Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• The Utter Emptiness of Trump’s Populism

  In Europe, right-wing demagogues steer material benefits to working-class supporters, but the current U.S. president has delivered nothing of the sort.

  Trump hasn’t done any such thing. Other than on trade, he’s utterly abandoned the economic populism that he touted during the 2016 campaign. As a candidate, he vowed not to reduce Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid. In office, he endorsed a push to turn Medicaid into a block grant, thus leaving it vulnerable to dramatic cuts. On the campaign trail, he pledged to end the carried-interest deduction that benefits the private-equity and hedge-fund industries and promised not to cut taxes for the rich. As president, though, he signed a tax cut whose benefits go mostly to the wealthiest and offered little support when Republican Senators Marco Rubio and Mike Lee pushed for a child tax credit vaguely reminiscent of what Poland offers. Candidate Trump suggested raising the minimum wage to $10 an hour and instituting a $1 trillion infrastructure plan. In office, he has backed off both.

• What The AJC Poll Gets Wrong About American Jews And Zionism

  Peter Beinart

  But the AJC wants to be bipartisan. More importantly, part of its mission is to defend the Israeli government against harsh criticism and external pressure. Since that criticism comes mostly from the left, defining it as anti-Semitism allows the AJC to pretend that its work against bigotry and its work on behalf of Benjamin Netanyahu are one and the same.
  ...
  But the phrase "right to exist" is deeply loaded. It's a formulation that evokes deep-seeded, post-Holocaust fears about Jews losing their, individual, "right to exist." The real question is whether Israel has the right to be a Jewish state that holds millions of Palestinians as permanent non-citizens under military law.
  ...
  In version number two, Israel grants those Palestinians citizenship, which means the end of Jewish political dominance and the potential end of Israel as a state that offers special privileges and protections to Jews. Version number two, which key BDS leaders support, is what the AJC means by Israel losing its "right to exist."
  Is it anti-Semitic to support one state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River in which everyone lives under the same law? Is it more bigoted than one Jewish state that holds millions of Palestinians as permanent non-citizens under military blockade and military law?
  

• Non-Intuitive Lessons From the Man Who Solved the Market

  Gregory Zuckerman book about Jim Simons's Renaissance Technologies hedge fund.

  Ren Tech uses a number of non-intuitive signals so it's only fitting that the lessons from Simons and his firm are non-intuitive as well. Here are the main lessons:

  • Keep it simple. Simons decided the Medallion fund would use a single model to make things easier.
  • Know who's on the other side of your trades. Renaissance was exploiting the foibles and faults of fellow speculators, both big and small.
  • Sometimes the whys don't matter. One of the reasons Simons and his researchers have been successful is they didn't come from an investing background.
  • Human behavior makes the market go round. Our entire premise was that human actors will react the way humans did in the past...we learned to take advantage.
  • Be humble. Ren Tech claimed to only be right on roughly 51% of their trades. People who think they're right all the time will eventually be humbled by the markets.

• Go master quits because AI 'cannot be defeated'

  A master player of the Chinese strategy game Go has decided to retire, due to the rise of artificial intelligence that "cannot be defeated".
  ...
  He will play against HanDol, a program developed by South Korea's NHN Entertainment Corp, which has already defeated the country's top five Go players. Lee will be given an advantage of two stones in the first game, but suspects he will lose.

• How Deep Sleep May Help The Brain Clear Alzheimer's Toxins

  The brain waves generated during deep sleep appear to trigger a cleaning system in the brain that protects it against Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative diseases.

  Electrical signals known as slow waves appear just before a pulse of fluid washes through the brain, presumably removing toxins associated with Alzheimer's, researchers reported Thursday in the journal Science.

• Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep" Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors

  In the process of reading the book and encountering some extraordinary claims about sleep, I decided to compare the facts it presented with the scientific literature. I found that the book consistently overstates the problem of lack of sleep, sometimes egregiously so. It misrepresents basic sleep research and contradicts its own sources.

  1. No, shorter sleep does not imply shorter life span
  2. No, a good night's sleep is not always beneficial: sleep deprivation therapy in depression
  3. No, lack of sleep will not outright kill you
  4. No, the World Health Organization never declared a sleep loss epidemic
  5. No, two-thirds of adults in developed nations do not fail to obtain the recommended amount of sleep

  To hear from Matthew Walker himself see the discussion at Found My Fitness

• The Dating Market: Thesis Overview

  A conservative estimate of the percentage of new relationships begun online in 2019 is at least 65%, but likely over 75%.
  ...
  With the advent of online dating, women in prime reproductive age are in the dominant position in the dating market for the first time in human history.

• Poop 101: A beginner's guide to reading your own poop
  • Earth tones are healthy -- but so are lots of other colors
  • There's no ideal poop shape
  • Food bits are fine, but lots of them is weird
  • Mucus and fat aren't okay

Some links related to understanding and estimating probabilities.

• The Sleeping Beauty Problem

  Nice video explanation from Julia Galef of the philosophical Sleeping Beauty problem.

  For more information see the description in Quanta Magazine

• Hey-guess what? There really is a hot hand!

  Refers to analysis of streakiness in basketball shooting.

  We find a subtle but substantial bias in a standard measure of the conditional dependence of present outcomes on streaks of past outcomes in sequential data. The mechanism is driven by a form of selection bias, which leads to an underestimate of the true conditional probability of a given outcome when conditioning on prior outcomes of the same kind. The biased measure has been used prominently in the literature that investigates incorrect beliefs in sequential decision making - most notably the Gambler's Fallacy and the Hot Hand Fallacy. Upon correcting for the bias, the conclusions of some prominent studies in the literature are reversed. The bias also provides a structural explanation of why the belief in the law of small numbers persists, as repeated experience with finite sequences can only reinforce these beliefs, on average.

• Simpson's Paradox

  Simpson's paradox occurs when groups of data show one particular trend, but this trend is reversed when the groups are combined together.

  For example you and a friend do problems and your friend does better each day but that doesn't mean the friend does better when the two days are combined:

  Day	You	Friend
  Saturday	7⁄8 = 87.5%	2⁄2 = 100%
  Sunday	1⁄2 = 50%	5⁄8 = 62.5%
  Total	8⁄10 = 80%	7⁄10 = 70%

• Replication Markets

  Predict which social and behavioral science studies will replicate and win cash prizes.

  1. Predict social and behavioral science results.
  2. Help improve scientific research methods.
  3. Earn rewards for your insights.