Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• One man's health food is another man's junk food

  When you eat, you're also supplying the bacterial community in your colon, comprised of 100 trillion cells. The right food can help this micrbiome.

  An Israeli study, published last month in the medical journal "Cell," concludes that even after eating identical meals, the way those meals are then metabolized differs -- sometimes dramatically -- from one person to another.

  And in 'Healthy' foods differ by individual:

  An Israeli study tracking the blood sugar levels of 800 people over a week suggests that even if we all ate the same meal, how it's metabolized would differ from one person to another.
  ...
  To understand why such vast differences exist between people, the researchers conducted microbiome analyses on stool samples collected from each study participant. Growing evidence suggests gut bacteria are linked to obesity, glucose intolerance, and diabetes, and the study demonstrates that specific microbes indeed correlate with how much blood sugar rises post-meal. By conducting personalized dietary interventions among 26 additional study participants, the researchers were able to reduce post-meal blood sugar levels and alter gut microbiota. Interestingly, although the diets were personalized and thus greatly different across participants, several of the gut microbiota alterations were consistent across participants.

• Health Care's Price Conundrum

  Atul Gawande

  The costs of care for the privately insured vary from town to town just as crazily as they do for the publicly insured. But the patterns are strikingly different. The most expensive places for Medicare are not the most expensive places for private insurers. In fact, there was essentially zero correlation between where a city ranks in Medicare spending and where it ranks in private-insurance spending--even when you only consider people undergoing the exact same procedure.
  ...
  When your grocery store is the only one in town, it can jack up prices without losing customers. The same goes for hospitals. The study found that hospital prices in monopoly markets are fifteen per cent higher than in those with four or more hospitals.

• Aspirin targets key protein in neurodegenerative diseases

  A new study finds that a component of aspirin binds to an enzyme called GAPDH, which is believed to play a major role in neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Huntington's diseases.

• Sad news: Scientists say happiness won't extend your life after all

  But a new paper published in the medical journal Lancet comes to the sad conclusion that happiness isn't responsible for this observed longevity. Instead, the things that make people happy, particularly their good health, are the same things that shield them from premature death.

• The Birth And Death Of Privacy:

  3,000 Years of History Told Through 46 Images

  • Privacy, as we understand it, is only about 150 years old.
  • Humans do have an instinctual desire for privacy. However, for 3,000 years, cultures have nearly always prioritized convenience and wealth over privacy.
  • Section II will show how cutting edge health technology will force people to choose between an early, costly death and a world without any semblance of privacy. Given historical trends, the most likely outcome is that we will forgo privacy and return to our traditional, transparent existence.

• Capitalists should listen to Bernie Sanders

  For example: Globalization has "elevated the living standards of hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people worldwide" but also "has helped suppress the incomes of low-skilled middle-class workers in rich countries." Where do our loyalties lie? How do we balance obligations to our fellow citizens in the communities and countries in which we live against the interests of those far away? And how do the vast disparities of wealth that the system creates constrain the very process of democratic deliberation over what to do about it?
  ...
  You don't need to be a democratic socialist to believe this. On the contrary, the survival of democratic capitalism depends upon facing the difficulties the system is having in delivering on the promises it was once able to keep.

• What Hillary Clinton Gets (and Bernie Sanders Doesn't) About Wall Street

  If you agree with Democrats that Wall Street should be reformed, Hillary Clinton's more comprehensive solution better grasps the world of finance today.

  Clinton's beyond-the-banks rhetoric, in the op-ed and in the debate itself, is meant to position her as tougher on the finance industry than Sanders, a move that is hard for her to make convincingly--one has the sense that Sanders would strip every last cufflink off every investment banker, if he could. If you agree with the Democrats that Wall Street should be reformed, though, Clinton's more comprehensive solution better grasps the world of finance today. Not only are Sanders's bogeybanks just one part of Wall Street but they are getting less powerful and less problematic by the year. "It ain't complicated," Sanders said during the debate. But Clinton is right: it is.

• Cronyism Causes the Worst Kind of Inequality

  When a country succumbs to cronyism, friends of the rulers are able to appropriate large amounts of wealth for themselves -- for example, by being awarded government-protected monopolies over certain markets, as in Russia after the fall of communism. That will obviously lead to inequality of income and wealth. It will also make the economy inefficient, since money is flowing to unproductive cronies. Cronyism may also reduce growth by allowing the wealthy to exert greater influence on political policy, creating inefficient subsidies for themselves and unfair penalties for their rivals.
  ...
  The relationship between wealth inequality and growth was negative, as the IMF and others had found for income inequality. But only one kind of inequality was associated with low growth -- the kind that came from cronyism.

• Why "Economic Inequality" Is a Bogus Issue

  It's true that wages have been stagnant for much of the middle class over the last few years. Yet our purchasing power is still expanding.
  
  For example, economists Donald Boudreaux and Mark Perry note that spending by households on most of modern life's "basics" -- food, clothing, housing, household furnishings and utilities -- fell from 53% of disposable income in 1950 to 44% in 1970 to 32% today.
  
  ... It's true that the richest have gotten richer faster than the rest of us. But the tide is rising for us all.
  
  ... Even our poor are rich by historical standards. Most Americans living under the poverty line today live in larger accommodations than the average European.

  If the previous link about cronyism isn't enough to cause you to think this guy is wrong, be sure to read the comments to his article,

• Why do Nigerian Scammers Say They are from Nigeria?

  Far-fetched tales of West African riches strike most as comical. Our analysis suggests that is an advantage to the attacker, not a disadvantage. Since his attack has a low density of victims the Nigerian scammer has an over-riding need to reduce false positives. By sending an email that repels all but the most gullible the scammer gets the most promising marks to self-select, and tilts the true to false positive ratio in his favor.

• Annuity Wars Highlight Rift Between Factions

  Are annuities just a trap set for uninformed investors or valuable retirement tool? It depends on who you ask: Ken Fisher or Moshe Milevsky

• The Return of Werner Erhard, Father of Self-Help

  But it was the Church of Scientology that actually drove him out of the country. According to Mr. Erhard, the "60 Minutes" allegations were the culmination of a smear campaign organized by Scientology officials to get back at him for poaching clients and ideas."
  ...
  He also did some consulting work for Landmark, the Forum's successor, run by his brother Harry Rosenberg.

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• Are Successful CEOs Just Lucky?

  A series of recent papers help answer that question, by quantifying the roles of luck, ability, and experience in CEOs' success. Together they suggest two conclusions: first, no single trait or skill seems to explain CEO performance; and second, luck plays a very large role.

• Do all living organisms on Earth share one ultimate common ancestor?

  Or did life begin more than once in separate places?

  The current view is that all life on Earth evolved from one common ancestral population, instead of evolving multiple times (which, by the way, is a perfectly valid hypothesis).
  ...
  The model predicts that descent from a universal common ancestor is at least 10^2,860 times more probable than the closest competing hypothesis!

• Climate models and precautionary measures

  One can sidestep the "skepticism" of those who question existing climate-models, by framing risk in the most straight-forward possible terms, at the global scale. That is, we should ask "what would the correct policy be if we had no reliable models?"
  ...
  The popular belief that uncertainty undermines the case for taking seriously the 'climate crisis' that scientists tell us we face is the opposite of the truth. Properly understood, as driving the case for precaution, uncertainty radically underscores that case, and may even constitute it.

• The French Gender-Bender Coming for American Pop

  French pop star Christine and the Queens

  My favorite music act of the moment. I like how she sounds and how she moves.

• Dan Sperber on The Argumentative Theory of Reason

  Interview by Julia Galef on the Rationally Speaking Podcast.

  The traditional story about reason is that it evolved to help humans see the world more clearly and (thereby) make better decisions. But on that view, some mysteries remain: why is the human brain so biased? Why are we so much better at defending our pre-existing views than at evaluating new ideas objectively?
  ...
  In this episode of Rationally Speaking, Julia talks with guest Dan Sperber, professor of cognitive and social sciences, who is famous for advancing an alternate view of reason: that it evolved to help us argue with our fellow humans and convince them that we're right.

Attacks on Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined and his rebuttal.

• The "Long Peace" is a Statistical Illusions

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Author of Antifragile, Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan.

  This includes 3 articles, the first a nontechnical discussion of the book by science writer S. Pinker, the second a technical discussion of the flaw in Pinker's book published in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and Applications, the third a technical discussion of what I call the Pinker Problem, a corruption of the law of large numbers.

• Fooled by Belligerence: Comments on Nassim Taleb's "The Long Peace is a Statistical Illusion"

  Pinker's rebuttal to Taleb. It begins:

  I was surprised to learn that Nassim Taleb had a problem with my book The Better Angels of Our Nature, because its analysis of war and terrorism harmonizes with Taleb's signature themes. The chapter on major war begins with 21 pages on historians' overinterpretation of temporal trends in war and could have been called "Fooled by Randomness." It was followed dozen pages on the thick-tailed distribution of the magnitudes of wars which could have been subtitled "The Black Swan." Yet rather than acknowledging our similar mindsets, Taleb has come out swinging, pummeling away at what he thinks is the message of the book, accompanied by a stream of trash-talk about my statistical competence.

  Taleb shows no signs of having read 'Better Angels' with the slightest attention to its content. Instead he has merged it in his mind with claims by various fools and knaves whom he believes he has bettered in the past. The confusion begins with his remarkable claim that the thesis in 'Better Angels' is "identical" to Ben Bernanke's theory of a moderation in the stock market. Identical! This alone should warn readers that for all of Taleb's prescience about the financial crisis, accurate attribution and careful analysis of other people's ideas are not his strong suits.

• On the statistical properties and tail risk of violent conflicts

  Long mathematical paper by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, et al. claiming to disprove Pinker.

  We examine statistical pictures of violent conflicts over the last 2000 years, finding techniques for dealing with incompleteness and unreliability of historical data.
  ...
  All the statistical pictures obtained are at variance with the prevailing claims about "long peace", namely that violence has been declining over time.

• Violent warfare is on the wane, right?

  Mark Buchanan: Physicist and author, former editor with Nature and New Scientist.

  Many optimists think so. But a close look at the statistics suggests that the idea just doesn't add up.

• John Gray: Steven Pinker is wrong about violence and war

  A new orthodoxy, led by Pinker, holds that war and violence in the developed world are declining. The stats are misleading, argues Gray -- and the idea of moral progress is wishful thinking and plain wrong.

I find it interesting how vociferous people are on both sides of what is essentially a science and math argument. It seems to me good evidence for (something I've blogged about before) The Argumentative Theory.

"Reasoning was not designed to pursue the truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments.

I wonder if how one interprets the numbers for violence depends on whether they lean more to optimism or pessimism?