Category: Science
The Physics of BS
Here is Frank Tipler on macroeconomics:
accurate predictions means that they do not know what they are talking about. We
non-economists should realize this also, and realize that our leaders, who are
being advised by macroeconomists, haven’t got a clue where they are leading us.
Well ok I have some problems with macroeconomics too but considering many of Tipler's writings his criticisms of macroeconomics are rather amusing. e.g.
Singularity–God–is like. The laws of physics tell us that our universe
began in an initial singularity, and it will end in a final
singularity. The laws also tell us that ours is but one of an infinite
number of universes, all of which begin and end in a singularity. If we
look carefully at the collection of all the universes–this collection
is called the multiverse–we see that there is a third
singularity, at which the multiverse began. But physics shows us that
these three apparently distinct singularities are actually one
singularity. The Three are One.
There is one religion which
claims that God is a Trinity: Christianity. According to Christianity,
God consists of Three Persons: God the Father (the First Person), God
the Son (the Second Person), and God the Holy Ghost (the Third Person).
But there are not three Gods, only one God. Using physics to study the
structure of the Cosmological Singularity, we can see that indeed the
three “parts” of the Singularity can be distinguished by employing the
idea of personhood. In particular, physics can be used to show how it
is possible for a man–Jesus, according to Christianity–to actually be
the part of the Singularity that connects the Initial and Final
Singularities. So the Incarnation makes perfectly good sense from the
point of view of physics.
Salsa Dancing Into the Social Sciences
The author is Kristin Luker and the subtitle is Research in an Age of Info-Glut. I enjoyed this book very much and I thought it was one of the best books on the philosophy of the social sciences I have read, ever. In part it is good because it ignores philosophy of science (and Continental philosophy gobbledy-gook) and focuses on the anthropology of how research is actually done. Here is the author's summary of her message
Let's review the state of play. I've told you that "methods" in the social sciences are historically, socially, and politically located in both time and place. I've also told you that the methods most commonly taught (canonical social science, "normal science") grew out of a particular time and place, namely postwar America. I've tried to convince you that in this new postmodern, globalizing world, those old methods don't work as well as they used to, at least not for the kinds of problems that most of us are interested in these days. Finally, I have argued that a whole set of "practices," that is, taken-for-granted ways of doing things that aren't even at the level of consciousness most of the time, grew out of those old methods and now must be rethought by those of us whose contributions will consist of making connections across boundaries, rather than following the normal-science way of making incremental contributions to a deep but narrow part of our fold.
There's much more to the book than that quotation indicates. Recommended.
How financial economics should evolve, from this point onwards
I read this in Temple Grandin's new (and often quite interesting) Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals:
She [Jane Pruetz] spent four years just habituating the chimpanzees to her presence before she could study them. Then she spent three summers observing their lives. She discovered that some of the chimpanzees make spears out of tree branches and use them to spear bush babies inside hollow trees. Bush babies are small furry animals. The chimpanzee breaks a branch off the tree, strips off the leaves, and sharpens one end to a point with its teeth. Then it stabs the spear violently inside the hollowed trunk to kill any bush baby that might be inside. This discovery is so revolutionary that it has caused a big controversy in the field of primate research, because it is the first documentation of an animal using a tool as a weapon for hunting.
But alas we are told:
Animal research is getting more and more what I call "abstractified." Instead of people studying the real animals in their natural habitats, researchers use fancy statistical software to construct statistical models, and then they study the models.
The 10,000 Year Explosion
The subtitle is How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution and the authors are Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending. I do think that such topics should receive open debate but, as with Greg Clark's book, I'm not convinced. There is plenty on dog breeding, lactose intolerance, Genghis Khan and his children, the difficulties of settling the Andean Highlands, and just-so stories about medieval Ashkenazi Jews. What's missing is a sense of what the hypothesis does not explain, what its limitations are, and also what exactly is being claimed beyond the particular cited examples. The stories of "lots of recent change overall" and "current groups differ" are jammed together but of course they are very different. Epigenetics don't receive much attention, even critically, and the lower levels of Ashkenazi social achievement before 1800 are dismissed quickly. It's fine and indeed correct to claim they were oppressed but that opens up many doors to explain many other observed correlations. The authors report that we have Neanderthal genes even though this seems to fly in the face of recent discoveries and more importantly the evidence that such interbreeding (if it occurred) mattered is extremely speculative. Perhaps the authors are right but the reader is not given the tools to see why their understanding is a superior one.
Razib liked this book (see the first Amazon review) and I suppose it is a good introduction to this point of view, but overall I didn't come away feeling I obtained a superior understanding of the issues.
Don’t touch when you are shopping, or the new endowment effect
Be careful how you reach out:
A new study suggests that just fingering an item on a store shelf can create an attachment that makes you willing to pay more for it.
Previous studies have shown that many people begin to feel ownership of an item – that it "is theirs" – before they even buy it. But this study, conducted by researchers at Ohio State University, is the first to show "mine, mine, mine" feelings can begin in as little as 30 seconds after first touching an object.
Here is the full story. I thank Deron Bauman for the pointer.
Blogging *The Origin of Species*
That is a worthwhile endeavor and you will find the blog here. Nonetheless I was shocked (but not surprised) to read the following:
Evolutionary biologist John Whitfield is reading Origin for the first time and writing about it, chapter by chapter.
This is Darwin year, of course, 200 years for his birthday and 150 for The Origin of the Species. I may end up covering a bit of Darwin myself. And no, history of thought is not always essential but Darwin is one of the greatest authors I have read.
How do airplanes float on water?
Surely you've all been wondering, here's one answer I ran across (more at the link):
All airplanes will eventually sink if it is in water, even pressurized
planes. (more on that later) But there are several areas in the
airplane that have pockets of air that help keep the plane afloat. For
example, in the area between the outside skin of the fuselage and the
interrior there is a space that is usually insulated and has air that
needs to be displaced by the water. In most airplanes built today, the
wing is the fuel tank, and since water is heavier than fuel the fuel in
the wings help offset some of the weight of the plane…not a lot but
some.
There is also air in the cargo hold of larger planes that will help
maintain buoyancy until the air is replaced by water. Anyone who thinks
an airplane is water tight and will float because it is pressurized is
nuts! The airplane is pressurized only while the engines are running
and the air being pumped into the aircraft to pressurize it is almost
escaping the aircraft just as fast as it is being pumped in. There are
control valves in the forward and rear bulkhead that regulate the
pressure inside the plane but all pressure is lost if the engines quit
running. At the altitude that the A-320 that crashed in the Hudson
river was at when it lost it's engines, it probably didn't have much
pressurization anyway since it was only a few thousand feet above sea
level.
Scientist facts of the day
Chris Mooney reports:
Only 18 percent of us know a scientist personally, according to a 2005 survey (subscription required), and when asked in 2007 to name scientific "role models," the results were dismal.
Forty-four percent of Americans couldn't come up with a name at all,
and among those few who did, their top answers were either not
scientists or not alive: Bill Gates, Al Gore, Albert Einstein.
Tabarrok at TED
I will be speaking on The Future of Economic Growth at this year's legendary TED Conference, TED 2009, which takes place in Long Beach, Feb 3-7. Other speakers include Tim Berners-Lee, Oliver Sacks, Daniel Lebeskind, Herbie Hancock and Bill Gates. In my session, I am paired with Nate Silver, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, and Dan Ariely. Yeah, I'm a little nervous. Fortunately, TED provides a masseuse for speakers before they hit the stage! I kid you not.
Chris Blattman on randomized control trials
As usual, he is wise:
Yes, the randomized evaluation remains the "gold standard" for
important (albeit narrow) questions. Social science, however, has a
much bigger toolbox for a much broader (and often more interesting)
realm of inquiry. If you want to know the effects of small binary
treatments, you are in business. If you find any other question in the
world interesting, you have some more work to do. Dani Rodrik has made
a similar point here.Don’t
get me wrong: a large number of my projects are randomized control
trials. They are eminently worth pursuing. But to be honest, uncovering
the causes of effects excites me more than measuring the effects of
causes. An evaluation masters the second, but only hints at the first.
The hardest and most rewarding work is the theoretical and
investigative work that comes with uncovering the underlying rhythms
and rules of human behavior.…If your goal is to improve the delivery of aid, and truly advance
development, many more skills and knowledge are involved than the
randomized evaluation. See here for
more. But in short: a well-identified causal impact that arrives two
years after the program does not performance management make.
Chris also points us toward a new and excellent blog, Obama in Kenya.
The Smart Grid and the Fiscal Stimulus
Earlier I pointed out that a) regulatory problems have prevented investment in the smart grid and b) subsidies to wind power in some states have driven prices to negative levels (yes, people are being paid to consume power). These two problems are closely related.
The states control whether transmission lines get built but states with a lot of wind energy don’t have an incentive to build transmission lines to move the power out. In effect, states with a lot of wind energy are preventing exports which lowers their own internal price of electricity but raises everyone else’s price and reduces the use of wind power.
A new article in Technology Review makes the point.
One effect of these regulatory moves was that companies had less incentive to invest in the grid than in new power plants, and no one had a clear responsibility for expanding the transmission infrastructure. At the same time, the more open market meant that producers began trying to sell power to regions farther away, placing new burdens on existing connections between networks. The result has been a national transmission shortage….
[Many states have a lot of wind potential]…But the existing transmission system doesn’t have the capacity to get that much electricity to the parts of the country that need it. In many of the states in the [wind] region, there’s no particular urgency to move things along, since each has all the power it needs. So most of the applications for grid connections are simply waiting in line, some stymied by the lack of infrastructure and others by bureaucratic and regulatory delays.
Hat tip to Andrew Samwick who writes:
The federal government is the entity that can resolve that failure, by taking the lead and making those expansions itself. It can recoup its costs by levying a fee on subsequent power consumed through the grid. I hope the fact that we need this investment isn’t a reason for it to be excluded from plans for fiscal stimulus.
Do we compete more against fewer competitors?
This caught my eye:
If you’ve ever had to take a test in a room with a lot of people, you may be able to relate to this study: The more people you’re competing against, it turns out, the less motivated and competitive you are. Psychologists observed this pattern across several different situations. Students taking standardized tests in more crowded venues got lower scores. Students asked to complete a short general-knowledge test as fast as possible to win a prize if they were in the fastest 20 percent completed it faster if they were told that they were competing against 10 people rather than 100. Students asked how fast they would run in a race for a $1,000 prize if they finished in the top 10 percent said they would run faster in a race against 50 people rather than 500. Similarly, students contemplating a job interview or Facebook-friending contest said they would be less competitive if they expected more competitors – even if "winning" only required finishing in the top 20 percent. The authors conclude that competitiveness was curtailed because the larger the group, the more difficult it is to compare oneself directly to others.
The original paper is here, but note that context effects may well give you varying results in other settings. The initial article, from the Boston Globe, discusses several other social science mechanisms of interest, although I was not surprised to learn that your dog relaxes you.
Addendum: Here is my earlier article on invisible competition.
What’s this?
Really, I want to know. Chris Blattman doesn’t know either. Please tell me in the comments.
Intelligent agent modeling
I am more optimistic about intelligent agent modeling than is Tyler. For one we already have an important, convincing, and Nobel-bestowed variant of intelligent agent modeling, namely experimental economics. Experimental economics uses one particular type of intelligent agent, the type based on…genetic algorithms. True, the intelligent agents used in I-A models are typically not as sophisticated as the agents used in experimental economics but they are rapidly improving. (Moreover, such agents are already important economic actors in their own right in limited areas, e.g. portfolio insurance, and they will continue to become more important as time continues.)
I see bringing experimental economics and I-A modeling closer as an important goal with potentially very large payoffs. Here, for example, is my model for a ground-breaking paper.
1) Experiment
2) I-A replication of experiment (parameterization)
3) I-A simulation under new conditions
4) Experiment under the same conditions as 3 demonstrating accuracy of simulation
5) I-A simulation under conditions that cannot be tested using experiments.
Now that would be a great paper. I-A agent modeling is already very useful for modeling contagion, peer effects, and highly non-linear environments. It will become even more useful when combined with experimental economics in a way that demonstrates the equivalence of the two types of intelligent agents.
Markets in everything
Wearable air bags for the elderly (click on "Start Reading" to get through).
Can you guess in which country?
If you keep on clicking on that link, you’ll go through the NYT’s Year in Ideas 2008, always worth reading. I found at least half of them worthwhile (a very good way to spend your Friday night) but sadly they do not have a separate link for each bit. Under "B" you will find an interesting discussion of the Bus-Wait Problem, namely when you should stop waiting for that bus and start walking. The advice is that usually you should wait.
Here is separate information on "the glass cliff," a fascinating phenomenon.