A Finer Grain

After many years of blogging at Cognitive Strain, I'm moving to a new blog titled A Finer Grain.

Every once in a while it helps to separate my current self from my historical posts. I'm not who I was when I started Cognitive Strain, and I hope I won't stay the same in the future. I have a lot that I'm embarrassed of in Cognitive Strain, and a little that I'm proud of. I hope A Finer Grain is a new braver step into new ideas.

Meta Analysis Associates Spanking and Detrimental Child Outcomes

The paper here,

Meta-analyses focused specifically on spanking were conducted on a total of 111 unique effect sizes representing 160,927 children. Thirteen of 17 mean effect sizes were significantly different from zero and all indicated a link between spanking and increased risk for detrimental child outcomes.

It's not hard to find studies like this. Spanking is linked to lower IQs and higher violent crime rates. Eating family dinners is linked to not doing drugs. Reading to your children is linked to  better performance in school.

The most common interpretation is that "linked to" means "caused by", but it takes very little intellectual discipline to see why that wouldn't be the case.

The effects do not only go one way. Children also cause parents to act differently. I would expect violent children to get spanked more than more peaceful children. Children who like books get read to more often. Teenagers who aren't off doing drugs are more likely to spend time with their families.

These studies also don't control at all for genes. Children's environment is not the only way parents effect their children. They also pass down their genes. It's not hard to imagine how more physically aggressive parents who spank more also pass down genes for violence to their children.

I remember these alternative interpretations were obvious to me in my early 20s, before I knew anything about the attempts of behavioral genetics to account for the effect of genes. When I discovered them I felt amazed and validated. Someone else actually noticed what was so apparent to me!

Fallacy of Reversed Moderation

From Scott Alexander,

This is a pattern I see again and again. 

Popular consensus believes 100% X, and absolutely 0% Y. 

A few iconoclasts say that X is definitely right and important, but maybe we should also think about Y sometimes. 

The popular consensus reacts “How can you think that it’s 100% Y, and that X is completely irrelevant? That’s so extremist!”

 I've known people who act like child development is 100% based on the parents. When I point out that genes/biology exist, they interpret me as saying, "everything is predetermined by biology."

Women earn less when their supervisor is the same sex

Sci-Hub for full paper here. From the abstract:

This article analyzes wage differences according to whether or not employees and their supervisors are of the same sex. The mechanism of homophily predicts that having supervisors of the same sex has a positive effect on wages. Additionally, we introduce four conflicting theories that consider group composition as a moderating factor. The hypotheses are tested with data from the Bavarian Graduate Panel via fixed-effect panel regressions. Results show that relative group sizes must be considered in order to see wage differences. These wage benefits emerge in minority and majority groups for male academics, but women earn less in majority groups when their supervisor is of the same sex.

Homophily: refers to the tendency for people to have (non-negative) ties with people who are similar to themselves in socially significant ways.

As always keep in mind that this is only one study.

Gender Differences in Violent Offending

From the abstract:

It is concluded that there are important differences in violent offending between male and female patients. Most importantly, female violence was more often directed towards their close environment, like their children, and driven by relational frustration. Furthermore, female patients received lower punishments compared to male patients and were more often considered to be diminished accountable for their offenses due to a mental illness.

The Definition of Cheating

Listen to this intriguing Ted Talk, 6.5 million people already have.






It's filled with great lines like,

Why do we think that men cheat out of boredom and fear of intimacy, but women cheat out of loneliness and hunger for intimacy?

and

Monogamy used to be one person for life, today monogamy means one person at a time.

and

As Marcel Proust said, 'it's our imagination that is responsible for love, not the other person'

One line I'm not so fond of,

Throughout history men practically had a licence to cheat, with little consequence, and supported by a host of biological and evolutionary theories that justified their need to roam. So the double standard is as old as adultery itself.

First, no, adultery is far older than evolutionary or even biological theories of it. Her last sentence does not follow from what came before.

Second, there's a difference between explaining it and "justifying" it. Biology can explain men's proclivity to cheat without justifying it. This is a case of the naturalistic fallacy.

How Google Plans to Kill the Mosquitos

From Bloomberg:

It was Dobson’s lab that figured out how to infect mosquitoes with a form of Wolbachia that’s different from the type of the bacteria that mosquitoes usually carry. That’s what makes the eggs unviable. MosquitoMate makes two species of mosquitoes infected with Wolbachia, A. aegypti and Aedes albopictus. Fresno became one of its test sites.

But don't mosquitos like everything else play an important part in the ecological balance?

Read the balance of nature myth here, here, and here.

How Free Markets Address the Disabled and Destitute

Someone on Quora asked,

How do advocates of a completely free market address those people are are unable to compete, e.g. the disabled, or destitute?

So I answered:

The free market doesn’t fix every problem in the world. Neither does any other system 

Consider the following questions: how does the non-free market address cops shooting innocent people by mistake? How about when child protective services separates parents from children for illegitimate reasons? How about when government decides that people should be arrested for carrying a plant in their pocket? How about when government decides that people of Japanese ancestry should be put in concentration camps? How about when 63,000,000 people vote for Donald Trump? I’m sure you have your own list. How is government going to address that? 

Sometimes government does “address” these problems by various means, just like the free market addresses the disabled and destitute through charity, trade, and economic growth. Yet when someone points out that this is an imperfect solution it seems like some kind of knockdown argument against free markets. Are government solutions not imperfect? Does government never exasperate these problems? Does government never inhibit markets from treating these problems? Do government solutions not come bundled with a bunch of government created problems? 

I think what happens is we compare what government should do to what the private sector will do. This is comparing an ideal version of one thing to a realistic version of another. This is not apples to apples. 

A completely free market addresses the disabled and destitute the same way government does, partially, sometimes negatively, sometimes merely theatrically, and always imperfectly.

Where Jonathan Haidt thinks the American mind went wrong | Ezra Klein Show

Listen to two cool cucumbers Jonathan Haidt and Ezra Klein talk about how parenting has changed, how it's influencing journalism, the academy, and tech, and how accurate the social justice lens is.

"Teen anxiety, depression, and suicide rates have risen sharply in the last few years," he writes in The Coddling of the American Mind, co-authored with Greg Lukianoff. "The culture on many college campuses has become more ideologically uniform, compromising the ability of scholars to seek truth, and of students to learn from a broad range of thinkers."

Walls around Boarders and Brains

I wrote a short post over at AFinerGrain, it makes an obvious bare rarely noticed point,

But if you're pro-immigrant, should't arguments for the wall's futility make you more pro-wall? The more effective the wall would be, the more you should be against it. The less effective, the less you should be against it.

Michael Huemer's New Blog

Philosopher Michael Huemer has started blogging. He used to write rather long posts on Facebook, now I'm happy to see he's transitioned to a blog that organizes his posts a little better.

For a good first post try Ideology and Outrage:

What do feminists and Trump supporters have in common? Lots of things. Both are humans, both are mostly ideologues, both will hate this question. Also, both of them are easily scammed. That’s because ideology makes people suckers. 

How to scam an ideologue: tell them a story that fits their narrative about society and plays into their stereotypes.

Politics in Your Genes

Twin study shows political attitudes are somewhat heritable, more so environmental, but have little to do with upbringing:

To the extent that political ideologies are inherited and not learned, they become more difficult to manipulate. Conservative parents who try to make their children conservative by carefully controlling their children’s environments are probably overestimating the importance of those environments. Offspring of such parents are likely to end up being conservative but less because of the environment created by the parents than the genes passed along by the parents.

Did Toronto Really Break the Homicide Record?

While other news outlets are saying Toronto just broke homicide records, The CBC deserves credit for pointing out the difference between rates and instances:

Nearly half a million fewer people lived in Toronto back in 1991, so with 89 slayings the homicide rate was 3.9 per 100,000 residents. Right now it's 3.3 per 100,000 with the 90th homicide of the year.

#Everythingisawesomenobodyishappy

What is The Euphemism Treadmill?

Click here for a clear explanation of The Euphemism Treadmill, with lots of examples.

Do People like you more than You Think?

 New paper on The Liking Gap:

We found that following interactions, people systematically underestimated how much their conversation partners liked them and enjoyed their company

Spending, School Rankings and Performance

Why you can't argue spending increases school performance by citing school rankings that assume spending increases school performance

We fixed two serious problems common to traditional rankings. First, we removed factors that do not measure K–12 student performance or teaching effectiveness, such as spending per student (intentions to raise performance are not the same as raising performance), graduation rates (which often indicate nothing about learning, since 38 states do not have graduation proficiency exams), and pre-K enrollment. 

Rankings that include these factors distract from true student performance. For example, under traditional rankings, states with inferior test scores sometimes outrank states with better ones simply because they spend more. A June article in the Tampa Bay Times highlighted the role of spending in the state's position in one lineup: "Critics of Florida's public education funding system got another piece of ammunition Wednesday, as Education Week rated the state's school spending an F alongside 25 other states."

Intellectual Idols

Bryan Caplan is against veneration. Why?

First, the standard idols just seem overrated...

Second, lobbying on the idols’ behalf seems overrated as well

and

But, you may ask, where’s the harm in veneration? Above all else, veneration taxes the search for truth. Once you idolize a thinker, it’s hard to calmly weigh his arguments. Perverse nepotism sets in: “Take heed lest a statue crush you!” Don’t believe me? Imagine if I randomly inserted some trite words into the works of whatever thinker you most venerate. Wouldn’t you be sorely tempted, by hook or by crook, to spin my forgery as yet another expression of your idol’s genius?

What Causes Racial Disparities?

Read over Wikipedia's List of ethnic groups in the United States by household income:

Rank	Race	Median household income (2018 US$)
1	Asian	80,720[1]
2	White	61,349[1]
3	All households	57,617[1]
4	Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander	57,112[1]
5	Hispanic or Latino (of any race)	46,882[1]
6	Some other race	44,798[1]
7	American Indian and Alaska Native	39,719[1]
8	Black or African American	38,555[1]

1. Indian American (2016) : $122,026 ^[2]
2. Jewish American (2016) : $100,059 ^[3]
3. Australian American (2016) : $91,452 ^[3]
4. Taiwanese American (2016) : $90,221 ^[3]
5. Filipino American (2016) : $88,745 ^[2]
6. British American (2016) : $79,872^[3]
7. Austrian American (2016) : $78,127^[3]
8. Russian American (2016): $77,841 (2014)^[3]
9. Latvian American (2016): $77,636^[3]
10. Bulgarian American (2016): $76,861^[3]
11. Lithuanian American (2016) : $76,694^[3]
12. Israeli American (2016) : $76,584 ^[3]
13. Slovene American (2016) : $75,940^[3]
14. Lebanese American (2016): $75,337^[3]
15. Croatian American (2016): $73,991^[3]
16. Sri Lankan American: $73,856^[3]
17. Scandinavian American (2016): $73,797^[3]
18. Chinese American (2016): $73,788^[2]
    (including Taiwanese American)
19. Belgian American (2016) : $73,443^[3]
20. Chinese American (2016): $72,827^[2]
    (excluding Taiwanese American)
21. Swiss American (2016) : $72,823^[3]
22. Iranian American (2016) : $72,733^[3]
23. Italian American (2016) : $72,586^[3]
24. Ukrainian American (2016): $72,449 ^[3]
25. Romanian American (2016): $72,381^[3]
26. Greek American (2016): $72,291^[3]
27. Scottish American (2016): $71,925^[3]
28. Danish American (2016) : $71,550^[3]
29. Swedish American (2016): $71,217 ^[3]
30. Polish American (2016): $71,172^[3]
31. Slavic American (2016) : $71,163^[3]
32. Norwegian American (2016): $71,142^[3]
33. Canadian American (2016) : $70,809^[3]
34. Welsh American (2016): $70,351^[3]
35. Japanese American : $70,261^[4]
36. Czech American (2016) : $70,454^[3]
37. Czechslovakian American (2016) : $70,084^[3]
38. Finnish American (2016) : $70,045^[3]
39. Serbian American (2016) : $70,028^[3]
40. Hungarian American (2016): $69,515^[3]
41. French Canadian American (2016) : $68,075^[3]
42. Portuguese American (2016): $67,807^[3]
43. Vietnamese American : $67,800^[5]
    (excluding Foreign Born)
44. English American (2016) : $67,663^[3]
45. Slovak American (2016) : $67,471^[3]
46. Armenian American (2016): $67,450^[3]
47. German American (2016): $67,306^[3]
48. Korean American : $66,737^[2]
49. Irish American (2016) : $66,688^[3]
50. Ghanaian American (2016): $66,571^[3]
51. Turkish American (2016) : $66,566^[3]
52. Palestinian American (2016): $65,170^[3]
53. Egyptian American (2016) : $64,728^[3]
54. Vietnamese American : $64,191^[6]
55. Scotch-Irish American (2016) : $64,187^[3]
56. Yugoslavian American (2016) : $63,765^[3]
57. Dutch American (2016) : $63,597^[3]
58. French American (2016) : $63,471^[3]
59. Syrian American (2016): $63,096^[3]
60. Pakistani American : $62,848^[4][7]
61. Albanian American (2016) : $62,624^[3]
62. Indonesian American : $61,943^[4]
63. Guyanese American (2016) : $60,968^[3]
64. Nigerian American (2016): $60,732^[3]
65. British West Indian American (2016): $60,407^[3]
66. Vietnamese American : $58,700^[8]
    (Foreign Born)
67. Cuban American : $57,000^[9]
68. West Indian American : $56,998^[3]
69. Brazilian American (2016): $56,151^[3]
70. Barbadian American : $56,078^[3]
71. Argentine American: $55,000^[10]
72. Laotian American : $53,655^[4]
73. Thai American : $53,468^[4]
74. Cambodian American : $53,359^[4]
75. Cajun American : $52,886^[3]
76. Jamaican American (2016): $52,669^[3]
77. Trinidadian and Tobagonian American : $55,303^[3]
78. Moroccan American (2016) : $52,436^[3]
79. Peruvian Americans : $52,000^[3]
80. American (2016): $51,601^[3]
81. Jordanian American (2016): $51,552^[3]
82. Pennsylvania German American (2016): $48,955^[3]
83. Ecuadorian American : $49,000^[3]
84. Hmong American : $48,149^[4]
85. Colombian American : $48,000^[10]
86. Haitian American (2016): $47,990^[3]
87. Cape Verdean American (2016) : $47,281^[3]
88. Assyrian/Chaldean/Syriac American (2016): $44,733^[3]
89. Nepali American : $44,677^[4]
90. Bangladeshi American : $44,512^[4]
91. Afghan American : $43,838^[3]
92. Arab American (2016): $42,204^[3]
93. Bahamian American : $42,000^[3]
94. Ethiopian American (2016) : $41,357^[3]
95. Puerto Rican American : $40,000^[10]
96. Mexican American : $38,000^[10]
97. Burmese American : $35,016^[4]
98. African American : $34,600^[11]
99. Iraqi American (2016) : $32,818^[3]
100. Dominican American : $32,300^[10]
101. Honduran American: $31,000^[10]
102. Somali American (2016): $24,185^[3]
103. Salvadoran American : $20,800^[9]

This is evidence Coleman Hughes cites against what he calls The Disparity Fallacy.

The disparity fallacy holds that unequal outcomes between two groups must be caused primarily by discrimination, whether overt or systemic.

It is funny to think Americans forgot to be racist against Indians or Nigerians, who both have median incomes above the average.

Coleman Hughes' essay is called, The Racism Treadmill