Until more people come to a more realistic, fact-based understanding of the government and the economy, little hope exists of tearing them away from their quasi-religious attachment to a government they view with misplaced reverence and unrealistic hopes. Lacking a true religious faith yet craving one, many Americans have turned to the state as a substitute god, endowed with the divine omnipotence required to shower the public with something for nothing in every department – free health care, free retirement security, free protection from hazardous consumer products and workplace accidents, free protection from the Islamic maniacs the U.S. government stirs up with its misadventures in the Muslim world, and so forth. If you take the government to be Santa Claus, you naturally want every day to be Christmas; and the bigger the Santa, the bigger his sack of goodies. This prevailing ideology constitutes probably the most critical obstacle to reductions in the government's size, scope, and power. Getting rid of this ideology will be diabolically difficult, if possible at all.
Friday, October 16, 2009
Faith in Government
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Intellectual Honesty
Good scientific research has no agenda other than uncovering a fact about the world. Most people who have a Master's degree or better in any real, data-driven science can quickly recognize the difference between real research and pseudoscientific junk. Real science is what our civilization is built on; it is the cornerstone of our entire society. It should be respected, for without a common set of facts we cannot communicate or do anything useful.
I know that having an advanced degree does not make you wise, and there are a lot of people who cling to their ideologies. Even though they know what good research is, they do not apply that standard to everyone. It is distressingly common to ignore the flaws in bad research that supports your beliefs, or to ignore the existence of good research that would make you question your beliefs. It is also true that researchers sometimes sell out and twist things to support some agenda.
But whenever an academic who has lots of good publications and works at a good school is attacked by some politician or popular author with no real credentials, it is almost always the case that the academic is correct and the attacker is just some hack who is trying to make money or support a political agenda.
Let me give a specific example. Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers are good, solid economists. They'll probably never win the Nobel Prize, but they are definitely among the elite of the profession. They recently published a paper called 'The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness'. Here's the abstract:
I've looked through this paper, and I can confirm that it is a good piece of research. They use about 30 pages of high-quality data analysis to show that woman report less happiness today than in the past.
I would think that this is an ideologically neutral finding. They are very careful not to engage in any idle speculation about why women are less happy. They simply report the fact, and the world is a better place because they did.
But a lot of people don't like this fact, for whatever reason. So the authors have often been attacked by people who know nothing about science. One of the latest people to do so is Barbara Ehrenreich. She has a new book coming out, with the claim that people are worse off because they are made to feel artificially happy.
I would think that Ehrenreich would find value in the research; it agrees with her thesis that people are not really better off. But for some reason she has decided that she doesn't like it. Perhaps this is because some people (not the authors) have used the paper to claim that feminism did not help women.
You can read some of the criticisms, and the author's response, in this Freakonomics blog post. This is the intro:
Many of my readers probably know of Ehrenreich already, and don't like her, so they are not surprised by this. But if you are thinking that this kind of ideologically motivated attack on real scientists, and a refusal to accept the honest facts that science produces, is a trait of the left, let me say a few words:
Biology is a much more reliable and more data-driven science than Economics. Biology is directly responsible for most of the medical care that keeps us alive, and a lot of the technology and food that makes our lives better. Biologists are good scientists, and they know what they are doing. They make useful predictions about reality.
And they all know that evolution is a proven fact. Evolutionary thinking is the core of biology, and has been for about 150 years. It explains why plants, animals, bacteria, and viruses are the way they are, and it tells us how to work with the world around us. For example, evolution explains why it is a very bad idea to misuse antibiotics. We have seen things like MRSA evolve before our very eyes. Analysis of the fossil record and genetics shows us that this same process has been operating for millions of years, to produce life as we know it today.
And yet, despite 150 years of hard work and good science on the part of biologists, a large fraction of the American population simply refuses to accept that evolution is real. This fact often makes me despair of ever getting people to understand unpopular facts about economics. The biologists have way better data than we ever will, and they still can't get people to abandon their preconceptions.
I see no conflict between religion and science here. Replication with mutation is a very elegant process that produces organisms that are adapted to their environment and will be able to respond to an environmental change. Given that life as we know it would be impossible without a changing world, life must have some way to adapt to change. It is perfectly reasonable to assume that God set up the process, then pressed a cosmic 'fast-forward' button so that a billion years of evolution happened in a few days.
The Catholic Church will never escape the fact that they denounced and arrested Galileo for stating that the earth moves around the sun. The modern opposition to evolution is just as foolish, and the church looks worse the longer it goes on. In the long run, you cannot ever win a fight against a scientific fact.
I know that having an advanced degree does not make you wise, and there are a lot of people who cling to their ideologies. Even though they know what good research is, they do not apply that standard to everyone. It is distressingly common to ignore the flaws in bad research that supports your beliefs, or to ignore the existence of good research that would make you question your beliefs. It is also true that researchers sometimes sell out and twist things to support some agenda.
But whenever an academic who has lots of good publications and works at a good school is attacked by some politician or popular author with no real credentials, it is almost always the case that the academic is correct and the attacker is just some hack who is trying to make money or support a political agenda.
Let me give a specific example. Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers are good, solid economists. They'll probably never win the Nobel Prize, but they are definitely among the elite of the profession. They recently published a paper called 'The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness'. Here's the abstract:
The lives of women in the United States have improved over the past
35 years by many objective measures, yet we show that measures of
subjective well-being indicate that women's happiness has declined
both absolutely and relative to men. This decline in relative wellbeing
is found across various datasets, measures of subjective wellbeing,
demographic groups, and industrialized countries. Relative
declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness
in which women in the 1970s reported higher subjective well-being
than did men. These declines have continued and a new gender gap
is emerging—one with higher subjective well-being for men.
I've looked through this paper, and I can confirm that it is a good piece of research. They use about 30 pages of high-quality data analysis to show that woman report less happiness today than in the past.
I would think that this is an ideologically neutral finding. They are very careful not to engage in any idle speculation about why women are less happy. They simply report the fact, and the world is a better place because they did.
But a lot of people don't like this fact, for whatever reason. So the authors have often been attacked by people who know nothing about science. One of the latest people to do so is Barbara Ehrenreich. She has a new book coming out, with the claim that people are worse off because they are made to feel artificially happy.
I would think that Ehrenreich would find value in the research; it agrees with her thesis that people are not really better off. But for some reason she has decided that she doesn't like it. Perhaps this is because some people (not the authors) have used the paper to claim that feminism did not help women.
You can read some of the criticisms, and the author's response, in this Freakonomics blog post. This is the intro:
One of the things I've learned from Levitt is that you need a thick skin if you are going to write about controversial topics. And since Betsey Stevenson and I wrote about "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness," we've been called everything from left-wing fools to right-wing tools. But it can be a real kick in the guts when you learn that someone you thought you admired turns out to be simply dishonest. And that's how I felt when I read Barbara Ehrenreich's "takedown" of our research in today's LA Times.
Many of my readers probably know of Ehrenreich already, and don't like her, so they are not surprised by this. But if you are thinking that this kind of ideologically motivated attack on real scientists, and a refusal to accept the honest facts that science produces, is a trait of the left, let me say a few words:
Biology is a much more reliable and more data-driven science than Economics. Biology is directly responsible for most of the medical care that keeps us alive, and a lot of the technology and food that makes our lives better. Biologists are good scientists, and they know what they are doing. They make useful predictions about reality.
And they all know that evolution is a proven fact. Evolutionary thinking is the core of biology, and has been for about 150 years. It explains why plants, animals, bacteria, and viruses are the way they are, and it tells us how to work with the world around us. For example, evolution explains why it is a very bad idea to misuse antibiotics. We have seen things like MRSA evolve before our very eyes. Analysis of the fossil record and genetics shows us that this same process has been operating for millions of years, to produce life as we know it today.
And yet, despite 150 years of hard work and good science on the part of biologists, a large fraction of the American population simply refuses to accept that evolution is real. This fact often makes me despair of ever getting people to understand unpopular facts about economics. The biologists have way better data than we ever will, and they still can't get people to abandon their preconceptions.
I see no conflict between religion and science here. Replication with mutation is a very elegant process that produces organisms that are adapted to their environment and will be able to respond to an environmental change. Given that life as we know it would be impossible without a changing world, life must have some way to adapt to change. It is perfectly reasonable to assume that God set up the process, then pressed a cosmic 'fast-forward' button so that a billion years of evolution happened in a few days.
The Catholic Church will never escape the fact that they denounced and arrested Galileo for stating that the earth moves around the sun. The modern opposition to evolution is just as foolish, and the church looks worse the longer it goes on. In the long run, you cannot ever win a fight against a scientific fact.
Antique Mechanical Pedometer
A couple weeks ago, a friend game me an interesting an old mechanical device. She hadn't looked at it closely, and thought it was a broken pocketwatch, but after studying it I saw it is not a watch, but a mechanical counter or meter of some kind.
It looks much like a pocketwatch, but the numbers on the dial only go to 10. There is a big hand on the dial that looks like a watch's minute hand, and a smaller hand inside, with numbers from 0 to 100 in a circle. The centers of the two circles are in different places. When I took off the back, I saw a weight attached to clockwork, and something that is meant as an adjustment. When I shake the device, it clicks and the counter (sometimes) advances one unit.
I sent emails to various people who might know what it was, including my cousin and a mechanical engineering professor here. My cousin guessed that it was a pedometer. Today the professor confirmed this. He dated it to about the '30s or '40s, noting that the gears were made of stamped metal. The workings reminded him of the cheap $1 watches of the time period, and he commented that 'pedometers are not rare.'
This was the first time I had ever heard of such a thing. I had known that there was something of a health and fitness fad in the earlier part of the century, but I had no idea that it featured widespread use of cheaply mass-produced mechanical pedometers.
I wonder if any common thing from today will be lost in the mists of time like this. What might we use that could only be identified by someone with a master's degree 70 years form now?
It looks much like a pocketwatch, but the numbers on the dial only go to 10. There is a big hand on the dial that looks like a watch's minute hand, and a smaller hand inside, with numbers from 0 to 100 in a circle. The centers of the two circles are in different places. When I took off the back, I saw a weight attached to clockwork, and something that is meant as an adjustment. When I shake the device, it clicks and the counter (sometimes) advances one unit.
I sent emails to various people who might know what it was, including my cousin and a mechanical engineering professor here. My cousin guessed that it was a pedometer. Today the professor confirmed this. He dated it to about the '30s or '40s, noting that the gears were made of stamped metal. The workings reminded him of the cheap $1 watches of the time period, and he commented that 'pedometers are not rare.'
This was the first time I had ever heard of such a thing. I had known that there was something of a health and fitness fad in the earlier part of the century, but I had no idea that it featured widespread use of cheaply mass-produced mechanical pedometers.
I wonder if any common thing from today will be lost in the mists of time like this. What might we use that could only be identified by someone with a master's degree 70 years form now?
Hacker Heaven
When I saw this article, the first thing I thought was 'Hackers will have a lot of fun with this, unless it is secured really well.'
Tech companies are basically shipping computers that are programmed to automatically open connections with any machine that asks for it. This could be a disaster. If you get any computer or advanced phone next year or later, make sure that it is secured very well.
Wi-Fi Direct will automatically scan for local existing hotspots and any wi-fi-enabled devices, such as cameras, phones and computers.
The Alliance says the specification will search for both consumer electronics and office applications, enabling devices to connect from across a home or workplace.
Tech companies are basically shipping computers that are programmed to automatically open connections with any machine that asks for it. This could be a disaster. If you get any computer or advanced phone next year or later, make sure that it is secured very well.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Imagination
Showing kids a CD video teaching some simple relaxation exercises is a far more effective painkiller than drugs:
Among those who had used the CDs, 73.3% reported that their abdominal pain was reduced by half or more by the end of the treatment course compared with 26.7% in the standard care group.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Class and Food
Random Unscientific Observations:
The goal of lower-class food is to provide calories as cheaply as possible.
The goal of lower-middle-class food is to taste as good as possible.
The goal of middle-class food is to be healthy and practical.
The goal of upper-middle-class food is to signal one's social and environmental credentials.
The goal of upper-class food is to embarrass any non-upper-class person who tries to eat it.
A couple comments on the last two, because many of my readers have probably never been subjected to upper-middle-class or upper-class food, or they were and didn't know what they were dealing with or why.
Some people really don't care about taste or cost or practicality in their food. They want to keep up appearances by sending the message that they are the 'right kind of person'. So their food will probably be some combination of organic, 'fair trade', and whatever the latest food fashion is. They may think that it is healthy and good for the environment, but it probably isn't.
Upper-class food takes the social games to an even more extreme level. Its goal is to make anyone outside the social circle uncomfortable and/or to make them look bad, thus reinforcing the bonds of the in-crowd. This kind of thing is typical of the upper class. They love to invent arbitrary complicated rules, and make things artificially difficult. Entry into the upper class requires that you spend a lot of time memorizing useless things and developing useless skills. This has been true for millennia. It allows them to feel superior to people who have to spend their time actually earning a living.
Here are some signs that you might be dealing with upper-class food:
1) There are no knives, no forks, and/or no plates.
2) You are expected to eat standing up.
3) The food is either very messy or too big to eat in a single bite. By itself, this is fine, but in combination with points 1 and 2 it is a real killer.
4) There are no trash cans in the room. You have to put everything on a tray that a waiter will carry off.
That's for receptions. At the sit-down meals, they have different ways to mess with you:
1) There are way too many forks and knives and plates.
2) The food requires special unique skills or utensils to eat properly.
3) The place is swarming with way more waiters than is necessary.
And the universal attribute of upper-class food: It is not healthy, good, cheap, or socially responsible. Anything that the lower classes might actually choose to eat on their own is frowned upon, because they might know how to deal with it without looking and feeling bad.
For example, at the conference I attended recently, there was a reception with a 'light refreshments' buffet. One of the things on this buffet was slices of hard toasted white bread, half the size of a slice of normal bread and twice as thick. There were also a lot of sauces and dips that you were presumably supposed to eat with the bread. If you tried to break the bread by hand, you would cover your clothes in a shower of crumbs. If you tried to eat it without breaking it, you would either have to bite through the hard tough bread or stuff the whole thing in your mouth. Both of these would be extremely unpleasant for both you and anyone who saw you.
I have no idea how we were supposed to eat this bread. Maybe finishing schools teach you how to break bread without causing crumbs or getting your hands dirty. Maybe you weren't even supposed to try. It could simply have been a a trap for the unwary. I stayed with the fruit. Even though the pineapple chunks were far bigger than was proper or comfortable, I was able to eat them in a single bite without any unpleasantness.
The goal of lower-class food is to provide calories as cheaply as possible.
The goal of lower-middle-class food is to taste as good as possible.
The goal of middle-class food is to be healthy and practical.
The goal of upper-middle-class food is to signal one's social and environmental credentials.
The goal of upper-class food is to embarrass any non-upper-class person who tries to eat it.
A couple comments on the last two, because many of my readers have probably never been subjected to upper-middle-class or upper-class food, or they were and didn't know what they were dealing with or why.
Some people really don't care about taste or cost or practicality in their food. They want to keep up appearances by sending the message that they are the 'right kind of person'. So their food will probably be some combination of organic, 'fair trade', and whatever the latest food fashion is. They may think that it is healthy and good for the environment, but it probably isn't.
Upper-class food takes the social games to an even more extreme level. Its goal is to make anyone outside the social circle uncomfortable and/or to make them look bad, thus reinforcing the bonds of the in-crowd. This kind of thing is typical of the upper class. They love to invent arbitrary complicated rules, and make things artificially difficult. Entry into the upper class requires that you spend a lot of time memorizing useless things and developing useless skills. This has been true for millennia. It allows them to feel superior to people who have to spend their time actually earning a living.
Here are some signs that you might be dealing with upper-class food:
1) There are no knives, no forks, and/or no plates.
2) You are expected to eat standing up.
3) The food is either very messy or too big to eat in a single bite. By itself, this is fine, but in combination with points 1 and 2 it is a real killer.
4) There are no trash cans in the room. You have to put everything on a tray that a waiter will carry off.
That's for receptions. At the sit-down meals, they have different ways to mess with you:
1) There are way too many forks and knives and plates.
2) The food requires special unique skills or utensils to eat properly.
3) The place is swarming with way more waiters than is necessary.
And the universal attribute of upper-class food: It is not healthy, good, cheap, or socially responsible. Anything that the lower classes might actually choose to eat on their own is frowned upon, because they might know how to deal with it without looking and feeling bad.
For example, at the conference I attended recently, there was a reception with a 'light refreshments' buffet. One of the things on this buffet was slices of hard toasted white bread, half the size of a slice of normal bread and twice as thick. There were also a lot of sauces and dips that you were presumably supposed to eat with the bread. If you tried to break the bread by hand, you would cover your clothes in a shower of crumbs. If you tried to eat it without breaking it, you would either have to bite through the hard tough bread or stuff the whole thing in your mouth. Both of these would be extremely unpleasant for both you and anyone who saw you.
I have no idea how we were supposed to eat this bread. Maybe finishing schools teach you how to break bread without causing crumbs or getting your hands dirty. Maybe you weren't even supposed to try. It could simply have been a a trap for the unwary. I stayed with the fruit. Even though the pineapple chunks were far bigger than was proper or comfortable, I was able to eat them in a single bite without any unpleasantness.
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