Category: Science

"We are somehow like an amalgam, a mix of bacteria and human cells.
There are some estimates that say 90 percent of the cells on our body
are actually bacteria," Steven Gill, a molecular biologist formerly at
TIGR and now at the State University of New York in Buffalo, said in a
telephone interview.

Read more here.

1. It is by now pointless to deny that global warming is man-made to a considerable degree.

2. It is a very real problem.  If you don’t believe me, go visit the deltas of East Bengal or Bangladesh and think about it again.  Sweden I am not worried about and Greenland may become valuable, but where do we put the losers and no this isn’t just a few small islands in the Pacific.

3. I can imagine Manhattan and other major cities taking protective action against rising water levels, much as the Dutch do today.  I recall reading that the Dutch spend about as a high a percentage of their gdp defending themselves from water as the U.S. does on national defense.  That is quite a burden, but it is better than forsaking economic growth.

4. Like Arnold Kling, I do not much trust climate models.  Perhaps I have spent too much time doing macro, and the experience carries over.  Nonetheless uncertainty about final effects gives us more to worry about, not less.  It is the worst-case scenarios for global warming which worry me, not the middling scenarios.  Variance is our enemy in this matter.

5. I don’t have a good plan for what to do.  Imagine passing and extending Kyoto and turning 2/3 of the U.S. energy supply into nuclear, wind, and solar power.  Heroic achievements, to be sure.  But if China and India continue to industrialize, global warming will likely continue and perhaps accelerate, as I understand current knowledge.

6. I have yet to see a real plan which recognizes three points: a) without continued economic growth the world will probably fall apart, b) the problem is real and significant, c) any good preventive solution would require an enormous amount of concerted action across both time and across nations.

7. How much does the framing of the problem contribute to our political views on the matter?  How much would we spend, or how intensively would we organize global action, if a typhoon were headed right for Bangladesh?  An earthquake?  A war?  A much slower set of changes, not fully our fault?  An out-of-control American nuclear weapon?  Should it matter?

8. If we could relocate all the losers-to-be into freer and richer countries, should we consider this a satisfactory solution?  Or are we still massive and unjustified aggressors if they are crying to us: "Don’t let it happen, don’t let it happen!"?

The thesis is simple, and almost everyone disagrees with it upon first hearing.

The symmetry thesis: A given person likes (loves) you as much as you like (love) him or her.

I have encountered many apparent refutations of the symmetry thesis,
but with time most have turned out to be spurious.  I find the symmetry
thesis a surprisingly strong predictor of human behavior and
inclination.

Do I want to know how much you like me?  It is simple.  I imagine
how much I like you.  (If you do the same, are we circular?  Or does
some kind of fixed point theorem apply?)

Let me rule out or explain some obvious "counterexamples."  If a guy
stalks you, and you can’t stand him, the reality is that he is probably
more hostile to you than loving.  The thesis fits.

Break-ups are tricky and they provide the best counterexamples.  But
who really left whom is not always obvious; it can take several years
to figure out what was going on.  Often the leaving party is the one
who first develops a narrative of how things might be different; this
is distinct from liking or loving the other person less.  Other people
leave pre-emptively.

Unilateral crushes are possible and indeed common, although with
repeated contact they usually collapse into symmetry, one way or the
other.

I can imagine several (non-exclusive) mechanisms in support of the
symmetry thesis.  Perhaps "having a connection" — which is mutual by
nature — is the key to true liking and attraction.  That is my favored
view.  Note that it creates a possible exception for people who can
like or love others without having any real connection with them.  I
tend to think of such likes as delusional.

Alternatively, perhaps at least one person is a "fraidy cat," and
won’t let himself or herself fall for the other, or even like the
other, without witnessing signs of reciprocity.  The two people then
lead each other down the pathway of like, in a kind of low-key
intertemporal seduction, sans the sex.  Or with it.

Perhaps we like other people for their intrinsic qualities less than
we pretend.  Mostly we like people for liking (loving) us. 

Yes I know that most of you don’t believe it, and have plenty of
counterexamples to offer.  But keep it in the back of your mind, and
see if it proves useful over the next few years.

It even plays Kraftwerk.

Activity, or the fraction of time each person talks, is the simplest measurement. Not surprisingly, the more someone talks, the more interested in the conversation he or she is assumed to be. Engagement measures how the speakers influence one other. Are they talking in smooth succession, or are there long pauses between utterances? Does one speaker hesitate more often than another? Stress measures the variation in the pitch and volume of each speaker’s voice to determine whether his or her voice betrays any discomfort or anxiety. Mirroring, finally, is a measurement of the speaker’s empathy–how frequently he or she adopts the vocal intonations and inflections of the other, or repeats short phrases such as "uh huh" and "OK" if the other says them first.

Pentland then collaborated with other researchers in fields ranging from psychiatry to business in order to put his markers to the test. Could they be used to predict what would happen in various social situations, say, landing a date, or getting a job or a raise?

In most scenarios, the predictions that Pentland and his colleagues were able to make turned out to be shockingly accurate. Using nothing but these simple, nonlinguistic clues–and analyzing conversations that lasted between five minutes and just over an hour, depending on the experiment–the researchers were able to calculate the likelihood of a given outcome with an average accuracy rate of almost 90%.

If men engaged in mirroring, for example, women were more likely to be attracted to them. Men, by contrast, were more attracted to women who varied the tones of their voices. Pentland and several Media Lab graduate students used his markers to analyze more than 50 speed-dating sessions, where participants interacted with one another for five minutes before deciding if they wanted to contact the other person for an actual date. By the end of the analysis, the researchers could predict with 83% accuracy whether or not two people would exchange phone numbers.

Here is the full story.  Here is the researcher’s home page, which includes work on the concept of "smart rooms."  Read "About this Picture" on the home page.

What does Robin Hanson say?: "There must be some reason we are unconscious of these cues, even though our subconscious clearly notices and uses them.  So some sort of hell will probably break loose when tech makes it easier for us to see and publicize these cues."

Here is Dubner and Levitt, from the Sunday New York Times:

[Anders] Ericsson and his colleagues have thus taken to studying expert
performers in a wide range of pursuits, including soccer, golf,
surgery, piano playing, Scrabble, writing, chess, software design,
stock picking and darts. They gather all the data they can, not just
performance statistics and biographical details but also the results of
their own laboratory experiments with high achievers.

Their
work, compiled in the "Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert
Performance," a 900-page academic book that will be published next
month, makes a rather startling assertion: the trait we commonly call
talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers –
whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming – are
nearly always made, not born. And yes, practice does make perfect.
These may be the sort of clichés that parents are fond of whispering to
their children. But these particular clichés just happen to be true.

Here is the link.  Here is The Economist on Ericsson.  Here is Ericsson’s home page.  Here is more from Dubner and Levitt, including further links to papers.

Addendum: Here is an archive link to the Sunday article.

Here is Tim Harford’s article on poker and game theory, from today’s Financial Times.  Excerpt:

…he admits that it is only a matter of time before anyone will be able
to download a free poker robot that will outplay the world champion. At
that point, people may not care to risk money online against
unidentified opponents.

Despite the strong positive feelings that characterize newlyweds, many marriages end in disappointment.  To understand this shift, the authors argue that although newlyweds’ global relationship evaluations may be uniformly positive, not all spouses base their global adoration on an accurate perception of their partner’s specific qualities. Two longitudinal studies confirmed that whereas most newlyweds enhanced their partners at the level of their global perceptions, spouses varied significantly in their perceptions of their partners’ specific qualities. For wives, but not for husbands, more accurate specific perceptions were associated with their supportive behaviors, feelings of control in the marriage, and whether or not the marriage ended in divorce. Thus, love grounded in specific accuracy appears to be stronger than love absent accuracy.

Here is the paper, and thanks to Robin Hanson for the pointer.

There will be no society anywhere on Earth where all dancing is done
in secret. Dancing will be a public phenomenon everywhere. Whereas a
man or woman might practice alone, the end product will always involve
witnesses.

There will be no society on Earth where all the dancing done by men is away from the eyes of women.

Women, far more than men, will find the skill with which a potential
mate can dance far more of a factor which influences their choices of
mate. This will be true of all societies.

Women will get the most pleasure from dancing (except perhaps when
taking the contraceptive pill) when they are at the fertile peak of
their menstrual cycle.

There is much more, and thanks to Newmark’s Door for the pointer.

Addendum: Here is a working link.

Self-awareness, regarded as a key element of being human, is
switched off when the brain needs to concentrate hard on a tricky task,
found the neurobiologists from the Weizmann Institute of Science in
Rehovot, Israel.

The
team conducted a series of experiments to pinpoint the brain activity
associated with introspection and that linked to sensory function. They
found that the brain assumes a robotic functionality when it has to
concentrate all its efforts on a difficult, timed task – only becoming
"human" again when it has the luxury of time.    

Here is the full story.

I don’t worry much, so it is good I survived my 20s:

Using the survey to follow the fortunes of 5,362 people born in 1946,
the researchers found that those individuals who had higher anxiety –
as determined by the opinion of their school teacher when they were 13
– were significantly less likely to die in accidental circumstances
before they were 25 (only 0.1 per cent of them did) than were
non-anxious people (0.72 per cent of them did). Similar trends were
observed when anxiety was measured using the teachers’ anxiety
judgments when the sample were 15-years-old, or using the sample’s own
completion of a neuroticism questionnaire when they were 16. By
contrast, anxiety had no association with the number of non-accidental
(e.g. illness-related) deaths before 25. “Our findings show, for the
first time in a representative sample of humans, a relatively strong
protective effect of trait anxiety”, the researchers said.

It’s
not all good news for anxious people though. After the age of 25 they
started to show higher mortality rates than calmer types thanks to
increased illness-related deaths.

Here is the link and also the paper.  Elsewhere on BPS Digest, the language you speak influences your personality.

Prayer doesn’t reduce mortality and neither does alcohol.  In both cases, more evidence that there is no god.