Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• What Minimum-Wage Foes Got Wrong About Seattle

  The dire warnings about minimum-wage increases keep proving to be wrong. So much so that in a new paper, the authors behind an earlier study predicting a negative impact have all but recanted their initial conclusions. However, the authors still seem perplexed about why they went awry in the first place.
  ...
  But we can't emphasize enough just how wrong many of the initial analyses of the wage increase have been. Cognitive dissonance is a powerful force. If your ideology includes the belief that all government attempts at raising living standards are doomed, then of course you are going to be against mandated minimum wages. The problem occurs when these folks are confronted by facts that are at odds with their belief systems. The options are to either rethink your ideology or alternatively ignore the data. Most participants seem to have done the latter. Kudos to the University of Washington team for at least trying to incorporate the facts into their latest research.

• Universal Basic Income Is Silicon Valley's Latest Scam

  The plan is no gift to the masses, but a tool for our further enslavement. Douglas Ruchkoff

  To the rescue comes UBI. The policy was once thought of as a way of taking extreme poverty off the table. In this new incarnation, however, it merely serves as a way to keep the wealthiest people (and their loyal vassals, the software developers) entrenched at the very top of the economic operating system. Because of course, the cash doled out to citizens by the government will inevitably flow to them.
  ...
  Whether its proponents are cynical or simply naive, UBI is not the patch we need. A weekly handout doesn't promote economic equality-- much less empowerment. The only meaningful change we can make to the economic operating system is to distribute ownership, control, and governance of the real world to the people who live in it.

• A New Report Offers Insights Into Tribalism in the Age of Trump

  Throughout the past year, the report's four authors surveyed eight thousand randomly chosen Americans, asking questions about "core beliefs": moral values, attitudes toward parenting and personal responsibility, perceptions of threats, approaches to group identity. The authors then sorted people, based on their beliefs and values, into seven "tribes": Progressive Activists, Traditional Liberals, Passive Liberals, Politically Disengaged, Moderates, Traditional Conservatives, Devoted Conservatives. Progressive Activists, as described by the report, tend to be "younger, highly engaged, secular, cosmopolitan, angry." The Politically Disengaged are "young, low income, distrustful, detached, patriotic, conspiratorial." Moderates are "engaged, civic-minded, middle-of-the-road, pessimistic, Protestant." Devoted Conservatives are "white, retired, highly engaged, uncompromising, patriotic."

  More in Common found that "tribal membership predicts differences in Americans' views on various political issues better than demographic, ideological, and partisan groupings." In other words, whether or not you think creativity is more important than good behavior in children is a better indicator of your political views than is your gender, your race, your income, or your party affiliation. "Once we have the seven segments, their views on issues are highly correlated," Tim Dixon, an Australian political activist and a founder of More in Common, told me. He added, "We have too much opinion research and not enough value research."

• Why Can Only 24% Solve Bayesian Reasoning Problems in Natural Frequencies:

  Frequency Phobia in Spite of Probability Blindness

  For more than 20 years, research has proven the beneficial effect of natural frequencies when it comes to solving Bayesian reasoning tasks (Gigerenzer and Hoffrage, 1995). In a recent meta-analysis, McDowell and Jacobs (2017) showed that presenting a task in natural frequency format increases performance rates to 24% compared to only 4% when the same task is presented in probability format. Nevertheless, on average three quarters of participants in their meta-analysis failed to obtain the correct solution for such a task in frequency format. In this paper, we present an empirical study on what participants typically do wrong when confronted with natural frequencies. We found that many of them did not actually use natural frequencies for their calculations, but translated them back into complicated probabilities instead. This switch from the intuitive presentation format to a less intuitive calculation format will be discussed within the framework of psychological theories (e.g., the Einstellung effect).

• The Scientific Paper Is Obsolete

  The more sophisticated science becomes, the harder it is to communicate results. Papers today are longer than ever and full of jargon and symbols. They depend on chains of computer programs that generate data, and clean up data, and plot data, and run statistical models on data. These programs tend to be both so sloppily written and so central to the results that it's contributed to a replication crisis, or put another way, a failure of the paper to perform its most basic task: to report what you've actually discovered, clearly enough that someone else can discover it for themselves.
  ...
  The idea for IPython's notebook interface came from Mathematica. Pérez admired the way that Mathematica notebooks encouraged an exploratory style. "You would sketch something out-because that's how you reason about a problem, that's how you understand a problem." Computational notebooks, he said, "bring that idea of live narrative out ... You can think through the process, and you're effectively using the computer, if you will, as a computational partner, and as a thinking partner."
  ...
  At every turn, IPython chose the way that was more inclusive, to the point where it's no longer called "IPython": The project rebranded itself as " Jupyter" in 2014 to recognize the fact that it was no longer just for Python. The Jupyter notebook, as it's called, is like a Mathematica notebook but for any programming language.

  Also see, Why Jupyter is data scientists’ computational notebook of choice.

• Men and Women Can't Be "Just Friends"

  Researchers asked women and men "friends" what they really think - and got very different answers.

  The results suggest large gender differences in how men and women experience opposite-sex friendships. Men were much more attracted to their female friends than vice versa. Men were also more likely than women to think that their opposite-sex friends were attracted to them - a clearly misguided belief. In fact, men's estimates of how attractive they were to their female friends had virtually nothing to do with how these women actually felt, and almost everything to do with how the men themselves felt - basically, males assumed that any romantic attraction they experienced was mutual, and were blind to the actual level of romantic interest felt by their female friends. Women, too, were blind to the mindset of their opposite-sex friends; because females generally were not attracted to their male friends, they assumed that this lack of attraction was mutual.
  ...
  Taken together, these studies suggest that men and women have vastly different views of what it means to be "just friends" - and that these differing views have the potential to lead to trouble. Although women seem to be genuine in their belief that opposite-sex friendships are platonic, men seem unable to turn off their desire for something more. And even though both genders agree overall that attraction between platonic friends is more negative than positive, males are less likely than females to hold this view.

• #MeToo Will Not Survive Unless We Recognize Toxic Femininity

  Women are not monolithic. Pretending they are holds everyone back. Meghan Daum

  #MeToo is important. #BelieveWomen is hollow sloganeering that will ultimately set us back rather than move us forward. Like all movements, #MeToo will live or die by the degree to which it's willing to let people in. Until it makes room for examinations not just of toxic masculinity but also toxic femininity-and, even better, dispatch with these meaningless terms-it will continue to tell only half the story. Until it admits that women can be as manipulative and creepy and generally awful as men, the movement will continue to send a message that we're not really whole people. And why would anyone believe someone like that?

• Is Huge Publishing Hoax 'Hilarious and Delightful' or an Ugly Example of Dishonesty and Bad Faith?

  'Sokal Squared'

  Three scholars - Helen Pluckrose, a self-described "exile from the humanities" who studies medieval religious writings about women; James A. Lindsay, an author and mathematician; and Peter Boghossian, an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University - spent 10 months writing 20 hoax papers that illustrate and parody what they call "grievance studies," and submitted them to "the best journals in the relevant fields." Of the 20, seven papers were accepted, four were published online, and three were in process when the authors "had to take the project public prematurely and thus stop the study, before it could be properly concluded." A skeptical Wall Street Journal editorial writer, Jillian Kay Melchior, began raising questions about some of the papers over the summer.

  Beyond the acceptances, the authors said, they also received four requests to peer-review other papers "as a result of our own exemplary scholarship." And one paper - about canine rape culture in dog parks in Portland, Ore. - "gained special recognition for excellence from its journal, Gender, Place, and Culture … as one of 12 leading pieces in feminist geography as a part of the journal's 25th anniversary celebration."

• Genetic Attributions: Sign of Intolerance or Acceptance?

  Many scholars argue that people who attribute human characteristics to genetic causes also tend to hold politically and socially problematic attitudes. More specifically, public acceptance of genetic influences is believed to be associated with intolerance, prejudice, and the legitimation of social inequities and laissez-faire policies. We test these expectations with original data from two nationally representative samples that allow us to identify the American public's attributional patterns across 18 diverse traits. Key findings are (1) genetic attributions are actually more likely to be made by liberals, not conservatives; (2) genetic attributions are associated with higher, not lower, levels of tolerance of vulnerable individuals; and (3) genetic attributions do not correlate with unseemly racial attitudes.

• Why think about Philosophy and Engineering?

  We need to bring the two worlds together, both for the intrinsic value of better understanding engineering, but also to help society better use engineering to improve overall well-being.

  Bringing engineers and philosophers into deeper conversation allows for both to learn from each other, and can serve as a community to reflect on society's broader approach toward engineering and its governance. In this way, fPET research can also be seen as 'in family' with a lot of other humanties and 'science and technology studies' research that strives for a deeper engagement between science and the liberal arts.

Various web links looking back on the tenth anniversary of the 2008 Financial Crisis

• After the Financial Crisis, Wall Street Turned to Charity-and Avoided Justice

  This is the shape our recovery has taken: some bailouts, some fines, some giving, and a net transfer of wealth from the many to the few. Is it any wonder that our political discourse is angrier, fringier, and more paranoid than at any time in memory? The stark fact about the financial crisis ten years on is that, in retrospect, it was a good deal for many of the people who caused it. Imagine what might have been: a recovery in which homeowners and indebted students had won relief from their loans, in which banks had agreed to pay a fairer share of taxes in exchange for the bailout help, in which they had been required to pump more of their capital into the real economy instead of swilling it around Wall Street. But none of that was to be, because, as the e-mail shows, a little bit of generosity could be put forward as a plausible substitute for justice. Giving in millions has a way of erasing harm done in billions.

• The Real Cost of the 2008 Financial Crisis

  The aftermath produced a lost decade for European economies and helped lead to the rise of anti-establishment political movements here and abroad.

  In "Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World," the Columbia economic historian Adam Tooze points out that we are still living with the consequences of 2008, including the political ones. Using taxpayers' money to bail out greedy and incompetent bankers was intrinsically political. So was quantitative easing, a tactic that other central banks also adopted, following the Fed's lead. It worked primarily by boosting the price of financial assets that were mostly owned by rich people.

• He Was the Resistance Inside the Obama Administration

  Timothy Geithner's refusal to obey his boss has had long-term political and economic consequences.

  According to credible accounts, Geithner slow-walked a direct presidential order to prepare the breakup of Citigroup, instead undertaking other measures to nurse the insolvent bank back to health. This resistance to accountability for those who perpetrated the crisis, consistent with Geithner's demonstrated worldview, had catastrophic effects-including the Trump presidency itself.
  ...
  Any objective look at Geithner's actions in response to the financial crisis confirms that he would maximize his power on behalf of big banks, even if it meant going around his colleagues and his president. That included paying off AIG's investment bank counter-parties at 100 percent instead of forcing a discount, or blocking Bair, the FDIC chair, from forcing higher capital rules on banks. Every action fit Geithner's worldview: The financial system must be stabilized at all costs, as the only way to heal the economy so real people benefit. "We do not need to imagine that he was in the pocket of any one bank," Adam Tooze wrote in the new book Crashed. "It was his commitment to the system that dictated that Citigroup should not be broken up."

  But this neglects the political implications of deploying massive resources to save Citigroup and Wall Street more broadly. Failing to hold anyone accountable for causing the Great Recession as the economy struggled to regain its footing generated significant public resentment, from the Tea Party on the right to Occupy Wall Street on the left. The same urgency and ingenuity was simply not adopted to save homeowners drowning in mortgage debt, which weighed down the overall recovery. Obama fired the CEO of GM, but no bank executive suffered for a moment. And people noticed.