Category: Science

Needed in Empirical Social Science: Numbers

by  Tyler Cowen in

By Aaron S. Edlin and Michael Love:

Knowing the magnitude and standard error of an empirical estimate is much more important than simply knowing the estimate’s sign and whether it is statistically significant. Yet, we find that even in top journals, when empirical social scientists choose their headline results – the results they put in abstracts – the vast majority ignore this teaching and report neither the magnitude nor the precision of their findings. They provide no numerical headline results for 63%±3% of empirical economics papers and for a whopping 92% ± 1% of empirical political science or sociology papers between 1999 and 2019. Moreover, they essentially never report precision (0.1% ± 0.1%) in headline results. Many social scientists appear wedded to a null hypothesis testing culture instead of an estimation culture. There is another way: medical researchers routinely report numerical magnitudes (98%±1%) and precision (83% ± 2%) in headline results. Trends suggest that economists, but not political scientists or sociologists, are warming to numerical reporting: the share of empirical economics articles with numerical headline results doubled since 1999, and economics articles with numerical headline results get more citations (+19% ± 11%).

Via somebody on Twitter?

*The Wrong Stuff: How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned*

by  Tyler Cowen in

By John Strausbaugh, an excellent book.  Here is one good passage of many:

Putting dogs on top of rockets was nothing new.  Since so little was known about the effects that blasting off in a rocket might have on th ehuman body and brain — the g-force of acceleration, the disorientation of weightlessness, the impact of radiation, the g-force of deceleration — the Soviets and the Americans both had been using various species of animals to test conditions since the 1940s.  The Americans started sending up fruit flies aboard their White Sands V-2s in 1947.  An anesthetized rhesus monkey they named Albert II…went up eighty-three miles in a V-2 in 1949.  Unfortunately, his parachute failed to oepn on reentry and he was smashed to death on impact with the ground.  The Americans continued to send up primates in the 1940s and 1950s.  Something like two-thirds of them died.  They used many other species as well, maybe the oddest of which was black bears, who were strapped into a rocket-powered sled at a facility with the deceptively sweet name the Daisy Track to test the physical effects of ultra-rapid acceleration and deceleration.

Recommended.

A virtual rodent predicts the structure of neural activity across behaviors

by  Tyler Cowen in

Animals have exquisite control of their bodies, allowing them to perform a diverse range of behaviors. How such control is implemented by the brain, however, remains unclear. Advancing our understanding requires models that can relate principles of control to the structure of neural activity in behaving animals. To facilitate this, we built a ‘virtual rodent’, in which an artificial neural network actuates a biomechanically realistic model of the rat in a physics simulator. We used deep reinforcement learning to train the virtual agent to imitate the behavior of freely-moving rats, thus allowing us to compare neural activity recorded in real rats to the network activity of a virtual rodent mimicking their behavior. We found that neural activity in the sensorimotor striatum and motor cortex was better predicted by the virtual rodent’s network activity than by any features of the real rat’s movements, consistent with both regions implementing inverse dynamics. Furthermore, the network’s latent variability predicted the structure of neural variability across behaviors and afforded robustness in a way consistent with the minimal intervention principle of optimal feedback control. These results demonstrate how physical simulation of biomechanically realistic virtual animals can help interpret the structure of neural activity across behavior and relate it to theoretical principles of motor control.

Here is the new Nature article by Diego Aldarnado, et.al.  Via @sebkrier.

Terence Tao on AI and mathematics

by  Tyler Cowen in

With formalization projects, what we’ve noticed is that you can collaborate with people who don’t understand the entire mathematics of the entire project, but they understand one tiny little piece. It’s like any modern device. No single person can build a computer on their own, mine all the metals and refine them, and then create the hardware and the software. We have all these specialists, and we have a big logistics supply chain, and eventually we can create a smartphone or whatever. Right now, in a mathematical collaboration, everyone has to know pretty much all the mathematics, and that is a stumbling block, as [Scholze] mentioned. But with these formalizations, it is possible to compartmentalize and contribute to a project only knowing a piece of it. I think also we should start formalizing textbooks. If a textbook is formalized, you can create these very interactive textbooks, where you could describe the proof of a result in a very high-level sense, assuming lots of knowledge. But if there are steps that you don’t understand, you can expand them and go into details—all the way down the axioms if you want to. No one does this right now for textbooks because it’s too much work. But if you’re already formalizing it, the computer can create these interactive textbooks for you. It will make it easier for a mathematician in one field to start contributing to another because you can precisely specify subtasks of a big task that don’t require understanding everything.

The entire interview is worth reading.  As Adam Smith once said…

Basil Halperin, observations on academia and research

by  Tyler Cowen in

Miscellaneous things I learned in [econ] grad school: 1. The returns to experience are high(er than I thought) – Someone who has studied a single topic for a decade or two or three really does know a LOT about that topic

It is worth clicking through to read the whole thread.  People should be writing more about how things actually work!  This is oddly grossly undersupplied.  His points about seminars are especially interesting and well-taken.

Updating the Drake equation?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Planetary scientists Robert Stern from the University of Texas at Dallas and Taras Gerya from ETH-Zurich, the two co-authors on the study, suggest that the presence of both continents and oceans, along with long-term plate tectonics, is critical for the emergence of advanced civilizations. They consequently propose the addition of two factors into the equation: the fraction of habitable planets with significant continents and oceans and the fraction of those planets with plate tectonics operating for at least 500 million years. This adjustment, however, significantly reduces the value of N in the Drake Equation…

According to the new study, plate tectonics are crucial for developing complex life and advanced civilizations. Earth’s plate movements create diverse habitats, recycle nutrients, and regulate climate—all vital for life. It’s important for plate tectonics to last for 500 million years, Gerya explained, because biological evolution of complex multicellular life is extremely slow. “On Earth, it took more than 500 million years to develop humans from the first animals, which appeared around 800 million years ago,” he said.

Here is more from George Dvorsky, via the excellent Samir Varma.

The partisanship of American inventors

by  Tyler Cowen in

Using panel data on 251,511 patent inventors matched with voter registration records containing partisan affiliation, we provide the first large-scale look into the partisanship of American inventors. We document that the modal inventor is Republican and that the partisan composition of inventors has changed in ways that are not reflective of partisan affiliation trends amongst the broader population. We then show that the partisan affiliation of inventors is associated with technological invention related to guns and climate change, two issue areas associated with partisan divide. These findings suggest that inventor partisanship may have implications for the direction of inventive activity.

Here is the full piece by Daniel Fehder, Florenta Teodoridis, Joseph Raffee, and Jino Lu.  Via Kris Gulati.

My Conversation with the excellent Michael Nielsen

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary:

Michael Nielsen is scientist who helped pioneer quantum computing and the modern open science movement. He’s worked at Y Combinator, co-authored on scientific progress with Patrick Collison, and is a prolific writer, reader, commentator, and mentor. 

He joined Tyler to discuss why the universe is so beautiful to human eyes (but not ears), how to find good collaborators, the influence of Simone Weil, where Olaf Stapledon’s understand of the social word went wrong, potential applications of quantum computing, the (rising) status of linear algebra, what makes for physicists who age well, finding young mentors, why some scientific fields have pre-print platforms and others don’t, how so many crummy journals survive, the threat of cheap nukes, the many unknowns of Mars colonization, techniques for paying closer attention, what you learn when visiting the USS Midway, why he changed his mind about Emergent Ventures, why he didn’t join OpenAI in 2015, what he’ll learn next, and more. 

And here is one excerpt:

COWEN: Now, you’ve written that in the first half of your life, you typically were the youngest person in your circle and that in the second half of your life, which is probably now, you’re typically the eldest person in your circle. How would you model that as a claim about you?

NIELSEN: I hope I’m in the first 5 percent of my life, but it’s sadly unlikely.

COWEN: Let’s say you’re 50 now, and you live to 100, which is plausible —

NIELSEN: Which is plausible.

COWEN: — and you would now be in the second half of your life.

NIELSEN: Yes. I can give shallow reasons. I can’t give good reasons. The good reason in the first half was, so much of the work I was doing was kind of new fields of science, and those tend to be dominated essentially, for almost sunk-cost reasons — people who don’t have any sunk costs tend to be younger. They go into these fields. These early days of quantum computing, early days of open science — they were dominated by people in their 20s. Then they’d go off and become faculty members. They’d be the youngest person on the faculty.

Now, maybe it’s just because I found San Francisco, and it’s such an interesting cultural institution or achievement of civilization. We’ve got this amplifier for 25-year-olds that lets them make dreams in the world. That’s, for me, anyway, for a person with my personality, very attractive for many of the same reasons.

COWEN: Let’s say you had a theory of your collaborators, and other than, yes, they’re smart; they work hard; but trying to pin down in as few dimensions as possible, who’s likely to become a collaborator of yours after taking into account the obvious? What’s your theory of your own collaborators?

NIELSEN: They’re all extremely open to experience. They’re all extremely curious. They’re all extremely parasocial. They’re all extremely ambitious. They’re all extremely imaginative.

Self-recommending throughout.

Can they reconstitute Philosphy & Public Affairs?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is a recent announcement of note:

We are unanimously resigning from our editorial roles at Philosophy & Public Affairs, published by Wiley, and launching a new diamond open-access journal published by Open Library of Humanities (OLH). All of us will play the same editorial roles in the new journal and will retain the aim of publishing the best philosophical work touching on matters of public importance.

Do read the whole text, but you can imagine how the arguments run.  Lots of big names are behind this, including Sen, Scheffler, Srinivasan, Waldron, and others.  I am rooting for them, but can this succeed?

How sticky are reputations anyway?  Nine months from now, what percentage of people on a university-wide tenure committee will know about this change?  Three years from now?

Or consider the new journal itself.  Without the long history of famous articles behind it, might it, with the same set of editors, have a lower reputation?  Talk about mood affiliation!

Or might the existence of a “naming squabble” itself lower the reputations of both the old journal and the new venture?  “Well, if they can’t get along, both outlets will have trouble managing their future reputations…”

Or might some of the highly prestigious editors, over time, be more willing to leave than would have been the case under the old moniker?  Perhaps the newly reconstituted board will not be able to get along with itself, not without the final backstop of “the company” (Wiley) to enforce a core on all the bargaining.

If I am in the second year of my tenure clock in a philosophy department, and I have a great paper, do I send it to the new journal?  In its old manifestation it was a top top outlet, but is it still?  What risks am I running?  Or do I send it to the thing still named Philosophy & Public Affairs, which presumably still has some very good new editors.

I will be watching.

How important is “the scientific method”?

by  Tyler Cowen in

From a recently published paper by Alexander Krauss:

Using data on all major discoveries across science including all Nobel Prize and major non-Nobel Prize discoveries, we can address the question of the extent to which “the scientific method” is actually applied in making science’s groundbreaking research and whether we need to expand this central concept of science. This study reveals that 25% of all discoveries since 1900 did not apply the common scientific method (all three features)—with 6% of discoveries using no observation, 23% using no experimentation, and 17% not testing a hypothesis. Empirical evidence thus challenges the common view of the scientific method.

File under “In favor of methodological pluralism.”  Via Zhengdong Wang.

What should I ask Philip Ball?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him.  Here is Wikipedia:

Philip Ball (born 1962) is a British science writer. For over twenty years he has been an editor of the journal Nature, for which he continues to write regularly. He is a regular contributor to Prospect magazine and a columnist for Chemistry World, Nature Materials, and BBC Future.

Ball holds a degree in chemistry from Oxford and a doctorate in physics from Bristol University.

He has written more science books than I can count (see Wikipedia), on a wide variety of topics, and I very much liked his latest book How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology.  How many people have demonstrated a greater total knowledge of science than he has?

So what should I ask him?

What should I ask Paul Bloom?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him.  Here is Wikipedia:

Paul Bloom…is a Canadian American psychologist. He is the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor Emeritus of psychology and cognitive science at Yale University and Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto. His research explores how children and adults understand the physical and social world, with special focus on language, morality, religion, and art.

Here is Paul’s own home page.  Here are Paul’s books on Amazon.  Here is Paul on Twitter.  Here is Paul’s new Substack.  Here is Paul’s post on how to be a good podcast guest.