Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• The Curse of Middle-Aged Capitalism for Trump, Rest of Us

  A similar story applies to corporate investment in buildings and machinery (computers, vehicles). From 1975 to 2015, this capital investment has dropped from 8% of corporate assets to 4%. Interestingly, this decline in investment was mostly offset by increases in corporate research and development (R&D) -- reflecting the need to develop new digital products and programs, say Kahle and Stulz. But the R&D spending was heavily skewed toward bigger firms. Half of publicly traded firms showed no R&D.
  ...
  But what if the weaknesses go deeper? For example: It's hard to argue that cuts in corporate taxes will accelerate economic growth if many companies are already suffering losses -- and don't benefit from tax cuts. Similarly, large, very profitable firms, with huge piles of cash but few appealing investment projects, won't suddenly find new projects if their taxes are cut.

• How your mind protects you against hallucinations

  These examples suggest hallucinations arise when the brain gives more weight to its expectations and beliefs about the world than to the sensory evidence it receives, says study author and Yale psychiatrist Philip Corlett.
  ...
  The team hypothesized that people who hear voices would be more likely to "believe" in auditory hallucinations. That's precisely what they found: Both the schizophrenics and self-described psychics were nearly five times more likely to say they heard the nonexistent tone than healthy controls. They were also about 28% more confident that they had heard the tone when none was there, the researchers report today in Science.

• How To Know You're In a Mass Hysteria Bubble

  Scott Adams (Dilbert)

  The most visible Mass Hysteria of the moment involves the idea that the United States intentionally elected a racist President. If that statement just triggered you, it might mean you are in the Mass Hysteria bubble. The cool part is that you can't fact-check my claim you are hallucinating if you are actually hallucinating. But you can read my description of the signs of mass hysteria and see if you check off the boxes.

  If you're in the mass hysteria, recognizing you have all the symptoms of hysteria won't help you be aware you are in it. That's not how hallucinations work. Instead, your hallucination will automatically rewrite itself to expel any new data that conflicts with its illusions.
  ...
  On November 8th of 2016, half the country learned that everything they believed to be both true and obvious turned out to be wrong. The people who thought Trump had no chance of winning were under the impression they were smart people who understood their country, and politics, and how things work in general. When Trump won, they learned they were wrong. They were so very wrong that they reflexively (because this is how all brains work) rewrote the scripts they were seeing in their minds until it all made sense again. The wrong-about-everything crowd decided that the only way their world made sense, with their egos intact, is that either the Russians helped Trump win or there are far more racists in the country than they imagined, and he is their king. Those were the seeds of the two mass hysterias we witness today.

• How to Stop Gentrification

  Individuals moving to newly-hip neighborhoods admit they are part of the problem. What can they do?

  Drawing on earlier urban scholars, Moskowitz breaks the process down into four basic steps. First, individuals seeking cheap rents begin moving to a disinvested neighborhood, sometimes forming their own sub-communities: artists, radicals, and so on. Before long, more middle-class people follow, and real-estate interests catch on. Soon enough, the new middle-class residents take their place in the neighborhood"s institutions and begin reshaping power dynamics, attracting more amenities (and, notably, police), as well as bigger-money developers. By the time "managerial-class professionals" find their way to the neighborhood, the original gentrifiers can no longer afford it and get pushed out, starting the process over again in another neighborhood.

• How "Despacito" became the biggest song of 2017

  An anatomy of what made "Despacito" the most popular song of the year.

  Also related How Did Pop Music Get So Slow.

• Prediction Markets & Crowdsourced Forecasting

  DOES (HUMAN + MACHINE) x GEOPOLITICAL FORECASTING = HYPERACCURACY? (Philip Tetlock)

  The Hybrid Forecasting Competition (HFC) is a government-sponsored research program designed to test the limits of geopolitical forecasting. By combining the ingenuity of human analysts with cutting edge machine systems (including statistical models and algorithms), HFC will develop novel capabilities to help the U.S. Intelligence Community improve their forecasts in an increasingly uncertain world.

• An Introduction to Emergent Order in Our Daily Lives

  Russ Roberts

  There is order sprinkled liberally throughout the chaotic nature of nature. The planets orbit the sun. Birds of a feather flock together. Fish make schools of fish. Ants create colonies. No ant is in charge of the ant colony, yet an order emerges from the actions of the individual ants that no one of them intends. The colony and the bee hive seems to have a mind of their own that can respond to challenges and change, independent of any of its members.
  ...
  We humans create emergent order as well--order that is the product of human action but not human design. It looks like someone is in charge yet no one and no group intends these outcomes we observe and experience. These parts of our lives are incredibly orderly and reliable. They look as if someone or a group of people have convened to take action together. It looks like someone is steering the system to achieve certain goals. But no single human being is in charge or intending what actually occurs.

• What Meditation Can Do for Us, and What It Can't

  Examining the science and supernaturalism of Buddhism.

  Wright sets out to provide an unabashedly American answer to all these questions. He thinks that Buddhism is true in the immediate sense that it is helpful and therapeutic, and, by offering insights into our habitual thoughts and cravings, shows us how to fix them. Being Buddhist-that is, simply practicing Vipassana, or "insight" meditation-will make you feel better about being alive, he believes, and he shows how you can and why it does.
  ...
  What Wright correctly sees as the heart of meditation practice-the draining away of the stories we tell compulsively about each moment in favor of simply having the moment-is antithetical to the kind of evidentiary argument he admires. Science is competitive storytelling. If a Buddhist Newton had been sitting under that tree, he would have seen the apple falling and, reaching for Enlightenment, experienced each moment of its descent as a thing pure in itself. Only a restless Western Newton would say, "Now, what story can tell us best what connects those apple-moments from branch to ground?
  ...
  Science is putting names on things and telling stories about them, the very habits that Buddhists urge us to transcend.

Some links about health care matters.

• A radical new hypothesis in medicine: give patients drugs they know don't work

  Why the placebo effect is weirder and potentially more useful than we imagined.

  Placebos only affect what the brain can modulate. It's not going to shrink a tumor. It's not going to deal with malaria. But it will deal with pain, fatigue, and nausea. Or will deal with feeling malaise. But it's not going to deal with killing bacteria. That doesn't happen on the level of the brain.
  ...
  The first open-label study we did was in irritable bowel syndrome. People on no treatment got about 30 percent better. And people who were given an open-label placebo got 60 percent improvement in the adequate relief of their irritable bowel syndrome.

• Please Calm Down: Coconut Oil Is Fine

  In response to articles like: Coconut oil 'as unhealthy as beef fat and butter'

  The studies don't link eating more coconut oil to heart disease-they link it to a changing cholesterol metric. A metric that, if you look for it, has lots of conflicting data as to how it makes things worse and how badly (may I point you to Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories).
  So, coconut oil is fine. It's not fantastic. It's not horrible. It's just a source of saturated fat probably not as bad as butter. Which we also don't think is that bad.

• Chiropractors are bullshit

  You shouldn't trust them with your spine or any other part of your body.

  Chiropractic care, I'm sorry to say, is little more than the buffoonery of a 19th-century lunatic who derived most of his medical theory from séances. It has not evolved much since its creation. Chiropractic beliefs are dangerously far removed from mainstream medicine, and the vocation's practices have been linked to strokes, herniated discs, and even death. Chiropractors can't replace your doctor, and I'm amazed that they're still even allowed to practice. You shouldn't trust them with your spine or any other part of your body, and here's why.
  ...
  Though some chiropractors are now making an effort to introduce evidence-based practices into their treatment, chiropractic as a whole hasn't evolved like other areas of medicine -- with hypotheses, experimentation, and peer review. Instead, it was birthed by a strange combination of hocus pocus, guesswork, and strongly held religious beliefs. I'm not being hyperbolic when I cite hocus pocus. Palmer held séances to contact a dead physician named Jim Atkinson, and said that those séances helped him develop chiropractic.

  Also see the skeptics guide to everything chiropractic.

• Why I Won't Get a PSA Test for Prostate Cancer

  Physicians are still recommending the blood test for prostate cancer even though it harms far more men than it helps.

  The problem is that inflammation and other problems unrelated to cancer can also elevate PSA levels. And when the PSA test correctly detects cancer, it is often so slow-growing that it would never have caused death or even impairment of health. Detection of these non-deadly cancers is called overdiagnosis.
  ...
  Just to be clear: you are 240-120 times more likely to misdiagnosed as a result of a positive PSA test and 80-40 times more likely to get unnecessary surgery or radiation than you are to have your life saved.