How to save a trillion dollars?

2011-04-13T22:12:00.000-07:00

Do you remember the story of the Emperor's New Clothes? I had a moment like that today, when I read yesterday's column in the NYTIMES by Mark Bittman. His message is that the giantic deficit in the US economy amounts to a rounding error, compared with the Federal Budget's share of the cost of our lifestyle diseases.

It's a surreal moment. It's like having an elephant in the room. An elephant that's grown big enough to almost choke off the world's richest economy. And what are our politicians doing? They're bringing the Federal Govenment to the brink of a shutdown in a show over how to shrink the "ronding error" without raising people's taxes.

How big is the elephant going to be next year? And why not raise the taxes? Don't most Americans have more than enough money to eat themselves to death? Isn't it in fact the very convenience of it all, the living standard that we're trying to raise, that's killing us?

As human beings, we have evolved with a very fine balance between appetite for food on the one hand, and our dislike of walking on the other. If our ancestors wanted to eat dinner, they had to hunt it or gather it, or both. Imagine having to walk five miles for your dinner. Imagine getting only a half portion, and having to walk five more miles for the other half. That's the kind of resistance that your appetite evolved to overcome.

The older you got, and the more your joints ached, the stronger your appetite had to be, in order to get you to feed yourself. In the end, you starved to death. Today, you're more likely to eat yourself to death. It's a big difference.

:-(

Clicker training

2011-04-05T22:30:00.000-07:00

In Karen Pryor's latest book,

Reaching The Animal Mind,

she tells about her life as a trainer of animals and humans, and elaborates further on the ideas of the "clicker training" that she helped develop. The first half of the book held my attention steadily, and I ploughed through the pages at a steady pace.

It was in the the second half that I began to take notes, when I realized that she was drawing lines between operant conditioning on the one hand, and what Temple called the "Blue Ribbon Emotions" on the other. This helps explain more of what I called in an earlier post the difference between "training" and "learning".

* Opererant conditioning ("training") is fast because it bypasses the Cortex. It addresses the primitive parts of the brain directly. The signal hardly has to be modulated or interpreted at all.

* The effects of operant conditioning lasts for a long time, because operant conditioning establishes an extremely short and simple link between information and its usefulness. The brain seems to be "wired" to keep information longer in memory, the more useful it appears to be.

* The effects of operant conditioning can be hard to undo through "teaching", because the traffic from the primitive parts of the brain (like the Amygdala, which controls fear responses) is largely one-way. The Amygdala knows how to talk to the Neocortex, but the Neocortex has practically no way to talk to the Amygdala. Or so Karen Proyr says.

This is bad news if you've been accidentally conditioned to have an aversive reaction to stuff like homework, and are trying to reason your way out of it. In fact, the only way to undo the damage, seems to be through new operant conditioning.

* Mixing sticks and carrots (rewards and punishments) is worse than we tend to think, because the two are handled by different parts of the brain. Fear responses are handled by the Amygdala, while the positive reinforcement is handled by the Hypothalamus. Activating both centres of the brain at the same time, does not improve the efficiency of the training.

* Operant conditioning can be great fun because it stimulates the SEEKING system in the primitive brain. This is the primary emotion that drives us to go out window-shopping, travelling, exploring, etc. Getting a good chance to explore something can be extremely rewarding ...

... which may be why I have enjoyed this book so much
(along with her previous book "Don't Shoot the Dog", which is an excellent textbook on operant conditioning).

PS: An afterthought: Could it be that the SEEKING emotion is the reason why we get addicted to computer games? Could it be because these games offer us a constant barrage of opportunities to find out "WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?"

"Jørgen Explains"

2011-03-13T23:31:00.000-07:00

Ilana has collected all her little Facebook videos of me in a YouTube channel she calls Jørgen Explains. The latest addition to the collection is a shortened version of my talk yesterday, at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Oslo, which she also helped me write.

I'm grateful - and flattered!
:-J

Limitations on human rationality

2011-03-12T07:44:00.000-08:00

I have always been a firm believer in human intelligence. Maybe not in my own, so much as in the principle.

I used to think that there is no problem

so big or so complicated

that a great mind can’t reason its way out of it,

at least if given enough information and time.

Try to imagine me as a guy who walks around with a hammer, and thinks that every problem in the world looks like a nail. That’s me, except that the tool isn’t a hammer. It’s more like a flashlight, shining a narrow ray of attention into the chaos of the world around me. The way to have the best possible life, I thought, was always to learn and understand everything that held me back.

I still think it’s a good program, as far as it goes, but I’ve recently found a valuable counterpoint to it. It’s in a book I’m reading called “What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought”, and is written by Keith E. Stanovich. Among other things, it says that if we gave every human being a pill that added 20 points to their IQ scores instantly, we would still be making most of the same mistakes the next day. The biggest difference would be that we’d be making them faster and more effectively. Intelligence, in other words, is not all.

When I mentioned the title to a friend of mine who is a psychologist, he said that “That must be a very long book”. However, the most important insight we can gain from it is a very short one. It’s that

We Are All Cognitive Misers.

as Stanovich calls it. This is shorthand for the fact that

The brain will always try to use

the simplest and sketchiest model of the world,

that it can get away with.

There are many reasons why we’re cognitive misers. One is that when brains and sensory systems first started to evolve, they were very primitive. The operating system that ran on those early brains, therefore had to make do with some pretty sketchy ideas of what the world consisted of. Still, they did their job. They helped keep their owners alive. Over the next several hundred million years, they kept evolving, and they always kept this as their first priority:

The evolutionary purpose of the brain

is to help keep its owner alive,

and promote his/her reproductive success,

not to take him/her to the moon.

When you look at the brain from that angle, it’s an absolutely amazing device. Normal computer programs need to be complete. They need to be double and triple checked for “bugs”. If something goes wrong, they crash. The brain, on the other hand, can make do with only the vaguest beginning of an idea. If something is missing, it simply fills in the blanks with whatever looks most probable, and goes on computing. If it needs a concept, it forms one on the spot. If input from one sense is confusing, it consults the other senses.

The brain’s image of the world around it will always look whole and complete, no matter what flaws and approximations it contains. The stuff we use to fill in the blanks usually fits so well, that we’re not aware that anything is missing.

This is as it should be. A bigger and more complicated model will require more processing power from the brain. The smaller and simpler we can make it, the easier we will get by. This type of optimization seems to be a general principle behind the way the nervous system is organized. Brains are optimized for speed, not for accuracy:

Every task that the brain can delegate

to a lower level of consciousness,

will be delegated, and to the lowest possible level.

If there’s enough information that a lower level of your nervous system knows what to do with it, without bothering your conscious mind, then that action will usually be taken without any further notification to higher quarters. The most extreme example of this is the simple “reflexes” that we learn about in school: A knee jerk here or a hand flying back at the touch of something hot. But it’s actually much more pervasive than that. It permeates everything: If a simple and primitive solution is good enough, it will be adopted until we see a reason to do otherwise, and without any resources being wasted on conscious processing.

This process of delegation happens all over our sensory systems. Let me take the eye as an example. Imagine that you are staring at a field of uniformly gray sky. That means that all the little rods and cones at the back of your eyes will be reporting the exact same level of stimulation back to the brain.

Now imagine that a pinpoint of light suddenly you comes on in the sky, causing just one little cell in your retina to start firing back to the brain. Can’t you hear it? It’s jumping up and down, shouting I see light! while all the others are still only seeing uniform grey. The thing that blew my mind when I learned about this, is that the neighbours of that little cell are also going to start responding, even though nothing has changed for them. They’ll respond by reporting a false drop in light intensity, as if it had suddenly gotten getting darker. It’s as if they’ve become jealous: “Now that my neighbour has more, it feels as if I’ve got less.

You can say that the eye is lying to the brain, but it’s actually an example of delegation.

* If the brain had to analyze every single pixel in the picture that’s being projected onto our retinas, it probably wouldn’t be able to make heads or tails of it ... and it certainly wouldn’t have time for anything else.

* Instead, by the time the signal leaves the eye, it has already been heavily doctored. Contrasts and movement have been emphasized, and that makes it just simple enough for the brain to take effective action.

The eye was only an example. All sensory input has to travel through a whole hierarchy of nerve cells, on its way towards the top level of full consciousness. Long before it gets there, salient points have been emphasized. Others have been suppressed. Different forms of input are compared and used to emphasize or cancel each other out.

For every level that a signal passes, on its way to full consciousness, details will invariably get lost. That’s how you’re able to filter one thread of conversation out of the background hum during a party. That’s how you’re able to pick out one little detail in a picture. The implication of this is that

Your subconscious, in the wider sense,

has a lot more information at its disposal

than your conscious mind has,

which is why our semi-conscious or subconscious assessments can be not only much faster, but can also be much more accurate than our conscious analysis.

It’s time to start summing up the insights that I feel I’ve gained. There are three of them.

- o 0 o -

The first is a new understanding of the cognitive biases. Every one of these seems to be an expression of how our brains are optimized for speed and computational ease, rather than accuracy. I’ll mention a few examples:

*    “Confirmation bias” is one of the most pervasive because it’s an expression of how we don’t interpret sensory input from scratch. Instead, we filter it through other layers of meaning, including our ideas of what the world should look like. When I was looking for an example of how this works, I suddenly remembered the debate around the so-called “Ground Zereo Mosque”. The thing people couldn’t agree about then, was whether a Sufi Muslim religious centre two blocks away from the World Trade Center site would be a victory for the Terrorists or for our own ideals of Religious Freedom.

   When I studied the issue, I got the impression that the majority of Muslim terrorism is directed against other Muslims: Shias against Sunnis, Sunnis against Shias ... and Everybody against the Sufis. Maybe I’m wrong, but to me it looked as if a Sufi religious center near ground zero would be more likely to be a terrorism target than a terrorism rallying point.

   Another example of confirmation bias is very close to my own heart: The way lawyers and their clients always seem to be more sensitive to information going in their favor, than to information pointing the other way. The result is a fundamental inefficiency in how legal disputes are settled. My personal estimate is that at least 75% of lawyers’ incomes are derived from this factor alone, but then again, I’m biased.

*    “Base rate neglect” or “Base rate fallacy” is the tendency to base judgments on specifics, ignoring general statistical information because that’s more abstract and hard to relate to. This is why some people anchor their judgements on Muslims in what they see on TV (terrorism, repression of women), and don’t bother to find out how many Muslims are actually sensible, peace-loving, flexible-minded and hard-working.

*    The “Bandwagon effect” is another kind of cognitive bias, that occurs when we don’t bother to form all our ideas from scratch, when other people seem to have done the work for us. This is a huge problem in some circumstances - and a huge source of efficiency in others.

*    The “Availability cascade” is a self-reinforcing process in which a collective belief gains more and more plausibility through its increasing repetition in public discourse. "Repeat something long enough and it will become true". What is “available” in memory gets the appearance of being more likely, and as we all know, our memories are biased toward vivid, unusual, or emotionally charged examples.

I have printed a list of cognitive biases in an attachment here, and encourage you to read them at home. It’s an interesting list.

Keith Stanovich sees these biases, which are all part of our default mode of operation, as failure to operate rationally. It’s easy to agree with him on this. In every instance, it is possible to say that we would do better if we were able to eliminate the bias and the mental shortcuts that lie behind it.

On the other hand, I’m also tempted to see these cognitive biases as examples of how the human brain needs to function, if it is to function at all. It’s all very well to know exactly what “sand” is, but sometimes we just have to throw it in the eyes of the attacking tiger and get on with our lives. The reason is that our highest level of rational consciousness, that Stanovich calls “type 2 reasoning”, consumes a lot of resources. If we try to attain the highest possible level of rationality in all aspects of life, we’ll get to be right, but we won’t get to be much else.

There’s also the problem of focus when trying to engage in “type 2" fully conscious and rational reasoning. Our highest level of attention is very much like a ship’s radar: It can only look in one direction at a time. With the first naval radar sets, the captain of a ship actually had to steer his ship in a full circle, if he wanted to scan the whole horizon. (That was how British naval forces discovered the battleship “Bismarck” and the heavy cruiser “Prinz Eugen” in the Denmark Strait on May 24, 1941). Later radar sets were set up with revolving antennae, so that the single beam could scan the whole 360 degrees of the horizon every 5 seconds or so, giving equal attention to everything.

If our human system of attention regulation had been set up in this manner, making us pay equal amounts of attention to everything, I doubt that we’d ever have gotten out of the primordial ooze. The cognitive biases occur because we have no choice: We’ll be lucky if we can compensate for 1 or 2 of them at a time.

- o 0 o -

I said before that every task that the brain can delegate to a lower level of consciousness, will be delegated, and to the lowest possible level. My second insight is that this seems to explain why Training is so much more powerful than Learning.

* “Learning” is all about understanding and memorizing facts and rules. It’s an incredibly powerful tool. “Learning” is powerful because it’s about deepening our your understanding of why we should or shouldn’t do things, like point a sextant to the sun or eat less sugar. Without learning in this sense, we’d probably still be stuck in the stone age.

* “Training” is all creating sub-conscious dispositions to do one thing rather than another. It’s known as behaviour training, shaping, and a host of other names. Well-known examples are Ivan Pavlov and his drooling dogs, B.F. Skinner and superstitious pigeons, and smiling dolphins jumping high in the air at our marine parks.

If training and learning contradict each other, the thing you’re trained to do (or think) will usually win. The reason, I believe, is that training operates at a lower level of consciousness, and tends to determine our actions long before we’ve had time to think them over. It makes us want to do things, not just because there might be a bucket of fish (or praise or ice cream) at the end of the game, but because the action has come to feel natural for us. It feels good. It’s become part of what we consider “who we are”, rather than just “what we do”. And once we’re there, it’s usually easy to justify in an apparently rational manner rationally what we want to do.

- o 0 o -

My third insight is a feeling that I can now explain God rationally, and that God doesn’t need to exist, ... but I can’t always replace him with pure rationality.

The question about God’s existence can be made pretty simple. As I said before, the brain will always try to use the simplest and sketchiest model of the world, that it can get away with. Can you imagine a simpler model than “God”, for how the Earth and the Universe came to be? I can’t, and it’s a model that satisfied the needs of all our early ancestors. Can you imagine a simpler source of ultimate authority than “God”, behind the rules we try to make each other follow? I can’t.

When I look at God from that angle, it doesn’t seem matter any more whether “he” exists or not. All that matters is whether the concept makes it easier for us to operate at the level of accuracy that’s needed at the moment.

Finding a better explanation than “God” is easy, when we’re talking about the Creation of the Universe, but difficult - and maybe unwise - when we’re looking at “him” as the ultimate source of moral authority. Rational analysis is slow and cumbersome. It’s narrow in focus. It’s at constant risk for irrational cognitive bias. If the Police and our human Rationality were to be our only bulwarks against moral transgressions, I think we’d be worse off than we are today. It may be irrational bo believe in the Wrath of God and Eternal Damnation, but in times of great temptation, rationality is usually playing second fiddle anyway. In fact, research shows that when we have enough stress hormones in our systems, the prefrontal cortex starts to shut down, or get subdued. In a crisis, we're not meant to be rational. We're meant to go on autopilot.

This is not to say that I want to start scaring little children out of their wits again, about how they’ll burn in hell if they don’t do as we say. I’m saying that whatever we bring up to fill the void when God goes out the window, needs to be simple, powerful, and capable of acting directly on an irrational mind.

This posting was written with the help of Ilana Bram.

Logic

2011-02-21T23:25:00.000-08:00

Logic is like a sewer: What you get out of it depends on what you put into it.

It's great for some tasks, like getting rid of garbage. But when you actually have to wade out into the pool, and start sorting carefully between garbage and non-garbage, it can be worse than useless: A blind that covers the subjective nature of of our priorities, and the ambiguity of the words that make up the premises.

Interesting Correlations

2011-02-09T00:48:00.000-08:00

Ilana pointed me to this article from OKCUPID, because a friend of hers had crunched the numbers.

The Best Questions For A First Date

I was fascinated, particularly by some of the corellations towards the end.

What's it most important for potential partners in a couple to agree on?
The top 3 user-rated match questions are

"Is God imporant in your life?"

"Is sex the most important part of a relationship?"

"Does smoking disgust you?"

However, in 85% of the couples formed with the help of OKCUPID, people had diverging answers to one or more on their answers to these questions. On the other hand, a whopping 32% agree on all of these:

"Wouldn't it be fun to chuck it all and go live on a sailboat?"
"Do you like horror movies?"

"Have you ever traveled round another country alone?"

Are political beliefs corellated with anything else?
On OKCUPID, people have an opportunity to state whether they prefer simplicity over complexty, or vice versa. People who prefer simplicity turn out to be twice as likely to be conservative than liberal, and the other way around.

On questions like

"Should burning your country's flag be illegal?"

"Should the death penalty be abolished?"

"Should the marriage be legal?"

"Should evolution and creationism to be taught side-by-side in schools?"

It turns out that the people who "prefer simplicity" are twice as likely to answer these questions in a "conservative" way. People who "prefer complexity", on the other hand, are twice as likely to lean in the liberal direction.

I'm wondering whether this has anything to do with the S/N difference in the MBTI system. Somebody ought to look into this.

And what about religious beliefs?

One of the questions in the OKCUPID questionnaire is "Do spelling and grammar mistakes annoy you?". It turns outthat people who answer no to this, are twice as likely to be at least moderately religious than people who answered yes. Maybe this is a question of tolerance, i.e. that religious people are more okay with small mistakes than other people.

However, the article also looks into another possibility, expressed by this graph that I let speak for itself:

More about irrationality

2011-01-24T06:56:00.000-08:00

Hi,

Today's post is about a piece of writing that I don't really recommend: A report from the French Food Safety Agency called

Efficacy and safety of gluten-free and casein-free diets proposed in children presenting with pervasive developmental disorders (autism and related syndromes)

This report is a splendid example of irrational "scientific" thinking: Intelligent people following what they consider good rules, and ending up with a completely ridiculous result. If you take the logic of the of this report seriously, it would be wrong of health care personell to give mouth-to-mouth first aid to victims of drowning today:

a) The method carries with it several risk factors, like blowing air into the patient's stomach, which can cause the patient to vomit and get gastric acid into his airways. The method also carries with it the risk of over-inflation and lung damage, particularly if the patient is a child with low lung capacity. Heart compressions, which are often advocated along with the blowing, carry with them a severe risk of fractured ribs.

b) No double-blind study has yet been done, where drowned patients have been randomly been assigned to the treatment group and placebo group, and where enough care has been taken to keep observers in the dark about what patient is getting mouth-to-mouth treatment and who's been given placebo.

Before I get back to the drowning victims, I'd like to say something about seven distinct types of irrationality that we may be dealing with here.

1) First and foremost, the authors of this report seem to be suffering from a severe case of irrational loss aversion. This factor was first convincingly demonstrated by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. Several studies have shown that the motivating force of a potential loss (like the social awkwardness from being on a diet) is much stronger than a corresponding gain (like recovering from autism). This is sometimes also called the pseudocertainty effect – the tendency to make risk-averse choices if the expected outcome is positive, but make risk-seeking choices to avoid negative outcomes.

* On the one hand, they are taking very seriously a small risk for a modestly negative outcome: "No data are available on growth or nutritional status of autistic children subjected to a gluten-free, casein-free diet. Therefore, it is impossible to contend that such a diet has no harmful effect in the short, medium or long term".

* On the other hand, they are completely disregarding the possibility of a positive outcome.

2) Secondly, it seems safe to guess is that the loss aversion in this case is being reinforced by omission bias – the tendency to judge harmful actions as worse, or less moral, than equally harmful omissions (inactions).

* The alternative they are advising against, requires practical action.

* The alternative that they don't mind, consists of inaction.

3) Thirdly, the way the authors justify their position makes me suspect that they also suffer from the observer expectancy effect – they may have manipulated unconsciously the criteria for what they consider valid, in order to find the result they expected.

* On the one hand, they advise that studies should be assigned a credibility of zero, unless they fulfill certain formal criteria: A control group (autistic children without dietary intervention), random allocation of treatment or placebo, and a double blind protocol. These criteria happen to exclude all evidence for an effect from diet on autism.

* On the other hand, this last study is assigned high credibility, in spite of the fact that the study design is such that it didn't actually test the hypothesis that most parents and supporters believe in. It's as if they'd finally gotten around to doing a double-blind placebo-controlled study of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, ... and were giving the patients 2 inhalations each, without clearing their airways of water first.

4) Fourth, they also seem to have been at risk of falling for the Ambiguity effect - the tendency to avoid options for which missing information makes the probability seem "unknown." I see this as a verision of the Zero-risk bias - the preference for reducing a small risk to zero over a reduction in a larger risk).

* In autism, the total amount of uncertainty will be reduced if nothing is done (although in favour of a truly awful outcome).

5) Fifth, the authors must also have been at risk of Hyperbolic discounting - the risk of having a stronger preference for or against something, the closer to the present the cost or payoff are in time or space.

* In autism, the cost of treatment (financial and in the form of hassle) is certain and immediate, while the benefit is uncertain and several months (years) into the future.

6) Sixth, the authors have also been at risk for the Bandwagon effect – the tendency to do or believe things because many other people do or believe the same. This is related to "groupthink", "herd behavior" and the Semmelweis reflex – the tendency to reject new evidence that contradicts an established paradigm and the Availability cascade - a self-reinforcing process in which a collective belief gains more and more plausibility through its increasing repetition in public discourse (or "repeat something long enough and it will become true").

* No medical authorities have yet had the courage to be the first to make a rational cost-risk-benefit analysis of what this treatment has to offer autistic children.

7) Lastly, it's also possible that the authors (or the authority figures that have created today's medical paradigm in this area) are suffering from Confirmation bias – the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions. This factor will be particularly strong if the preconceptions in question have the power cause severe and irreparable damage.

* In autism, it can be postulated that the medical authorities will be less and less disposed towards changing their policy, the more children that have suffered irreparable brain damage as a result of those policies.

There is probably a strong synergistic interaction between all these kinds of irrationality.

Now, back to the drowning victims. Do I hear voices saying that it's unethical not to treat them with whatever means we have at hand, as long as there's a chance that we might save them?` Thank you very much. That's exactly my point. Why shouldn't the same rule be applied to autistic children? Untreated autism leaves the patient to suffer for a lifetime (irreversible brain damage), along with his parents (burned-out), his siblings (neglected), and the rest of society (stuck with the bill when the patient grows up).

We still have a chance of saving at least some of these children. Why are these people insisting that we don't even try?

- o 0 o -

Before you can say you have a rational solution to the autism-and-diet question, you need to do the math involved in a structured risk analysis. I recommend that everyone who is interested in this issue, start by setting up a risk analysis matrix around at least five risk factors:

1) The patient 's physical growth is retarded because of a well monitored GFCF diet,
2) The patient develops irreversible brain damage, from untreated autism
3) The patient's social life becomes more complicated because of a GFCF diet,
4) The patient's social life becomes more complicated because of autism
5) The patient's parents incur some expense because of the GFCF diet,

They should then assign a probability of 1-100% to each of these factors, under the following alternatives:

a) The patient does not try the diet.
b) The patient tries the diet, has no effect from it, and discontinues it after 6 months.
c) The patient tries the diet, experiences an average *) reduction in symptoms, and continues.
d) The patient tries the diet and recovers completely.

*) The average outcome of dietary experiments is still unknown. Even if it were known, it would be impossible to extrapolate from that figure to what was going to happen to one specific patient. For that patient, the full range of outcomes must still be reckoned with, from nothing to a full recovery. The actual treatment decision must therefore always be based on possibilities, rather than probabilities. Even so, I've attempted to assign a value to this column, based on my best assessment of the total amount of evidence available.

Next, they should assigned a numerical value (for example 1-100) for the importance of each of the problems above, relative to the worst possible outcome in the most serious of the categories, to make them comparable.

Lastly they should multiply probability and importance. The resulting numbers will tell something about how important you consider it is to guard against each of these factors.

My conclusion at the bottom of my personal risk analysis matrix, was that a lifelong diet needed to produce a recovery rate of around 4%, or a reduction in severity of the autistic outcome of the same size order, in order to outweigh the costs. If we take into consideration that patiens who don't benefit from the diet, can discontinue it after 6 months, the figure falls to under 1%.

This is all based on my personal value system, i.e. how I (for example) prioritize a 100% certain loss of social convenience (being able to eat anything in birthday parties) versus a somewhat lower chance of irreversible brain damage.

I'm longing for the day when the Government's medical researchers starts doing this kind of math. When they come clean about their priorities. When they start looking at ALL the available evidence, including the lab reports that show the opoid peptides right there, physically present in the blood and urine ... just because it isn't part of a randomized double-blind placebo controlled crossover study.

And I'm longing for the day when the same people start paying attention to study designs, and start laughing - along with me - of studies that are so badly designed that they can't prove anything - even though they fulfill all those sensible criteria, with randomization and crossover and all.

:-J

IQ and rationality

2011-01-19T01:09:00.000-08:00

I'm reading about the distinction between intelligence and rationality these days:

What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought
by Keith E. Stanovich

There's one aspect of the book that I'd like to comment on so far:

Intelligence has to do with the processing power of the brain. Rationality has to do with how we form our beliefs.

In other (my) words: You don't have to be unintelligent to believe that you're safer with a gun in your house, or that lower taxes are always better. You just have to be irrational.

What do I mean with irrational? It's a lot of things, but an important element is our common tendency to be more impressed by evidence that supports our worldview, than by evidence that contradicts it.

Let's start with the pistols and revolvers. Of course, it's easy to create in our minds a scenario where you're safer with a gun in your house than without it. "You hear an intruder. You have time to find your gun and load it before the intruder finds it. You know how to use it effectively and responsibly, even when your adrenaline is sky high. The intruder is either unarmed or unprepared." And at the end of the story, you are the hero, unhurt, and the intruder is either dead, wounded or (hopefully just) in chains.

The problem is that this scenario is far more appealing than it is likely. Most people are shot by their own family members or by acquaintances, or by themselves. Not by intruders. If you let objective statistics, and not your wishful thinking be your guide, you'll know that having a gun in your house is far more likely to get you or one of your loved ones shot, than to protect them from getting shot.

As for the taxes, of course it's tempting to believe that we get richer, the more of "our" earnings we're allowed to keep. If you let objective statistics be your guide, however, you'll see that the easiest way to get richer is to live in a rich society, and that rich societies on average have higher tax rates. This doesn't prove that higher taxes will make you rich, but it does suggest, at least to me, that that it's pure wishful thinking to imagine that "my" earnings are "mine", and to forget that the opportunity to make so much wasn't a free lunch.

If you sort the lists of countries by GDP (adjusted for purchasing power) and tax rates (as percentages of GDP), the poorest 25 have an average tax rate of 13,6%, and the richest 25 have 37,2%. Coincidence? Hardly.

History is awash with politicians idealists: People whose grandiose, but irrational beliefs caught on with the masses, and ended up creating major disasters. Marx? Lenin? Hitler? I believe that they all belonged to that category.

If you want to comment on this thread, please let the thread be one of dialogue ("yes, and......"), not debate ("no, because...."). One question I'd like your opinions on, is who the 3 most popular politicians or political movements today are, that stand out by the irrationality of their beliefs?

:-J

Top 25 countries by GDP (adjusted by purchasing power)

GDP Tax Country GDP Tax as % of GDP
rank rank
1 151 Luxemb. 57.640 36,40
2 172 Norway 56.050 43,60
3 47 Singap. 49.850 13,00
4 126 USA 46.730 28,20
5 163 Netherl. 40.510 39,50
6 177 Sweden 38.560 49,70
7 170 Austria 38.550 43,40
8 133 Australia 38.210 30,50
9 150 Denmark 37.720 50,00
10 139 Canada 37.590 33,40
11 161 UK 37.360 39,00
12 99 Germany 36.960 40,60
13 175 Belgium 36.520 46,80
14 100 Finland 34.430 43,60
15 171 France 33.980 46,10
16 165 Iceland 33.390 40,40
17 144 Ireland 33.280 34,00
17 122 Japan 33.280 27,40
19 158 Spain 31.630 37,30
20 168 Italy 31.330 42,60
21 93 Greece 28.440 33,50
22 117 Korea S 27.310 26,80
23 154 Israel 27.040 36,80
24 162 Slovenia 26.340 39,30
25 124 Trin.&Tob. 25.100 28,00
26 153 Czech R. 23.610 36,30
27 156 Portugal 22.870 37,00
28 129 Slovakia 21.600 29,50

Bottom 25 countries by GDP

GDP Tax Country GDP Tax as % of GDP
rank rank
156 50 Liberia 290 13,20
155 40 Congo,DR 300 13,20
154 75 Burundi 390 17,40
153 35 Niger 660 11,00
152 19 C.African R 750 7,70
151 92 Malawi 760 20,70
150 27 S.Leone 790 10,50
149 68 Togo 850 15,50
148 52 Mozamb. 880 13,40
147 134 Ethiopia 930 11,60
146 56 Rwanda 1.060 14,10
145 36 Burkina F. 1.170 11,50
144 33 Nepal 1.180 10,90
142 63 Mali 1.190 15,30
142 45 Uganda 1.190 12,60
141 8 Chad 1.230 4,20
140 71 Zambia 1.280 16,10
139 106 Comoros 1.300 12,00
138 26 Gambiae 1.330 18,90
137 42 Tanzania 1.350 12,00
136 166 Ghana 1.480 20,80
135 65 Benin 1.510 15,40
134 83 Kenya 1.570 18,40
133 22 Banglad. 1.580 8,50
132 54 Côte d'Ivoire 1.640 15,30

Source: Wikipedia
Selection: Countries with data in both columns

Bob Herbert's vision of the class war ... and mine

2010-11-27T23:32:00.000-08:00

The NYTIMES columnist Bob Herbert had an article in this morning's online edition entitled

Winning the Class War

Reading this against the background of just having finished Tolstoy's "War and Peace" was fascinating. Herbert describes an American system anno 2010 that is remarkably similar to Russian system anno 1810, in the sense that wealth and power are to a higher and higher degree inherited. Americans anno 2010 don't call themselved "Count" and "Prince", and they no longer feel obliged to take care of and provide for their serfs. Those are the main differences.

Of course I'm exaggerating. Herbert is, too, when he says that "Aristocrats were supposed to be anathema to Americans. Now, while much of the rest of the nation is suffering, they are the only ones who can afford to smile". There's still a middle class out there. Most of it is still gainfully employed, and enjoying the benefit of low interest rates. Most of it has a looooong way to fall before it hits the living standards of the 1950s, and even back then, they could afford to smile.

The problem, as I see it, is that a return to the affluence of the 1950s (relative to the rest of the world back then) would leave 75% of us unemployed today ... and that we have no mechanism for taking care of the unemployed. The problem isn't the upper class that Herbert is complaining about, but that the economic contraction is creating a rapidly expanding new underclass: People who don't have what it takes to compete for the jobs that will be left in tomorrow's economy.

The best that this underclass can hope for, seems to be to compete on equal terms with unskilled workers in China. Except they can't even hope for that, since the cost of merely staying alive in the US, is so much higher than it is in China. Put a big enough underclass of this type into any society, and let its desperation start spreading upwards, and you have a recipe for disaster.

Karl Marx saw this problem. His recipe for solving it was a disaster in its own right, but the economic force that he described, is still very real: Unless we do something to contain them, the upper classes are going to grab more and more and more, until almost everybody else is left in poverty.

As long as we had the Soviet Union as a credible alternative, we did what was necessary to contain those upper classes. Now that utopian socialism is dead, the American economic and social system is heading full speed down the same old drain as before. When I was reading Tolstoy, what I kept seeing in my inner eye was the Russian nobility laying the noose of history around its own neck.

Fascism is also dead, for the time being. That leaves only two of the alternatives standing, that naive political idealists clung to at the end of the 1800s: Anarchism (represented today by the "Tea Party Movement") and Religious Fundamentalism. None of these are going to solve the basic economic or social problem. The only thing we can hope for is a Resurgence of Reason. A New Age of Enlightenment.

It's not going to happen on its own. Is it too late to hope that somebody who understands the true nature of things, will get out and talk to the people in a way that makes them understand the danger, and the power they have to avoid it if they act together?

:-J

Bubbles and busts: An airplane analogy

2010-11-08T06:53:00.000-08:00

This morning's reading of Rob Alderman's blog made me think of another analogy of the economy.

Your airplane analogy is good, but I think it can be taken further. The primary problem isn’t turbulence, but that the plane has developed an undersized engine (agricultural and industrial sector) and an oversized passenger compartment (private consumption). A plane like that is only capable of flying slowly, and even slower if it needs to climb.
Every time the stall speed warning has gone off (the economy has slowed down), the Fed has done what every good pilot would have done. It has put the plane into a dive, by adding more money to the system. This makes the plane (economy) go faster, at the expense of altitude. As long as we were sure we were high up, higher than anybody else, this didn’t seem to matter. We stayed focused at airspeed (GNP), not altimeter (national debt).

Today, we’re painfully aware that China’s engines are getting stronger and stronger, while ours are due for a major overhaul. That has caused a lot of simple-minded people to go bananas over the way the altimeter is spinning backwards … to the point where they’re willing to pull the stick backwards and jerk the whole thing into a tailspin. If they do, it will be the end of America as we know it.

Every time we’ve piled up more debt, we’ve given power to our creditors: Power that we’ll no longer have to solve our own problems the way they should have been solved in the first place.

Right now, with the stall-speed warnings blaring all around us, I support trying to jump-start the economy once more by putting the plane into yet another dive. This is something we can’t afford to NOT do.

However, the only thing that can get the aircraft back in airworthy condition in the long run is to drop dead weight overboard, focus all remaining engine power on actual propulsion, and put all available manpower and talent to work improving the system.

The idea that freer markets and even lower taxes will solve this spontaneously, is ridiculous. If left to their own devices, most passengers will continue to spend their energy on useless luxury items or personal “profit”. In today’s speculation-driven economy that means buying some more or less useless asset in the hope that someone else will pay more for it another time (=asset price inflation).

We need leadership. We need to stop doing things that don’t work.

When I say dead weight, I mean things that don't solve real problems. Like putting drug offenders in jail, when on the one hand it doesnt't really restrict the supply of drugs, and on the other hand contributes to destabilizing neighbouring countries, and ends up stuffing the pockets of hardned criminals with hundreds of billions of our hard-earned dollars.

:-j

Structure of Excuses By PAUL KRUGMAN

2010-09-28T23:55:00.000-07:00

Structure of Excuses

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Thanks a lot to Paul Krugman for drawing his flawless logic just one notch too far in this article in the NYTIMES online. There's nothing that engages me more as a pupil, than when I see my teacher making a mistake.

How can I use words like "flawless logic" and "mistake" about the same article?

The way I see it, logic has some serious limitations. Unless we're very careful, we tend to end up with statements that are only true because of the definitions we put into our premises. Basically, "1+1=2" is true because "2" is defined as "1+1". I get the same feeling when I see Paul Krugman's statement that (emphasis added by me):

I’ve been looking at what self-proclaimed experts were saying about unemployment during the Great Depression; it was almost identical to what Very Serious People are saying now. Unemployment cannot be brought down rapidly, declared one 1935 analysis, because the work force is “unadaptable and untrained. It cannot respond to the opportunities which industry may offer.” A few years later, a large defense buildup finally provided a fiscal stimulus adequate to the economy’s needs — and suddenly industry was eager to employ those “unadaptable and untrained” workers.

The problem here isn't the logic. It's the way the closed loop of reasoning includes only the premises that point in the desired direction.

I'm not arguing that employment is important. It's critically important for the well-being and coherence of our societies.

I'm not arguing against the stimulus spending either. Without it, the situation would have been catastrophic.

What I'm trying to say is that Paul Krugman is talking completely beside the point when he's trying to teach Republicans about stimulus spending. They know all about it. They just don't want the money to go through the Federal Government. They want the stimulus to come in the form of tax reductions, and not on the Democrats' watch.

The reason we are in a ditch right now, is that the Republicans put the economy on an artificial and completely unsustainable stimulus in the Bush years. This created the structural problems that Krugman was wise enough to write about in his follow-up notes: Too many jobs in sectors where they don't produce enough long-term benefit.

The last thing we need now is more of the same kind of stimulus. We don't need more oversize houses, particularly not in Floria. We don't need more financial wizardry. We don't need more luxury products. There are a lot of builders, electricians, real estate agents and bankers who need to get retrained and put to useful work, like digging up potatoes or building factories that produce things that people need, like cheap, reliable energy that doesn't subsidize terrorist-sponsoring regimes.

One of today's problems is that we've started to confuse "speculation" and "investment" with each other. We've actually come to the point where people no longer see "speculation" as parasitical behaviour, and where "investment" has become synonymous with buying something in the hope that someone will pay more for it tomorrow. No wonder why people have stopped "investing": We already have massive deflation in certain sectors of the economy. That means that other people are likely to pay less for your assets tomorrow, not more. And who cares about investments in the old-fashioned sense of the word any more?

We all need to care.

Yes: We could solve the unemployment problem immediately by starting another World War. What I'm trying to say is that there must be cheaper ways of solving the problem. Like creating new rules that discourage private waste and speculation (i.e. higher taxes), while encouraging real investments and ensuring an adequate level of spending on the things we need to spend money on.

About the long overdue death of an economic theory

2010-08-01T21:57:00.000-07:00

Four Deformations of the Apocalypse

By DAVID STOCKMAN

Published: July 31, 2010

This article hit the top of the "most popular" list in the New York Times Online this morning, and it's easy to see why: Finally a compact and easy-to-understand overview of what's gone wrong with the American economy.

Stockman points out four ideas that have worked together, in a kind of synergy, to undermine our position. Together, they have created a false impression of prosperity that has enticed us to go further and further down the garden path into economic la-la land.

Sixty years ago, the people who lived in our house had to start laundry day by harnessing the horse and hitching it up to the wagon. Then they'd have to drive their laundry down to the river, stoke up the wood-fired boiler on the beach, do their laundry by hand, rinse it in the river, drive home, unhitch the horse and feed it, and then hang up the laundry to dry. That's the kind of effort it took to create modern, civilized society.

One of our problems today is that other people are still willing to work just as hard, for similar rewards. For a while, they've been content to be our servants, supplying us with almost everything we've wanted while we ran through our capital. It's going to be really interesting to see what happens in a generation or two, when they've saved some of what we've squandered, and invested enough of it in improved local infrastructure and education.

:-J

Afghanistan

2010-07-26T21:47:00.000-07:00

View Is Bleaker Than Official Portrayal of War in Afghanistan

This article in the NYTIMES online by C. J. Chivers, Carlotta Gall, Andrew W. Lehren, Mark Mazzetti, Jane Perlez, and Eric Schmitt, with contributions from Jacob Harris and Alan McLean takes as its starting point the recent publication, through Wikileaks, of thousands of classified documents about the ongoing military operations in Afghanistan.

The article is unpleasant reading. It details, in example after example, how difficult it is to stabilize a country that doesn't seem to have any interest in stabilizing itself.

My reflections:

1) This is not about Afghanistan, but about every single nation in the world that is falling apart because it can't feed its population at a living standard they're willing to accept. While Islam is certainly adding flavour to the problem, the underlying problem is that people are fighting for control over resources. Afghanistan is too hot and too dry, and its population is too hungry. We either have to feed them or fight them.

2) The conflict is being shaped not so much by Islam, but by a lethal triangle of Western inventions. The first corner of the triangle is dirt cheap, mass-produced high-tech weaponry and explosives. The second is dirt cheap transportation. The third is dirt cheap communications. It's the combination of all three that enables modern insurgents to do things today that only national armies could do in the past.

Add to that, if you like, that our modern, industrial agriculture has pushed food prices so low down, that there's no way that Afghanistan can make a decent living from growing food for the world market.

3) The driving force behind the current conflict isn't so much Islam, as the money that the Afghans can manage to suck out of Western nations, in exchange for heroin. Until we learn to take care of our own heroin addicts, the Afghans are going to keep doing it for us.

4) Armies in a war are a little like businesses in a market place: If all else is equal, victory will go to the party with the lowest operating costs. In Afghanistan, our operating costs per shot fired are simply enormous, compared with what the enemy has to pay.

That much being said, all other things are of course not equal. Our weapons are more sophisticated, and we have more of them. The insurgents, on the other hand, can hide in the civilian population, and is free to torture and murder anyone they suspect of collaborating with us.

- o 0 o -

I'm left with a strong impression that the war in Afghanistan can't be won, because I can't imagine how anyone can manage to stabilize a place like that. Their education level is low. They have no fisheries. There's very little industry. It's too hot and too dry, and the soils probably way too saline for their agriculture to have any hope of competing with ours. There's no reliable civilian infrastructure. And yet, as long as there's a western market for expensive heroin, the place is a bubbling cauldron of money. This place is going to continue to mean TROUBLE.

:-J

"Gluten free" isn't the same as gluten free

2010-07-20T01:40:00.000-07:00

"Gluten-free" foods may be contaminated

This article by Genevra Pittma brings our attention to a new study of supposedly naturally gluten free products. Unfortunately, many of these appear to contain gluten after all.

Researchers analyzed 22 naturally gluten-free grains, seeds, and flours off supermarket shelves. They tested the amount of gluten in those products against a proposed Food and Drug Administration limit for any product labeled gluten-free, 20 parts contaminant per million parts product.

Seven of the 22 products wouldn't pass the FDA's gluten-free test - and one product, a type of soy flour, had a gluten content of almost 3,000 parts per million, the authors found. Other products from the sample that weren't truly gluten-free included millet flour and grain, buckwheat flour, and sorghum flour.

My reflections: This study illustrates one possible reason why children on a GFCF diet don't improve more than they do: Gullible researchers think the children are on a Gluten Free diet, while they are, in reality, only on a "Gluten Free" diet.

:-J

Why argumements escalate

2010-07-16T00:46:00.000-07:00

How facts backfire

One of the most thankless jobs a lawyer can take on, is to try to dampen, rather than escalate a conflict. This article by Joe Keohane sheds some light on why this is so.

Instead of giving you an explanation or a summary, I'll give you a few selected quotes.

"New research, published in the journal Political Behavior last month, suggests that once those facts — or “facts” — are internalized, they are very difficult to budge. In 2005, amid the strident calls for better media fact-checking in the wake of the Iraq war, Michigan’s Nyhan and a colleague devised an experiment in which participants were given mock news stories, each of which contained a provably false, though nonetheless widespread, claim made by a political figure: that there were WMDs found in Iraq (there weren’t), that the Bush tax cuts increased government revenues (revenues actually fell), and that the Bush administration imposed a total ban on stem cell research (only certain federal funding was restricted). Nyhan inserted a clear, direct correction after each piece of misinformation, and then measured the study participants to see if the correction took.

For the most part, it didn’t. The participants who self-identified as conservative believed the misinformation on WMD and taxes even more strongly after being given the correction. With those two issues, the more strongly the participant cared about the topic — a factor known as salience — the stronger the backfire."

"... people who were given a self-affirmation exercise were more likely to consider new information than people who had not. In other words, if you feel good about yourself, you’ll listen — and if you feel insecure or threatened, you won’t. This would also explain why demagogues benefit from keeping people agitated. The more threatened people feel, the less likely they are to listen to dissenting opinions, and the more easily controlled they are."

"A 2006 study by Charles Taber and Milton Lodge at Stony Brook University showed that politically sophisticated thinkers were even less open to new information than less sophisticated types. These people may be factually right about 90 percent of things, but their confidence makes it nearly impossible to correct the 10 percent on which they’re totally wrong. Taber and Lodge found this alarming, because engaged, sophisticated thinkers are “the very folks on whom democratic theory relies most heavily.”"

"... relentless self-questioning, as centuries of philosophers have shown, can be exhausting. Our brains are designed to create cognitive shortcuts — inference, intuition, and so forth — to avoid precisely that sort of discomfort while coping with the rush of information we receive on a daily basis. Without those shortcuts, few things would ever get done. Unfortunately, with them, we’re easily suckered by political falsehoods."

My reflections: This article explains all the main reasons why arguments tend to be self-reinforcing. The sentence "The more threatened people feel, the less likely they are to listen to dissenting opinions, and the more easily controlled they are" echoes particularly strongly with me. The more important it is for us to resolve a conflict, for example with someone we love and feel dependent on, the harder it is to do it. Our ability to catch our own mistakes are always at the weakest, when we need them the most.

:-J

The dangers of sitting

2010-07-14T22:17:00.000-07:00

The Men Who Stare at Screens

This article in the NYTIMES by Gretchen Reynolds brought the insight that sitting too much involves dangers that can not be undone by bouts of exercise.

I'm SO glad I never got a TV.

:-J

News about the human microbiome

2010-07-14T21:54:00.000-07:00

How Microbes Defend and Define Us

This article from the New York Times, by Carl Zimmer, should be obligatory reading for anybody who wants to characterize bacteriae as either good or bad.

Some quotes:

"Dr. Khoruts mixed a small sample of her husband’s stool with saline solution and delivered it into her colon. Writing in the Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology last month, Dr. Khoruts and his colleagues reported that her diarrhea vanished in a day. Her Clostridium difficile infection disappeared as well and has not returned since. "

"In the mouth alone, Dr. Relman estimates, there are between 500 and 1,000 species. “It hasn’t reached a plateau yet: the more people you look at, the more species you get,” he said. The mouth in turn is divided up into smaller ecosystems, like the tongue, the gums, the teeth. Each tooth—and even each side of each tooth—has a different combination of species. "

"Scientists are even discovering ecosystems in our bodies where they weren’t supposed to exist. Lungs have traditionally been considered to be sterile because microbiologists have never been able to rear microbes from them. A team of scientists at Imperial College London recently went hunting for DNA instead. Analyzing lung samples from healthy volunteers, they discovered 128 species of bacteria. Every square centimeter of our lungs is home to 2,000 microbes. "

" Out of the 500 to 1,000 species of microbes identified in people’s mouths, for example, only about 100 to 200 live in any one person’s mouth at any given moment. Only 13 percent of the species on two people’s hands are the same. Only 17 percent of the species living on one person’s left hand also live on the right one. "

"One of those tasks is breaking down complex plant molecules. “We have a pathetic number of enzymes encoded in the human genome, whereas microbes have a large arsenal, ...”

"The Imperial College team that discovered microbes in the lungs, for example, also discovered that people with asthma have a different collection of microbes than healthy people. Obese people also have a different set of species in their guts than people of normal weight."

My reflection: It's going to take a LONG time before reductive science manages to make sense of the interactions between all these bacteriae and ourselves. In the mean time, we'd better approach the subject with some humility. Remember how the polio epidemic got started? It turned out that the main cause was cleanliness: People were meeting a new microbe later in life than they used to.

:-J

Reflections on Risk

2010-05-30T00:48:00.001-07:00

This morning, I ran the numbers on traffic fatalities in the US and Norway.

The background was a Charles Krauthammer's article in the Washington Post, "A disaster with many fathers", where he insinuates that there would be fewer oil spills if the oil companies were allowed easier access to other potential oil fields, in shallower water. To me, that's like saying that there would be fewer traffic accidents if roads were better and cars were cheaper, so drivers could afford to upgrade to newer, safer models.

This hypothesis is testable. America, for example, has fantastically good roads, compared to Norway. Their fleet of cars is also much younger, thanks to the fact that cars cost next to nothing there.

Does this lead to fewer accidents? Apparently not. The US has 2,4-2,6 times more traffic related fatalities per inhabitant per year.

My first idea when I saw this number, must that it must be due to Americans driving more than Norwegians. Wouldn't better roads lead to more driving and then to more accidents? If so, that would be bad for Charles Krauthammer, since it would imply that better access to more oil fields would simply result in more drilling and more oil spills.

When I checked the numbers, it turned out that Americans do indeed drive more than Norwegians, but only enough to explain 15% of the effect.

My wife suggested that the remaining 85% difference might be due to higher fines and stricter law enforcement in Norway. It's true that the fines for speeding are higher here, but the enforcement is actually laxer: In Norway I see policemen doing speed checks once or twice a year, and in America I see them several times a day when I'm doing long road trips.

My conclusion is that the remaining 85% of the difference must be due to the fact that Americn drivers (just like Norwegians) compensate for better roads and cars by adapting their driving style to the perceived level of risk they're comfortable with, and that Americans are collectively less risk-averse than Norwegians.

There's no reason that Americans in general would behave more responsibly in boardrooms than behind steering-wheels. What we really, really need to do, is to create systems of governance in the widest sense, that keep the risktakers out of positions where we can't afford to have them. Like in certain parts of the banking system, or behind automatic weapons. We need to limit their freedom, in order to preserve our own opportunities.

Why aren't Americans more risk-averse? Is it because America is populated by the descendants of people who preferred the risk of the great unknown, to the certainty of what they had at home? If so, it's strange to see how strong the effect is, and just how Kraut-headed (sorry, but that pun was irresistible) Charles Krauthammer is in his belief.

How far does the Tea Party Movement want to go?

2010-05-30T00:06:00.000-07:00

I've been having a discussion with some of my friends lately about the "Tea Party" movement, and their idea that we should promote individual freedom whenever we can. This is an intensely political question. Is there an easy answer anywhere? The "Tea Party" followers seem to think that there is.

Last night, I read Bob Herbert's article "An Unnatural Disaster" about the oil spill in the Gulf. It struck me immediately that this is an opportunity to discuss the balance between freedom and opportunity in our society: The freedom of for example BP to take risks, versus the opportunities of practically everyone else in the regional ecosystem.

This morning, I was offered Charles Krauthammer's article "A disaster with many fathers" as an alternative opinion the matter. I read it with great interest.

Both articles suffer from the same weakness: They've been written to please the demographic that already subscribes to each columnist's way of thinking. It's as if both of them know that there's thin ice out there in the middle of the lake, and none of them wants to go anywhere near it.

Bob Herbert's take on the issue, is to have more Government Control. I'm not sure that's the only answer. Government employees aren't always competent, and they can sometimes be bribed. My favourite book on the subject is Nevil Shute's autobiographical "Slide Rule", that details why the "capitalist" airship R100 flew as it should, while the government-built R101 went up in flames and killed 48 people.

Charles Krauthammer's views puzzle me more. He seems to be insinuating that the Deepwater Horizon accident was caused by drilling in unusually deep water, and that we'd all be safer if the oil companies were allowed to drill in more locations in shallow water. That is pure nonsense.

The Deepwater Horizon has precious little to do with the amount of water between the rig and the wellhead on the ocean floor, and everything to do with BP's willingness to take risks. At that critical moment in time, just before the well blew out, BP was comfortable with keeping only two cement plugs and a potentially compromised blowout preventer between themselves and disaster.

* They continued the drilling,in spite of the fact that the rubber seal in the blowout preventer was compromised (chunks of rubber were coming up),

* They continued with the drilling in spite of the fact that one of the actuators (there were two) for the preventer wasn't working properly, and

* They started replacing the heavy drilling mud with lighter salt water before placing the third and final cement plug that was supposed to seal the well.

(Source: "60 minutes" interview with surviving crew member and experts on offshore drilling safety).

This was a bit like making love with only two condoms and the ragged remains of a third, when they knew that the baby, if they sired one, was going to be another Adolf Hitler.

I've heard Bob Herbert described is a leftist. That's weird, seen from the European perspective. A real leftist would have argued that the government should not only be the one to decide how many condoms to use: It should also own the whole drilling operation. That's where I've always felt that leftists are delusional.

Krauthammer, on the other hand, is just as delusional if he thinks that oil companies will start behaving responsibly just as soon as they're allowed to drill in shallower water: That's almost like arguing that teenage boys will be less likely to lose their heads when girls have shorter skirts. Some boys will take reasonable precautions. Others won't, and that's how it is.

The question that ought to be discussed at the "Tea Party" is how to keep the latter out of the boardrooms, (or for instance how easy their access to handguns should be, to go off on a related tangent).

My view is that we need systems of governance that keep business (and not only people) in check, because businesses are led by people, and because some of them (like banks and oil companies) are capable of causing truly horrendous damage. However, even small businesses can cause damage that is serious for smaller communities, and since some businesses are led by idiots and other by crooks, there's no exempt them from oversight just because they're small.

What worries me about the "Tea Party" movement is that I only see them arguing one side of the equation: Towards fewer rules and less regulation. That's why I see them as anarchists and fundamentalists, more than right-wing extremists. What I'm wondering is: How far do they actually want to go? Do they think that the current oil spill in the Gulf is the result of an acceptable risk? Do they concede that society needs any safeguards at all against undue risk-taking or outright criminal behaviour on the part of businessmen and corporations? Where, in all the fogbank, do they want to draw the limits?

I agree with them that a simplified society with fewer rules is attractive. As a lawyer I have often despaired over the naive belief that some politicians have, that all problems can be solved if we only get enough rules. On the other hand, I haven't seen a single empirical study indicating that the societies that have the lowest number of rules, or the least amount of government oversight are the ones that function best.

I'm curious about all my friends' views on this.

:-J

The Sandra Bullock Trade

2010-03-30T10:05:00.000-07:00

The Sandra Bullock Trade

By David Brooks, published as an Op-Ed article in the New York Times on March 29, 2010

In this article, David Brooks uses the recent media storm around Sandra Bullock as an angle on the age-old problem of happiness. Apparently, Bullock's professional life has just gone through the roof, with an Academy Award, at roughly the same time that her marriage went down the drain.

So, what's more important in life: A good income or a happy marriage? There's a lot of research on this topic now, and the message I got from Brooks's article is that if you're planning to get happy by making money, rather than by being happily married, you need to aim for at least $100.000 extra per year.

Research has, in other words, confirmed the story of the romantic movies and novels: You gain more happiness by marrying for love, than by marrying for money.

Towards the end of the article, Brooks has a paragraph that I think is important, and which don't want to compress:

"Most people vastly overestimate the extent to which more money would improve our lives. Most schools and colleges spend too much time preparing students for careers and not enough preparing them to make social decisions. Most governments release a ton of data on economic trends but not enough on trust and other social conditions. In short, modern societies have developed vast institutions oriented around the things that are easy to count, not around the things that matter most. They have an affinity for material concerns and a primordial fear of moral and social ones."

Amen
:-J

Another look at the Danish study of the MMR vaccine and autism

2010-03-12T21:36:00.000-08:00

The famous Danish study comparing the vaccination and autism rates of Danish children born between 1991 with 1998, has been in the news again lately. The reason is that one of the key witnesses for the defense of the MMR vaccine has gone missing along with approximately 10 million DKK (2 mill USD) of other people's money.

This morning, I took a closer look at both the study and Ulf Brånell's analysis of it. Brånell's conclusion starts out soundly enough:

"All the sources of error identified in the study distort it in the same direction: obscuring the role of the MMR vaccine and exonerating it from any suspicion that it may cause autism. This strongly indicates deliberate fraud".

I can follow him all the way here. The study authors have designed their study so that it counts vaccinated children too young to be diagnosed with autism, as non-autistic. What kind of proof is that? To me, it's proof of either stupidity or dishonesty. Brånell points to four other sources of error as well, all leaning the same way.

Brånell doesn't stop there, however. Here's how his conclusion continues, in a crescendo of improbables:

"The reason is not hard to guess. Most of the authors of the report are medical doctors and it is safe to assume that they are - or have been - ardent pro-vaccinators. By now they should be well aware of the many scientific studies of the injuries caused by vaccines. They will know that there is now an autism epidemic, that only the vaccinated are affected and that autism always occurs after vaccination and not before. In other words the authors of this report are people with blood on their hands, who fear the retribution of parents, whose children they have killed, mutilated and rendered autistic. People who are prepared to kill and injure helpless children for money will hardly hesitate to lie and cheat if it will keep them out of jail and enable them to avoid paying compensation to their victims. This report is a desperate and despicable attempt by child abusers to remove the noose that is tightening around their necks. Their report (and this one) belongs in the hands of the prosecutor."

What's going on here?

I believe that the study authors and Ulf Brånell are unwittingly illustrating the same principle, which is that we find what we're looking for, and we don't find the evidence that points the other way. The sad thing is that this process ends up with both sides "preaching to the choir". It drives a wedge between the parties, right at the point where they ought to have been looking for common ground.

If I were to assign a prize for intellectual integrity here, it would still go to Ulf Brånell. At last, he's honest enough to admit that he's guessing and making assumptions based on thin evidence.

The weaknesses of the study are so glaring, that it's hard to understand why anyone ever took it seriously. The conclusion alone should be enough to give it away, when the authors claim to have found "strong evidence against the hypothesis that MMR vaccination causes autism". Really? All that I can see is that they've failed to find evidence for the hypothesis, through a study that looks tailormade for the purpose of not finding it. (Read Brånell's analysis for a full overview of the five most serious weaknesses in the study design)

It's interesting, and also a bit gratifying to see that one of the study authors has now gone missing. 10 mill DKK sounds like a low price to pay for getting such people out of the way.

:-j

No reason to continue PSA screening

2010-03-12T01:17:00.000-08:00

The Great Prostate Mistake

This article in the NYTIMES, byt Richard J. Ablin (who invented the PSA test) is Recommended Reading for anyone who considers taking a PSA test. The test seems to be a great tool for finding out how big your prostate is, but that's about it.

The problem is that a big prostate doesn't necessarily mean you have a malignant growth, and vice versa. You can have a small prostate with a malignant cancer in it, and score negative, or a big prostate that scores positive, but is completely harmless (unless, maybe, you're planning to live to 150).

The high number of false positives means that the only way of reacting to it that will save lives, will have the cost of placing 50 times as many at high risk for incontinence and/or impotence.

My choice: Accept that life is dangerous, that it's going to end, and that the time to enjoy it (while still preparing for the foreseeable future) is NOW.

:-j

Mercury in High Fructose Corn Syrup

2010-03-10T23:25:00.000-08:00

Mercury from chlor-alkali plants: measured concentrations in food product sugar

Renee Dufault et. al. Environmental Health 2009, 8:2

Abstract

Mercury cell chlor-alkali products are used to produce thousands of other products including food ingredients such as citric acid, sodium benzoate, and high fructose corn syrup. High fructose corn syrup is used in food products to enhance shelf life. A pilot study was conducted to determine if high fructose corn syrup contains mercury, a toxic metal historically used as an anti-microbial. High fructose corn syrup samples were collected from three different manufacturers and analyzed for total mercury. The samples were found to contain levels of mercury ranging from below a detection limit of 0.005 to 0.570 micrograms mercury per gram of high fructose corn syrup. Average daily consumption of high fructose corn syrup is about 50 grams per person in the United States. With respect to total mercury exposure, it may be necessary to account for this source of mercury in the diet of children and sensitive populations.

My interpretation:

This was something of an eye-opener. If we start with a daily dose (50 grams) of HFCS at the upper end of the contamination scale above (0,570 micrograms of mercury per gram), it's enough to

* renter 14 litres ( nearly 4 gallons) of water undrinkable
* 60 pounds of fish inedible

according to the food safety rules.

If we pour a year's consumption of this kind of HFCS on the ground, and it stays there, it would make ten metric tons of soil so toxic that we wouldn't even be allowed to build on it.

Did you know that the average Norwegian corpse already has 10 times more mercury in its blood than is allowed in the drinking water? Dracula beware!

:-J

PS: If you think that the mercury stops in the blood, think again. It's much more concentrated in other parts of the body.

Do Toxins Cause Autism?

2010-03-04T05:22:00.000-08:00

Do Toxins Cause Autism?

Nicholas D. Kristof asked this question in the New York Times the other day.

Here's the answer I sent him:

Dear Mr. Kristof,

Thank you for bringing up the autism/toxicity question. You are closer to the truth than you may have imagined. An example that you didn't mention, is the Somalis: They have one of the highest autism rates in the world - but not at home. It’s only after they come to America.

The problem is huge. Its financial implications are already crushing the families who are raising these children. In the future it will be just as crushing for America. These children are not going to pay any taxes, they’re going to need a lot of care, and they’re not going to die young. In that perspective, one autistic child can equal at least 25 retiring baby-boomers for the long-term financial health of our societies.

This is a problem that hits 5 times more boys than girls. By a lucky coincidence, it takes 5 (female) caregivers to look after my son round the clock. That’s six people out of the productive workforce for 1 case of autism, not counting me ... and I’m TIRED.

We’re starting to look at autism rates of 1%, up from 0,05% when my son was diagnosed.

This is a tsunami story. The wave is already out there. It’s gainging force. New children are being added to it every day. Its first tendrils have already started creeping up the beach, towards health bueraucrats that are sitting with their heads in the sand, thinking that as long as parents are taking care of the children, they somehow don't count in the national equation. What are they going to do when the full force of the wave hits? Divert 5% of the national workforce to take care of the 1% that have been sacrificed on the altar of cheap products and scientific shortcuts?

We’re also looking at a Semmelweiss story. You write in your article that "... fears that vaccinations cause autism — a theory that has now been discredited..." I suggest you study this further.

* Our health authorities have spent enormous amounts of energy on discrediting people who reported what they saw, and asked a question that had to be asked.

* Our authorities have so far only managed to camouflage the problem, with poorly designed statistical studies (unless the point of the studies was not to investigate, but to discredit).

* Meanwhile, other scientists have repeatedly replicated the original findings, and the question is still open: Can we add autism to the list of possible side effects of these vaccines?

* However, the witch-hunt against the scientists who asked the question first, is making everybody else a little jittery about repeating it in public.

All vaccines are not safe for everybody. That's why we have compensation systems. By pretending that they are safer than they are, i.e. that autism is the one side effect that vaccines can't possibly have, even in sensitive individuals with a high toxic load, our health authorities have exposed that their reactions are based on a belief system rather than science. Most people don’t see this yet. When they do, we’re going to need other people in charge who can restore the confidence in the vaccine schedule that it deserves, with proper scientific backing, instead of the present mess.

Another part of this tragedy, now that I’m at it, is that autism can actually be treated if we start early enough, and take into account what we already understand about the underlying pathologies. The chief difference between my son (lifetime need for round-the-clock care) and my stepson (getting good grades in high school, socially integrated and on track to becoming a good taxpayer) is not the diagnosis nor the symptoms nor the treatment they received, but the fact that my stepson received that treatment at 21 months, while my son was 8 years old.

Solving the autism problem will be expensive, because it will involve retiring some products that are cheap and otherwise useful. Not solving it, and not using what we know about treatments, already amounts to a national disaster.

Thank you for your help!
Jorgen Klaveness

The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning

2010-03-03T21:40:00.000-08:00

James Lovelock has a problem with populist consensus climate science, and the way it's being used politically. He is deeply concerned that we're wasting our efforts on misguided attempts to "save the planet", when the planet's most certainly going take care of itself, in one way or another. What we need to do, is to save ourselves.

Geological history shows that the earth can exist in several relatively stable states with rapid transitions from one to the other. Lovelock does a good job of describing some of the negative feedback loops that stabilize these states. He also describes, in chilling detail, some of the positive feedback loops that can replace them, and cause the sudden transitions.

Lovelock argues convincingly that the conventional wisdom of today is based on oversimplifications rooted in atmospheric physics. His main theme is that things are already wildly out of control - OUR control, that is - and that major climate change is already inevitable. He uses the image of the drink that stays cold in a hot room as long as it's got an ice cube in it. There are several "ice cubes" in our global climate drink. Ice caps that continue, for a while, to reflect sunlight and absorb energy. Oceans that continue, for a while, to mix cold and warm water. Populations of algae, that help keep the world cool as long as temperatures remain under certain thresholds, but not a minute longer. Forests, that regulate their own temperature through controlled evaporation, but will stop doing so when drought spreads.

Lovelock also argues convincingly that many of the steps now proposed to solve the problem, would have the immediate effect of making it much worse. One example is that if we stop burning coal, we'll reduce the amount of atmospheric dust that's currently keeping a lot of the radiation out.

This book won't have the power to save the world as we know it. Acccording to Lovelock, that's far too late, anyway. However, it looks like a very good beginning for independent thinkers who want to understand the future, and how to prepare themselves and their children for it.

I've made up my mind to reread this book, starting next week, and I'll bringe a couple of pens and highlighters to the next sitting. I'll write more about it when I'm done.

A summary of this morning's reading

2010-03-02T21:38:00.000-08:00

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/rogoff64/English
On how artificial intelligence is poised to reach "escape velocity" and have the same kind of transformational effect on the world economy as has had the emergence of China and India.

My reflection: The best part of this is that it might make top-level university education more affordable for everybody. The worst is a question the author doesn't even ask: Such a leap in productivity will involve losses as well as gains. Who will lose, and who will gain? What if this reinforces the present trend, where low-skilled workers lose more and more of their opportunities? What's going to happen to the cohesion of our societies? Aren't they already fragmented to the point where large blocks of the inner-city populations are feeling worse than useless?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/health/02case.html?em
On how old age isn't what young people think.

My reflection: All the more reason to keep going for those walks together.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/health/02baby.html?em
On preventing hearing loss in children - and how important it is to start when they're young.

My reflection: The article isn't that important, but it illustrates something: There's a big change going on here. In my parents' generation, and the one before, safety margins were thin. Knowing how dangerous life was, people they gave their children less freedom. Today we actually have a much better starting-point for steering our children in the right directions, but our culture has changed, and children are given much wider latitude for self-destructive behaviour.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/science/02evo.html?em
On how human culture affects evolutionary changes in human beings. The article focuses on how closeness to dairy animals cause the emergence of genes for handling lactose.

My reflection: This slots nicely in with Nicholas Kristof's article from a few days ago, so I sent the author this letter:

Thank you for "Human Culture, an Evolutionary Force". Since you're interested in the subject, I'd like to point to one more important example: The general rise in the toxic load around us.

Nicholas Kristof pointed out a few days ago, in an excellent article, how this rise may be the driving force behind the current autism epidemic. (The incidence of autism has gone up by a factor of 20 in the last 25 years). Mr. Kristof is absolutely correct in this. An example he didn't mention is the Somalis: Somali immigrants have one of the highest autism rates in the USA, while autism is virtually unknown in Somalia. It's the change in the environment that does it.

The implication for your subject is: Autistic individuals don't reproduce. They may live just as long as other people, but they are not desirable mates, and they wouldn't be good at caring for their offspring.

So, what's going on right now is that we're chopping off an entire branch of the human genetic tree: We're in the process of eliminating the genetic material that can't handle the modern toxic load.

Yours sincerely
Jørgen Klaveness
Autism Dad / Attorney / Fitness Entrepreneur
Norway

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/opinion/02brooks.html?em
David Brooks draws a line from Norway's recent success in the Winter Olympics, back to a wartime survival story. His conclusion is that "There is also an interesting form of social capital on display. It’s a mixture of softness and hardness. Baalsrud was kept alive thanks to a serial outpouring of love and nurturing. At the same time, he and his rescuers displayed an unbelievable level of hardheaded toughness and resilience. That’s a cultural cocktail bound to produce achievement in many spheres".

My reflection: David Brooks is probably jumping to conclusions, but I was still deeply touched by his story, deeply grateful that I was born here, and worried that today's affluence is going to destroy the spirit that he describes. Every improvement in the human condition will also produce a hidden loss.

:-J
Jørgen