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Dispatches from Weird Platonic Spherical Cow Perfect Rationality Outside View World

Links 12/15: Ma’oz Tz-URL

In 2007, the Texas Legislature officially declared that the West Pole was in the town of Bee Cave, Texas.

Vox: Hamilton’s Cabinet Battle #1 Explained. Using a silly song to investigate a tough question: how easy it is to map our current concepts of “right” and “left” onto the 1700s’ Federalist and Democratic-Republican parties? Is there a clear line between either of them and either modern party? With the perspective of history, can we clearly identify either as the “good guys”? Just similar enough to our own time to produce an uncanny valley effect.

“Blowback theory” is the common belief that the West’s overly harsh response to terrorism is itself encouraging more Middle Easterners to become terrorists. Anonymous Mugwump explains how studies do not support it. [EDIT: But some disagree, see here and comments]

That experiment people were saying showed a “cure for diabetes” that would prevent people from needing insulin? Actually an n = 14 safety study not designed to test efficacy. Yet still pretty cool.

The Greater Male Variability Hypothesis says that men will have more variability on most traits than women, and therefore the highest and lowest performers in lots of areas will be disproportionately male. It goes along with a neat genetic explanation: males don’t have a backup for the X chromosome and so small mutations there have more effect – and a neat evolutionary explanation: men have more variability in their reproductive success and so should pursue higher-risk strategies. A 2013 study gives the theory an interesting test – what about birds, where females are XY and males XX? Here the female birds have more variability, suggesting the genetic principle is sound but casting doubt on the evolutionary explanation. Unless I’m misunderstanding something.

The 21 Bitcoin Computer is a computer that’s constantly producing bitcoins in the background and integrating them into some kind of micropayment structure so you can buy things without spending any of your own money on them. Problem is it costs $400, costs more in electricity than it makes in bitcoins, and is worse than any other payment method in practically every way. Nevertheless smart people have informed me that for complicated reasons this is The Future. We should probably all get three of them if we don’t want to be buried beneath the tide of progress.

I know I mentioned that there were rationalist solstice celebrations in SF and NYC, but I have been reminded that there is another celebration in Boston this Friday evening and one in Seattle on the 19th.

Israeli Jews have a fertility rate of 3, very high for developed countries, despite a high level of female education. Some of this is driven by the Orthodox, but even more liberal Israeli Jews average about 2.6, compared to more like 1.3 for secular Jewish Americans. Why such a big difference?

Related: Palestinian PM Mahmoud Abbas says he turned down a peace plan in 2008 because the Israelis demanded an on-the-spot decision from him and wouldn’t even let him show the plan to his advisors first. Now he is reduced to drawing the proposed border from memory because Israel wouldn’t let him keep the map. Really, Israelis? Really?

Steven Pearlstein: Four Tough Things Universities Should Do To Rein In Costs vs. Daniel Drezner: Four Tough Things Columnists Should Do Before Writing About Universities.

The Islamic State has a really professionally done English-language magazine, and you can read every issue online as long as you don’t mind probably ending up on various FBI lists. My favorite article is Issue 11, page 16, where they pre-emptively denounce Iran for taking the side of the Jewish Messiah in the End Times, even though said Messiah will probably be the Devil.

As usual you should read Harold Lee: The Confucian Heuristic.

As usual you should read Sarah Constantin: Regulatory Problems With Cancer Research.

I have always been skeptical of the research showing that spanking traumatizes children and causes them various problems throughout their life. For one thing, it’s a shared-environmental effect. For another, it’s just too convenient – this thing everyone in history has done forever turns out to be really bad for you, and the late-20th-century-rich-Westerner way of doing things is actually provably way better! Brian Boutwell is also skeptical, but unlike me he did a really complicated study that shows that a lot of this may be genetic confounds – some of the variation in which parents spank their children may be genetic, and these genes could be passed down to children and correlated with child outcomes. Exactly how much of the variation this explains I’m not sure, as the statistics get really complicated and their model goes all over the place.

New study: White police officers do show a racial bias in favor of ticketing black motorists. Twist: black police officers show a racial bias in ticketing white motorists.

RCT: Diet soda causes (slightly) more weight gain than water. You might think that’s obvious, but it really isn’t – a lot of diet sodas are zero-calorie, and water is zero-calorie, so classically they ought to be equivalent. Not sure whether this is a real result or confounded by something else – eg group randomized to diet soda primed to eat fast food because it goes well with soda, or something.

In the old days, people said poverty explained racial gaps in educational achievement. Then someone did a study controlling for poverty and found the gaps still remained. The new conventional wisdom points to concentrated poverty, the effects not just of being in poverty yourself, but growing up in a neighborhood full of other poor people. So what happens when you control for that? (warning: simple, non-peer reviewed analysis)

Space and time may be built out of quantum entanglement. Scott Aaronson very kindly tried to explain this to me, but I got hung up on how the qubits knew which other qubits they were entangled with if there was no spatial arrangement to them and information about those relationships didn’t seem to be encoded in any of the qubits that made up the universe. The answer seems to be “look, saying that qubits are entangled with each other might sound more complicated than saying they’re arranged in space, but the math is actually a lot simpler, so this is an important forward step”.

What should we do about the moribund state of the Less Wrong website? Should it be an aggregator, an archive, or something more?

That “gold standard” study “proving” that brain training worked? Included 70% attrition rate, carried over data from dropouts in a weird way, used a self-report measure, et cetera

What factors determine whether a country’s men are happier than its women or vice versa? As per a new paper in the Journal of Happiness Studies, the main determinant was that the lower the female employment rate, the happier (relative to men) women were; the female:male happiness ratio was highest (in favor of women!) in Muslim countries and the Middle East. Woodley papers always give me the impression that they are trolling, and this one is no exception. Related: Meta-analysis of gender differences.

So there is epigenetic information about weight carried in sperm cells, but that still doesn’t explain how it survives the general post-conception epigenetic reprogramming and nobody seems to be asking that question.

The big debate in effective altruism this month: earn to give, or choose a directly beneficial career?

You’ve heard of embodied cognition, now get ready for enclothed cognition.

Jacobin Magazine is obviously really variable, but Real Utopias is a surprisingly mature and readable piece. After admitting that advocating a giant revolution probably isn’t the best way to deal with the excesses of capitalism, they start a classification system for anti-capitalist activity including “eroding capitalism”, ie working within the system to create non-capitalist institutions that are better than capitalism and will eventually take over. Sounds a lot like some of the best libertarian and conservative ideas I hear about as well. There are worse futures than the one where politics turns into everyone competing to create awesome institutions that catch on and take over.

Dog Rating Twitter. Related: Guide To Dog Rating Twitter Breeds.

You know those oil paintings you can get for like $50 at Wal-Mart? You know how they look hand-painted? Turns out they are indeed hand-painted on giant art assembly lines all in a single Chinese village. I betray my Fake Capitalist Girl nature by feeling like maybe it would just be easier to print them off and save everyone the trouble.

I always felt the universally-cited statistic that 15% of depressives eventually commit suicide sounded way too high. Turns out it was indeed way too high. The study lasted five years, and 15% of the depressives who died during those five years died of suicide, but since most people don’t die in any five year period it was disproportionately the ones who died young who got counted. The real number is more like 2%. Also, REALLY?! NOBODY THOUGHT ABOUT THAT UNTIL NOW?!

Depending on what you classify as a “mass shooting”, you can prove pretty much whatever you want about mass shootings.

I discussed this during my talk in Boston, but it’s nice to have it all in one place: A meta-analysis of the fade-out effect in raising early intelligence. Extrapolated just a little, this is the sort of thing that makes me doubt college’s effects on critical thinking last very long.

The best discussion of gun control, like the best discussion of most other things, comes from Popehat: “OK, maybe not actually ::air quotes:: hounds ::air quotes::”

Finland is likely to enact a basic income of 800 euro/month! Not sure how close that is to a living wage in Finland or what will happen if it’s not enough for somebody. [EDIT: preliminary]

After the Titanic sank, the government passed a law requiring ships to have lots of lifeboats. The weight of all the extra lifeboats made the S. S. Eastland top-heavy, and in 1915 it sank, killing 844 passengers. Sometimes I feel like everything is like this.

In my post on Lizardman’s Constant, I suggested polls include an obviously stupid option so we could see how many respondents were trolling. Now some tried that, and apparently the answer is it depends.

University of Ottawa bans free yoga class because yoga is a form of “cultural appropriation”. I hate to have to make a big deal of this, but since we still live in a world where Vox wants us to edit our browsers to auto-change “political correctness” to “treating people with respect”, fine, big deal it is.

I’m cautiously optimistic about the Paris climate talks, and they have already resulted in an agreement to restore 360,000 square miles of African forest by 2030. Talk may be cheap, but they’ve also agreed on $1.5 billion in funding.

There are only two known polyhedra where each face shares an edge with each other face: the common tetrahedron and this thing.

Coronary angioplasty in stable heart disease does not improve survival.

Study: Sweden’s intensive refugee integration program has no effect on integration of refugees as measured by employment and earnings.

Why Is English So Weirdly Different From Other Languages? It’s got a lot of unique features, and their theory is that this was because Olde England was a complicated melting pot/invasion target of all different cultures. Fine. But wasn’t everywhere a complicated melting pot/invasion target of all different cultures? Still not seeing why that would make English special. Related: Is “eeny, meeny, miny, mo” the numbers one through four in Cornish?

Why does building subways in the US cost five times as much as building similar subways in European countries? How come American railroads have the same issues? How come Robert Moses was like the only American in the entire 20th century who could actually do a halfway-decent job getting infrastructure built, and how did that shape New York’s position as America’s preeminent city? Transit Infrastructure and the Temptations of Techno-Autocracy.

We know professors are more likely to be liberal than the average American. How much of that is increased intelligence versus some sort of academia-specific factor? Here, have a bar graph on the subject.

More on the compound interest question: The Effects of General Sherman’s March To The Sea. Southern counties devastated by Sherman’s scorched-earth strategy in the Civil War had some lingering ill effects even fifty years later. No news on whether those still persist.

Why don’t we ever hear about Alexander the Great’s brothers? Probably because he killed them all so they wouldn’t give him trouble.

Nowadays uniquely black names (eg DeShawn) are strongly correlated with poverty and other bad outcomes. But the early 20th century had its own set of uniquely black names, and black people with those names actually lived longer than everyone else. Why the change?

FDA approves clinical trial of metformin as anti-aging drug. Can’t we just use the randomized controlled trials for diabetes and see if the metformin group lived longer? Or did those not last long enough?

People with ADHD who take medication are about 30% less likely to turn to crime than those who remain unmedicated.

Paul Krugman reviews Robert Reich on skills gaps and unemployment, argues that there’s more monopoly in the economy than we think and this is having lots of bad effects despite the apparently convincing theoretical arguments for why this shouldn’t happen.

Why not build nuclear reactors in the ocean? Well, okay, but aside from that?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 62 Comments

OT36: Nes Threadol Hayah Sham

This is the weekly open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. Also:

1. Comments of the week are PSJ on college and timetraveler3_14 on sugar and obesity.

2. One of my posts has been placed on the short list for the Golden Giraffe Award. The final winner will be announced at a party December 18 in a restaurant in London. They say if I can’t make it to the party I am supposed to “nominate a friend or colleague who would enjoy attending on your behalf”. So if anyone would enjoy going (+1 included guest) to a blogging party in London that might involve David Brooks and Jeremy Paxman appearing as judges, and might involve free food although they didn’t say for sure, let me know below or send me an email. (found someone, no need for further applications)

3. The rationalist community is having its yearly Solstice party in New York the weekend of December 19th. If you want to come to the kind of church-service-ish main event you can, but if that’s too weird for you there will also be a concurrent free party hosted by “Reasonable New York” at the New York Society For Ethical Culture, 2 W 64th St, New York, New York 10023, December 19, 5:30 – 10:30, for all the people whom the service is too weird for. I will probably briefly attend the party at some point. There is also hope of a more interesting afterparty and/or a meetup Sunday, but right now we don’t have a big enough location. We used to do it at Raymond’s place, which was a big multi-person house in Brooklyn, but now he lives in a less big house and that won’t work; some people are looking for alternatives but we’ve got nothing yet. If anyone knows a big space in New York and wouldn’t mind 50 – 100 people descending upon it for a day or two, we could provide you with interesting conversation and maybe some money.

4. And I will be in the Bay Area very briefly next weekend (weekend of December 12th) and may try to set up some kind of meetup, so watch this space.

5. I am behind on answering various kinds of electronic communication and expect to remain so for the near future. Sorry!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 973 Comments

Product Recommendations 2015

It’s Christmas shopping season, and so time for the annual reminder that if you want to support this blog you can shop through my Amazon affiliate link (also on sidebar) and I’ll get ~5% of whatever you spend at no extra cost to you.

If that doesn’t appeal to you, you can also shop through this portal and give ~5% of whatever you spend to one of GiveWell’s top recommended charities.

In order to get you started, here are some recommendations for products I really liked over the past year. I’m not affiliated with any of these and don’t get anything from endorsing them besides the Amazon fee. I talk about some health care products, but they’re all out of my field and best thought of a the opinion of an informed consumer, not as official medical endorsements.

Traditional 18-Year Balsamic Vinegar

A big part of people’s enjoyment of food is placebo. For example, people in blind taste tests prefer Pepsi to Coke, but people in unblinded taste tests prefer Coke to Pepsi because of the Coke “mystique”. Likewise, people will rate wine as better-tasting if they are falsely told it is more expensive. I expect this effect is bigger in people who (like me) with relatively dull palates and overactive imaginations. We could capitalize on this by finding some food that sounds magical, amazing, and precious, and expecting it to have a taste that matches.

That food is balsamic vinegar. Not the fake stuff you get for $4.99 at the supermarket. The real version, which is usually called something like “traditional 18-year balsamic vinegar” and whose manufacture involves about the same number of complicated restrictions and obscure types of wood as building the Ark of the Covenant.

It’s not just that the grapes have to be from a particular species and grown in a particular Italian soil. It’s that they then have to be aged through a process in which the vinegar is constantly transferred, untransferred, and retransferred among series of successively smaller barrels of oak, chestnut, cherry, juniper, mulberry, and acacia a bunch of times for eighteen years, so that each wood can “add its flavor” to precisely the right degree. How long it must spend in each cask is so complicated that people need high-level mathematics just to figure out how old any specific sample of vinegar is. See for example Guidici & Rinaldi 2007, A Theoretical Model To Predict The Age Of Traditional Balsamic Vinegar. The paper finally concludes that “there is a finite limit for the age of balsamic vinegar” – which I guess is reassuring.

So how does it actually taste? Kind of like a mixture of grapes, oak, chestnut, cherry, juniper, mulberry, and acacia It tastes really interesting. Definitely not like normal vinegar. Not really like normal anything. Italians put it on ice cream (really!) or drink it straight from the bottle (really!) I can’t promise it’s not just the placebo effect, and honestly it probably is, but it’s certainly a more interesting the placebo effect than just buying an expensive wine or eating at a fancy French restaurant.

Buy traditional 18-year balsamic vinegar

Fake Nice Pants

I have some sensory issues which make me find normal pants annoying; I prefer to wear sweatpants whenever I can. But this isn’t always compatible with appearing as a normal productive member of society, so sometimes I am forced to wear uncomfortable blue jeans or dress pants or whatever.

Luckily now there are are now sweatpants that look like jeans, khakis, dress pants, etc. I won’t say they’ll fool a careful examination, but hopefully nobody is carefully examining your pants, plus even if people notice they might feel awkward calling you out on it.

Buy sweatpants that look like jeans, sweatpants that look like other types of jeans, sweatpants that look like dress pants, or sweatpants that look like khakis.

Xylitol Nasal Spray

Xylitol nasal spray is for nasal congestion and allergies. It’s not too different from saline sprays, but it’s a little gentler on the body and also has mild antibacterial properties. Also, I hadn’t even realized how well saline sprays worked until recently.

I’ve informally recommended this to a couple of patients with nasal and sinus issues and have received mostly good reports from them too.

Buy xylitol nasal spray

Hamilton CD

The new Broadway musical Hamilton is really good. If you don’t believe me, believe mainstream media sources like 538, Vox, Breitbart, Vox again, the New York Times, Vox a third time, the LA Times, and one more Vox. Also all of Tumblr.

It’s a musical about the life of Alexander Hamilton set to rap, but you will like it even if you do not like rap or early American history. You can listen to the whole soundtrack for free on YouTube, follow along with the heavily annotated lyrics on genius.com, and finally you’ll want to have the CD so you can force your friends and family to listen.

If nothing else, this will help you understand the in-jokes on social media.

Buy the Hamilton CD

Dental Floss Scythes

Like everyone else in the world, my dentist told me to floss more but I never listened. Dealing with that weird little box of string was just too much of a trivial inconvenience.

I recently learned about dental floss scythes (probably they have a less interesting official name). These are little plastic things that kind of pre-arrange the dental floss for you. Now I am actually flossing every day. Well, most days. Some days. The point is, I’m flossing. Yes, I’m a bad person contributing to disposable waste culture, but at least I’m healthy.

(Now some people say flossing might not prevent heart attacks as was previously believed, but it’s probably still a good idea)

Buy dental floss scythes

Nootropics Depot and Ceretropic

Not a product so much as a company. Nootropics Depot and Ceretropic are two online nootropics stores. They’re both owned by the same guy but have different branding: Nootropics Depot has nice gentle all-natural stuff, Ceretropic has new high-tech research chemicals.

There are lots of online nootropics stores, but these are far and away the best. I say this after lurking on r/nootropics for a long time, where users are very vocal about their experiences with different companies and mostly agree with my assessment. The guy who runs these stores also hangs out on r/nootropics, where he shares his encyclopaedic knowledge of everything and helps people who have gotten themselves in trouble. There are worse ways to spend a day than just reading through his entire posting history, but his commentary on my article Iron Curtain Of Psychopharmacology is a good specific example. He is legit and so are his sites.

Experimenting with nootropics is fundamentally a risky endeavor. You are using experimental psychoactive chemicals that haven’t been rigorously tested for safety or efficacy. Nootropics Depot and Ceretropic don’t change any of that. But they do ensure you are not doing anything stupider than the stupid thing you think you are doing. They are very careful about having purity-tested, un-degraded chemicals and making sure you are getting what is advertised on the bottle. They try to have the gold standard version of everything – for example, if they’re selling an herbal extract, it will be the same by composition, subspecies, etc as the version used in whichever studies have most clearly suggested safety and efficacy for the herb. They avoid at least some of the sketchiest diet-pill-stimulant-amphetamine-analogs you can find on some other sites. And they have excellent customer service and if for some reason your nootropics don’t arrive or get confiscated by customs they will work it out for you.

The other reason I like this company is that it does seem to have a long-term plan to build up a power base from which to try to ‘disrupt’ the pharmaceutical industry in the way we often talk about here. That’s obviously crazy ambitious, but they’ve already done some impressive things, like come up with a longer-lasting version of tianeptine. From a chemistry point of view that may not be super hard, but since tianeptine is a prescription drug in most of Europe it means they’ve improved pretty substantially upon a real pharmaceutical company’s project. They seem to be gradually getting labs and researchers, so I’m optimistic.

Oh, and if some of you crypto geniuses want to do a mitzvah, find an easy way for them to charge people non-Bitcoin money without credit card companies backstabbing them every few months because they get cold feet and decide nootropics are too weird.

Visit Nootropics Depot and Ceretropic.

Periscope Glasses

In case the nootropics don’t work well enough for you and you still have human experiences like “sleep” and “tiredness”, you may be interested in periscope glasses. They let you lie down supine in bed and still read without having to hold your book in an awkward position.

Buy periscope glasses.

[EDIT: If that wasn’t enough for you there’s also a 2014 Product Recommendations post.]

Setting The Default

[Epistemic status: I predict everyone except me will respond to this with “Duuuuuuuuh”, but I found it changed some views of mine]

I.

I recently did couples therapy with two gay men who’d gotten married a year or so ago. Since then one of them, let’s call him Adam, decided he was bored with his sex life and went to a club where they did some things I will not describe here. His husband, let’s call him Steve, was upset by what he considered infidelity, and they had a big fight. Both of them wanted to stay together for the sake of the kids (did I mention they adopted some kids?) but this club thing was a pretty big deal, so they decided to seek professional help.

Adam made the following proposal: he knew Steve was not very kinky, so Adam would go do his kinky stuff at the club, with Steve’s knowledge and consent. That way everyone could get what they wanted. Sure, it would involve having sex with other people, but it didn’t mean anything, and it was selfish for a spouse to assert some kind of right to “control” the other spouse anyway.

Steve made the following counterproposal: no. He liked monogamy and fidelity and it would make him really jealous and angry to think of Adam going out and having sex with other people, even in a meaningless way. He argued that if Adam didn’t like monogamy, maybe he shouldn’t have proposed entering into a form of life that has been pretty much defined by its insistence on monogamy for the past several thousand years and then sworn adherence to that form of life in front of everyone they knew. If Adam hadn’t liked monogamy, he had ample opportunity to avoid it before he had bound his life together with Steve’s. Now he was stuck.

Adam gave the following counterargument: yeah, marriage usually implies remaining monogamous, but that was all legal boilerplate. He had wanted to get married to symbolize his committment to Steve – committment that he still had! – and he hadn’t realized he was interested in fetish stuff at the time or else he would have brought it up.

Steve gave the following countercounterargument: okay, this is all very sad, but now we are stuck in this position, and clearly only one of the two people could get their preference satisfied, and given the whole marriage-implies-monogamy thing, it seemed pretty clear that that person should be him.

So then of course they both turned to me for advice.

The rules for psychotherapy are a lot like the rules for Aaron Burr: talk less, smile more, don’t let them know what you’re against or what you’re for. This last principle is generally known as “therapeutic neutrality”, and it demands that we not take sides in our patients’ disputes or dilemmas. Instead, we try to remain an impartial discussion facilitator, teasing out our patients’ true values and concerns until they are able to come to a conclusion on their own.

On the other hand, their friends probably don’t have the same scruples and are going to be offering them advice. And I wondered what advice I would give, if I were their friends and not stuck in metaphorical Switzerland.

II.

Assume Steve’s analysis is right; this is a zero-sum game and there’s no way for them both to come out of it happy. Which side do we choose?

A quick retreat to a simpler situation: suppose Adam really wants to keep all the windows in the house open all winter with no heat on, so that the inside temperature is 10F and the house is full of snow. Steve does not want to do this. Both of them want to stay together for the sake of the kids, but this do-we-freeze-our-house thing is really getting in the way.

This problem is easy. Adam, you’re crazy and your preferences are stupid and don’t count. Suck it up and keep living with Steve at normal-person temperatures.

Another retreat in the other direction: suppose Adam wants to sometimes take a shower, but for some reason the thought of Adam being in a shower pisses Steve off and he refuses to allow it. Once again, both of them want to stay together for the sake of the kids, but this can-Adam-take-a-shower thing is really getting in the way.

This problem is also easy. Steve, this time your preferences are stupid and don’t count. Suck it up and let Adam take a shower.

A third new situation. The one Unit of Caring recently discussed on her blog. A transwoman wants to have Christmas with her family, but her family doesn’t believe in transgender and insists on calling her by her original male name and male pronouns. Both her and her family don’t want to “ruin Christmas” by refusing to get together as a family or making a big deal of this. Who is in the right? Unit of Caring writes:

Anyone who does not respect their siblings enough to call them by the name of their choosing does not then get to go “oh! you not wanting to let me repeatedly hurt you is breaking apart our family, how unreasonable of you!” If you want people to spend time around you, call them by the names they chose. If you wouldn’t repeatedly slap your siblings in the face, don’t deliberately misgender them either. (And if you would repeatedly slap your siblings in the face, then you shouldn’t have to look too far to figure out whose behavior ruined Christmas.)

If it doesn’t bother you that you’re hurting someone, then you don’t get to act wronged when they decide you’re not worth spending time with.

I agree with this assessment, but only because I agree with Unit about the object-level issue of transgender. It seems like if you wrote in the same question to your local priest, they’d say the trans woman was being unreasonable. I don’t think there’s any good way for Unit and the priest (or the woman and her family) to resolve their differences except by one convincing the other of their position on the object-level issue of transgender.

(well, if you really really really understood utilitarianism, you might be able to say you should take the highest-utility solution, but no one understands utilitarianism that well)

This seems to be true of my patients’ problem too. Unless we can decide whether wanting to go to a fetish club and have sex with people besides your husband is a reasonable request, we can’t solve Adam and Steve’s disagreement. I mean, Steve’s argument about the contract isn’t bad, but if it were something we disagreed with – let’s say some old-timey marriage contract where the woman vowed to always serve and obey her husband, and now she’s a feminist and wants out – we would probably be pretty sympathetic despite the precise wording of what she’d “agreed” on.

III.

I come to the table with personal baggage. I come from a very permissive subculture. I’ve had some very happy open relationships and wanting to be open seems like a reasonable request. I’ve had some friends who are very kinky, and wanting to be kinky seems like a reasonable request too. I’m not personally very good at feeling jealous, so wanting your husband to never go to a club, even if he doesn’t tell you about it, or make you think about it, or even agrees only to do it when you’re away on a business trip in another city – seems a bit odd. Honestly I would be tempted to take Steve aside and ask him whether he’s sure that he couldn’t deal with Adam going to this club, and whether maybe he wants to give it a chance, and whether maybe he just wants what’s best for Adam even if that makes him a little uncomfortable.

But go back two hundred years and ask the people of that culture, and this choice is a no-brainer. Fetish clubs (or the closest 19th century equivalent) are weird, vile, sinful things, and Adam’s desire to go to one is totally beyond the pale. He should never even have made the request. But since he did, we can strongly and clearly tell him that this is morally wrong, that he should apologize to Steve for the trouble he put him in, that he should realize there’s more to life than kinky sex, and that he should want what’s best for Steve even if that means he can’t satisfy his libido quite so much.

If Adam and Steve were in the traditional culture of the 1800s there would be no debate. If they were in some ultra-permissive sexually-open subculture of the 2100s, there would also be no debate. The culture would tell one of them that they were wrong, just like someone who wants to make the other live in a 10 degree frozen house is wrong, that person would grudgingly agree, they would stay together, and that would be that. The problem only comes when they’re in a culture with a lot of different subcultures that haven’t made up their minds yet. Like ours.

We all hear the stories of the economists who start by assuming perfect rationality, and then add in deviations from that assumption when they come to them. I kind of like to start from a liberal assumption of perfect atomic individualism and add in deviations when I encounter them. And, well, this is the latest one I encountered.

Adam and Steve’s individual personalities and situations will help resolve their conflict, but the tiebreaker vote is always going to be cast by the culture around them. Realizing this has made me more open to activists who are trying to change the culture – and, symmetrically, to conservatives who are trying to prevent the culture from being changed. People with unusual sex lives like to say that what they do in the privacy of their own bedroom doesn’t hurt anyone else – neither breaks their nose nor picks their pocket – but the fact is that the partial social acceptance of fetish clubs and of open relationships is what gives Adam a leg to stand on. And some religious conservatives like to talk about how they only want to defend their own right to practice and express their beliefs instead of being forced into the broader cultural revolution all around them, but the fact is that their beliefs are what’s supporting Steve. My sympathies will always be with the atomic individualists who want to come up with some clever Adam-Steve contract that solves their problem on the meta-level as long as all actors are rational, but I am starting to worry the culture warriors have a point here.

UR said that “the sovereign is the one who sets the null hypothesis”. Once you’ve let the culture set a default – going to fetish clubs is a reasonable request, going to fetish clubs is an unreasonable request – then given sufficiently good liberal norms people who want to deviate from the default can absolutely do so, but as soon as a conflict springs up the identity of the default option still matters a lot.

I’m not suggesting a total war of all against all, and there’s always the Archipelago option, but I guess sometimes culture wars do need to be fought beyond the point where you just leave people alone, if only to shift the default in your direction.

Speaking of culture wars, an apology to gay people. I always obfuscate details about my patients to disguise their identities, but I feel particularly bad about making this couple gay because it reinforces the stereotype of gay people as hypersexual and bad at committment. I made them gay anyway, because when I tried to write them hetero, their gender seemed to skew the problem too much to one side or another – for example, when Steve was a woman, he was the poor innocent wife wronged by a horny husband who insisted on thinking with his crotch. I worried that if I made the couple hetero, my readers for one reason or another would bring their own baggage and wouldn’t be able to see it as the difficult and evenly-balanced problem it seemed like when I was in the office with them.

Which itself says something about how our culture sets default hypotheses.

College And Critical Thinking

[epistemic status: My bias is against the current college system doing much good. I have tried not to be bogged down by this bias, but take it into account when reading my interpretations below.]

[EDIT: An earlier version of this post claimed that one paper had shown a u-shaped relationship between time spent in college and critical thinking. A commenter pointed out this was true only of a subset in two-year colleges, but not of four-year colleges or college in general – which shows the expected linear relationship. I am sorry for the error, and correcting it somewhat increases my confidence in college building critical thinking.]


Over Thanksgiving, I was discussing tulip subsidies with the pro-Bernie-Sanders faction of my family, and my uncle claimed that we needed college because “it teaches you how to think critically”.

The evidence sort of supports him, but with the usual caveats and uncertainties.

First of all, what the heck is critical thinking? Luckily, we have a very objective scientific answer: critical thinking is the ability to score highly on the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal. Now that we’ve answered that, we can move on to the question at hand.

Most studies on this issue are terrible because they lack control groups. That is, they measure students when they enter college, measure them again when they leave college, and find that their critical thinking ability has improved. But this could be for any number of reasons. Maybe older people generally have better critical thinking than younger people. Maybe life experience builds critical thinking. Maybe college had nothing to do with any of it. The best meta-analysis of such studies, MacMillan 1987, finds exactly this, and concludes:

Overall these studies suggest that seniors, in the main, are probably better at critical thinking than freshmen. However, since the most compelling data were gathered through weak pretest-posttest or longitudinal designs, it is difficult to separate out the effect of college from the maturational effects that occur despite college.

I like the phrase “maturation that occurs despite college”, although I don’t think they meant it in that way.

But in any case we need a better study design to conclude anything from this. There are two studies with moderately good designs, both by a guy named Pascarella. The first compares 30 college students to 17 matched non-college students and follows them up for one year. They find that while both students and non-students gain critical thinking skills over the course of the year, the college students gain 17% more, corresponding to an effect size of 0.44.

The second, larger study compares students doing college full-time to students doing college part-time, under the theory that if college is causing the effect, then a little college should cause a small effect, but lots of college should cause a big effect. They find this in the four-year college sample, and a garbled u-shaped mess in the two-year college sample. At least the four-year sample, which is what most people are interested in, looks good.

On the other hand, some other studies find less impressive effect sizes. Arum and Roska recently wrote a book on this kind of thing, Academically Adrift, and they find that two years of college (start of freshman to end of sophomore) only increases critical thinking by 0.18 SD. This is weird because it’s twice as much college as the past few studies but less than half the effect size. Also, it doesn’t seem to be controlled, so this is the sum of actual-college-effect-size and confounder-effect-size. According to one review:

College entrance to end of sophomore (ie half of college) improves critical thinking by 0.18 SD. This might have been greater in the past “Pascarella and Terenzini estimated that seniors had an 0.5 SD advantage over freshmen in the 1990s. In contrast, during the 1980s students developed their skills at twice the rate: seniors had an advantage over freshmen of one standard deviation.”

Note that we’re comparing unlike with unlike. Four years of college need not produce an effect twice as great as two years of college, any more than a space heater that increases the temperature of a room 10 degrees after being left on for one hour will increase the temperature 87600 degrees after being left on for a year. Indeed, some studies suggest that most of the gains happen in freshman year. But even so, there’s a very clear downward trend here. As usual, we have no good way of knowing if that’s caused by gradually-improving studies, gradually-improving college critical thinking training, or gradually-deteriorating colleges.

One more question: do we know the specific aspects of the college experience that cause critical-thinking gains?

Specific explicitly-advertised “critical thinking classes” don’t. Being a college that prides itself on a specific “critical thinking focus” doesn’t. This sort of thing seems very well replicated, although there are a few individual studies that don’t really interact with the rest of the literature that seem to have at least temporary positive results. Classes that you might think would teach critical thinking, like logic, or philosophy, or statistics, don’t seem to do especially well (here’s a specific in-depth discussion of philosophy). The only positive result anyone’s been able to find is that “liberal arts” (here viewed as a broad category including science and mathematics) seems to do better than occupational skills, and “education, social work, communications, and business” seem to do worse.

In terms of broader factors, – one study finds that quantifiable college experiences explain “between 7 and 17%” of the variability in first-year critical thinking gains (other sources say classes explain 2.5% and extracurriculars 2.9%). Studying a lot seems to help. So does reading unassigned books. Aside from that, the biggest finding is kind of concerning:

Students who characterized their relationships with other students as “competitive, uninvolved…alienated” were more likely to show gains in critical thinking than were students who portrayed their peer relations as “friendly, supportive, or a sense of belonging” The data in this study do not permit confident explanation of this relation, but one might speculate that a sense of participation in a friendly, supportive peer environment may require a partial suspension of one’s critical thinking skills.

…wow. I was going to say something like “students busy spending time with their friends have less time to learn stuff”, but your cynical awful explanation works too.

So what’s the big picture?

Well, we know that people will gain critical thinking skills during the four years from age 18 to age 22. We have an small study that finds college helps a little with this process and a larger study that shows dose-dependent effects of college. We have some hard-to-compare effect sizes ranging from 0.18/2-years to 0.44/year. That’s modest but appreciable, and it’s probably at least somewhat real.

But those of you who went to my talk last week hopefully know what my next question will be: how long does this last?

For example, we know that parents’ personalities have all sorts of interesting effects on their children while those children are living with their parents. We also know that as soon as children leave their parents, those effects go down to near zero. What people tried to interpret as some deep fact about development was actually just a reflection of the environment that those children were in. Likewise, preschool makes children do much better in kindergarten, but by third grade the preschool-educated kids are doing the same or worse as the others. It’s not fundamentally altering their developmental trajectory, it’s just creating an short-term effect.

Every one of the studies I’m citing here was done in freshman or sophomore year (one study cited another done in senior year, but I couldn’t find it directly). No one has ever looked at students who have been out of college a year – let alone out of college thirty years – to see if the effect continues. I would bet that it doesn’t.

Until somebody checks, enjoy your opportunity to tell people that the evidence backs college building critical thinking skills.

Links 11/15: Linksgiving

Owl species of the week: the Powerful Owl.

You may have heard the theory that the famous God-reaching-toward-Adam picture in the Sistine Chapel actually encodes an anatomically correct image of the human brain. But did you know that another Sistine Chapel image, The Separation of Light from Darkness, might contain a detailed diagram of the medulla? Apparently the whole Sistine Chapel ceiling was just one big disguised anatomy textbook, or something.

A random guy who put up a website of fake facts about James Buchanan and then followed it to see who cited them and how far they went.

The statistics behind why Antigua & Barbuda (population 90,000) can have a better soccer team than China (population 1.3 billion), and how this applies to other measures of national differences and success.

GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz acting out a scene from The Princess Bride and actually being pretty good at it.

I previously said some nice things about ASAN and the neurodiversity movement, but Slate has published a couple of exposes on them that might force me to take that back. A big part of their argument is that we don’t need cures because autistic people, even supposedly nonverbal autistic people, prove to be intelligent and self-reliant when given proper accomodations. But by “proper accomodations” they usually mean Facilitated Communication, and this is actually pseudoscience that works on about the same principles as the Ouija Board. Related: ASAN New York doubles down on supporting Facilitated Communication.

From the Department of Living In The Future: Dubai Firefighters To Get Jetpacks For Fighting Skyscraper Fires.

A while back I pointed out some polls suggesting that white people’s opinion of police improved after the Ferguson shooting, apparently as a kind of backlash-to-the-backlash effect. Possibly related: favorability ratings of Muslims rise after every big Islamic terrorist attack.

In the 1980s Democrats and Republicans both supported Israel about the same amount. Over the next thirty years, Republican support for Israel shot way, way up. Why did that happen, and will it politicize Israel enough to start making the Democrats dislike it?

Chutzpah: Wired writes an article on a $100,000 nano-sapphire razor mocking its ridiculous cost and saying that “It’s all so depressing…if Zafirro sells a single one of these, the world will be a worse place.” Zafirro’s now got it on Kickstarter, with an “as seen on Wired” advertisement.

Lots of continuing discussion about Garrett Jones’ new IQ-of-nations book Hive Mind. Open borders supporter Robin Hanson says that “I must admit to now being more nervous about allowing more impatient and stupid immigrants, though as Bryan Caplan points out, that still allows for taking on billions of smart immigrants. But even if I’m now mildly more reluctant to take on certain kinds of immigrants, I’ll blame that mainly on our poor governance institutions, which give too much weight to the stupid and the impatient.” Bryan Caplan says that given some common assumptions about discount rate, open borders is still an obviously good policy. Jones answers that given Bryan’s assumptions about discount rates, open borders would still be an obviously good idea even if it set off a thousand-year dark age. You can see the full debate between them here (warning: video).

David Friedman on legal systems very different from ours.

Did you know: according to the Star Wars Extended Universe, Jar Jar Binks’ father is named George R. Binks, and he attempted suicide because of how annoying his son was.

The Ku Klux Klan had little measurable impact on society in terms of any variables being different in areas with high vs. low Klan participation. What it did have was – seriously – a really sweet business selling overpriced robes, such that it might best be viewed as “rather than a terrorist organization, a social organization built through a wildly successful pyramid scheme fueled by an army of highly-incentivized sales agents selling hatred, religious intolerance, and fraternity in a time and place where there was tremendous demand.”

Giving one party or the other unified control of a US state government has surprisingly little effect – for example, increasing (or decreasing) welfare payments about $2 per month per recipient, and switching the political climate of a state an amount only “one-twentieth the size of the typical difference between states”

Uber for flu shots is actually just regular Uber.

The H-1B visa lottery seems to be gamed by a few big companies that spam the government with applications. A new company is trying to counter-game the system by helping current H-1B holders transfer to new companies, leaving the big companies that got them their visas wailing and gnashing their teeth.

Psilocybin makes brain regions more connected. To some degree this is cool. To another, I’m starting to worry that every time neuroscientists are asked to explain something they flip a coin, and if it lands heads they say “this increases connections between brain regions” and if it lands tails they say “this decreases connections between brain regions”.

The time a legion of 40,000 Czechoslovakians went to fight in Russia, then were blocked by World War I and the Russian Revolution from crossing back into Czechoslovakia. One of them remembered that the world was round, and so began a three year, 20,000 mile journey to bring the entire legion around the world.

People are much more likely to identify as nonwhite when given affirmative action incentives to do so. Also: theory of a correlation between campus affirmative action and the latest round of campus protests (not just “affirmative action means more minorities and so more protests by minorities”, more interesting than that)

From the Department Of Things That Are Obvious In Retrospect: nutrition study finds that different people have widely varying metabolic responses to the same foods.

12th century Bologna looks like some kind of vision of a 22nd century supermetropolis thanks to its up-to-180 really tall towers.

Despite their growing demographic disadvantage, Republicans are likely to maintain Congressional and state-level power in the US for the next few decades.

Police civil asset forfeitures exceed all burglaries in 2014.

People talk a lot about restoring monarchy these days, but nobody ever mentions what rule of succession we should use. The genetics community comes through and proves that optimal royal succession moves from parent to opposite-sex child.

Why are scientists finding fungi in the brains of Alzheimers patients (but not healthy controls)? The Economist also comments. I don’t know much about this, but I would think if it were straight-out caused by fungus, someone would have noticed that people treated with antifungals had their Alzheimers go away / stop progressing. Other possibility – Alzheimers is a disruption to the brain’s immune system (it is) and this makes it harder for it to get rid of fungi.

French organization demands a law that imams must obtain a license certifying them to be liberal and tolerant before preaching. So far, so racist – except that the organization involved is actually France’s largest Muslim group, and this seems less about Islamophobia than about regulatory capture and attempts at monopolizing a religious ‘market’ – guess who they hope would be giving out the licenses.

Pokemon or Big Data?

H/T Stephen Guyenet: this chart is a pretty damning one-image rebuttal to people who think sugar is responsible for the obesity epidemic.

Vox: Wait a second, why are we all so sure that constant front-runner Donald Trump will suddenly crash and burn just before the election for no apparent reason?

Sam Harris really doesn’t like Salon, and as per his story Salon lied about editing one of his interviews.

Another good example of how reporters have lots of degrees in freedom when deciding how to report studies: recent research finds that women with lots of tattoos have higher self-esteem – and four times as many suicide attempts.

Time to take the 2015 Effective Altruism Survey – your participation is welcome even if you do not identify as an effective altruist.

Scott Sumner has a new book out, The Midas Paradox, which despite having a perfect title for an airport thriller in fact is about how issues with the gold market help explain the Great Depression. Tyler Cowen reviews and calls it “a very good book, one of the best on the economics of the Great Depression ever written.”

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OT35: Boston Comment

This is my attempt to get away without writing posts because I’m still on vacation the weekly open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. Also:

1. The subreddit is still around and will host parallel open threads. Those of you who don’t like the commenting system here can go there and either post on the open thread or start a new topic.

2. Comment of the week is Sarah explaining the gift horse thing better than I could. I may have to ban myself from giving Sarah comment-of-the-week status too often because that’s too easy.

3. Thanks to everyone who attended the Boston meetup and my talks in the Northeast. Everyone was super nice and I’m really happy with how it all went and with all the great people I met. Some kind of video or transcript of talk possibly to become available later, maybe.

4. MealSquares (the Soylent-esque food substitute company that advertises in the sidebar here, as seen in Business Insider magazine) is looking for a formally trained nutrition expert who’s good at parsing and understanding studies in the field to serve as an advisor in exchange for equity in their company. If that sounds like you, you can contact them here.

5. Nathan Robinson, whose blog Navel Observatory is on the other sidebar here and whose work I’ve previously linked to, is starting a “new print magazine of political analysis, satire, and entertainment” and seeking donations/subscriptions on Kickstarter. Take a look.

6. Please use the “Report” button responsibly. If you don’t like someone, finding and reporting every single one of their posts doesn’t get them banned. It just means every single one of my posts appears on my reported comments list, and I have to manually clear all of them after I see they’re not bad. It doesn’t punish them, it just punishes me.

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Reporter Degrees Of Freedom

I.

A sample of Thursday’s talk at Yale:

These are four headlines describing the same study, Milkie, Nomaguchi and Denny (2015). The study found that of twenty or so outcomes, only three of them – all measuring delinquent behavior among teenagers – show significant effect from time spent with parents (and this result remains after Bonferroni correction). So Vox has a great argument for their headline. The National Post has an okay argument for their headline even though it’s kind of cherry-picked. The Washington Post just sort of reads between the lines and figures that if it’s not quantity of time that helps kids, it must be quality. And FOX also reads between the lines and figures that if moms spending time with their kids has no effect, the argument from opportunity costs suggests mothers are spending too much time with their kids.

None of them are completely outright lying. And indeed, most of the articles eventually explain what I just said, halfway down the article, in one or two short sentences that most readers will skim over. But the rest of the article uses the study to support whatever the news source involved wants it to support, and so people will come up with four diametrically opposed conclusions from this one study depending on which source they read.

II.

Here’s a study that I wasn’t able to include in the presentation because it just came out recently. As per the Rice University press release: Overweight Men Just As Likely As Overweight Women To Face Discrimination.

The paper included two studies. In the first, men went into stores either with or without fat suits and try to do some things – ask if there were job openings, ask for a job application, ask an employee for help, try to buy some things, et cetera. Then they measured the men’s success across both conditions to see if they had more trouble when they appeared overweight.

In the second, subjects were asked to rate videos of an employee giving a marketing spiel for a new product; once again, the employee was either wearing or not wearing a fat suit. They measured the subjects’ ratings across conditions to see if they ranked the overweight employees lower.

The first study only included men, and so could not possibly have determined whether men were more or less likely than overweight women to face discrimination. The second study actually did have both male and female employees involved, and although it really wasn’t their main interest, the researchers did a post hoc evaluation to find the effect in each sex. In all three of the outcomes where discrimination was found, women faced more discrimination than men. They didn’t significance-test the comparison, but just from eyeballing it, it was probably significant.

So a paper in which one study does not compare men to women, and the other study finds women facing more discrimination than men, the press release somehow gets phrased as “Overweight men just as likely as overweight women to face discrimination in retail settings”. Huh.

You might wonder, “Does it really matter what a press release says? Does anyone read the exact wording?” Yes. Many other news sources copied the phrasing, for example Medical Daily’s Fat Discrimination Is The Same Regardless Of Gender. One such copycat, PsyPost.com copied the press release nearly word for word, including the title. Then it got posted on Reddit and now has 5189 upvotes and 1572 comments. So there’s that.

III.

“But at least it correctly raised awareness of how weight discrimination is a big problem in the retail setting, right?”

The paper measured a ton of different outcomes. Let’s focus on Study 1. The actor in the fat suit was supposed to ask if there were job openings (there were) and see if the company told him. Then he was supposed to ask for an application form and see if they gave it to him. Then he was supposed to walk in as a customer and see if employees greeted him. Then he was supposed to ask the employees to recommend him an item and see if they did. Then he was supposed to ask them to recommend him a second item and see if they did.

No difference was found between overweight and normal-weight actors in any of those five experiments. Two of them had ceiling effects that probably made the attempt futile, but the other three didn’t, and there wasn’t even a trend toward discriminating against the overweight guy.

So what did they find discrimination on? They say that detected “interpersonal discrimination”, ie discrimination based not on any quantifiable outcome but based on how friendly/warm the person interacting with the actor seemed toward him. They determined this by self-rating and other-rating; that is, the actor wrote down how friendly he thought the store clerks were toward him, and a spy surreptitious observer who had placed herself near the interaction also rated this for corroboration. Their rating scales included twelve items including “how many times did the clerk nod”, “how friendly did the clerk seem?”, “how much eye contact was the clerk making?” and “how much comfort level did the clerk seem to have?”. The experiment found a statistically significant difference between the fat-suit-wearing and non-fat-suit-wearing trials and concluded that there was interpersonal discrimination.

But hold on a second! The study says nothing about anyone being blinded. In fact, it’s really hard to blind an actor to the fact that he is going into some stores while wearing a fat suit and other stores while not wearing a fat suit. As far as I can tell, everybody involved was in on the study from the beginning. If your boss tells you “I want you to rate how much comfort level clerks have with you for this study on fat discrimination”, it seems really possible to me that there might be a slight tendency to overrate the clerks who interacted with thin-you, and to underrate the clerks who interacted with fat-you.

How slight a tendency? Clerks dealing with fat people got an average rating of 2.3 (seven point scale, lower is better), and those dealing with thin people of 2.0.

So after finding no discrimination on five objectively measurable outcomes, they find very subtle discrimination on an unblinded subjective outcome practically designed to produce placebo effects.

We move on to the second study, where participants (as usual, psychology students) are rating video presentations given by fat vs. thin people. This is supposedly tying into the “retail industry” theme of the paper, but honestly it seems kind of forced to me.

Anyway, the participants are asked to rate their presenters on seven measures: overall quality of presentation, overall attitude toward product being presented, overall attitude toward the store that would employ a person such as this, intention to support the store, employee’s appearance, employee’s carelessness, and employee’s professionalism. The results:

There was no difference between how participants rated overweight vs. normal-weight presentations overall.

There was no difference between how participants rated products presented by overweight vs. normal-weight people.

There was no difference between how participants rated stores staffed by overweight vs. normal-weight people.

There was no difference between how likely participants were to support stores staffed by overweight vs. normal-weight people.

There was a difference in how participants ranked the appearance, carelessness, and professionalism of overweight vs. normal-weight people.

The first four results are encouraging. What about the last three?

Well, I feel like if you ask people to rank someone based on “their appearance”, and your subjects answer based on how they look, you kind of walked into that one. Oh no, people rank conventionally attractive people as having better appearances than less conventionally attractive people! Someone call John Ioannidis to double-check this astonishing result!

“Carelessness” and “professionalism” are perhaps less excusable, but c’mon, you had them watch a two-minute video. When you give someone zero information on a thing, and you force them to make a judgment on the thing, then yes, stereotypes are their best source of information. If you showed me a picture of an average-looking man and an average-looking woman and say “Quick! Which of these people is more likely to like baking cupcakes?!” I’ll pick the woman, not because I think all women are obsessed with cupcakes or because I go around looking at every woman I see as a cupcake factory, but because you asked me a stupid question and ensured stereotypes were the only thing I had to go on.

Then the authors find that this was mediated by explicitly-expressed stereotypes against fat people, which is kind of interesting, but doesn’t make the nonsignificant things any more significant.

So to sum up: there was no discrimination against the overweight on any objective measure of the actual retail experience, including positions advertised, applications given, greetings offered, or customers served. There was also no discrimination against the overweight on presentation evaluations in terms of overall evaluation, evaluation of employee, evaluation of product, or evaluation of company.

There was a tiny amount of discrimination on a subjective measure rated by unblinded observers aware of the purpose of the study. There was also some evidence on three subtler ratings of the presentation that seemed designed to ask participants impossible questions in order to force them to stereotype. However, these meaningless scales did not effect the raters’ overall impressions as measured any of four different ways.

IV.

Here is the reporting from the news outlets that passed their first test and didn’t frame it as men and women facing equal amounts of weight discrimination.

Business Insider: Researchers Had Men Pretend To Be Obese – And The Results Are Disturbing, which says that “this research highlights the importance of including men in discussions about weight stigmatization,” and “the authors also advocate organizational efforts to combat negativity against heavy customers and potential employees…the first step may be for individuals to become aware of how strong weight biases are.”

AskMen: Young Men Who Appear Overweight Suffer Interpersonal Discrimination. “Researchers disguised six thin young men as obese customers or job applications and found that they were victims of microaggressions. Basically people were a little bit more jerky towards them.”

Oximity: Overweight Men Often Snubbed At The Mall. “Shopping malls can be hostile places for overweight men, regardless of whether they’re customers or simply looking for a job.”

The Health Site: Men, Here’s One More Reason For You To Lose Weight. “Ruggs said that these findings were another reminder that there was still more work to be done in terms of creating equitable workplaces for all employees, potential employees and consumers. She concluded that this was something organisations could take an active role in, and said that companies could do better job training on customer relations as part of the employees’ new-hire process. ”

Now I’m almost missing the kind of random scattershot media bias we found on the time-spent-with-children study. Here every media outlet reports the results the same way that the study’s author and the press release reports the results.

This is not a totally wrong interpretation, any more than “six hours a week will tame your teen” is a totally wrong interpretation of the childhood study. But if I myself were writing an article on this study, it would be SURPRISINGLY LITTLE DISCRIMINATION FOUND AGAINST OVERWEIGHT MEN, and mention somewhere in the middle that some discrimination was found on a few sketchy variables. Instead, we get DAILY DISCRIMINATION AGAINST OVERWEIGHT MEN and WE NEED TO INSTITUTE SENSITIVITY TRAINING PROGRAMS IN RETAIL ENVIRONMENT, and they mention somewhere in the middle that a lot of important variables came out negative.

A lot of studies work like this. You test ten or twenty complicated variables, you get positive results on some, negative results on others, some of those results seem plausible, other results seem like maybe you made a mistake somewhere or didn’t have enough power or whatever, and then you make an interpretation based on your personal bias. Then it goes from the researcher’s personal bias to the abstract to the press release to the headlines to the mind of the average reader, dropping subtlety at each step, until “No discrimination against overweight men, except where the study was practically designed to ensure false positives” becomes “Rampant discrimination against overweight men everywhere” becomes “Overweight men are discriminated against just as much as overweight women.”

Don’t get me wrong. I expect there probably is lots of discrimination against overweight men. And I think this study’s project of trying to find it and convince people of its existence was worthwhile. But I don’t think you should get to convince everyone that science has proven X, unless science has actually proven X. The process that produced these headlines is strong enough to produce any headline you want, with the part where you actually do the study becoming more and more of a ritual or a formality. There are just too many degrees of freedom between the study and the reporting.

Stalin once said that “those who vote decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything.” It’s starting to look like those who do the studies decide nothing and those who report the studies decide everything. The only solution is to actually read the study and not just the headlines. Sometimes we might even have to – God help us – read beyond the abstract.

SSC New England Meetup And Presentations Schedule

1. Tonight (11/19) I’ll be speaking at Yale on the subject of “How To Ruin A Perfectly Good Randomized Controlled Trial” and other aspects of interpreting scientific evidence. Probably. I’m currently stuck in New Jersey due to airplane mishaps, but 90% confidence I’m going to be able to make it on time. Event is at LC101, Linsly-Chittenden Hall, 63 High St, New Haven, at 7 PM. You’re invited.

2. Monday (11/23) I’ll be speaking at Harvard at Sever Hall 203 at 5 PM on the same subject. You’re invited to this one too.

3. Sunday (11/22) we’ll be having a Boston meetup (thanks to the Boston rationalist and EA communities for setting this up) at MIT, room 5-134 at 6 PM. There is a Facebook event page here. You are invited to all of these things but you are extra definitely invited to this one. Every time I try to have a meetup I specify that everyone is invited even if you are only a lurker and even if you don’t understand everything you see on SSC and even if you are not very interesting and so on and so forth, and every time people still say “I wanted to go but I didn’t because I’m afraid I wouldn’t have been welcome there because I’m not enough like the typical SSC reader,” and so now I have to repeat in bold that you are definitely welcome.

I won’t be around much for the next week or two while I do this stuff and see my family for Thanksgiving, so apologies for not responding to emails/comments, etc.

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Hardball Questions For The Next Debate

Dr. Carson:

One of your most important achievements as a neurosurgeon was inventing the functional hemispherectomy, a treatment for epilepsy in which the epileptic hemisphere of the brain is severed from the healthy hemisphere and the body, allowing the healthy hemisphere to have full control of the body free from any epileptic interference. Children who get a functional hemispherectomy sufficiently early will be partly paralyzed on one side, but they will mostly be seizure-free.

Standard hemispherectomies remove the epileptic hemisphere from the body, but that tended to cause hydrocephalus, so your technique instead just severed all of its sensory and motor connections, leaving it present but inert.

But an anonymous neuroscientist on Reddit expressed some concern that just as the functional hemisphere seems to develop full independent personhood after the split, so the epileptic hemisphere may do so as well. Obviously it remains impaired by the epilepsy, but it’s not seizing all the time, so there will still be comparatively lucid intervals.

So my question for you is – what do you think happens to that person who is in an empty hemisphere, locked out of all sensory input and motor control? Do you think they’re conscious? Do you think they’re wondering what happened? Do you think they’re happy that the other half of them is living a happy normal life? Do they sit rapt in unconditioned contemplation of their own consciousness like an Aristotelian god? Or do they go mad with boredom, constantly desiring their own death but unable to effect it?

Also, a follow-up question. You solve paediatric epilepsy by severing all connections between right and left, consigning one to the outer darkness and turning complete control over to the other. Given that you’re trying to become President, that has obvious kabbalistic implications. Do you stand behind those kabbalistic implications or not?

Ms. Fiorina:

One of the issues that’s played a central role in your campaign is your belief that the Ottoman Empire was the greatest civilization in the world. Certainly their five-hundred-plus year reign was marked by impressive military, political, and artistic achievements. But I want to bring up a particular aspect of Ottoman governance today.

One of the really unique Ottoman innovations was its so-called “millet system”, where every ethnicity and religion was almost its own little empire-within-an-empire. For example, although the Ottoman Empire was itself Muslim, Christians within it got their own millet, led by the Patriarch of Constantinople. They made their own laws, which applied only to Christians, settled disputes between two Christian claimants, levied taxes from Christians to pay for Christian-related projects, and generally kept their own people in line. When the Ottoman Empire as a whole wanted something from its Christian population, the Sultan would meet with the Patriarch and they would hammer it out. There were similar structures in place for Jews, Armenians, et cetera.

The past few years have seen an almost unprecedented rise in identity politics in America, usually marked by the claim that the society is using its weight to kick around people of some identity or another. Society is kicking around blacks. Society is kicking around conservative Christians. Society is kicking around bisexuals. They all feel like they’re getting the short end of the stick, but a lot of their preferences are mutually exclusive, and it’s hard to imagine some kind of centralized government policy that could satisfy any of them.

As an admirer of the Ottoman Empire, you’d be in a uniquely good position to import some of the advantages of the millet system into the modern Western world. Obviously this would be complicated given all the conflicting identity claims and the close quarters in which everyone is intermingled, but there are already some visions of what it could look like – including my own Archipelago – and if it were raised to the level of a national discussion, people could no doubt come up with many more.

So my question for you is – weren’t you a pretty crappy CEO?

Mr. Bush:

Assume that fitness-to-be-President is a normally distributed trait with known heritability. Suppose also that past elections have 100% efficiency; that is, they always choose the most qualified candidate. We can then use some of the standard regression-to-the-mean equations to determine the chances that the highest fitness-to-be-President individual in generation G will be the offspring of the highest fitness-to-be-President individual in generation G-1.

The single most fit-to-be president man in a population of 300 million would be about six standard deviations above the norm. If that man breeds with the single most fit-to-be-president woman, and if in keeping with findings for other complex traits heritability is about 60%, we would expect their offspring to be about 3.6 standard deviations above the mean in fitness-to-be-president. One in every 2500 or so people is 3.6 standard deviations above average, meaning there would be at least 120,000 equally good or better presidential candidates than they in the United States.

How high would the heritability of presidential fitness have to be before there was at least a 10% chance that the offspring of the two most presidential Americans was himself presidential material? My calculations suggest about 90%, which is very high compared to what we know about similar traits – but actually not entirely outside the realm of plausibility.

But if a maximally-presidential man breeds with a woman who is less than maximally presidential, the odds fall precipitiously. Suppose that a maximally-presidential man breeds with a woman who is merely in the 99th percentile for presidential ability. Now given a heritability of 60% there will be three million Americans more presidential than their average offspring. Even given a 100% heritability, there is only a 1/73 chance that their offspring will themselves be worthy of the presidency.

So my question for you is: do you think Barbara Bush is an unrecognized political super-genius, or are there probably hundreds of thousands of Americans who would make a better president than you would?

Senator Cruz:

You were on your college debate team, and you were good at it. Really good. You won the national championships and you were pretty widely believed to be the best debater in the country. Quite an achievement. But my worry is – which is more likely? That the best debater in the country would also be the best choice for President? Or that he would be really really really good at making us think that he would be?

Don’t respond yet. Before you answer that question – well, before you answer any question – we’ve got to think about this on the meta-level. There’s a classic problem in epistemology. Suppose that we have a superintelligence with near-infinite rhetorical brilliance. The superintelligence plays a game with interested humans. First, it takes the hundred or so most controversial topics, chooses two opposing positions on each, writes the positions down on pieces of paper, and then puts them in a jar. Then it chooses one position at random and tries to convince the human of that position. We observe that in a hundred such games, every human player has left 100% convinced of the position the superintelligence drew from the jar. Now it’s your turn to play the game. The superintelligence picks a position from the jar. It argues for the position. The argument is supremely convincing. After hearing it, you are more sure that the position is true than you have ever been of anything in your life; there’s so much evidence in favor that it is absolutely knock-down obvious. Should you believe the position?

The inside view tells you yes; upon evaluating the argument, you find is clearly true. The outside view tells you no; judging from the superintelligence’s past successes, it could have convinced you equally well of the opposite position. If you are smart, you will precommit to never changing your mind at all based on anything the superintelligence says. You will just shut it out of the community of entities capable of persuading you through argument.

Senator Cruz, you may not quite be at the superintelligence level, but given that you’ve been recognized as the most convincing person out of all three hundred million Americans, shouldn’t we institute similar precautions with you? Shouldn’t your supporters, even if they agree with everything you are saying, precommit to ignore you as a matter of principle?

Senator Rubio:

When you became Florida’s Speaker of the House, one of the other men on stage here tonight, Jeb Bush, presented you with a golden sword, which he said was the “Sword of Chang”. He told you that “Chang is somebody who believes in conservative principles, believes in entrepreneurial capitalism, believes in moral values that underpin a free society. Chang, this mystical warrior, has never let me down.” You looked pretty excited about it.

Now, some might say that this all came from a giant misunderstanding. Back in the late 1940s, Mao Zedong’s victorious Chinese communists forced Chiang Kai-shek’s defeated Chinese nationalists to retreat to the island of Taiwan. The United States kept the peace in the the Taiwan Strait, mostly to prevent Mao from invading and finishing the job, but a common refrain in 1950s conservativism went that we should “unleash Chiang”; that is, advise Chiang Kai-Shek to go back across the strait and reconquer China. George H. W. Bush served as envoy to China, had to listen to this sort of stuff, and got annoyed enough at the “unleash Chiang” rhetoric that he would quote it ironically at bizarre times, like his documented habit of threatening that his serve would “unleash Chiang” on his tennis opponents. It’s unclear how we got from George H. W. Bush’s constant threats to “unleash Chiang” on people, to his son’s belief that Chang was a mystical conservative warrior. Maybe it was a joke, either Bush Sr. pranking Jeb or Jeb pranking you.

In any case, you hung the sword in “a place of honor in your office”. From that point forward, Jeb’s fortunes declined. He left the Florida governorship, failed to get any further high positions, and then ran a very lackluster Presidential campaign. But from that same point your own fortunes decidedly rose. You started a law firm, were appointed a professor, got elected to the Senate, and are currently running a spectacular Presidential campaign with most pundits betting on your eventual victory after Trump and Carson lose their shine. The connection between the transfer of the sword and the sudden switch in both your fortunes is so striking that even the Huffington Post, not normally a source for magic-sword-related journalism, wrote about it: Jeb’s Last Hope – Reclaim the Sword of Chang.

But here we have a conundrum: if there was never a mythical Chinese warrior named Chang, by what magic does this sword grant worldly success to its possessor and ignomious ruin to any who lose it? There is a legend that fits almost exactly: the tale of the Holy Lance, aka the Spear of Destiny, aka several other portentious sounding names. According to the story, this relic from Christ’s crucifixion grants victory to all who own it and swift ruin to all who lose it. Charlemagne was reputedly the first to make use of its power; he was unstoppable while he wielded it but died moments after dropping it during battle. The same pattern repeated with Frederick Barbarossa, then a host of other military leaders, until finally it passed to the Austrian Habsburgs. They realized its power, locked it away, and ended up winning the greatest empire in European history. Supposedly Hitler was obsessed with it, so much so that his fascination with the object inspired the depiction of Nazi archaeologists in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and he took it for himself after the Anschluss. As the war wound down, the relic caught the special attention of General George Patton, who brought it back safely to Vienna afterwards. But ever since that time there have been various rumors that it was a fake, and that Nazi sympathizers took the real Lance in preparation for the time when the Reich would rise again.

The book Secrets of the Holy Lance describes one possible route by which the artifact might have been smuggled out of Europe:

Reporters John Buchanan and Stacey Michael cite recently declassified documents from the US National Archives that indicate that Prescott Bush “failed to divest himself of more than a dozen enemy national relationships that continued until as late as 1951. Bush conducted business following the end of World War II with moving assets into the Nazi refuges of Argentina, Panama, and Brazil.

So Prescott Bush was involved in moving Nazi “assets” from conquered Europe to South American refuges, presumably including the true Lance. Far be it from me to impugn his business ethics, but I don’t remember Nazi refugees in Argentina becoming an unstoppable force aided by a weapon of legendary mystical power. On the other hand, I do remember Prescott Bush being elected to the United States Senate just a few years later. Then his son and the presumed heir of his property was elected US President. Then his son was also elected US President. I need not add that according to the the laws of genetics, the chance of this happening by coincidence is hundreds-of-thousands to one even assuming implausibly high heritability of the fitness-to-be-president trait. Then his other son starts rocketing up through the ranks right up until the moment he gave you the sword of Chang, a sword named after a weird Bush family in-joke about a Chinese mystical warrior who doesn’t exist.

I think we can start to sketch out a plausible explanation here. Hitler didn’t want the Holy Lance falling into the hands of his enemies, so he replaced it with a fake and hired Nazi-artifact-smuggler Prescott Bush to transport the real one to safety in South America. Bush realized what he had, handed the South Americans a second fake, and kept the real one for himself, reforging it from a lance into a sword to cover his tracks – an action entirely in character for Prescott Bush, whose other relic-stealing adventures include the theft of Geronimo’s skull. He died unexpectedly without getting the chance to explain the significance of the artifact to his son George H. W. Bush. But since it seemed like a sentimentally important heirloom, George took care of his father’s weird golden sword anyway. When his sons asked him about it he didn’t have a real answer, so he just made his favorite in-joke about “unleashing Chiang”, and they believed him. Then eventually it passed to George W, later on to Jeb, and then Jeb thought it would be a funny present to give you to honor your election as Florida speaker.

Obviously the Lance is a significant strategic asset for America, and I imagine if you were President then its aura of victory would apply to the country as well, much as the Habsburgs’ possession of the lance enlarged Austria-Hungary. However, its powers are generally held to come from the Antichrist.

So my question for you is, do you think it’s ethical to use your magic sword to channel the power of the Antichrist if that would ensure America’s military success?

Mr. Trump:

You are famous both for your vast corporate empire and for your tendency to name the pieces of that corporate empire after yourself. By my count there are six buildings named “Trump Tower”, ten named some variation on “Trump Hotel”, a Trump Building, a Trump Palace, and a Trump Estate. You founded a financial services group called Trump Mortgage, a modeling agency called Trump Model Management, a bottled water brand called Trump Ice, and a magazine called Trump Magazine. You also started an airline called Trump Airlines, a TV company called Trump Productions, a book series called Trump Books, and your own radio talk show called Trumped!. There are also several Trump-themed games, like Donald Trump’s Real Estate Tycoon and Trump: The Game.

Mother Jones wrote a great article on this last one. Trump: The Game seems to be a tacky Monopoly clone. Players move around a board and bid on properties, and when one of them gets locked out of bidding for a property the other player gets to say “YOU’RE FIRED” the same way you do on your show. The only way to get back in to a property once you’ve been fired is to use the game’s most powerful card, which has a picture of your face on it and is called “The Donald”.

My question for you is: WHY DIDN’T YOU CALL IT THE TRUMP CARD?!?!!!!111111111asdfdf

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