Category: Science

…a growing body of research–and a new study from the trenches of the New York public-school system–strongly suggests it might be the other way around.  Giving kids the label of “smart” does not prevent them from underperforming.  It might actually be causing it.

It turns out you should praise them for their effort, not their intelligence.  If you praise kids for their intelligence, they tend to avoid tasks they fear they will fail at.  And get this:

Scholars from Reed College and Stanford reviewed over 150 praise studies. Their meta-analysis determined that praised students become risk-averse and lack perceived autonomy.  The scholars found consistent correlations between a liberal use of praise and students’ “shorter task persistence, more eye-checking with the teacher, and inflected speech such that answers have the intonation of questions.”  …image maintenance becomes their primary concern–they are more competitive and more interested in tearing others down.  A raft of very alarming studies illustrate this.

That is, by the way, from New York magazine.

…boredom has little to do with lack of external stimulation and everything to do with being out of touch with our emotions.

More here, though I wonder whether a third cause is controlling the correlation.

In a paper posted online in the current issue of the journal
Psychological Medicine, a team of psychiatrists and literary scholars
reports that it could not find a single account of repressed memory,
fictional or not, before the year 1800.

The researchers offered
a $1,000 reward last March to anyone who could document such a case in
a healthy, lucid person.  They posted the challenge in newspapers and on
30 Web sites where the topic might be discussed.  None of the responses
were convincing, the authors wrote, suggesting that repressed memory is
a “culture-bound syndrome” and not a natural process of human memory.

Madame Tourvel, in Dangerous Liaisons, was the closest they found to an example, but the character did not come close enough.  Here is the story. 

You can submit your suggestions here, I should note I am not convinced by the lack of a winner.  People can be oddly unable to recognize a pattern until they understand the pattern; just think how late in human history the first good explanation of supply and demand comes (North? Steuart? Smith? Bailey? Longfield?), and that is a fairly basic economic concept which can be taught to most high schoolers.

Instead of forcing subjects to become aware of their own awareness–in the process perturbing the very phenomenon one wishes to measure–wagering is a more implicit, a more indirect, way to assess awareness.  And, an important practical concern, wagering is more natural, more intuitive, for subjects than introspection.

Most intriguingly, Persaud’s method implies that computing expected gains and choosing the more profitable outcome–that is, placing a bet–has a close and intimate connection to awareness…

That is from Nature Neuroscience, February 2007, gated.  The article is "Betting the House on Consciousness," by Christof Koch and Kerstin Presuschoff.  Another relevant piece from the same issue is "Post-decision wagering objectively measures awareness," by Navindra Persaud, Peter McLeod, and Alan Cowey.

Thanks to Neil H. for the pointer.

Here is the list.  This one surprised me:

[Myth] "A penny dropped from the top of a tall building could kill a pedestrian"

[Truth] A
penny isn’t the most aerodynamic of weapons.  A combination of its shape
and wind friction means that, tossed even from the 1,250-foot Empire
State Building, it would travel fast enough merely to sting an unlucky
pedestrian.

Researchers have shown women rate a man as more attractive after
they’ve seen another woman smiling at him.  By contrast, being a jealous
bunch, male observers rate a man as less attractive after they’ve seen
a woman smiling at him.

Here is more.

The atomic bombs were the product of an industrial effort which cost just under $2bn ($20 bn in 1996 dollars).  One billion dollars to destroy a city which would have been destroyed at minimal additional cost by one conventional raid represented an awful lot of ‘bucks per bang.’  Another way to look at it is that it cost $3bn to manufacture the 4,000 or so B-29s which were used exclusively in long-range operations against Japan, including as atomic bombers…Another index was that the total cost of the atomic bombs was the equivalent of making one-third more tanks or five times more heavy guns.

That is intriguing but it misses two points.  First, the cost of making subsequent atomic bombs is lower.  Second, atomic bombs have superior signaling power about the willingness to destroy.  That excerpt is from David Edgerton’s The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900.

Apparently, even real frogs will jump out of slowly heated water.

That is from Robin Hanson.  You are not encouraged to experiment at home.

When Nobel Laureate and University of Chicago economics professor Robert Fogel found his desk becoming massively piled he simply installed a second desk behind him that now competes in towering clutter with the first.

That is from A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder, by Eric Abramson and David Freedman, an intriguing defense of…um…mess.  Here is my previous post on this topic.

Most of the really important parts of our lives — who we love and how, how we live and why, why we lie and when — have yet to yield their secrets to real evidence.

Here is more.  Here is a full directory of optimistic prognostications.  Arnold Kling comments on same.

Bruce Charlton asks:

What is the worst designed everyday object?

Bruce Charlton answers:

My vote would go to the standard, hard plastic, hinged CD case.

Its functionality is terrible at best, and it breaks way too easily;
especially the hinge – upon which functionality depends.  And I have
hundreds of them!

That was my answer too.  I am also frustrated by the prevalence of non-sharp knives, although perhaps this is best for the children.  Do you all have other answers?

According to Patric Bach and Steven Tipper of Bangor University, the mere sight of Wayne Rooney
[a soccer player] inhibits the control you have over your feet.  Apparently, looking at
Rooney automatically triggers football-related activity in the movement
control parts of your brain, leading to the paradoxical effect of
impairing your own foot control.  By contrast, Bach and Tipper found the
sight of the British tennis player Tim Henman impairs observers’ hand
control, but not their foot control.

Here is the full story.

Here is the link.  The pointer is from Chris Masse.

Elsewhere, from my Indiana hotel I found Dwight Lee on whether money can buy happiness, and Brad DeLong on Milton Friedman.  Jane Galt won’t go see Borat, I prefer the skits, most of all Bruno talking to the pastor.  And here is an NYT article about a free market think tank in Kenya.