Jai on the Copenhagen interpretation of ethics, ie “people are punished for touching a problem without solving it.”

Nowadays we say the brain is like a computer. Fifty years ago, people said the brain was like a telephone switchboard. Three hundred years ago? Human beings are basically made of fireworks.

In case you were insufficiently convinced about the crime-IQ link, the latest study from Finland demonstrates it conclusively across > 20,000 people – or you could skip the text and just look at the graph (since the same effect is found on self-report of crime, it’s not just “stupid people get caught”). h/t Stuart Ritchie.

Lovecraft fans: did you know the dhole is a real animal?

The latest promising potential obesity treatment is celastrol, a chemical isolated from the awesomely-named Thunder God Vine. I have already started confusing this with Thorazine for the obvious reason. [EDIT: This may have excessive side effects]

Mississippi is in special trouble for having the Confederate banner on its state flag, but you should know that every state flag is horrible.

Silk Road and similar bitcoin dark markets keep either getting their organizers arrested or turning out to be scams. Now some coders have a vision of creating a distributed dark market as decentralized and open as bitcoin itself. Not for illegal things, mind you. Just for totally legal things that you happen to want to sell via an untraceable currency on a heavily encrypted site. Something something call up something can’t put down.

Space probes that fly by the Earth for a gravitational assist seem to gain speed in a way inconsistent with known laws of physics. Possible explanations include dark matter halo around Earth.

Big new study claims to have found that black-white outcome differences are almost entirely a result of how children of different races are raised. They compare black people with white mothers to black people with black mothers, and find that black people with white mothers do just as well as white people; then they conclude that this means it’s the way you get raised by your mother which determines which racial pattern you fall into. Interesting result, but seems to have no awareness of the fact that people who identify as black but have white mothers are most likely half-white – this reintroduces discrimination as an explanation (since half-white people presumably will have whiter appearance and people might not recognize them as black or discriminate against them as much) as well as genetics. One might argue that in genetic or discrimination explanations they should at least be halfway between all-whites and all-blacks, but I don’t really see the study doing the analysis necessary to make that argument. Although the blindingly obvious next step is to look at children of black mothers and white fathers, either I am missing this in the study or it isn’t done. Overall interesting methodology but very disappointing; I only skimmed it but I’m interested in seeing further analysis.

Closely related: The IQ Gap Is No Longer A Black And White Issue. What should we conclude from African immigrants to the US (and their children) being among the highest-IQ and most successful people in the country, while ‘native’ African-Americans do much worse? Does this argue against discrimination-based explanations for outcome gaps, since immigrants’ blackness doesn’t seem to hurt them at all? Does it argue against genetic explanations, since both groups have broadly similar genetic makeup? (but the article seriously misunderstands regression to the mean, which probably dooms us to a slog through quantitative arguments about exactly how strong selection effects can be – see also here ). Does it argue for something about “poverty traps”? Should we take it as corroborating evidence for the above study that it has to do with cultural transmission and child-rearing?

And related: statistician looks over three of the most celebrated papers purporting to find evidence of racial discrimination and finds that they seem to have heavily fudged numbers, almost as if there were some sort of “ulterior” “motive” “incentivizing” people to publish shoddy research in the field. I don’t really understand the test used and would be grateful to someone explaining it to me using short words.

Not related: the cookbook written by the spouses of Supreme Court Justices.

For-profit colleges are charging tens of thousands of dollars for courses that tend to leave most of their graduates unemployed or working below-poverty-line jobs. Cosmetologists and medical assistants hardest hit. Now the government is cracking down.

Stuart Armstrong’s top ten myths about AI risk. I would have also included “people only worry about AI risk because they think superintelligent AI is very near”.

Drone strikes in areas associated with decreased terrorism in those areas.

Scott Sumner on the startling level of inequality between the northern and southern parts of various European countries, especially Italy.

Actually, please don’t.

Master craftsman Shing Myongsik is apparently very serious about selling this game board, which “took twenty years to make” and “has appeared on TV numerous times”, for $100,000. Plus $54.30 for shipping.

A very comprehensive meta-analysis by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation gathers studies showing that giving poor families money improves children’s outcomes considerably – for example, closing the financial gap between rich and poor kids would close half of the school achievement gap. Some obvious caveats – it doesn’t seem to have been published in a peer-review journal, and the Foundation seems to be a think tank associated with the cause of giving poor families money – but the research and methodology seem solid as far as it goes. My main caveat, and it’s a big one, is that pretty much all their studies measured very near-term outcomes – eg giving families money this year improves their childrens’ grades in school this year. No proof that there is any effect on outcomes that actually matter, like whether the children break out of poverty when they grow up. On the other hand, one would have a hard time arguing that getting better grades throughout your childhood and so getting into a better college or something doesn’t give you a leg up when you’re older. I can’t remember exactly which, but seems like a good place to point out that a lot of these study links are h/t Nathaniel Bechhofer and Ben Southwood.

But this is SSC and we are totally going to try! Estimating The Return To College Selectivity Over The Career Using Administrative Earnings Data by Dale and Krueger (of minimum wage fame) finds that, after accounting for the unobserved differences in ability that allow some students to get into better colleges than others, the return to going to a better college is basically zero. An unrelated analysis in the Economist on a similar topic comes to the same conclusion with a striking graph. [EDIT: Robin Hanson tears this apart]

Also, a while back, China increased years of required schooling, leading to a perfect quasi-experiment to see whether more schooling led to better outcomes. Authors conclude that “our results are consistent with the signaling story [ie education being mostly about signaling]; further consistent with such a story, we estimate that the labor market return to another year of schooling is very small, though greater for the less-educated.”

Some people volunteer to moderate for AOL. Later, they decide to launch a class action suit against AOL for not paying them for the volunteer work they volunteered to do as volunteers. They argue that they worked really hard, so it was kind of like being an employee, and so AOL owes them lots of back pay for all the work they weren’t compensted for. The court decides this makes perfect sense and AOL eventually settles for $15 million. Am I misunderstanding the legalities here, or has volunteering just been made illegal? [see discussion in comments]

Florida is the only state with its own embassy in Washington DC, for some reason.

There’s a common talking point that the US’ private health system is demonstrably inferior to Europe’s public health systems because it spends more money to get worse results. I was recently linked to two articles that challenge that assumption. Random Critical Analysis argues that GDP per capita is the wrong measure to compare healthcare to, and when we use the right denominator the US’ health care expenditure is no more or less than expected given its size and wealth; I don’t know enough economics to be sure it’s right, but I admire the number of graphs included in the argument. And a team from University of Pennsylvania claims that the US’ sub-par life expectancies are unrelated to the healthcare system, although their methodology consists of some measurements of health care quality that for all I know could be cherry-picked or nonrepresentative.

Language Log on the International Classification of Diseases, the official medical coding manual which goes above and beyond in trying to have a code for every possible reason somebody might come to a doctor – plus extra commentary on the inherent difficulty of ontologies. They include some classic ICD codes like “bitten by orca”, “burn due to water-skis on fire”, and “struck by tortoise”. But I have had occasion to use the ICD myself and would add personal favorites V97.33 (sucked into jet engine), V90.23 (drowning due to jumping from burning ship), W58.13 (crushed by crocodile), W50.3 (accidental bite by another person), Y38.5X3 (terrorist injured by their own nuclear bomb), Y92.72 (injury occurring in chicken coop) and W22.02 (walked into lamppost).

Interfluidity gives the Greeks’ side of the Greek financial crisis; Tyler Cowen gives the creditors’ side. Somewhat related: at least according to Forbes (whose ideological committments give them little reason to lie), despite their lazy reputation Greeks work the longest hours in Europe [EDIT: but see comment].

I get accused of overusing the word “orthogonal”, so I want you to know that the Supreme Court has officially ruled that this is cool. (h/t Oscar Cunningham)

Relevant to previous discussion on this blog: Colorado finds that giving out lots of birth control does, indeed, decrease teenage pregnancy rates.

This is a complicated paper and I’m not sure I’m understanding it right, but I think it says that genetic factors and childhood trauma both play independent roles in increasing people’s risk for psychosis, and that the chilhood trauma -> psychosis link isn’t just an artifact of genetics where psychotic people have psychotic parents who cause them trauma.

I was sure that this picture of a deep blue tarantula was photoshopped, but it’s actually a pretty typical poecilotheria metallica.

Congratulations to everybody starting, graduating, or progressing up in medical residencies this July (the rest of you might want to stay away from hospitals for a while). If you’re feeling overwhelmed, you (and medical students also) might want to check out a new book written by LW/SSC community member / new radiology resident Peter Wei: Learning Medicine: An Evidence Based Guide. It talks about how to best use spaced repetition software and similar tools to memorize and understand medical knowledge as quickly as possible.

A lot of the links this week have been studies, some more credible than others, purporting to find that genetics don’t matter as much as we thought. We had better hope they’re right: according to Pew only 46% of Americans support genetic engineering to reduce disease risk, and only 15% of Americans support genetic engineering to make kids more intelligent.

Pakistan’s transgender tax collectors.

A couple of posts ago, I mocked the Muslim activist who claimed Mossad broke into his house and stole one of his shoes to creep him out. Jonathan Zhou corrects me and points out that this sort of thing is actually a known intelligence agency tactic.

A systematic review of all 55 medical conditions whose risks vary with your month of birth.

Popehat does some very impressive investigative reporting into the government trying to make a (literal) federal case out of random libertarian blog commenters criticizing a judge at Reason.com. A pretty good example of the abuses of power possible if laws about Internet threats are made too strict. Followups here, here, and here.

Probiotics watch: maybe eating fermented food decreases social anxiety?

Nevada enacts comprehensive school choice law. The experiment has begun.

Life imitating JRPGs – mysterious “time crystals” may hold the secret to outlasting entropy. No word on whether you have to get all seven, or whether they are hidden in temples themed around the seven elements. Some people on Tumblr try to help me understand the implications.

A while ago, I was getting the impression that the Mexican drug cartels were unstoppable and the Mexican government was too corrupt to be able to do anything about them. Now the cartels are almost all defeated or in retreat. What happened?

Long ago I reviewed a book claiming the future was glia. Now some scientists are proposing that maybe SSRIs work by affecting glial cells.

American Hippopotamus describes the 1910s plan by two larger-than-life Boer War guerilla-assassins to “turn American into a nation of hippo ranchers”. The story alone would be worth your time even if it wasn’t well-written, but it happens to be very possibly the best-written article I have ever read. Long, but also available on Kindle if wanted.

Program that teaches college women how to avoid rape may cut risk of rape in half as per new study.

This article on whether the US could replicate Scandinavia’s low poverty rate is interesting throughout, but what makes it for me is the claim that Swedes in the US have the same poverty rate as Swedes in Sweden [edit: possibly this is false?]. How much should we make of this?

Not only are we living in the future, but it’s exactly the future Philip K Dick told us to expect: “Abortion drone” to make first flight into Poland

The mysterious resemblance between the ancient Numenorean calendar and the French revolutionary calendar (h/t an-animal-imagined-by-poe)

I’d always heard the story “Iceland rejected fiscal austerity and did everything exactly the way the left wanted and did great.” Scott Sumner and Tyler Cowen say that actually Iceland had lots and lots of austerity.

I think it’s probably time to stop bothering Rachel Dolezal. She seems like a good example of a person who’s not hurting anyone, has some really weird problems she needs to sort out, but because she doesn’t fall into a designated “here are people we have agreed it’s not okay to mock” category we are mocking her. The psychoanalyst in me wants to say this is some kind of displacement where people who are upset they can’t get away with making fun of real black people suddenly see an apparent black person (and NAACP leader, no less!) lose their magical protection and become a valid target, and are now channeling years of pent-up rage at her. Anyway, not totally related, but an explanation of why this is not a good analogy for transgender.

Article originally reported as “no gender gap in tech salaries” gives a more nuanced description of their result. Summary: true based on sample of equally qualified people one year after graduation; no evidence whether or not it’s true in other situations. This article is also good example of “if you have data supporting a controversial point, ignorant people on Twitter will throw out some terms that sound statistics-y and bad, like ‘confounding’ or ‘cherry-picking’, then say you have now been debunked.”

Doctors with the highest ratings on those rate-your-doctor sites may deliver worse care than less-well-rated docs. Maybe you get higher ratings by giving patients what they want, which is usually amphetamines, narcotics, antibiotics, and unnecessary tests.

The time Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote an article about Lord Byron’s divorce so controversial it caused a third of The Atlantic’s readership to cancel their subscriptions.

Alyssa Vance writes on Facebook about Ivy League colleges’ sketchy methods of soliciting alumni donations.

In a study of 20,000 people, an uncommon allele of the MAO-A gene may cause a sevenfold increased risk of violent criminal behavior, making it probably the strongest gene-crime link to date.

Previously on SSC links: if robots are taking our jobs, how come productivity numbers aren’t increasing? Now: okay, productivity numbers are increasing, but the robots still don’t seem to be taking our jobs.

A man angry at the German government for falsely imprisoning him is adopting a thousand children in order to make them German citizens and do his part to strain the welfare state. Apparently everything legally checks out and no one can stop him. Open borders advocates take note. [edit: old story, loophole since possibly closed?]

Anti-science-denial group Committee for Skeptical Inquiry wants to make a $25,000 bet with the global warming doubters at the Heartland Institute about future climate trends. While I totally approve of this strategy (“A bet is a tax on bullshit” – Alex Tabarrok and Bryan Caplan), the exact terms seem kind of dumb – AFAIK, Heartland doesn’t believe that the Earth is not getting warmer, just that it’s not necessarily human-caused. Betting on next year’s temperature does nothing to settle that.

In the last links post, I mentioned a study that tried to use transgender people to test the sources of the gender gap. A new study from Brazil tries to do the same with race – Brazilians are frequently very multiracial, and different companies might classify the same employee differently. The study tries to match that with salaries – does a boss who thinks of an employee as white pay them more than their boss next year who thinks of them as black? They conclude that 40% of racial income gaps can be explained in that way, though of course it sounds like Brazil’s racial situation is different enough from America’s that it might not generalize.

Nothing sophisticated or intellectual about this one – just trucks driving off aircraft carriers. Wheeeee!

Some linguists talk of “the Anglic languages”, a language family including English and some of its weirder relatives and descendants that have evolved to the point of mutual intelligibility. You’ve probably heard of Scots, ie “the reason you can’t understand Robert Burns”. But did you know about Forth and Bargy?

Google’s neural nets can now amplify images without human guidance. And by amplify, they mean add shoggoths (warning: shoggoth). Also, this seems way too much like the visual effects of LSD to be a coincidence, and I look forward to neuroscientists explaining the exact connection.

A mildly interesting Wall Street Journal article on how jobs are staying open longer because employers can’t find qualified candidates also contains some surprising information – 5% of job interviews include an IQ test, and almost 20% include a personality test. I’m not sure how that meshes with our recent discussion of Griggs vs. US. I’m starting to think the importance of this case is overblown – the actual ruling specifically banned assessing qualifications based on IQ tests or on degree completion. Everyone does the latter, so why are we so sure this case is restricting people from doing the former?

Obvious once I heard it but something I never thought about it before – the Statue of Liberty is green because all old tarnished copper is green. When it was first built, it was, well, copper-colored. When it tarnished the government was supposed to raise money to fix it, but never got around to it. Now it’s impossible for me not to find the idea of the Statue of Liberty being green kind of hilarious.

California college professors told they can be disciplined or fired for committing “microaggressions” including “describing America as a melting pot” or saying that “I believe the most qualified person should get the job”. Assumed this was some kind of total fake, did some digging, still seems legit, but if anyone can find otherwise I will correct myself with apologies and relief. At least every time I see this sort of thing it’s in universities, suggesting the contagion is somewhat contained. [edit: a claim that this doesn’t matter much]

We already know that many medical studies and many psychological studies fail to replicate. What about economics studies? The necessary work is still being done, but the recent progress report suggests that about 66% of replication attempts completely fail to replicate the original finding, with another 12% partly failing to replicate and only 22% replicating completely. Possibly an argument for privileging theory more in the interminable Econ Theory Versus Empiricism Wars?

Contrary to some reports, nationwide gun violence and nationwide violence against police do not seem to have spiked after the latest round of police brutality stories and race riots.

This wins my prize for real case most like the sort of weird murder mysteries you see in books: A man is found dead in the desert with an obvious fatal gunshot wound. He has no enemies but recently suffered a major financial setback; everyone suspects he committed suicide and only wanted it to look like murder. However, this ruse is very convincing; no gun is found anywhere nearby. How did he shoot himself?

How long can a con man with no soccer talent whatsoever play soccer at the professional level before anybody catches on? How about twenty years?

IQ researcher, Ian Deary collaborator, and SSC victim Dr. Stuart Ritchie has written an introductory book on IQ and intelligence studies that looks pretty good. Not sure if the ambiguity of meaning in the subtitle is a horrible mistake or 100% deliberate.

Automated theorem provers and the changing foundations of mathematics (does not require much math knowledge to read).

New American Statistical Association ‘premium’ membership plan will permit members to reject null hypotheses at alpha values > 0.05. Actually, the whole site is pretty good.

Some opponents of open borders argue that a lot of Third World countries (eg Afghanistan, Somalia) are kind of terrible, and worry that if we import many of their citizens here, then they might bring whatever factors made their country terrible to the First World and make our countries terrible. The open borders movement presents the start of a counterargument.

Canada passes a law saying they must eliminate one old regulation for every new regulation adopted. I didn’t realize libertarianism had a win condition, but I think Canada just reached it. Will be very interesting to watch.

National Review columnists debate the real primary contenders this election: Cthulhu versus the Sweet Meteor of Death.

Remember, “non-shared environment” doesn’t necessarily mean “sociology stuff” – Toddler temperament could be influenced by different types of gut bacteria.

Citizens of Baltimore living in (more) terror (than usual) as murders and all other types of crime skyrocket after Freddie Gray riots. Seems to be caused by the police not doing much policing. Dueling talking points are “recent media feeding frenzy has left police so scared of racism accusations that they won’t touch any majority-black area” versus “police are acting like toddlers and saying ‘well, if we can’t do policing with racism and brutality, then we’re just not going to do any policing at all, SO THERE”.

Old question “why does evolution allow homosexuality to exist when it decreases reproduction?” seems to have been solved, at least in fruit flies: the female relatives of gayer fruit flies have more children. Same thing appears to be true in humans. Unclear if lesbianism has a similar aetiology.

“Translating Finnegan’s Wake into Chinese” sounds like a bad joke or possibly a metaphor for life. It’s actually an unexpected bestseller.

If you’re not familiar with the Albion’s Seed hypothesis, Charles Murray does a decent job explaining it here, plus discussion of America’s multicultural past and future.

BoingBoing: Why Rickrolling Is Sexist

When I wrote a post calling the education system kind of useless (no, not that one, the other one) the first comment was Buck asking why developed countries with lots of education seemed to do better than developed countries with little education. A new study provides an answer: not because of education, because that seems to have no effect.

A novel but fascinating way of investigating gender discrimination in pay: do male-to-female transgender people take a pay cut? Do female-to-male transgender people get a pay raise? Obviously there’s a lot of trouble in adjusting for the effect of transgender itself on pay, but the study finds a 20% pay cut for M->Fs and a 10% pay raise (nonsignificant) for F->M, and concludes that this seems is likely more gender-related than transition-related. Probably should add this to my list of good social justice studies to replace some of the others that keep dropping like flies.

This is the most “we are living in the grim cyberpunk future” story I have ever seen: Russian billboard advertising contraband changes to a more innocuous advertisement when its computer vision system spots a police officer.

Back when I was writing about AI scientists who worried about AI risk, I somehow missed this great interview with Stuart Russell.

A mile-long machine is going to be deployed to the Tsushima Strait to clean it of floating garbage. If it works, there are plans to dispatch 1000 km (!) worth to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. But actual ocean-garbage-ologists say it will never work and might be counterproductive.

Fake-Etymologies.com

Does Zoloft treat Ebola? Scientists decide to throw every existing drug at the Ebola virus to see if just by coincidence some of them work just by coincidence, and get some weird positives. But given how many drugs psychiatry has borrowed from infectious diseases, it’s about time we started giving some back.

The most important thing I’ve gotten out of this FIFA scandal is that being a complete loon is apparently no barrier to holding a very high position in the world’s most influential sporting body. Upon being arrested, vice-president Jack Warner promised: “Not even death will stop the avalanche that is coming” he said. “The die is cast. There can be no turning back. Let the chips fall where they fall.” About soccer negotiations. This is the same guy who cited the Onion article.

Latest hullaballoo: Curtis Yarvin (aka “Mencius Moldbug”) was invited to give a presentation on his new computer system Urbit to the Strange Loop tech conference. Then some of his ideological enemies (actually literal Communists) found out, objected to his political views, and he got banned from the conference. Article here, Hacker News thread here, impressively prescient Moldbug post here, demonstration of inevitable Streisand Effect here. I did consider not linking this since it’s so obviously toxoplasma, but I was convinced to do so by this letter where the conference organizer states he’s never read any Moldbug himself, but decided to cave to the ban request because otherwise politics overshadow the conference, which was supposed to be about tech. This kind of crystallizes a pattern I’ve been noticing recently where some social justice activists use a tactic along the lines of “Nice institution youse gots here, shame if somebody were to politicize it”. I sympathize with the desire to give into that to avoid trouble, but I think maybe the only way to avoid enshrining that kind of heckler’s veto always working is to make it clear that the choice to give in will also be politicized. Maybe if organizers know that banning all insufficiently-leftist-people and not banning all insufficiently-leftist-people will both result in politicization and Internet firestorms, they’ll say “screw it” and just follow their principles.

Is Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy For Depression Losing Its Efficacy? New meta-analysis across almost 40 years shows that “effects of CBT have declined linearly and steadily since its introduction” with high significance consistent across multiple different measurement modalities. Study theorizes that maybe therapy is getting worse as a lot of people who aren’t very good at it or don’t stick to the evidence-based principles jump on the CBT bandwagon. Also suggests maybe as it becomes less “the exciting new thing” there’s decreased placebo effect. I would add a possibility that CBT ideas have become so prevalent in our society already that there might be less left to teach, and that as depression diagnoses have skyrocketed we may be sending a different population to therapy (eg people who are less severely depressed and therefore can’t be helped as much). Somebody should also try to unify this result with the finding that antidepressant drug efficacy has been declining over the same period. There’s something very important hidden here, but I’m not totally sure what it is.

Dalai Lama says is considering reincarnating as a ‘mischievous blonde woman’.

The economics of art museums. The first half of this article is a terrible ramble that demonstrates some, uh, creative understanding of economics. The second half is much better, and describes the economic forces that lead most art museums to keep most of their art in basements where no one can see it forever, even though selling the tiniest fraction of that could allow them to (for example) make admission free forever.

We already sort of knew that exposure to cat parasite toxoplasma was a risk factor for schizophrenia. Now researchers take the next step and find that children in cat-owning families are at higher risk of schizophrenia across multiple different studies. Odds ratio not on abstract, but it’s about 1.5.

Technocracy Inc was a pro-technocracy movement of the 1930s which had over half a million members, who “painted their cars Official Technocracy Gray, wore a uniform consisting of a gray double-breasted suit, and saluted [leader] Scott when they encountered him in person. At their most extreme, some members replaced their names with numbers, such as 1x1809x56.”

CuddleBids is…I should probably avoid saying “Uber for cuddle prostitution”, but I’m not sure there’s another equally concise way to describe it. Notable as example of the kind of website I hate, with all the information carefully hidden away where it can’t interfere with the sleek design. Other than that I so in favor.

Cool graphs on my Twitter feed: effect sizes of preschool interventions (low and dropping), funnel plot of preschool interventions, not very encouraging at all. Poor sociology. There’s always time to get into the gut-bacteria-studying business.

Cute confirmation bias experiment: when an education plan was pitched as “the Democrats’ education plan”, Democrats supported it 75%-17%, and Republicans opposed it 13%-78%. When the exact same plan was pitched as “the Republicans’ education plan”, Democrats opposed it 80%-12% and Republicans supported it 70%-10%.

The first review of this light fixture.

“Crash blossoms” are complicated ambiguous headlines, like “Screenwriter Reveals He Tried To Commit Suicide During Awards Ceremony”. Language Log has nine whole pages of crash blossoms.

New volleys in the debate about whether moderate drinking is good for your health or it’s all just bad statistics.

At the age of three, Dorothy Eady hit her head and was suddenly jarred back into remembering her past life as an ancient Egyptian priestess. So she did what anyone would do in that situation – grow up, move to Egypt, and use her recovered memories to help her in a career as an Egyptologist.

Several hundred ways to describe results that are almost but not quite significant.

More evidence against dysgenics: childlessness among female PhDs has decreased by 50% since 1990. What are we doing right?

LW community startup and SSC sidebar advertiser MealSquares was profiled in Vice Magazine this month, as well as getting a quick shoutout on Vox.

100 Interesting Data Sets For Statistics

A pet peeve of mine: Stop Using Income As A Guide To Economic Class.

If you’re willing to follow consistency wherever it leads, you can stay way ahead of the curve on moral progress: Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, supported gay rights in 1785.

Tyler Cowen described this as “if Thomas Schelling made an alarm clock”

A new way trolls can produce unexpected patterns in survey data, and why it might produce a fake signal indicating gay parents are bad at raising children. (h/t Wulfrickson)

Not only do Tibetans have a native zombie mythos, but many Tibetan houses have low doorways to prevent zombies (who are less flexible than mortals) from entering. Bonus: the five types of Tibetan zombie, and how to kill them.

Linked mostly for having a great title: Self-Driving Trucks Are Going To Hit Us Like A Human-Driven Truck

Did you know the Salvation Army used to fight an arch-enemy, the Skeleton Army?

How do the arts funding decisions of government bureaucracies compare to the arts funding decisions of Kickstarter?

Chinese online dating scams. Imagine a beautiful woman asks you out on an online dating site. You go to a nice restaurant together, you have a great time, and then you never hear from her again. What happened? The restaurant was paying her to bring you there.

An article gets posted on Reddit about how China was able to cut CO2 emissions extremely rapidly after their deal with President Obama earlier this year. Redditors talk about how authoritarianism is superior to democracy when you really need something done. This kind of opened my eyes a little to how authoritarianism isn’t the domain of any one side of the political spectrum, so much as a fallback position that becomes really tempting once you feel like the system is too weak to serve your interests. Twist: China’s emissions might not really be falling.

Taxi Medallion Prices In Free Fall. I would like to make a comment about “sweet, sweet rent-seeker tears”, but it looks like some decent middle-class individuals invested in these and are now getting burned, so it’s a lot sadder than I would have hoped.

How do commitment contracts and other incentive structures affect people’s success at quitting smoking? Obviously relevant to LW community startup and SSC sidebar advertiser Beeminder, who blog about it here.

One common message in effective altruist circles is that overhead isn’t the most important thing about a charity. On the other hand, when only 3% of a charity’s $197 million budget makes it to cancer patients, consider the possibility that they’re a giant scam.

Albino redwoods.

Genetically engineered yeast makes it possible to create home-brewed morphine. Nothing can possibly go wrong.

No! Bad San Francisco! A housing moratorium is exactly the opposite of the sort of thing that leads to housing costs going down!

Excellent first sentences: “We do not usually identify Palau as part of the Roman Empire…” (h/t Nydwracu)

Final decision on nature vs. nurture: it’s 49% nature, 51% nurture. I guess that means nurture wins by a hair. Good going, guys.

Boring neurological disease: you can no longer process human faces. Interesting neurological disease: you can process human faces, but all of them look like DRAGONS.

Big political science study on how gay canvassers going door-to-door substantially increases long-term support for gay marriage was fake. I don’t particularly care about gay canvassers, but two important takeaways. Number one, sometimes when studies find much larger effects than you would expect from the rest of the literature, there are sinister reasons. Number two, the problems were discovered by a couple of grad students who looked at the paper and found it was suspicious, suggesting that nobody else had done that over the past year, which says something about the uses of the review process.

Nrx watch: Leading neoreactionaries announce the formation of a council to guide the movement, first action of their auspicious reign is to exile Michael Anissimov (really). Good commentary here. As someone who spent his formative years in micronations, where it’s acknowledged that the whole point of having a weird political movement is to run the movement on its own utopian principles and see what happens, I’m disappointed they can’t have a patchwork of different excruciatingly formalized brands/movements with people switching to the most successful – but I guess that’s why nobody asked me. Related: Konkvistador, Athrelon, Nyan and Erik leave MoreRight.

New York Times interprets NEJM study to say severe mental illness is dropping in young people, contrary to beliefs. I won’t comment until I’m somewhere I have full-text access to the original paper.

An unexpected fan of 9-11 conspiracy theories: Osama bin Laden. What? How does that even work?

Cryonics works in nematodes. According to the paper, they were frozen for a period about equal to their natural lifespan, then revived with memories intact. See also the study itself and a lively debate on the Hacker News thread including an appearance by Gwern. Also notable for nominative determinism in the form of cryonicist Dr. Vita-More.

What does a $1,000 keyboard look like? Also, Alicorn has recently been unreasonably delighted by these slightly cheaper accessories.

Popehat is a popular legal blog on the SSC sidebar. It is run by Ken White, a partner at a successful law firm and minor Internet celebrity. Earlier this week, he blogged about his recent experience as a patient in a psychiatric facility, prompting other people to tell their own similar stories. My reaction is a lot like ClarkHat’s: “I really really hate it when someone opens up and a thousand people say ‘Oh, so brave!’ because it’s usually not remotely brave. That said, this post by Ken is damned brave and I’m even more impressed by him today than I was before.” I see a lot of pretty high-functioning professionals who have to spend a few days or a few weeks in psychiatric hospital, and a lot of them get very stressed out about “How could this be happening to me, well-off successful people aren’t supposed to be mentally ill!” and then they worry that they’re the only one and there’s something wrong with them. I hope Ken’s post helps a couple of those people realize they’re not alone.

I was able to solve the Cheryl’s birthday Singapore logic puzzle after a few minutes, but I got stuck on the transfinite version.

The Kosher Light Switch claims that after you flip it, the light will come on, but that your flipping it doesn’t cause the light to come on, thus making it compliant with complicated Jewish ritual laws. Needless to say, this seems to depend on an interpretation of causation which is not entirely…what’s the word…kosher.

I said a while ago I thought that “affirmative consent” laws wouldn’t matter one way or the other since situations where people pressed cases based on them were unliikely to come up. I seem to have been wrong – in a recent case in Brandeis, a man was found in violation of affirmative consent laws because during the course of a two year romantic relationship, he occasionally kissed his partner goodbye in the morning without asking permission first. I’d like to blame this one on Feminism Gone Too Far, but since both parties were gay men we guys have nobody to blame but ourselves here.

The worst method of transliterating the Qiang language gives us such lovely words as “eazheabeageyegeaiju”, “gganpaeidubugeisdu”, and “chegvchagvchegvchagvlahva”. Anyone want to play a game of Terrible Qiang Transliteration Scrabble?

Be Careful Studying Discrimination Using Names. I talked about this briefly when comparing the two recent Women In STEM studies – calling one candidate “John” and the other “Jennifer” introduced a whole host of possible confounds beyond just gender. The article points out that articles which try to prove white-black discrimination by comparing “John” to “Jamal” have the same problem – Jamal isn’t just a black name, it’s a poor black name, and a fairer comparison would be a poor white name like Billy Bob. Features a pretty good reply by Women In STEM paper author Corinne Moss-Racusin, and a less good reply by the guy who wrote the John-Jamal paper.

Dodging Abilify is about the contortions some mental health patients have to go through to prevent their doctors from inappropriately prescribing latest Exciting-New-Marketing-Campaign-Drug Abilify to them. The writer may or may not be pleased to know that when Abilify goes generic in the near future, all of a sudden all of these prescriptions will stop and people will start pushing brexipiprazole instead.

South Dakota’s new ad campaign (h/t Heidi): look, lots of people want to go to Mars, but South Dakota is less inhospitable than Mars, so come to South Dakota instead. Key slogan: “If you’re someone that’s really introverted, it might not be that bad.”

The politics behind the recent campaign against Dr. Oz, and why it might have played right into his hands.

Student Course Evaluations Get An F. Professors whom students rate worst are precisely those professors whose students get the best grades in future courses, suggesting these evaluations are negatively correlated with teaching quality. Very relevant to our recent discussion on psych drugs, hopefully not relevant to past discussions on democracy!

Marijuana probably exacerbates psychosis because of its main chemical constituent THC. But a different marijuana chemical, cannabidiol, might actually a potent antipsychotic. And more evidence for same.

Dutch people swear using diseases. I bet doctors must win all verbal duels in the Netherlands.

An intervention meant to raise kindergarteners’ tolerance of disabled people by teaching them a curriculum about how great it was to have disabled friends actually lowered their tolerance of the disabled compared to a control curriculum where they learned science stuff. Researchers theorized that the science stuff made them work together in groups with other children (including disabled ones) for a practical goal rather than rubbing their noses in the difference.

A new study finds homeopathy and Prozac both outperform placebo by the same amount in treating postmenopausal depression. Ars Technica thinks it knows why the study found such a counterintuitive finding, but check the comments for why their deconstruction seems a bit premature. Overall I think both those defending the integrity of the trial and those attacking it have some good points, but the problem is that if this experiment had done anything other than propose homeopathy worked, it would never have gotten this level of scrutiny and any flaws it might or might not have would just have been allowed to pass.

This is Steven King-level creepy: Thoughts Can Fuel Some Deadly Brain Cancers.

Nostalgebraist, a very interesting guy who hangs around rationalist Tumblr, is writing fiction I’ve been enjoying a lot. His completed work, Floornight, asks – what happens if we discover the soul is real, but operates more like a quantum object than a classical object, and also some people go to study it in a giant dome in the middle of the sea surrounded by alien ghosts which is part of a plot by parallel universes to fight a war based on differing interpretations of measure? His current work-in-progress, The Northern Caves, is even better.

Somebody actually does the full scientific study and determines that atheists are no more angry than the general population. I predicted this result here two years ago.

Kazakh leader apologizes for winning election with 97.7% of the vote, saying “it would have looked undemocratic to intervene to make the victory more modest”.

Polygamists are four times more likely to get heart disease than monogamists after everything else is controlled for, which to me probably means they think they controlled for everything else but they didn’t.

First results from psychology’s largest reproducibility test: by strict criteria, only 39% of published studies replicate; by looser criteria, 63% do.

Speaking of which, you remember that study on how reading problems in a hard-to-read font makes you think about them more rationally? Totally failed to replicate multiple times, now abandoned.

RPG doormat.

A new paper finds that telling people that everyone stereotypes just makes them stereotype more.

A new paper finds black mayors (relative to white mayors) improve position of blacks (relative to whites) in cities where they are elected.

Genetic influence on political beliefs. Everything is some typical combination of heredity and nonshared environment except which party you belong to, which is mostly shared environment. In other words, you come up with your opinions on your own, then ignore them and vote for whoever your parents voted for.

John Boehner was wrong when he said we as a nation spend more money on antacids than we do on politics, but he was surprisingly close – within a factor of three or so.

A Redditor lists facts and fictions about the new spaceship drives that claim to use weird physics. Apparently if they work they will Change Everything Forever, including land transportation. But smart people are very skeptical.

Razib Khan finds that, contrary to the stereotypes, more intelligent and more liberal people are more likely to believe in free speech.

Drinking too much caffeine during pregnancy may double your baby’s risk of childhood obesity

Killing Hitler With Praise And Fire is a Choose Your Own Adventure book about a time traveler trying to assassinate the Fuhrer without messing history up too atrociously.

Greg Cochran on creepy cell line infections. “There are diseases that look as if they might be infectious where no causative organisms has ever been found – diseases like sarcoidosis. They might be caused by some disease that started out as your second cousin Frank.”

Yale on climate change polling. More people believe in global warming themselves, than believe there is a scientific consensus around it? That’s the opposite of what I would have expected. More people want to regulate CO2 than believe global warming exists? Polling is weird.

A lot of the scrutiny around Ferguson focused on its corrupt police force as an example of white officials fleecing black citizens, and how this might be solved by mobilizing black voters to take control of the government. The Daily Beast has an interesting article on the town next to Ferguson – where black officials fleece black citizens about the same amount.

CVS will allow people to get naloxone without prescriptions in order to fight deaths from opiate overdose (which naloxone treates). The two interesting things I took from this study – first, it’s surprisingly legal to give prescription drugs away without prescriptions if you can get a couple of trade groups to agree to it. Second, maybe this will mean alcoholics can try the Sinclair Method on their own.

Lot of interesting graphs on my Twitter feed this month. Here’s one on how fertility isn’t declining and one on how IQ affects likelihood of escaping poverty (source)

An Italian surgeon is prepared to attempt the world’s first head transplant.

A multinational team says their machine learning program can now predict IQ from MRI images accurately enough that their estimates correlate at 0.71 with the real thing. I asked Twitter what they thought; apparently it’s real prediction rather than “my machine learning algorithm correctly predicted the same data we fed it”, but it might be confounded by the sample of different-aged children; the program might just be reading off whose brain looks older and predicting that older children perform better on IQ tests.

How did surveyors in 1919, long before the computer was invented, calculate the geographical center of the United States?

No Irish Need Apply: A Myth Of Victimization. A historian argues that there are no actual records of 19th century American businesses or advertisments using this phrase, and it was later made up to promote Irish-American solidarity. When asked for comment, experts look shifty and say they “know nothing”.

More strong claims for probiotics: a four-week treatment with a multispecies supplement decreases reactivity to sad mood, considered a risk factor for depression.

Vox writes about Raj Chetty’s theories of location-dependent social mobility, and now it seems that Hillary Clinton is a huge fan. But Steve Sailer points out exactly the same giant gaping radioactive flaw that I noticed – he is basically just noticing that there is less social mobility between races than within them, and that therefore, places with high black populations appear to have less social mobility. Please tell me I’m misunderstanding something and he didn’t actually miss this.

A while back we discussed gender differences in ethical theories. A recent big meta-analysis finds that women are moderately more deontological than men, and men slightly more utilitarian than women. Whatever.

It’s morally wrong to blame a victim’s actions for their own victimization. We should be blaming those victims’ genes. Or something. Not really sure what to do with this one.

Very closely related: a while back I argued that the apparent connection between childhood bullying and psychiatric disorders was way too strong to be real and likely to represent some kind of common confound. Sure enough, when somebody twin-studied it they found that at least in the case of paranoia 93% of the association is likely to represent a common genetic risk factor.

Ready For Hillary? Take Our Quiz And Find Out! Question four: “Her slogan is (a) Ready for Hillary, (b) Resigned to Hillary, (c) Preparing for Chelsea, or (d) What Difference, At This Point, Does It Make?”

19th century polymath Francis Galton was among the first to study the efficacy of prayer, noting among other things that despite all the people praying “God save the King” royals tended to die earlier than other upper-class individuals.

Chris Blattman conducted a study in Liberia that finds that at-risk poor young men given cognitive behavioral therapy were involved in 20-50% less crime, drugs, and violence than a control group, with effects lasting at least a year. This sincerely surprises me. I would pay money to see what James Coyne thinks of this.

New work with odd jellyfish-like creatures called ctenophores raises the surprising question: did neurons evolve twice?

At least three towns have exclamation points in their names: Hamilton!, Ohio; Westward Ho!, Devon, and Saint Louis du Ha! Ha!, Quebec.

In order to prove some kind of point, Ecuador very carefully disguises a portion of its territory as Costa Rica, tells some of its citizens they were going on a trip to Costa Rica, then keeps them in Ecuador. Now it’s an international incident with the Costa Rican government getting involved.

Individual Differences In Executive Function Are Almost Entirely Genetic In Origin. And when they say “almost entirely”, they mean “about 99%”. This doesn’t make sense to me – why should this be the only 99% genetic thing in a world full of cognitive skills that are about 50% genetic? Really looking forward to a replication attempt.

Has Obamacare Turned Voters Against Sharing The Wealth? Maybe not Obamacare specifically, but the magnitude of increasing opposition to redistribution is surprising and disturbing. Also a confusing sign of how poorly trends in media coverage mirror trends in people’s attitudes.

FBI Admits It Fudged Forensic Hair Matches In Nearly All Criminal Trials For Decades. “Oops” doesn’t seem to cut it.

If Douglas Hofstadter wrote erotica (h/t Multiheaded)

Peter Singer’s new book The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically will probably be released by the time you read this post. He’s giving out prizes for people who can help sell copies, and will be publicizing it with a Reddit AMA (“Ask Me Anything” thread) April 14.

In case Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates weren’t enough for you, Steve Wozniak becomes the latest science/technology celebrity to speak out about the threat of machine superintelligence.

I missed this the first time around, but I’m glad I found it now: Scott Aaronson on a novel idea about what might be required for consciousness. The good news is that it gives the intuitively correct answer to a lot of thought experiments. The bad news is I can’t see any other reason to believe it’s true.

Libya was once our best bet for an example of foreign military intervention going well for once, but in retrospect it went terribly and might have been a huge mistake.

Finally we know how many bloggers live in their parents’ basement – somewhere less than 3.7%.

The great white hope? In an upcoming boxing match, former heavyweight champion of the world Evander Holyfield will take on Mitt Romney.

Why does European cooking have less spice than Indian and other cuisines? One theory: after the Age of Exploration, spice became cheap and everyone started countersignaling.

It’s long been an anomaly that the rich donate proportionally less to charity than the poor even though they have more to give. The Atlantic describes research that it’s because the rich are so isolated that they barely remember the needy’s existence.

More econ statistics: poverty is plummeting globally, and general global inequality is declining even as it increases within individual countries.

What if we’ve been on the wrong track blaming the insurers/government/drug companies for soaring health care costs? What if the real culprits are the hospitals?

Have you heard the story that lots of Mohawk Indians worked on skyscrapers because for some reason they were genetically immune to fear of heights? Turns out if you ask the Mohawks in confidence, they admit that they’re exactly as scared as everyone else but their culture teaches them to hide it.

There’s been growing evidence that zero-calorie artificial sweeteners somehow still make you gain weight, and that my cynical intuition that there’s no way they made a food taste good without being unhealthy was right after all. Now an Israeli team may have discovered a mechanism. Artificial sweeteners change the balance between Bacteroides and Firmicutes bacteria in the gut, and the latter seem to have the ability to break down food in such a way that the body absorbs more calories (!). If true, it might be not only an important step toward the development of free-lunch-weight-neutral sweeteners, but also to a better understanding of obesity in general.

The strongest force in the universe is the tendency of Chinese people to kill and consume exotic animals out of some kind of far-fetched hope that it will cure diseases. What if we could use that power for good?

Free IUDs reduce teen pregnancy. Part of me wants to be snarky and say something like “sun reduces darkness”, but the last time they did one of these studies with condoms it turned out to be incredibly flawed, so I’ll wait until someone’s double-checked the methodology.

Lots of people and businesses are moving to small-government low-tax conservative states these days, which some have used as evidence of the success of conservative policies. Paul Krugman makes an interesting counterargument: the rise of air conditioning has increased the desirability of hot states relative to cold states, hot southern states are more conservative. Marginal Revolution basically agrees that weather is more important than politics in recent inter-state migration, but doesn’t think air conditioning in particular mattered that much.

That was unexpected: the Supreme Court bans regulatory boards made up of the profession they are regulating, in what looks like a big victory for, for example, entrepreneurs in the dental industry who don’t want the dental establishment to be the ones deciding whether they’re allowed to have a business. Cynical prediction: established players in the industry keep their regulatory boards, but pack them with non-professionals who just happen to agree with them about everything.

Remember how a few months ago two female librarians heavily involved in social justice called a male librarian a sexual predator, going into lurid detail about how his offenses are so well known that “women attending library conferences have instituted a buddy system to protect themselves from him”. And how, unable to produce any evidence of this, they blogged about how sexist it was to put the burden of proof on victims or to demand people “treat both sides equally”? And how after he lost his job, he sued them for libel? And how they become a huge online cause celebre for “refusing to be silenced” about the institutionalized sexism this represented in the (90% female) library field? And how feminist bloggers bravely spread the word and raised tens of thousands of dollars for their legal defense fund? Well, last week, apparently as part of some kind of settlement deal, the accusers admitted they made the allegations up in a post that literally used the phrase “mistakes have been made” and implied that they were still kind of heroes for raising the issue of sexism.

Related: a reporter inexplicably asks a pizza place if they would cater a gay wedding that for some reason wanted pizza. The pizza place says they are happy to serve gay customers but that their religion prohibits them from catering a gay wedding. The social justice world responds with such a flurry of death threats and rape threats and threats against their family that they are forced to close down. (Salon to publish article explaining how objecting to death and rape threats is a sign of “aggrieved entitlement” in 3…2…1…)

A Seattle doctor proposes a plausible aetiology for SIDS: a disorder of the inner ear.

Is poverty in the United States declining? The answer turns out to be “it depends how you define poverty”, but a lot of methodologies converge on the idea that government programs have successfully treated the symptoms of poverty without doing much to lessen the prevalence of the disease. That is, if you give the poor food stamps they may be less hungry and therefore happier, but they don’t necessarily escape a poverty trap and end up self-sufficiently middle-class.

“There are three hypotheses about why wages for the middle class are falling: robots, unions, and China…The evidence may point to least favored answer being the right one.” Noah Smith on what the evidence tells us about wage stagnation.

Also: An Epidemic Of Americans Behaving Well.

How nepotistic are different industries in the US? One in fifty male governors has a son who’s also a governor; one in a hundred male football players have a son who’s also a football player.

This is an interesting study, but the differences in how different media outlets report upon it is even more interesting: Vox: A New Study Says It Doesn’t Matter How Much Time You Spend With Your Kids versus National Post: Six Hours A Week Of Family Time May Just Tame Your Teenager. This isn’t even an isolated case – there are a lot of studies so complex that they support diametrically opposite headlines, allowing a source’s bias to seep in.

Speaking of which, Poverty Shrinks Brains is the title most sources are using to cover a new study which finds that poorer people have smaller brains than wealthier people, even at age one month old. West Hunter makes the objection I would have made, somewhat more forcefully and sarcastically than I would have made it. But as far as I can tell blame rests less on the study authors (who raised all possibilities) than on the coverage.

Vox: Why Education Won’t Cure Poverty, In One Chart. To save you a click, it’s about how poor Americans today are much more educated than they were a generation ago, but still poor – not the results table from that brain size study above.

OKAY, I ADMIT IT, I’VE BEEN READING ABOUT POVERTY AND INEQUALITY WAY TOO MUCH THIS WEEK. But here’s a chart showing that a lot of modern inequality comes from the cost of housing. Does this or doesn’t this debunk Thomas Piketty?

The darknet market Evolution recently turned out to be a scam that ran off with its customers’ money. In the aftermath, the federal government is subpoenaing account information of the Reddit users who talked about it, including SSC-commenter and generally-swell-guy Gwern. They seem to be concerned about his prescient prediction that this would happen, but once they realize that he’s Gwern and that sort of thing is just what he does, hopefully they’ll leave him alone.

Speaking of Gwern, he is my source for this study on Intentional Weight Loss And All-Cause Mortality, which somewhat contrary to my expectations shows that trying to lose weight leads to a 15% reduction in all-cause mortality. Maybe some diets work after all?

Here’s another study that violated my expectations: No Link Between Military Suicide Rate And Deployments. That is, someone who joins the military but hangs out at a fort in the States all day has the same suicide rate as someone sent to Iraq or Afghanistan. If true – and it joins similar results from other studies – it suggests the military’s high suicide rate may be related less to battle-related trauma and more to attracting suicidal sorts of people. Which I guess makes a lot of sense, when you think about it.

Soda taxes do not decrease soda consumption. Okay, now we’re three in a row for studies that contradict my expectations. I better get some better expectations quick.

Online libertarian portal The Libertarian Republic: We Give Up, Libertarianism Is Impossible, Who Would Build The Roads? But do check the date on the article.

I don’t know if this is a real product.

Beautiful pictures of world landmarks taken with no-longer-legal drone fly-overs.

Back in 2014 I linked to Economics of the Undead, but that’s old hat. The new frontier in the field that people are writing books about is the economics of pirates. And the title is perfect

People predicted online education would give everyone access to free courses on every subject taught by the world’s top experts. It did exactly that and disrupted approximately nothing. So how do we adapt online education to a credentialist world?

I liked this idea when it was speculative. Now it’s supported: Anorexia and body dysmorphic disorder have similar brain anomalies.

Here’s some utopian but creative speculation about weird alternative basic income systems.

Political bubble segregation alert: did you know Fox News is the most trusted news channel in America, and it’s not even close? But beware – the article claims this is true “even among Democrats”, which seems to contradict its own data.

When I lived in Ireland I never really got the impression that the government was very good at what it did. Sure enough, in one week Ireland manages to accidentally legalize all drugs, and almost accidentally ban non-homosexual marriage. On the plus side, they’ve finally gotten around to repealing the law that anyone selling horses outside Dublin will be put to death.

Researchers who probably have never done calibration training are 99% sure endocrine disrupting pollutants are linked to diabetes, ADHD, etc.

Infinite Jest in Legos.

Astrology meets economics: In Singapore, kids born in the Year Of The Dragon are considered lucky. So lots of parents have kids in the Year Of The Dragon, the class sizes are bigger those years, and it’s harder to get into good colleges and entry-level jobs. Not so lucky now, are you?

More than 6% of American synaesthetics have color-letter associations that match a popular set of Fisher-Price alphabet magnets.

Marginal Revolution: Larger companies means more income inequality.

The 2014 Effective Altruist survey results are out.

An article on divestment which makes a point I’m slapping myself for not realizing earlier: divestment can’t possibly have any economic consequences on the companies it targets because of the efficiency of the stock market. It then goes on to point out that the largest divestment campaign in history, against apartheid South Africa, didn’t change the prices of South African company shares one bit. It concludes divestment might be a good way to raise discussion, but nothing more.

The Justice Department recently joined all the other experts who took a careful look at the case in concluding that Darren Wilson shot Mike Brown in self-defense, and the whole “hands up, don’t shoot” story was made up by Brown’s friend. That isn’t news. What’s news is that a columnist who pushed the opposite narrative has apologized.

Speaking of Ferguson, why are there more than twice as many black women as black men there and what effect does it have on the culture? (h/t Marginal Revolution)

The Most Decade Specific Words In Billboard Hits, 1890 – 2014. One day our children are going to be astounded that we survived the 2010s.

I recently wrote about the Bay Area rationality community being difficult to get into. Well, not anymore! www.bayrationality.com is a central listing of all their events and directory of people to contact. Thanks, Oliver!

The social justice movement is telling people to stop reading books by white male authors to fight the “inherent bias” of the literary world. But if you know how these things work, you shouldn’t be surprised that a rudimentary investigation finds that books written by women are just as likely to get reviewed in prestigious publications as those by men, and there are simply fewer of the former.

More shared-environment-mattering-blogging: a natural quasi-experiment in Norway finds that when maternity leave is increased, the children do better in school and make more money growing up.

More money-not-mattering-blogging: a natural quasi-experiment in Sweden finds that lottery winners’ children (who are raised rich) do no better than other children in school, in avoiding drugs, etc (suggesting that the clear real-world correlation between wealth and child success is genetic rather than financial). But of course Sweden has one of the world’s strongest social safety nets, so money may matter more in other countries.

Why are so many people myopic (ie need glasses) these days? It used to be thought that the problem was kids straining their young eyes reading too many books. A new study convincingly finds that it’s more likely kids not spending enough time in bright sunlight outside.

One reason California has become such an important tech center despite having some pretty terrible laws is that it got the important law right, says a group who track inventor movements and find the most important factor is banning non-compete agreements. This kind of thing could form the core of an interesting argument against libertarianism.

The Battle Of Castle Itter was the only time in history the US military defended a besieged castle.

I’ve seen a lot of smart people defending the Trans-Pacific Partnership recently. Here’s Noah Smith: A Trade Deal Liberals Can Live With. And Tyler Cowen: Why Paul Krugman Is Wrong To Oppose Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Scientists cure Alzheimers in mice. Human trials to begin in 20-something something who cares THEY’RE ONE WEEK LATE! A WEEK! WHY COULDN’T YOU HAVE JUST CURED ALZHEIMERS ONE WEEK EARLIER!

A pretty good explanation of the conflicting claims about sea ice at the South Pole.

As far as I can tell, this is not an early April Fools’ joke, a viral marketing campaign, or an urban legend. As far as I can tell, this is actually true: Mr. T will star in a home improvement show called “I Pity The Tool”

Bleeding Heart Libertarians argues against compulsory voting – not only won’t it help, but if it’s a sneaky plot to get the Democrats to win elections, it won’t do that either.

Colleges improve critical thinking skills, says research with no control group so they can’t differentiate it from the effects of normal aging. I dunno, maybe they didn’t go to college so they didn’t think of that.

Buying copies of your own music or books to game the best-sellers charts is practically universal.

It’s like rain on your wedding day. It’s like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife. It’s like…

Hospitals are starting to try to address poverty among their patients to prevent easily preventable poverty-related problems from eating up too many health resources. Don’t be fooled by this looking like an expansion of the creeping social services bureaucracy – this is highly-competent profit-seeking institutions being given an economic incentive to improve the lives of specific poor people assigned to them, which is the same kind of promising as social impact bonds.

The Less Wrong Sequences by Eliezer Yudkowsky are now available as an ebook:

But those of you who are looking for something steamier don’t even have to go entirely off topic!

Hottest Heads Of State ranks the US Presidents (h/t Eric Rall). “Here he is—the hottest American president! You’re probably thinking “Wow! Where has Franklin Pierce been all my life?” The answer is that he died in 1869.”

New artificial lighting with nanoparticle scattering is indistinguishable from sunlight (h/t Naureen). So much so that the company reports it has tricked seasoned interior designers into thinking its lights are real windows or skylights. You start to get a feel for what a big deal this is when you see their pictures, and it could have some really big effects – access to natural lighting is a limiting factor in a lot of architecture, and people’s mood and productivity are different in different lighting environments. And I assume someone will be able to overlay images on top of these, making them really indistinguishable from windows. Imagine you can make your bedroom look just like a Hawaiian hotel room on a bright sunny day, complete with beach view. Possible caveat – this could screw up our circadian rhythm even more than it’s screwed up already (but see this)

Greg Mankiw puts inequality in perspective: if income inequality had not increased after 1973, the median household would have $9,000 more. If productivity growth had not slowed after 1973, the median household would have had $30,000 more. But see also MR comments, which ask about whether the two trends could be related and which is easier to reverse than the other.

The newest thing someone’s claimed they can determine with digit ratio: how nice a man is to women (h/t Yana). “When with women, men with smaller ratios were more likely to listen attentively, smile and laugh, compromise or compliment the other person.”

The FDA helps cover up fraud in FDA clinical trials, which seems to be unexpectedly common. I was floored by the idea that outright falsification (as opposed to mere deliberately biased experimental design) was going on at these levels, but it seems at least some of it is in China (which has a laxer scientific culture). It’s pretty impressive how the FDA can quash innovation and fail to protect people at the same time. Also, I think I speak for everyone in medicine when I pray that please please please don’t let there be anything wrong with rivaroxaban or else we’ll have to go back to warfarin.

A defense of Fahrenheit. “In a sentence: Fahrenheit uses its digits more efficiently than Centigrade.”

Magic is a company that lets you text them any legal request, and they’ll fulfill it for the appropriate fee. Potentially useful for all my social phobic friends who hate phone calls, since they can be communicated with by text and can handle the calling part of things like ordering delivery pizza.

Oregon City has the United States’ only public outdoor elevator to transport citizens from one level of the city to another.

New immigration does not reduce assimilation of existing immigrants.

Even more interesting: Immigrants’ political views are similar to those of the native-born, become indistinguishable after one generation (h/t Drew) though the significance testing looks weird and there may be country-of-origin confounders.

First Ever Human Head Transplant Possible, Says Neuroscientist.

Sunglasses that help with color blindness by restricting the ranges of light that can be seen.

Greece wants a basic income. This seems terrible to me. First, they can’t even afford what they’re already doing, let alone a basic income. Second of all, Greece ruins anything economic that it touches, so probably this program would fail and discredit basic income for decades even if it would have worked fine in the hands of a more competent country.

Right-to-try laws say permanently ill patients can get experimental drugs even without full FDA approval. An attendee at the SSC meetup pointed out a potential pitfall – if you can get the real thing, who’s going to want to participate in studies that include a 50% chance of getting placebo?

The media’s latest attempt to misrepresent stories about sexual assault doesn’t seem to be going so well.

Noah Smith against the complaint that economics can’t predict anything, or isn’t a real science. I think he misses what I would consider to be the most important point – market behavior is anti-inductive, so the argument that only being able to predict the market counts is unfairly saying you’ll only give economics credit it it can predict inherently unpredictable things. Interested whether the most striking success he credits to economics – the economist who correctly predicted BART ridership when everyone else got it wrong – has been replicated on other mass transit or if it’s a little post hoc.

Every form of youth behavior has been improving over the last five years in Britain, including crime, truancy, pregnancy, alcoholism, etc. But beware of truncated axes!

Leah posted this mentioning my thrival/survival dichotomy: Republicans are more confident than Democrats they will survive the apocalypse. Could be from any number of things – more rural, better with guns – but the result I find most interesting is that Republicans have invested much more effort into preparing for it.

People who talk about processed food being bad for you sound intuitively plausible, but they’ve always sounded unscientific when they can’t point to the particular reason it’s bad: “Uh, toxins!”. Now two very common emulsifiers have been preliminarily found to damage the gut microbiome and increase obesity.

Everyone knows when you’re drunk other people look more attractive. But apparently also being drunk makes you look more attractive to others even in terms of them merely seeing photos of your face. Interesting not only in proposing “be drunk all the time” as a dating strategy, but as a point in favor of what I think of as the creepy telepathy model of attraction – that internal mental qualities like how relaxed and confident you are can change your attractiveness level independentlyish of your actions. That is, I assume the way being drunk makes your face more attractive is by making you feel more relaxed and so altering your muscle pattern, which other people can subconsciously pick up on. What other things might work like that?

Why bookstores sometimes destroy the books they are sent, plus why books frequently include a message that if you got the book without a cover it may have been stolen.

Yuval Harari’s his new book on humanity (how’s that for a broad topic?) gets a Daniel Kahneman interview, makes Rod Dreher existentially terrified about our transhuman future, and gets excerpted on Xenosystems with what I consider a really important point:

The 20th century, it’s the era of the masses, mass politics, mass economics. Every human being has value, has political, economic, and military value, simply because he or she is a human being, and this goes back to the structures of the military and of the economy, where every human being is valuable as a soldier in the trenches and as a worker in the factory. […] But in the 21st century, there is a good chance that most humans will lose, they are losing, their military and economic value. This is true for the military, it’s done, it’s over. The age of the masses is over. We are no longer in the First World War, where you take millions of soldiers, give each one a rifle and have them run forward. And the same thing perhaps is happening in the economy.

This month in machine value-binding being hard: an AI that was supposed to use reinforcement learning to play Tetris keeps it paused forever since that way it can’t lose.

A while back I suggested giving homeless people houses might pay for itself in reduced use of public services. I was probably wrong. According to a new study in JAMA, giving poor people subsidized housing increases the amount of time they spend housed (okaaaay, I’m with you so far) but has no effect on “health related quality of life”. I am moderately suspicious of this measure and would like to see ER use / hospital visits measured directly. Also, I think they accidentally say they measured general quality of life when they really measured health-related quality of life. Also also, this doesn’t include savings from things like reduced use of the criminal justice system. But I have to admit the evidence is now against me in terms of health savings.

Sister Y has a book out, and it is exactly as cheerful as you would expect

FAA: If you can get to the moon, nobody’s stopping you from claiming property there.

Normal weight woman gets a fecal transplant from overweight donor and suddenly gains a lot of weight, supporting theory that microbiome is involved in weight regulation.

A claim that humans naturally divide into a bimodal distribution of monogamous and promiscuous.

Preliminary research suggests that eating a diet rich in tryptophan might make people more charitable (news article, study)

Left-handed people differ from righties in various ways, including less likely to attend college, less likely to get good jobs, and earn an average of $1,300 less per year. Likely mechanism is that a lot of neonatal health issues that disrupt brain development can leave you left-handed. If you restrict your sample to people without any neonatal health issues, lefties and righties appear about equal.

Sounds like a dystopian horror story – in a lot of areas, it is illegal to live with your friends because zoning issues say that houses must be owned by “a family”.

There is a campaign going around to boycott Yale’s senior gift because of their shameful mental health policies. Those policies are that if a student at Yale develops a serious mental illness, they can sometimes be kicked out of school because of worries that if they committed suicide on campus it would be a public relations nightmare. Yale is far from the only college to do this, but I’ve talked to some people there who say they’re especially bad. I’m reluctant to signal-boost this because I don’t really like boycotts as a political tactic, but the article suggests the senior gift is already very politicized and so this wouldn’t be politicizing it any further. If you go to Yale, take a look and draw your own conclusions.

Some interesting discussion of the Crusades recently, sparked by an Obama remark. Here a historian explains that a lot of anti-Crusade tropes are myths. On the other hand, the trope that the Crusaders were bloody and killed lots of innocent people is totally true. There was a lot of outrage that Obama was trying to distract from ISIS with his clumsy remark that Christians had done some bad stuff too. The appropriate analogy to me seems to be “Down with ISIS” : “Christians do bad stuff too” :: “Black lives matter!” : “All lives matter!”. The second statement in each branch is 100% true, but brought up at a time when it can’t help but be seen as a somewhat insensitive distraction.

Adjunct Professors Demand That Their Pay Quintuple. I don’t have enough space to do justice to this issue in a links post, but I urge you to meditate on the claim mentioned in the article that adjuncts need their pay quintupled in order to get “the kind of upper-middle-class salary they think people with advanced degrees should be able to expect.”

Ramon Llull meets Weird Sun Twitter in @CloneOfSnow, which describes itself as “an attempt to robotically exhaust all pairs of memes.” Since popular memes are often created by combining two other memes, for example something like “Hello, gentlemen, all your snakes on a plane are belong to us”, if you just get a list of all memes and combine them exhaustively, some of the results should be interesting. And so they are.

The Chinese philosopher Mozi was one of the first pacifists and consequentialists – and his followers decided the greatest good was to train to become experts in siege warfare, then go around to places helping them resist invasions.

According to a survey, the public believe medicine to be the most scientific field. In your face, physics! As usual, Razib Khan has some good analysis. H/t Noahpinion.

WhoPays is a site where writers post how much they got writing for different media. Useful if you’ve just gotten an offer from someone and want to know if it’s competitive, or if you want to know where to send a piece. Linked because I keep getting for-profit news sites asking me to write for them for free if they promise to link back to my blog; I guess this probably works for some people but it annoys me and I want people to know their options.

Woman’s wedding to Charles Manson called off after it turns out she just planned to wait for him to die so she could turn his corpse into a tourist attraction. r/theredpill warned me about this kind of thing!

Everybody knows that gender stereotypes are so fluid and socially constructed that people used to associate pink with boys and blue with girls, right? According to a more recent paper, this is “a scientific urban legend”, and when you do a systematic search of old books, blue and pink always had their current gender associations (study). I find the paper’s claim that maybe these links are genetically based to be extremely bizarre and hard to swallow, which I guess means that there was no harm done – whether or not pink and blue actually reversed, it’s the sort of thing that probably could have happened. But if the new paper is true, there’s still a lesson to be learned about how easily any politically convenient story that supports nurturist ideas can turn into gospel.

The case for melancholia as a distinct type of depression.

Here’s a study I don’t believe at all, but can’t quite figure out how to debunk: The Lethal Effects Of Three Strikes Laws. Not only do three-strikes laws fail to decrease crime, but they “are associated with 10-12 percent more homicides in the short run and 23-29 percent in the long run”, possibly because “a few criminals, fearing the enhanced penalties, murder victims and witnesses to limit resistance and identification”. Are there really that many criminals hardened enough to consider killing witnesses an option who weren’t going to be getting these long sentences anyway? Are there really that many instances of witness-killing? Until this gets replicated, I defy the data.

A newer, bigger, more rigorous study once again finds that quality of parenting has no effect on whether a child becomes a criminal.

At this point I only really pay attention to results in economics when they go against the bias I expect the writer to have. In that spirit, here’s a study by Alex Tabarrok finding that increasing regulation is not to blame for the decline in American entrepreneurship.

The Man Who Tried To Redeem The World With Logic is an interesting biography of near-forgotten polymath and neuroscientist Walter Pitts. Related: a couple of posts ago, someone pooh-poohed me for saying von Neumann was a born genius, insisting it was just the effect of the high quality education his rich father gave him. Walter Pitts worked with von Neumann and was considered to have a similar level of genius – and he was the son of a poor laborer in Detroit who insisted he drop out of school to do real work. Pitts’ education consisted solely of reading library books on his own time, including Principia Mathematica – about which he sent a letter to Russell containing several corrections when he was only 12 years old.

Work Stress Found Not To Cause Cancer. The most interesting thing that could come out of this study would be an attack on the tradition that has sprung up from the Whitehall Study, which found that lower-ranking civil servants were more likely to get diseases than higher-ranking civil servants even after the usual confounders were adjusted away, and which is touted as proving that inequality directly causes poor health. This current study doesn’t directly contradict Whitehall since it limits itself to a few cancers and Whitehall mostly limited itself to cardiovascular disease and a different few cancers. But it will be interesting to see if someone tries to replicate the Whitehall results in light of this new study, and whether they hold up.

The greatest hits of legendary comments troll KenM: 1, 2.

The Promises And Pitfalls Of Genoeconomics. Most interesting result: male income appears to be heritable at a level of 0.6 or so (female income slightly lower). This isn’t just boring old “if your parents are rich you’ll be rich”, this is pure genetic “based on the difference between monozygotic twins and dizygotic twins” heritability. Applying this result to your favorite economic argument is full of potential pitfalls I should probably write a full post on sometime.

Why the medieval debate between geocentrism and heliocentrism was more complicated than that. Be sure to read also Jonathan Lee’s comment and Douglas Knight’s comment.

Thing #8603238450 that correlates with obesity and is neither calories in nor calories out: timing and intensity of light exposure.

Another boring article on political correctness which I am linking not for the sake of the article itself but for the sake of a short throwaway argument it makes: private colleges are companies in the free market, so if they want to ban offensive ideas, then students won’t go to them unless they like offensive ideas being banned, which means the market works – ie a Patchwork/exit/Archipelago type picture. Anyone want to agree or disagree?

MIRI: Three common misconceptions of people who say they’re not worried about AI risk.

Extreme Obesity In Children Tied To Low IQ, independent of obvious genetic diseases. At least three possible interpretations. Number one, low IQ kids have poor impulse control/understanding of consequences so they have poorer health. Number two, bad diet impedes brain development. Number three, there are non-obvious genetic diseases which affect both metabolism and IQ; this would work especially well in the context of a mutational load argument.

The Nazis had a bright idea. They didn’t like Jews. A lot of Arabs didn’t like Jews. Why not dislike Jews together? Thus begins the facepalm-inspiring history of attempts to translate Mein Kampf into Arabic, which basically consisted of the smarter Nazis saying “This might catch on if we remove the parts about Arabs being subhuman scum” versus Hitler saying “But I really like those parts!”

I didn’t think it was possible to make a graph about US inequality I’d never seen before, but the second graph in this article is genuinely pretty neat. And worrying.

EXPECTO PATRONUM!

Relevant to my interests: how a bunch of different measures of different kinds of intelligence relate to college majors.

Melanie’s Marvelous Measles is an anti-vax propaganda book aimed at children ages 4-10 about getting measles is actually really fun, and also how really vaccination causes the measles (why yes, those two forms of propaganda do seem to be mutually self-defeating). You probably shouldn’t read it. But you should definitely read the Amazon reviews.