Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• Bernie Sanders's post-campaign political revolution is off to a rocky start

  Not only have Sanders-backed candidates generally struggled to knock off opponents backed by the Democratic establishment, but the national organizations created to help them have already become mired in petty infighting and legal difficulties.

• "I don't like the idea of capitalism": Charles Koch, unfiltered

  Billionaire businessman, philanthropist and political donor Charles Koch grabbed headlines this weekend for focusing a semiannual gathering of wealthy conservatives on a surprising topic: income inequality. It is a topic that has loomed increasingly large in Koch's mind recently and one that he expounded on in the spring in an interview with The Washington Post's Jim Tankersley.

  If they make it through by rigging the system, then that's horrible, and that's a good part of the disparity we have. Whereas the median income -- which I think is a much better metric on well-being than GDP, hasn't gone up in the last decade -- and productivity has barely moved. And I think it is because of this corporate welfare and the Fed. So what we see happening is that because of that combination -- free money to big companies like ours or established companies and the difficulties in getting permits to do something new with all of the handicaps on innovation -- that rather than going in and investing in increasing productivity, it is investing in buying other companies.

  To my surprise there's more I agree with than disagree with.

• Washington's Sunni Myth and the Civil Wars in Syria and Iraq

  In the first of two articles, a Westerner with extensive on-the-ground experience in Syria and Iraq explains how the West's understanding of sectarian identity in the Middle East is fatally flawed.

  Similarly, these same voices describe the Syrian government as an "Alawite regime" that rules and oppresses Sunnis. However, Sunnis are heavily represented at all levels of leadership in Assad's government. The territory it controls at this point in the war and at all points past is majority Sunni. And the Syrian armed forces are still majority Sunni. Alawites may be overrepresented in the security forces, but all that means is that they get to die more than others. It if it is an "Alawite regime," isn't it odd that includes and benefits so many non-Alawites?

  Sunnis not only have political power in Syria, but they also have social power, more opportunities, and a greater range of choices in life compared to other states in the region ruled by Sunni heads of state. At the heart of this negligent misapprehension of what is actually happening in the Middle East is an acceptance and mainstreaming of notions of Sunni identity propagated by the most extreme voices in the Sunni world: Saudi Arabia, al Qaeda, and the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

Part 2: http://warontherocks.com/2016/08/washingtons-sunni-myth-and-the-middle-east-undone/

• The truth about the gender wage gap

  Instead, the workforce disadvantages women in subtler ways -- ways that ultimately show up in their paycheck but don't always begin there. The highest-paying jobs disproportionately reward those who can work the longest, least flexible hours.

  These types of job penalize workers who have caregiving responsibilities outside the workplace. Those workers tend to be women.

  ... The data tells us that this can't be the entire story. It can't explain why the wage gap is so much bigger for those with kids than those without. One 2015 study found that childless, unmarried women earn 96 cents for every dollar a man earns. Remember that study we started with, the one about the MBA graduates? It showed that women with kids had a wage gap twice as large as women without.

• Are Replicas Changing the Way We Experience Art?

  Precise Digital Reproductions Allow More People to Own and View Masterpieces, Minus the Work's Soul

  One might pay a fortune to get a work entirely painted by Rembrandt, or a more modest sum for a work designed by Rembrandt but largely painted by his staff. This did not mean that the less expensive option was poorly made, and technically, it could even still be called a "Rembrandt." This process was an entirely legal, artist-sanctioned form of forgery.
  ...
  Experts and art lovers can tell the simulacrum from the authentic work. The rest of the world could, likewise, if they tried, but they may not care to. Perhaps they are just as happy with a Relievo Collection van Gogh on their walls? A danger arises when amateurs and bogus experts aren't able to tell the difference between what's real and what's reproduced. Worse, they might see the digital copy and decide that it is not worth the effort to see the original. They might not think that the work is better, but it is unarguably more convenient to access.

  Has there been a scientifically controlled study that proves experts and art lovers can actually tell the difference just by looking?

• The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority

  It suffices for an intransigent minority --a certain type of intransigent minorities --to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences. Further, an optical illusion comes with the dominance of the minority: a naive observer would be under the impression that the choices and preferences are those of the majority. If it seems absurd, it is because our scientific intuitions aren't calibrated for that (fughedabout scientific and academic intuitions and snap judgments; they don't work and your standard intellectualization fails with complex systems, though not your grandmothers' wisdom).
  ...
  A Kosher (or halal) eater will never eat nonkosher (or nonhalal) food, but a nonkosher eater isn't banned from eating kosher.

• Scientists propose why we cannot find life in space

  The reason we cannot find other life outside of Planet Earth is because we may be ahead of the curve, according to scientists from the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
  ...
  Life first became possible 30m years after the Big Bang, when stars first provided the universe with enough carbon and oxygen. Life is predicted to end in 10 trillion years when all the stars in the universe have faded and died. Loeb and a team of researchers considered the likelihood of life between those two parameters.

• Spiritual emergency

  After decades of practising as a psychotherapist, I am convinced that our treatment of psychosis is thoroughly wrong-headed

  Most of modern psychiatry dismisses the idea that psychotic experience is a meaningful response to the condition of one's life in favour of the view that the voices, the visions, come from meaningless disease. By contrast I've learned to distinguish between the ravages of chronic psychotic disorder in the long and persistently afflicted, and the kind of acute aberrations experienced by Martha, which can usually be better understood as a 'spiritual emergency' instead of an impersonal state of disease.
  ...
  Among the many fascinating facts that Whitaker has gathered is that if you suffer a psychotic breakdown, your odds of complete, treatment-free recovery are much, much better if you are treated in a third-world country that cannot afford psychotropic medication. In poor countries they treat psychotic breaks with various forms of social support, and largely leave the brain alone and unaltered.

• 'Googlement' Pushes Aside 'Government Sachs'

  Google/Alphabet's annual spending on lobbying, for example, went from less than $1 million a decade ago to $16.7 million in 2015, putting it behind only Boeing and General Electric among American corporations.
  ...
  Since Obama took office in January 2009, at least 250 people have left Google and related companies for jobs in the administration or vice versa. Oh, and in 2012 Schmidt actually helped recruit the Obama campaign technology team and spent election night in the campaign "boiler room" in Chicago.

• The big puzzle in economics today: why is the economy growing so slowly?
  1. Theory 1: We're running out of innovations
  2. Theory 2: There's too little spending`
  3. Theory 3: Bad corporate governance is causing companies to under-invest
  4. Theory 4: The economy is weighed down with debt
  5. Theory 5: Excessive regulation is holding back growth
  6. Theory 6: There's too much housing regulation in big cities
  7. Theory 7: The economy is becoming dominated by big, incumbent companies
  8. Theory 8: A slow-growing, aging population is hurting growth
• The Effect of Population Aging on Economic Growth, the Labor Force and Productivity

  Population aging is widely assumed to have detrimental effects on economic growth yet there is little empirical evidence about the magnitude of its effects. This paper starts from the observation that many U.S. states have already experienced substantial growth in the size of their older population and much of this growth was predetermined by historical trends in fertility. We use predicted variation in the rate of population aging across U.S. states over the period 1980-2010 to estimate the economic impact of aging on state output per capita. We find that a 10% increase in the fraction of the population ages 60+ decreases the growth rate of GDP per capita by 5.5%. Two-thirds of the reduction is due to slower growth in the labor productivity of workers across the age distribution, while one-third arises from slower labor force growth. Our results imply annual GDP growth will slow by 1.2 percentage points this decade and 0.6 percentage points next decade due to population aging.

• Research suggests being lazy is a sign of high intelligence

  Results of the study revealed the thinking group were far less active than the non-thinkers

  Findings from a US-based study seem to support the idea that people with a high IQ get bored less easily, leading them to spend more time engaged in thought.

  And active people may be more physical as they need to stimulate their minds with external activities, either to escape their thoughts or because they get bored quickly.

  But note it ends with,

  Despite highlighting an unusual trend, generalising the findings should be done with caution due to the small sample of participants, it added.

  Sounds bogus to me.
• Tyler Cowen's three laws
  1. Cowen's First Law: There is something wrong with everything (by which I mean there are few decisive or knockdown articles or arguments, and furthermore until you have found the major flaws in an argument, you do not understand it).
  2. Cowen's Second Law: There is a literature on everything.
  3. Cowen's Third Law: All propositions about real interest rates are wrong.

  There is of course a common thread to all three laws, namely you should not have too much confidence in your own judgment.

• What Happened to WikiLeaks?

  WikiLeaks has hit rock bottom. Once dedicated to careful vetting and redaction--sometimes too much redaction--the "whistleblower site" is now gleefully basking in its dump of thousands of emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee--most of which are full of personal, non-newsworthy information--published with the express intent of harming Hillary Clinton's political campaign. In this latest release, there is no brave whistleblower in sight, just an anonymous hacker believed by the FBI and U.S. intelligence community to be a front for Russian intelligence services. The WikiLeaks project has fallen far from the lofty heights of its founding a decade ago, when Julian Assange promised to "facilitate safety in the ethical leaking movement."

• Browserprint.info

  Does your web browser have a unique fingerprint? If so your web browser could be tracked across websites without techniques such as tracking cookies. Additionally the anonymisation aspects of services such as Tor or VPNs could be negated if websites you visit track you using your browser fingerprint. This service is designed to test how unique your web browser's fingerprint is, and hence how identifiable your browser is.

• Dark Patterns are designed to trick you

  User Interfaces Designed to Trick People

  It happens to the best of us. After looking closely at a bank statement or cable bill, suddenly a small, unrecognizable charge appears. Fine print sleuthing soon provides the answer--somehow, you accidentally signed up for a service. Whether it was an unnoticed pre-marked checkbox or an offhanded verbal agreement at the end of a long phone call, now a charge arrives each month because naturally the promotion has ended. If the possibility of a refund exists, it'll be found at the end of 45 minutes of holding music or a week's worth of angry e-mails.

  Everyone has been there. So in 2010, London-based UX designer Harry Brignull decided he'd document it. Brignull's website, darkpatterns.org, offers plenty of examples of deliberately confusing or deceptive user interfaces. These dark patterns trick unsuspecting users into a gamut of actions: setting up recurring payments, purchasing items surreptitiously added to a shopping cart, or spamming all contacts through prechecked forms on Facebook games.

• Russia Without BS

  Welcome dear reader, to Russia Without BS, the foreigner-in-Russia blog that strives to give all those interested in Russia an insight into life in the capital from the perspective of an ordinary working American. If you're interested in Russian life and politics without the bias and sensationalism of Western journalism or the farcical Russophilia of the Putin fan club, you've come to the right blog. If you're interested in living and working in Russia and you're skeptical of the expat literature that's full of embellished, exaggerated, and occasionally fabricated tales of nightly debauchery or James Bond fantasies, read on.

More on a topic I've blogged about before here and before that here.

• The 7 biggest problems facing science, according to 270 scientists
  1. Academia has a huge money problem
  2. Too many studies are poorly designed
  3. Replicating results is crucial -- and rare
  4. Peer review is broken
  5. Too much science is locked behind paywalls
  6. Science is poorly communicated
  7. Life as a young academic is incredibly stressful
  Conclusion: Science is not doomed

  "I think the one thing that would have the biggest impact is removing publication bias: judging papers by the quality of questions, quality of method, and soundness of analyses, but not on the results themselves," writes Michael Inzlicht, a University of Toronto psychology and neuroscience professor.

  Some journals are already embracing this sort of research. PLOS One, for example, makes a point of accepting negative studies (in which a scientist conducts a careful experiment and finds nothing) for publication, as does the aptly named Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine.

• A Rant on Peer Review

  George J. Borjas

  I have a few pet peeves. One of them is how "peer review" is perceived by far too many people as the gold standard certification of scientific authority. Any academic who's been through the peer review process many times (as I have) knows that the process is full of potholes and is sometimes subverted by unethical behavior on the part of editors and reviewers.
  ...
  The point is that many human emotions, including nepotism, professional jealousies, methodological disagreements, and ideological biases go into the peer review process. It would be refreshing if we interpreted the "peer-reviewed" sign of approval as the flawed signal that it is, particularly in areas where there seems to be a larger narrative that must be served. The peer-review process may well be the worst way of advancing scientific knowledge--except for all the others.

• Why Most Clinical Research Is Not Useful

  John P. A. Ioannidis

  • Blue-sky research cannot be easily judged on the basis of practical impact, but clinical research is different and should be useful. It should make a difference for health and disease outcomes or should be undertaken with that as a realistic prospect.
  • Many of the features that make clinical research useful can be identified, including those relating to problem base, context placement, information gain, pragmatism, patient centeredness, value for money, feasibility, and transparency.
  • Many studies, even in the major general medical journals, do not satisfy these features, and very few studies satisfy most or all of them. Most clinical research therefore fails to be useful not because of its findings but because of its design.
  • The forces driving the production and dissemination of nonuseful clinical research are largely identifiable and modifiable.
  • Reform is needed. Altering our approach could easily produce more clinical research that is useful, at the same or even at a massively reduced cost.

• A Crisis at the Edge of Physics

  DO physicists need empirical evidence to confirm their theories?

  A few months ago in the journal Nature, two leading researchers, George Ellis and Joseph Silk, published a controversial piece called "Scientific Method: Defend the Integrity of Physics." They criticized a newfound willingness among some scientists to explicitly set aside the need for experimental confirmation of today's most ambitious cosmic theories -- so long as those theories are "sufficiently elegant and explanatory." Despite working at the cutting edge of knowledge, such scientists are, for Professors Ellis and Silk, "breaking with centuries of philosophical tradition of defining scientific knowledge as empirical."