Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently:

• Another flu vaccine myth--Big Pharma profits

  Today's myth is that the flu vaccine is being pushed because of money--that the flu vaccine somehow fills the coffers of the pharmaceutical industry.

  • Flu vaccine sales are small portion of worldwide pharmaceutical company revenues, less than 0.3%.
  • The Big Three flu vaccine manufacturers make less than 4.5% of their total corporate revenues with the vaccine.
  • Other pharmaceutical products have up to 10% greater gross profits than vaccines. The better strategic choice for Big Pharma companies is in other drugs.
  • If Big Pharma stopped making vaccines, they would probably make more money at a higher profit percentage.
• Study: Antioxidant use may promote spread of cancer

  Researchers suggest that pro-oxidants may help to prevent metastasis of cancer.

  While antioxidants may be good for healthy people, researchers found they promote cancer growth in a study with mice.

  The study, researchers said, echoes some other study results showing cancer patients' tumors actually grew while being treated with antioxidants.

• GMOs and Junk Science

  But scientists occasionally "go rogue," forsaking the scientific method -- often for notoriety or economic gain -- to produce propaganda and to sow fear in a public that lacks expertise but is hungry for information. This abuse of scientific authority is especially widespread in the "organic" and "natural" food industries, which capitalize on people's fear of synthetic or "unnatural" products.
  ...
  But the problems with Ayyadurai's paper are legion. Its title alone is enough to show that something is amiss. If you think that GMOs might "accumulate formaldehyde" -- a chemical that is probably carcinogenic at high levels but is present in most living cells and found widely in our environment -- the obvious response would be to measure its levels in the organisms. Ayyadurai, however, chose to make guesses based on modeling via "systems biology."

• Why Hillary Would Make a Better President Than Bernie

  Clinton's skill as a bureaucratic infighter makes her the right pick for an era of political gridlock. As president, Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton would have to use executive power, stacking the courts, empowering Cabinet officials, shaping regulatory boards.

  That's not to say their rhetoric isn't important. That Sanders believes in a "political revolution" against money in politics tells you about his priorities as president. And Clinton's legislative incrementalism gives you a good signpost to how she'll work with Congress. But, the truth is that--in terms of writing new laws--both agendas are inert. They aren't passing Congress. Indeed, if Democrats hold the White House, they'll hold an inverse presidency of sorts. Like a second-term president, Clinton or Sanders will have to focus on executive power. To have legislative traction, she or he would have to wait for broader shifts to the electorate, as well as redistricting in 2020. It's only then that the big plans are plausible.

• Sen. Bernard Sanders Congressional Record

  24 Sponsored Bills (Ranks 44 of 98) 0 Made Into Law (Ranks 21 of 98)

  138 Co-Sponsored Bills (Ranks 54 of 100) 0 Made Into Law (Ranks 73 of 100)

• Why U.S. politics are a disaster

  The states that have the highest levels of inequality, or the fastest growth in equality, have also tended to see the most political polarization, the paper says.

• If You're Not Paranoid, You're Crazy

  As government agencies and tech companies develop more and more intrusive means of watching and influencing people, how can we live free lives?

• Why too much choice is stressing us out

  From jeans to dating partners and TV subscriptions to schools, we think the more choices we have the better. But too many options create anxiety and leave us less satisfied. Could one answer lie in a return to the state monopolies of old?

  Increased choice, then, can make us miserable because of regret, self-blame and opportunity costs. Worse, increased choice has created a new problem: the escalation in expectations.
  ...
  Schwartz's suggestion is that, at a certain point, choice shifts from having a positive relationship with happiness to an inverse one. So, what's the answer? "The secret to happiness is low expectations," he says, sensibly.

• The Reign of Recycling

  Once you exclude paper products and metals, the total annual savings in the United States from recycling everything else in municipal trash -- plastics, glass, food, yard trimmings, textiles, rubber, leather -- is only two-tenths of 1 percent of America's carbon footprint.

  As a business, recycling is on the wrong side of two long-term global economic trends. For centuries, the real cost of labor has been increasing while the real cost of raw materials has been declining. That's why we can afford to buy so much more stuff than our ancestors could. As a labor-intensive activity, recycling is an increasingly expensive way to produce materials that are less and less valuable.

• Can You Get Smarter?

  Can you get smarter by exercising -- or altering -- your brain?

  In the end, you can't yet exceed your innate intelligence. But that seems less important than the fact that there is much that you can do to reach your cognitive potential and to keep it. Forget the smart drugs and supplements; put on your shorts and go exercise. If you're 60 and up, consider brain training. And do it all with your friends.

• Don't Worry so Much About Your Memory Loss

  New research published Aug. 26 in the journal Neurology studied 239 people drawn from several other larger study populations and found that those with the onset of significant dementia, no matter what its cause, forget that they are forgetting things. They gradually drift into a state in which they are unaware of the problem.

Does Philip Tetlock hold the key to accurate predictions?
Seeing Into the Future

Within all the teams, researchers ran experiments -- for example, pitting individuals against groups -- to see which methods improved accuracy. The essential insight? Prediction accuracy is possible when people participate in a setup that rewards only accuracy -- and not the novelty of the explanation, or loyalty to the party line, or the importance of keeping up your reputation. It is within this condition that the "supers," the top 2 percent of each group, emerged.

Every prominent pundit who was invited to participate in the tournament declined. Put it this way, Tetlock says: "If you have an influential column and a Nobel Prize and big speaking engagements and you're in Davos all the time -- if you have all the status cards -- why in God's name would you ever agree to play in a tournament where the best possible outcome is to break even?"

... Now that we know some limitations, and strengths, of forecasters, Tetlock wants to focus on asking the right questions. He hopes to create what Kahneman has called "adversarial collaboration tournaments" -- for instance, bringing together two politically opposed groups to discuss the Iran nuclear deal. One group thinks it's great, one group thinks it's terrible, and each must generate 10 questions that everyone will answer.

The idea is that each side will generate questions with answers that favor their position, and that, with everyone forced to consider all questions, a greater level of understanding will emerge.

Good Judgment™ Open

Compete in the GJ Open against the smartest crowd online -- the one that decisively won the 4 year ACE forecasting tournament!

Edge Master Class 2015: Philip Tetlock: A Short Course in Superforecasting

On the weekend of July 30th, Edge convened one of its "Master Classes."

... This year, the psychologist and social scientist Philip E. Tetlock presented the findings based on his work on forecasting as part of the Good Judgment Project. In 1984, Tetlock began holding "forecasting tournaments" in which selected candidates were asked questions about the course of events: In the wake of a natural disaster, what policies will be changed in the United States? When will North Korea test nuclear weapons? Candidates examine the questions in teams. They are not necessarily experts, but attentive, shrewd citizens.

... Over the weekend in Napa, Tetlock held five classes, which are being presented by Edge in their entirety (8.5 hours of video and audio) along with accompanying transcripts (61,000 words).

• Edge Short Course in Superforecasting, Class I

  Forecasting Tournaments: What We Discover When We Start Scoring Accuracy

  If you read Tom Friedman's columns carefully, you'll see that he does make a lot of implicit predictions.
  
  . . . He's warned us about a number of things and uses the language of could or may -- various things could or might happen. When you ask people what do "could" or "might" mean in isolation, they mean anything from about .1 probability to about .85 probability. They have a vast range of possible meanings. This means that it's virtually impossible to assess the empirical track record of Tom Friedman, and Tom Friedman is by no means alone. It's not at all usual for pundits to make extremely forceful claims about violent nationalist backlashes or impending regime collapses in this or that place, but to riddle it with vague verbiage quantifiers of uncertainty that could mean anything from .1 to .9.
  
  It is as though high status pundits have learned a valuable survival skill, and that survival skill is they've mastered the art of appearing to go out on a limb without actually going out on a limb. They say dramatic things but there are vague verbiage quantifiers connected to the dramatic things. It sounds as though they're saying something very compelling and riveting. There's a scenario that's been conjured up in your mind of something either very good or very bad. It's vivid, easily imaginable.
  
  It turns out, on close inspection they're not really saying that's going to happen. They're not specifying the conditions, or a time frame, or likelihood, so there's no way of assessing accuracy. You could say these pundits are just doing what a rational pundit would do because they know that they live in a somewhat stochastic world. They know that it's a world that frequently is going to throw off surprises at them, so to maintain their credibility with their community of co-believers they need to be vague. It's an essential survival skill. There is some considerable truth to that, and forecasting tournaments are a very different way of proceeding. Forecasting tournaments require people to attach explicit probabilities to well-defined outcomes in well-defined time frames so you can keep score.

• Edge Short Course in Superforecasting, Class II

  Tournaments: Prying Open Closed Minds in Unnecessarily Polarized Debates

  Four Performance Drivers in Tournaments:

  • Get Right People on Bus
    
    10-15% boost from screening forecasters on fluid intelligence/ active open-mindedness.
  • Benefits of Interaction
    
    10-20% boost: Forecasters do better working either collaboratively in teams or competitively in predictions markets.
  • Benefits of Training
    
    10% boost: Cognitive debiasing exercises help
  • Benefits of Elitist/Extremizing Algorithms
    
    15-30% boost: more weight to better forecasters AND then "extremize" to compensate for conservatism of aggregate forecasts ("super-fox" strategy)

  ... the Good Judgment Project outperformed a prediction market inside the intelligence community, which was populated with professional analysts who had classified information, by 25 or 30 percent, which was about the margin by which the superforecasters were outperforming our own prediction market in the external world.

• Edge Short Course in Superforecasting, Class III

  Counterfactual History: The Elusive Control Groups in Policy Debates

  The U.S. intelligence community does not believe it's appropriate to hold analysts accountable for the accuracy of their forecasts. It believes it's appropriate to hold analysts accountable for the processes by which they reach their conclusions. It's not appropriate to judge them on the basis of the accuracy of their conclusions when their conclusions are about the future.

• Edge Short Course in Superforecasting, Class IV

  Skillful Backward and Forward Reasoning in Time: Superforecasting Requires "Counterfactualizing"

  A lot of human beings take a certain umbrage at the thought that they're just an algorithm. A lot of superforecasters would not. They would be quite open to the possibility that you could create a statistical model of their judgment policies in particular domains, and that statistical model might, in the long run, outperform themselves because it's performed more reliably. They're quite open to that. Most people do not like that idea very much. That's another way in which superforecasters, not all of them, as Barb is pointing out, as they're a somewhat heterogeneous group, but the best among them would be quite open to that idea.
  
  ... Creativity is one of those buzzwords. I'm a little hesitant to talk about creativity. There are things they do that feel somewhat creative, but what they mostly do is they think very carefully and they think carefully about how they think. They're sensitive to blind spots, and they kick themselves pretty hard when they slip into what they knew was a trap. They slip into it anyway because some of these traps are sneaky and they're hard to avoid.

• Edge Short Course in Superforecasting, Class V

  Condensing it All Into Four Big Problems and a Killer App Solution

  The first big problem I see is that in virtually all high stakes policy debates we observe now, the participants are motivated less by pure accuracy goals than they are by an assortment of other goals. They're motivated by ego defense, defending their past positions, they're motivated by self-promotion, claiming credit for things (correctly or incorrectly), they're motivated to affirm their loyalty to a community of co-believers because the status of pundits hinges critically on where they stand in their social networks. If you're a liberal or a conservative high profile pundit, you know that if you take one for the home team, they're going to pick you up and keep you moving along.
  
  ... The second big point--we've already talked about attribute substitution. High stakes partisans want to simplify an otherwise intolerably complicated world. They use attribute substitution a lot. They take hard questions and replace them with easy ones and they act as if the answers to the easy ones are answers to the hard ones.
  
  ... The third thing we talked a bit about yesterday is rhetorical obfuscation as an essential survival strategy if you're a political pundit. To preserve their self and public images in an environment that throws up a lot of surprises, which, of course, the political world does, high stakes partisans have to learn to master an arcane art: the art of appearing to go out on a predictive limb without actually doing it, of appearing to be making a forecast without making a forecast.
  
  They say decisive-sounding things about Eurozone collapse or this or that, but there are so many "may's" and "possibly's" and "could's" and so forth that turning it into a probability estimate that can be scored for accuracy is virtually impossible. A, they can't keep score of themselves. B, there is no way to tell ex post which side gets closer to the truth because each side has rhetorically positioned itself in a way that allows it to explain what happened ex post.
  
  ... Attribute substitution, point four, is not just going on among the debaters, it's going on in the audience as well. Audiences are remarkably forgiving of all these epistemological sins that debaters are committing. There is a tendency to take partisan claims more or less at face value as long as the partisans belong to their community of co-believers.

Addendum: Interview with Phil Tetlock on the Rationally Speaking podcast.