May 2009
52 posts
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Female bingers
I’m working on an econometrics project exploring how binge drinking differently affects women and men’s wages. While bingeing negatively affected both groups, we found that women experienced much larger drops in income (depending on the regression, the difference was in the 10’s of percentage points).
The most mundane explanation for the gap is that binge drinking has a greater...
Careless Climate Skepticism
SciAm has a brief report from David Biello about Freeman Dyson speaking at a Cato luncheon. NYT Magazine recently profiled him. Dyson’s pretty smart and has been a fairly big climate change skeptic. He doesn’t deny the scientific consensus that the globe is warming and we caused it, but he does think that the dangers posed by climate change are overblown.
Mostly he’s skeptical...
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How to be a person - Dale Carnegie and The Game
A little after I got back from my last trip in China, I picked up a copy of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends & Influence People in part because I had seen translated copies of it and other works of his all over a Beijing 5-story bookstore.
The book comes with suggestions like:
Read each chapter twice before going on to the next one.
And:
review this book each month.
I...
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Taking vacation seriously
Every modern society seems to have major public holidays. Holidays often honor some class of society or mark a historical occasion. In America we have President’s day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day and Columbus Day among others. Sure holidays are nice and fun, but why have public holidays rather than individual vacations or floating holidays? And why do we shame people who...
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What do socially conservative attitudes signal?
In a piece for The New Republic John Judis argues that during times of economic hardship or in the face of security crises, people’s views become more socially conservative. Socially conservative attitudes are also more widely expressed in developing nations and in poorer areas of developed nations.
Explanations for the correlation could argue that societies with liberal attitudes profit...
A few good recent articles
The Cost Conundrum - Gawande. A good article by Atul Gawande (whom I’ve written about before) on the kinds of agency problems that lead to widely divergent health care costs across the country. Tip - premeds should head to McAllen.
Don’t - Lehrer. An interesting piece on the relationship between our ability to delay gratification and success in life.
The Dictator’s...
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Intuitions and gut instincts
I think one of the biggest problems with Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink - a problem that made it more a pop-business book for lazy airport reading than anything else- is that Gladwell doesn’t offer a clear way to discern between good and bad times to make decisions based upon our intuitions and instincts. That is, the book includes a lot of interesting examples of good and bad intuitive...
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Co-ed houses might be the way to go
I went to a co-ed greek house at Dartmouth today. I think that model might be the ideal future for Greek life at Dartmouth and other schools. SIngle-sex houses enforce gender expectations and also create spaces where opposite sexed people feel uncomfortable.
That’s not to say that I think administrations should force the transition to co-ed houses, or even that current co-eds are the...
Asexual reproduction
Seed has a really awesome article about the crazy reproductive habits of termites. More or less, the queen clones herself. When the queen dies, one of the “secondary” queens take over and become the new queen. This means there’s no inbreeding, and the genes are absolutely preserved.
I think it’s an excellent illustration of the gene-centric view of evolution at work. The...
Cloning extinct and endangered animals
Continuing on the theme of technology-driven solutions to ecological problems (see my post about geo-engineering), National Geographic has a piece about cloning mammoths. The article’s attitude is that though there are formidable technical challenges remaining, it’s just a matter of putting the time and money in.
Is it moral to bring back a species just for our own enjoyment in zoos?...
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Should we focus on geo-engineering
Two interesting articles on geo-engineering have me thinking. First from Seed, Will the future be geo-engineered. It’s a bunch of people commenting on their attitudes towards geo-engineering, and it’s a mixed bag. The basic argument against geo-engineering is that it’s potentially very risky so we should focus on reducing emissions. The other side says in fact we will be unable...
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Phelps, success, and innovation
Michael Phelps is experimenting with a different kind of stroke. Brian Palmer of Slate [asks] why is the best swimmer in the world rockin’ the boat? I think the answer is that he’s rockin’ the boat because he’s the best in the world; or more precisely, that his success is directly related to his drive to constantly experiment and innovate to push the limits and shave more...
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Statistically improbable phrases
Amazon.com catalogs what they call statistically improbable phrases for every book. That means one to three word combinations that don’t seem to occur very often in other books. They help establish what a book is about as well as what makes this particular book unique.
But just as with MS Word’s auto-summarize function, SIPs give an interesting artistic peek at the language from...
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Algorithms for who will quit
Apparently, Google has been working on developing an algorithm to predict which of their employees will quit. I don’t doubt that it’s possible, but I wonder whether - no matter whom the algorithm spits out - designating someone as “likely to quit” isn’t a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even if the results are kept secret from the probable quitter, the designation would...
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Reason and hate crimes
Steve Chapman wrote an article for Reason about the Matthew Shepard Act. I found his argument sloppy at best. Consider his analysis on whether criminals are deterred by longer sentences:
it’s hard to imagine that it would reduce the prevalence of [hate crime], which is already 1) really, really illegal and 2) subject to harsh penalties.
This exhibits a lack of marginal thinking...
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Lewis on Buffet
Michael Lewis, author of the Iceland piece I mentioned earlier, has a review (read: synopsis) of a new biography on Warren Buffett, The Snowball. The piece makes Buffett seem a lot more human (he shoplifted and had social problems as a kid), then the run-of-the-mill treatment of him, something that I think makes his life a more compelling/inspiring story.
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Stupid but ok fine pretty funny: xML
No, not the markup language. I’m talking about FML, LML, and MLIA. That is fmylife, lmylife, and mylifeisaverage.
Still don’t get it? Some examples follow. FML:
Today, I received my passport in the mail. They got my birthdate wrong. Then I picked up my birth certificate that I had sent in with the application. Turns out my parents have been celebrating my birthday on the wrong...
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The harms of grade inflation
Joe outlines the welfare harms of grade inflation. There are distributional harms as well: while mediocre harms are better off, excelling students are harmed. But I’m also interested in arguing that grade inflation may be in small part welfare enhancing.
The argument is simply that grade inflation acts as students purchasing insurance. That is, suppose students have a chance of getting...
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Is grade inflation a problem?
Wansley and I are researching institutional responses to grade inflation. We found, first, that articulating clear harms of grade inflation (without relying on vague cultural harms of giving everyone A’s) is actually pretty difficult. Eventually, we came up with:
While you might hope that students are motivated to excel by some intrinsic value of learning, I think we can agree that...
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So tired of the self-employment craze
Jonathan Mead (working on quitting his day job) has a post in Zen Habits, encouraging people to leave their jobs to be self-employed. The post has a number of ambiguous, meaningless arguments for doing so, including “reclaiming your mind” and:
Why we’re tired of choking back vomit because we’re going another day doing a job we hate, with people we don’t connect with, working for...
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Monkeys and the endowment effect
People seem to value things more once they own them. It’s called the endowment effect. Often it’s described as an instance of resolving cognitive dissonance — we’re made uncomfortable when our actions and our beliefs don’t align so we invent preferences ex post.
So this happened a long while back but I just came across it again today: turns out monkeys exhibit the...
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Geographic cheerleading
Sports fans care intensely about their home teams, but Jonah Lehrer notes that it’s weird:
My “team” is little more than a corporate logo and a bunch of overpaid athletes, most of whom will play for multiple teams over the course of their career. This means that the sole link between me and my team is geographic location: when I root for a team I’m really rooting for a...
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Moral babies
Seed Magazine has an interview with Alison Gopnik about children’s minds. The whole thing is fascinating, but this is particularly interesting:
Two-and-a-half-year-olds already recognize the difference between moral principles and conventional principles. You can ask them if it would be okay to hit someone at daycare if everyone said it would be okay, versus asking them whether it would...
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Paulo Freire and TFA
From City Journal, an article about Paulo Freire’s book Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The article claims that programs like Teach for America and the New York Teaching Fellows emphasize the lessons Freire’s book to student teachers — this is problematic because the book is very much a political treatise rather than an educational guide.
TFA and similar programs look for student...
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Cheerios is a drug
No really, the FDA is claiming that Cheerios is a drug because of its claims to lower cholesterol. Cheerios can’t be marketed until it ends its very reasonable ad campaign or applies to the FDA as a new drug.
To me, this seems like an agency regulating just because it’s supposed to regulate.
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Do credit cards exploit human irrationality?
We’ve long been bigger spenders than our counterparts across the pond. For a while in ‘06 we had a negative personal savings rate — Americans spent more than a dollar for every dollar they earned. With the economic downturn, savings rates are up. But Jonah Lehrer has a cool post arguing that low savings rates are likely a permanent feature of the macroeconomic landscape.
Why?...
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David Boaz at Dartmouth
David Boaz gave a talk today at Dartmouth. I attended the talk and then had a group dinner with him afterwards. Overall, I found him a better leader and spokesperson than an economist - I think he had some strange rhetoric for the explanations of Cato’s positions on aspects like health care and the bail-out.
Aside from that complaint, I found him generally reasonable. What did surprise...
Foreign Policy magazine on H+
Noted futurist Alvin Toffler has a blurb in the most recent FP on the future of humanity. He mentions what three trends:
Humans will get a lot smarter
Socio-political backlash against change
We’ll find out the universe is huge
I honestly found the writing kind of disjoint and difficult, but I guess I mostly agree. Having Wikipedia around lets me fact check things all the time. I can...
Nerds, friends and economic outcomes
Name three of your best friends from High School. How many people would’ve named you?
Think it doesn’t matter? Check out the recent study from ISER simply called Popularity. From the non-technical summary:
Shifting somebody from the bottom fifth to the top fifth of the school popularity distribution – in other words, turning a social reject into a star – would be predicted to yield...
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Some empirical backup....
… for my previous post dismissing fears about the death of the newspaper industry.
Jack Shafer at Slate has an article on what we can learn from the 1962-1963 New York newspaper strike. In just 114 days, New Yorkers learned to adapt and depend on new sources of news and radio shows and others stepped up to fill the void left behind by newspapers. This, for me, provides additional support...
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Apocalyptic rumblings
Wired indulges in some apocalyptic prophesying. Seems like NASA researchers are forecasting pretty big solar storms in 2012. There’s evidently a Mayan prediction that 2012 is the end of the world or the beginning of a new era or something. Almost in anticipation of bellyaching from serious scientific blogs they also have a long slideshow of failed end-of-the-world predictions.
These guys...
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Obama the tweeting comedian
I’m watching an actually pretty funny speech Obama gave at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. It was linked to on the White House twitter account which I found through the Barack Obama twitter account.
Yeah yeah, it’s not really Barack Obama. Still, the idea of fireside tweets floors me a little.
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How permanent are URLs
The new nytimes global homepage was a merger with the International Herald Tribune. As a part of this process, all of the URLs at IHT.com got moved. Some people were upset that their work was unavailable. Evidently a bunch of wikipedia articles had citations pointing at IHT that need to be updated now.
People have argued that the friendliest way for NYT to have made this move would be to set up...
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More on firing teachers
The rest of the LA Times series on the absurd barriers to firing incompetent or dangerous teachers is horrifying. Two awful facts:
Teachers with multiple sexual harassment accusations get shuffled from school to school, district to district. Police will leave accusations to districts for them to handle when they don’t have enough evidence for a trial. Districts, then, turn a blind eye...
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No one needs to hear your goals, sorry.
According to an article in the Gazette, when it comes to so-called “identity goals”, sharing them with other makes you less likely to fulfill them. The act of sharing makes you feel like you’ve already taken a step toward your ideal self, so you reap some of the benefit without actually moving toward the goal, undermining your motivation to make progress toward the actual...
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Expressing philosophical allegiances more easily
I want a series of t-shirts that allow me to identify my political sympathies more easily. Go for the easy choices like consequentialism vs. deontology or just have people. I feel like the philosophically inclined are often seeking arguments with strangers and this would be a good way to make that happen in our every day lives.
Keep it simple. Just give me a shirt that says: “Eliminative...
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Hippies were onto something
Evidently, those expensive running shoes you buy whenever you’re going to ‘get serious about your health’ are destroying your feet. They encourage you to run unnaturally landing on your heel. Also, they cause important muscles in the arch and elsewhere to atrophy.
Running and walking barefoot is actually better for avoiding injuries. Alternatively, check out these bizarre...
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Flavors of emotions: disgust and guilt
One of my favorite psychologists, Paul Bloom, suggested in a bloggingheads.tv that humanity has an innate faculty for disgust that cultures co-opt to produce moral judgements.
Similarly an article in Miller-McCune suggests a similar faculty for guilt exists. The article is more concerned with arguing that our guilt if left unassuaged turns self-destructive. I’d be more inclined to think of...
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A newspaper bailout?
I’ve been thinking some lately about whether the government should do anything to help failing newspapers. Newspapers provide a clear public good; like regular education, they allow for a more informed citizenry, leading to better political participation and governance. Some have proposed giving newspaper companies bailouts similar to the ones received by the auto companies. Others, perhaps...
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Considering Wikipedia
Two recent articles discuss the future of the Wikipedia. First from NYT, an article arguing that wikipedia is like a city in a couple of ways. It’s ultimately a vindication: the author praises wikipedia for its vibrancy, its commitment to neutrality, its transparency and its vastness.
The second article from the Times of Higher Ed considers a post-wikipedia future. Sites like Citizendium...
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Why we believe what we do
The UK Times has an article debunking 9/11 conspiracy claims. It’s hardly the first; see the wiki article on the subject. I think the 9/11 truth movement is another example of a way in which the human algorithm is less sophisticated than we’d like to believe — our opinions about issues are determined far more by social expediency than truth.
Referenced earlier on our blog, the...
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Life metrics
I’ve been thinking more and more about the importance of tracking aspects of life - time spent, activities, food, etc. My post on Gawande’s book Better mentioned the use of metrics in improving health care, but I’m realizing that it makes sense to apply the same principle to living.
Finally, this Lifehacker article pushed me over the edge and I set up an account with Daytum, a...
Why I'm not worried about a shadow biosphere
I think Wansley is too pessimistic about finding other life on earth.
That it’s possible for life to develop on earth, even twice, doesn’t indicate that it’s possible or probable for life to develop elsewhere. It may be that there is no common “Great Filter”, but rather that different planets in our solar system are more or less able to sustain life.
Think -...
I hope we don't find other life on earth
That’s right I’m going to talk about another Nick Bostrom paper. The New Scientist has an article about finding a “shadow biosphere” in our own backyard. Here’s the key quote:
…many astrobiologists now think that given the right conditions any sufficiently complex molecular soup has a good chance of generating life if it simmers long enough. If that’s...
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Johnathan Zittrain at Dartmouth
I saw Johnathan Zittrain give a lecture at Dartmouth today. He had some interesting ideas about what he termed “civic technologies” — a somewhat uninformative term but an interesting idea. The notion is that there’s a class of technologies that depend heavily on the enthusiasm of their initial users.
The examples he used were the internet, wikipedia and the personal...
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The US education system needs repair
Should teachers be fired for encouraging an 8th grader who just attempted suicide to try harder next time? Yes! So why wasn’t he?
It is absurdly difficult for public school administrators to fire teachers. Firing a teacher accused of sexual assault is costly and often uncertain, let alone teachers who just teach poorly. As a result, terrible teachers get passed around from school to...
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Life extension: how important is it
It’s more important than you think — probably. The best argument I’ve heard is a bit of a long one, so you might want to instapaper it and come back, but it comes from Nick Bostrom and it’s one of the most important and worthwhile things you’ll read for a few years. It certainly was for me.
Enjoy The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant.
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Swine Flu Watch
It’s official (basically), swine flu has reached Dartmouth. 5 students are suspected to have the virus.
I’m thinking it’s still too early to take out Camus’s The Plague. So far, it doesn’t look too grim.
Still, the outbreak, however bad, will almost definitely strain the world’s already struggling economy.
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Life extension: the inequity objection
Another objection to life extension that has some intuitive weight is that it’s something that only the wealthy will have access to. That seems likely; the so-called ‘bottom billion’ living on less than a dollar a day probably won’t have access to modern medical technology for some time.
Again John Davis has a paper on the subject.
Now supposing that it didn’t...
"Everything is amazing right now, and nobody's...
Not too long ago, comedian Louis CK was on the Conan show, complaining that “the crappiest generation of just spoiled idiots” are taking for granted how incredible technology is.
While I certainly agree that technology is making amazing things possible, I think it’s good that we refuse to be satisfied with the state of technology. It’s precisely because we complain about...