Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• What Do Economists Actually Know?

  Turns out, not as much as you -- and they -- would like to think.   by Russ Roberts

  But there is no way of knowing reliably if the consensus reflects the truth. It may rely instead on the underlying biases of the prosecutors and defendants in the intellectual trial of ideas. Or where they received their PhD degrees. Or the fashionability of certain positions over time as society changes. Unlike product markets where poorly made products are punished by low prices or fewer and fewer consumers, there are no clear feedback loops in the world of academic economics. You can say something that is wrong and the price you pay may be zero. In fact you may be rewarded.

  And that is because of what does not happen. There is never a clean empirical test that ultimately settles these issues. There is no reliable scientific experiment where each side is forced to make a prediction and the results settle the matter.
  ...
  Most economics claims are really not verifiable or replicable. (And if you are interested in the related crisis of statistical reliability and replicability in psychology and elsewhere, follow Brian Nosek on Twitter and listen to him here). Most economic claims rely on statistical techniques that try to simulate a laboratory experiment that holds all relevant factors constant. That is the hope. My claim is that in general, holding all relevant factors cannot be done in a way that is reliable or verifiable. And that is why so many empirical issues such as the minimum wage, immigration, fiscal policy, monetary policy and so on, have smart people on both sides of the issue each with their own sophisticated analysis to bolster their claim.
  ...
  I am arguing that the math and science of economic predictions and assessments are nothing like the math and science of space travel. Economics provides the illusion of science, the veneer of mathematical certainty.

• The economics of beard popularity in the US

  In the early 20th century, beards once again began to be associated with anti-capitalist movements, and for nearly a century they were nowhere to be seen in corporate board rooms and many parts of society, being relegated to "fringe" sets.

  Then along came the tech boom, which made many scruffy outsiders in Silicon Valley rich and powerful members of the capitalist landscape. People like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Jack Dorsey redefined how we view powerful business heads and have helped usher in a new period of beard acceptance and popularity.

• Mitt Romney's former policy director makes the case for the GOP's health bill

  Lanhee Chen explains why Republicans landed on this health care bill, and this process.

• Breaking Faith -- Peter Beinart

  The culture war over religious morality has faded; in its place is something much worse.

  Secularism is indeed correlated with greater tolerance of gay marriage and pot legalization. But it's also making America's partisan clashes more brutal. And it has contributed to the rise of both Donald Trump and the so-called alt-right movement, whose members see themselves as proponents of white nationalism. As Americans have left organized religion, they haven't stopped viewing politics as a struggle between "us" and "them." Many have come to define us and them in even more primal and irreconcilable ways.
  ...
  For decades, liberals have called the Christian right intolerant. When conservatives disengage from organized religion, however, they don't become more tolerant. They become intolerant in different ways. Research shows that evangelicals who don't regularly attend church are less hostile to gay people than those who do. But they're more hostile to African Americans, Latinos, and Muslims.

• The Unpersuadables

  Book Review: The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science by Will Storr.

  We would like to believe people are rational. We would like to believe that if they have formed a false belief based on inaccurate information and poor reasoning, they will change that belief when they are provided with accurate information and better reasoning. We are frequently disappointed.
  ...
  We can't even trust our memories. They are reconstructed every time we access them, and they can become distorted or contaminated with other memories. Psychological studies suggest that about 30% of our memories are false, including some of the ones we are most confident about.
  ...
  Cognitive dissonance is painful; confirmation bias is comforting. Experience is re-interpreted in such a way that it doesn't force us to rebuild our internal models of reality. We are all prejudiced, but we need prejudices to function efficiently. They serve as a practical starting point for our guesses about the world.

  We are subject to confirmation bias; we get a feel-good "neurochemical kiss" as a reward for confirming a brain model. Confirmation bias serves a purpose. If we had to fairly evaluate every new argument and every bit of new evidence from scratch and constantly rebuild our models, we would become hopelessly overwhelmed and unable to function.

• Heterodox Academy

  We are a politically diverse group of social scientists, natural scientists, humanists, and other scholars who want to improve our academic disciplines and universities.

  We share a concern about a growing problem: the loss or lack of "viewpoint diversity." When nearly everyone in a field shares the same political orientation, certain ideas become orthodoxy, dissent is discouraged, and errors can go unchallenged.

  To reverse this process, we have come together to advocate for a more intellectually diverse and heterodox academy.

• Ping-Pong as the Fountain of Youth

  Ping-Pong, or table tennis as it is officially known, is one of the fastest racket sports, requiring muscular and cardiorespiratory endurance. Players need nimble footwork and upper body flexibility to return balls that can fly over 60 miles per hour, demanding faster response times than tennis or badminton.

• What was the real paleo diet? Prehistoric plaque reveals what Neanderthals ate.

  If you are what you eat, Neanderthals might have been a diverse, flexible bunch ... just like their diets.

  Examining the contents of the calcified plaque of five Neanderthal specimens that range from 42,000 to 50,000 years old, researchers who study ancient DNA were able to determine their diet. And, it turns out, not all Neanderthals ate alike.

  Some dined on a lot of meat, eating the flesh of animals like woolly rhinoceros and wild sheep. But others may have been complete vegetarians, according to a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature. In the plaque of these Neanderthal vegetarians, researchers found no evidence of any meat. Instead, they say these individuals dined on mushrooms, pine nuts, and moss.

• Hit Makers by Derek Thompson

  The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction

  Nothing "goes viral." If you think a popular movie, song, or app came out of nowhere to become a word-of-mouth success in today's crowded media environment, you're missing the real story. Each blockbuster has a secret history--of power, influence, dark broadcasters, and passionate cults that turn some new products into cultural phenomena. Even the most brilliant ideas wither in obscurity if they fail to connect with the right network, and the consumers that matter most aren't the early adopters, but rather their friends, followers, and imitators -- the audience of your audience.

• Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives

  by Tim Harford

  Messy: How To be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World celebrates the benefits that messiness has in our lives: why it's important, why we resist it, and why we should embrace it instead.

Links reflecting my cynicism about philosophy.

• Five part series about What Is Philosophy's Point? by John Horgan in Scientific American:
  1. Part 1 (Hint: It's Not Discovering Truth)

     Philosophy can still serve many purposes, even if it can't compete with science as a method of accumulating knowledge

  2. Part 2--Maybe It's a Martial Art

     Philosophers sometimes seem more concerned with winning than wisdom

  3. Part 3--Maybe It Should Stick to Ethics

     Philosophers keep giving us moral advice in spite of their doubts about all ethical systems

  4. Part 4--Maybe It's Poetry with No Rhyme and Lots of Reason

     The line between philosophy and the arts can get awfully blurry

  5. Part 5--A Call for "Negative Philosophy"

     Philosophy's chief value is countering our terrible tendency toward certitude

  Followed by: Philosophers Push Back

  Philosophers react to a science journalist's critique of their calling

• Philosophers' biased judgments persist despite training, expertise and reflection.

  We examined the effects of framing and order of presentation on professional philosophers' judgments about a moral puzzle case (the "trolley problem") and a version of the Tversky & Kahneman "Asian disease" scenario. Professional philosophers exhibited substantial framing effects and order effects, and were no less subject to such effects than was a comparison group of non-philosopher academic participants. Framing and order effects were not reduced by a forced delay during which participants were encouraged to consider "different variants of the scenario or different ways of describing the case". Nor were framing and order effects lower among participants reporting familiarity with the trolley problem or with loss-aversion framing effects, nor among those reporting having had a stable opinion on the issues before participating the experiment, nor among those reporting expertise on the very issues in question. Thus, for these scenario types, neither framing effects nor order effects appear to be reduced even by high levels of academic expertise.

  Full paper (pdf).

• Cheeseburger Ethics

  Are professional ethicists good people? According to our research, not especially. So what is the point of learning ethics?

  Ethicists do not appear to behave better. Never once have we found ethicists as a whole behaving better than our comparison groups of other professors, by any of our main planned measures. But neither, overall, do they seem to behave worse. (There are some mixed results for secondary measures.) For the most part, ethicists behave no differently from professors of any other sort -- logicians, chemists, historians, foreign-language instructors.

  Nonetheless, ethicists do embrace more stringent moral norms on some issues, especially vegetarianism and charitable donation. Our results on vegetarianism were particularly striking. In a survey of professors from five US states, we found that 60 per cent of ethicist respondents rated 'regularly eating the meat of mammals, such as beef or pork' somewhere on the 'morally bad' side of a nine-point scale ranging from 'very morally bad' to 'very morally good'. By contrast, only 19 per cent of non-philosophy professors rated it as bad. That's a pretty big difference of opinion! Non-ethicist philosophers were intermediate, at 45 per cent. But when asked later in the survey whether they had eaten the meat of a mammal at their last evening meal, we found no statistically significant difference in the groups' responses -- about 38 per cent of professors from all groups reported having done so (including 37 per cent of ethicists).

  ... We aspire to be about as morally good as our peers. If others cheat and get away with it, we want to do the same. We don't want to suffer for goodness while others laughingly gather the benefits of vice. If the morally good life is uncomfortable and unpleasant, if it involves repeated painful sacrifices that are not compensated in some way, sacrifices that others are not also making, then we don't want it.

  Can one blame physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson for Dismissing Philosophy As 'Useless'.