Category: Science

“We speculate that high testosterone individuals are comfortable in
a high status position, and able to concentrate on the task at hand,”
Newman said. “In a low status position, however, they appear to be
distracted by their low status, and thus presumably less able to
concentrate on the task at hand.

“They were more impaired
by low status than they were helped by high status,” Newman added. “If
you’re a high testosterone person, it is a really big deal to lose
status, where as to get a high status position is more expected.

Here is the full story.  And thanks to Eloise for the pointer.

Here is one good analysis.

Addendum: Read also Brad DeLong.

Matt Yglesias claims he is defective and asks:

Are there good reasons for young people to be designed as more risk-friendly than older people? …Is there some more general logic to this?

After all, teenagers can do some very stupid things, and for no apparent benefits.  Why?  I see a few major hypotheses:

1. The young take risks to signal they are strong and thus good potential mates.  We are biologically programmed so that this motivation declines with age.  This also helps explain why the young are most foolish amongst their peers.  Note that under this hypothesis, the default setting must be that a non-risk-taker doesn’t reproduce very much (otherwise why take risks?).  If polygamy was once common, this might explain why young men are more reckless than young women.

2. The young have greater need for some skill which is biochemically correlated with risk-taking behavior.  The risk-taking itself performs no useful functional role.  Read Randall Parker on this.

3.  When it comes to the kind of risks that were most prevalent in early hunter-gatherer societies — such as facing hostile large animals — today’s young are still quite risk-averse.

4. The young have fewer commitments and thus less to live for.  This is related to yesterday’s discussion of theism and risk-taking.

I view #4 as an underrated hypothesis, but I have turned on the comments function for your ideas.  And here is my earlier post on risk-taking and life extension.

Many of you have written back in defense of cryogenics (be sure to read Robin Hanson’s appended response).  But reader Michael Goodfellow offers a more negative view:

Robin Hanson’s comment implies cryonics will continue to be used even after the first set of people is revived.  This is unlikely.

There are few diseases (including aging) that could damage your brain more than having your head cut from your body and frozen.  The ability to repair this huge damage implies the ability to repair nearly any damage in a living person.  So no one will be frozen after the point where revival becomes possible (because no one will die!)  In fact, since repair of lesser injuries would be possible before
that, cryonics would already be an unused technology (no new brains frozen) long before revival is possible.

This has some consequences — if you are revived, it will be to a society of immortals.  Second, cryonics will stop being used before it has been proven to work, even if it does work (because no one dies and is frozen.)  So only a limited number of people will ever be frozen, and they will all have to take on faith that the technology can work.

My take: I’ll stick with my original pessimism, albeit for simpler reasons.  Despite recent efforts, it remains hard to buy insurance against the price of your home falling five years from now.  And how many companies issue fifty-year bonds?  Can I expect that  anyone will maintain my web page long after I die?  How much capitalization is needed to insure that an organization lasts even as little as fifty years?

In reality the series should be called "Spot Markets in Everything."

Some people I know have contracted to have their heads chopped off and frozen after (before? during?) their death.  Here is one fun and engaging calculation of one’s chances of resurrection:

At the end, then, what is the combined probability of success? If all my best case figures are used, P(now) from the Warren Equation is 0.15, or a  bit better than one chance in seven. This is my most optimistic scenario. The pessimistic scenario puts P at 0.0023, or less than one chance in 400.

The idea that (in my personal estimation) cryonics has all told at best only   a 15% chance of working, may be a bit shocking. But answers of this sort fall naturally out of chained probability equations. Like it or not, the Warren equation simply forces one to remember that the success of cryonics depends on the correctness of at least four separate physical hypotheses, the fortunate consummation of at least eight modern social trends, and some luck in the circumstances surrounding one’s demise. That’s a lot of hurdles. Even if the probability for each of these 13 factors is a flat 95%, the total probability of success would still only be 51% — barely better than flipping a coin.

My take: The true estimate should be even more pessimistic.  I think simply no one will care to thaw you out.

Addendum: Robin Hanson responds…

Their home lies further beneath sea level than Everest’s peak rises above it. And yet tiny organisms have been found living at the very bottom of the Pacific Ocean’s deepest trench, the remotest spot on the globe.

The microscopic organisms, called foraminifera, live in mud at the bottom of Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, almost 11 kilometres beneath the waves of the western Pacific Ocean. The pressure at this depth is a crushing 1,090 times that at the surface.

This recent story causes me to raise my prior ever so slightly…

Here is the Harvard account.  I love his books, start with The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance.

More police officers die each year in patrol car crashes than at the
hands of criminals, and most of the time the accidents occur when the
officers are not speeding to an emergency, a new study says.

But
the researchers say the number of deaths could be reduced if police
departments did more to encourage officers to use seat belts. The
authors of the report, in The Journal of Trauma, reviewed hundreds of
police car accidents across the country from 1997 to 2001 and also
found that officers involved in crashes were 2.6 times as likely to be
killed if they were not wearing seat belts…

Dr. Jehle said that officers who were interviewed for the study were
surprised to find that about 60 percent of the deaths occurred during
routine driving. They tend to view the car as a haven. "It’s their
office," he said. "They’re in it all the time."

Here is The New York Times story.

The new [classificatory] system, which draws upon many of the words
used to describe the human brain and has broad support among
scientists, acknowledges the now overwhelming evidence that avian and
mammalian brains are remarkably similar — a fact that explains why
many kinds of bird are not just twitchily resourceful but able to
design and manufacture tools, solve mathematical problems and, in many
cases, use language in ways that even chimpanzees and other primates
cannot.    

In particular, it reflects a new recognition that the
bulk of a bird’s brain is not, as scientists once thought, mere "basal
ganglia" — the part of the brain that simply coordinates instincts.
Rather, fully 75 percent of a bird’s brain is an intricately wired mass
that processes information in much the same way as the vaunted human
cerebral cortex.

…behavioral studies in recent years have proved that many birds have more pallium power than your average mammal.

Even seemingly moronic pigeons can categorize objects
as "human-made" vs. "natural"; discriminate between cubistic and
impressionistic styles of painting; and communicate using visual
symbols on computers, according to evidence compiled by the consortium,
which spent seven years on the project with input from scientists
around the world.

Some birds can play games in which they intentionally
tell lies. New Caledonian crows design and make tools. Scrub jays can
recall events from specific times or places — a trait once thought
unique to humans. And perhaps most impressive, parrots, hummingbirds
and thousands of other species of songbirds are able to teach and learn
vocal communication — the basic skill that makes human language
possible. That’s a variant of social intelligence not found in any
mammal other than people, bats, and cetaceans such as dolphins and
whales.

Read more here.

The most detailed study ever conducted of mundane bodily movements found that obese people tend to be much less fidgety than lean people and spend at least two hours more each day just sitting still. The extra motion by lean people is enough to burn about 350 extra calories a day, which could add up to 10 to 30 pounds a year, the researchers found.

Here is the full story.  Here is another summary.  And check out the thin researcher.

All that methane has to be coming from somewhere, here is the story.  If any of you know the betting odds on this, please write me.

Elsewhere on the science front, humans may be an excessively in-bred species, rendering us unusually vulnerable to genetic diseases.  And our solar system may have formed in a violent nebula.

At least if you have the right gene.  I’m actually not very impressed with these correlation studies, experiments with mice and fruit flies where genes can be turned on and off are more convincing, but I don’t doubt that most behaviors are influenced by genes. 

Here; and for the more practical topologist, a Klein stein.  Need I point out that the Klein stein is perfect for dunking donuts?

Thanks to Rasmusen’s Weblog for the pointer.