Matt Yglesias

Revisiting “Depressive Realism”

I made reference a couple of days ago to the literature on “depressive realism,” which I characterized as the hypothesis that “people suffering from depression have more accurate perceptions about many things.”

As perhaps I should have predicted, the situation turns out to be somewhat more complicated than that. There were a wave of “depressive realism” studies starting in 1979 as a counter to 1960s-era “cognitive” theories of depression which held that depressed people were making some kind of mistake. It turns out that at least on some metrics, the reverse is happening. But the depressed and non-depressed populations are both heterogeneous and there are a lot of different kinds of cognitive biases that people suffer from, so it’s not at all clear that you’d want to say that depression leads to more accurate perceptions in general. A well-informed reader suggests this meta-analysis as a good survey of the subject.

Accuracy and Flourishing

Via Tyler Cowen, research indicating that being sad has its virtues:

Bad moods can actually be good for you, with an Australian study finding that being sad makes people less gullible, improves their ability to judge others and also boosts memory.

The study, authored by psychology professor Joseph Forgas at the University of New South Wales, showed that people in a negative mood were more critical of, and paid more attention to, their surroundings than happier people, who were more likely to believe anything they were told.

Put this in a box with a growing body of researching indicating that there’s a problematic relationship between what’s good for you to think and what’s accurate. For example, how well you fare in life is largely due to socioeconomic circumstances and luck. But individual initiative does play a role. And consequently people who overestimate the role of individual initiative tend to do better in life than those with more accurate perceptions, plausibly because getting this stuff wrong inspires you to try harder. There’s also a substantial literature on “depressive realism” indicating that people suffering from depression have more accurate perceptions about many things.

Monkey Economics

Via Brad DeLong you won’t want to miss Keith Chen, Laurie Santos, and Venkat Lakshminarayanan, “How Basic Are Behavioral Biases?: Evidence from Capuchin Monkey Trading Behavior.”

Basically they cooked up an ingenuous experiment to see if capuchin monkeys exhibited the same kind of irrational reference effects and loss aversion that Kahneman & Tversky have demonstrated in humans. The answer is, in short, yes. This suggests that these kind of behavioral biases are very deeply rooted since the last common ancestor between humans and monkeys was many millions of years ago. It’s not really a terribly surprising result once you think about it, but definitely a clever line of inquiry.

Physics and Metaphysics: Together at Last

Richard Alleyne reports on the intriguing theory that Hibbs Bosons from the future are preventing the Large Hadron Collidor from working:

The pair’s hypothesis centres around the Higgs Boson, a mysterious tiny particle and building block of life that it is hoped the LHC will discover.

They have come up with a theory that it will “ripple backward through time” and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

“It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,” Dr. Nielsen said.

Aha, I hear you saying, isn’t the idea of events in the future causing events in the past incoherent? Fortunately, I’m here to tell you that the answer is no. Way back in the July 1964 issue of Philosophical Review, Michael Dummett published “Bringing About the Past” which persuasively argued that backwards causation is just as conceptually sound as the idea of forwards causation. That said, it remains an open question of empirical science whether any actual examples of backwards causation exist.

Holger Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya think that we may have such a situation on our hands, and they argue in “Test of Effect from Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal” and “Search for Effect of Influence from Future in Large Hadron Collider” that the circumstances now exist to perform empirical tests to locate backward causation in action.

Carnap and Scientific Realism

Via John Holbo, it seems They Might Be Giants’s latest for kids projects involves a new song “Science is Real” that opens with a quote from German philosopher Rudolf Carnap:

Carnap did a lot of good work during his career, but as I tweeted it’s disappointing to see TMBG embracing his discredited view that “science is a system of statements based on direct experience and controlled by experimental verification.” That’s just not the case. It’s not how science works in practice and it doesn’t work in principle, either. Facts and theories are interdependent.

Nothing is ever observed that admits of a definitive, theory-independent observation nor does anything ever happen that can verify or falsify a single proposition in isolation. Obviously, observation and experimentation are integral to the work of scientists, but it’s a lot murkier and more complicated than that.

I think it’s unfortunate that people trying to enhance the social prestige of science and scientists (which is basically what the TMBG song is about) have this tendency to want to fall back on this kind of naive realism and positivism as their means for doing so. To understand why science is so impressive what I think you really need to do is not talk about how it’s “real” (whatever that means) but put it as a social practice alongside other social practices aimed at explaining the world. You’ll see that science is impressively progressive—when old theories get overturned by newer ones, our capabilities as a society and as a species are enhanced in really noteworthy ways. There’s no better set of ideas or practices out there. If you really really want to cling to Young Earth Creationism there’s no argument that can compel you to change your mind, but at this point in history creationist thinking is all about explaining away the successes of Darwinian theory it doesn’t actually contribute anything to enhance our understanding of things.

The Case Against Pandas

Giant Panda (wikimedia)

Englishman tries to earn the ire of panda-lovers everywhere:

Conservationists should “pull the plug” on giant pandas and let them die out, according to BBC presenter and naturalist Chris Packham.

“Here’s a species that, of its own accord, has gone down an evolutionary cul-de-sac,” Packham told Radio Times magazine.

The 48-year-old believes that money spent on conserving the panda would be better invested in other animals as the species is not strong enough to survive alone.

I think that’s probably true in some kind of narrow sense. And by the same token, one might argue that it’s wrong to expend funds on restoration of architectural landmarks when the funds might be better spent improving infrastructure in poor countries. But there isn’t actually a lump sum of charitability in the universe and not hard to understand why it’s easier to raise funds for preservation of cute animals than non-cute animals. The question is whether panda-related endeavors generate a net surplus or a net deficit of funds for non-panda conservation activities. My understanding is that it’s a net positive, that programs for “flagship” famous animals help subsidize work on lesser-known species.

Still, on an individual basis I think the critique holds up. I own some stuffed pandas, I like to visit the pandas in the zoo, I used to have a panda-based Twitter icon, but personally I try to donate money to more high priority causes.

Good News on HIV Vaccine

Some positive new on the test for an HIV vaccine as a human trial in Thailand shows that a new vaccine is partially effective at stopping infection. It’s not good enough to actually use, but it demonstrates that a vaccine can be made to work in principle and should give researchers some signposts in the direction of how to move further forward.

Thursday Dinosaur Blogging

Exciting developments in the dinosaur world as researchers discover a creature that’s a lot like Tyrannosaurus Rex, but much smaller:

Apparently this upends our understanding of how T Rex evolved:

But this scaled-down version, which was about nine feet long and weighed only 150 pounds, lived 125 million years ago, about 35 million years before giant Tyrannosaurs roamed the earth. So the discovery calls into question theories about the evolution of T. rex, which was about 5 times longer and almost 100 times heavier.

“The thought was these signature Tyrannosaur features evolved as a consequence of large body size,” Stephen L. Brusatte of the American Museum of National History, an author of a paper describing the dinosaur published online by the journal Science, said at a news conference. “They needed to modify their entire skeleton so they could function as a predator at such colossal size.”

Naturally, this demonstrates that dinosaurs are fun all my political opinions are correct.

Natural History Museum Pushing Global Cooling

Back in the spring of 2007, I went with my little brother to the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum and was surprised to see this outdated panel pushing concern about global cooling based on some highly speculative 1970s-era science:

In the 70s the study of earth’s climate was in its infancy. There was some data, that now turns out to be a very short-term trend, that pointed toward cooling. Other data pointing toward a warming trend. More research was done, and we now understand that there’s been a long-term warming trend throughout the industrial era, caused largely by growing concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, and that the trend has been intensifying as emissions levels continue to rise.

Over two years ago, this display was flagged with a small sign warning that the exhibit in question was being updated to reflect current science. But I went back to the museum yesterday, and it’s still there! A number of other displays in the museum do reflect an accurate understanding of the climate change situation, so it’s not as if the people running the museum don’t know what’s going on. So I don’t understand why they can’t change this.

Chamber of Commerce Wants to Put Evolution on Trial

John T. Scopes

The US Chamber of Commerce has come up with the bizarre idea that we should hold a trial about whether or not climate change is real. Interestingly, they came up with the same analogy I did:

Chamber officials say it would be “the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century” — complete with witnesses, cross-examinations and a judge who would rule, essentially, on whether humans are warming the planet to dangerous effect.

“It would be evolution versus creationism,” said William Kovacs, the chamber’s senior vice president for environment, technology and regulatory affairs. “It would be the science of climate change on trial.”

The thing people forget about the Scopes Monkey Trial is that Scopes and Clarence Darrow lost the case. William Jennings Bryan and the creationists won. In part because the legal issues at hand were not identical to the scientific issues in the creationism versus evolution debate. But mostly because a jury of twelve laypeople is not actually an ideal way of resolving scientific disputes. Which should be pretty obvious.

Of course it’s a bit difficult to know exactly where the irony lies here because what the Chamber wants is basically the equivalent of a creationist victory. Unable to carry the day in an actual scientific research process, they’re trying to transfer the battle to the court of public opinion or to the inappropriate venue of a adversarial trial. And they might win. US public opinion remains, despite the evidence, pretty skeptical of evolution and there’s every reason to think that well-financed and irresponsible elites can, if they so choose, continue to induce public confusion on the climate issue. It’s just, you know, irresponsible of them to do so. You’d think that even the business types who make up the Chamber would have some level of concern for their kids and grandkids.

Against The “Alpha Male”

Cliché about “alpha males” and so forth are so deeply ingrained in our culture that I had no idea what they specifically referred to. Apparently, though, it refers to research on hierarchical behavior in wolf packs, research that was done in the 1960s and popularized in part through David Mech’s book The Wolf: Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species.

And in this fascinating video (via Jim Henley) Mech explains why that research is outdated and people should drop the idea:

As Jim says, “this is how science is supposed to work but doesn’t, necessarily. Open-mindedness, readiness to renounce superceded views.”

So Much Drama in the LHC

The New York Times takes a look at the problems that have plagued the Large Hadron Collider since its turn-on last September. What the article doesn’t mention is that about a year ago some people were worrying that the launch of the LHC would literally lead to the destruction of the universe. That kind of puts the current wave of technical problems in perspective.

In other CERN-blogging, why not revisit this post I did when I was in Switzerland:

My group had a chance to talk to the head of CERN yesterday. Mostly his talk and our discussion focused on the Large Hadron Collider and also some organization aspects of CERN. He did, however, mention that the work that led to the development of the World Wide Web was done at CERN. He also said that when CERN realized this Web concept was promising, they tried to put it up for sale. But nobody was interested. And since nobody was interested, they released their work to the public for free and one thing led to another and now we have the Web we all know and love.

Scary!

Politico Only Knows Conservative Experts

Politico had the interesting idea of asking various DC policy experts to recommend books in their areas of expertise. Unfortunately, it went off the rails. Things start out okay on the Middle East where they ask one person from CAP (left) one from AEI (right) and two from the Carnegie Endowment (center). But on energy, they ask one person from CAP (left) one from AEI (right) and one from Cato (also right). Then on economic history they go for Cato (right), Brookings (center), and Americans for Tax Reform (right). On American political history, it’s Cato (right), Brookings (center) and Heritage Foundation (right) and Foreign Policy Initiative (right).

Absurd.

For my part, I’ve been spending a lot of time lately working on reading Infinite Jest and also working on a review essay about books about finance. But two good politically relevant books I’ve read recently are Mark Kleiman’s When Brute Force Fails which I want to talk about when it’s actually in stores, and Chris Mooney’s new book with Sheril Kirshenbaum Unscientific America.

This book takes a wider-lens view of some of the issues dealt with in Chris’ great first book The Republican War on Science. The basic point is that, of course, it’s extremely dangerous to have important public decisions being made without them being grounded in accurate scientific information. Unscientific America looks at how we got to have a political, and media culture that’s so inhospitable to science and a public that’s so ill-informed. They then pivot to show how the culture within the sciences has tended to fail in its own responsibility to communicate scientific ideas to a broader public in an effective manner. Very interesting all around.

The Two Efficient Markets Hypotheses

Nomura's Jellyfish (wikimedia)

Via Brad Delong, Richard Thaler’s admirably succinct summary of the problem with the Efficient Capital Markets Hypothesis:

The [Efficient Capital Markets] hypothesis has two parts, he says: the “no-free-lunch part and the price-is-right part, and if anything the first part has been strengthened as we have learned that some investment strategies are riskier than they look and it really is difficult to beat the market.” The idea that the market price is the right price, however, has been badly dented.

Brad says “A failure to distinguish between the no-free-lunch and the price-is-right versions of the efficient market hypothesis has been the source of a great deal of very bad economics over the past generation.” Eugene Fama explaining that there’s no such thing as bubbles based on evidence that at best supports the position “it’s extremely difficult to accurately assess bubbles in such a way as to make money off of them” is a nice illustration.

Meanwhile, I don’t have a good image with which to illustrate a post about the theory of finance, so here’s a link to a story about giant jellyfish menacing Japan to serve as pretext for a photo of a giant jellyfish.

Return of the Chimera Ban

Apulian red-figure dish, Louvre Museum (wikimedia)

I’ve spent some time chuckling over George W. Bush’s decision to take time out during his 2006 state of the union address to call for a ban on human-animal hybrids. Turns out, though, that there’s some real legislative momentum behind this:

“What was once only science fiction is now becoming a reality, and we need to ensure that experimentation and subsequent ramifications do not outpace ethical discussion and societal decisions,” Brown said last year when he introduced similar legislation. “History does not look kindly on those who violate the dignity of the human person.”

Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), the only Democratic co-sponsor, has taken a similarly hardline stance against what she called “blending” of species.

Steve Benen points out that joking aside there’s some very legitimate, potentially life saving, scientific research that could be blocked by this ban. And I think it’s important to put this kind of thing in an international context. The United States is a world leader in scientific research, but that’s obviously something that will come to an end if people need to spend too much time worrying about Sam Brownback’s delicate moral sensibilities (recall: preventive war = good; stem cell research = murder) rather than worrying about their work.

My Netflix Weekend

Saturday afternoon, I watched Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie. I think the polemical political argument that some contemporary reviewers claim to have seen in the film in 1972 is a little bit hard to detect over 35 years later. But I think that may be a change for the better. The Nation review linked above gets tripped up on the fact that it’s not really clear how a corrupt ambassador from a Latin American country fits into the class struggle, but now that we know the revolution was not, in fact, around the corner I think we can appreciate the bourgeoisie’s discreet charm as genuinely charming. Long story short, for a decades-old classic French film, this is an honest-to-God laugh-out-out funny movie.

Pixies fans will, of course, recall Buñuel as the auteur behind Un Chien Andalou, whose eyeball-slicing scene is the inspiration for “Debaser.” I was saying to myself, “someone should really do a YouTube mashup of the movie with the song” but of course it’s already been done:

The other thing I watched was the first three episodes of Planet Earth on Blu-Ray. This really makes the case for Blu-Ray pretty convincingly; it’s simply jaw-dropping. That said, the series seems to have an anti-American bias. The episode about fresh water doesn’t even mention the Great Lakes! And it goes beyond that to make the controversial claim that Lake Baikal is the largest lake in the world. This is true by volume, by Lake Superior is the biggest by area, which I think is a more intuitive way of understanding the phrase. And either way, it’s hard to understand how you can profile the world’s lakes without mentioning this giant series of lakes we have. Oh well.

Mike Pence is Not an Intelligent Man

I’ve made this point before, but one of the salient characteristics of the House GOP’s big “ideas guy” Mike Pence (R-IN) is that he’s pretty dumb. Watch this Hardball interview, for example, and wait about 90 seconds in when Chris Matthews asks Pence whether or not he believes in evolution:

Now the answer Pence gives is stupid and nonsensical. But sometimes a canny, clever politician says something that doesn’t make sense as part of his canny strategy. But watch Pence’s hesitation, his stalling for time, his JV tactic of re-stating the question. He doesn’t know off the top of his head whether or not he believes in evolution. He needs to stall and think it through. It’s pathetic.

Meanwhile, Satyam Khanna reminds us that Pence, along with noted buffoon Michele Bachmann (R-MN), will be crafting their caucus’ energy strategy.

Charles Johnson Versus the Rightosphere

Like the vast majority of progressives, I stopped paying any attention whatsoever to Charles Johnson’s Little Green Footballs blog some time ago. But it had a reputation as the wingnuttiest of right-wing blogs. So much so that it inspired the Little Green Footballs or Late German Fascists? quiz. But Dave Weigel reports that more recently there’s been a schism in the “anti-jihad” movement, as many bloggers have joined forces with racist far-right European political parties and Johnson’s distanced himself from that effort, in turn earning the wrath of his former friends:

“Some people at that summit in Belgium were not people we should have been associated with,” Johnson said, pointing out that since 2007 the terrorism-focused conservative bloggers have become supporters of Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who wants to outlaw Islam in his country. “Some of these people outright want to ban Islam from the United States, which I think is crazy, completely nuts. That’s not something we do in this country. These people will outright defend banning the Koran or deporting Muslims. That’s popular with the Geller/Spencer crowd.”

When they talk about Johnson today, the rest of the terrorism-focused bloggers alternate between anger and regret. He has smeared them, they say, and according to Dymphna he’s “destroyed a lot of networking that was beginning to emerge” between American and European critics of Islamic extremism. “He’s really gone off the deep end,” Geller said, pointing to Johnson’s more and more frequent criticisms of creationists, such as the attack on the anti-evolution, Glenn Beck-inspired event, which made the host angry enough to lash out at LGF on his show. “He’s a leftist blogger now.”

“Leftist” now apparently is identical to belief in uncontroversial scientific facts.

Men’s Biological Clocks

Lisa Belkin has a fascinating piece in The New York Times Magazine about how research is indicating that men’s ability to successfully fertilize an egg declines after 35 and declines sharply after 40. Similarly, “British and Swedish researchers, in turn, have calculated that the risk of schizophrenia begins to rise for those whose fathers were over 30 when their babies were born” and other research indicates that children of older dads are more at risk for autism spectrum disorders and bipolar disorder. Of course if you substituted “women” for “men” nothing about this would be very interesting at all. Everyone “knows” that parenthood in your late thirties and forties is problematic for women and not for men. The evidence, however, is that we know no such thing—that as Dolores Malaspina put it “the optimal age for being a mother is the same as the optimal age for being a father.”

Dana Goldstein comments:

Imagine a world in which the stereotype of women rushing men to the altar, biological clocks on overdrive, simply disappeared, as men took full 50 percent ownership over the reproductive process. Or in which wealthy 50- year old divorced men ceased to be such catches for 30-year old women, because of weakened sperm. I wouldn’t want to return to a society in which both men and women are pressured into settling down and having babies at an unduly young age. But I do like the idea of rejiggering our notions about the intersection of gender and aging. It isn’t just women who have a lot to fit into their lives in terms of career, romance, and parenthood. Science is beginning to tell us that men are facing the same pressures.

I think this may be unduly optimistic about the impact of actual facts on people’s stereotypes. My sense is that scientific findings that appear to bolster traditional gender stereotypes have a way of getting both wider and deeper attention than do findings that seem to undermine them. But more to the point, in this particular case I think women are less after equity than relief from pressure. These findings, if they continue to be disseminated and if further research backs them up, seem much more likely to increase pressure on men than to relieve pressure on women.

Poverty is Bad for Kids’ Brains

Some interesting new research on the poverty cycle:

Children raised in poverty suffer many ill effects: They often have health problems and tend to struggle in school, which can create a cycle of poverty across generations.

Now, research is providing what could be crucial clues to explain how childhood poverty translates into dimmer chances of success: Chronic stress from growing up poor appears to have a direct impact on the brain, leaving children with impairment in at least one key area — working memory.

Not only is poverty incredibly bad for children, but a really large proportion of American children are impoverished. To be specific, in 2007 back before the recession 18 percent of America’s kids were below the poverty line, a number that must be pushing past twenty given the current circumstances. We could dramatically reduce this number with relatively small levels of expenditure, and our failure to do so is creating a serious threat to our future.

Also take a look at these interesting comments.

Science Proves That This Blog Now Sucks

Via Brian Beutler it seems that “According to scientists, our mental abilities begin to decline from the age of 27 after reaching a peak at 22.”

This explains a lot. I started this blog when I was twenty, and it was pretty good and some folks read it. Then it secured a steadily growing audience throughout 2002 and 2003 and soon we were set for Matt Yglesias’ Golden Years of Blogging. But ever since 18 May 2008, the quality of this site has been slowly and steadily draining away. And it’s no accident—I’m getting dumber!

The Perception of Time

Interesting stuff from Tom Vanderbilt:

Talking about the city’s “Transit Tracker” program, which allows people to get real-time info on bus arrivals via their cell phones, Hansen mentioned a study that had been done in the U.K. of a similar program. What was noteworthy was that people using the service felt that the bus service itself had improved, that more buses were running, that they were running closer to schedule, even though none of this was empirically true.

I have a particular interest in the fluid nature of time, and the way travel, queuing, and even routing can play additive and subtractive games with this. Paco Underhill, for example, notes that people who wait in airport lines overestimate the time they waited by some 50 percent. I’ve also seen it noted that a train trip with a transfer feels longer to people than it really is, that people overestimate the time it will take to walk somewhere and underestimate the time it will take to drive somewhere. Of course, one of the masters of managing time is Disney, with its posted wait times (just posting the time makes it feel shorter for people) at queues, wait times which are then inflated — so the payoff at the end is even better: That wasn’t long at all!

Among other things, this is important because I think improving the level of objective and subjective service people get from the bus is important to our transportation future. Ultimately, I think rail is essential as the backbone of a major metropolitan area’s mass transit, but that rail backbone can have its utility massively extended if supplemented by good buses. This is also why if you’re ever taking the Subway in New York City you’ll generally be happier if you get on the local train rather than waiting for the express even if the express would be faster. Waiting around makes people very unhappy for some reason.

Obama’s Scientists

A couple of additional Obama appointments broke last night. One is John Holdren from Woods Hole and the dread HKS as presidential science adviser. I wrote one two three posts about a talk I heard Holdren give in Aspen back in July. He’s a very intense guy on the climate change issue as well as being a very accomplished scientist.

Meanwhile Jane Lubchenco will head up the National Oceanographic and Marine Administration. NOAA is best known to me as the government agency that once ordered me to stop poking a dolphin corpse with a stray tree branch, but they also have substantial responsibility for climate research and issues related to fisheries. Lubchenko is very impressive and “has served as president of the International Council for Science, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Ecological Society of America” as well as winning a bunch of awards: “a MacArthur Fellowship, a Pew Fellowship, eight honorary degrees, the 2002 Heinz Award in the Environment, the 2003 Nierenberg Prize for Science in the Public Interest, and the 2004 Distinguished Scientist Award from the American Institute of Biological Sciences.”

These two plus Steven Chu creates a very impressive Team of Scientists who hopefully will be listened to when pushes start coming to shove.

Trying to Remember High School Physics

RNC Chairman Mike Duncan is campaigning for a second term and promising to make the GOP “an accelerator of change.” I might be confused about this, but it seems to me that this would be a huge error for the conservative movement. After all, at the moment the direction of change is to the left. If the Republicans become accelerators of change, then leftward change will happen more swiftly.

But perhaps this is the plan. After all, throughout the year there have been these battles over economic stimulus, with the White House and congressional conservatives making the first stimulus smaller and less effective than it should have been, and completely foiling efforts at a second stimulus. Perversely, by worsening economic conditions the incumbent party therefore greatly boosted the electoral fortunes of their opponents. And conservative malgovernment has now created a global economic crisis of such severe proportions that the “sensible center” has shifted dramatically to the left in terms of willingness to see large-scale deficit-financed public investments. I’ve been assuming that all this was just a side effect of conservatives making policy errors because their movement is corrupt and intellectually bankrupt, but maybe it’s a deliberate plan to accelerate change.

Today in Panda Science

Scientists working in China have announced the completion of the project to sequence the entire giant panda genome. That’s perhaps good news for panda fans such as myself everywhere. At the same time, one has to worry about the possibility of China arming itself with advanced, genetically enhanced panda warriors. Initially, they’ll disarm and confuse their opponents with massive cuteness. But then, just as enemy soldiers are busy trying to take snapshots, they enter panda attack mode.

Something along the lines of Kung Fu Panda is definitely something to be concerned about.