Category: Science

Randall Parker wrote an interesting sentence:

To state my argument at a philosophical level:  Technological advances increase what one can do with one’s positive liberty and by doing that they increase the ease which people can violate  negative liberty.  This rift came as a result of reading a post by Tyler Cowen on positive and negative liberty.

He has further rapid speculations:

Will rejuvenation therapies lead to such a huge
boost in the world’s population that even the industrialized countries
will fall back into a Malthusian trap?   On Darwinian grounds this seems
inevitable.  I’ve previously argued that natural selection will reverse the trend of declining fertility in industrialized countries.
Combine that selective pressure with bodies that stay young for
centuries and a population explosion seems inevitable unless either
humans get wiped out by robots or a world government decides we do not
have an unlimited right to reproduce and enforces restrictions on
reproduction.

What is nature’s only hope?  That rich people decide that owning
their own unspoiled rain forests is a hugely status enhancing form of
consumption.  Show your benevolence and wisdom by buying half the Amazon
and let your friends visit its untamed wildness.

The subtitle is Why We’re Living Longer, Healthier, More Comfortable Lives on a Cleaner Planet, and it is written by Indur M. Goklany.  Imagine an up-to-date version of Aaron Wildavsky and Julian Simon, in easily digestible form.  On global warming, it won’t make Tim Lambert happy, but it not "denialist" either.  A useful resource, recommended.  Here is the book’s home page.  Here are papers by Goklany.

…conventional wisdom suggests keeping a daily gratitude journal.  But one study revealed that those who had been assigned to do that ended up less happy than those who had to count their blessings only once a week.  Lyubomirsky therefore confirmed her hunch that timing is important.  So is variety, it turned out: a kindness intervention found that participants told to vary their good deeds ended up happier than those forced into a kindness rut.

Here is more.

Here are two excerpted quotations, cited by John Tierney in his sadly gated blog:

“While we typically think of a smile as displaying our emotional state (happiness), it also appears that smiles convey information about the signaler’s status.  Specifically, lower status individuals appear to smile more than higher status individuals.  I suspect that this is due, in part, to the fact that there are several different types of smiles, including a true happiness smile and a true embarrassment smile.  The latter smile, the embarrassment display, is often seen as an appeasement display in primates.  Jimmy Carter smiled a lot, George Bush smiles much less.  Jimmy Carter is generally perceived to be warm and friendly, but not very dominant and strong.  George Bush is perceived be be somewhat less warm and friendly, but is seen as quite dominant and strong.”

And:

“I believe that the smiling faces of the models for the lower priced brands are simply conveying information regarding the social status of the brand image, rather than attempting to make customers feel better.  Sometimes the advertiser must make a trade-off between advertising high status and presenting an emotionally positive image.  Thus, the non-smiling faces of the higher status brands are not trying to make the consumer feel bad; they are simply attempting to display the signals that are associated with higher status.  We liked Elvis even when he sneered at us from the stage because the contemptuous sneer is typically produced by individuals with higher status.  Although we don’t generally like contemptuous individuals, most folks admire higher status individuals and want to be around them.  Thus, the irony is that higher status brands are creating a positive image -– high status–by using a negative signal (lack of a smile).”

Cialdini asked his subjects to read a short biography of Grigori Rasputin, the notorious monk who served as an adviser in the court of Czar Nicolas II, and to give their opinion of him.  The biography depicted Rasputin as a mendacioius and manipulative villain.  In half the cases Cialdini had adjusted Rasputin’s birthday so that it matched that of the reader.  Those subjects who shared a birthday with Rasputin were ovrewhelmingly more likely to rate him positively — as a strong and effective leader with many redeeming qualities.

That is from Jake Halpern’s Fame Junkies: The Hidden Truths Behind America’s Favorite Addiction.  By the way, Bob Cialdini’s Influence is one of my all-time favorite books, if you don’t already know it you should.

…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.