Category: Science

In a study of Gordon Tullock’s The Organization of Inquiry (the full Tullock symposium is here), Bruce Cadwell writes:

Tullock next turns to what he considers to be the real reasons behind the backwardness of the social sciences, which in his view is due to differences in the social organization of natural versus social science. The first difference is the relative absence of applied research: because there is no way to patent applied research in the social sciences (He asks, for example, how does one patent a new sales technique?), little of it is done. But this means that, unlike the natural sciences, there are many fewer checks from the applied side on pure social science research (p. 149). Furthermore, the second motive for research, curiosity, is in the social sciences “likely to get distracted to essentially non-scientific ends.” This is because in the social sciences:

[TC: this is now Tullock]. . . there is a strong possibility of artistic distraction. Literature of all kinds is quite frequently based on careful observation of human beings. A large number of brilliant men led by their curiosity to study their fellow men have produced great literature instead of science (p. 151).

Tullock is responding to Mises and Hayek, who both thought that the social sciences were different because matters of human affairs are more complex and because of the subjective dimension of human choice and expectation (NB: the views of Mises and Hayek are not exactly the same and Hayek himself changed his position over time, laying greater stress on complexity rather than subjectivity). 

I would note, by the way, that while economics lags behind physics, we understand the economy better than we understand the human brain or for that matter the deep ocean.  I see complexity of the topic and accessibility to information as determining the progress of a science; I am not so far from Hayek’s view, although he underestimated how much progress quantitative and experimental economics could make.

It seems there were even ancient computers, not to mention advanced philosophy.  So the point remains: the absence of a developed economics until the mid-18th century remains a startling anomaly in the history of ideas.  Why was that?

Addendum: Arnold Kling comments.

1. **x in Chile (but safe for work and wife)
2. Is this how they built Stonehenge?
3. Does Obama’s popular vote advantage come so much from Cook County?
4. Seth Roberts visits and explains what is unique about blogging

5. More on Bear Stearns

6. Anatol Lieven on John McCain

“Researchers have studied men with cross-gender names like Leslie,” Dr.
Evans explained. “They haven’t found anything negative – no
psychological or social problems – or any correlations with either
masculinity or effeminacy. But they have found one major positive
factor: a better sense of self-control. It’s not that you fight more,
but that you learn how to let stuff roll off your back.”

Here is much more, interesting throughout.  I liked this part:

“In the past, there was more of a sense of humor, probably because
fathers had more say in the names.” He said the waning influence of
fathers might explain why there are no longer so many names like Nice
Deal, Butcher Baker, Lotta Beers and Good Bye, although some dads still
try.

As I’ve told you before, my dad had wanted to name me Tyrone.  It could have been worse:

…why would any parent christen an infant Ogre? Mr. Sherrod found several
of them, along with children named Ghoul, Gorgon, Medusa, Hades,
Lucifer and every deadly sin except Gluttony (his favorite was Wrath
Gordon).

Scientists have developed a computerised mind-reading technique which lets them accurately predict the images that people are looking at by using scanners to study brain activity.

The breakthrough by American scientists took MRI scanning equipment normally used in hospital diagnosis to observe patterns of brain activity when a subject examined a range of black and white photographs. Then a computer was able to correctly predict in nine out of 10 cases which image people were focused on. Guesswork would have been accurate only eight times in every 1,000 attempts.

The study raises the possibility in the future of the technology being harnessed to visualise scenes from a person’s dreams or memory.

Writing in the journal Nature, the scientists, led by Dr Jack Gallant from the University of California at Berkeley, said: "Our results suggest that it may soon be possible to reconstruct a picture of a person’s visual experience from measurements of brain activity alone. Imagine a general brain-reading device that could reconstruct a picture of a person’s visual experience at any moment in time."

Here is the full story.  It’s a big step from paragraph two to paragraph four, and paragraph one reads to me like a misrepresentation.  Predicting a viewed image from a set is very different from figuring out the image from scratch.  But still this is impressive.

Addendum: Elsewhere from the world of science, here is a new article on finger ratios and the length of ring fingers and what it all means.

Here is the story, via Megan McArdle; an excerpt:

“On global warming, the problem is
ideologically I suspect it did cause me to …discount evidence which cut
against the way I wanted it to be in that case. My justification to my
self would be that I had seen [the environmentalists] be so wrong so
many times before, why should I trust them this time?” he says.

But when the science appeared irrefutable, Bailey changed.

It is important to distinguish two claims.  The first is that a revenue-neutral carbon tax is, in expected value terms, a good idea.  If nothing else, we cannot emit accelerating rates of carbon forever. 

The second and more dubious claim is "a carbon tax is likely to solve the problem."  That’s not so clear.  China and India may not follow suit, the oil may be pumped and used anyway, and the elasticities may be working against us.  I give the carbon tax about a thirty percent probability of significantly ameliorating global warming and that is assuming that we engage China in a constructive manner.  A pessimistic view, however, does not refute the case for trying.

Addendum: Here is an interesting post on whether more information about global warming causes people to worry about it less.

Chimpanzees are highly sensitive
to inequity, and typically refuse to continue in interactions in which
they get less than a social partner. However, chimpanzees from stable social groups
do not respond negatively in situations in which their partners
received better rewards, whereas chimpanzees from less-established
groups show rejection rates as high as 60 percent.

Here is the full story, interesting throughout; the hat tip is to Mark Thoma.

As one cryonicist puts it: "We didn’t evolve to be frozen."

But:

"It’s pretty well accepted that at the point at which the usual human
being gets pronounced dead, all their cells are alive. It’s a very
eerie question: if all their cells are alive, what is death?" says
Becker. Besides, if all the patient’s cells are alive, why can’t the
patient recover and walk out of the hospital?"

Here is the full article, which covers recent advances in cryonics.

Addendum: Or try YouTube on related issues, hat tip to Robin Hanson.  Maybe that is the right way to do philosophy, namely by cartoon.  Definitely recommended.  It also presents a solution to the current subprime crisis.

Felix Salmon points to the declining price of self-knowledge.

• Cost of sequencing Craig Venter’s genome: $3 billion, over 10 years.
• Cost of sequencing James Watson’s genome: $1 million, over 2 months.
• Cost of sequencing an anonymous African’s genome: $100,000, over 1 month.

In the past few years, Watts–a network-theory scientist who recently
took a sabbatical from Columbia University and is now working for Yahoo
(NASDAQ:YHOO) –has performed a series of controversial, barn-burning
experiments challenging the whole Influentials thesis. He has analyzed
email patterns and found that highly connected people are not, in fact,
crucial social hubs. He has written computer models of rumor spreading
and found that your average slob is just as likely as a well-connected
person to start a huge new trend. And last year, Watts demonstrated
that even the breakout success of a hot new pop band might be nearly
random. Any attempt to engineer success through Influentials, he
argues, is almost certainly doomed to failure.

Here is the full article.  Here is the home page of Duncan Watts.  Thanks to John DePalma for the pointer.

I have to side with Matt Yglesias’s claim that Russian women have been beautiful for a long time and that it is not the recent advent of capitalism which elevated their looks.  I’ve seen pictures of the younger Natasha, pre-capitalism, and she was beautiful back then too.  I know many of her female friends, or have seen early photos of them, and almost all of them are (and were) beautiful.  I visited Russia in the early 90s, just as capitalism was taking hold.  There was plenty of beauty to go around, although admittedly people dress better now.  Countries don’t develop networks of beautiful women overnight.  Furthermore, once you get past the point of malnutrition, beauty is not related to per capita income in any simple way.  I’ll take Cuba, Croatia, Senegal, and Brazil over Australia and Finland, or to cite a closer comparison Slovakia over Austria.  One hypothesis is that inequality of male income and power encourages female beauty for competitive reasons.  Admittedly much more research needs to be done on this question.

Addendum: Free Exchange weighs in.

Imagine a matching game.  Imagine also that you always get the same outcome.  It might be a happy relationship, a sad relationship, a repeating pattern of dysfunctionality, lots of affairs with librarians, or whatever.

In many models, an unusual similarity of outcomes means that we let partners choose us, rather than choosing partners ourselves more actively.  The other side of the matching process is doing the work.

How can this be?  The intuition is that "you searching for hidden matches in the rough" is a process that will have higher variance in outcomes than "lots of hidden matches in the rough searching for you." 

If you don’t observe that much variance in your outcomes (e.g., lots of librarians), it means one of two things.  Maybe you are choosing the non-varying quality very directly and very intentionally, such as having a fetish.  That possibility aside, maybe it is a sign that you’re not really choosing but rather being chosen and thus you live in a world of thick search processes and low variance outcomes.  Imagine a man who will take whatever comes his way, and spends lots of time in libraries.

If there are recurring outcomes of this kind in your life or relationships, perhaps you are being chosen, whether you know it or not.

A loyal MR reader asks:

I’m reading (grr) a lot of academic papers lately and, to keep myself awake, have wondered: why do they almost always have more than one author? Is it like cops in New York City–they’ve got everyone persuaded it’s too dangerous to go alone? Is there some networking benefit, professional or psychological? Does it just enable everyone to claim more publications? Has anyone studied which fields have the highest and lowest average number of authors per paper?

I thought you could blog something interesting on this. I might add that the papers couldn’t be any duller, and I wonder if committee authorship plays a role in this as well.

I believe that co-authored papers are correlated with:

1. The existence of a laboratory

2. Senior scholars who generate funding and thus gains from trade

3. Empirical work, which tends to be more divisible than theory; co-authored papers are relatively rare in pure economic theory and in philosophy

Co-authored papers are becoming increasingly common in economics, also because the effort requirements for top publications have been rising.  In most cases a co-authored piece is worth at least 2/3 of a singly-authored piece, so the incentives for co-authorship are strong.  Here is an earlier post on co-authorship.

…an analysis of strike outs (failing to hit the ball three times in a
row) in American baseball from 1913 to 2006 showed that players whose
first or last names began with K suffered significantly more strikeouts
than other players. Why? Because in baseball scoring, K is used to
denote a strikeout – "For players with this initial, the explicitly
negative performance outcome may feel implicitly less aversive," the
researchers said.

Next, an analysis of 15 years of MBA students’
grades at a large American University showed that students with the
initials C or D achieved significantly lower grades than students whose
initials were unrelated to grade scores, and students with the initials
A or B.

Was this due to the students’ self-preference for their
initials or was it the examiners showing the bias? To test this, Nelson
and Simmons, asked hundreds of other undergrads to report their liking
for the different letters of the alphabet. A subsequent analysis of
their exam scores again showed that students with the initials C or D
performed less well, but only if they had previously shown a preference
for these letters. This shows that affection for one’s own initials
really is playing a role in the patterns being observed here.

Another
study showed how far-reaching these effects can be. An analysis of
392,458 lawyers who studied at 170 law schools showed that as the
quality of law schools declined, so too did the proportion of lawyers
with the initials A or B who had attended.

Here is more.  When I think of the letter K, I think of Ted Kluszewski, Harmon Killebrew, and brawny Poles who swing for the fences.  Maybe that’s lame, but I don’t see that names with "S" strike out more often, or that names with "H" hit more home runs.  Maybe "K" has special power, just ask Franz Kafka.  The A and B stuff puzzles me too, but it also doesn’t seem consistent with other parameters on the power of suggestion.  I also would expect the C and D names to do better than average, given all the names lower in the alphabet, at least if there is going to be an effect at all.  Are people whose names start with the letter "B" more likely to be bloggers?

I’m not contesting the raw tabulations but my gut feeling is that the letters in your name correlate with physique or education or IQ in some other way.  One paper is here, I don’t see a lot of controls.

Addendum: Andrew Belman seems puzzled too.  Alex has a related post, he doesn’t feel totally puzzled.

…across the eons of time, the standard theories suggest, the universe can
recur over and over again in an endless cycle of big bangs, but it’s
hard for nature to make a whole universe. It’s much easier to make
fragments of one, like planets, yourself maybe in a spacesuit or even –
in the most absurd and troubling example – a naked brain floating in
space. Nature tends to do what is easiest, from the standpoint of
energy and probability. And so these fragments – in particular the
brains – would appear far more frequently than real full-fledged
universes, or than us. Or they might be us.

Here is more, the piece also contains a serious scientific discussion of the possibility of reincarnation.