Hungry? Grab a Link

• My brother and his gang of nerds find the mass radius relations for these dark matter bosonic stars, their density profile as well as the maximum mass they can support. Those whacky characters and their shenanigans.
  
• Bryan Caplan argued with a senator about ending drug prohibition. I've seen intellectuals argue with politicians before, and the clean shaven face always ends up having to be scraped up from the street curb.
  
• Scott Alexander defends the Myers-Briggs Personality Test. 

...you answer a lot of personality questions on a test, like “Do you like spending time around other people?”, and you say “no”, and then later the test tells you “You’re an introvert”, and then you think “Oh my god, this is amazing, it’s like it’s known me my whole life!”

The claim that MBTI gives you new information would be a bold scientific claim and would require bold scientific evidence. I don’t know to what degree the MBTI people make this claim, but I don’t think it’s necessary for me to enjoy the test and consider it useful. All it needs to do is condense the information you put into it in a way that makes it more relevant and digestible.

• Lots of people are talking about Scott Sumner's new book, The Midas Paradox. The complicated world of monetary policy and business cycles is something I don't know very much about. And every time I try the words become gibberish about a sentence and a half into it. From what I hear though, Mr. Sumner is pretty good. although it might just be that the high cost of entry (knowing what their talking about), keeps that complicated world monopolized.
  
• Hive Mind by Garrett Jones is about why the IQ of the society you live in matters so much more than the IQ of your own.

Controversy over Starbuck's Red Cups

Some people are complaining about Starbucks using a plain red design for their hot cups this season. Why? because its another ploy of grinch-like liberals to take Christmas out of everything.

Of course, the cups are different each year and they're not always particularly Christmas-centric. Its not like this year they're excluding the holy trinity from their cup design. They just made a design choice that I doubt had anything to do with Christmas.

Last Year's Starbucks Cups

I read that social media covered with angry Christians, but the only thing I catch on The controversy is now trending everywhere. Now everyone is outraged over a small subset of Christian's outrage over a small subset of liberal's outrage over the celebration of Christmas. This is how contagious dumb is.

And what does Starbucks fill those non-Christmas cups with each and every day? Their premier coffee, Christmas Blend!

100 people are outraged over the 5 people who are outraged over the 2 people who are outraged over something silly. This is how we bond over madness.

Does Transgender make sense if Men and Women are the same?

The bottom line is that saying there are differences in male and female brains is just not true.

A neuroscientist has stepped forward to remind everyone that men and women have the same brains

sexes are not ‘hardwired’ in different ways

So are male and female brains naturally different?

One holy belief of the liberal tribe is that they aren't; men and women are born with brains indistinguishable from one another's. Gender differences are therefore explained entirely by culture, and differences in gender outcomes can therefore be explained entirely by culture and discrimination. If there are no natural differences, those are the only options left. Why is the liberal tribe so anxious to believe this?

The Haidtian explanation is that the liberal tribe bond with each other over the sacralization of victim groups. They're eager to accept any possible story involving the victimization of women, because the defense of those women makes them feel like a part of the good team. And if they defect by questioning their battle orders, they're pushed outward from the circle for betraying their tribe. 

Maybe this is why the above links get so much attention, even though as far I can tell the only evidence is that one neuroscientist said so. One.

What can we do about this? Well, if we really want to be provocative we can pit the victim stories against each other. So how can a transgender person identify mentally as one gender if there are no mental gender differences? I think the impulse of the liberal tribe will be to concoct any possible way to protect both victim groups; the transgender group and the female group. But that would be very hard if they've already committed to men and women having exactly the same brains.

Though in my experience if you point out the inconsistencies in the doctrines of these tribes you're more likely to incite more anger than introspection. 

Are Trangender people God's Mistake?

I was Transsexual .Then Jesus came into my life

God doesn’t create a person with the genitals of a male and the consciousness and heart of a female.

His wonderful work leaves no room for mistakes; no one is born with the “wrong body.”

Sometimes the evangelical tribe says that trans-gender people can't exist; that those who say so are confused or have a disorder of some kind. 

I'm sometimes taken aback by how pervasive groupthink is, how it leaves us with the inability to entertain counter-arguments. Sometimes exposure to this kind of groupthink leaves others thinking that they're just stupid, rather than the truth that like most of us, they're not very good at practicing intellectual discipline when we're surrounded by people who hold the same beliefs that they do.

In the case of evangelicals protesting transgenderism because, "God doesn't make mistakes", the counter should be clear. There are tons of wrong things we are born with that we should fix if we are able:

-When a baby is born with one leg, we don't say, "God doesn't make mistakes, he can't have an artificial leg"

-When a baby is born not breathing we don't say, "God doesn't make mistakes, we can't give CPR"

-When a baby is born identifying intellectually as one gender and identifying bodily as the other gender...

This is one aspect of a broader trend in evangelicals to ignore natural evil completely. They, like the world that they're not supposed to conform to, believe that nature is perfect and all the terribleness in our experience can be traced naturally to human beings messing with things.

This is false. Nature is a mess; red in tooth and claw. The Problem of Natural Evil, is called a problem for a reason. And whatever solution the theist might have for it should be applies consistently. When someone says they were born transgender, you should not forget the reality of natural evil as an explanation and surgery or hormone pills a solution, no different from the many problems in nature and many solutions we've come up with.

Vaccine ingestion vs injection

Injection vs Ingestion. Myths and Facts from one of my favorite sites, Vaxplanations.

Actually, Everyone Benefits from Free Trade

Actually, everyone benefits from free trade

How Speculation Works and why the Prophets don't Speculate

There's nothing novel about what David Friedman believes about speculation, economists everywhere would give him a thumbs up for the following description. In Chapter 13 of Hidden Order he covers the issue as elegantly as one can.

It is difficult to read either newspapers or history books without occasionally coming across the villainous speculators. Speculators, it sometimes seems, are responsible for all the problems of the world - famines, currency crises, high prices. 

.How Speculation works 

 A speculator buys things when he thinks they are cheap and sells them when he thinks they are expensive. Imagine, for example, that you decide there is going to be a bad harvest this year.You buy grain now, while it is still cheap. If you are right, the harvest is bad, the price of grain goes up, and you sell at a large profit. 

There are several reasons why this way of making a profit gets so much bad press. For one thing, the speculator is profiting by other people's bad fortune, making money from, in Kipling's phrase, "man's belly pinch and need." Of course, the same might be said of farmers, who are usually considered good guys. For another the speculator's purchase of grain tends to drive up the price, making it look as though he is responsible for the scarcity.

But in order to make money, the speculator must sell as well as buy. If he buys when grain is plentiful, he does indeed tend to increase the price then; but if he sells when it is scarce (which is what he wants to do in order to make money), he increases the supply and decreases the price just when the additional grain is most useful. 

The speculator, acting for his own selfish motives, does almost exactly what a benevolent ruler would do. When he foresees a future famine he drives up the current price, encouraging consumers to economize on food (by slaughtering meat animals early, for example, to save their feed for human consumption), to import food from abroad, to produce other kinds of food (go fishing, dry fruit, ...), and in other ways to prepare for the anticipated shortage. He then stores the wheat and distributes it (for a price) at the peak of the famine. Not only does he not cause famines, he prevents them. 

Speculators, if successful, smooth out price movements, buying goods when they are below their long-run price and selling them when they are above it, raising the price toward equilibrium in the one case and lowering it toward equilibrium in the other. They do what governmental "price-stabilization" schemes claim to do - reduce short run fluctuations in prices. In the process, they frequently interfere with such price-stabilization schemes, most of which are fun by producing countries and designed to "stabilize" prices as high as possible.

Knowing this, prophets of bad harvests everywhere should not only believe that they have a financial incentive to speculate, but perhaps even a social obligation to do so. It is curious that predictors of peak-water, peak oil, the beepocalypse, and the rest rarely speculate on the resources they prophesy will be depleted. I believe it has something to do with putting your money where your mouth is, and how cheap talk is so... well cheap. Most importantly, it has to do with the fact that beliefs about stuff far away from you serve a social function. It isn't about finding out what the truth is, it is about bonding with other true believers and delusions of being a prophet of some kind.

It also should cause doubt in their minds because lots of profit seeking people aren't buying the relevant resource. How do we know? Because the price of the resource is still cheap. Colony Collapse Disorder, California draughts, and oil reserve numbers aren't secrets. But people who's money is actually at stake know that there's something wrong with the prophesies based on these "evidences". And they're the ones who's money is on the line. Meanwhile people who saw a documentary online once like to talk a good game... amid conversation of where their hair was styled, and what's with the new Walking Dead Episode.

A Short Defense of Generalizations

Some people have a problem with generalizations. But there is no logical fallacy called, "generalization", because in fact we can make true generalizations from particulars. All of social science is built on generalizations from particulars because we can't sample the entire population. But through the magic of statistics, especially the law of large numbers, we can make true generalizations, even about people, and still be on solid ground.

Are the people who disagree with you Hypocrites and Bigots?

Consider this meme. Is it a valid point?

Bigots are intolerant of other beliefs. Hypocrites do things in conflict with their own beliefs. These definitions sound right to me.

It's not bigotry if they're asked for nothing more than tolerance. Tolerance only obliges inaction. Their job obliges action. In neither situation is the individual asked to tolerate something.

It's not hypocrisy if there are relevant differences in the rationale of the supporter. There are plenty of possible differences in the rationale of the supporter. Most obviously, Kim refused to do a small fraction of her job (marry gay couples). The Muslim refused to do a very large fraction of her job (marry all those without hijabs).

Maybe one only supports people who refuse to do their job because they have the right beliefs. And don't support people who refuse to do their jobs for wrong beliefs. That too is not inconsistent or hypocritical.

The charge of hypocrisy is over-levied because we often think in terms only as specific as we need to in order to maintain the charge.

I think of the "hypocrisy" of pro life pro-capital punishment, or the other way around if you prefer. It seems that anyone who gives a yes-yes or no-no answer would be able to site relevant differences (a fetus isn't a real life / a criminal is a guilty life), but their opponents are thinking in terms only specific enough to maintain a charge of hypocrisy.

And then when their beliefs are under scrutiny, OF COURSE there are relevant differences!

Education Spending in the U.S. doesn't seem to be doing any good

I was caught up in a debate recently over whether school funding provides better student achievement. My tentative view is that extra spending have very trivial impact beyond a relatively low point.

When I take a few gulps  of the research on the subject, I find that the general trend is on my side with a few exceptions. I take away that schools with more money have higher student achievement, but schools very similar to each other, and with similar student body compositions but very different budgets, don't get these results.

The remarkable finding from combining the 377 estimates across 90 separate published works is that neither variation in teacher-pupil ratio nor variations in teacher educations are systematically related to student performance...

Teacher experience stands out in that about 30 percent of the parameter estimates are statistically significant in a positive direction. whereas 7 percent are statistically significant in a negative direction. But, again, this is far from unqualified support for the efficacy of employing more experienced teachers, since 71 percent are statistically insignificant or negative. Since these three inputs are combined to indicate variations in instructional spending per pupil, the results lead to the conclusion that there is no strong or systematic relationship between spending and student performance.
(Does Money Matter? Gary T. Burtless)

Why do schools with more money have higher achievement? The alternative story is that successful parents have successful kids regardless of where the kids go to school. It just so happens that successful parents also buy their kids sexy educations, if not by affording private school, then by buying an expensive house in a good school district. The expensive education isn't an investment, but a consumption good. The kid's experience is better, but it doesn't change where the kid is going.

The research also meshes with my experience. In the town where I grew up I knew lots of kids who didn't go anywhere because they had a "I don't care", "I live for today" mindset. No amount of spending was going to change that. The district, by the way, spent $2,000 more per student than average. You wouldn't have thought that if you went to school there.

There is little doubt that on a national scale education spending isn't the magic that some think it is. The U.S. governments spend about $ 1 Trillion on education now after ramping up the funding over a period when student achievement has only gone downhill. Most of it is spent on K-12. The U.S. spends  more than almost every other country on earth, beat only by Switzerland. All that increased spending didn't all go do the richest districts, although they were preferred they're also too few to consume all that extra spending.

I believe that many impressions people have of how dry the education budgets are in the U.S. come two places. One is a lot of political zealots manipulating data by citing only federal expenditure when states and local governments are the main spenders. The seconds is the anecdotal stereotypical "budget cuts" that are immediately accepted without so much as a whiff of skepticism. How do you know that there are budget cuts? Who did you hear this from? Does "budget cut" mean what we think it means? (The term is often used to describe the difference between what the district asked for and how much they got, rather than the difference between what they got and what they got last year. Bullshit, I know)

Bryan Caplan on Divorce and Unemployment

Bryan Caplan quotes Louis C.K. in one of his most recent blog posts.

It is one of Bryan's sharpest posts.

SlatStar on My Id on Defensiveness

Here's another great post by the best blogger in town (high praise from both David Friedman and Bryan Caplan) Scott Alexander:

I like discussion, debate, and reasoned criticism. But a lot of arguments aren’t any of those things. They’re the style I describe as ethnic tension, where you try to associate something you don’t like with negative affect so that other people have an instinctive disgust reaction to it.

No Universals?

Though twilight may be long, there is a difference between night and day.

Higher class correlates with charity?

A Large Scale Test of the Effect of Social Class on Prosocial Behavior

Across eight studies with large and representative international samples, we predominantly found positive effects of social class on prosociality: Higher class individuals were more likely to make a charitable donation and contribute a higher percentage of their family income to charity (32,090 ≥ N ≥ 3,957; Studies 1–3), were more likely to volunteer (37,136 ≥N ≥ 3,964; Studies 4–6), were more helpful (N = 3,902; Study 7), and were more trusting and trustworthy in an economic game when interacting with a stranger (N = 1,421; Study 8) than lower social class individuals.

If this finding is basically right, it might seem natural to say that money is causing this good behavior. I doubt it for the same reasons I doubt that lack of money causes many of the poor's systematic bad behaviors (like divorce, alcoholism, and single parenthood). Rather, bad behavior generally leads to failure, and good behavior lead leads to success.

Call off the beepocolypse

Call of the beepocolypse, for the love of God...

"As you can see, the number of honeybee colonies has actually risen since 2006, from 2.4 million to 2.7 million in 2014, according to data tracked by the USDA"

Nothing in the article is novel, I wrote this several months ago.

Great Summary of Minimum Wage

Tyler Cowen calls it the best summary of minimum wage he's heard. Minimum Wage Muddle.

Standard economic logic: when you raise the price of something people buy less of it. Raise the price of labor and you'll create disemployment effects; hurting the people you're trying to help.

Then comes empirical work: Card and Krueger can't find disemployment effects after minimum wage is raised in a couple of states. Some other studies find the same thing

Other studies do find disemployment effects. Sometimes quite significant.

Takeaway from the empirical work; measuring disemployment effects is messy business. Also, conditions matter. Obviously the important condition the minimum wage depends on is how far it deviates from the market wage.

The picture we have in our heads of the typical minimum wage earner is mostly false. Minimum wage earners are as likely to be from high income households as low-income households.

The cost of higher pay is (somewhat) passed onto consumers, who are often poor. How much of the cost is an important matter, and disappointingly neglected in the article.

Also, What economic ideas are hard to popularize?

Comparative Advantage is the most popular answer in the comments. It is the first thing that came to my mind.

Tyler Cowen gives tax incidence theory as an answer.

Optimist or Pessimist?

A question I dislike is, "are you a pessimist or an optimist?" because on one level it is a question about the answerer, and on another it is a question about the universe.

It can be split into two questions, a subjective one and an objective one
1. Is a pessimist or optimist the kind of person you are?
2. Is the part of the universe we're talking about best described by pessimism or optimism?

It is rarely clear which question is being asked. And by conflating the two, one can dismiss objective evidence as subjective personality expression.

Four Cards Question

Four cards on the table have a number on one side and a letter on the other.
Rule: "If a card has D on one side then it has a 3 on the other side."
Which card(s) do you have to turn over to verify whether the rule is true?

The four cards show,

>D
>F
>3
>7

The third best answer is D and 3, but it is wrong. The statement in question states, "if D then 3" No matter what is on the other side of the 3, it doesn't tell us anything about what D requires.

The second best answer is just D, but it is also wrong. It is true that you need to flip over D to find out if it has a 3 on the other side. But you also need to flip another card to see if D necessitates 3.

The correct answer is D and 7. You have to flip over D to find out if 3 is on the other side, but you also need to flip over 7 to see if there is a D on the other side. If there is then the rule is false.

This is an example psychologists give for human failure at deductive reasoning.

Steven Pinker on concepts

Adolescent Psychological Development: Rationality, Morality, and Identity

Tyler Cowen Interview with Jeffrey Sachs

An interview between Jeffrey Sachs and Tyler Cowen. 

Jeffrey Sachs:

Now I would say if you have resource wealth, one problem is you’re likely to be invaded. You have more vulnerability to geopolitics as well as to internal politics to mess things up.

I've certainly heard about the resource curse from many economists. I've also heard it explained by multiple countries all fighting over the same pool of resource, and them all losing as a result. But I'm not sure how well this quote from Jeffrey Sachs matches up with something I heard Steven Pinker say.

Studies that look at climate stress at time 1 and organized violence at time 2 find very little relationship. Usually zero. At first people are surprised by that because they a lot of people think that wars are fought over competition over resources. Then you start to think about individual wars, and you try to think of a war that was fought over diminishing resources, it's really hard to think of any. So when you think about what are the current wars over, in Ukraine or the Islamic state, they're over ideas and ideology and nationalism and tribalism and seeking perfect justice and rectifying historic injustices. It's very hard to find a war that is fought over some pool of water or oil that two parties both want.

I found this back and forth really interesting.

I should explain this idea of clinical economics, as I’ve called it, or differential diagnosis... The purpose of a differential diagnosis is two things. First, it is of course to try to get to the core reasons so that you can make a proper prescription based on a proper diagnosis. Second, it’s done in a way that you’re minimizing serious risk.

and

I’ve listened to my wife take an oral history a thousand — thousands of times, perhaps. It’s a wonderful art, first of all, because a mother calls with a crisis of a baby or a young child — usually a high fever... The first question always that my wife asks is, “Is the baby’s neck stiff, or do you notice that?” Because that’s one of the symptoms of meningitis. If the mother answers that way, the next point is “I’ll meet you at the emergency room. Don’t stop. Just go.” Because it could be something that is fulminant and life-threatening immediately...
It’s an hour of sequenced questions down a decision tree, and it’s fascinating to watch. I wish as economists we had those basic skills inbred. I certainly didn’t learn them, and it took me a long time of seeing lots of “patients” to see that one needs that same kind of approach.

And then there's Tyler gives the libertarian critique, at least the one of the George Mason variety:

One of my worries is that the doctors are not actually in charge. It may be the lawyers, which is . . . We’re in a law school, but still, if I may say, in some ways a step down.
To some extent you have people voting on the baby, not all of whom even know who the baby is or what the baby’s symptoms are. The differential diagnostics may exist in a kind of platonic realm, but you are more optimistic about them than I am.

Jeffrey responds well:

I believe that knowledge matters and that the more clarity, the more evidence, the more appropriate an analysis, the more likely we can find a good outcome to things. Many people are cynical. I tend not to be. I’m sometimes accused of being gullible as a result, or being too soft in the face of whatever. But I believe that there’s a way to reach an agreement, typically, among pretty conflictual and often pretty antagonistic actors.I tend to believe there’s a way out of a crisis, and I tend to believe that a lot of what poses as either pure zero-sum struggle or harsh ideological conflict is often resolvable by good, clear ideas, or good, clear evidence, or a good, clear game plan.

You'll never get anywhere without the optimism Jeffrey talks about, but when the "best chance" of succeeding is not very high, shouldn't you revert your attention -- your expertise, to things you actually can change? For example:

For me, the biggest, most complicated mess that we’re in that is like the one you’re describing is climate change. Which in my now 43 years of thinking about economics, so it’s a long time, is the most complicated mess that I can imagine. It’s got every attribute of just a terrible, terrible problem. It’s global, it’s long-term, it’s uncertain. It’s got vested interests, it’s got hugely unequal payoffs, it’s got everything wrong with it as a problem.

 Okay, now, how much work are you going to put into solving global warming? One one hand it won't be solved without clarity, evidence, appropriate analysis, and knowledge... On the other hand it is the most complicated mess in his 43 years of thinking about economics, shouldn't you divert your attention elsewhere?

On another subject, his response to worries about African premature de-industrialization:

I don’t think that there’s any magic to manufacturing. What there is crucially is a need for all developing countries to export. You need to export because you need to import technology. Manufacturing has been a route to export earnings, to earning a place in the world that allows you to import the technology which 99.9 percent comes from outside your country.
The question to ask for Africa is how is it going to pay its way in the world? Not whether it’s going to have manufacturing or not.

No development economics talk is complete without a mention of China. What will happen with China now, and what do they need to do?

What’s happened of fundamental significance for the world is that East Asia has become the third growth pole in the world, or arguably the second, because for the first 200 years of modern economic growth, it was all the North Atlantic. 

You could call that two regions or one depending on how you want to define it, but it was the US and Europe that defined 90 percent of the technological advance that created the underlying dynamics to which the whole rest of the world would engage in catching up, integration, or falling under imperial rule, or whatever it was. 

Now, because of the long history of Japanese development, because of the 50-year history of Korean and Taiwanese, Hong Kong, Singapore development, and especially because of the post-1978 scale of China’s achievement, East Asia is an absolutely key, transformative growth pole of the world. This, I think, is a fundamental geopolitical, historical, and economic significance.

Empathetic Language

Everyone is pro-life. Everyone believes in preserving the lives of sentient human babies. The relevant question is concerned with what counts as a sentient human baby.

Everyone is pro-choice. Everyone believes that women have the right to do what they want with their bodies... up until it conflicts with the life of another. The relevant question is concerned with when choice conflicts with life.

Of course, if it is a sentient human baby, then they are anti-life. And if it isn't, then they are anti-choice. But in discourse we shouldn't be so steeped in our conclusion that we draw our language from there. The language we use ought to be directed at the crux of the dispute, because others are not where we are in the logical progression.

 If you approach discussion using language that only fits from beyond your conclusion, you're probably not good at intellectual empathy.

A parallel: I have long believed that tickling is torture. The tickling of children is therefore child torture. So my treatment of those who disagree will be as those who are pro-child-torture. And I will call my group the anti-child-torture group.

That sounds pretty closed minded.

Links for 7/16

• Benefits of legal recognition of marriage
  
  Since gay marriage was not illegal in the U.S., and hence hasn't been legalized, the relevant discussion is concerning the costs, benefits, and perhaps morality of legal recognition.
• A Conversation between Tyler Cowen and Peter Thiel on the future of innovation
  
  "There’s the question of stagnation, which I think has been a story of stagnation in the world of atoms, not bits. I think we’ve had a lot of innovation in computers, information technology, Internet, mobile Internet in the world of bits. Not so much in the world of atoms, supersonic travel, space travel, new forms of energy, new forms of medicine, new medical devices, etc."
  
  "On a first cut, I would say that we lived in a world in which bits were unregulated and atoms were regulated."
• Does the Treaty of Tripoli prove the United States is not a Christian nation?
  
  "... ratified unanimously by a Senate still half-filled with signers of the Constitution, this treaty announced firmly and flatly to the world that "the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."
  
  "Despite the founders' intent, later generations of Americans began to assert that the country they created was indeed Christian."
  
  Half filled? How about some precise language from an expert? When I match the U.S. senate with signers of the constitution, one in every two are not matches.
  
  James McHenry, a signer of the constitution, protested the aforementioned passage in the treaty of Tripoli. He seemed to think the United States was a Christian nation. He was not a "later generation." The lesson here is there was no unified intent from the founders.
  
  The Paris Peace Treaty begins, "in the name of the most holy and undivided trinity". Those unique Christian terms were also ratified by the senate, Maybe we should take out of this that the Senate ratifies bundles of claims, like ones in treaties, without necessarily approving of every bit in it.
• How can there be a sex difference, when there is no sex difference?
  
  Answer: men usually have a higher variance, even when the averages could be the same.
  
  The article caters to leftist confirmation bias. The articles says that it is possible to have higher variances with one sex without an average sex difference. Leftist confirmation bias will treat the possibility as intellectual permission to believe it
  
  The great Steven Pinker is quoted in the article.
• Bryan Caplan on the analogy between gay marriage and polygamy
  
  "Change the labels and names, and the parallel between government persecution of gays and polygamists is nearly perfect. Let the slippery slope of marriage equality proceed at maximum speed."
  
• Steven Pinker on Jews, Genes and Intelligence
  
  Sorry, the end is cut off.
  
  "Despite the fact that Jews make up no more than 2-3% of the American population, they make up 50% of the top 200 intellectuals, 40% of the nobel prize winners in science and economics, 20% of the professors at top universities, 40% of the partners in top New York and DC lawfirms, 59% of the top writers, producers and directors of the 50 top grossing movies, 39% of the winners of the national medals of science, and 50% of the world chess champions. 
• 

Everything is Awesome: Vox Charts Showing the World is getting much better

Everything is awesome (in 26 charts and maps). I just wish more people would realize it.

Steven Pinker vs. the Scaremongers

Everything Steven Pinker says...

Every last word.

Donald Hoffman on Evolution Favoring Inaccurate Perceptions

His examples of inaccurate perceptions in animal kingdom are not illustrations of nature selecting the fit, but of killing the unfit. "Does natural selection really favor seeing reality as it is?" He does not offer empirical evidence for the answer, "no", and I don't know of any examples.

A better question is this, "with all the ways natural selection has of choosing inaccurate perceptions, why should we expect it to choose accurate perceptions?"

It goes along with, "with all the ways natural selection has of choosing irrationality, why should we expect it to choose rationality?"

When we treat evolution like it isn't based on accurate perceptions or rationality, we treat evolution not as theory but as something sacred. So when evolution kills rationality or accurate perceptions, with what is evolution being treated?

More Evidence against Organic

Little evidence of health benefits from organic foods, study finds

After analyzing the data, the researchers found little significant difference in health benefits between organic and conventional foods. No consistent differences were seen in the vitamin content of organic products, and only one nutrient — phosphorus — was significantly higher in organic versus conventionally grown produce (and the researchers note that because few people have phosphorous deficiency, this has little clinical significance). There was also no difference in protein or fat content between organic and conventional milk, though evidence from a limited number of studies suggested that organic milk may contain significantly higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids...

“Some believe that organic food is always healthier and more nutritious,” said Smith-Spangler, who is also an instructor of medicine at the School of Medicine. “We were a little surprised that we didn’t find that.”

I hate to break it to you, but studies have been finding this for as long as we've been studying organic foods.

While many studies demonstrate these qualitative differences between organic and conventional foods, it is premature to conclude that either food system is superior to the other with respect to safety or nutritional composition. Pesticide residues, naturally occurring toxins, nitrates, and polyphenolic compounds exert their health risks or benefits on a dose-related basis, and data do not yet exist to ascertain whether the differences in the levels of such chemicals between organic foods and conventional foods are of biological significance.

 

This review illustrates that tradeoffs exist between organic and conventional food production. Organic fruits and vegetables rely upon far fewer pesticides than do conventional fruits and vegetables, which results in fewer pesticide residues, but may also stimulate the production of naturally occurring toxins if organic crops are subject to increased pest pressures from insects, weeds, or plant diseases. Because organic fruits and vegetables do not use pesticides or synthetic fertilizers, they have more biochemical energy to synthesize beneficial secondary plant metabolites such as polyphenolic antioxidants as well as naturally occurring toxins. In some cases, food animals produced organically have the potential to possess higher rates of bacterial contamination than those produced conventionally since organic production generally prohibits antibiotic use. The prohibition of antimicrobial agents also explains the apparent lower incidence of antimicrobial resistance in bacterial isolates of organic food animals, as some studies have shown a correlation between increased rates of antibiotic use and increased antimicrobial resistance.

Iceland Trolls and American Evolution Deniers

So I was sitting on a park bench next to someone was talking with their friend about her trip to Iceland.

"50% of Icelanders still believe in trolls"
"In the 21st century? That's so weird, I want to go to Iceland"

I have no idea if the fact about Iceland is true, but it reminded me of a fact about the United States that doesn't instigate the same kind of reaction. Some large percent of the United States don't believe in evolution. The level of feeling skyrockets to moral outrage over the United States fact, but the Iceland fact is accepted with dispassionate tolerance. Which I think is crazy since the two matters are about as practical as each other.

And by the way, I really want to hear the debate in Iceland over whether trolls should be taught in school.

Bible Quiz Documentary is worth a watch

I'm not a documentary type, they too often confuse the elegance of a story with the truth of some broader and nobler worldview. But I found myself drawn to this one, Bible Quiz. I didn't find anything it said about Christianity particularly insightful, but it was charming and throughout I was anxious to find out how it would end.

Scott Alexander's Pills

Scott Alexander's Pills.

Robin Hanson talks Signalling on Rationally Speaking

A podcast with Robin Hanson on signalling. 

Since I've heard so much about Signalling theory before, most of the highlights for me were epistemological in general.

The simplest explanation for almost anything anywhere is randomness. In fact, almost always, whatever we explain, we usually explain with some systematic theory plus randomness. We're always adding in some degree of randomness when we explain almost any data set we have. So one very simple explanation for anything is just to crank down the systematic part and crank up the noise and say “It's all noise, it's all random.” 

you might consciously decide, I'm going to go to school so I will look good. But it didn't have to be that way. Some young men decide they consciously want to be a rock star because it'll attract women. And many young men do that, but of course many other young men decide they want to be a rock star because they love rock music.
Now, either way works evolutionarily. It's the behavior that produces the outcomes and not necessarily your rationalization. For some kinds of behavior, evolution can give you a conscious desire to be seen, to look good. And then you consciously make a plan to achieve that looking good.

 This reminds me of Alvin Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism. Why should reason come to truth when evolution has so many other ways motivating behavior?

Of course, that's what all randomness is really. Complexity.
You see a pile of rocks on the ground. There were very specific forces that put each rock there in its place. If you don't know what those are, you tend to summarize it in a simple randomness theory. Which is adequate if you don't know those details. 

This is a way of making sense of the common saying "I don't believe in luck". 

Vox on Liberal Professor Scared of Liberal Students

Here is a good one from Vox. I read it as a plea to pull some young version of liberalism out of its juvenile, hyper emotional, and volatile state.

Commentators on the left and right have recently criticized the sensitivity and paranoia of today's college students. They worry about the stifling of free speech, the implementation of unenforceable conduct codes, and a general hostility against opinions and viewpoints that could cause students so much as a hint of discomfort.  

I agree with some of these analyses more than others, but they all tend to be too simplistic...

A more thorough analysis:

This new understanding of social justice politics resembles what University of Pennsylvania political science professor Adolph Reed Jr. calls a politics of personal testimony, in which the feelings of individuals are the primary or even exclusive means through which social issues are understood and discussed. Reed derides this sort of political approach as essentially being a non-politics, a discourse that "is focused much more on taxonomy than politics [which] emphasizes the names by which we should call some strains of inequality [ ... ] over specifying the mechanisms that produce them or even the steps that can be taken to combat them." Under such a conception, people become more concerned with signaling goodness, usually through semantics and empty gestures, than with actually working to effect change.

 How can there be education when...

Engagement is considered unnecessary, as the immediate, emotional reactions of students contain all the analysis and judgment that sensitive issues demand.

No Bite to Teething

While reading research on teething pain, I came across a lot on historic superstition regarding the topic. Ready for this?

Gum lancing:

"The procedure was conducted in the absence of any anaesthesia, generally requiring two incisions crossing at 90° overlying the 'difficult' tooth...Few doctors challenged (or would even contemplate challenging) the rationale for gum-lancing, such was their unquestioning belief in its potentially life-saving effect. Only in the late 19th century did a few sceptics publicly doubt both the rationale and supposed effect of gum-lancing"

Teething as the main cause of infant mortality:

Around one half of all infant deaths in 18th century France were attributed to teething, and teething accounted for 12% of the total deaths in children younger than 4 years old in the Registrar General's Report of 1842.

The hare brain solution to teething was pretty... hair brained:

In 117ad, the physician Soranus of Ephesus was the first to suggest using hare's brain to ease teething. This remained a favoured remedy until the seventeenth century. 

Until the seventeenth century! It took as that long!

Oh, and if you run short of hare brain in your pantry worry not, lamb's brain will work just as well.

Not sure why your 6 month old is vomiting? Probably just teething:

Eighteenth and nineteenth century therapies were varied and depended on local superstition and the beliefs of the attending physician. Doses of mercury salts, opiates, purgatives and emetics were recommended, even if the child was experiencing diarrhoea or vomiting beforehand. With modern understanding of diseases it is likely that dehydration was largely responsible for many of the signs, symptoms and deaths associated with teething.

With teething superstition permeating throughout time and culture, why should we expect anything different today? They don't generally take as radical form as these past examples, but I heard from more than one mommy that teething was the second most painful experience in life, next after childbirth. When reading research I come away believing that there's not much reason to believe that teething is painful whatsoever!

Teething pain, sometimes referred to as “dentitio difficilis”, is the commonest symptom associated with the eruption of the primary dentition. Despite a reported prevalence of around 85%, evidence for this condition is weak. Adults assume an infant is experiencing pain because they appear distressed, or because they believe the incisal edges of teeth “cut through” the alveolar bone and gingiva during eruption.

Weak evidence:

there is only weak evidence for pain and no evidence to support the wide array of systemic signs and symptoms often attributed to teething by parents, child carers and health care professionals...

 If some pain is experienced during teething, this will be impossible to assess reliably because infants cannot communicate their pain specifically or describe their pain experience explicitly. Instead, adults interpret various cues (vocalization, facial expression, body movements and changes in breathing rates) and attribute these to pain in the infant. Such cues are not specific and are caused by other forms of stress or distress.

A wastebasket diagnosis for when you can't find anything else.

Although many of the conditions historically thought to result from teething are now accurately diagnosed as specific clinical entities, the enigma of teething continues to endure as a somewhat wastebasket diagnosis, when no cause can be found for a particular sign or symptom.

and, 

'Teething' is an ill-defined non evidence-based entity proffered by both health care professionals and lay people as an inappropriate diagnosis for a wide variety of signs and symptoms...

RS Illingsworth statement, "Teething produces nothing but teeth." is a straightforward summation of the actual process of teething...

Studies could not identify systemic manifestations such as decreased appetite for liquids, congestion, sleep disturbances, daytime restlessness, loose stools, vomiting, cough, body rash, fever greater than 38.90C, an increase in finger-sucking, and gum rubbing to be associated with teething in children. 

 A Finland study found few symptoms of teething,

 Tasanen studied teething infants in North Finland, with daily recording of temperature, appearance of gums, presence of infections and disturbances of behaviour.² He showed that tooth eruption bore no relation at all to infection, diarrhoea, fever, rash, convulsions, sleep disturbance, cough or ear rubbing.

 If teething is so painful, why doesn't it cause pain the second time we grow teethe?

 the eruption of permanent teeth is free from the symptoms frequently ascribed to the eruption of the deciduous teeth.

and

Teeth, whether primary or permanent, do not “cut” through bone, connective tissue and oral epithelium during eruption as an eruption pathway is formed by via bone remodelling. The lack of any significant “teething pain” associated with eruption of permanent teeth is remarkable. Although it can be argued that in older children there is greater pain tolerance and lower pain sensitivity compared to infants.

 A common thread was that the contemporary myths of teething are common among parents as well as health care professionals. Of course when statistical literacy among doctors are lower than chance, what do you expect?

I have a 1 year old daughter and I'm quickly beginning to realize that as I have more kids, more and more people are going to pop my bubble by diagnosing teething pain to my children. I've given up winning arguments against adherents to popular superstitions, but I wish they'd leave me alone about it.

Also read, The Teething Virus or Separating Fact from Fiction

Stupid High Minimum Wage Examples

Sometimes I hear examples of stupid high minimum wages with no evident disemployment effects. Two examples: New Zealand's $14.75 minimum wage, and Seattle's $15 minimum wage. I thought maybe I'd explain why these two examples aren't what many think they are.

The first lesson to learn is to use constant dollars. How much does $14.75 actually buy you? What is its purchasing power? That's what we care about, not how big the numbers are. So New Zealand's real minimum wage using 2013 American dollars and a purchasing power parity is... $8.70. It is not the example many think it is.

The second lesson is this: the impact of minimum wage is relative to how far it deviates from the market wage. This is true for both the positive and negative impacts of minimum wage. So $15 an hour is very high for most cities, but Seattle was already a large metropolitan city with high market wages in the first place.

Read Scott Alexander

Scott Alexander regularly busts out phenomenal blog posts on a regular basis. If it's one thing you learn from this blog, it should be to read his much better blog.

Is Monsanto like Oscorp?

I never thought that Monsanto was evil because the depictions of them were cartoonish, conspiratorial, economically illiterate, and the people who believed such things were tended to be political zealots clearly too emotional to think carefully. But anyway, I found an interesting answer on Quora containing a pretty thorough rebuttal to many of the claims that Monsanto is basically a real life Oscorp. I haven't checked any of their sources yet.

A bit:

A lot of folks don't like that Monsanto patents seeds. That's just ignorance. All seed companies, including organic seed companies, patent seeds. A seed does not have to be GMO to be patented.[15] The first seed patents were issued in the 1800s, long before GMOs existed.[16]  

A lot of folks don't like that farmers aren't allowed to save seeds from GMO crops. Well, farmers also can't save seeds from patented organic or conventional crops either. Or from hybrid crops (seeds from hybrid crops don't tend to breed the desired traits reliably).[17][18] But I grew up in a farm town, and I've never met a farmer who wants to save seeds. It's bad for business. Seeds are one of the cheapest parts of running a farm.[19] Farmers who save seeds have to dry, process, and store them. Farmers who buy seeds get a guarantee that the seeds will grow; if they don't, the seed company will pay them.

If you're a Monsanto hater, you can tell yourself a just-so story about how the writer of the rebuttal is a Monsanto mole, and you don't have to deal with any of the reasons given.

How to get people to Change their Mind (about Minimum Wage)

There is one way I've ever managed to get someone to acknowledge the costs of minimum wage. I explained that minimum wage might still be desirable despite the costs. When I did this, it was like I was giving them permission to have a more nuanced view -- a reasonable view where everything has some costs --  an economic view of tradeoffs. I sealed off their sacred belief, that minimum wage is ultimately a good thing. I took it out of discussion and all of the sudden they were able to accept the reason of what I was saying.

I think of a line Jonathan Haidt gives, everyone holds something sacred and everyone wants to be rational, but when the two conflict they throw rationality under the bus.

So how to get people to change their mind? Make sure that the sacred and the rational do not conflict. Make sure they know that they get to hold onto their sacred beliefs, and what you're saying is only true up until they conflict with those sacred beliefs.

Laymen: Minimum wage is sooooo critical! I am unaware of any negative unintended consequences and it keeps wages from plummeting!

Economist: When you make something more expensive people buy less of it, this means that with minimum wage employers buy less labor from low skilled workers. Without minimum wage, these earners would be paid the market wage. There's no reason to expect the market wage to be far beneath the minimum wage. We certainly should not expect wages to plummet.

Laymen: You don't know what you're talking about. You're in the pockets of big business who want us to believe that. You've never worked for minimum wage in your life. Look at Mexico, they have low minimum wage and their workers are poor. Look at Seattle, they have a high minimum wage and they don't have high unemployment. Yada yada, the internet give me whatever reasons I need to believe whatever I want.

Economist: Look, minimum wage might still be a good idea. Within the right margins, it can put extra upward pressure on wages and keep disemployment effects to a minimum.

Laymen: Okay, maybe I'll think about what you said.

Misperceiving Inequality

Here is a very clever paper called Misperceiving Inequality. The abstract:

Since Aristotle, a vast literature has suggested that economic inequality has important political consequences. Higher inequality is thought to increase demand for government income redistribution in democracies and to discourage democratization and promote class conflict and revolution in dictatorships. Most such arguments crucially assume that ordinary people know how high inequality is, how it has been changing, and where they fit in the income distribution. Using a variety of large, cross-national surveys, we show that, in recent years, ordinary people have had little idea about such things. What they think they know is often wrong. Widespread ignorance and misperceptions of inequality emerge robustly, regardless of the data source, operationalization, and method of measurement. Moreover, we show that the perceived level of inequality—and not the actual level—correlates strongly with demand for redistribution and reported conflict between rich and poor. We suggest that most theories about political effects of inequality need to be either abandoned or reframed as theories about the effects of perceived inequality.

There's nothing in day-to-day life that would give the common-man any information about income distribution. Especially since their acquaintances are not representative of the whole country. What's left? Their news intake? Since when has the news communicated serious economics well? Needless to say, I'm not surprised to see that their utterly loud opinions on inequality or lack-thereof is misinformed.

The whole thing is locked without paying, but Bryan Caplan posts highlights for free, And who better? Bryan Caplan is master of criticizing public inanity.

Some more of the paper from Bryan,

The implications of this point for theories of redistribution, revolution, and democratization, are far reaching. If these are to be retained at all, they need to be reformulated as theories not about actual inequality but about the consequences of beliefs about it, with no assumption that the two coincide. We show that, although actual levels of inequality--as captured by the best current estimates--are not related to preferences for redistribution, perceivedlevels of inequality are... The actual poverty rate correlates only weakly with the reported degree of tension between rich and poor; but the perceived poverty rate is a strong predictor of such inter-class conflict.

Matthew Yglesias at Vox also has a blog post on income inequality, and says to stop using it (and pay attention to life cycle effects and net worth instead).

What is Human Biodiversity?

What is human biodiversity? If your answer is anything but “an excuse for racism”, then you won’t find many friends on Google. But if your more concerned with truth than with whether others are going to call you racist, you should probably read up on it, or listen to a debate especially between two liberals, so that you can get through with no racist name calling (How much more often do you think conservative Steve Sailer gets called a racist compared to how often liberal Steven Pinker gets called sexist?)

groups of genetically related individuals can exhibit average differences in various biological aspects (see more on this here). for example, immediate family members are more similar to each other genetically — and, usually, phenotypically — than they are to strangers. moving outwards from that circle, extended family members are also more similar to each other genetically than they are to strangers, although less so than are immediate family members. and the circle can be extended even further to: clan and tribe members, traditional villages and regions, ethnic groups, and races, until we reach the human race where we start comparing our collective biological traits to those of other species: primates, mammals, vertebrates, life on earth…. biodiversity in humans also exists between the sexes. remember that the biodiversity found in all these populations — which don’t necessarily have well-defined boundaries — includes features like epigenomes and microbiomes in addition to genomes.

It seems to me that biodiversity has to exist just because genetics exist, and this shouldn’t be controversial. But the left are as anti-science as anyone when it conflicts with their sacred beliefs.

I’ve looked pretty hard for serious counter-arguments to human biodiversity, but Google is flooded with the answer, “that’s racist”, which is not an argument so much as something they feel.

Here’s Tyler Cowen on the subject of biodiversity.

Windows Live Writer not working for Blogger

I usually write my posts on Windows Live Writer, but recently it hasn't been letting me post. There may have been a separation of compatibility since Windows Live Writer is a Microsoft Program and Blogger is Google. It might also just be a temporary glitch. If it doesn't get fixed then I'll just have to kiss my sweet sweet Baskerville Font goodbye and start writing posts on the boring old Blogger site.

Sad.

Surrendra Gangadean Video

This >>> http://thelogospapers.com/the-unity-of-the-faith-conference-audio-video/

I want to hear a lot more from Surrendra Gangadean.

It seems to me…

that if you’re in a state of moral outrage over something you only found out existed 5 seconds ago, you shouldn’t be taken seriously.

Economists on US Median Income

Here are economist’s perspective on the 35 year slowdown in median wage growth. The political like to use the slowdown to “prove” that whatever they don’t like is causing economic harm. Experts don’t even agree on the premise that the US Median income is a good measure of change in economic standard of living.

Why isn’t US Median Income capturing the Median American Household’s economic progress? Some reasons:

“Over the 1980-2014 period CPI probably does not fully account for quality improvements or for the value of new goods”

“The rise in life expectancy alone is worth on the order of 1% per year.”

“Difficult question, but life expectancy is up from 74 to 79 years - seems like a substantial gain not reflected in real median income.”

“Due to measurement issues e.g. prices, family composition, measures of income, prob understates by >1% py. Add to that price quality bias.”

“Burkhauser et al. (2011) show faster growth in median post-tax, post-transfer size-adjusted household income including health ins. benefits.”

“CPI has improved but is imperfect. Capital income matters, especially for retirees. Mean household size has shrunk from around 3.3 to 2.6.”

“Define substantial. Agree that CPI overstates inflation.”

Common reasons: Changes in family composition – smaller household size, makes median household income smaller than per person measurement. CPI is an imperfect measure, particularly because it poorly accounts for fundamentally new goods and quality improvements. The rise in life expectancy is a phenomenal improvement. Employers are spending more on healthcare for their workers in lieu of higher wages.

Dissenters often invoked the truth that more people (especially women) are working more hours.

At the end of the day,

“No one I know would rather face the 1980 bundle of goods (at 1980 prices) than current bundle, at anywhere near the same incomes.”

From the comparisons I’ve seen, it is hard to disagree with that.