Shunya's Notes

Battling Bad Science

"Every day there are news reports of new health advice, but how can you know if they're right? Doctor and epidemiologist Ben Goldacre shows us, at high speed, the ways evidence can be distorted, from the blindingly obvious nutrition claims to the very subtle tricks of the pharmaceutical industry." If you like this, check out another related performance by Goldacre from last year.

Regime Change Doesn't Work

In the Boston Review, a well-argued opening piece by Alexander B. Downes that is a "part of Regime Change Doesn’t Work, a forum on the use of military intervention to overthrow foreign governments", followed by variously interesting responses from others in this forum.

Beyond the question of whether it is wise for the United States to seek regime change in yet another country while it continues to clean up the mess from the last two, the Libya adventure begs a reconsideration of the wisdom of regime change in general. Focusing on consequences, I will steer clear of issues of legality and moral justification. Rather, I ask what the historical record tells us about the capacity of externally imposed regime change to bring peace, stability, and democracy to target countries. Is the bloody aftermath of regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq the exception or the rule? Does regime change work?

The short answer is: rarely. The reasons for consistent failure are straightforward. Regime change often produces violence because it inevitably privileges some individuals or groups and alienates others. Intervening forces seek to install their preferred leadership but usually have little knowledge of the politics of the target country or of the backlash their preference is likely to engender. Moreover, interveners often lack the will or commitment to remain indefinitely in the face of violent resistance, which encourages opponents to keep fighting. Regime change generally fails to promote democracy because installing pliable dictators is in the intervener’s interest and because many target states lack the necessary preconditions for democracy.

More here.  (Via 3QD, click to read comments.)

Herodotus, the Iliad, and 9/11

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)

Homer’s Iliad is the story of an epic war between the Greeks and the Trojans. The apparent cause of the war was the ‘abduction’ of Helen by Paris—Helen was the wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta; Paris was the son of Priam, king of Troy. Menelaus, his pride wounded, called on other Greek kings bound to him by an oath. Joining forces, they set sail and laid siege to the coastal city of Troy in Asia Minor. Mostly an account of the last days of the war, the Iliad teems with intrigue, character, and incident.

Herodotus, the 5th century BCE historian regarded as the father of history, lived more than three hundred years after the Iliad was written. He is justly famous for preferring rational—rather than mythical and supernatural—explanations for human events; to understand his past he looked to the actions, character, and motivations of men. Among the more charming passages of Histories is his take on the Trojan War. In his day and age, the Iliad was considered a true account of Greek ancestry and it was obligatory for every Greek schoolboy to read it. Cultivated Greek gents were expected to recite colorful stretches from it.

From the start, Herodotus had trouble with the Iliad. He found it odd that the Trojans, ‘when the Greeks ran off with their women, never troubled themselves about the matter; but the Greeks, for the sake of a single [Spartan] girl, collected a vast armament, invaded Asia, and destroyed the kingdom of Priam’. He doubted that Helen could have been taken from Sparta against her wishes, and even if she was, wasn’t that deed the work of a rogue, unworthy of such a large mobilization by the Greeks? What also didn’t sit well with his sense of human nature was the response of the otherwise reasonable Trojans to the Greek invasion, for ‘surely neither Priam nor his family could have been so infatuated as to endanger their own persons, their children and their city, merely that Paris might possess Helen.’

A Decade of War Costs

A look at what the wars of the post-9/11 decade cost the American economy (more data here):

Should You Kill the Fat Man?

Are you familiar with the famous "trolley problem" in ethics? If you're not (and even if you are), start with this introductory exercise. This thought experiment is a great way of spending a few minutes to probe some of your fundamental moral intuitions. Don't worry, there aren't any right or wrong answers here.

Assuming you are now familiar with the "trolley problem", read this discussion on it by Terrance Tomkow and his take on why most people consider it OK to pull the lever that kills one (rather than letting five people die) but do not consider it OK to push the fat man onto the tracks to achieve the same goal. Read Tomkow's progressively complex scenarios and see if you find his explanation plausible.

Finally, in Philosophy Now, read Phil Badger's engaging piece on the topic, and his own attempt at finding "a plausible account of morality which takes into consideration both the sense that we have to weigh the consequences of our actions and also the sense that, nonetheless, there are moments when consequences are secondary to higher principles".

On Equality vs. Growth

What should a country emphasize more: a more equitable income distribution or macroeconomic growth? Most people tend to assume that the two are opposed to each other. Research however reveals a very different picture. Andrew G. Berg and Jonathan D. Ostry explain why.

In his influential 1975 book Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff, Arthur Okun argued that pursuing equality can reduce efficiency (the total output produced with given resources). The late Yale University and Brookings Institution economist said that not only can more equal distribution of incomes reduce incentives to work and invest, but the efforts to redistribute—through such mechanisms as the tax code and minimum wages—can themselves be costly. Okun likened these mechanisms to a “leaky bucket.” Some of the resources transferred from rich to poor “will simply disappear in transit, so the poor will not receive all the money that is taken from the rich”—the result of administrative costs and disincentives to work for both those who pay taxes and those who receive transfers.

Do societies inevitably face an invidious choice between efficient production and equitable wealth and income distribution? Are social justice and social product at war with one another?

In a word, no.

In recent work, we discovered that when growth is looked at over the long term, the trade-off between efficiency and equality may not exist. In fact equality appears to be an important ingredient in promoting and sustaining growth. The difference between countries that can sustain rapid growth for many years or even decades and the many others that see growth spurts fade quickly may be the level of inequality. Countries may find that improving equality may also improve efficiency, understood as more sustainable long-run growth.

More here. (via the browser.)

How Terrorists Are Made

Anthropologist Scott Atran, compelling as usual, talks to Robert Wright about what creates terrorists, the subject matter of his book a year ago, Talking to the Enemy (via 3QD). Additionally, here is an audio interview (click on Listen near the top), and another video interview.

Is Inflation the Answer?

Who among us hasn't heard of the mounting U.S. national debt and the threat it poses to this country's future? There are really only three ways of bringing this debt under control: (a) by collecting more taxes, whether by raising the tax rate or increasing the GDP at the current tax rate, (b) by cutting government expenditure, and (c) by printing money to pay off debt, an inflationary measure. More liberals favor the first, more conservatives the second—both are harder to justify in recessionary times. The third option works rather differently and is not any more popular. Raghuram Rajan, Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago, takes a closer look at this option.

Recently, a number of commentators have proposed a sharp, contained bout of inflation as a way to reduce debt and reenergise growth in the United States and the rest of the industrial world. Are they right?

To understand this prescription, we have to comprehend the diagnosis. As Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff argue, recoveries from crises that result from over-leveraged balance sheets are slow and typically resistant to traditional macroeconomic stimulus. Over-levered households cannot spend, over-levered banks cannot lend, and over-levered governments cannot stimulate.

So, the prescription goes, why not generate higher inflation for a while? This will surprise fixed-income investors who agreed in the past to lend long-term at low rates, bring down the real value of debt, and eliminate debt "overhang", thereby re-starting growth. It is an attractive solution at first glance, but a closer look suggests cause for serious concern

More here.

Google Effects on Memory

Excerpts from a new study, "Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips" (via C&C):

The advent of the Internet, with sophisticated algorithmic search engines, has made accessing information as easy as lifting a finger. No longer do we have to make costly efforts to find the things we want. We can “Google” the old classmate, find articles online, or look up the actor who was on the tip of our tongue. The results of four studies suggest that when faced with difficult questions, people are primed to think about computers and that when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves. ...

These results suggest that processes of human memory are adapting to the advent of new computing and communication technology. Just as we learn through transactive memory who knows what in our families and offices, we are learning what the computer “knows” and when we should attend to where we have stored information in our computer-based memories. We are becoming symbiotic with our computer tools (8), growing into interconnected systems that remember less by knowing information than by knowing where the information can be found. This gives us the advantage of access to a vast range of information—although the disadvantages of being constantly “wired” are still being debated (9). It may be no more that nostalgia at this point, however, to wish we were less dependent on our gadgets. We have become dependent on them to the same degree we are dependent on all the knowledge we gain from our friends and coworkers—and lose if they are out of touch. The experience of losing our Internet connection becomes more and more like losing a friend. We must remain plugged in to know what Google knows.

9/11 and the Cycle of Revenge

Last week a flood of articles commemorated the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Not surprisingly, I was nauseated by all the self-love and self-absorption on display—including among American liberals, most of whom seem to me Americans first before they are liberals. I have just found a viewpoint that's close to my own take on 9/11 and its aftermath. It is by Simon Critchley. I only wish he had developed it further!

I’ve never understood the proverbial wisdom that revenge is a dish best served cold. Some seem to like it hot. Better is the Chinese proverb, attributed to Confucius, “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.” Osama bin Laden’s grave was watery, but the other still appears empty. Is it intended for us?

Revenge is the desire to repay an injury or a wrong by inflicting harm, often the violent sort. If you hit me, I will hit you back. Furthermore, by the logic of revenge, I am right to hit you back. The initial wrong justifies the act of revenge. But does that wrong really make it right for me to hit back? Once we act out of revenge, don’t we become mired in a cycle of violence and counterviolence with no apparent end? Such is arguably our current predicament.

Of course, moving from ends to beginnings, the other peculiarity of revenge is that it is often unclear who committed the first wrong or threw the first stone. If someone, George W. Bush say, asserts that the United States is justified in revenging itself on Al Qaeda, by invading Afghanistan, then Iraq and the rest of the brutal saga of the last 10 years, what would Bin Laden have said? Well, the opposite of course.

More here.

Jonathan Haidt on Morality

Another smart lecture by psychologist Jonathan Haidt whose "research indicates that morality is a social construction which has evolved out of raw materials provided by five (or more) innate "psychological" foundations: Harm, Fairness, Ingroup, Authority, and Purity. Highly educated liberals generally rely upon and endorse only the first two foundations, whereas people who are more conservative, more religious, or of lower social class usually rely upon and endorse all five foundations." (part 1 below; part 2; Q&A 1; Q&A 2)

The Weirdest People in the World

I finally got around to reading this very significant and influential paper about a highly exotic group of humans: people from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Below is the abstract:

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology, cognition, and behavior in the world’s top journals based on samples drawn entirely from highly educated segments of Western societies. Researchers—often implicitly—assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that standard subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species—frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self‐concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ.

The comparative findings suggest that members of Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, or behavior— hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re‐organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.

On Public Corruption in India

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)

Public corruption is often defined as the misuse of public office for private gain. It tends to thrive when discretionary power is vested in officials amid a weak architecture of deterrence. A persistent feature of all societies, public corruption is today considered a problem of the developing world. Examples include politicians, bureaucrats, and other officials taking bribes to influence outcomes in business licensing, awarding contracts, registering property, citing traffic violations, disbursing education funds, and so on.

The stakes rise dramatically with neoliberal reforms, when the state begins to transfer public assets to private firms—such as land, mines, and airwaves—usually under weak regulatory, supervisory, and legal frameworks. For instance, the big Bofors scandal of pre-reforms India of the 1980s involved $25 M, whereas the 2G telecom scam last year may have cost the exchequer $39 B. It is said that as developing countries turn into developed nations, bribery turns into another means of influence: lobbying.

It is widely believed that public corruption hurts macroeconomic growth. However, research on the impact of corruption on growth is not conclusive. China, among the most corrupt countries, has one of the highest growth rates. Perhaps China's GDP would have grown even faster without corruption, but that's a conjecture; theoretical explanations for China cut both ways. Some researchers now favor the view that the impact of corruption on macroeconomic growth depends on the nature of the regime and the kind of corruption there is. Some kinds can align in favor of growth, others against. Corruption of course has wider implications beyond growth. Various studies have shown its adverse impact in the microeconomic realm. Higher corruption reduces entrepreneurial activity, allocates talent less efficiently, and worsens services integral to human development. Finally, public corruption also eats away at social institutions, undermines the rule of law, erodes social trust, and can jeopardize public safety and hurt the environment.

It seems to me that most fights against public corruption, including in India, strive to make the system function "as advertised". They strive for transparency and accountability in the system. They tend not to challenge the rigged rules of the system itself, including the investment priorities of the country, or its response to socioeconomic disparities. But this is not necessarily a shortcoming. Tactical prudence may require such focus, and these latter concerns, related and complementary in nature, may sometimes be best left to other concerned citizens.

Reducing corruption, to be clear, may do nothing for equitable distribution —unless significant redistributive programs and safety nets already exist in a country. Indeed, in such cases, the clearest adverse impact of corruption occurs in the delivery of social services to the marginalized—food, schooling, medicine, employment assistance, etc. The more programs for socioeconomic justice that exist in a country, the bigger the obstacle that corruption poses for their delivery. This then is the context in which a fight against public corruption is also a promoter of socioeconomic justice, even if as a byproduct. The big question then becomes: how does one go about reducing corruption, especially in India?

What is Naturalism?

British philosopher Timothy Williamson on why "naturalism as dogma is one more enemy of the scientific spirit."

Many contemporary philosophers describe themselves as naturalists. They mean that they believe something like this: there is only the natural world, and the best way to find out about it is by the scientific method. I am sometimes described as a naturalist. Why do I resist the description? Not for any religious scruple: I am an atheist of the most straightforward kind. But accepting the naturalist slogan without looking beneath the slick packaging is an unscientific way to form one’s beliefs about the world, not something naturalists should recommend.

What, for a start, is the natural world? If we say it is the world of matter, or the world of atoms, we are left behind by modern physics, which characterizes the world in far more abstract terms. Anyway, the best current scientific theories will probably be superseded by future scientific developments. We might therefore define the natural world as whatever the scientific method eventually discovers. Thus naturalism becomes the belief that there is only whatever the scientific method eventually discovers, and (not surprisingly) the best way to find out about it is by the scientific method. That is no tautology. Why can’t there be things only discoverable by non-scientific means, or not discoverable at all?

What is the Jan Lokpal Bill?

(The Jan Lokpal Bill is at the heart of the anti-corruption movement now raging in India. Here is a brief overview of the bill based on my reading of the JLP bill ver 2.3 and its key features. This is an extract from my longer opinion piece, On Public Corruption in India.)
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The JLP bill is associated with the self-styled Gandhian, Anna Hazare, and his team—Arvind Kejriwal, Prashant Bhushan, Kiran Bedi, and others—under the banner of "India Against Corruption". It proposes to create a single independent agency to investigate allegations of public corruption all across India in accordance with the Prevention of Corruption Act 1988. It'll incorporate the currently defanged anti-corruption units of existing agencies, like the CBI and CVC.

The Lokpal will have eleven appointed members, all "eminent individuals", chosen by a search and a selection committee. It will have lots of investigators and support staff. Investigators will have the powers vested in police officers, and will also be able to wiretap any suspect's phone and internet lines (utilizing a 2008 amendment to the Information Technology Act 2000, which, incidentally, has been criticized for lacking adequate "legal and procedural safeguards to prevent violation of civil liberties").

Complaints against any government employee can be filed by any citizen in the form of an FIR. Following investigations, the Lokpal can fine, demote, or fire government employees from their jobs. It will prosecute them in special courts established within the existing judicial system (more courts can be created based on demand) and all trials have to be completed within 12 months. It will even go after their personal assets to recover the embezzled monies. Whistle-blowers are protected but frivolous or vindictive complaints are punishable by a fine.

Alongside the independence and prosecutory power vested in the Lokpal, the bill has some provisions to thwart abuses of power. Whether on not they are adequate is I think debatable. The Lokpal's and the special court's decisions can be legally challenged, though, for no good reason, this has been made far more onerous than for other civil and criminal cases. For transparency, the Lokpal will post each month the full records of completed investigations on the web, cases opened and closed, and minutes of board meetings. An Independent Complaints Authority with multiple offices, each comprised of five appointed "eminent individuals", would hear complaints against corrupt Lokpal officials and remove them if necessary, but the Lokpal's eleven members can be removed only by the Supreme Court.

Employment quotas, much as in other government bodies, will exist at the investigator and staff level, but not among its top echelon or in the search and selection committees. And while much of the focus is on policing, the bill also requires additional reforms to increase the odds of its success against corruption. For instance, it requires all public offices to publish a citizen's charter defining roles, responsibilities, and procedures, as well as a grievance redressal system. However, the entire focus of the bill is on the conduct of the public servant, and none at all on the "demand side" of the market, that is, on the role of ordinary citizens and businesses in creating incentives for public corruption. To tackle public corruption in state governments, each state will have a similar ombudsman agency too, called the Lokayukta.

Guinier on Redefining Merit

A brilliant short lecture by Lani Guinier, professor of law at Harvard and civil rights activist, on what merit means, why we need to redefine it, the benefits of diversity in approaching complex problems, what standardized tests like the SAT reveal about you ("what kind of car your parents drive"), and why we have moved into an era of "modern scientific racism" (via Anu Ramdas).