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anonymous

Pundit Forecasts All Wrong, Silver Perfectly Right. Is Punditry Dead? | TechCrunch - 1 views

techcrunch.com/...rfectly-right-is-punditry-dead

shared by anonymous on 07 Nov 12 - Cached
  • Silver’s analysis, and statistical models generally, factor in more data points than even the most knowledgeable political insider could possibly juggle in their working memory. His model incorporates the size, quality, and recency of all polls, and weights them based on the polling firm’s past predictive success (among other more advanced statistical procedures).
  • Silver’s methods present a dilemma for television networks. First, viewers would have to be a math geek to follow along in the debates. Even if networks replaced their pundits with competitor statisticians, the only way to compare forecasts would be to argue over nuanced statistical techniques. People may say they’re fans of Silver, but just wait until every political network is fighting over their own complex model and see how inaccessible election prediction becomes to most viewers.
  • Second, there’s no more rating-spiking shocking polls. Usually, the most surprising polls, which garner headlines, are the most inaccurate. Instead, in Silver’s universe, we’ll follow polling averages, with steadily (read: boringly) ebb and wane in relatively predictable directions.
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  • But, perhaps the most devastating impact on traditional punditry: politics and campaigning has a relatively small impact on elections. According to Silver’s model, Obama had a strong likelihood of winning several months before the election. Elections favor incumbents and Romney was an uncharismatic opponent, who wasn’t all that well liked even within his own party. Other influential factors, such as the economy, are completely outside the control of campaigns. The economy picked up before the election. Any conservative challenger had an uphill battle.
  • So, all the bluster about Americans not connecting with Obama or his “radical” social agenda is just hot air. Most of the pundit commentary that fills up airtime in the 24 hour news cycle is, politically speaking, mostly inconsequential.
  • anonymous on 07 Nov 12
     
    "The New York Times election statistician, Nate Silver, perfectly predicted all 50 states last night for President Obama, while every single major pundit was wrong-some comically wrong. Despite being derided by TV talking heads as a liberal hack, Silver definitively proved that geeks with mathematical models were superior to the gut feelings and pseudo-statistics of so-called political experts. The big question is, will the overwhelming success of statistical models make pundit forecasting obsolete, or will producers stubbornly keep them on the air?"
anonymous

Odds Are, It's Wrong - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/...Odds_Are,_Its_Wrong

science layscience statistics methodology

shared by anonymous on 19 Nov 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 19 Nov 10
     
    "It's science's dirtiest secret: The "scientific method" of testing hypotheses by statistical analysis stands on a flimsy foundation. Statistical tests are supposed to guide scientists in judging whether an experimental result reflects some real effect or is merely a random fluke, but the standard methods mix mutually inconsistent philosophies and offer no meaningful basis for making such decisions. Even when performed correctly, statistical tests are widely misunderstood and frequently misinterpreted. As a result, countless conclusions in the scientific literature are erroneous, and tests of medical dangers or treatments are often contradictory and confusing." By Tom Siegfried at Science News on March 27, 2010.
anonymous

Why Most Published Research Findings are False - 0 views

www.marginalrevolution.com/...why_most_publis.html

research criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 17 Nov 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 17 Nov 10
     
    "Suppose there are 1000 possible hypotheses to be tested. There are an infinite number of false hypotheses about the world and only a finite number of true hypotheses so we should expect that most hypotheses are false. Let us assume that of every 1000 hypotheses 200 are true and 800 false. It is inevitable in a statistical study that some false hypotheses are accepted as true. In fact, standard statistical practice guarantees that at least 5% of false hypotheses are accepted as true. Thus, out of the 800 false hypotheses 40 will be accepted as "true," i.e. statistically significant." By Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution on September 2, 2005.
anonymous

The Mind-Reading Salmon: The True Meaning of Statistical Significance - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm

criticalthinking layscience

shared by anonymous on 15 Aug 11 - Cached
  • The p-value is an all-purpose measure that scientists often use to determine whether or not an experimental result is “statistically significant.”
  • The p-value puts a number on the effects of randomness. It is the probability of seeing a positive experimental outcome even if your hypothesis is wrong.
  • Many scientific papers make 20 or 40 or even hundreds of comparisons. In such cases, researchers who do not adjust the standard p-value threshold of 0.05 are virtually guaranteed to find statistical significance in results that are meaningless statistical flukes.
  • anonymous on 15 Aug 11
     
    "If you want to convince the world that a fish can sense your emotions, only one statistical measure will suffice: the p-value."
anonymous

NATO's Ordinary Future by Robert D. Kaplan - 1 views

www.stratfor.com/...rdinary-future-robert-d-kaplan

shared by anonymous on 03 Jul 12 - Cached
  • The statistics regarding just how much the United States had to go it alone in Libya -- pushed by the British and French -- despite the diplomatic fig leaf of "leading from behind," are devastating for the alliance.
  • More than 80 percent of the gasoline used in the intervention came from the U.S. military. Almost all the individual operation orders had an American address. Of dozens of countries taking part, only eight air forces were allowed by their defense ministries to drop any bombs. Many flew sorties apparently only for the symbolism of it. While most airstrikes were carried out by non-U.S. aircraft, the United States ran the logistical end of the war.
  • "Europe is dead militarily," a U.S. general told me.
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  • Americans are deeply proud of their armed forces, even during wars that have become quagmires. For the most part, that is not the case in Western Europe, where the soldiers' profession is quietly looked down upon. (The United Kingdom, France and Denmark are among the exceptions.) Europeans tend to see their own armed forces members as civil servants in funny uniforms. The idea that it is the military that defends their democratic freedoms is something many Europeans find laughable.
    • Erik Hanson
      Erik Hanson on 05 Jul 12
       
      I think this is rightly so, especially given the history that many of the other nations have with fascism and military dictatorship in the 20th century. When I talk to a pro-military German, Italian or Spaniard, I worry that I'm speaking to a fascist.
  • Of course, during the Cold War NATO had a core purpose, which it lacks today: defending Central Europe against Soviet divisions. The disappearance of that core purpose immeasurably weakens NATO. And the withdrawal of two of the four U.S. Army brigade combat teams from Europe by 2014 will weaken it further, even with the missile deployments in Eastern Europe. But that doesn't mean the alliance has no uses.
  • Geography still rules.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 03 Jul 12
       
      This is where I still clear my throat. ;) I've yet to see any compelling reasons why technology (and/or social change) has trumped geography.
    • Erik Hanson
      Erik Hanson on 05 Jul 12
       
      I call that an unfounded assertion. Is it intended as an introduction to the topic of Russian inroads? If so, why should Russian influence in European nations wary of Russia (by dint of history, when geography was more important) be easier than Russian or Chinese inroads in Africa?
  • Moreover, the more that Europe reels from its debt crisis, the greater the possibility of geopolitical inroads made by Russia, and thus the more relevant NATO becomes.
  • Analytically, it is a mistake to assume that just because a political-military organization is less useful now than it was a quarter-century ago it is useless altogether.
  • NATO, like the United Nations on occasion, still provides diplomatic cover of varying degrees for American actions. NATO is American hegemony on the cheap. Imagine how much less of a fiasco the Iraq War would have been were it a full-fledged NATO operation, rather than a largely unilateral one. Without organizations like NATO and the United Nations, American power is more lonely in an anarchic world.
  • land engagements are especially problematic for militaries in pacifist-trending societies. NATO might be ideally suited for air and naval rescue missions in Africa and points beyond. But NATO will be kept alive so that it can continue to serve as a vehicle for European political coherence.
  • A more dynamic Russia, a more chaotic North Africa and continued unrest and underdevelopment in the Balkans might all pose challenges to Europe. If they do, NATO will provide a handy confidence-building mechanism.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 03 Jul 12
       
      More practical stratforian argumentation. They are a useful counter to both the ebuliant pro-NATO prostelyzers as well as the anti-NATO [usually Uhmrrican] detractors. It's a polito-military entity like any other: It has strengths, weaknesses, and qualities that are as yet untested.
  • anonymous on 03 Jul 12
     
    Whatever one thought of the Libya intervention, the details make for a bad advertisement about NATO. As one U.S. Air Force planner told me, "It was like Snow White and the 27 dwarfs, all standing up to her knees" -- the United States being Snow White and the other NATO member states being the dwarfs. The statistics regarding just how much the United States had to go it alone in Libya -- pushed by the British and French -- despite the diplomatic fig leaf of "leading from behind," are devastating for the alliance.
anonymous

Freakonomics: What Went Wrong? - 0 views

www.americanscientist.org/...issue.aspx

shared by anonymous on 13 Dec 11 - Cached
  • Oster’s work stirred debate for a few years in the epidemiological literature, but eventually she admitted that the subject-matter experts had been right all along. One of Das Gupta’s many convincing counterpoints was a graph showing that in Taiwan, the ratio of boys to girls was near the natural rate for first and second babies (106:100) but not for third babies (112:100); this pattern held up with or without hepatitis B. In a follow-up blog post, Levitt applauded Oster for bravery in admitting her mistake, but he never credited Das Gupta for her superior work. Our point is not that Das Gupta had to be right and Oster wrong, but that Levitt and Dubner, in their celebration of economics and economists, suspended their critical thinking.
  • In SuperFreakonomics, Levitt and Dubner use a back-of-the-envelope calculation to make the contrarian claim that driving drunk is safer than walking drunk, an oversimplified argument that was picked apart by bloggers. The problem with this argument, and others like it, lies in the assumption that the driver and the walker are the same type of person, making the same kinds of choices, except for their choice of transportation.
  • Such all-else-equal thinking is a common statistical fallacy. In fact, driver and walker are likely to differ in many ways other than their mode of travel. What seem like natural calculations are stymied by the impracticality, in real life, of changing one variable while leaving all other variables constant.
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  • This unavoidable tradeoff between false positive and false negative errors is a well-known property of all statistical-prediction applications. Circling back to check all the factors involved in the problem might have helped the authors avoid this mistake.
  • How could an experienced journalist and a widely respected researcher slip up in so many ways? Some possible answers to this question offer insights for the would-be pop-statistics writer.
  • Leave friendship at the door: We attribute many of these errors to the structure of the authors’ collaboration, which, from what we can tell, relies on an informal social network that has many potential failure points.
  • Don’t sell yourself short: Perhaps Levitt’s admirable modesty—he has repeatedly attributed his success to luck and hard work rather than genius—has led him astray. If he feels he is surrounded by economists more exceptional and brilliant than he is, he may let their assertions stand without challenge.
  • Maintain checks and balances: A solid collaboration requires each side to check and balance the other side. Although there’s no way we can be sure, perhaps, in some of the cases described above, there was a breakdown in the division of labor when it came to investigating technical points.
  • Take your time: Success comes at a cost: The constraints of producing continuous content for a blog or website and meeting publisher’s deadlines may have adverse effects on accuracy.
  • Be clear about where you’re coming from: Levitt’s publishers, along with Dubner, characterize him as a “rogue economist.”
  • Use latitude responsibly: When a statistician criticizes a claim on technical grounds, he or she is declaring not that the original finding is wrong but that it has not been convincingly proven. Researchers—even economists endorsed by Steven Levitt—can make mistakes. It may be okay to overlook the occasional mistake in the pursuit of the larger goal of understanding the world. But once one accepts this lower standard—science as plausible stories or data-supported reasoning, rather than the more carefully tested demonstrations that are characteristic of Levitt’s peer-reviewed research articles—one really has to take extra care, consider all sides of an issue, and look out for false positive results.
  • anonymous on 13 Dec 11
     
    In our analysis of the Freakonomics approach, we encountered a range of avoidable mistakes, from back-of-the-envelope analyses gone wrong to unexamined assumptions to an uncritical reliance on the work of Levitt's friends and colleagues. This turns accessibility on its head: Readers must work to discern which conclusions are fully quantitative, which are somewhat data driven and which are purely speculative.
anonymous

Recognizing the End of the Chinese Economic Miracle - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...g-end-chinese-economic-miracle

shared by anonymous on 23 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • A crisis can exist before it is recognized.
  • The admission that a crisis exists is a critical moment, because this is when most others start to change their behavior in reaction to the crisis.
  • First, The New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize-recipient Paul Krugman penned a piece titled "Hitting China's Wall." He wrote, "The signs are now unmistakable: China is in big trouble.
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  • Later in the week, Ben Levisohn authored a column in Barron's called "Smoke Signals from China." He wrote, "In the classic disaster flick 'The Towering Inferno' partygoers ignored a fire in a storage room because they assumed it has been contained. Are investors making the same mistake with China?"
  • Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs -- where in November 2001 Jim O'Neil coined the term BRICs and forecast that China might surpass the United States economically by 2028 -- cut its forecast of Chinese growth to 7.4 percent. 
  • The New York Times, Barron's and Goldman Sachs are all both a seismograph of the conventional wisdom and the creators of the conventional wisdom. Therefore, when all three announce within a few weeks that China's economic condition ranges from disappointing to verging on a crash, it transforms the way people think of China.
  • Now the conversation is moving from forecasts of how quickly China will overtake the United States to considerations of what the consequences of a Chinese crash would be. 
  • Suddenly finding Stratfor amid the conventional wisdom regarding China does feel odd, I must admit. Having first noted the underlying contradictions in China's economic growth years ago, when most viewed China as the miracle Japan wasn't, and having been scorned for not understanding the shift in global power underway, it is gratifying to now have a lot of company.
  • One of the things masking China's weakening has been Chinese statistics, which Krugman referred to as "even more fictional than most."
  • China is a vast country in territory and population. Gathering information on how it is doing would be a daunting task, even were China inclined to do so. Instead, China understands that in the West, there is an assumption that government statistics bear at least a limited relationship to truth. Beijing accordingly uses its numbers to shape perceptions inside and outside China of how it is doing.
  • The Chinese release their annual gross domestic product numbers in the third week of January (and only revise them the following year). They can't possibly know how they did that fast, and they don't. But they do know what they want the world to believe about their growth, and the world has believed them -- hence, the fantastic tales of economic growth. 
  • China in fact has had an extraordinary period of growth. The last 30 years have been remarkable, marred only by the fact that the Chinese started at such a low point due to the policies of the Maoist period.
  • Growth at first was relatively easy; it was hard for China to do worse. But make no mistake: China surged. Still, basing economic performance on consumption, Krugman notes that China is barely larger economically than Japan. Given the compounding effects of China's guesses at GDP, we would guess it remains behind Japan, but how can you tell? We can say without a doubt that China's economy has grown dramatically in the past 30 years but that it is no longer growing nearly as quickly as it once did.
  • China's growth surge was built on a very unglamorous fact: Chinese wages were far below Western wages, and therefore the Chinese were able to produce a certain class of products at lower cost than possible in the West.
  • China had another essential policy: Beijing was terrified of unemployment and the social consequences that flow from it. This was a rational fear, but one that contradicted China's main strength, its wage advantage.
  • Growing the economy is possible, but not growing profitability. Eventually, the economy will be dragged down by its inefficiency. 
  • As businesses become inefficient, production costs rise. And that leads to inflation. As money is lent to keep inefficient businesses going, inflation increases even more markedly. The increase in inefficiency is compounded by the growth of the money supply prompted by aggressive lending to keep the economy going. As this persisted over many years, the inefficiencies built into the Chinese economy have become staggering. 
  • The second thing to bear in mind is the overwhelming poverty of China, where 900 million people have an annual per capita income around the same level as Guatemala, Georgia, Indonesia or Mongolia ($3,000-$3,500 a year), while around 500 million of those have an annual per capita income around the same level as India, Nicaragua, Ghana, Uzbekistan or Nigeria ($1,500-$1,700).
  • China's overall per capita GDP is around the same level as the Dominican Republic, Serbia, Thailand or Jamaica.
  • Stimulating an economy where more than a billion people live in deep poverty is impossible. Economic stimulus makes sense when products can be sold to the public.
  • The Chinese have maintained a strategy of depending on exports without taking into account the operation of the business cycle in the West, which means that periodic and substantial contractions of demand will occur. China's industrial plant is geared to Western demand. When Western demand contracted, the result was the mess you see now.
  • The Chinese can prevent the kind of crash that struck East Asia in 1997. Their currency isn't convertible, so there can't be a run on it. They continue to have a command economy; they are still communist, after all. But they cannot avoid the consequences of their economic reality, and the longer they put off the day of reckoning, the harder it will become to recover from it.
  • The Chinese are not going to completely collapse economically any more than the Japanese or South Koreans did. What will happen is that China will behave differently than before. With no choices that don't frighten them, the Chinese will focus on containing the social and political fallout, both by trying to target benefits to politically sensitive groups and by using their excellent security apparatus to suppress and deter unrest.
  • The Chinese economic performance will degrade, but crisis will be avoided and political interests protected. Since much of China never benefited from the boom, there is a massive force that has felt marginalized and victimized by coastal elites. That is not a bad foundation for the Communist Party to rely on.
  • The Chinese are, of course, keeping a great deal of money in U.S. government instruments and other markets. Contrary to fears, that money will not be withdrawn. The Chinese problem isn't a lack of capital, and repatriating that money would simply increase inflation.
  • Had the Chinese been able to put that money to good use, it would have never been invested in the United States in the first place.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 23 Jul 13
       
      I'm having a hard time following all the econ stuff, but I understand this to mean that the U.S. is 'old reliable': Not an investment of last resort, but an investment to run to when you don't have a sure thing.
  • Rather than the feared repatriation of funds, the United States will continue to be the target of major Chinese cash inflows.
  • In a world where Europe is still reeling, only the United States is both secure and large enough to contain Chinese appetites for safety. Just as Japanese investment in the 1990s represented capital flight rather than a healthy investment appetite, so the behavior we have seen from Chinese investors in recent years is capital flight:
  • money searching for secure havens regardless of return. This money has underpinned American markets; it is not going away, and in fact more is on the way. 
  • The major shift in the international order will be the decline of China's role in the region. China's ability to project military power in Asia has been substantially overestimated.
  • Its naval capacity is still limited compared with the United States. The idea that it will compensate for internal economic problems by genuine (as opposed to rhetorical) military action is therefore unlikely.
  • In our view, the most important shift will be the re-emergence of Japan as the dominant economic and political power in East Asia in a slow process neither will really want.
  • China will continue to be a major power, and it will continue to matter a great deal economically. Being troubled is not the same as ceasing to exist. China will always exist. It will, however, no longer be the low-wage, high-growth center of the world. Like Japan before it, it will play a different role.
  • anonymous on 23 Jul 13
     
    "Major shifts underway in the Chinese economy that Stratfor has forecast and discussed for years have now drawn the attention of the mainstream media. Many have asked when China would find itself in an economic crisis, to which we have answered that China has been there for awhile -- something not widely recognized outside China, and particularly not in the United States."
anonymous

By the Numbers - 0 views

www.slate.com/2260461

criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 15 Jul 10 - Cached
  • "The creation, selection, promotion, and proliferation of numbers are … the stuff of politics," the editors write in their introduction. No debate lasts very long without a reference to data, and as the numbers boil their way into the argument, you must challenge them or be burned blind by them. The essays presented in Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts—about human trafficking, the Bosnian death count, the Darfur genocide, armed conflict, drugs, terrorism, and more—counsel exactly that sort of skepticism.
  • Often, the editors write, even the most rigorous-seeming statistics conceal squishy measurements. Inflated numbers are designed to create the sense that something must be done now. Depressed counts are intended to convince the recipients that the problem is too small to worry about. Whether it's body counts in Iraq or kilos of Colombian drugs, the creators and disseminators of the numbers usually have greater interest in their size than their veracity.
  • the drug bureaucracy spends extra billions to produce bigger numbers because the public associates "more" with "better."
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  • Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts performs similar forensics on the assertion, oft-repeated in government reports, that al-Qaida allots 10 percent of its budget to operational costs and 90 percent to administration and infrastructure. When you trace the claim to its origin—a report on terrorism—you find no footnote or sourcing at all. The author apparently concocted it from thin air.
  • The best advice in the book comes in the editors' concluding essay, which calls on everybody in the numbers racket—NGOs, government, academics, journalists—to confess humbly and honestly that they "don't know" rather than flinging dubious numbers.
  • anonymous on 15 Jul 10
     
    "A terrific new book of essays encourages us all to be skeptical about statistics." By Jack Shafer at Slate Magazine.
anonymous

America's Epidemic of Enlightened Racism - 0 views

www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/...epidemic-of-enlightened-racism

shared by anonymous on 28 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • the summary dismissal of the column – without substantive rebuttals to claims that are so racist as to seem to be beneath public discourse – means that he can play the role of victim of political correctness gone amok.
  • Derbyshire claims that his ideas are backed up by “methodological inquiries in the human sciences,” and includes links to sites that provide all the negative sociological data about black people you’d ever need to justify your fear of them, including the claim that “blacks are seven times more likely than people of other races to commit murder, and eight times more likely to commit robbery.”
  • So he can cast himself as someone who had the courage to tell it like it is – with all the sociological data backing him up – only to be punished for this by the reactionary hypocrites who control the public discourse.
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • Once again, he can tell himself, those quick to cry “racism” have prevented an honest conversation about race.
  • If Derbyshire were a lone crank, none of it would matter much. But he’s not.
  • they see them selves as advocates of a sort of enlightened racism that doesn’t shrink from calling a spade a spade but isn’t inherently unjust.
  • Enlightened racism is meant to escape accusations of being racist in the pejorative sense via two avenues: the first is the appeal to data I have just described. The second is a loophole to the effect that exceptions are to be made for individuals.
  • They could care less about skin color, they say; it really is the content of people’s characters that concerns them, and that content really does suffer more in blacks than whites.
  • Because they are so widespread and aim to restore the respectability of interracial contempt, these attempts at an enlightened racism deserve a rebuttal. Especially in light of the fact that those who hold such views often see themselves as the champions of reasons over sentiment, when in fact their views are deeply irrational.
  • First, a history of slavery, segregation, and (yes) racism, means that African American communities suffer from some social problems at higher rates than whites.
  • But that doesn’t change the fact that the majority of black people – statistically, and not just based on politically correct fuzzy thinking – are employed, not on welfare, have no criminal record, and so on and so forth.
  • So the kind of thinking that enlightened racists see as their way of staring a hard reality right in the face turns out to be just a silly rationalization using weak statistical differences.
  • In other words, one’s chances of being a victim of violent crime is already so low, that even accounting  for higher crime rates among African Americans, one’s chance of being a victim of violent crime by an African American remains very low.
  • The argument that Derbyshire and those like him make is that we are justified in treating an entire population as a threat – in essentially shunning them in the most degrading way – because one’s chances of being harmed by any given member of that population, while very low, is not quite as low as one’s chances of being harmed by the general population.
  • It’s an argument that starts out with sociological data and quickly collapses to reveal the obvious underlying motivation: unenlightened racism of the coarsest variety.
  • Second, there is the issue of character: because this, after all, is what really motivates these attempts at establishing an enlightened racism that gives individuals the benefit of the doubt while acknowledging the truth about general cultural differences.
  • I think it suffices to respond in the following way: people tend to mistake their discomfort with the cultural differences of a group with that group’s inferiority. (They also tend to conflate their political and economic advantages with psychological superiority).
  • If they respond with sociological data about education and birth rates and all the rest, we only have to respond that like crime rates, they’re exactly the sort of consequences one would expect from a history of oppression and even then fail to justify racist stereotypes.
  • The fact is, that where we pick a white person or black person at random, the same truths hold: they very likely have a high school diploma, and probably do not have a bachelor’s degree. They’re probably employed and not on welfare. They’ve probably never been to prison, and they almost certainly are not going to harm you. These are the broad statistical truths that simply do not vary enough between races to justify the usual stereotypes.
  • So here is the hard truth that advocates of enlightened racism need to face: their sociological data and ideas about black character, intelligence and morality are post-hoc rationalizations of their discomfort with average cultural differences between whites and blacks.
  • The fact that they have black friends and political heroes, or give individuals the benefit of the doubt as long as they are “well-socialized” and “intelligent” just means that they can suppress that discomfort if the cultural differences are themselves lessened to a tolerable degree.
  • And so they need to disabuse themselves of the idea that true, unenlightened racism is a term very narrowly defined: that it requires a personal hatred of individual black people based on their skin color despite evidence of redeeming personal qualities.
  • What they think of as redeeming personal qualities are just qualities that tend to make them less uncomfortable. But the hatred of black culture and post-hoc rationalizations of this hatred using sociological data are just what racism is.
  • This is not to say that mere discomfort with cultural difference is the same thing as racism (or xenophobia). Such discomfort is unavoidable: You’d have this sort of discomfort if you tried live in a foreign country for a while, and you’d be tempted by the same sorts of ideas about how stupid and mean people are for not doing things the way you’re used to.
  • strange customs become “stupid” because they reflect less of ourselves back to us than we’re used to.
  • That lack of reflection is felt not only as a distressing deprivation of social oxygen, but as an affront, a positive discourtesy.
  • The mature way to deal with such discomfort is to treat it as of a kind with social anxiety in general: people are strange, when you’re a stranger. Give it some time, and that changes. But it won’t change if you develop hefty rationalizations about the inferiority and dangerousness of others and treat these rationalizations as good reasons for cultural paranoia.
  • Americans seem to have difficulty engaging in the required reflective empathy, and imagining how they would feel if they knew that every time they walked into a public space a large number of a dominant racial majority looked at them with fear and loathing. They might, under such circumstances, have a bad day.
  • anonymous on 28 Mar 14
     
    From Nick Lalone in Buzz. "John Derbyshire has been fired from the National Review for an openly racist column on how white people should advise their children with respect to "blacks": for the most part, avoid them. Because on the whole, they are unintelligent, antisocial, hostile, and dangerous. Or as he puts it, avoid "concentrations of blacks" or places "swamped with blacks," and leave a place when "the number of blacks suddenly swells," and keep moving when "accosted by a strange black" in the street. The language is alarmingly dehumanizing: black people come in "swamps" and "concentrations" (and presumably also in hordes, swarms, and just plain gangs). And it's clearly meant to be a dismissal of the notion - much talked about recently in light of the Trayvon Martin shooting - that African Americans should be able to walk down the street without being shunned, much less attacked."
anonymous

Time and the End of History Illusion - 0 views

blog.longnow.org/...nd-the-end-of-history-illusion

shared by anonymous on 23 Jan 13 - Cached
  • “Middle-aged people – like me – often look back on our teenage selves with some mixture of amusement and chagrin,” said one of the authors, Daniel T. Gilbert, a psychologist at Harvard. “What we never seem to realize is that our future selves will look back and think the very same thing about us. At every age we think we’re having the last laugh, and at every age we’re wrong.”
  • There are several ways to explain these findings. It’s more difficult to predict the future than to recall the past; perhaps participants simply weren’t willing to speculate on something they felt uncertain about. It’s also possible that study participants overestimated how much they had changed in the past, making it seem as though they were underestimating their change in the future. However, the psychologists suggest that the end of history illusion is most probably explained by the fact that it just makes us feel better about ourselves:
  • On the other hand, French postmodern philosopher Jean Beaudrillard contends that Fukuyama’s modernist theory is no more than an illusion caused by our particular relationship with time. He writes that contemporary civilization has simply “lost” its sense of history:
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  • … one might suppose that the acceleration of modernity, of technology, events and media, of all exchanges – economic, political, and sexual – has propelled us to ‘escape velocity’, with the result that we have flown free of the referential sphere of the real and of history. … A degree of slowness (that is, a certain speed, but not too much), a degree of distance, but not too much, and a degree of liberation (an energy for rupture and change), but not too much, are needed to bring about the kind of condensation or significant crystallization of events we call history, the kind of coherent unfolding of causes and effects we call reality.
  • Once beyond this gravitational effect, which keeps bodies in orbit, all the atoms of meaning get lost in space. Each atom pursues its own trajectory to infinity and is lost in space. This is precisely what we are seeing in our present-day societies, intent as they are on accelerating all bodies, messages and processes in all directions and which, with modern media, have created for every event, story and image a simulation of an infinite trajectory.
  • Every political, historical and cultural fact possesses a kinetic energy which wrenches it from its own space and propels it into a hyperspace where, since it will never return, it loses all meaning. No need for science fiction here: already, here and now – in the shape of our computers, circuits and networks – we have the particle accelerator which has smashed the referential orbit of things once and for all.
  • Illusion or not, the Harvard study shows that a sense of being at the end of history has real-world consequences: underestimating how differently we’ll feel about things in the future, we sometimes make decisions we later come to regret.
  • In other words, the end of history illusion could be thought of as a lack of long-term thinking.
  • anonymous on 23 Jan 13
     
    "In a paper published last week in Science, these researchers report on a study that asked participants to estimate how much their personality, tastes, and values had changed over the last decade, and how much they expected they would change in the next. Statistical analysis reveals what these psychologists call an "End of History Illusion": while we remember our past selves to be quite different from who we are today, we nevertheless believe that we won't change much at all in the future. The New York Times quotes:"
anonymous

The Inequality That Matters - 1 views

www.the-american-interest.com/article-bd.cfm

shared by anonymous on 07 Jul 13 - Cached
  • there’s more confusion about this issue than just about any other in contemporary American political discourse.
  • The reality is that most of the worries about income inequality are bogus, but some are probably better grounded and even more serious than even many of their heralds realize. If our economic churn is bound to throw off political sparks, whether alarums about plutocracy or something else, we owe it to ourselves to seek out an accurate picture of what is really going on.
  • Let’s start with the subset of worries about inequality that are significantly overblown.
  • ...107 more annotations...
  • Most analyses of income inequality neglect two major points.
  • First, the inequality of personal well-being is sharply down over the past hundred years and perhaps over the past twenty years as well.
  • by broad historical standards, what I share with Bill Gates is far more significant than what I don’t share with him.
  • Compare these circumstances to those of 1911, a century ago. Even in the wealthier countries, the average person had little formal education, worked six days a week or more, often at hard physical labor, never took vacations, and could not access most of the world’s culture.
  • when average people read about or see income inequality, they don’t feel the moral outrage that radiates from the more passionate egalitarian quarters of society. Instead, they think their lives are pretty good and that they either earned through hard work or lucked into a healthy share of the American dream.
  • In narrowly self-interested terms, that view may be irrational, but most Americans are unwilling to frame national issues in terms of rich versus poor.
  • There’s a great deal of hostility toward various government bailouts, but the idea of “undeserving” recipients is the key factor in those feelings. Resentment against Wall Street gamesters hasn’t spilled over much into resentment against the wealthy more generally.
  • their constituents bear no animus toward rich people, only toward undeservedly rich people.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Jul 13
       
      Which is how the policy can be reframed to the benefit of those that understand this more cleanly.
  • in the United States, most economic resentment is not directed toward billionaires or high-roller financiers—not even corrupt ones. It’s directed at the guy down the hall who got a bigger raise.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Jul 13
       
      Provincialism!
  • The high status of the wealthy in America, or for that matter the high status of celebrities, seems to bother our intellectual class most. That class composes a very small group, however
  • All that said, income inequality does matter—for both politics and the economy.
  • To see how, we must distinguish between inequality itself and what causes it. But first let’s review the trends in more detail.
  • Income inequality has been rising in the United States, especially at the very top.
  • The data show a big difference between two quite separate issues
  • income growth at the very top
  • greater inequality throughout the distribution
  • When it comes to the first trend, the share of pre-tax income earned by the richest 1 percent of earners has increased from about 8 percent in 1974 to more than 18 percent in 2007. Furthermore, the richest 0.01 percent (the 15,000 or so richest families) had a share of less than 1 percent in 1974 but more than 6 percent of national income in 2007. As noted, those figures are from pre-tax income, so don’t look to the George W. Bush tax cuts to explain the pattern. Furthermore, these gains have been sustained and have evolved over many years, rather than coming in one or two small bursts between 1974 and today.1
  • Caution is in order, but the overall trend seems robust. Similar broad patterns are indicated by different sources, such as studies of executive compensation. Anecdotal observation suggests extreme and unprecedented returns earned by investment bankers, fired CEOs, J.K. Rowling and Tiger Woods.
  • At the same time, wage growth for the median earner has slowed since 1973.
  • But that slower wage growth has afflicted large numbers of Americans, and it is conceptually distinct from the higher relative share of top income earners. For instance, if you take the 1979–2005 period, the average incomes of the bottom fifth of households increased only 6 percent while the incomes of the middle quintile rose by 21 percent. That’s a widening of the spread of incomes, but it’s not so drastic compared to the explosive gains at the very top.
  • The broader change in income distribution, the one occurring beneath the very top earners, can be deconstructed in a manner that makes nearly all of it look harmless. For instance, there is usually greater inequality of income among both older people and the more highly educated, if only because there is more time and more room for fortunes to vary.
  • Since America is becoming both older and more highly educated, our measured income inequality will increase pretty much by demographic fiat.
  • Economist Thomas Lemieux at the University of British Columbia estimates that these demographic effects explain three-quarters of the observed rise in income inequality for men, and even more for women.2
  • Attacking the problem from a different angle, other economists are challenging whether there is much growth in inequality at all below the super-rich. For instance, real incomes are measured using a common price index, yet poorer people are more likely to shop at discount outlets like Wal-Mart, which have seen big price drops over the past twenty years.3 Once we take this behavior into account, it is unclear whether the real income gaps between the poor and middle class have been widening much at all.
  • And so we come again to the gains of the top earners, clearly the big story told by the data.
  • It’s worth noting that over this same period of time, inequality of work hours increased too. The top earners worked a lot more and most other Americans worked somewhat less. That’s another reason why high earners don’t occasion more resentment: Many people understand how hard they have to work to get there.
  • A threshold earner is someone who seeks to earn a certain amount of money and no more.
  • If wages go up, that person will respond by seeking less work or by working less hard or less often. That person simply wants to “get by” in terms of absolute earning power in order to experience other gains in the form of leisure—whether spending time with friends and family, walking in the woods and so on. Luck aside, that person’s income will never rise much above the threshold.
  • It’s not obvious what causes the percentage of threshold earners to rise or fall, but it seems reasonable to suppose that the more single-occupancy households there are, the more threshold earners there will be, since a major incentive for earning money is to use it to take care of other people with whom one lives.
  • For a variety of reasons, single-occupancy households in the United States are at an all-time high.
  • The funny thing is this: For years, many cultural critics in and of the United States have been telling us that Americans should behave more like threshold earners. We should be less harried, more interested in nurturing friendships, and more interested in the non-commercial sphere of life. That may well be good advice.
  • Many studies suggest that above a certain level more money brings only marginal increments of happiness.
  • What isn’t so widely advertised is that those same critics have basically been telling us, without realizing it, that we should be acting in such a manner as to increase measured income inequality.
  • Why is the top 1 percent doing so well?
  • Their data do not comprise the entire U.S. population, but from partial financial records they find a very strong role for the financial sector in driving the trend toward income concentration at the top.
  • The number of Wall Street investors earning more than $100 million a year was nine times higher than the public company executives earning that amount.
  • The authors also relate that they shared their estimates with a former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, one who also has a Wall Street background. He thought their estimates of earnings in the financial sector were, if anything, understated.
  • Many of the other high earners are also connected to finance.
  • After Wall Street, Kaplan and Rauh identify the legal sector as a contributor to the growing spread in earnings at the top.
  • Finance aside, there isn’t much of a story of market failure here, even if we don’t find the results aesthetically appealing.
  • When it comes to professional athletes and celebrities, there isn’t much of a mystery as to what has happened.
  • There is more purchasing power to spend on children’s books and, indeed, on culture and celebrities more generally. For high-earning celebrities, hardly anyone finds these earnings so morally objectionable as to suggest that they be politically actionable.
  • We may or may not wish to tax the wealthy, including wealthy celebrities, at higher rates, but there is no need to “cure” the structural causes of higher celebrity incomes.
  • If we are looking for objectionable problems in the top 1 percent of income earners, much of it boils down to finance and activities related to financial markets. And to be sure, the high incomes in finance should give us all pause.
  • some investors opt for a strategy of betting against big, unexpected moves in market prices.
  • Most of the time investors will do well by this strategy, since big, unexpected moves are outliers by definition. Traders will earn above-average returns in good times. In bad times they won’t suffer fully when catastrophic returns come in, as sooner or later is bound to happen, because the downside of these bets is partly socialized onto the Treasury, the Federal Reserve and, of course, the taxpayers and the unemployed.
  • To understand how this strategy works, consider an example from sports betting.
  • if you bet against unlikely events, most of the time you will look smart and have the money to validate the appearance. Periodically, however, you will look very bad
  • Does that kind of pattern sound familiar? It happens in finance, too. Betting against a big decline in home prices is analogous to betting against the Wizards. Every now and then such a bet will blow up in your face, though in most years that trading activity will generate above-average profits and big bonuses for the traders and CEOs. To this mix we can add the fact that many money managers are investing other people’s money.
  • If you plan to stay with an investment bank for ten years or less, most of the people playing this investing strategy will make out very well most of the time. Everyone’s time horizon is a bit limited and you will bring in some nice years of extra returns and reap nice bonuses.
  • And let’s say the whole thing does blow up in your face? What’s the worst that can happen? Your bosses fire you, but you will still have millions in the bank and that MBA from Harvard or Wharton.
  • For the people actually investing the money, there’s barely any downside risk other than having to quit the party early.
  • Moreover, smart shareholders will acquiesce to or even encourage these gambles.
  • They gain on the upside, while the downside, past the point of bankruptcy, is borne by the firm’s creditors.
  • Perhaps more important, government bailouts minimize the damage to creditors on the downside.
  • Neither the Treasury nor the Fed allowed creditors to take any losses from the collapse of the major banks during the financial crisis. The U.S. government guaranteed these loans, either explicitly or implicitly.
  • For better or worse, we’re handing out free options on recovery, and that encourages banks to take more risk in the first place.
  • In short, there is an unholy dynamic of short-term trading and investing, backed up by bailouts and risk reduction from the government and the Federal Reserve. This is not good.
  • But more immediate and more important, it means that banks take far too many risks and go way out on a limb, often in correlated fashion. When their bets turn sour, as they did in 2007–09, everyone else pays the price.
  • And it’s not just the taxpayer cost of the bailout that stings. The financial disruption ends up throwing a lot of people out of work down the economic food chain, often for long periods.
  • In essence, we’re allowing banks to earn their way back by arbitraging interest rate spreads against the U.S. government. This is rarely called a bailout and it doesn’t count as a normal budget item, but it is a bailout nonetheless. This type of implicit bailout brings high social costs by slowing down economic recovery (the interest rate spreads require tight monetary policy) and by redistributing income from the Treasury to the major banks.
  • The more one studies financial theory, the more one realizes how many different ways there are to construct a “going short on volatility” investment position.
  • In some cases, traders may not even know they are going short on volatility. They just do what they have seen others do. Their peers who try such strategies very often have Jaguars and homes in the Hamptons. What’s not to like?
  • The upshot of all this for our purposes is that the “going short on volatility” strategy increases income inequality.
  • In normal years the financial sector is flush with cash and high earnings. In implosion years a lot of the losses are borne by other sectors of society. In other words, financial crisis begets income inequality. Despite being conceptually distinct phenomena, the political economy of income inequality is, in part, the political economy of finance.
  • If you’re wondering, right before the Great Depression of the 1930s, bank profits and finance-related earnings were also especially high.8
  • There’s a second reason why the financial sector abets income inequality: the “moving first” issue.
  • The moving-first phenomenon sums to a “winner-take-all” market. Only some relatively small number of traders, sometimes just one trader, can be first. Those who are first will make far more than those who are fourth or fifth.
  • Since gains are concentrated among the early winners, and the closeness of the runner-ups doesn’t so much matter for income distribution, asset-market trading thus encourages the ongoing concentration of wealth. Many investors make lots of mistakes and lose their money, but each year brings a new bunch of projects that can turn the early investors and traders into very wealthy individuals.
  • These two features of the problem—“going short on volatility” and “getting there first”—are related.
  • Still, every now and then Goldman will go bust, or would go bust if not for government bailouts. But the odds are in any given year that it won’t because of the advantages it and other big banks have.
  • It’s as if the major banks have tapped a hole in the social till and they are drinking from it with a straw.
  • In any given year, this practice may seem tolerable—didn’t the bank earn the money fair and square by a series of fairly normal looking trades?
  • Yet over time this situation will corrode productivity, because what the banks do bears almost no resemblance to a process of getting capital into the hands of those who can make most efficient use of it.
  • And it leads to periodic financial explosions. That, in short, is the real problem of income inequality we face today. It’s what causes the inequality at the very top of the earning pyramid that has dangerous implications for the economy as a whole.
  • A key lesson to take from all of this is that simply railing against income inequality doesn’t get us very far.
  • We have to find a way to prevent or limit major banks from repeatedly going short on volatility at social expense. No one has figured out how to do that yet.
  • It remains to be seen whether the new financial regulation bill signed into law this past summer will help.
  • The bill does have positive features.
  • First, it forces banks to put up more of their own capital, and thus shareholders will have more skin in the game, inducing them to curtail their risky investments.
  • Second, it also limits the trading activities of banks, although to a currently undetermined extent (many key decisions were kicked into the hands of future regulators).
  • Third, the new “resolution authority” allows financial regulators to impose selective losses, for instance, to punish bondholders if they wish.
  • We’ll see if these reforms constrain excess risk-taking in the long run. There are reasons for skepticism.
  • Most of all, the required capital cushions simply aren’t that high, so a big enough bet against unexpected outcomes still will yield more financial upside than downside
  • What about controlling bank risk-taking directly with tight government oversight? That is not practical. There are more ways for banks to take risks than even knowledgeable regulators can possibly control
  • It’s also not clear how well regulators can identify risky assets.
  • Some of the worst excesses of the financial crisis were grounded in mortgage-backed assets—a very traditional function of banks—not exotic derivatives trading strategies.
  • Virtually any asset position can be used to bet long odds, one way or another. It is naive to think that underpaid, undertrained regulators can keep up with financial traders, especially when the latter stand to earn billions by circumventing the intent of regulations while remaining within the letter of the law.
  • For the time being, we need to accept the possibility that the financial sector has learned how to game the American (and UK-based) system of state capitalism.
  • It’s no longer obvious that the system is stable at a macro level, and extreme income inequality at the top has been one result of that imbalance. Income inequality is a symptom, however, rather than a cause of the real problem.
  • The root cause of income inequality, viewed in the most general terms, is extreme human ingenuity, albeit of a perverse kind. That is why it is so hard to control.
  • Another root cause of growing inequality is that the modern world, by so limiting our downside risk, makes extreme risk-taking all too comfortable and easy.
  • More risk-taking will mean more inequality, sooner or later, because winners always emerge from risk-taking.
  • Yet bankers who take bad risks (provided those risks are legal) simply do not end up with bad outcomes in any absolute sense.
  • We’re not going to bring back torture, trial by ordeal or debtors’ prisons, nor should we. Yet the threat of impoverishment and disgrace no longer looms the way it once did, so we no longer can constrain excess financial risk-taking. It’s too soft and cushy a world.
  • That’s an underappreciated way to think about our modern, wealthy economy: Smart people have greater reach than ever before, and nothing really can go so wrong for them.
  • How about a world with no bailouts? Why don’t we simply eliminate the safety net for clueless or unlucky risk-takers so that losses equal gains overall? That’s a good idea in principle, but it is hard to put into practice.
  • Once a financial crisis arrives, politicians will seek to limit the damage, and that means they will bail out major financial institutions.
  • Had we not passed TARP and related policies, the United States probably would have faced unemployment rates of 25 percent of higher, as in the Great Depression. The political consequences would not have been pretty.
  • Bank bailouts may sound quite interventionist, and indeed they are, but in relative terms they probably were the most libertarian policy we had on tap. It meant big one-time expenses, but, for the most part, it kept government out of the real economy (the General Motors bailout aside).
  • So what will happen next?
  • One worry is that banks are currently undercapitalized and will seek out or create a new bubble within the next few years, again pursuing the upside risk without so much equity to lose.
  • A second perspective is that banks are sufficiently chastened for the time being but that economic turmoil in Europe and China has not yet played itself out, so perhaps we still have seen only the early stages of what will prove to be an even bigger international financial crisis.
  • A third view is perhaps most likely. We probably don’t have any solution to the hazards created by our financial sector, not because plutocrats are preventing our political system from adopting appropriate remedies, but because we don’t know what those remedies are.
  • Yet neither is another crisis immediately upon us. The underlying dynamic favors excess risk-taking, but banks at the current moment fear the scrutiny of regulators and the public and so are playing it fairly safe.
  • They are sitting on money rather than lending it out. The biggest risk today is how few parties will take risks, and, in part, the caution of banks is driving our current protracted economic slowdown. According to this view, the long run will bring another financial crisis once moods pick up and external scrutiny weakens, but that day of reckoning is still some ways off.
  • Is the overall picture a shame? Yes. Is it distorting resource distribution and productivity in the meantime? Yes. Will it again bring our economy to its knees? Probably. Maybe that’s simply the price of modern society. Income inequality will likely continue to rise and we will search in vain for the appropriate political remedies for our underlying problems.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Jul 13
       
      Painfully straightforward.
  • anonymous on 07 Jul 13
     
    "Does growing wealth and income inequality in the United States presage the downfall of the American republic? Will we evolve into a new Gilded Age plutocracy, irrevocably split between the competing interests of rich and poor? Or is growing inequality a mere bump in the road, a statistical blip along the path to greater wealth for virtually every American? Or is income inequality partially desirable, reflecting the greater productivity of society's stars?"
anonymous

HowStuffWorks "How Fat Cells Work" - 0 views

science.howstuffworks.com/...fat-cell.htm

shared by anonymous on 12 Sep 12 - Cached
  • BMI is a calculation that takes into consideration both a person's body weight and height to determine whether they are underweight, overweight or at a healthy weight.
  • Fat, or adipose tissue, is found in several places in your body. Generally, fat is found underneath your skin (subcutaneous fat). There's also some on top of each of your kidneys. In addition to fat tissue, some fat is stored in the liver, and an even smaller amount in muscle.
  • The difference in fat location comes from the sex hormones estrogen and testosterone. Fat cells are formed in the developing fetus during the third trimester of pregnancy, and later at the onset of puberty, when the sex hormones "kick in."
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • It is during puberty that the differences in fat distribution between men and women begin to take form.
  • fat cells generally do not generate after puberty -- as your body stores more fat, the number of fat cells remains the same. Each fat cell simply gets bigger!
  • anonymous on 12 Sep 12
     
    "A little more than half of the adults in the United States are overweight. Statistics show that an incredible 65.2 percent of the U.S. population is considered to be "overweight" or "obese." According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), obesity and overweight status is determined in adults by finding a person's "Body Mass Index" or BMI."
anonymous

How Mitochondrial Eve connected all humanity and rewrote human evolution - 0 views

io9.com/...ty-and-rewrote-human-evolution

shared by anonymous on 25 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • So how did Mitochondrial Eve manage to rewrite the entire story of human evolution? For that matter, what exactly is Mitochondrial Eve? Unlike her biblical namesake, she wasn't the only woman on Earth. In a sense, she's just a quirk of statistics. But if that's the case, then she's easily the most important quirk of statistics who ever lived.
  • In order to find a common ancestor whose genetics have passed on, we need to look for things that are passed down from generation to generation with little or no alteration. Both genders pass along one thing that is unchanged during sexual reproduction. For women, this is the mitochondrial DNA, which is a distinct subset of genetic material found not in the cell nucleus but rather in the mitochondria, the power plants of the cell.
  • By tracing the subtle mutations to mitochondrial DNA that have accumulated over the millennia, we can figure out which groups are most closely related, and ultimately fix the existence of Mitochondrial Eve to a fairly specific time in the past, which is currently estimated at about 200,000 years ago. That pretty much rules out the idea of multiple origins for humanity — otherwise Mitochondrial Eve would have to date back a couple million years, and mitochondrial analysis shows that that simply isn't the case.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • While we don't really have 500 billion different ancestors, we can still look at the reverse of that idea: is there a single common ancestor that every person on Earth shares? As we know with Mitochondrial Eve, that answer is a resounding "yes" - but let's now take a look at the Most Recent Common Ancestor, or MRCA. The name says it all, really - this is simply the most recent person who, through any and all genetic lines, can be connected to every single person alive today.
  • anonymous on 25 Jan 12
     
    This month marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the discovery of Mitochondrial Eve, the common ancestor of every human alive today. Here's everything you need to know about why the mother of humanity is so important.
anonymous

Questions Surround the Netherlands' Future - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...ns-surround-netherlands-future

shared by anonymous on 19 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • In light of its economic problems and its leadership's waning popularity, the Netherlands will likely soften austerity measures in the short- and medium-term. In May, the European Commission gave The Hague permission to miss its deficit target for 2013. The country will probably fail to meet the required EU deficit goals again in 2014 -- the Dutch government has become increasingly worried about the negative effects of expedited spending cuts. While the European Commission is likely to pressure The Netherlands to implement additional spending cuts, it probably will not punish the country when it does not comply with those demands.
  • This goes beyond austerity measures; the Dutch parliament is currently assessing its broader relationship with the European Union. In a document released in June, the Dutch Cabinet indicated that no additional concessions of sovereignty should be made to supranational institutions, and that The Hague should keep as many of its own prerogatives as possible.
  • Because of its physical location in Europe, the Netherlands keeps strong political and economic ties with France and Germany. The Dutch will avoid any meaningful policy decisions until after Germans elections, which are scheduled for late September. The Hague will not openly criticize Berlin or Brussels as Paris has, but it will pursue a more independent fiscal policy by relaxing austerity at home in order to avoid a further drop in popular support.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Regardless of who governs Germany after September, in the short term Europeans will have to debate measures to reactivate financing for small- and medium-sized companies to try to stimulate economic growth and create new jobs.
  • In the long term, Germany and France will have to begin discussions for reforming European treaties. EU institutions and member states simply are reaching the limits of what they can do in the bloc's current institutional framework.
  • Both negotiations will force the Netherlands to define its position in Europe. As a country that traditionally relies on trade, the Netherlands will support any measure that protects the European free trade agreements -- which means that The Hague will not opt out of the European Union.
  • anonymous on 19 Jul 13
     
    "In a new indication that the economic crisis has reached the eurozone's core countries, the Dutch statistics office announced today that seasonally adjusted unemployment reached 8.5 percent in June, up from 6.3 percent the previous year. Clearly the EU unemployment crisis is far from over, and the bloc's structural weaknesses continue to affect even Europe's politically and economically stable nations."
anonymous

Problems with scientific research: How science goes wrong - 0 views

www.economist.com/...-itself-how-science-goes-wrong

shared by anonymous on 19 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Too many of the findings that fill the academic ether are the result of shoddy experiments or poor analysis (see article).
  • A rule of thumb among biotechnology venture-capitalists is that half of published research cannot be replicated. Even that may be optimistic.
  • Even when flawed research does not put people’s lives at risk—and much of it is too far from the market to do so—it squanders money and the efforts of some of the world’s best minds.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • In the 1950s, when modern academic research took shape after its successes in the second world war, it was still a rarefied pastime.
  • Nowadays verification (the replication of other people’s results) does little to advance a researcher’s career. And without verification, dubious findings live on to mislead.
  • In order to safeguard their exclusivity, the leading journals impose high rejection rates: in excess of 90% of submitted manuscripts. The most striking findings have the greatest chance of making it onto the page.
  • And as more research teams around the world work on a problem, the odds shorten that at least one will fall prey to an honest confusion between the sweet signal of a genuine discovery and a freak of the statistical noise.
  • “Negative results” now account for only 14% of published papers, down from 30% in 1990.
  • The failure to report failures means that researchers waste money and effort exploring blind alleys already investigated by other scientists.
  • When a prominent medical journal ran research past other experts in the field, it found that most of the reviewers failed to spot mistakes it had deliberately inserted into papers, even after being told they were being tested.
  • What might be done to shore it up?
  • One priority should be for all disciplines to follow the example of those that have done most to tighten standards. A start would be getting to grips with statistics, especially in the growing number of fields that sift through untold oodles of data looking for patterns.
  • Geneticists have done this, and turned an early torrent of specious results from genome sequencing into a trickle of truly significant ones.
  • Ideally, research protocols should be registered in advance and monitored in virtual notebooks. This would curb the temptation to fiddle with the experiment’s design midstream so as to make the results look more substantial than they are.
  • (It is already meant to happen in clinical trials of drugs, but compliance is patchy.) Where possible, trial data also should be open for other researchers to inspect and test.
  • Some government funding agencies, including America’s National Institutes of Health, which dish out $30 billion on research each year, are working out how best to encourage replication.
  • Journals should allocate space for “uninteresting” work, and grant-givers should set aside money to pay for it.
  • Peer review should be tightened—or perhaps dispensed with altogether, in favour of post-publication evaluation in the form of appended comments. That system has worked well in recent years in physics and mathematics. Lastly, policymakers should ensure that institutions using public money also respect the rules.
  • Science still commands enormous—if sometimes bemused—respect. But its privileged status is founded on the capacity to be right most of the time and to correct its mistakes when it gets things wrong.
  • anonymous on 19 Oct 13
     
    "A SIMPLE idea underpins science: "trust, but verify". Results should always be subject to challenge from experiment. That simple but powerful idea has generated a vast body of knowledge. Since its birth in the 17th century, modern science has changed the world beyond recognition, and overwhelmingly for the better."
anonymous

The Trouble With Intuition - 0 views

chronicle.com/...65674

philosophy criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 11 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Some 45 years after Wise found the private edition of the Sonnets, two British book dealers, named John Carter and Graham Pollard, decided to investigate his finds. They re-examined the Browning volume and identified eight reasons why its existence was inconsistent with typical practices of the era. For example, none of the copies had been inscribed by the author, none were trimmed and bound in the customary way, and the Brownings never mentioned the special private printing in any letters, memoirs, or other documents.
  • The 1847 edition had to be a fake.
  • According to Gladwell, those experts' intuitions proved correct, and the initial scientific tests that authenticated the statue turned out to have been faulty.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • Cases in which forgeries that intuitively appear real but later are discovered through analysis to be frauds are fairly common in the art world.
  • Gladwell's message in Blink has been interpreted by some readers as a broad license to rely on intuition and dispense with analysis, which can lead to flawed decisions.
  • Intuition means different things to different people. To some it refers to a sudden flash of insight, or even the spiritual experience of discovering a previously hidden truth.
  • In its more mundane form, intuition refers to a way of knowing and deciding that is distinct from and complements logical analysis.
  • The idea that hunches can outperform reason is neither unique nor original to Malcolm Gladwell, of course. Most students and professors have long believed that, when in doubt, test-takers should stick with their first answers and "go with their gut." But data show that test-takers are more than twice as likely to change an incorrect answer to a correct one than vice versa.
  • Intuition does have its uses, but it should not be exalted above analysis.
  • There is, moreover, one class of intuitions that consistently leads us astray—dangerously astray. These intuitions are stubbornly resistant to analysis, and it is exactly these intuitions that we shouldn't trust. Unfortunately, they are also the intuitions that we find the most compelling: mistaken intuitions about how our own minds work.
  • The finding that people fail to notice unexpected events when their attention is otherwise engaged is interesting. What is doubly intriguing is the mismatch between what we notice and what we think we will notice.
  • If you believe you will notice unexpected events regardless of how much of your attention is devoted to other tasks, you won't be vigilant enough for possible risks.
  • In the vast majority of cases in which DNA evidence exonerated a death-row inmate, the original conviction was based largely on the testimony of a confident eyewitness with a vivid memory of the crime. Jurors (and everyone else) tend to intuitively trust that when people are certain, they are likely to be right.
  • Study after study has shown that memories of important events like those are no more accurate than run-of-the-mill memories. They are more vivid, and we are therefore more confident about their accuracy, but that confidence is largely an illusion.
  • The most troublesome aspect of intuition may be the misleading role it plays in how we perceive patterns and identify causal relationships.
  • To determine whether two events are truly associated, we must consider how frequently each one occurs by itself, and how frequently they occur together. With just one or a few anecdotes, that's impossible, so it pays to err on the side of caution when inferring the existence of an association from a small number of examples.
  • We can rely on accumulated data, but too often we don't. Why not? Because our intuitions respond to vivid stories, not abstract statistics.
  • But more than a dozen large-scale epidemiological studies, involving hundreds of thousands of subjects, have shown that children who were vaccinated are no more likely to be diagnosed with autism than are children who were not vaccinated. In other words, there is no association between vaccination and autism. And in the absence of an association, there cannot be a causal link.
  • Many people who believe that vaccination can cause autism are aware of those data. But the intuitive cause-detector in our minds is driven by stories, not statistics, and once a compelling story leads us to ascribe an effect to a cause, we can hold to that belief as stubbornly as when we trust in our ability to talk on a phone while driving—or to spot a person wearing a gorilla suit.
  • Gladwell surrounds his arguments with examples that suggest an association, letting his readers infer the causal relationships he wants to convey.
  • The kouros example is effective because it capitalizes on our tendency to generalize from a single positive association, leading to the conclusion that intuition trumps reason. But in this case, a bit of thought would show that conclusion to be unlikely, even within the confined realm of art fakery. Think about how often experts throughout history have been duped by forgers because intuition told them that they were looking at the real thing. It is ironic that Gladwell (knowingly or not) exploits one of the greatest weaknesses of intuition—our tendency to blithely infer cause from anecdotes—in making his case for intuition's extraordinary power.
  • anonymous on 11 Jun 10
     
    By Daniel J. Simons and Christopher F. Chabris at The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education on May 30, 2010.
anonymous

Your intuitions are not magic - 0 views

lesswrong.com/...your_intuitions_are_not_magic

criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 11 Jun 10 - Cached
  • As a formal system, pure math exists only inside our heads. We can try to apply it to the real world, but if we are misapplying it, nothing in the system itself will tell us that we're making a mistake.
  • When someone says "correlation", they are most commonly talking about Pearson's correlation coefficient, which seeks to gauge whether there's a linear relationship between two variables.
  • A person who doesn't stop to consider the assumptions of the techniques she's using is, in effect, thinking that her techniques are magical.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Our brains keep track of countless pieces of information that we will not usually even think about. Few people will explicitly keep track of the amount of different restaurants they've seen.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 11 Jun 10
       
      This should probably read: "Our brains keep track of countless pieces of mis-remembered information"...
  • But like explicit statistical techniques, the brain makes numerous assumptions when building its models of the world.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 11 Jun 10
       
      Which this alludes to. :)
  • Thus, people asked to estimate the frequency of different causes of death underestimate the frequency of those that are underreported in the media, and overestimate the ones that are overreported.
  • like the person who was naively misapplying her statistical tools, the process which generates the answers is a black box to you.
  • he science seems absurd and unintuitive; our intuitions seem firm and clear. And indeed, sometimes there's a flaw in the science, and we are right to trust our intuitions. But on other occasions, our intuitions are wrong.
  • And what is ironic is that we persist on holding onto them exactly because we do not know how they work, because we cannot see their insides and all the things inside them that could go wrong.
  • That is why we need to study the cognitive sciences, figure out the way our intuitions work and how we might correct for mistakes.
  • anonymous on 11 Jun 10
     
    By Kaj Sotala at Less Wrong on June 10, 2010.
anonymous

Comparing China and Japan as They Change Rank - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...ina_and_japan_they_change_rank

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 17 Aug 10 - Cached
  • As these two economies change rank, what is more remarkable than their respective growth rates is what is concealed by the comparison.
  • China has a rapidly growing economy based on investment in new productive capacity and exports to meet foreign demand. It has grown at double-digit rates since embracing economic reform nearly three decades ago, and has maintained this pace throughout the 2008-2009 global economic crisis, mainly through government-directed investment and massive boosts in lending by state-owned banks.
  • By contrast, Japan’s economy is mostly characterized as being in an extended state of malaise since its asset bubble burst in 1990.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The contrast with China is stark. China’s rapid ascent was made possible through massive annual production that makes up a much greater proportion of its overall worth than it does for other major economies.
  • Government spending will have to make up for both lost foreign demand and weak domestic demand. And, unlike Japan, China will face greater social fragmentation and unrest.
  • anonymous on 17 Aug 10
     
    "apan's Cabinet Office released economic statistics for the second quarter of 2010, showing that the country's gross domestic product (GDP) for the first half of the year reached $2.77 trillion, not much higher than China's previously announced GDP of about $2.54 trillion for the same January-June period. The news spurred a new round of discussions about China's gradual surpassing of Japan to become the world's second biggest economy." At StratFor on August 17, 2010.
anonymous

The Myth of Charter Schools by Diane Ravitch | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

www.nybooks.com/...myth-charter-schools

education

shared by anonymous on 25 Oct 10 - Cached
  • Guggenheim presents the popularized version of an account of American public education that is promoted by some of the nation’s most powerful figures and institutions.
  • The message of these films has become alarmingly familiar: American public education is a failed enterprise. The problem is not money. Public schools already spend too much. Test scores are low because there are so many bad teachers, whose jobs are protected by powerful unions. Students drop out because the schools fail them, but they could accomplish practically anything if they were saved from bad teachers. They would get higher test scores if schools could fire more bad teachers and pay more to good ones. The only hope for the future of our society, especially for poor black and Hispanic children, is escape from public schools, especially to charter schools, which are mostly funded by the government but controlled by private organizations, many of them operating to make a profit.
  • The annual Gallup poll about education shows that Americans are overwhelmingly dissatisfied with the quality of the nation’s schools, but 77 percent of public school parents award their own child’s public school a grade of A or B, the highest level of approval since the question was first asked in 1985.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • The message of the film is clear. Public schools are bad, privately managed charter schools are good.
  • Some fact-checking is in order, and the place to start is with the film’s quiet acknowledgment that only one in five charter schools is able to get the “amazing results” that it celebrates. Nothing more is said about this astonishing statistic.
  • The proportion of charters that get amazing results is far smaller than 17 percent.Why did Davis Guggenheim pay no attention to the charter schools that are run by incompetent leaders or corporations mainly concerned to make money? Why propound to an unknowing public the myth that charter schools are the answer to our educational woes, when the filmmaker knows that there are twice as many failing charters as there are successful ones? Why not give an honest accounting?
  • The propagandistic nature of Waiting for “Superman” is revealed by Guggenheim’s complete indifference to the wide variation among charter schools. There are excellent charter schools, just as there are excellent public schools.
  • Guggenheim seems to believe that teachers alone can overcome the effects of student poverty, even though there are countless studies that demonstrate the link between income and test scores.
  • The movie asserts a central thesis in today’s school reform discussion: the idea that teachers are the most important factor determining student achievement.
  • But this proposition is false. Hanushek has released studies showing that teacher quality accounts for about 7.5–10 percent of student test score gains. Several other high-quality analyses echo this finding, and while estimates vary a bit, there is a relative consensus: teachers statistically account for around 10–20 percent of achievement outcomes. Teachers are the most important factor within schools.
  • But the same body of research shows that nonschool factors matter even more than teachers.
  • The film never acknowledges that charter schools were created mainly at the instigation of Albert Shanker, the president of the American Federation of Teachers from 1974 to 1997.
  • He sold the idea as a way to open schools that would collaborate with public schools and help motivate disengaged students. In 1993, Shanker turned against the charter school idea when he realized that for-profit organizations saw it as a business opportunity and were advancing an agenda of school privatization.
  • Under NCLB, low-performing schools may be closed, while high-performing ones may get bonuses. Some charter schools “counsel out” or expel students just before state testing day. Some have high attrition rates, especially among lower-performing students.
  • Perhaps the greatest distortion in this film is its misrepresentation of data about student academic performance. The film claims that 70 percent of eighth-grade students cannot read at grade level. This is flatly wrong.
  • NAEP doesn’t measure performance in terms of grade-level achievement. The highest level of performance, “advanced,” is equivalent to an A+, representing the highest possible academic performance. The next level, “proficient,” is equivalent to an A or a very strong B. The next level is “basic,” which probably translates into a C grade. The film assumes that any student below proficient is “below grade level.” But it would be far more fitting to worry about students who are “below basic,” who are 25 percent of the national sample, not 70 percent.
  • Guggenheim didn’t bother to take a close look at the heroes of his documentary. Geoffrey Canada is justly celebrated for the creation of the Harlem Children’s Zone, which not only runs two charter schools but surrounds children and their families with a broad array of social and medical services.
  • On the 2010 state tests, 60 percent of the fourth-grade students in one of his charter schools were not proficient in reading, nor were 50 percent in the other. It should be noted—and Guggenheim didn’t note it—that Canada kicked out his entire first class of middle school students when they didn’t get good enough test scores to satisfy his board of trustees.
  • Contrary to Guggenheim’s mythology, even the best-funded charters, with the finest services, can’t completely negate the effects of poverty.
  • While blasting the teachers’ unions, he points to Finland as a nation whose educational system the US should emulate, not bothering to explain that it has a completely unionized teaching force.
  • His documentary showers praise on testing and accountability, yet he does not acknowledge that Finland seldom tests its students.
  • Guggenheim simply ignores the realities of the Finnish system.
  • Becoming a charter is no guarantee that a school serving a tough neighborhood will produce educational miracles.
  • It raises important questions, but all of the answers it offers require a transfer of public funds to the private sector. The stock market crash of 2008 should suffice to remind us that the managers of the private sector do not have a monopoly on success.
  • First, I thought to myself that the charter operators were cynically using children as political pawns in their own campaign to promote their cause.
  • Second, I felt an immense sense of gratitude to the much-maligned American public education system, where no one has to win a lottery to gain admission.
  • anonymous on 25 Oct 10
     
    "Ordinarily, documentaries about education attract little attention, and seldom, if ever, reach neighborhood movie theaters. Davis Guggenheim's Waiting for "Superman" is different. It arrived in late September with the biggest publicity splash I have ever seen for a documentary. Not only was it the subject of major stories in Time and New York, but it was featured twice on The Oprah Winfrey Show and was the centerpiece of several days of programming by NBC, including an interview with President Obama." By Diane Ravitch at The New York Review of Books on November 11, 2010.
anonymous

The Skeptic's Skeptic: Scientific American - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm

criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 03 Nov 10 - Cached
  • If God created the eye, then how do creationists explain the blind salamander? “The most they can do is to intone that ‘the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,’” Hitchens mused. “Whereas the likelihood that the postocular blind­ness of underground salamanders is another aspect of evolution by natural selection seems, when you think about it at all, so overwhelmingly probable as to con­stitute a near certainty.”
  • To wit, after watching a quack medicine man fleecing India’s poor one Sunday afternoon, the belletrist scowled in a 2003 Slate column, “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” The observation is worthy of elevation to a dictum.
  • So, the question can and must be rephrased: ‘Why will our brief ‘something’ so soon be replaced with nothing?’ It’s only once we shake our own innate belief in linear progression and consider the many recessions we have undergone and will undergo that we can grasp the gross stupidity of those who repose their faith in divine providence and godly design.”
  • anonymous on 03 Nov 10
     
    "Science values data and statistics and champions the virtues of evidence and experimentation. Those of us "viewing the world with a rational eye" (as the new descriptor for this column reads) also have another, underutilized tool at our disposal: rapier logic like that of Christopher Hitchens, a practiced logician trained in rhetoric. Hitchens-who is "leaving the party a bit earlier than I'd like" because of esophageal cancer, as he lamented to Charlie Rose in a recent PBS interview-has something deeply important to offer on how to think about unscientific claims. Although he has no formal training in science, I would pit Hitchens against any of the purveyors of pseudoscientific clap­trap because of his unique and enviable skill at peeling back the layers of an argument and cutting to its core." By Michael Shermer at Scientific American on November 3, 2010.
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