The Gorilla in the Bus Station

I was at the bus station reading Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, when a gorilla walked in the room, did a little dance for nine seconds, and walked out.

When I observed the time was getting close to the time my bus departed, I got up and stood by the door. One of the employees asked me where I was headed, I told him, and he was surprised. He told me that he had already called for that bus a few minutes earlier. How could I not hear it? He asked me where I was sitting, and I pointed out a seat not 10 feet away. He couldn’t comprehend how I could have ignored something so obvious.

Of course, this bares a resemblance to the very subject of Thinking Fast and Slow, and the Gorilla and Basketball Passes Experiment. The idea is that the more we exert cognitive strain, the more we become oblivious to the world around us. Our cognitive self crowds out our automatic self’s ability to sense a change in our environment. If you’re given the task of counting basketball passes or comprehend a complex section of a book (I was reading the section about some of the implications of regression to the mean), you’ll become oblivious to a gorilla that walks right in front of you. Or in my case a bus driver who calls out your destination.

I’m the type of person who misses a lot of gorillas in the room.

Whole Food’s Pseudoscience

Here is a good article on Whole Food’s association with food pseudoscience, or what many of us would all fake science. A few excerpts of the kinds of things Whole Food’s is involved with:

You can buy chocolate with “a meld of rich goji berries and ashwagandha root to strengthen your immune system,” and bottles of ChlorOxygen chlorophyll concentrate, which “builds better blood.” There’s cereal with the kind of ingredients that are “made in a kitchen—not in a lab,” and tea designed to heal the human heart.

I invited a biologist friend who studies human gut bacteria to come take a look with me. She read the healing claims printed on a handful of bottles and frowned. “This is bullshit,” she said, and went off to buy some vegetables. Later, while purchasing a bag of chickpeas, I browsed among the magazine racks. There was Paleo Living, and, not far away, the latest issue of What Doctors Don’t Tell You. Pseudoscience bubbles over into anti-science. A sample headline: “Stay sharp till the end: the secret cause of Alzheimer’s.” A sample opening sentence: “We like to think that medicine works.”

There’s a sign in the Durham store suggesting that shoppers bag their organic and conventional fruit separately—lest one rub off on the other—and grind their organic coffees at home—because the Whole Foods grinders process conventional coffee, too, and so might transfer some non-organic dust. “This slicer used for cutting both CONVENTIONAL and ORGANIC breads” warns a sign above the Durham location’s bread slicer.

a significant portion of what Whole Foods sells is based on simple pseudoscience. And sometimes that can spill over into outright anti-science (think What Doctors Don’t Tell You, or Whole Foods’ overblown GMO campaign, which could merit its own article).

The article goes on to compare Whole Foods to the Creation Museum.

People are weird about health. If you want to find an area where the political left is severely anti-science look at their views on food. Some think they’re being scientific but latch onto fringe studies. Others deny the validity of health science altogether, but then end up basing their health guidelines by their own intuitions which are clearly vulnerable to framing effects (natural = good, chemicals = bad).

Christina Sommer’s on “Rape Culture”

For me, alarmist feminist research that comes to radical conclusions don’t pass the sniff test. When someone says 1 in 4 women are raped, I say that’s a heavy burden of proof, and simply stating the word “research” isn’t going to cut it.

Some people actively engage with this kind of research and find pretty severe problems with it. Consider this article on “rape culture” by Christina Hoff Sommers. In response to one feminist rape study by Mary Kross , Sommers points out:

Only about a quarter of the women Koss calls rape victims labeled what happened to them as rape. According to Koss, the answers to the follow-up questions revealed that "only 27 percent" of the women she counted as having been raped labeled themselves as rape victims.[10] Of the remainder, 49 percent said it was "miscommunication," 14 percent said it was a "crime but not rape," and 11 percent said they "don't feel victimized.

And more,

Koss and her colleagues counted as victims of rape any respondent who answered "yes" to the question "Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn't want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs?" That opened the door wide to regarding as a rape victim anyone who regretted her liaison of the previous night. If your date mixes a pitcher of margaritas and encourages you to drink with him and you accept a drink, have you been "administered" an intoxicant, and has your judgment been impaired? Certainly, if you pass out and are molested, one would call it rape. But if you drink and, while intoxicated, engage in sex that you later come to regret, have you been raped?

The article points out the radical discrepancy between the studies in question and other rape research get much lower figures and don’t draw as much attention. One answer is that women don’t feel comfortable admitting to being raped:

True, women are often extremely reluctant to talk about sexual violence that they have experienced. But the Harris pollsters had asked a lot of other awkward personal questions to which the women responded with candor: six percent said they had considered suicide, five percent admitted to using hard drugs, 10 percent said they had been sexually abused when they were growing up.

The article ends with a plea to end the growing trend of general violence, not just the variety of rape.

Equity feminists find it reasonable to approach the problem of violence against women by addressing the root causes of the general rise in violence and the decline in civility…The real challenge we face in our society is how to reverse the tide of violence.

I would like to see the data on the decline in civility, and the general rise in violence is patently false. Violent crime rates have been going down for decades. For such a great article on un-careful rape alarmism, it’s unfortunate that it ends by appealing to commonsense pessimism.

David Friedman on Evolution and Race / Gender Differences

Here is an excellent post by David Friedman on the anti-scientific race and gender difference denials:

The denial of male/female differences is the most striking example of left wing hostility to the implications of Darwinian evolution, but not the only one. The reasons to expect differences among racial groups as conventionally defined are weaker, since males of all races play the same role in reproduction, as do females of all races. But we know that members of such groups differ in the distribution of observable physical characteristics--that, after all, is the main way we recognize them. That is pretty strong evidence that their ancestors adapted to at least somewhat different environments.

There is no a priori reason to suppose that the optimal physical characteristics were different in those different environments but the optimal mental characteristics were the same. And yet, when differing outcomes by racial groups are observed, it is assumed without discussion that they must be entirely due to differential treatment by race. That might turn out to be true, but there is no good reason to expect it. Here again, anyone who argues the opposite is likely to find himself the target of ferocious attacks, mainly from people on the left.

Next consider the whole nature/nurture debate, in which the left has, for half a century or more, mostly taken a strong pro-nurture position. It is hard to see how humans could have evolved intelligence if intelligence is not heritable.

This parallels Jonathan Haidt’s description of liberals in social science. Something like, ‘Prenatal exposure to hormones are all well and good for gender differences in animals, but the idea that it could be in humans. How sexist!’

Trading off Health for Weight Loss

I’ve been trying to lose weight, and Wii Fit U (video game) has been a pretty effective tool so far. It recognizes the tendency to procrastinate and lures you in with cheap ways to get the game started – and then one you get started an exercise routine is an easier next step. I weigh myself on the Wii Fit balance board pretty much every day. I upload the information from my pedometer on Wii Fit every day. And then while I’m there I don’t mind starting up a half hour exercise routine. Weighing myself and keeping the pedometer strapped on keeps my conscious of how many calories I’m consuming, how much exercise I’m doing, and how I’m accomplishing my weight goals. I don’t know how much of the manipulation of the tendency to procrastinate was intentional by Nintendo, but in general it’s working.

But here is what I actually wanted to write about – I mentioned losing weight to my wife and she brought up the fact that I shouldn’t lose weight at the expense of my health. I should make sure I’m eating and not run myself ragged. To be honest, I disagree. I’m willing to trade off some – not all – of my health in order to lose weight. Sure losing weight will likely improve my health, and while it would be easy to lie to myself about how it’s about health, it isn’t. Health might be only 10% of why I’m trying to lose weight. The other 90% is in order to look better. Given that my main goal is actually to lose weight, not be healthy, it is acceptable to lose some extra health in order to lose some extra weight.

Thinking about health in terms of tradeoffs is a violation of a taboo, but the reality is that we tradeoff health all the time, and it is crazy not too. Anorexia would tradeoff health for weight loss, and so would taking up smoking. I will do neither because those aren’t reasonable tradeoffs, they’re extreme tradeoffs. But consuming a diet that is below the point at which it is optimally healthy is certainly reasonable. People who, like me, are tired of being overweight should consider trading off a little extra health for a little extra weight loss, or at least not fool themselves into thinking that it is about being healthy. It isn’t.

Social Problems Increase Trust in Government

Here is what Bryan Caplan has to say about how people think about government in Myth of the Rational Voter:

One striking instance of unreasoning deference: Shortly after 9/11, pools strangely found that the nation’s citizens suddenly had more faith in their government. How often can you ‘trust the government in Washington to do what is right’? In 2000, only 30% of Americans said ‘just about always’ or ‘most of the time.’ Two weeks after 9/11, that number more than doubled to 64%. It is hard to see consumers trusting GM more after a major accident forces a recall. The public’s reaction is akin to that of a religious sects who mispredict the end of the world: “we believe now more than ever.”

People just don’t think about government the way they think about anything else.

Consider the United States Health Care market. In 1970 the portion of mandatory federal spending on health care was 5%. In 2010 it was 24.4%. Suppose as many do that today health care in the United States is a totally broken system, what presumption should we start with of what’s causing it? The idea that government might have something to do with the problem should be an obvious place to look. What do I hear over and over again from others? I hear that health care is broken – therefore government.

Every time something goes wrong people turn to government to solve it – like a child brainwashed by her abusive father. Trust in government increases when social problems increase – look at FDR’s four successful elections during the great depression. Even when the social problem was correlated with a steady increase in government involvement, the public likely interprets it as government fighting a losing battle.

The Positive and Negative Unseen Effects of the FDA

Economists point out that the lives and value lost to consumers by the FDA’s long processing times are unseen. If I take a drug and die from it you see the dead body and the drug that caused my death. If I die because the FDA is processing a drug that saves my life, you wouldn’t be able to connect my death as a necessary result of the FDA’s processing time. It is a simple point which should make people value the FDA less. But in the real world, people seem to respond by evaluating the benefits of the FDA all the more in order to preserve the total net value of the FDA.

There is a counter-point; we don’t always see the lives that would have been lost by not having the FDA approve unsafe drugs. If I don’t take an unsafe drug because the FDA stopped it, then the FDA just saved my life.

The problem with this is that with the first example, the public respond to the uncertainty of the unseen by necessarily overvaluing the FDA. People currently assess the number of people the FDA kills at 0. But with the second example, it is hard to see how the public could be responding to the uncertainty of the unseen by undervaluing the FDA. Everyone I’ve ever met thinks that the world would end without the FDA. They tell me that without government food and drug approval, nothing could stop big business from selling hazardous products. Really? Nothing? They believe with all their heart the story that once upon a time we had unrestricted capitalism, so foods and drugs were very unsafe, so the FDA was put in place, it bound capitalism and made it into the server of safe consumables.

Sounds really good if you buy into post hoc tales, but we have this great big other variable called general economic growth. Risk reductions are a good like any other good, so they have a price, general economic growth raises incomes and so people can afford to purchase less risk.

Given the ignore economic growth completely fallacy, it is hard to see how people are underestimating the benefits of the FDA. Radical pessimism is not a reasonable way to respond to uncertainty. I’d say that they’re probably overestimating it. I mean, when you take the vision people have of the world without the FDA, how much worse could the world get?

Colon Camera Pill and the FDA

A colon cameral pill just got approved by the FDA, Huffington Post Reports.

The FDA on Monday cleared the company's PillCam Colon for patients who have experienced an incomplete colonoscopy. Given estimates 750,000 U.S. patients are not able to complete the procedure each year, due to anatomy issues, previous surgery or various colon diseases.

I wonder how many of them died because they couldn’t get an incomplete colonoscopy. And then there’s the consumer surplus of replacing a $4,000 colonoscopy with a $500 camera.

These are the costs of not having this neat little devise, and we ought to multiply it by 12 for the average number of years that it takes the FDA to approve a drug in order to assess the true costs of having the FDA approve it.

Most people don’t think about this kind of problem – approval times kill people and reduce the quality of their lives. Upon taking it into account, they ought to assess the value of the FDA accordingly, that is, as much less valuable than it was previously thought to be. My impression of how people actually react to it is by exaggerating the benefits of the FDA all the more in order to preserve the previous assessment of the total net value of having it.

The Principle of Caution on Abortion

This podcast got me thinking about abortion today.

What I see in the debate is a spectrum. On one end is the seed and the other is the born baby. Different people set markers between those two points to determine when the organism is worthy of normal human rights, human dignity, or whatever you want to call it.

Both sides try to set their markers so that they can’t be reduced to a violation of common-sense reality or morality, but the other side is very good at picking out scenarios where they can in fact be reduced to a violation of common-sense reality or morality. The cells lost by scratching your arm is theoretically cloneable into what everyone considers a human being, so the fact that a cell or a clump of cells which came about at conception will one day become what everyone considers a human being does not set a consistent marker. Likewise, if viability outside the womb is our marker, then it should also be morally permissible for me to kill someone who is on their death bed. We also have to ask the question, how viable is viable and given what technology?

Both sides are really good at reducing each other’s claims to violations of common-sense, but neither side is very good at actually justifying their markers. It is not enough to just set a marker (life begins at 10,000+ cells but not 9,999), but to set up a marker that has justification based on how we define humanity and how we define morality. As far as I can tell, both sides just sets their markers at what feels right to them. The crux of what we’re dealing with though, is what it means to be human, and why killing other humans is wrong. Our feelings about things are often wrong.

I don’t think that scientific labels help the situation at all. Science chops up their categories in ways that are useful, but the categories themselves aren’t true. The whole universe can be chopped up into homo-Sapiens and non homo-Sapiens, but it can also be chopped up in such a way as to move the boundaries of what it currently means to be a homo-sapiens to include more or less, and that category doesn’t become less or more true. Whether we call a clump of cells or a fetus a “person” is a semantic dispute. If we redefine something, that doesn’t mean anything for morality.

While resolution is unlikely any time soon, I think it is possible to follow a sound path to much more common ground than we have, even with how differently the two views see morality and anthropology (which are really the two relevant fields). Two simple principles I think all people should respect: morally speaking we should err on the side of life and legally speaking we should err on the side of choice.

For an abortion to be morally permissible, you don’t need absolute certainty that your not committing something like murder, but you need to be close. “Pretty sure” is not good enough. “I come down on the side of” is not good enough. You need to be as pro life as you can be without venturing into radical improbability. For some people that will be conception, and for others that will be well after conception. It is not okay to exterminate your fetus because you were pretty sure it wasn’t akin to murder.

Start before conception when it is probably absolutely clear to you that the organism has no rights. Now mentally venture down the spectrum, at each successive point ask whether it is still absolutely clear that the organism has no rights, or if it has become pretty clear. At the point where it becomes pretty clear, go back little bit, and that’s when you should act like the organism has rights.

For the second principle, I would say that you don’t need to be absolutely certain that someone is committing a terrible act before you charge them with infanticide, but you need to be close. You need to be as pro-choice as you can be without venturing into radical improbability. “I think” is not good enough. “probably” is not good enough. You have to be able to say, “It is totally improbable that that woman did something horrible to someone else”, before you write it into law, particularly if the law is going to have any teethe. It is not okay to prosecute a woman because you were pretty sure she committed an offense akin to murder.

Start after birth when it is probably absolutely clear to you that the organism has rights. Now mentally venture up the spectrum, at each successive point ask whether it is still absolutely clear that the organism has no rights, or if it has become pretty clear. At the point where it becomes pretty clear, go back a little bit, and that’s when you should act like the organism has rights, and legislate accordingly.

What is consistent in both of these principles is to err on the side of caution. When you deal with the possibility of committing a heinous moral act like killing a baby or prosecuting an innocent woman, you need to be cautious. There is a moral cliff you’re heading toward when you have an abortion or legislate against it, and it is really steep.

Under these principles, I suspect that there are too many abortions in the world and there are too many laws against abortion.

Unfortunately, the discussion is so dogmatic that either side will convince themselves that the marker they argue for now is absolutely certain, and the principles I put forward should be a warning largely to the other side. I don’t think that’s true.

Is the Concept of Prisons for Profit Wrong?

Here is a meme from The Skeptical Libertarian that showed up on Facebook today.

It is one of those memes that sound really good if you think about it for less than five seconds – and that’s most people, but a thoughtful person will start asking questions.

Is the demand for prisoners 0 without private prisons? Of course not. We have prisons so the demand for them is above zero. So it does not create a demand. Presumably, that there is a demand is a good thing. Most people think that a world without prisons would be filled with murderers and rapists running the streets, or something like that.

Given that the demand for prisoners would exist without private prisons, why would privatizing them even increase demand? There are people who profit from prisons in any case. In addition to prison guards, builders, and cooks, law makers profit from building prisons or else they wouldn’t do it.

Given that the demand for prisoners is non-0 with public prisons, and that’s a good thing (or else there would be no prisons), why is any more demand bad? There is no reason to believe that we have the optimal amount of demand for prisoners already. More than zero is good, but any more than we already have must be bad? If the optimal demand for prisoners is between 0 and infinity, why is are we currently above or at that point?

Newest Intellectual Crush on Jonathan Haidt

Here is what started my intellectual crush on Jonathan Haidt -- An Econtalk episode on his new book. I found him very smart and very thorough with his arguments. In a lot of ways he reminded me of Bryan Caplan, both in style and the subject matter of political irrationality and moral intuitionism. I had to learn more.

Of course, if there were ever a forum to accurately convey an idea in a brief time frame, it’s a Ted Talk. He has a few. One is The Moral Roots of Liberals and Conservatives. Another is on The Ecstasy of Transcendence. The third is on How Common Threats make Common Ground

The Moral Roots of Liberals and Conservatives

The Ecstasy of Transcendence

How Common Threats make Common Ground

 Here is a popular liberal talk show on which Jonathan Haidt appears (you can tell it’s liberal by all the thick rimmed glasses). The segment is called, The Republican Brain.  Haidt gives a good overview of his research and how all political people circle around their sacred values. The liberals sharing the table applies it entirely against their political opponents – clearly to Haidt’s objection. Haidt pointed out that liberals seemed more anti-science a couple decades ago, and that they continue to be when they reject scientific consensuses about nuclear power and genetically modified foods. And the liberals responded, “no no, liberals evolve out of their biases and into rightness, conservatives just stay wrong forever.” One person says that it isn’t the same because they’re just being skeptical while the other side is denying a clear reality. It’s hard to see the difference.

This video is a short elaboration on the denial of scientific consensus’ on both the political left and the political right.

Here Jonathan Haidt covers libertarian moral demographics. First a few general demographics he cites: libertarians are more male, better educated, and less religious.

Sen. Orrin Hatch: “These people are not conservatives they’re not republicans, they’re radical libertarians and I’m doggone offended by it. I despise these people.” The point: libertarians and conservatives are very different kinds of people.

Libertarians endorse all the original moral values less than the other parties. They’re very cognitive – very analytical – not as swayed by emotion. They’re a lot like liberals except for they’re less compassionate. They’re not the bleeding hearts types. They systemize more than empathize. When the metric of liberty is included libertarians score high. One explanation is that this is caused by libertarians being mostly male. It is more likely that the causal chain is different. Cognitive types (males) are attracted to libertarianism. Why? Because women who are libertarians still score unusually high in cognition and less high in empathy.

The only emotion on which libertarians score high is reactance. Items on the scale are thing such as, “I find contradicting others stimulating”, “It makes me angry when another person is held up as a model for me to follow” “when something is prohibited I think that’s exactly what I’m going to do.” I find that as hilarious as the audience did.

Libertarians score low on extraversion, and score low on agreeableness, both of which liberals and conservatives score the same. Conservatives score high in conscientiousness, libertarians and liberals score lower than them.

Here is a much less formal talk about libertarian demographics.

It is easy to interpret the data as saying that libertarians don’t care, or have no emotion, or aren’t compassionate at all. That’s very clearly not what the data says.

“It is certainly true that libertarians look as social policy positions and they say, my God the liberal view is causing so much damage and here’s a way to do it much better. And they’re upset that bad policies are put into place by bleeding heart liberals, people who are so motivated by compassion that they can’t see the effect of their actions.” However compassion is not their main driver. “My sense is that libertarians come to see this more intellectually, and then they say my God these policies are much better at helping people.”

My personal introspection is aligned with what Haidt is saying. I fit the libertarian demographic.