Avoid News

March 9th, 2011

Avoid News is a good rant against paying attention to the storytellers that typically get labeled as news reporters:

Information is no longer a scarce commodity. But attention is. Why give it away so easily? You are not that irresponsible with your money, your reputation or your health. Why give away your mind?

I don’t know a single truly creative mind who is a news junkie – not a writer, not a composer, mathematician, physician, scientist, musician, designer, architect or painter. On the other hand, I know a whole bunch of viciously uncreative minds who consume news like drugs.

Bryan Caplan says:

P.S. When I read this passage, the counter-example of Tyler Cowen came immediately to mind.

I don’t consider that much of a counter-example. I found Tyler Cowen’s blog to be a dangerous addiction, and I’m glad I quit. I have a strong impression that he could be much more creative than he is, but has made a deliberate choice to pursue fame at the expense of creativity.

In order to maintain the pretense that news focuses on important information, storytellers focus on events that make us unhappy (avoiding or fixing mistakes are more important than understanding what routinely goes right, which makes it hard to focus on good news). [This also applies to other sources of political information, but that means I want the most concise source, which is not likely to be a rapidly published source.]

I’m not willing to completely follow the advice to kick my news addiction, since I’m somewhat dependent on social connections with people who imagine that news media provide valuable information. But I can mostly learn enough by watching The Daily Show, which often (but hardly consistently) is careful to indicate that they focus on frivolous, entertaining stories that give low priority to educational value. I’m definitely better off with that than I was when I was addicted to serious-sounding daily news sources.

I have a system for reading financial news that minimizes the problems with news. It involves mostly reading numbers that I find via stock symbols. Most of those numbers have been checked by accountants, who have strict rules to minimize biases. I’m fairly careful to select which symbols I follow by analyzing numbers, not stories.

For more evidence that news harms you, see an experiment done by Andreassen where subjects trading stocks did worse if they saw a constant stream of news than if they saw no news once they started trading.

Also, Robin Hanson’s analysis of how the press handled one story suggests a pretty clear positive correlation between the time a source takes to convey a story and the accuracy of that story.

[I've been neglecting this blog recently due to an obsession with finding waterfalls; that will change any week now when rainfall tapers off.]

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Ashkenazi and the Industrial Revolution

February 15th, 2011

Some of the ideas in the 10,000 Year Explosion have got me wondering whether the spread of the Ashkenazi culture played an important role in starting the industrial revolution.

The Ashkenazi developed a unique culture that was isolated for many centuries from the mainstream. Then around 1800, western Europe allowed Jews to interact much more with the rest of society (The 10,000 Year Explosion suggests that it started in 1791 in France).

At about the same time, the same region experienced a sudden shift in values that increased the status of merchants, which is what you’d expect if Ashkenazi culture that had previously been shunned became partially accepted. Those values may have contributed significantly to the industrial revolution.

The 10,000 Year Explosion explains why the Ashkenazi had some unique values that were somewhat unlikely to have been duplicated elsewhere, which would help explain why the industrial revolution didn’t start somewhere other than northern Europe.

This isn’t a complete explanation of the industrial revolution – for one thing, it doesn’t explain why England developed faster than France.

A completely unrelated idea of how agricultural diversity helped British farming productivity around the same time: Agricultural biodiversity crucial to the agricultural “revolution”.

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Assorted Links

February 2nd, 2011

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How To Win Friends and Influence People

January 24th, 2011

Book review: How To Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie.

This book mostly deserves its fame. It gives simple descriptions of basic techniques that should make most people who follow the advice more likable than average, without requiring prohibitive effort.

I have two modest complaints.

He focuses more than I would like on how to befriend people who like to talk at length, which leaves me wondering what to do with the potentially nicer friend who is too modest to say interesting things about himself.

The chapter called Make the Fault Seem Easy to Correct encourages misleading people into thinking something is easier than it actually is. Even if this works 75 percent of the time, I expect that the resentment caused by a few rare cases where it turns out to be more misleading than intended outweigh the benefits produced by its successes. The book Switch describes a better version of this strategy (incorporating an important part of what Carnegie advises): focus on breaking down the task into small steps.

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Trans-fats in commonly sold plant oils

January 20th, 2011

There seem to be serious risks in some food oils that are commonly considered healthy. This report says:

hexane processing strips the remaining nutrients from the oil, and turns a significant quantity of polyunsaturated fats into inflammatory, artery-clogging trans fats!

Hexane processing is apparently common for Canola oil, soybean oil, and other plant-based oils (but not olive oil). Trans-fat levels have been measured at 0.56 to 4.2 percent in commercial oils.

Since FDA-regulated labels are only accurate to about 0.5 grams, and oils are often labeled for 14g serving sizes, a 1 or 2 percent trans-fat content would apparently show up as zero. I suspect those levels are more harmful than most additives that the FDA has banned from foods.

The bottled Canola oil I buy from Trader Joe’s says it’s expeller pressed – no solvents used, so I’m still guessing it’s healthy, but I’ll try harder to avoid processed foods containing plant oils. (There a lot of misleading arguments against Canola oil that should be ignored).

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Going Inside

January 16th, 2011

Book review: Going Inside: A Tour Round a Single Moment of Consciousness, by John McCrone.

This book improved my understanding of how various parts of the brain interact, and of how long it takes the brain to process and react to sensory data. But there were many times when I wondered whether it was worth finishing, and I wish I had given up before the last few chapters that focused on consciousness other than neuroscience.

Too much of the book is devoted to attacking naive versions of reductionism and computational models of the brain. His claim that “chaos theory electrified science” is wrong. It electrified some reports about science, but has done little to create better models or testable predictions.

It’s misleading for him to claim the difference between human and animal consciousness “is terribly simple. Animals are locked into the present tense.” There are many hints that animals have some thoughts about the future and past, and it’s hard enough to evaluate those thoughts that we need to be cautious about denying that they think like us. He suggests that language and grammar provide unique abilities to think about the future. But I’m fairly sure I can analyze the future without using language, using mostly visual processing to plan a route I’m going to kayak through some rapids, or to imagine an opponent’s next chess move. I expect animals have some abilities along those lines. Human language must provide some improved ability to think about the future, but I find it hard to specify those abilities.

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Sex at Dawn

December 28th, 2010

Book review: Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha.

This book makes a strong case that pre-agricultural humans were very far from monogamous, much like Chimps and Bonobos. It’s often convincing, but sometimes biased by ideology.

Some of the evidence comes from the difficulty that humans have being monogamous now, and the under-reported satisfaction of cultures that encourage egalitarian sharing of mates (including WWII pilots). Some stronger evidence comes from the size of our genitalia, and the promiscuous, egalitarian sex and reported absence of rape and war in our closest living relatives (Bonobos – have they really been observed well enough that we should expect to have seen rape and war?).

The book is highly critical of the Victorian version of marriage, but is somewhat approving of marriage as an institution if it’s more like some non-English cultures where occasional sex outside of the marriage is considered to be fairly harmless.

They also claim there was little violence, because food was abundant and it was normally easier to move to unoccupied land than to fight over resources. They provide decent reasons not to trust arguments that supposedly demonstrate high levels of violence in primitive cultures, but they don’t convince me they’re any more objective than the people they criticize. The most questionable part of this section is their belief that the natural growth rate of pre-agricultural humans was unusually low. They have some plausible reasons for expecting a slower population growth rate than the 25 year doubling time that Malthus expected in the absence of resource constraints, but they don’t come close to providing a good argument that Malthus was off by the factor of 10,000 that would be needed to reconcile the estimated pre-agricultural population growth rates with an absence of resource constraints. I get the impression that they imagine our direct ancestors had no competition from other hominids.

The book’s back flap claims that it contains an explanation of why homosexuality hasn’t been selected out of our genes, but the closest to that I could find in the book was a theory involving bonding which would explain bisexuality but not homosexuality.

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Doctors and Smart Drugs

December 23rd, 2010

Doctors are more willing to prescribe Viagra than cognitive enhancement drugs.

Why?

The report wonders whether it’s due to conservative tendencies among doctors. But Viagra and Modafinil both became available in the U.S. in 1998. Conservatism doesn’t explain why doctors are slower to accept Modafinil than Viagra. Although maybe combined with more patients asking for Viagra it would be plausible.

Concern over side effects might explain why doctors are less comfortable with Ritalin, but not why three different cognitive enhancing drugs all produced similar comfort levels – about half that of Viagra. And I see no signs that Modafinil is much riskier than Viagra.

Could it be concern that Viagra has an equalizing effect (making people more normal), whereas cognitive enhancers make people who can afford them smarter than the less fortunate? Partly – doctors were more willing to prescribe cognitive enhancers for older patients than younger ones. But the cross-drug comparisons were done for a case where “the patient was a 40-year-old reporting symptoms consistent with the label indications for the respective drug”. I’m pretty sure the label indications describe a patient who is functioning well below normal.

The obvious conclusion part of what’s happening is that doctors believe sex produces larger benefits than cognitive enhancement. If we ignore potentially important externalities such as sexually transmitted diseases versus improved science/technology (would doctors admit to doing that?), I could make a decent case for sex being more valuable. There’s no shortage of evidence that sex makes people happy, whereas there seems to be little or no correlation between cognitive ability and happiness.

(HT YourBrainonDrugs.net).

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Counterclockwise

December 15th, 2010

Book review: Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility, by Ellen J. Langer.

This book presents ideas about how attitudes and beliefs can alter our health and physical abilities.

The book’s name comes from a 1979 study that the author performed that made nursing home residents act and look younger by putting them in an environment that reminded them of earlier days and by treating them as capable of doing more than most expected they could do.

One odd comment she makes is the there were no known measures of aging other than chronological age at the time of the 1979 study. She goes on to imply that little has changed since then – but it took me little effort to find info about a 1991 book Biomarkers which made a serious attempt at filling this void.

She disputes claims such as those popularized by Atul Gawande that teaching doctors to act more like machines (following checklists) will improve medical practice. She’s concerned that reducing the diversity of medical opinions will reduce our ability to benefit from getting a second opinion that could detect a mistake in the original diagnosis, and cites evidence that North Carolina residents have an unusually high tendency to seek second opinions, and also have signs of better health. But this only tells me that with little use of checklists, getting a second opinion is valuable. That doesn’t say much about whether adopting a culture of using checklists is better than adopting a culture of seeking second opinions. The North Carolina evidence doesn’t suggest a large enough health benefit to provide much competition with the evidence for checklists.

One surprising report is that cultures with positive views of aging seem to produce older people who have better memory than other cultures. It’s not clear what the causal mechanism is, but with the evidence coming from groups as different as mainland Chinese and deaf Americans, it seems likely that the beliefs cause the better memory rather than the better memory causing the beliefs.

Two interesting quotes from the book:

certainty is a cruel mindset

to tell us we’re “terminal” may be a self-fulfilling prophecy. There are no records of how often doctors have been correct or not after making this prediction.

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Relational Mobility and Self-Disclosure

December 2nd, 2010

Research indicates that cultures in which relationships can be formed and dissolved relatively easily produce more disclosure of intimate information between friends, probably due to a combination of greater need to invest in each relationship and lesser harm from taking risks that alter relationships.

The study compared Japanese culture to U.S. culture, but my impression is that there has also been a significant change over time in the U.S., with internet access increasing relationship mobility, followed by an increase in self-disclosure. (It’s possible that my impression was due to my move from New England to Silicon Valley in 1994 – there’s more social mobility in Silicon Valley, but I didn’t notice much change in self-disclosure until several years later).

It seems likely that the effects of the web on relationship mobility and self-disclosure will grow larger. The trend of increasing mobility has shown few signs of slowing, and the effects on self-disclosure probably lag by at least a few years.

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