Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• Debunking The Myth That Anti-Zionism Is Anti-Semitic

  Peter Beinart

  As David Harris, head of the American Jewish Committee, put it last year, "To deny the Jewish people, of all the peoples on earth, the right to self-determination surely is discriminatory."

  All the peoples on earth? The Kurds don't have their own state. Neither do the Basques, Catalans, Scots, Kashmiris, Tibetans, Abkhazians, Ossetians, Lombards, Igbo, Oromo, Uyghurs, Tamils, Quebecois nor dozens of other peoples who have created nationalist movements to seek self-determination but failed to achieve it.
  ...
  

  In the real world, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism don't always go together.

  Before Israel's creation, some of the world leaders who most ardently promoted Jewish statehood did so because they did not want Jews in their own countries.
  ...
  

  If anti-Semitism exists without anti-Zionism, anti-Zionism also clearly exists without anti-Semitism.

  Consider the Satmar, the largest Hasidic sect in the world. In 2017, twenty thousand Satmar men - a larger crowd than attended that year's AIPAC Policy Conference - filled Brooklyn's Barclays Center for a rally aimed at showing, in the words of one organizer, that "We feel very strongly that there should not be and could not be a State of Israel before the Messiah comes."

• The unnatural ethics of AI could be its undoing

  Algorithms are so good at racism that it will hopefully become impossible to ignore.

  Because, if we believe tech gurus at least, the Trolley Problem is about to become of huge real-world importance. Human beings might not find themselves in all that many Trolley Problem-style scenarios over the course of their lives, but soon we're going to start seeing self-driving cars on our streets, and they're going to have to make these judgments all the time. Self-driving cars are potentially going to find themselves in all sorts of accident scenarios where the AI controlling them has to decide which human lives it ought to preserve. But in practice what this means is that human beings will have to grapple with the Trolley Problem - since they're going to be responsible for programming the AIs.

• Robo-Apocalypse? Not in Your Lifetime

  As Autor observes, though auto manufacturers "employ industrial robots to install windshields ... aftermarket windshield replacement companies employ technicians, not robots." It turns out that "removing a broken windshield, preparing the windshield frame to accept a replacement, and fitting a replacement into that frame demand more real-time adaptability than any contemporary robot can cost-effectively approach." In other words, automation depends on fully controlled conditions, and humans will never achieve full control of the entire environment.

  Some might counter that artificial-intelligence applications could develop a capacity to absorb "tacit knowledge." Yet even if machine-learning algorithms could communicate back to us why they have made certain decisions, they will only ever work in restricted environmental domains. The wide range of specific conditions that they need in order to function properly renders them brittle and fragile, particularly when compared to the robust adaptability of human beings.

• The rising cost of education and health care is less troubling than believed

  These possibilities reveal the real threat from Baumol' s disease: not that work will flow toward less-productive industries, which is inevitable, but that gains from rising productivity are unevenly shared. When firms in highly productive industries crave highly credentialed workers, it is the pay of similar workers elsewhere in the economy-of doctors, say-that rises in response. That worsens inequality, as low-income workers must still pay higher prices for essential services like health care. Even so, the productivity growth that drives cost disease could make everyone better off. But governments often do too little to tax the winners and compensate the losers. And politicians who do not understand the Baumol effect sometimes cap spending on education and health. Unsurprisingly, since they misunderstand the diagnosis, the treatment they prescribe makes the ailment worse.

• Interpretations and methods: Towards a more effectively self-correcting social psychology

  We consider how valid conclusions often lay hidden within research reports, masked by plausible but unjustified conclusions reached in those reports. We employ several well-known and cross-cutting examples from the psychological literature to illustrate how, independent (or in the absence) of replicability difficulties or questionable research practices leading to false positives, motivated reasoning and confirmation biases can lead to drawing unjustified conclusions. In describing these examples, we review strategies and methods by which researchers can identify such practices in their own and others' research reports. These strategies and methods can unmask hidden phenomena that may conflict with researchers' preferred narratives, in order to ultimately produce more sound and valid scientific conclusions. We conclude with general recommendations for how social psychologists can limit the influence of interpretive biases in their own and others' research, and thereby elevate the scientific status and validity of social psychology.

• Meta-Research: A comprehensive review of randomized clinical trials in three medical journals reveals 396 medical reversals

  The ability to identify medical reversals and other low-value medical practices is an essential prerequisite for efforts to reduce spending on such practices. Through an analysis of more than 3000 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) published in three leading medical journals (the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Lancet, and the New England Journal of Medicine), we have identified 396 medical reversals. Most of the studies (92%) were conducted on populations in high-income countries, cardiovascular disease was the most common medical category (20%), and medication was the most common type of intervention (33%).

• Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard - by David Moser

  Most Chinese people will cheerfully acknowledge that their language is hard, maybe the hardest on earth.

  1. Because the writing system is ridiculous.
  2. Because the language doesn't have the common sense to use an alphabet.
  3. Because the writing system just ain't very phonetic.
  4. Because you can't cheat by using cognates.
  5. Because even looking up a word in the dictionary is complicated.
  6. Then there's classical Chinese (wenyanwen).
  7. Because there are too many romanization methods and they all suck.
  8. Because tonal languages are weird.
• Can hit songs be worth more than gold?

  Nowadays even songs can have shareholders. Hipgnosis Songs Fund is steadily building up a catalogue of hit songs and inviting big institutional investors to share in the proceeds. That means a much wider group of people can see an income from music royalties. The fund floated on the London Stock Exchange in July 2018 and recently published its first-ever annual results.

• Tyrannical Minds

  Dean A. Haycock Ph.D.

  Authoritarian and virtuous characters, common traits of dictators, paths to tyranny.

Some recent items related to economics and business

• Why Bias Will Always Be a Part of Economics

  Perhaps no other discipline has as fraught a relationship with the idea of bias as economics. Because economics is more complex than most of what’s studied in the natural sciences, no set of rules of inquiry will ever fully eliminate the need for judgment calls by the researcher. And judgment calls are where our biases truly have teeth.

• Beyond Unemployment

  In modern economies, people may have jobs, but they still harbor major concerns in a wide range of areas, including security, health and work-life balance, income and distribution, training, mobility, and opportunity. By focusing solely on the unemployment rate, policymakers are ignoring the many dimensions of employment that affect welfare.

• America's Illusions of Growth

  Many commentators have interpreted buoyant GDP and unemployment data in the United States as vindicating President Donald Trump's economic policies, and some suggest that his re-election chances have improved as a result. But these indicators fail to measure what really counts for the public.

  As a firm believer in the rationality of the public, Barro should consider what the public actually says. According to the most recent Gallup survey, 40% of the public approve of the 2017 tax cuts, while 49% disapprove - a net negative assessment confirmed by several other recent polls. The public is looking beyond any temporary boost in spending and is concerned about growing income and wealth inequality and the soaring budget deficit. Following Barro himself (via Ricardo), they most likely surmise that future tax hikes are on the way.

• Big business

  Critical review of Tyler Cowen's book "Big Business: A love Letter to an American Anti-Hero"

  On some of the specific issues he lists, there is probably something to what he says (and I'm with him in pushing back against the Elizabeth Warren approach to capitalism and business), but as a general proposition (which is what he makes it out to be) what he claims - that companies are a source of social and political good, going beyond merely the production they facilitate - is at very least arguable.
  ...
  But businesses are owned, staffed, and run by human beings, and are unlikely to be consistently any better than those human beings. If anything, and around the limits and taboos that societies might seek to establish and maintain, they will often be worse - even as they remain very narrowly efficient in marshalling inputs and generating outputs.

  What are the odds that Cowen examined the pros and cons of big business without prejudice to come to his conclusions? My guess is he had the title for the book before he ever started writing it. It's well known that cognitive dissonance hampers a persons ability to see facts that go against prior beliefs and the smarter one is the better they are at finding evidence to support their beliefs.

• George Mason economics department admits it sold hiring control to anonymous, super-rich donors

  George Mason University has long defended its willingness to take $50,000,000 from the Charles Koch Foundation by insisting that the money didn't come with strings attached -- and insisting that the fact that their economics department says a lot of things that makes Koch very happy is just a mysterious coincidence.

  But now the university president, Angel Cabrera, says that he has discovered that since at least 2003, the university's development department (the people who hit up donors for money) have been entering into secret agreements with big-money donors to let them appoint members of the university's hiring committee for the economics department.

  Interestingly this is the home of Tyler Cowen, the lover of big business.