting tiny magnets under your skin thereby creating the ability to sense electomagnetic fields. 

He sliced open my finger with a
standard scalpel, inserted a tool to make a gap for the magnet, and tried to
insert the magnet in one nonstop motion. The insertion didn’t work, and he
widened the cut and tried again. This time it worked, and he closed the cut with
a single suture. The suture was the most painful step — an indicator that the
cold "anesthetic" had worn off. The process took less than 10 minutes. My finger
was slightly swollen and sported a blue, knotted plastic thread.

When we were done we sat in Haworth’s living room. He brought out a magnet
and handed it to me. I brought it near my finger and felt the magnet move for
the first time up against the raw inside of my finger. I startled visibly, and
Haworth grinned. "Welcome to your new sense," he said.

Here is part one in the Ubermensch series.

Hat tip to Kottke.

The Apprentice and Group Identity

The final two candidates in Donald Trump’s The Apprentice lead two teams through a task.  Every year Donald asks the respective team members who should win.  If the members answered objectively then each team should split in about the same proportion.  Yet almost invariably the members of each team tell Donald that the candidate that led them in the last task is the best. 

This is an interesting example of how easily our own identity can become tied to that of a group.  We are the Red team, and the Red Team leader is the best.  The Robber’s Cave may be more difficult to exit than Plato’s cave.

The failure of the teams to split in equal proportions also means that information fails to aggregate.  The Donald learns nothing from the people who know the candidate the best, the employees. 

Comments are open especially if you have other examples of the malleability of group identity and how it can distort information aggregation.

Cleansing in Zimbabwe

The image on the left (click to expand) from June of 2002 shows Porta Farm in Zimbabwe, a settlement of 6,000 to 10,000 people.  The image on the right is the same area today.  Does it help to explain if I say that the residents were opponents of Mugabe’s regime?

The images are from the American Association for the Advancement of ScienceKottke has further links.  Note, once again, that David Brin was correct.

Satzimb1

My views on global warming

1. It is by now pointless to deny that global warming is man-made to a considerable degree.

2. It is a very real problem.  If you don’t believe me, go visit the deltas of East Bengal or Bangladesh and think about it again.  Sweden I am not worried about and Greenland may become valuable, but where do we put the losers and no this isn’t just a few small islands in the Pacific.

3. I can imagine Manhattan and other major cities taking protective action against rising water levels, much as the Dutch do today.  I recall reading that the Dutch spend about as a high a percentage of their gdp defending themselves from water as the U.S. does on national defense.  That is quite a burden, but it is better than forsaking economic growth.

4. Like Arnold Kling, I do not much trust climate models.  Perhaps I have spent too much time doing macro, and the experience carries over.  Nonetheless uncertainty about final effects gives us more to worry about, not less.  It is the worst-case scenarios for global warming which worry me, not the middling scenarios.  Variance is our enemy in this matter.

5. I don’t have a good plan for what to do.  Imagine passing and extending Kyoto and turning 2/3 of the U.S. energy supply into nuclear, wind, and solar power.  Heroic achievements, to be sure.  But if China and India continue to industrialize, global warming will likely continue and perhaps accelerate, as I understand current knowledge.

6. I have yet to see a real plan which recognizes three points: a) without continued economic growth the world will probably fall apart, b) the problem is real and significant, c) any good preventive solution would require an enormous amount of concerted action across both time and across nations.

7. How much does the framing of the problem contribute to our political views on the matter?  How much would we spend, or how intensively would we organize global action, if a typhoon were headed right for Bangladesh?  An earthquake?  A war?  A much slower set of changes, not fully our fault?  An out-of-control American nuclear weapon?  Should it matter?

8. If we could relocate all the losers-to-be into freer and richer countries, should we consider this a satisfactory solution?  Or are we still massive and unjustified aggressors if they are crying to us: "Don’t let it happen, don’t let it happen!"?

The symmetry thesis

The thesis is simple, and almost everyone disagrees with it upon first hearing.

The symmetry thesis: A given person likes (loves) you as much as you like (love) him or her.

I have encountered many apparent refutations of the symmetry thesis,
but with time most have turned out to be spurious.  I find the symmetry
thesis a surprisingly strong predictor of human behavior and
inclination.

Do I want to know how much you like me?  It is simple.  I imagine
how much I like you.  (If you do the same, are we circular?  Or does
some kind of fixed point theorem apply?)

Let me rule out or explain some obvious "counterexamples."  If a guy
stalks you, and you can’t stand him, the reality is that he is probably
more hostile to you than loving.  The thesis fits.

Break-ups are tricky and they provide the best counterexamples.  But
who really left whom is not always obvious; it can take several years
to figure out what was going on.  Often the leaving party is the one
who first develops a narrative of how things might be different; this
is distinct from liking or loving the other person less.  Other people
leave pre-emptively.

Unilateral crushes are possible and indeed common, although with
repeated contact they usually collapse into symmetry, one way or the
other.

I can imagine several (non-exclusive) mechanisms in support of the
symmetry thesis.  Perhaps "having a connection" — which is mutual by
nature — is the key to true liking and attraction.  That is my favored
view.  Note that it creates a possible exception for people who can
like or love others without having any real connection with them.  I
tend to think of such likes as delusional.

Alternatively, perhaps at least one person is a "fraidy cat," and
won’t let himself or herself fall for the other, or even like the
other, without witnessing signs of reciprocity.  The two people then
lead each other down the pathway of like, in a kind of low-key
intertemporal seduction, sans the sex.  Or with it.

Perhaps we like other people for their intrinsic qualities less than
we pretend.  Mostly we like people for liking (loving) us. 

Yes I know that most of you don’t believe it, and have plenty of
counterexamples to offer.  But keep it in the back of your mind, and
see if it proves useful over the next few years.