Lunch at the Labs

I've written about the unreasonableness of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia before, so it's nice to see constitutional lawyer Noah Feldman add weight to my argument while commemorating the death of renowned legal scholar Ronald Dworkin:

Dworkin's Death Deprives Scalia of His Moral Foil

In response to Scalia, Dworkin had a devastating riposte. How, he asked, did Scalia know that the judge's job was simply to apply the law? The Constitution never expressly says so, and in fact never specifies how it should be interpreted. The answer, Dworkin explained, was that Scalia had to rely on his own theory of the best moral vision for the country. In Scalia's political morality, judges should exercise restraint. But that belief itself was a product of interpretation and moral judgment -- and logically couldn't be otherwise. Scalia's "love affair with textual fidelity," as Dworkin put it, was therefore proof that he was interpreting the Constitution in the light of his moral judgment.

Some web links I found to be of interest:

• Beware the Big Errors of `Big Data'

  Nassim Taleb opines:

  Big data may mean more information, but it also means more false information.

  and

  if I generate (by simulation) a set of 200 variables -- completely random and totally unrelated to each other -- with about 1,000 data points for each, then it would be near impossible not to find in it a certain number of "significant" correlations of sorts. But these correlations would be entirely spurious.

• 2013 Edge Annual Question : WHAT *SHOULD* WE BE WORRIED ABOUT?

  Over 150 of the world's greatest minds answer the Edge question of the year.
  
  Edge is an online salon for intelligent conversation (unlike TED).

• That Cuddly Kitty Is Deadlier Than You Think

  Domestic and feral cats are significant predators of a wide range of prey species.

  the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that domestic cats in the United States -- both the pet Fluffies that spend part of the day outdoors and the unnamed strays and ferals that never leave it -- kill a median of 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion mammals a year, most of them native mammals like shrews, chipmunks and voles rather than introduced pests like the Norway rat.

• That Daily Shower Can Be a Killer

  Jared Diamond on the importance of being attentive to hazards that carry a low risk each time but are encountered frequently.

  Consider: If you're a New Guinean living in the forest, and if you adopt the bad habit of sleeping under dead trees whose odds of falling on you that particular night are only 1 in 1,000, you'll be dead within a few years.

• The Placebo Phenomenon

  Researcher Ted Kaptchuk searches fpr the real ingredients of fake medicine.

  researchers have found that placebo treatments--interventions with no active drug ingredients--can stimulate real physiological responses, from changes in heart rate and blood pressure to chemical activity in the brain, in cases involving pain, depression, anxiety, fatigue, and even some symptoms of Parkinson's.

  and

  even patients who knew they were taking placebos described real improvement, reporting twice as much symptom relief as the no-treatment group.

• Germs Are Us

  An article in The New Yorker, Annals of Science describes how some bacteria and other microorganisms make us sick while many others keep us alive.

  We inherit every one of our genes, but we leave the womb without a single microbe. As we pass through our mother's birth canal, we begin to attract entire colonies of bacteria. By the time a child can crawl, he has been blanketed by an enormous, unseen cloud of microorganisms--a hundred trillion or more. They are bacteria, mostly, but also viruses and fungi (including a variety of yeasts), and they come at us from all directions: other people, food, furniture, clothing, cars, buildings, trees, pets, even the air we breathe. They congregate in our digestive systems and our mouths, fill the space between our teeth, cover our skin, and line our throats. We are inhabited by as many as ten thousand bacterial species; these cells outnumber those which we consider our own by ten to one, and weigh, all told, about three pounds--the same as our brain. Together, they are referred to as our microbiome--and they play such a crucial role in our lives that scientists like Blaser have begun to reconsider what it means to be human.

Two of today's most interesting thinkers had a discussion at the New York Public Library earlier this month:

LIVE from the NYPL: NASSIM TALEB & DANIEL KAHNEMAN
http://www.nypl.org/audiovideo/live-nypl-nassim-taleb-daniel-kahneman

Download: Video (178.4MB MP4, 1 hr 18 min)
http://www.nypl.org/audiovideo/live-nypl-nassim-taleb-daniel-kahneman

Although wide-ranging, it is mostly about ideas in Taleb's recent book Antifragile.
There is a nice summary in the blog post of financial advisor Robert P. Seawright:

We Suck at Probabilities
https://rpseawright.wordpress.com/2013/02/28/we-suck-at-probabilities/

I've wondered why people are so bad at dealing with probabilities and I think
this quoted excerpt may be the best explanation I've seen:

To compute probabilities you need to keep several possibilities in your mind at once. It's difficult for most people. Typically, we have a single story with a theme. People have a sense of propensity, that the system is more likely to do one thing than the other, but it's quite different from the probabilities where you have to think of two possibilities and weigh their relative chances of happening.

In The New York Review of Books dated February 7, 2013, biologist H. Allen Orr reviews the book by philosopher Thomas Nagel,

Mind and Cosmos:
Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False

A question addressed is how can consciousness be explained, and it is no surprise that a scientist and a philosopher disagree. Nagel is an atheist but he thinks something more than evolution and natural selection is needed and he suggests a natural teleology that does not depend on any agent's intentions but are just laws of nature that we don't know about yet. Similar to the reviewer I don't buy it, and I particularly like this quote that illustrates why I much prefer science over philosophy:

Instead Nagel's conclusion rests largely on the strength of his intuition. His intuition recoils from the claimed plausibility of neo-Darwinism and that, it seems, is that. (Richard Dawkins has called this sort of move the argument from personal incredulity.) But plenty of scientific truths are counterintuitive (does anyone find it intuitive that we're hurtling around the sun at 67,000 miles per hour?) and a scientific education is, to a considerable extent, an exercise in taming the authority of one's intuition. Nagel never explains why his intuition should count for so much here.

The reviewer summarizes Nagel's positions as:

Nagel is deeply skeptical that any species of materialist reductionism can work. Instead, he concludes, progress on consciousness will require an intellectual revolution at least as radical as Einstein's theory of relativity.

But I prefer the reviewer's own thoughts on the subject:

For there might be perfectly good reasons why you can't imagine a solution to the problem of consciousness. As the philosopher Colin McGinn has emphasized, your very inability to imagine a solution might reflect your cognitive limitations as an evolved creature. The point is that we have no reason to believe that we, as organisms whose brains are evolved and finite, can fathom the answer to every question that we can ask. All other species have cognitive limitations, why not us? So even if matter does give rise to mind, we might not be able to understand how.

I have felt this way for a long time and it's nice to see a scientist express it so clearly. Actually it seems so obvious to me I cannot understand why anyone would think otherwise!

Some web links I found to be of interest:

• Nassim Taleb: Understanding is a Poor Substitute for Convexity (Antifragility)

  In his latest book, the author of The Black Swan says that forecasting and risk measurement do not work. Instead what is needed is the ability to benefit and grow from volatility, errors, and disorder. Similar to how bones need stress to become stronger, stressors are needed in politics and economics and eliminating them makes these systems weaker.

• Leading Environmental Activist's Blunt Confession: I Was Completely Wrong To Oppose GMOs

  The British environmentalist Mark Lynas, an early figure in the fight against genetically modified organisms (GMO), now supports genetically modified food. He says: I discovered science, and in the process I hope I became a better environmentalist.

• Perverse Economics of the Electric Grid: As Generation Gets Cheaper, Transmission Costs Soar

  In recent years the cost of generating electricity has decreased while transmission and distribution costs have increased. And it looks like the trend will continue because of a decline in transmission infrastructure investment.

• Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing

  Different activities vary in how much of success depends on skill versus luck. In any case, statistical reasoning is hard.

• History lesson: Why the Bush tax cuts were enacted

  After the Clinton tax surpluses, Republicans feared we would not have enough debt and the federal government would grow.

• How AT&T and Verizon Manipulate Your Smartphone

  The big phone companies (AT&T and Verizon) collude with the big cable companies (Comcast and Time Warner) to limit competition between wireless phone and wired internet services.

• Mythbusting: Israel and Switzerland are not gun-toting utopias

  Ezra Klein discusses with Janet Rosenbaum actual gun policy in Israel and Switzerland, both of which are often used to defend gun ownership in the United States but seemingly should not.

• Why the Pundits Are Wrong About Big Money and the 2012 Elections

  Both Democrats and Republicans receive obscene amounts of money, but more than determining who wins, it determines what gets discussed during campaigns and what the winner will do after being elected.

Human memory is not like computer memory and is quirky, unreliable and its accuracy cannot be trusted. But in spite of that many people people believe their memory even when it is contradicted by evidence. There is a summary of the psychology of human memory at,

How Memory Works: 10 Things Most People Get Wrong

The ten points given (with my one-line summary) are:

1. Memory does not decay
   Memories remain but they become harder to retrieve.
2. Forgetting helps you learn
   It is easier to learn new information as less relevant information becomes inaccessible.
3. 'Lost' memories can live again
   But even less accessible memories are not gone and can be re-learned more quickly than new information.
4. Recalling memories alters them
   Retrieving a memory makes it stronger but also can result in a false memory due to the reconstruction process.
   Psychologists have experimentally implanted false memories.
5. Memory is unstable
   Because a memory is changed by recalling it.
6. The foresight bias
   It is easy to think you will remember something and then forget it minutes later.
7. When recall is easy, learning is low
   The more work you have to do to remember something the better you will remember it and this is why testing improves learning.
8. Learning depends heavily on context
   Learning improves when done in different ways or contexts.
9. Memory, reloaded
   In the long run (but not the short term) both physical and mental learning is improved when interleaving different things rather than one at a time.
10. Learning is under your control
    With knowledge of how memory works, you memory can improve.

See the above link for more details.
Most false memories are harmless but in some cases people lives have been ruined by them.

For some information about false memories see:

• False Memory Syndrome Foundation
• False Memory Syndrome Facts
• False Memory — Scholarpedia
• Creating False Memories — Elizabeth F. Loftus

A fact is not always a fact. This is not just because someone is being deceitful, but due to the way knowledge is obtained and how the scientific process is suppose to work. The term half-life is the time required for a quantity to fall to half its value and comes from the description of radioactive decay in physics.

In a new book The Half-Life of Facts, applied mathematician and network scientist author Samuel Arbesman explains why everything we know has an expiration date.

The book review at Half of the Facts You Know Are Probably Wrong makes these observations:

• half of what physicians thought they knew about liver diseases was wrong or obsolete 45 years later
• a team of researchers over ten years was able to reproduce the results of only six out of 53 landmark papers in preclinical cancer research.
• We persist in only adding facts to our personal store of knowledge that jibe with what we already know, rather than assimilate new facts irrespective of how they fit into our worldview.

In another review at Universe Today it states:

• The half-life of a physics paper is on average 13.07 years, in Math it's 9.17 years, and in Psychology it's 7.15.

Remember this is for science and the situation is worse for areas like politics and economics, etc.

There is a Center for Inquiry podcast interview with the author at Point of Inquiry.

Some web links I found to be of interest:

• The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking — by Oliver Burkeman

  although extreme insecurity is a bad thing, it provides one huge benefit: you cannot be worried about losing your security if you don't have any to lose in the first place. And worries about becoming insecure do seem to be at the root of a lot of anxiety in western societies.

• RationalWiki
  
  1. Analyzing and refuting pseudoscience and the anti-science movement.
  2. Documenting the full range of crank ideas.
  3. Explorations of authoritarianism and fundamentalism.
  4. Analysis and criticism of how these subjects are handled in the media.
  
  
• S.H.A.M.E Project: Shame the Hacks who Abuse Media Ethics

  The S.H.A.M.E. Media Transparency Project takes the war against corporate trolls and media shills to a new and more effective level. Its goal is to expose corrupt media figures, document journalistic fraud and make life a little harder for covert propagandists who manipulate the public, degrade our democracy and help perpetuate oligarchy power.

  Sometimes it seems a bit excessive and unfair to me, but still fun to read their takedowns of some big names.

• thoughtfulPersonals.com
  Free personal ads for people who like the NYT, New Yorker, Harper's, NPR, Atlantic or NYRB

• In Technology Wars, Using the Patent as a Sword — How patents are stifling innovation.

  Last year, for the first time, spending by Apple and Google on patent lawsuits and unusually big-dollar patent purchases exceeded spending on research and development of new products, according to public filings.
  New York Times, October 7, 2012

  And this paper (2012-035) from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis:

  The Case Against Patents
  by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine, September 2012

  The case against patents can be summarized briefly:there is no empirical evidence that they serve to increase innovation and productivity, unless the latter is identified with the number of patents awarded – which, as evidence shows, has no correlation with measured productivity. This is at the root of the “patent puzzle”: in spite of the enormous increase in the number of patents and in the strength of their legal protection we have neither seen a dramatic acceleration in the rate of technological progress nor a major increase in the levels of R&D expenditure ...

Because of super storm Sandy I did not get to post these before the Presidential election, but I think they are of general interest and perhaps even more relevant in hindsight.

• Peter Thiel: Austerity Coming, No Matter Who You Vote For (10/08/2012)
  

  Short Bloomberg video with the libertarian/contrarian Peter Thiel about the Presidential race:
      It might not matter who wins the election
      Obama & Romney are more similar than people think

• Why do "Third Parties Never Work"? Collusion and the Presidential Debates (10/08/2012)
  A nice explanation of why the presidential debates are a farce (from Falguni A. Sheth's Translation Exercises blog).

• America's duopoly of money in politics and manipulation of public opinion (10/03/2012).
  Charles Ferguson opines in The Guardian that "behind the divisiveness lies a deeper bipartisan consensus in which donors own democracy and there are no votes in reform".

  And so Obama can avoid all the hard issues and yet retain the grudging support of his base simply by proposing modest tax increases on the wealthy, and by supporting the safety net (unemployment benefits, Medicare, social security) that Romney might cut.
  Voila: an election in which there are a dozen elephants in the room, and neither candidate pays them any notice at all; an election that Obama can win because he's somewhat less bad, somewhat less utterly bankrupt, than the other guy.
  Welcome to America's new and improved two-party system.

• Why evangelical Christians like Romney? Why civil libertarians like Obama? (Tom Bissell 09/27/2012)

  Because our politics don't necessarily have anything to do with our beliefs. Politics, and presidential politics particularly, are instead dictated by nodes of sympathetic inclination.

  Mentioned at the end is, iSideWith.com where you can take a political quiz that lets you select your stance on many important issues, allowing you to specify how important they are to you and even letting you choose another position that is not specified. Once completed it tells you which political candidate you side on most issues with. You may be surprised that you didn't vote for the person you most agree with! Maybe voting on issues rather than candidates would give better results?