Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• Economics: The new astrology

  By fetishising mathematical models, economists turned economics into a highly paid pseudoscience

  Every economist I interviewed agreed that conflicts of interest were highly problematic for the scientific integrity of their field - but only tenured ones were willing to go on the record. 'In economics and finance, if I'm trying to decide whether I'm going to write something favourable or unfavourable to bankers, well, if it's favourable that might get me a dinner in Manhattan with movers and shakers,' Pfleiderer said to me. "I've written articles that wouldn't curry favour with bankers but I did that when I had tenure."
  ...
  Economists who rationalise their discipline's value can be convincing, especially with prestige and mathiness on their side. But there's no reason to keep believing them. The pejorative verb 'rationalise' itself warns of mathiness, reminding us that we often deceive each other by making prior convictions, biases and ideological positions look 'rational', a word that confuses truth with mathematical reasoning. To be rational is, simply, to think in ratios, like the ratios that govern the geometry of the stars. Yet when mathematical theory is the ultimate arbiter of truth, it becomes difficult to see the difference between science and pseudoscience. The result is people like the judge in Evangeline Adams's trial, or the Son of Heaven in ancient China, who trust the mathematical exactitude of theories without considering their performance - that is, who confuse math with science, rationality with reality.

• No, Seattle's $15 Minimum Wage Is Not Hurting Workers

  Contrary to what one unrepresentative study found, the city's workers are actually benefiting from the wage hike.

  There are, of course, naysayers. A recent University of Washington study argued that Seattle's wage hike would actually hurt workers overall because an hourly increase would be offset by a reduction of workers' hours and decreased employment. But IRLE researchers and others challenged that study as excessively limited in scope, based on an unrepresentative sample of workers. The Berkeley researchers contend that their analysis focuses on material impacts in a more representative sector.

  Probably an example of how one's politics can influence your conclusions.

• The weird power of the placebo effect, explained

  Belief is the oldest medicine known to man.

  The family of placebo effects ranges from the common sense to some head scratchers.

  1. Regression to the mean
     When people first go to a doctor or start on a clinical trial, their symptoms might be particularly bad (why else would they have sought treatment?). But in the natural course of an illness, symptoms may get better all on their own. In depression clinical studies, for instance, researchers find around one-third of patients get better without drugs or placebo.
  2. Confirmation bias
     A patient may hope to get better when they're in treatment, so they will change their focus. They'll pay closer attention to signs that they're getting better and ignore signs that they're getting worse.
  3. Expectations and learning
     ... So awareness that you're being given something that's supposed to relieve pain seems to impact perception of it working.
     ... The research also suggests that fake surgeries - where doctors make some incisions but don't actually change anything - are an even stronger placebo than pills.
     ... The research also suggests that fake surgeries - where doctors make some incisions but don't actually change anything - are an even stronger placebo than pills.
     ... There is such thing as the nocebo effect: where negative expectations make people feel worse.
     
  4. Pharmacological conditioning
     For instance, Colloca has found that individual neurons in the brains of patients with Parkinson's disease will still respond to placebos as though they are actual anti-Parkinson's drugs after such conditioning has taken place.
     
  5. Social learning
     When study participants see another patient get relief from a placebo treatment they have a greater placebo response.
     
  6. A human connection
     ... The warm, friendly acupuncturist was able to produce better relief of symptoms.
     ... This may be the least-understood component of placebo: It's not just about pills. It's about the environment a pill is taken in. It's about the person who gave it to you - and the rituals and encounters associated with them.
  Also see Surgery Is One Hell Of A Placebo about sham surgery.
• The Myth of Drug Expiration Dates

  Hospitals and pharmacies are required to toss expired drugs, no matter how expensive or vital. Meanwhile the FDA has long known that many remain safe and potent for years longer.

  The idea that drugs expire on specified dates goes back at least a half-century, when the FDA began requiring manufacturers to add this information to the label. The time limits allow the agency to ensure medications work safely and effectively for patients. To determine a new drug's shelf life, its maker zaps it with intense heat and soaks it with moisture to see how it degrades under stress. It also checks how it breaks down over time. The drug company then proposes an expiration date to the FDA, which reviews the data to ensure it supports the date and approves it. Despite the difference in drugs' makeup, most "expire" after two or three years.
  ...
  Pharmacists and researchers say there is no economic "win" for drug companies to investigate further. They ring up more sales when medications are tossed as "expired" by hospitals, retail pharmacies and consumers despite retaining their safety and effectiveness.
  ...
  A 2006 study of 122 drugs tested by the program showed that two-thirds of the expired medications were stable every time a lot was tested. Each of them had their expiration dates extended, on average, by more than four years, according to research published in the Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences.

• High US health care spending is quite well explained by its high material standard of living

  When properly analyzed with better data and closer attention to detail, it becomes quite clear that US healthcare spending is not astronomically high for a country of its wealth.

• Fareed Zakaria made a scary prediction about democracy in 1997 - and it's coming true

  Democracy is rising, but not the good kind.

  Zakaria's piece made an important distinction between democracy and liberalism, constructs that are often conflated. Democracy is a process for choosing leaders; it's about popular participation. To say that a state is democratic is to say little about how it is actually governed.

• The more things change

  What kinds of sex one has varies enormously over time, as does with what kinds of and how many people. We can see this over big periods of history and within living memory in our own culture.

Some links about politics and democracy in the United States.

• The problem with democracy is voters

  Democracy for Realist by Christopher H. Achen & Larry M. Bartels
  Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government
  Why almost everything you think about democracy is wrong.

  Even voters who pay close attention to politics are prone - in fact, more prone - to biased or blinkered decision-making. The reason is simple: Most people make political decisions on the basis of social identities and partisan loyalties, not an honest examination of reality.
  ...
  So much of politics, not surprisingly, turns out to be about expressive behavior rather than instrumental behavior - in other words, people making decisions based on momentary feeling and not on some sound understanding of how those decisions will improve or hurt their life.
  ...
  I think it's hard to see how the public as a whole would steer the country in any particular direction. Usually when we think about public input, we think about public input in response to particular kinds of choices that have been framed by political elites of one kind or the other, whether they're party leaders or elected officials.
  ...
  History clearly demonstrates that democracies need parties to organize and simplify the political world. But parties don't make the fundamental problems of democratic control disappear; they just submerge them more or less successfully. When professional politicians are reasonably enlightened and skillful and the rules and political culture let them do their job, democracy will usually work pretty well. When not, not.
  ...
  If you think about democracy in the terms we prefer, you might say the biggest limitation at the moment is that we don't know how to incorporate the role of political elites in a constructive way into the governing process or to somehow make it possible to ensure that they're working on behalf of the interests of ordinary people.
  ...
  It seems clear to us that a lot of the actual ways in which people of ordinary education or ordinary means or just not much power, the ways in which they are disadvantaged are often occurring at the level of policymaking rather than at the level of elections themselves. The financial sector, for instance, is having a lot of policy success in Washington, in ways that ordinary people, if they really understood what was happening, would not approve. But they don't follow it closely enough, they don't understand, and the policy process is tilted toward moneyed interests that ordinary people have no chance.

• I was a lobbyist for more than 6 years. I quit.

  My conscience could't take it anymore. "The hypocrisy from both sides is staggering."

  Today, most lobbyists are engaged in a system of bribery but it's the legal kind, the kind that runs rampant in the corridors of Washington. It's a system of sycophantic elected leaders expecting a campaign cash flow, and in return, industry, interest groups, and big labor are rewarded with what they want: legislation and rules that favor their constituencies.
  ...
  Know this: Lobbyists are not bad people. They're simply doing their jobs, and those jobs are not only legal but protected by the First Amendment. The political left loves to shit all over lobbyists, but they dial for dollars just like their Republican brethren. And as for the political right? Well, at least they make no bones about paying to play. It's "free speech by God. The Supreme Court makes it so!"

• Alan Dershowitz pulverizes liberal anti-Trump Russia theories

  But Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, a liberal who voted for Hillary Clinton, believes Mueller's appointment will help Trump - not bring his downfall like so many Democrats want.

• The Bullshitter-in-Chief

  Donald Trump's disregard for the truth is something more sinister than ordinary lying.

  As the Princeton University philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt put it in a famous essay, to lie presumes a kind of awareness of and interest in the truth - and the goal is to convince the audience that the false thing you are saying is in fact true. Trump, more often than not, isn't interested in convincing anyone of anything. He's a bullshitter who simply doesn't care.
  ...
  When Trump says something like he's just learned that Barack Obama ordered his phones wiretapped, he's not really trying to persuade people that this is true. It's a test to see who around him will debase themselves to repeat it blindly. There's no greater demonstration of devotion.