Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently:

• Homeopathy won't cure you, researchers conclude

  Is this news?

  After a years-long review of hundreds of studies, Australia's top medical research agency has concluded that homeopathy is essentially useless for treating any medical condition.
  ... Although several studies have shown that homeopathic "remedies" have no detectable amounts of the original substance left, homeopaths believe the tinctures retain a "memory" of the original substance and are thus effective.
  ... They say they found no reliable evidence that any homeopathic treatment led to health improvements that were any better than a placebo.
  And the researchers say the studies that did find homeopathic remedies effective were either so poorly designed, or so poorly conducted, that they were too flawed to be considered reliable.

• Hospitals Are Robbing Us Blind

  Forget Obamacare. The real villains in the American health care system are greedy hospitals and the politicians who protect them

  Whether you’re for Obamacare or against it, you can’t afford to ignore the fact that America’s hospitals have become predatory monopolies.
  

• What's Changed about the Standard of Living?

  It's Complicated. But Hopeful.   By Megan McArdle

  This list illustrates why public policy seems to be struggling to come up with a plan of attack against our current insecurities. The welfare state is relatively good at giving people money: you collect the taxes, write a check, and now people have money. The welfare state has proven very bad at giving people stable jobs and stable families, a vibrant community life, promising career tracks, or a cure for their drug addiction. No wonder so many hopes now seem to be pinned on early childhood education, far in excess of the evidence to support them: it is the only thing we have not already tried and failed at.
  But I think this list illustrates the poverty of trying to measure living standards by staring at median wages. Many of the changes of the last century show up in that statistic, but others, like the time no longer spent plucking chickens, or the joys of banishing lye from the pantry, appear nowhere. Nor do the changes in job and family structure that have made the lives of people who are indisputably vastly materially richer than my young grandparents were, nonetheless feel much more precarious. We look into the numbers and think we're seeing hard facts. But in fact, like someone reading tea leaves, we are projecting our intangible impressions onto an ambiguous picture.

• Why the Idea That a Big Cyber Attack Could Create a Huge Tech Armageddon Is Pure BS

  It turns out that all the talk of cyber Armageddon was a load of bunkum. An elaborate propaganda campaign which only serves as a pretext to sacrifice our civil liberties and channel an ocean of cash to the defense industry.
  

• Will Misogyny Bring Down The Atheist Movement?

  The continuing debate over a murky sexual encounter at a 2008 convention for cheekily anti-establishment skeptics underscores a broader dilemma: How can a progressive, important intellectual community behave so poorly towards its female peers?

  Also see, Atheism's shocking woman problem: What's behind the misogyny of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris?.

• Genetic Data Tools Reveal How Pop Music Evolved In The US

  ... and show that The Beatles didn't start the 1964 American music revolution after all

  Instead, they say that the evolution of music between 1960 and 2010 was largely constant but punctuated by periods of rapid change. "We identified three revolutions: a major one around 1991 and two smaller ones around 1964 and 1983," they say.
  The characters of these revolutions were all different with the 1964 revolution being the most complex.
  ... Another question hotly debated by music commentators is how British bands such as the Beatles and The Rolling Stones influenced the American music scene in the early 1960s. Mauch and co are emphatic in their conclusion. "The British did not start the American revolution of 1964," they say.

Why do people still pay attention to a profession that has been so wrong so often?

• What Good Are Economists?

  Robert J. Shiller, Professor of Economics at Yale

  Indeed, economists failed to forecast most of the major crises in the last century, including the severe 1920-21 slump, the 1980-82 back-to-back recessions, and the worst of them all, the Great Depression after the 1929 stock-market crash.
  ...
  A cynic might ask, "If economists are so smart, why aren't they the richest people around?" The answer is simple: Most economic ideas are public goods that cannot be patented or otherwise owned by their inventors. Just because most economists are not rich does not mean that they have not made many people richer.

  I guess I must be a cynic because I disagree with the Nobel laureate. If economists understood economics they could become rich without owning or patenting anything, by for example just betting on which way interest rates will go.

• How Economists Came to Dominate the Conversation

  There's an old Bob Dylan song that goes "there's no success like failure," and it's a lesson that's been central to the rise of the economics profession. Each economic calamity since the Great Depression -- stagflation in the 1970s, the double-dip recession in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the 1991 downturn -- has served to boost the stock of economists. The long Clinton boom that pushed unemployment down to 3.8 percent was good news for nearly all Americans, except economists, who saw their prominence plummet. Fortunately, the last financial crisis fixed that.

• Explaining How Economists Explain
  

  It takes a physicist, Mark Buchanan, to analyze what is wrong with economics:

  Academic economists, they say, use the term "explanation" in a way that other scientists never would. Instead of developing realistic and testable theories like those in biology or physics, they often aim only to develop "theoretical cases" -- imaginary mathematical worlds with their own rules of cause and effect.
  ...
  And yet, Gilboa and his colleagues suggest that most economists don't see checking the external validity of models as part of their job. Rather, they like to make whatever assumptions are needed to prove their results, get published in a journal, and then "leave the similarity judgements to practitioners." If their results are inappropriately applied in the real world, that's not their problem. In no way does it threaten the reputation of the theories they have developed.

As explained in The Economist the only reliable method to evaluate predictions is to conduct a Philip Tetlock forecasting tournament.

Addendum 04/19/2015: Science's Toughest Test, & Higgs Particle vs Piketty

Good science allows only shakeable faiths. Its toughest test comes when new evidence meets old certainties. By that test some economics seems more art (or math masked religion) than science.
...
One aspect of Tyler Cowen's intertribal Piketty review illustrates. He calls Piketty's redistributive recommendations "more ideological than analytic," then complains about "distorting effects" of "intense government control," asserting that growing the "economy would do more than wealth redistribution to combat...inequality." But recent IMF research finds "no observed tradeoff between redistributive...institutions and...growth." Instead "inequality reduces growth". Are Cowen's ideological priors encouraging him to discount contrary evidence?

It is pretty hard to find decent coverage of Netanyahu's address to Congress from conventional reports in newspapers or on radio or television. As usual for some good coverage see how Jon Stewart covered it on The Daily Show,

• Bibi's Big Adventure

Two points raised there are also mentioned by Robin Wright in The New Yorker news-desk,

• Netanyahu and Obama: The Two Realities

• Netanyahu has made a career out of crusading against Iran. In 1992, as a member of parliament, he predicted that Iran was three to five years away from producing a nuclear weapon, and appealed for its program to be "uprooted by an international front headed by the U.S." He cited the same time frame three years later, in his book "Fighting Terrorism."


• Netanyahu has long supported American military intervention. In 2002, he testified before Congress in favor of invading Iraq, and predicted that ousting Saddam Hussein would have "enormous positive reverberations on the region" and ripen Iran for revolt against the theocracy. "It's not a question of whether you'd like to see a regime change in Iran but how to achieve it," he said. Today, Iran holds more sway over Iraq than any other country.

What are the odd of someone like Charlie Rose, who gets to interview Netanyahu, ever asking him about his past comments and poor record of predictions?