Category: Science
Sentences to ponder
Jason Kottke reports:
The collective optimization of individual driving routes by drivers using realtime traffic maps slows everyone down.
That is, everyone picking the "fastest" route on the map results in
overall slowdowns. Interestingly, the solution to this problem may be
to remove some roads so that drivers have fewer options for route
optimization.
Here is more. To how many other problems can this point be applied?
How did ADHD evolve and survive?
Michelle Dawson (without endorsing it) directs my attention to this paper:
The evolutionary status of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is central to assessments of whether modern society has created it, either physically or socially; and is potentially useful in understanding its neurobiological basis and treatment. The high prevalence of ADHD (5–10%) and its association with the seven-repeat allele of DRD4, which is positively selected in evolution, raise the possibility that ADHD increases the reproductive fitness of the individual, and/or the group. However, previous suggestions of evolutionary roles for ADHD have not accounted for its confinement to a substantial minority. Because one of the key features of ADHD is its diversity, and many benefits of population diversity are well recognized (as in immunity), we study the impact of groups’ behavioural diversity on their fitness. Diversity occurs along many dimensions, and for simplicity we choose unpredictability (or variability), excess of which is a well-established characteristic of ADHD. Simulations of the Changing Food group task show that unpredictable behaviour by a minority optimizes results for the group. Characteristics of such group exploration tasks are risk-taking, in which costs are borne mainly by the individual; and information-sharing, in which benefits accrue to the entire group. Hence, this work is closely linked to previous studies of evolved altruism.
We conclude that even individually impairing combinations of genes, such as ADHD, can carry specific benefits for society, which can be selected for at that level, rather than being merely genetic coincidences with effects confined to the individual. The social benefits conferred by diversity occur both inside and outside the ‘normal’ range, and these may be distinct. This view has the additional merit of offering explanations for the prevalence, sex and age distribution, severity distribution and heterogeneity of ADHD.
Overall the argument is weak because it relies too much on group selection. An alternative tack is to admit that ADHD, and correlated traits, can have cognitive advantages and thus survival and mating advantages. One simple story is that many people with ADHD can use their "jumpiness" to propel themselves to sample and learn extra new pieces of information. The current distribution of identified cases from the ADHD population likely suffers from selection bias, namely that it identifies ADHD cases associated with greater life problems.
Addendum: Jerry Fodor has a recent paper challenging common applications of evolutionary psychology; Razib defends Darwin.
Project Tuva
Bill Gates has bought the rights to Richard Feynman's lectures, The Character of Physical Law, and has put them on the web with lots of annotations. Nicely done.
I liked Feynman's point about Newton's law of gravity being used by astrologers, "That's the strange world we live in, that all the advances and understanding are used only to continue the nonsense which has existed for 2,000 years."
Hat tip to Tierney Lab.
In which regards are autistics more rational?
Many bloggers are citing a recent Scientific American piece, one part of which covers how autistics come closer to satisfying some canons of economic rationality. Since I discuss the underlying research in Create Your Own Economy, I should point out that the SA article doesn't quite get it right. They serve up:
One group that does not value perceived losses differently than gains are individuals with autism…
I would sooner describe the underlying research as showing that framing effects are weaker (NB: not absent) for autistics. That is, for the autistics it matters less whether a given change in endowment is described as a gain or a loss, relative to varying frames. I read the SA account ("when balancing gains and losses") as conflating framing and endowment effects; in any case the exposition is not clear.
SA writes:
…this seeming rationality may itself denote abnormal behavior…
An alternative would have been: "The autistics are in this way more rational."
One underexplored question is whether most people distrust those who are not irrational in particular, commonly realized ways. Even the researchers on the original piece considers the superior performance of autistics on the test to be a sign of their processing "failures."
Another part of the piece concerns the skin conductance responses; there is preliminary evidence that autistics approached the framed choices in a less emotional manner, at least by that one measure.
Create Your Own Economy considers a number of possible overlaps between economics and autism, including Vernon Smith's claim that Adam Smith was himself on the autism spectrum. It also considers other ways in which autistics are likely to be more rational, such as being less likely to encode false memories and less likely to resort to excessive use of narrative to organize their memories and explanations.
Are generational traits cyclical?
I haven't looked at any of the underlying research but I found the following claims to be very interesting:
In the end, however, much of what my research uncovered was inconsistent with Strauss and Howe’s theories. At least in terms of psychological differences, generations do not occur in cycles; instead, the changes are primarily linear, with each generation taking the previous generations’ traits to the next level. There is no sudden shift in personality for someone born before or after 1982 (Strauss and Howe’s cutoff for what they call the “Millennial” generation). Thus generational labels such as Boomers, Xers, and GenY are of limited use. What’s more important is the number of birth years separating two people – e.g, 20 years or 40 years. Although I occasionally use generational labels (such as Generation Me or GenMe to describe today’s young people), I primarily rely on labels such as “older” and “younger” generations; those in the middle in terms of age (today, the GenXers in their 30s and 40s) will typically fall in the middle in terms of traits and attitudes.
One particular implication is that individualism and indeed narcissism have been increasing steadily with each generation. I find that the most plausible models of intergenerational learning support the author's "linear accretion" view rather than cycles of rebellion and counterreaction. There is a niche effect for siblings, but I think less of such an effect for generations per se.
Hat tip goes to BPS Research Digest.
The Singularity is Near
Tom Vanderbilt, author of the excellent Traffic, has a very good piece in the latest NYTimes Magazine on data centers.
The specter of infinitesimal delay is why, when the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, the nation’s oldest, upgraded its trading platform in 2006, it decided to locate the bulk of its trading engines 80 miles – and three milliseconds – from Philadelphia, and into NJ2, where, as Thomas notes, the time to communicate between servers is down to a millionth of a second. (Latency concerns are not limited to Wall Street; it is estimated that a 100-millisecond delay reduces Amazon’s sales by 1 percent.)
…It seemed heretical to think of Karl Marx. But looking at the roomful of computers running automated trading models that themselves scan custom-formatted machine-readable financial news stories to help make decisions, you didn’t have to be a Marxist to appreciate his observation that industry will strive to “produce machines by means of machines” – as well as his prediction that the “more developed the capital,” the more it would seek the “annihilation of space by time.”
I like the quote but doubt that Marx is the best guide to this new world. try Charlie Stross instead.
You don’t (want to) know yourself
Why can't we use a video of ourselves to improve the accuracy of our
self-perception? One answer could lie in cognitive dissonance – the
need for us to hold consistent beliefs about ourselves. People may well
be extremely reluctant to revise their self-perceptions, even in the
face of powerful objective evidence. A detail in the final experiment
supports this idea. Participants seemed able to use the videos to
inform their ratings of their "state" anxiety (their anxiety "in the
moment") even while leaving their scores for their "trait" anxiety
unchanged.
Here is more. Is it an accident that so many people do not enjoy watching videos of themselves, while at the same time believing they are quite splendid?
Claims I wish I understood better
This is from the July/August issue of Discover magazine:
Hawking is now pushing a different strategy, which he calls top-down cosmology. It is not the case, he says, that the past uniquely determines the present. Because the universe has many possible histories and just as many possible beginnings, the present state of the universe selects the past. "This means that the histories of the Universe depend on what is being measured," Hawking wrote in a recent paper, "contrary to the usual idea that the Universe has an objective, observer-independent history."…Hawking's idea provides a natural context for string theory. All those universes might simply represent different possible histories of our universe.
“Why Steve Sailer is wrong”
That's a request I received and probably the reader is referring to IQ and race.
Let me first say that I am not the Steve Sailer oracle. On such a sensitive matter I don't wish to misrepresent anyone, so I'll simply tell you what I think of the issues, without suggesting that he or anyone else necessarily disagrees.
There is a belief that progress in genetics will resurrect old, now-unpopular claims about race and IQ, namely that some races are intrinsically inferior in terms of IQ. I very much expect that we will instead learn more about the importance of the individual genome and that variations within "groups" (whether defined in terms of race or not) are where the traction lies. So I don't expect "old style eugenics views" to make a comeback as applied to race, quite the contrary. On that point, here is more.
I also think that IQ will be shown to be more multi-dimensional than we now think. If you wish to understand the role
of IQ in human affairs, you would do better to study autism and ADHD than race (by the way, I discuss the importance of neurodiversity in much greater detail in my forthcoming book Create Your Own Economy.)
You may know that some nations — basically the wealthy ones — have higher IQs than the poor nations. But IQ is endogenous to environment, as evidenced by the Flynn Effect, namely the general rise in IQ scores with each generation. It is sometimes noted that some racial IQ gaps are not closing but I find it more significant that scores can continue to rise. For instance it is quite possible that groups with higher measured IQs simply have been on an "improvement track" for a longer period of time. More generally I think we should consider the Flynn Effect a bit of a mystery and that suggests an overall tone of caution on these issues rather than polemicism.
Most importantly, there is a critical distinction between hypocritical discourse on race and racism itself. Hypocritical discourse on race is harmful and often Sailer does a very good job skewering it. But racism itself is far, far more harmful, whether in the course of previous history or still today. It is fine if a given individual, for reasons of division of labor, spends his or her time attacking hypocritical discourse about race rather than attacking racism itself. (For instance we shouldn't all focus on condemning Hitler and Stalin, simply because they were among the most evil men; there are other battles to fight.) But I still wish that specified individual to ardently believe that racism is the far greater problem. Insofar as that individual holds such a belief about racism, I am much happier than if not.
The comments section is for discussion of the issues in a mature way; if you want to attack any particular individual, that is for elsewhere.
Addendum: If you are looking for another perspective, here is William Saletan on Steve Sailer.
Hennessey on CAFE
Excellent post, filled with detail, by Keith Hennessey on CAFE. Some highlights:
The NHTSA analyses look at a range of benefits to society, including economic and national security benefits from using less oil, health and environmental benefits from less pollution, and environmental benefits from fewer greeenhouse gas emissions (this is new). They also consider the costs, primarily from requiring more fuel-saving technologies to be included by manufacturers….
Rather than maximizing net societal benefits, [the Obama] proposal raises the standard until (total societal benefits = total societal costs), meaning the net benefits to society are roughly zero…
The Obama plan will increase costs enough to further suppress demand for new cars and trucks. This will cause significant job loss, and probably in the 150K 50K range over 5-ish years, with a fairly wide error band….[updated to reflect an error in calculation, AT]
The Obama option would reduce the global temperature by seven thousandths of a degree Celsius by the end of this century….[and] would reduce the sea-level rise by six hundredths of a centimeter. That’s 0.6 millimeters.
…As early as this fall, greenhouse gases could become “regulated pollutants” under the Clean Air Act. Once something becomes a “regulated pollutant,” a whole bunch of other parts of the Clean Air Act kick in, and EPA is off to the races in regulating greenhouse gases from a much (much) wider range of sources, including power plants, hospitals, schools, manufacturers, and big stores.
One of the scariest elements of this is called the “Prevention of Significant Deterioration” permitting system. In effect, EPA could insert itself (or your State environmental agency) into most local planning and zoning processes. I will write more about this in the future. It terrifies me.
The Politics of Cap and Trade
Good overview in the NYTimes on the politics of cap and trade. The bottom line:
How did cap and trade, hatched as an academic theory in obscure
economic journals half a century ago, become the policy of choice in
the debate over how to slow the heating of the planet? And how did it
come to eclipse the idea of simply slapping a tax on energy consumption…
The answer is not to be found in the study of
economics or environmental science, but in the realm where most policy
debates are ultimately settled: politics…Cap and trade…is almost perfectly designed for the buying
and selling of political support through the granting of valuable
emissions permits to favor specific industries and even specific
Congressional districts.That is precisely what is taking place now in the House Energy and Commerce Committee…
Here is how Tyler and I put it in Modern Principles: Microeconomics
With a tax, firms
must pay the government for each ton
of pollutant that they emit. With pollution
allowances, firms must either use
the pollution allowances that they are
given or if they want to emit more they
must buy allowances from other firms.
Either way, firms that are given allowances
in the initial allocation get a
big benefit compared to having to pay
taxes. Thus, some people say that pollution
allowances equal corrective taxes
plus corporate welfare.
That’s not necessarily the best way of
looking at the issue…
…To make progress against global warming, may require building
a political coalition. A carbon tax pushes one very powerful and interested
group, the large energy firms, into the opposition. If tradable allowances are
instead given to firms initially, there is a better chance of bringing the large energy
firms into the coalition. Perhaps it’s not fair that politically powerful
groups must be bought off but as Otto von Bismarck, Germany’s first chancellor,
once said,”Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.”
We can only add that producing both laws and sausages requires some pork.
Careful readers may recognize a friendly jab at a competitor.
Hail Lord Monboddo
Who says we are losing expertise in engineering?:
An Australian zoo was evacuated after an "ingenious" orang-utan
escaped from her enclosure by short-circuiting an electric fence today.
Staff
at Adelaide zoo said 137lb (62kg) Karta used a stick to short-circuit
the electric wires around her enclosure before piling up some more
sticks to climb out.
But the 27-year-old ape only ventured as far
as a surrounding fence, still metres from members of the public, during
her 30 minutes of freedom.
The zoo's curator, Peter Whitehead,
said she seemed to realise she was somewhere she was not supposed to be
and returned to her enclosure.
Here is the story. I was intrigued to read this:
Burnett also examined feral children and was the only thinker of his
day to accept them as human rather than monsters. He viewed in these
children the ability to achieve reason.
The personality traits of stand-up comedians, and owners of vicious dogs
They don't quite fit the stereotype:
Stand-up comedians are a vocational group with unique characteristics:
unlike most other entertainers with high creative abilities, they both
invent and perform their own work, and audience feedback (laughter or
derision) is instantaneous. In this study, the Big Five personality
traits (NEOFFI-R) of 31 professional stand-up comedians were compared
to those of nine amateur comedians, 10 humor writers and 400 college
students. All four groups showed similar neuroticism levels.
Professional stand-up comedians were similar to amateur stand-up
comedians in most respects. However, compared to college students,
professional and amateur stand-up comedians on average showed
significantly higher openness, and lower conscientiousness,
extraversion, and agreeableness. Compared to stand-up comedians, comedy
writers showed higher openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, and
agreeableness. These results challenge the stereotype of comedians as
neurotic extraverts, and suggest a discrepancy between their stage
persona and their true personality traits.
The paper is here. Here is another paper on personality profiles, for owners of vicious dogs, summarized as follows:
Findings revealed vicious dog owners reported significantly more
criminal behaviors than other dog owners. Vicious dog owners were
higher in sensation seeking and primary psychopathy. Study results
suggest that vicious dog ownership may be a simple marker of broader
social deviance.
I thank BPS Research Digest for the pointers.
New CBO paper on climate change
It is here and a short summary is here. It is a good overview, noting that it does not cover the parts of the world most likely to be severely hit. The paper is especially good at discussing the policy implications of scientific uncertainty. This passage outlines a key issue and, in bureaucratese, asks how much it is possible to do:
Those insights have spurred some researchers who are particularly worried about low-probability but high impact outcomes to call for limiting long-term warming to no more than 3°F to 5°F with a high degree of certainty. However, since about 1.4°F of warming has already occurred, and past emissions have made a substantial amount of further warming inevitable, limiting long-term warming to such levels with a substantial degree of certainty would probably require very dramatic and potentially very expensive curtailment of expected future emissions. There is a large difference in costs between a policy that leaves a 50 percent risk of warming exceeding 5°F and a policy that virtually eliminates that risk. In moving along the continuum of risk from the former to the latter, each increment of risk reduction is likely to come at an increasing price.
I was taken by Paul Collier's earlier discussion of the ethics of climate change. Using different terminology, given that "probabilistic aggression" against people in the poorer countries is problematic, concern for climate change is (or rather should be) the libertarian point of view.
I also found useful the dialogue "The Big Heat" in the June issue of Discover magazine (not yet on-line). It's the best discussion I've seen of why the climate change skeptics clutch at a few pieces of (supposedly) favorable evidence but don't think about the issue at the very deep level or require that their scientific theories cohere as a whole or predict a wide range of climate-related data.
That all said, I come to the Waxman-Markey climate change bill. Here is one estimate that the impact of that bill on global temperature will be very small. I am not at all endorsing that estimate, but as someone concerned with the issue as a whole, I would like to know: what is the highest quasi-credible estimate for how much good that bill will do?
I would like to know.
More on the new Geoffrey Miller book, *Spent*
Here is a typical bit:
Sexual traits are also well predicted by the Central Six [personality traits]…The highly sociosexual, open, impulsive, and selfish tend to invest more of their time and energy in "mating effort" rather than "parenting effort": they are constantly seeking new sexual partners rather than raising the offspring from existing relationships. On the other hand, people with "restricted" sociosexuality (the virginal, the chaste, and the happily married) have fewer sexual partners, less infidelity, lower openness, higher conscientiousness, higher agreeableness, and lower extraversion. They invest more time and energy in parenting effort and less in mating effort.
Miller suggests also that parasite loads of various societies predict (cause?) their openness. A "mating-primed" man is more likely to express bold taste when asked about his preference in cars. Mostly I am skeptical of such claims (many of the studies fall apart upon inspection) but still it is worth hearing Miller out as long as you approach the cited results with some skepticism.
I liked this passage:
Some common themes emerge from these slightly whimsical suggestions. One is that buying new, real, branded premium products at full price from chain-store retailers is the last refuge of the unimaginable consumer, and it should be your last option. It offers low narrative value — no stories to tell about interesting people, places, and events associated with the product's design, provenance, acquisition, or use. It reveals nothing about you except your spending capacity and your gullibility, conformism, and unconsciousness as a consumer.
The impish troublemaker in me — and yes I have now been Robin's colleague for over ten years — wonders if indeed that is exactly what people are signaling with those purchases.
Here is my first post on the book.