Category: Science

In a fascinating column, John Tierney writes:

The Yale experiment was a variation of the classic one that first
demonstrated cognitive dissonance, a term coined by the social
psychologist Leon Festinger. In 1956 one of his students, Jack Brehm,
carted some of his own wedding gifts into the lab (it was a low-budget
experiment) and asked people to rate the desirability of things like an
electric sandwich press, a desk lamp, a stopwatch and a transistor
radio.

Then they were given a choice between two items they
considered equally attractive, and told they could take one home. (At
the end of the experiment Mr. Brehm had to confess he couldn’t really
afford to give them anything, causing one woman to break down in
tears.) After making a choice (but before having it snatched away),
they were asked to rate all the items again.

Suddenly they had a
new perspective. If they had chosen the electric sandwich press over
the toaster, they raised its rating and downgraded the toaster. They
convinced themselves they had made by far the right choice.

So,
apparently, did the children and capuchin monkeys studied at Yale by
Louisa C. Egan, Laurie R. Santos and Paul Bloom. The psychologists
offered the children stickers and the monkeys M&M’s.

Once a monkey was observed to show an equal preference for three colors
of M&M’s – say, red, blue and green – he was given a choice between
two of them. If he chose red over blue, his preference changed and he
downgraded blue. When he was subsequently given a choice between blue
and green, it was no longer an even contest – he was now much more
likely to reject the blue.

I would distinguish between self-deception and an endowment effect.  We value more what is ours, perhaps because of our biological programming — to protect our children above those of others — spills over into decisions more generally.  (Or perhaps because of a precommitment strategy to limit violent plunder of our resources.)  Self-deception is then layered on top, but in fact many mothers will argue that their kids are lazier or less obedient than the average.  The endowment effect holds nonetheless, as those mothers care more about their kids.  It is very hard to switch back babies once the hospital makes a mistake in allocation (how much time must elapse?), even if the parents know for sure they did not take home the genetically appropriate little bundle of joy.

I can see that the monkeys behave according to an endowment effect.  I am less sure that the monkeys self-deceive.  The key question, in my view, is whether the monkeys would throw out or downgrade information that some other bundle of food was in fact better than M&Ms.

America has 62 percent of the world’s [scientist] stars as residents, primarily because of its research universities which produce them.

Here is the paper, and, addended, here are non-gated versions.

Jason Kottke reports:

Ben Tesch is about to launch a collaborative weather site called cumul.us.
It’ll aggregate weather information and harness the wisdom of crowds to
see if they can make better weather predictions than the experts.

Will this all work? Who knows, but it only took me two months to make, and I wanted to find out.

Unlike so many other types of information, the web has had little
impact on how weather reporting is done (the Weather Channel stuff is
still rudimentary), so it’ll be interesting to see if this works.

I predict this will fail — how many government agencies already work at predicting the weather?, or in other words the crowd is already in place.  The alternative hypothesis is that weather forecasting awaits its Orley Ashenfelter, and that a mechanism like this will bring the best nerdy, quantitative "amateur" forecast into public prominence.

George Mason is updating to a new network system.  We are told, "MESA was designed specifically for George Mason University." 

In other words, MESA has not been thoroughly tested, no other universities have found it worthwhile to adopt the same system and we will be utterly dependent on the designers.   Ahhhrghhh!  Run for the hills!   

He released the last of his 21 books, What Makes Biology Unique?,
on his hundredth birthday, after which he published the last seven of
his 856 papers. He died five months short of turning 101.

That’s Jared Diamond reviewing a new biography of Mayr. 

Hat tip to Entertaining Research.

This optical illusion is so compelling it is hard to believe that it is an illusion and not a computer trick.  I have my doubts about the left-brain right-brain story but check it out.  Which way does she spin and does this fit your profession?

A new age has dawned.

What I found was that economic inequality doesn’t frustrate Americans at all.  It is, rather, the perceived lack of economic opportunity that makes us unhappy.  To focus our policies on inequality, instead of opportunity, is to make a grave error–one that will worsen the very problem we seek to solve and make us generally unhappier to boot.

Here is the full article, interesting throughout.  This paragraph is right on the mark:

One of the many problems with the egalitarians’ line of reasoning is that it misinterprets the experimental evidence.  The two famous studies mentioned above don’t necessarily mean, as the egalitarians claim, that people would be happier in a world of total equality.  Rather, they suggest that in a world of inequality, people like having more than others and dislike having less–even to the point of neglecting their financial interests.  How people would react to a miraculously equal world is something that the studies don’t attempt to address.

And this:

But there is another, more fundamental, reason that the arguments linking economic inequality to unhappiness are mistaken.  If the egalitarians are right, then average happiness levels should be falling.  But they aren’t.  The GSS shows that in 1972, 30 percent of the population said that they were “very happy” with their lives; in 1982, 31 percent; in 1993, 32 percent; in 2004, 31 percent.  In other words, no significant change in reported happiness occurred–even as income inequality increased by nearly half.  Happiness levels have certainly shown some fluctuations over the last three decades, but income inequality explains none of them.

Thanks to Michael Cragg for the pointer.  You might also revisit my earlier post on mobility.

I have two sets of beliefs about global warming.  The first set I infer from the observed "scientific consensus," but applying my "sociology of science" adjustments to the filters of mainstream media, intelligent blogs, reports of peer-reviewed journals, popular science books, and so on.  That means somewhat more skepticism than the postulated consensus, but mostly I buy into the consensus account as our best available estimate.  Procedurally speaking, I am not sure how I could make these beliefs more rational.

The second segment of my beliefs is less rationally grounded.  I believe, for instance, that ocean acidification will, in the long run, be the most dangerous consequence of carbon emissions.  (And by saying that I don’t mean to downgrade the other worries.)

I am aware that this belief isn’t necessarily justified.  It is shared by some scientists as a speculation, and it could turn out to be true, but it is hardly well-grounded as our major worry even though it does seem to be a real worry. 

Still, for whatever reason, I cannot help but believe it, or at least believe it with some excess degree of credence.  Is this because I visited the ocean as a child, and received some mysterious emotional sense of its powers, a sense which I can no longer eradicate from my subconscious?  Or am I more generally attracted to explanations which postulate some deeper but slightly hidden or indirect problem with status quo policies?  (I could look for signs that I hold similar delusions elsewhere.)

I try to keep these beliefs from affecting my policy conclusions, but I am not altogether able to stop holding them.  And even if my belief turns out to be true (which I expect someone to suggest in the comments), I am quite sure my procedural reason for holding it is an irrational one.

John Ioannidis’s argument that most published research findings are false has been getting some attention in the blogosphere because of a recent article in the WSJ.  In an earlier post I  explained why most published research findings might be false using a simple diagram.

Hat tip and thanks to Steve Novella at Neurologica Blog and Mark H at Denialism both of whom refer to my analysis adding many excellent insights of their own.

That is the new book by James R. Flynn.  He suggests the following:

Today we have no difficulty freeing logic from concrete referents and reasoning about purely hypothetical situations.  People were not always thus.

In other words, people in earlier times really were stupider when it came to abstract thought, but this was primarily for environmental reasons.  These people also had more daily, practical skills, again for reasons of practice.  We in contrast receive daily workouts with hypotheticals, rapidly moving images, and spatial reasoning.  So Flynn is suggesting that IQ isn’t more multi-dimensional than it may seem.  The Flynn Effect gains are in fact concentrated in the most spatial and abstract versions of IQ tests.

Flynn summarizes the "Dickens-Flynn" model, through which environment and IQ interact in multiplicative fashion.  Smart people seek out environments which make them even smarter, and this helps reconcile the cross-sectional IQ data (adoption doesn’t change IQ so much) with the time series of increasingly higher IQ scores (environments are changing for everybody).  This reconciliation was fuzzy to me, but I took Flynn to be claiming that separated identical twins will reimpose common environmental forces on themselves, thus keeping their IQs in relatively close long-run synch.  I still don’t understand what kind of test (might it contrast permanent vs. temporary environmental shocks?) might falsify the Dickens-Flynn model.

Flynn also argues that the Chinese in America attained high levels of achievement before
above-average IQs.

This book doesn’t tie up all the loose ends, and it could have been written in a more organized fashion.  Still it is one of the more interesting volumes of the year.

Addendum: I have long thought that the Germanic "Hausmusik" tradition was responsible for producing so many great composers in one relatively short period of time.  Flynn’s book offers (unintended) hints about why it is so hard to reproduce the cultural blossomings of times past, and also why future creations will seem baffling to the old fogies.

The researchers held two containers, one empty and the other
containing food, in front of chimpanzees and dogs. Then they pointed to
the correct container. The canines understood the gesture immediately,
while the apes, genetically much more closely related to humans, were
often perplexed by the pointing finger.

That’s not all. Many dogs were even capable of interpreting the
researcher’s gaze. When the scientists looked at a container, the dogs
would search inside for food, but when they looked in the direction of
the container but focused on a point above it on the wall, the dogs
were able to understand that this was not meant as a sign.

Puppies seem able to do this before they have been socialized with human beings.

Says one researcher: "The great advantage of dogs is that we can study them in their
natural habitat without any great effort," explains Adám Miklósi.

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

That’s Bjorn Lomborg’s latest book on global warming.  He has good arguments against the exaggerations of others, so this book is worth reading.  I cannot, however, agree with one of his central claims, namely that the most serious economic research favors only mild remedies or sees the problem as only a moderate one.   

I would instead claim the following:

1. Policy recommendations are extremely sensitive to the choice of discount rate, and economists do not agree on this issue.  Furthermore most economists do not even know enough moral philosophy to understand the issues involved (and the philosophers don’t understand enough economics), so there is no coherent consensus one way or the other.

2. The most current economists’ word is from Martin Weitzman; he argues that the very high costs of the worst-case scenarios suggest an insurance-based case for significant worry, more worry than Lomborg suggests.  A Salon review notes:

Harvard’s Weitzman puts the current concerns of many economists
clearly. Based on the findings of the U.N. climate panel, he notes that
with roughly 3 percent probability, "we will [live in] a terra
incognita biosphere within a hundred years whose mass species
extinctions, radical alterations of natural environments, and other
extreme outdoor consequences of a different planet will have been
triggered by a geologically-instantaneous temperature change that is
significantly larger than what separates us now from past ice ages."

3. We spend too much time wondering about what is "most believable" and not enough energy worrying about the expected value of pending losses.  The major critical reviews all nail Lomborg for neglecting this point.  That said, the speed with which the negative reviews of the book move to the extreme cases is itself noteworthy, and it does not exactly correspond to the image presented to the public.

4. Given that the value of risk is context-specific, economists are bad at taking the value of insurance from market data in one setting, and then transplanting that estimate to another setting.

5. The strongest argument against significant action is not from cost-benefit analysis in the narrow sense, but simply that we are not very good at producing international public goods.  Especially when it comes to extended, intertemporal collective action problems directed against small probability events, with unclear periodic feedback, and dealing with the Chinese and the Indians, who feel they have the right to pollute as much as we did, and also with the not-nearly-as-cooperative-as-they-might-sound Europeans (how’s that sentence for a mouthful?). 

This argument sounds immoral and indeed perhaps is immoral — "we’re ruining things for others, yet if we tried to fix things we would ruin the fixing, so let’s do nothing."  Yet I do not think this issue should be disregarded.  If I can’t open up my computer, dissemble it, and then put it back together again, surely my repair plans should take that fact into account.

Here is a Jonathan Adler review of the book.  Here is a very critical Tim Flannery review.  Here are critical remarks from Chris Mooney.  Here is the Salon review.

Remember that line from Dirty Harry?:  "Do you feel lucky, kid?"