Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds

  The vaunted human capacity for reason may have more to do with winning arguments than with thinking straight.

  Stripped of a lot of what might be called cognitive-science-ese, Mercier and Sperber's argument runs, more or less, as follows: Humans' biggest advantage over other species is our ability to cooperate. Cooperation is difficult to establish and almost as difficult to sustain. For any individual, freeloading is always the best course of action. Reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems or even to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data; rather, it developed to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.

• The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

  Human beings are primates, and primates are political animals. Our brains were designed not just to gather and hunt, but also to get ahead socially, often by devious means. The problem is that we like to pretend otherwise; we're afraid to acknowledge the extent of our own selfishness. And this makes it hard for us to think clearly about ourselves and our behavior.

  The Elephant in the Brain aims to fix this introspective blind spot by blasting floodlights into the dark corners of our minds. Only when everything is out in the open can we really begin to understand ourselves: Why do humans laugh? Why are artists sexy? Why do people brag about travel? Why do we so often prefer to speak rather than listen?

  Like all psychology books, The Elephant in the Brain examines many quirks of human cognition. But this book also ventures where others fear to tread: into social critique. The authors show how hidden selfish motives lie at the very heart of venerated institutions like Art, Education, Charity, Medicine, Politics, and Religion.

  Acknowledging these hidden motives has the potential to upend the usual political debates and cast fatal doubt on many polite fictions. You won't see yourself -- or the world -- the same after confronting the elephant in the brain.

• Most scientists 'can't replicate studies by their peers'

  Science is facing a "reproducibility crisis" where more than two-thirds of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, research suggests.

  The reproducibility difficulties are not about fraud, according to Dame Ottoline Leyser, director of the Sainsbury Laboratory at the University of Cambridge.

  That would be relatively easy to stamp out. Instead, she says: "It's about a culture that promotes impact over substance, flashy findings over the dull, confirmatory work that most of science is about."

  She says it's about the funding bodies that want to secure the biggest bang for their bucks, the peer review journals that vie to publish the most exciting breakthroughs, the institutes and universities that measure success in grants won and papers published and the ambition of the researchers themselves.

• The Only Thing, Historically, That's Curbed Inequality: Catastrophe

  Plagues, revolutions, massive wars, collapsed states--these are what reliably reduce economic disparities.

  The pressures of total war became a uniquely powerful catalyst of equalizing reform, spurring unionization, extensions of voting rights, and the creation of the welfare state. During and after wartime, aggressive government intervention in the private sector and disruptions to capital holdings wiped out upper-class wealth and funneled resources to workers; even in countries that escaped physical devastation and crippling inflation, marginal tax rates surged upward. Concentrated for the most part between 1914 and 1945, this "Great Compression" (as economists call it) of inequality took several more decades to fully run its course across the developed world until the 1970s and 1980s, when it stalled and began to go into reverse.

• Donald Trump Isn't Mentally Ill. He's Just Unpleasant, Psychiatrist Says

  "Most amateur diagnosticians have mislabeled President Trump with the diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder. I wrote the criteria that define this disorder, and Mr. Trump doesn't meet them," Frances wrote in a letter to the New York Times.

  Frances chaired the team that defined psychiatric disorders for the mental health profession -- the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV (called DSM 4). The DSM V or 5 is the most recent edition.

  "He may be a world-class narcissist, but this doesn't make him mentally ill, because he does not suffer from the distress and impairment required to diagnose mental disorder," Frances wrote.

  A personality disorder must lead to "clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning," the DSM IV says.

  "Mr. Trump causes severe distress rather than experiencing it and has been richly rewarded, rather than punished, for his grandiosity, self-absorption and lack of empathy," Frances wrote.

• Things Every Hacker Once Knew

  Eric S. Raymond reminisces

  There are lots of references to Unix in here because I am mainly attempting to educate younger open-source hackers working on Unix-derived systems such as Linux and the BSDs. If those terms mean nothing to you, the rest of this document probably won't either.

• Evaluating partisan gains from Congressional gerrymandering

  Using computer simulations to estimate the effect of gerrymandering in the U.S. House

  The analysis reveals that while Republican and Democratic gerrymandering affects the partisan outcomes of Congressional elections in some states, the net effect across the states is modest, creating no more than one new Republican seat in Congress. Therefore, the partisan composition of Congress can mostly be explained by non-partisan districting, suggesting that much of the electoral bias in Congressional elections is caused by factors other than partisan intent in the districting process.

• The Motion Microscope

  'Motion microscope' reveals movements too small for the human eye

  By using an algorithm that magnifies minute changes in color and movement, researchers are able to extract basic vital signs like heart rate and breathing from any old video.
  You can even use these algorithms to listen in on someone's conversation by keeping an eye on the objects around them. MIT researchers recently published a study in which they extracted intelligible audio by analyzing the movements of a nearby bag of chips. By magnifying its movements, they were able to reconstruct the soundwaves that were causing it to flutter imperceptibly.
  

  Michael Rubinstein TED Talk
• Psychiatrists Must Face Possibility That Medications Hurt More Than They Help

  Mental health has declined as prescriptions for antidepressants and other drugs keep surging

  It is time for mental-health practitioners in the U.S. and elsewhere to come to grips with the possibility that medications are doing more harm than good.

• India's Secret to Low-Cost Health Care

  Harvard Business Review

  At a time when health care costs in the United States threaten to bankrupt the federal government, U.S. hospitals would do well to take a leaf or two from the book of Indian doctors and hospitals that are treating problems of the eye, heart, and kidney all the way to maternity care, orthopedics, and cancer for less than 5% to 10% of U.S. costs by using practices commonly associated with mass production and lean production.
  ...
  The nine Indian hospitals we studied are not cheap because their care is shoddy; in fact, most of them are accredited by the U.S.-based Joint Commission International or its Indian equivalent, the National Accreditation Board for Hospitals. Where available, data show that their medical outcomes are as good as or better than the average U.S. hospital.

• Fasting diet 'regenerates diabetic pancreas'

  The pancreas can be triggered to regenerate itself through a type of fasting diet, say US researchers.

  Dr Valter Longo, from the University of Southern California, said: "Our conclusion is that by pushing the mice into an extreme state and then bringing them back - by starving them and then feeding them again - the cells in the pancreas are triggered to use some kind of developmental reprogramming that rebuilds the part of the organ that's no longer functioning."

  Rhonda Patrick related interview:
  Valter Longo, Ph.D. on Fasting-Mimicking Diet & Fasting for Longevity, Cancer & Multiple Sclerosis