The Monotonic Decline of The Strokes

I've listened to the new Strokes album, Comedown, and it ain't much. That shouldn't surprise anyone, really, as, ever since Is This It?, each Strokes album was poorer than the previous one, a trend which is only continuing. Don't take my word for it. Instead, trust the users of rateyourmusic.com (average ratings out of 5, as of noon today):

I guess there reasons for Comedown Machine are inflated due to a recency/fan effect: The biggest fans will check something out first, and give higher ratings than the general population. So I would expect the last datapoint to sink down a little in the months to come.

Another thing this graph demonstrates is that my Excel skills are also in decline.

Pebbles, Vol. 42

Rolf Dobelli explains why you shouldn't follow the news.

Arnold Kling makes the argument that states are better than clans.

"A founder of the anti-GM food movement on how he got it wrong: Mark Lynas in conversation with Charlie Gillis"

Naughty logos (mildly NSFW) (via)

Preface and Chapter 1 (Abraham Lincoln) of Edward Jay Epstein’s book, Annals of Unsolved Crime (via). Don't be put off by the trashy graphics.

Paris in 1900 vs. 2013 photos (via)

Startup ideas that looked stupid but weren't (via)

Small island problems (via)

New journal called Porn Studies founded. Sounds interesting, but the Call for Papers/Mission Statement suggests it's some cultural studies crap.

Gender and Causality

As far as I can see, a lot of the astronomical number of citations Paul Holland's article "Statistics and Causal Inference" has accumulated is due to the fact that he coined the term "fundamental problem of causality", describing the fact that you can observe a unit only with or without treatment, but not both. Every time you mention that problem, you're pretty much obliged to cite Holland. I'm not so happy with Holland's coinage of the term, because I would have thought that an even more fundamental problem of causality - or rather, the estimation of causal influences -  than the one Holland referred to is that you cannot observe causality.

Like many others, I am also unhappy with the maxim "No causation without manipulation" that Holland's article spread. Writes Markus Gangl in his pretty good (but not untechnical) review of causal inference with observational data (pp. 38-39; gated link):

The perception that the counterfactual framework would primarily apply to the effects of policy interventions or other explicitly manipulated (or at least manipulable) treatments is perhaps the single most important impediment to its more widespread adoption in sociology. This perception is a major misunderstanding on the part of sociologists (cf. also Heckman 2005, Moffitt 2005, Sobel 1998). Whether nonmanipulable factors such as gender, race, or class affect life courses is a perfectly sensible counterfactual question to begin with [...]. With respect to gender, for example, the counterfactual “manipulation” in question is the determination of fetal gender at inception, which, moreover, is plausibly random (Rubin 1986), so that its causal effect is directly identified from the comparison of mean life-course outcomes among men and women from, for example, the same birth cohort or country. In this specific case, and ignoring SUTVA [...], the main impediment to causal inference is not so much a lack of controls, as a lack of representative samples (see Sobel 1998).

That's right: If you want to look at the causal effects of gender, just compare group means. I don't know, though, what Gangl is getting at with his remark on representative data - there's quite a few representative datasets that contain both men and women. The problem (that Gangl hints at in technical, general terms on p. 39) is rather that nobody really cares about the total effect of assignment to a sex. What people care about are the mediating mechanisms - testosterone, discrimination, that kind of thing.

Speaking of discrimination, feminism is a bewilderingly imprecise term, but I have found the following, very reductionist, model helpful when thinking about the strand sometimes called "radical feminism." You can see it as an ideology that took two figures of thought referring to the interrelationship between groups and applying them to gender. From anti-racism, radical feminism took the idea that differences between groups cannot be based on biological differences. From Marxism came the idea that history is mainly the struggle between groups, which leads to fanciful statements such as the description of rape as "nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear."

Note that the two combine nicely to shut off uncertainty. The no-biology view tells us that all observed differences between men and women must be due to discrimination of one sort or another; the men-against-women view tells us who's doing the discriminating. No further research needed.

Around the Blogs, Vol. 96

1. Neurobonkers summarizes the results of a new review on the efficacy of learning techniques (via). Contains link to the full, open-source paper, but that's one long article, that is.

2. If the excerpt presented by Michael Blowhard is anything to go by, Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowolf into modern English is tasty.

3. How much benefit has the Human Genome Project brought so far? Says Roberts says meh.

4. ". . . the average free-market economist doesn't take the unemployment problem seriously", says free-market economist Bryan Caplan. And he's not happy about it.

Comments, Journal Space, the Internet, and the Cynical Theory of Journals

Andrew Gelman, discussing scientific standards in the social sciences, relates the following:

Recently I sent a letter to the editor to a major social science journal pointing out a problem in an article they’d published, they refused to publish my letter, not because of any argument that I was incorrect, but because they judged my letter to not be in the top 10% of submissions to the journal. I’m sure my letter was indeed not in the top 10% of submissions, but the journal’s attitude presents a serious problem, if the bar to publication of a correction is so high. That’s a disincentive for the journal to publish corrections, a disincentive for outsiders such as myself to write corrections, and a disincentive for researchers to be careful in the first place.

Commenter WB wonders:

Why don’t journals simply post serious criticisms and important corrections on their websites? Any reluctance to admit mistakes and publish corrections seems inexcusable given how easy it is to post items online. Obviously, websites don’t face the strict space limitations of print journals. So online sections could be used to publish items that aren’t “in the top 10% of submissions to the journal,” but are nonetheless important and worth the attention of readers.

And Gelman replies:

I suppose one reason they don’t do it is that it would take effort and expense to set up the website. Another difficulty is the need to review the critiques. If it were easier to publish a letter to the editor, I suppose the journal would get more submissions, then they’d need to find more reviewers, etc.

Yeah, maybe. But for the time being I'll hypothesize that the cynical theory of journals explains a larger chunk of the variances.

Around the Blogs, Vol. 95

1. The problem with macroeconomics: uninformative data (Noah Smith)

2. In the recent blog genre of Reinhart-Rogoff bashing, Kieran Healy wins the prize. May seem a bit cruel, but that's what you get for using Excel for your data analysis. And a weighting scheme that is so bonkers that people may well think it's politically motivated. But it's mainly for using Excel.

3. Audio of BBC interview with Vladimir Nabokov (presented by Maria Popova). If the answers sound written rather than spoken, that's because they are.

4. How quickly do cultural works depreciate? (Matthew Yglesias)

Around the Blogs, Vol. 94

1. Deontic or consequentialist ethics? Bayesianism! (Eric Raymond)

2. How to keep your brain clean (Bryan Caplan)

3. Are learning styles a myth? (Mo Costandi)

4. 11 rules for critical thinking (Maria Popova/Peter A. Sturrock)

5. Bonkers infographics (Adam Obeng) (via)

Fußball, blutige Hölle

Playlist: The Beatles' White Album Covered

Well, what it says in the title. Personal favourites: I'm So Tired, Blackbird, I Will, Good Night. As an alternative to the player below, use this link.

The Science Is Settled, Only More So

As I read a few U.S. blogs, I am reasonably well-informed about current debates they have over there. Currently the hot topic seems to be gay marriage, with a lot of the discourse focusing on the well-being of children who grow up in same-sex-parents households. Via Jeremy Freese, here's Sally T. Hillsman, executive officer of the American Sociological Association, and apparently not a fan of Karl Raimund Popper's, sending her two cents to the Washington Post:

Social science research consistently and incontrovertibly has shown that parents’ sexual orientation has no bearing on children’s well-being.

Hard-and-fast rule: When someone claims that the evidence on a social science topic has shown something "incontrovertibly", you know you've left the realm of scientific discourse and are in the ugly land of policy advocacy.

*

As a side note on the topic, I am surprised that - as far as I can see - nobody opining on the matter mentions the general finding of behavioral genetics research that the influence of parents on how children turn out is not nearly as strong as Tom, Dick and Harry believe. It's indirect evidence, sure, but if you want to make the case for gay marriage and gay adoption rights, at least you'd want to mention this in passing, no? My best guess on why one does not see this more is that many of the people who are most fervently for gay rights have stored the concept behavioural genetics research in their mental folder marked "Hitler, etc."

Around the Blogs, Vol. 93

1. Why social science research is so hard: The case of guns and violence. Part one, part two. (Maggie Koerth-Baker)

2. Important questions that are easy to not ask dept.: Which type of growth trajectory are you on? (Scott H. Young) And are there sudden jumps? (Ben Casnocha)

3. Brits probably shouldn't worry about the economic effects of immigration. (Tim Harford)

4. Self-reports underestimate BMIs in Ireland, too. (Economic Logician/David Madden)

5. Placebo effects in priming. (Christian Jarrett/Ulrich W. Weger & Stephen Loughnan) Will it replicate?

Rational Choice of the BMI

A 2011 paper by Thomas Klein, called "Durch Dick und Dünn: Zum Einfluss von Partnerschaft und Partnermarkt auf das Körpergewicht", studies the intersection of mating and health-related outcomes, namely the BMI. Here's the English-language abstract to the paper which is both written in German and gated for maximum inaccessibility:

This article analyzes how body weight is associated with the existence of an intimate partner and with the sex ratio in the marriage market. The data rely on a representative sample of the 16–55 years old population in Germany, carried out in 2009 (Partner Market Survey 2009). In this data set, individuals’ mating opportunities for the first time are measured by their integration in a network of friends as well as in foci of activity as conceptualized by Scott Feld. Results confirm a weight increase after an intimate relationship has started (negative protection) and they also confirm a mating disadvantage corresponding to high weight (selection). Further results lead to the discovery that the weight difference between individuals with and without a partner varies according to the sex ratio in the marriage market: higher competition in the marriage market obviously corresponds to relatively lower weight of individuals without partner. Moreover, similar BMI of partners is not a result of adaption between partners over time but solely is a result of assortative mating. Consequently, mating patterns with respect to obesity have no effect on the individuals’ weight.

So, there is a number of results; I'll highlight two. Perhaps the most convincing one gives an answer to a question many people will have wondered about (and that, according to the author, no previous study has addressed): How come partners are similar in BMI? According to Klein's results, this is solely a selection effect; treatment - measured as the coefficient yielded by an interaction between the partner's BMI and the length of the relationship - seems to play practically no role.

Another key finding is that single people (but not others) appear to react to the sex ratio in their social circles: When there are more potential partners and fewer competitiors, they exhibit higher BMIs (controlling for other stuff). It's as though people don't try as hard when there's little competition. I have a few quibbles with these analyses, however. It's unclear exactly how the sex ratio measure was operationalized and it is never explained why it was logged rather than used in its original (linear) form, which would seem the most plausible functional form a priori. Further, Klein asserts, but does not show, that only the sex ratio in a person's social circles counts - I would have liked to see the local sex ratio as an additional independent variable. I also bet the size of the local market has an influence. More generally, none of the regressions presents a particular identification strategy beyond controlling for confounds.

Nonetheless, these are interesting results. There are (at least!) two views on when rational choice explanations will not work so well. One holds that rational choice will work poorly when decisions involve strong emotions. Another is that rational choice cannot contribute much to explaining decisions when the stakes are low, but will be powerful when they are high. The continuing flow of results showing that rational choice has a lot to contribute to the study of mating is evidence in against the former view, and in favour of the latter.

Which Economic Literatures Are the Least Trustworthy? Does Science Put Too Much Weight on the Base Rate?

Those tables (click to enlarge) are from an important paper called "Are All Economic Facts Greatly Exaggerated? Theory Competition and Selectivity" (gated, via) by Chris Doucouliagos and T.D. Stanley that's recently been published in the Journal of Economic Surveys (rather than the AER, where it probably belongs). The higher the beta-value, the more the publications in that literature are estimated to be biased due to selection (what gets published and what doesn't). Hence, the higher the value, the more the literature as a whole exaggerates how homogenous real-world phenomena are. Hypothetical example (mine, not theirs): Imagine you knew with certainty that, on average, a woman's colour of hair had no effect on how attractive men find her. Further imagine that the economic literature consistently showed that "gentlemen prefer blondes". You would then expect this literature to receive a high beta-value in the table. (The computation of the value is somewhat complicated, but based on the idea that literatures are selective if they feature many results that are just significant.)

The authors go on to estimate what predicts beta. Here's the paper's abstract:

There is growing concern and mounting evidence of selectivity in empirical economics. Most empirical economic literatures have a truncated distribution of results. The aim of this paper is to explore the link between publication selectivity and theory contests. This link is confirmed through the analysis of 87 distinct empirical economics literatures, involving more than three and a half thousand separate empirical studies, using objective measures of both selectivity and contests. Our meta–meta-analysis shows that publication selection is widespread, but not universal. It distorts scientific inference with potentially adverse effects on policy making, but competition and debate between rival theories reduces this selectivity and thereby improves economic inference.

Besides being a very important contribution on the trustworthiness of different literatures, this addresses a question that I've been thinking about quite a bit: Everybody knows that implausible results get double-checked more often than plausible ones (I once helped a friend who had found, using matching, that the results were exactly the opposite of what you should expect. Can you guess the reason?). So results that seem plausible get a leg up. Isn't that an unfair advantage for plausible results? Well, that depends on how good your prior theories are. If they're really good, then confirming results should get a leg up. But how do you know that they're good? Only by looking at empirical results. Etc., ad infinitum.

The authors run a regression to see what predicts the selectivity of literatures. It turns out that selectivity is higher when there is only one reigning theory - that is, when available theory makes a clear prediction on which way the results ought to go, the estimates are particularly untrustworthy. This suggests that results that conform to theory are given too much of a leg up, probably due to a number of processes including, but not limited to, double-checking. This, it seems to me, is a very, very important result.

Words of Wisdom

The Economist just listed New Zealand as the best place in the world for working women. We somehow managed this while having very free labour markets and minimal obligations placed on employers around maternity leave. Maybe New Zealand's been on the right track by subsidising daycare rather than making it really expensive to hire women of childbearing age.

That's from Eric Crampton. You'll find Germany way down on the list. I have not seen comparative statistics, but it's certainly very risky in this country to hire women of childbearing age. Daycare is subsidized, but after 5 p.m., things start to get tricky. I'm all for incentivizing professional couples in particular to have children, as this would increase the quality of the future population. A sort of unromantic concept, I know, but when thinking about society, you need a splinter of ice in your heart. That is, sociology currently attracts exactly the wrong kinds of people.

Glück auf, Til Schweiger kommt: Die Tatort-Blitzkritik

Til Schweiger rennt, als ob er sich in die Hose gekackt hätte, und hat in weniger als fünf Minuten deutlich mehr als 10% der Kugeln verballert, die der deutschen Polizei pro Jahr zur Verbrecherbekämpfung zustehen, und man könnte auch sonst noch dies und das bemeckern, doch ich fand's knorke kurzweilig.

Ha, schneller als die Fernsehfreundin!

Incentives, Exogeneity, and Social Planning

Ian Lovett writes about neighbourhoods and sex offenders in Los Angeles (via):

So local residents and city officials developed a plan to force convicted sex offenders to leave their neighborhood: open a tiny park.

Parents here, where state law prohibits registered sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of a school or a public park, are not the only ones seizing on this approach. From the metropolis of Miami to the small town of Sapulpa, Okla., communities are building pocket parks, sometimes so small that they have barely enough room for a swing set, to drive out sex offenders.

This nicely illustrates a three-step caveat it's useful to keep in mind when thinking about social processes: (1) People respond to incentives. (2) Hence, stuff you might have thought is exogenous actually turns out to be endogenous. (3) Hence steering society is harder than one might think.

Pebbles, Vol. 41

1. What was it like to be Vladimir Nabokov's research assistant? (Edward Jay Epstein) (via)

2. Ist Gewalt gegen Polizisten wirklich angestiegen? (Friederike Haupt) (HT: Christian)

3. "Accused of being gay, Spanish priest challenges Church to measure his anus" (Barry Duke)

4. The history of Pulp Fiction (Mark Seal) (via)

5. Pictures of the old main library of Cincinnati:

Writing about Educational Achievement Requires Basic Maths Skills

In NPR, Samuel A. Abrams writes about what the U.S. need to do to improve the performance of their schools (via). As is standard procedure, he looks at how the Finns do things differently. That's because the Finns outperform the U.S. (and almost everybody else) on the PISA test. Abrams' reliance on the test as a measure of educational performance is kinda weird, given that he also suggests standardized testing is a bad idea, but never mind. He discusses a number of ways in which the Finnish system differs from the U.S.'s and suggests making American more like Finnish education would improve U.S. performance.

Then he senses that this kind of analysis may not be all that trustworthy:

The reflexive critique of comparing the Finnish and U.S. educational systems is to say that Finland's PISA results are consequences of the country being a much smaller, more homogeneous nation (5.3 million people, only 4 percent of whom are foreign-born). How could it possibly offer lessons to a country the size of the United States? The answer is next door. Norway is also small (4.8 million people) and nearly as homogeneous (10 percent foreign-born), but it is more akin to the United States than to Finland in its approach to education: Teachers don't need master's degrees; high school teachers with 15 years of experience earn only 70 percent of what fellow university graduates make; and in 2006, authorities implemented a national system of standardized testing. The need for talent in the classroom is now so great that the Norwegian government is spending $3.3 million on an ad campaign to attract people to teaching and, last year, launched its own version of Teach for America in collaboration with Statoil — called Teach First Norway — to recruit teachers of math and science.

Moreover, much as in the United States, classes in Norway are typically too large and equipment too scarce to run science labs. A science teacher at a middle school in Oslo told me that labs are unfortunately the exception, not the rule, and that she couldn't recall doing any labs as a student a decade ago. Unsurprisingly, much as in 2000, 2003, and 2006, Norway in 2009 posted mediocre PISA scores, indicating that it is not necessarily size and homogeneity but, rather, policy choices that lead to a country's educational success.

I highlighted the bits about immigrants that I found particularly iffy. I found them particularly iffy because (i) here in Germany, it is received wisdom that a high number of immigrants in the classroom is going to drive down achievement (which is plausible on both compositional and contextual grounds), (ii) 10% is 2.5 times as much as 4% and (iii) Norway's foreign-born rate is much closer to the United States', which is 12.9%, so the "nearly as homogenous" argument doesn't hold water.

Let's run a simple linear bivariate regression to further assess the claim. I calculated overall PISA scores by adding the scores for the three fields reading, mathematics, and science, taken from Abrams' link, and regressed them on the rate of foreign-borns. This yields the following equation:

SCORE = 1691.1 -16.8*(% FOREIGN-BORN)

In this equation, each percentage point increase in the foreign-born population decreases the score by 16.8%. If we take this result at face value, we should expect, on the basis of differences in immigration alone, Finland's result to be 143.3 points better than the United States'. That's almost exactly what we observe (1631 vs. 1489 points). This nice fit is unsurprising given that the regression statistically explains almost 94% of the variance.

Of course, I would not want to present this regression as a good measure of the causal effect of immigration on test scores. I would like to point out, though, that if you cannot distinguish the numbers 4 and 10, or think that 10 is closer to 4 than to 12.9, perhaps you should not try to teach others about educational attainment. Abrams unfortunately is writing a book on the matter. I think I will pass.

Around the Blogs, Vol. 92

1. Their behaviour suggests that hardcore libertarians are actually consequentialists. (Eric Crampton)

2. When Will Wilkinson's analytical mind and the topic of writing fiction meet, something interesting is bound to happen. And it does. (via)

3. Using science to beat procrastination. (lukeprog) (via)

4. Jim Manzi explains banking regulation in a way that I can understand.

5. The argument that it's the long-run effects of minimum wage laws that really count (Isaac Sorkin) (via)

6. "Unpaid Internships Have Officially Jumped the Shark" (Paul Gowder)

Pebbles, Vol. 40

1. Are Greenpeace et al. responsible for the death of eight million children? (Bjørn Lomborg)

2. The very low external validity of social science experiments (Jim Manzi)

3. An academic review of high-quality studies estimating the effect of police on crime (Jonathan Klick and Alexander Tabarrok)

4. Software programs for diagnosis (Katie Hafner)

5. Michael Chabon reads Finnegans Wake.

6. The rare xkcd foray into the humanities is a highlight. Bonus: The Aumann impossibility theorem.

7. Wives appear careful not to outearn their husbands (C.O./Marianne Bertrand, Emir Kamenica and Jessica Pan).

8. The famous "Broken Windows" article by George Kelling and James Wilson is back online.

9. An essay on memory by Oliver Sacks (via) (A good read, but contains nothing new if you have a fair grasp of the research literature)

10. Jonah Lehrer: Mistakes were made (by me).

11. "World's craziest freekick?" (video)

12. Earning money the hard way (video) (Cory Jones)

13. "13 Book Covers You Won't Believe Are Real" (Lauren Passell)

From the Archives of LiberTrash

Via Eric Crampton comes a short 1978 libertarian propaganda film called Libra. It's unknown to imdb, but at the Smithonian, Matt Novak explains:

Produced and distributed by a free-market group based in San Diego called World Research, Inc., the 40-minute film is set in the year 2003 and gives viewers a look at two vastly different worlds. On Earth, a world government has formed and everything is micromanaged to death, killing private enterprise. But in space, there’s true hope for freedom.

The film explains that way back in 1978 a space colony community was formed using $50 billion of private funds. Back then, government regulations were just loose enough to allow them to form. But here in the year 2003, government regulators are trying to figure out a way to bring them back under their oppressive thumb through taxes and tariffs on the goods they ship back to Earth.

The film's fascinating to watch because it's a textbook case of how not to write a screenplay: The film ends just when one would expect the conflict to really get going; until then, it's little plot and lots of exposition - almost all of which is delivered by actors talking. Indeed, listening the agressively educational dialogues reminded me of the film Street Wise, which they made me watch in my first week at Anglia Polytechnic ("Hey, everybody, I won 50 quid at the pub quiz! I'm gonna put it on my desk in my room and not lock the door!"). There is one exception to this, however: Right at the beginning of the film, we see that New York City in 2003 looks exactly like New York City in 1978. We instinctively understand that this is due to guv'ment regulations stifling innovation in cars, clothing, and even hairdressing.

The entire film can be watched here. Recommended for fans of 70s trash and liberals who like making fun of the enemy.

Around the Blogs, Vol. 91

Is openness to experience responsive to environmental conditions? (Gwern)

All hail Wisconsin! (Tyler Cowen)

The Metamorphosis (elevator pitch) (Andrew Hammel)

How much do economists really agree? (Dan Klein)

"The average middle-class American is driven about 90% by a desire for more money, and most of these people will come right out and tell you that. A similarly-situated German will be motivated 40% by money, 20% by job security, and 40% by the desire for officially-bestowed, external signs of high social status -- especially involving education or heredity. However, they will only admit the desire for job security, and will half-heartedly deny or rationalize the other motivations." (Andrew Hammel)

Innovation: Do incentives play a noteworthy role? (Tyler Cowen)

Note to journalists: Asking expert can help get stuff right. Assuming that's what you're after. (Jason Kottke)

How to be persuasive (Eric S. Raymond)

Now that's what I call paternalism! (Jason Kottke/Laura June)

Why PCs Are Superior to Macs

If my rememberance of assorted newspaper articles is to be trusted, there's a number of surveys in which the majority of respondents indicate they don't think they're influenced by advertising. In contrast, I must say I am fully aware that I am influenced by advertising, and a good's or behaviour's image more generally, but only in the negative. That is, it is clear to me that there's stuff I don't like solely because it has a negative image. For example, Apple's computers may exhibit excellent performance, but I would never buy one, because Apple has made it abundandly clear that Macs are products for people who think they can make themselves creative and individualistic by buying what millions of others also own.

More generally, I feel a strong dislike for lots of stuff that's associated with what in Northern America is sometimes referred to as the SWPL scene. No doubt that's a case of the narcissism of small differences proper.

Fun with Stanley Kubrick

Classic movies in minature style (via)

Fake 2001 ads (via)

More Kubrick humour here.

Differences: Smallness and Closeness

When you look out into the distance, the distances between nearby objects are magnified relative to the distance between objects that are further away. Strangely enough, this is a good model for how the psyche works more generally; people are well aware of differences between "objects" that are "close". This way of dealing with limited cognitive differences is useful. For example, it is more important for you to understand the differences in character between your two brothers than it is for your best friend; it is more important for a New Yorker to know the difference between the North and South Bronx than it is for a Bostoner, and so forth. Also, knowing about the differences between the North and South Bronx is easier when you live in New York. That is, motivation and opportunity, the two horsemen of psychology, are at work again.

Keeping this in mind helps you avoid violations of other people's vanity. Many people have pointed to photos claiming that the person pictured "looks like you"; they were always wrong. Likewise, I once talked to a Frisian who declared that everything south of the river Elbe is Southern Germany, but I can assure you that residents of Cologne don't think they reside in the same corner of the country as Bavarians, and they don't like being told otherwise.

This is sometimes referred to as the vanity, or narcissism, of small differences, but perhaps it is not only the smallness of the differences that counts, but also the fact that differences which are nearby are easier to see. Your typical socialist will see Rothbard and Friedman as more or less interchangeable, but if you've actually read them, it's genuinely easy to point out differences between the two, not least because Rothbard spends a considerable portion of his time pissing in the general direction of Friedman. Which may well be an instance of the narcissism of small differences.

The Best Songs of the 1980s, Part 3 (30-1)

And here they are, the objectively best 30 tracks from the eighties, as determined by a secret scientific procedure. For previous installments, use the tag. As an alternative to the player below, use this link. And for those who can't get enough: 38 tracks that didn't make the final cut.

Three Quick Shots

1. If you like outlandish academic papers, how about "An examination of Rushton’s theory of differences in penis length and circumference and r-K life history theory in 113 populations" by Richard Lynn? Here's the abstract:

Rushton’s (1985, 2000) r-K life history theory that Mongoloids are the most K evolved, Caucasoids somewhat less K evolved, and Negroids the least K evolved is examined and extended in an analysis of data for erect penis length and circumference in three new data sets. These new data extend Rushton’s theory by presenting disaggregated data for penis size for European and North African/South Asian Caucasoids; for East Asian and Southeast Asian Mongoloids; for Inuit and Amerindians and Mestizos, and for thirteen mixed race samples. The results generally confirm and extend Rushton’s r-K life history theory.

Seriously, though, this paper is pretty uninformative for the same reason that most research on sex differences is pretty uninformative: It uses nonrepresentative samples.

2. A NY Times comment by Thomas Edsall (via) discusses disagreements about economic inequality. Basically, economists seem to have different opinions on whether consumption inequality is more important than income inequality, and if so, which consumption counts and how it should be measured. This illustrates a pervasive point about the inequality debate in both academic circles and society in general. Few people care about economic inequality per se; what they really mean is human well-being. But the psychological theory that would tell you how inequality translates into well-being is, basically, absent, and people work with implicit assumptions all the time. For example, if you think that consumption inequality is the only kind that matters, you are implying (whether or not you're aware of it) that nobody's ever suffered because his colleague down the hall earned ten percent more. Speaking of which, the concept of the reference group is old, but, unless I've missed something, social scientists have yet to come to a conclusion on what the relevant reference group for a person is. I suspect that has nothing to do with social scientists' laziness and a lot with reality not lending itself to a general answer.

3. Via Steve Sailer, here are some results from a study of the representation of women among authors of academic papers (the dots represent subfields within a discipline, such as "socilology of the family"):

You could explain the differences in representation between economics and sociology as a consequence of economics being much more mathematical than sociology, combined with the fact that women tend to be underrepresented where maths features heavily. Unfortunately, this theory runs into the immediate problem of women being underrepresented in economics even relative to probability and statistics. However, both observations are consistent with a two-step selection model. In a first step a person either does or does not go into a social science field, and in a second step, the more specific discipline is selected. This is basically the same explanation I've offered for why there are no romantic comedies for men. Well, sort of.

The Greatest Songs of the 1980s, Part 2 (60-31)

Instead of the player below, try this link, or this one. First installment here.

Wikipedia: Into Self-parody

1. There is a Wikipedia page for the new Star Treck film.

2. On the discussion page, an incredible amount of pixels is spilled about whether the page should be titled "Star Treck Into Darkness" or "Star Treck into Darkness". Including this philosophical gem:

3. xkcd makes fun of this.

4. Now look what happens next:

This may be conscious, intended self-mockery, but I doubt it.

The Systemic Problem with Private Prisons

Alex Tabarrok links to an interesting NY Times article by John Tierney on the benefits of spending money on prisons vs. police. One thing I learned from it is that New York did not follow the general U.S. trend towards more and more imprisonment. Here's a snippet:

Dr. Ludwig and Philip J. Cook, a Duke University economist, calculate that nationwide, money diverted from prison to policing would buy at least four times as much reduction in crime. They suggest shrinking the prison population by a quarter and using the savings to hire another 100,000 police officers.

Diverting that money to the police would be tricky politically, because corrections budgets are zealously defended in state capitals by prison administrators, unions and legislators.

But there is at least one prison administrator, Dr. Jacobson, the former correction commissioner in New York, who would send the money elsewhere.

“If you had a dollar to spend on reducing crime, and you looked at the science instead of the politics, you would never spend it on the prison system,” Dr. Jacobson said. “There is no better example of big government run amok.”

There's been a lot of argument about private prisons focusing on whether they will treat prisoners too harshly, or perhaps too well. But perhaps the real problem is that when you have private prison companies you have created a lobby group that has an interest in keeping behaviours illegal and sentences long. It almost looks like U.S. politicians are on a mission to prove that the Marxists were right after all.

I wonder how much lower U.S. imprisonment would be if there were no private prisons.

The Greatest Tracks of the 1980s, Part 1 (100-61)

As promised, here's the first installment of my top 100 list of 1980s tracks. It's a strange mix of indie stuff and well-known radio hits, with the latter dominating in the first installment. In part that reflects my lesser knowledge of 1980s music (compared to the 1990s), but also, I just happen to think that "In the Air Tonight" is better than anything by The Fall I've come across.

As an alternative to the player below, try this link. 

Around the Blogs, Vol. 90

The next few Fridays will bring another playlist, so let's empty out the Around the Blogs folder:

1. Do high wages drive economic growth? (Tim Harford)

2. Attempts to answer the questions, "What is science?" and "What is love?", collected by Maria Popova.

3. How women think about love. (Penelope Trunk)

4. Let's Potato (Andrew Hammel and his brother).

5. "Infographic Names 21 Emotions with No English Word Equivalents" (Erin McCarthy) (via). Large version of graph here. "Saudade" seems especially useful.

6. "Prosecutors are Demi-Gods in the United States" (Andrew Hammel)

7. I want that drug! (Jon M)

The 'Nonexpert' Challenge

When there is a public debate about a (social) science topic, pitting proponents of view A against proponents of view B, you sometimes encounter a variant of the following statement by someone promoting view A: "The specific person who holds that B is correct has never published original analyses concerning the topic in question in the peer-reviewed literature."

Let's note in passing that people who know the peer-review process first hand are often not as impressed by this institution as many journalists. More importantly, I am not so sure that not having published extensively about a topic makes your view less credible. If you do have a history of publication on the topic, you will probably have a better grasp of the facts, including methodological challenges brought about by the kind of data that we're talking about.

On the other hand, if you don't have such a history, you have some advantages. First, you can look at the issues with a fresh eye. You may, for example, see issues that people trained in a certain field can't, because that is not germane to the way one looks at things in a that field. Second, you are less subject to pressures that come with being a researcher in a field. This comes in two flavours - social disapproval (no one wants to have a beer with you after the conference) and professional disadvantages (no grant money for you). Third, long-standing researchers went on the record long ago with their view on whether A or B is correct. It is painful to state in public that you were wrong. A newbie does not have this problem.

Given this, it's not clear to me that an author's lack of a history of publication should signal reduced credibility of his views. It seems quite clear, though, that if the only rebuttal to A that B-proponents can come up with is that A-proponents have no history of publication in the field, this is a strong signal that there is a lot to be said for A. If that's all B-proponents offer, this suggests they have no good replies to the actual arguments in question.

While I'm at it, let me note that stating (perhaps correctly) that a certain view is "divisive" says nothing about its veracity, just as the claim that being a Christian improves your behaviour says nothing about the existence of god. 

The Growing Social Gradient in U.S. Educational Attainment and the Shadow of Meritocracy

Here's from a New York Times article by Jason DeParle John Cohen links to:

Poor students have long trailed affluent peers in school performance, but from grade-school tests to college completion, the gaps are growing. With school success and earning prospects ever more entwined, the consequences carry far: education, a force meant to erode class barriers, appears to be fortifying them.

“Everyone wants to think of education as an equalizer — the place where upward mobility gets started,” said Greg J. Duncan, an economist at the University of California, Irvine. “But on virtually every measure we have, the gaps between high- and low-income kids are widening. It’s very disheartening.”

The growing role of class in academic success has taken experts by surprise since it follows decades of equal opportunity efforts and counters racial trends, where differences have narrowed.

Class an increasingly good predictor of academic success after decades of equal opportunity efforts? That's just what my theory of the changing relative importance of external resources and personality predicts.

The article presents a laundry list of possible influences on the phenomenon, all of which probably explain some of the variance. My theory suggests that a nonnegligible portion of the growth of the gap is explained by growing differnces in the personality characteristics that you need to succeed academically. And indeed:

Income has always shaped academic success, but its importance is growing. Professor Reardon, the Stanford sociologist, examined a dozen reading and math tests dating back 25 years and found that the gap in scores of high- and low-income students has grown by 40 percent [...].

Reasons given for this: The rich provide more "enrichment" and enjoy an "advocacy edge". Again, that probably plays some role, and data is cited to the effect that lower-class students finish college less often even holding skills constant. But I don't think you can understand that kind of phenomenon unless you look at past meritocracy, and acknowledge that children will tend to resemble their parents no matter what.

I predict that we're going to see a lot of handwringing like this in the coming years and decades. As societies stay relatively meritocratic, class will become a better and better predictor of education. This will lead to more pressure to tackle the remaining deficits in meritocracy. This will only help to solidify the phenomenon it was meant to rectify. And so on, and so forth, civil war.

The Best Blog Posts of 2012: Vanity Edition

After my post on other people's 2012 posts that I liked best, here are ten of my posts from last year that I find more worthwhile than the others. In chronological order:

• How "Social Distance" Is Misleading
• The within-between Fallacy
• The Discrimination Fallacy
• The Argument from the Absence of Apocalypse
• Poverty and Life Outcomes: A Theory of the Changing Relative Importance of Resources and Personality
• Why You Shouldn't Borrow Books from Acquaintances
• The Greatest Tracks of the 1990s, Part 3: 30-1
• Testing vs. Matching and the Attraction of the Aphorism
• Sometimes You Need Both Blades of the Scissors
• Why Most Studies of Male-Female Differences Are Useless

This is the last installment of my turn-of-the-year flurry in linklists. I promise the next post will contain substantial blocks of new text written by me.

The Best Blog Posts of 2012

Hmmmm . . . I had had the feeling that it had not been a particularly strong year for blog posts - so only ten this time, to keep up this series' ridiculously high standards.

As last time, brackets are appended to each link to indicate whether the post is Long, Medium lenght or Short; High-Brow, Mid-Brow or Low-Brow, and Funny or Not.

For the rest of this series, use the tag.

10. Scatterplot: "Eight Observations on 'Biology' and Social Science", by Jeremy Freese (L; HB; N)

9. iSteve: "Feminists: Still Making Children Cry on Christmas Morning", by Steve Sailer (L; MB; F)

8. Seth's Blog: "Two Dimensions of Economic Growth: GDP and Useful Knowledge", by Seth Roberts (M; HB; N)

7. EconLog: "My Beautiful Bubble", by Bryan Caplan (M; MB; N)

6. Meteuphoric: "Value Realism", by Katja Grace (L; HB; N)

5. Overcoming Bias: "Unspeakable Arrogance", by Robin Hanson (M; HB; F)

4. Cheap Talk: "Dogmatic Doesn’t Have To Mean Closed-Minded", either by Jeff Ely or by Sandeep Baliga, I don't know which (M; MB; N)

3. The Atlantic Business: "What Is Causality?", by Jim Manzi (L; HB; N)

2. Old School Panini: "The Lumberjack’s Top Ten", by Alex Bourof (M; LB; F)

1. Jaltcoh: "Why do people say, 'Life is too short?'", by John Althouse Cohen (S; MB; F)

Hats off to everyone on the list, and may everybody have a great year! "Everybody" includes people not on the list.

Operation Blank Slate, 2012 Edition

As usual, my end-of-the-year dump of stuff I meant to use for blogging but didn't. Shorter than usual because I changed machines mid-year and, much in the spirit of this series, didn't export bookmarks.

• "Assault Deaths within the United States", by Kieran Healy
• "An examination of Rushton’s theory of differences in penis length and circumference and r-K life history theory in 113 populations", by Richard Lynn
• "Literature Film Quarterly (1978) - John Buchan and Alfred Hitchcock", from Hitchcockwiki
• "Human capital and longevity: Evidence from 50,000 twins", by Petter Lundborg, Carl Hampus Lyttkens, and Paul Nystedt (via)
• "Hammer: Hunde, Erdmännchen & Co. in echter 3D Optik als T-Shirt …", von Kerstin
• "The Mountain" bei Amazon

And coming on Jan 1st: The best blog posts of 2013.

Around the Blogs, Vol. 89

Yeah, not a lot of original content lately; and given that it's the end of the year, readers should prepare for lots more listed-links-type of posts. Perhaps I'll get round to writing some original stuff over the holidays, but I doubt it. So, here's some noteworthy recent blog posts:

1. Steve Sailer vs. Elizabeth Sweet on economic development, sex roles, and presents. Funny and thought-provoking. From the same author: The Wertherpedia theory of mass shootings

2. Ben Casnocha's best Tweets collected

3. When outcomes for the treatment group affect outcomes for the control group, results won't scale up. (Economic Logician/Pieter Gautier, Paul Muller, Bas van der Klaauw, Michael Rosholm and Michael Svarer)

4. Perform your own meta-analysis (soon, perhaps) (passed along by Tyler Cowen)

5. A partial model of U.S. politics, from Andrew Hammel

Happy holidays, everyone.

Around the Blogs, Vol. 88: Social Science Special

1. Bryan Caplan discusses Malcolm X's autobiography: Directory to all parts.

2. How important are survey response rates? Jeremy Freese, Fabio Rojas.

3. Retracted psychology articles keep getting cited as evidence. (Sanjay Srivastava)

4. What would an ideal stats text book look like? (Phil Price)

Two Great Cover Versions of "I'll Try Anything Once"

Great eyebrow work from Jodie Makin:



And here's proof pandas have a good taste in music:



Nice weekend, everyone!