Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• I was Jordan Peterson’s strongest supporter. Now I think he’s dangerous

  By Bernard Schiff, Professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Toronto

  In the end, I am writing this because of his extraordinary rise in visibility, the nature of his growing following and a concern that his ambitions might venture from stardom back to his long-standing interest in politics. I am writing this from a place of sadness and from a sense of responsibility to the public good to tell what I know about who Jordan is, having seen him up close, as a colleague and friend, and having examined up close his political actions at the University of Toronto, allegedly in defence of free speech. When he soared into the stratosphere he became peculiarly unknowable. There is something about the dazzle of the limelight that makes it hard to see him clearly. But people continue to be who they are even in the blinding overexposure of success. I have known Jordan Peterson for 20 years, and people had better know more about who he is.

  Also see YouTube videos by Rationality Rules debunking Jordan Peterson:

  • Jordan Peterson's Truth - Debunked

    "Jordan Peterson is the Deepak Chopra of Christianity".

  • Jordan Peterson's Archetypes Debunked
    Second in series debunking Jordan Peterson's religious beliefs.
    

• Series of Unsurprising Results in Economics (SURE)

  An e-journal of high-quality research with "unsurprising" findings.

  We publish scientifically important and carefully-executed studies with statistically insignificant or otherwise unsurprising results. Studies from all fields of Economics will be considered. SURE is an open-access journal and there are no submission charges.

  SURE benefits readers by:

  • Mitigating the publication bias and thus complementing other journals in an effort to provide a complete account of the state of affairs;
  • Serving as a repository of potential (and tentative) "dead ends" in Economics research.

  SURE benefits writers by:

  • Providing an outlet for interesting, high-quality, but "risky" (in terms of uncertain results) research projects;
  • Decreasing incentives to data-mine, change theories and hypotheses ex post or exclusively focus on provocative topics.

• Noise: How to Overcome the High, Hidden Cost of Inconsistent Decision Making

  by Daniel Kahneman, Andrew M. Rosenfield, Linnea Gandhi, and Tom Blaser

  Professionals in many organizations are assigned arbitrarily to cases: appraisers in credit-rating agencies, physicians in emergency rooms, underwriters of loans and insurance, and others. Organizations expect consistency from these professionals: Identical cases should be treated similarly, if not identically. The problem is that humans are unreliable decision makers; their judgments are strongly influenced by irrelevant factors, such as their current mood, the time since their last meal, and the weather. We call the chance variability of judgments noise. It is an invisible tax on the bottom line of many companies.
  ...
  In this article we explain the difference between noise and bias and look at how executives can audit the level and impact of noise in their organizations. We then describe an inexpensive, underused method for building algorithms that remediate noise, and we sketch out procedures that can promote consistency when algorithms are not an option.

• Tailspin: How My Generation Broke America

  Steve Brill: How Baby Boomers Broke America

  About five decades ago, the core values that make America great began to bring America down. The First Amendment became a tool for the wealthy to put a thumb on the scales of democracy. America's rightly celebrated dedication to due process was used as an instrument to block government from enforcing job-safety rules, holding corporate criminals accountable and otherwise protecting the unprotected. Election reforms meant to enhance democracy wound up undercutting democracy. Ingenious financial and legal engineering turned our economy from an engine of long-term growth and shared prosperity into a casino with only a few big winners.

  These distinctly American ideas became the often unintended instruments for splitting the country into two classes: the protected and the unprotected. The protected overmatched, overran and paralyzed the government. The unprotected were left even further behind. And in many cases, the work was done by a generation of smart, hungry strivers who benefited from one of the most American values of all: meritocracy.

• Sam Harris and the Myth of Perfectly Rational Thought

  Author: Robert Wright

  We all need role models, and I'm not opposed in principle to Harris's being mine. But I think his view of himself as someone who can transcend tribalism-and can know for sure that he's transcending it-may reflect a crude conception of what tribalism is. The psychology of tribalism doesn't consist just of rage and contempt and comparably conspicuous things. If it did, then many of humankind's messes-including the mess American politics is in right now-would be easier to clean up.

  What makes the psychology of tribalism so stubbornly powerful is that it consists mainly of cognitive biases that easily evade our awareness. Indeed, evading our awareness is something cognitive biases are precision-engineered by natural selection to do. They are designed to convince us that we're seeing clearly, and thinking rationally, when we're not. And Harris's work features plenty of examples of his cognitive biases working as designed, warping his thought without his awareness. He is a case study in the difficulty of transcending tribal psychology, the importance of trying to, and the folly of ever feeling sure we've succeeded.

• The Sam Harris-Ezra Klein debate

  Ezra and Sam Harris debate race, IQ, identity politics, and much more.

  The short version is that Sam Harris, host of the Waking Up podcast, and I have been going back and forth over an interview Harris did with The Bell Curve author Charles Murray. In that interview, which first aired almost a year ago, the two argued that African Americans are, for a combination of genetic and environmental reasons, intrinsically and immutably less intelligent than white Americans, and Murray argued that the implications of this "forbidden knowledge" should shape social policy. Vox published a piece criticizing the conversation, Harris was offended by the piece and challenged me to a debate, and after a lot of back-and-forth, this is that debate.

• Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web

  An alliance of heretics is making an end run around the mainstream conversation. Should we be listening?

  Here are some things that you will hear when you sit down to dinner with the vanguard of the Intellectual Dark Web: There are fundamental biological differences between men and women. Free speech is under siege. Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart. And we're in a dangerous place if these ideas are considered "dark."
  ...
  The closest thing to a phone book for the I.D.W. is a sleek website that lists the dramatis personae of the network, including Mr. Harris; Mr. Weinstein and his brother and sister-in-law, the evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying; Jordan Peterson, the psychologist and best-selling author; the conservative commentators Ben Shapiro and Douglas Murray; Maajid Nawaz, the former Islamist turned anti-extremist activist; and the feminists Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Christina Hoff Sommers. But in typical dark web fashion, no one knows who put the website up.

  Also see the online magazine Quillette:

  Quillette is a platform for free thought. We respect ideas, even dangerous ones.

• DuckDuckGo (search engine)

  The Solopreneur That Is Beating Google at Its Game

  DuckDuckGo is a general purpose search engine, which focuses on privacy. Although I will call it a search engine DuckDuckGo is more of a hybrid engine. In short, it uses proprietary crawlers on the one hand. And APIs from other websites on the other hand. The mission is clear, DuckDuckGo doesn't store your personal information. Therefore, your personal details won't be shared either. In short, they address a felt issue, which is privacy.

  Also see, Why should I use DuckDuckGo instead of Google?

• GoodRx

  Stop paying too much for your prescriptions

  1. Collect and compare prices for every FDA-approved prescription drug at more than 70,000 US pharmacies
  2. Find free coupons to use at the pharmacy
  3. Show the lowest price at each pharmacy near you

• Chronic pain treatment: Psychotherapy, not opioids, has been proven to work

  100 million Americans have chronic pain. Very few use one of the best tools to treat it.

  Chronic pain often has no physical cause. Psychotherapy can reduce the suffering.

• Chemical Sleuthing Unravels Possible Path to the Formation of Life's Building Blocks in Space

  Experiments at Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light Source reveal how a hydrocarbon called pyrene could form near stars.

  Scientists have used lab experiments to retrace the chemical steps leading to the creation of complex hydrocarbons in space, showing pathways to forming 2-D carbon-based nanostructures in a mix of heated gases.
  ...
  "Starting off from simple gases, you can generate one-dimensional and two-dimensional structures, and pyrene could lead you to 2-D graphene," Ahmed said. "From there you can get to graphite, and the evolution of more complex chemistry begins."