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).