Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Economist Brad DeLong's Fair, Balanced, and Reality-Based Semi-Daily Journal

Now I Have an Irresistible Desire to Go Read "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones"...

Gary Farber sends us to Samuel Delany, who reads:

Samuel R. Delany: About Five Thousand Seven Hundred and Fifty Words: Now let's atomize the correction process itself. A story begins:

The

What is the image thrown on your mind? Whatever it is, it is going to be changed many, many times before the tale is over. My own, unmodified, rather whimsical The is a grey­ish ellipsoid about four feet high that balances on the floor perhaps a yard away. Yours is no doubt different. But it is there, has a specific size, shape, color, and bears a particular relation to you. My a for example, differs from my the in that it is about the same shape and color—a bit paler, per­haps — but it is either much farther away, or much smaller and nearer. In either case, I am going to be either much less, or much more, interested in it than I am in The. Now we come to the second word in the story and the first correction:

The red

My four-foot ellipsoid just changed color. It is still about the same distance away. It has become more interest­ing. In fact, even at this point I feel vaguely that the in­creased interest may be outside the leeway I allowed for The. I feel a strain here that would be absent if the first two words had been A red … My eye goes on to the third word while my mind prepares for the second correction:

The red sun

My original The has now been replaced by a luminous disk. The color has lightened considerably. The disk is above me. An indistinct landscape has formed about me. And I am even more aware, now that the object has been placed at such a distance, of the tension between my own interest level in red sun and the ordinary attention I accord a the: for the in­tensity of interest is all that is left with me of the original image.

Less clearly, in terms of future corrections, is a feeling that in this landscape it is either dawn, sunset, or, if it is another time, smog of some sort must be hazing the air (… red sun …); but I hold all for the next correction:

The red sun is

A sudden sense of intimacy. I am being asked to pay even greater attention, in a way that was would not demand, as was in the form of the traditional historical narrative. but is…? There is a speaker here! That focus in attention I felt between the first two words is not my attention, but the at­tention of the speaker. It resolves into a tone of voice: “The red sun is …” And I listen to this voice, in the midst of this still vague landscape, registering its concerns for the red sun. Between the and red information was generated that between sun and is resolved into a meaningful correction in my vision.

This is my first aesthetic pleasure from the tale—a small one, as we have only progressed four words into the story. Never­theless, it becomes one drop in the total enjoyment to come from the telling. Watching and listening to my speaker, I proceed to the next corrections:

The red sun is high,

Noon and slightly overcast; this is merely a confirma­tion of something previously suspected, nowhere near as major a correction as the one before. It allows a slight sense of warmth into the landscape, and the light has been fixed at a specific point. I attempt to visualize that landscape more clearly, but no object, including the speaker, has been cleared enough to resolve. The comma tells me that a thought group is complete. In the pause it occurs to me that the redness of the sun may not be a clue to smog at all, but merely the speaker falling into literary-ism; for at best, the redness is a projection of his consciousness, which as yet I don't under­stand. And for a moment I notice that from where I'm stand­ing the sun indeed appears its customary, blind-white gold. Next correction

The red sun is high, the

In this strange landscape (lit by its somewhat untrust­worthily described sun) the speaker has turned his attention to another grey, four-foot ellipsoid, equidistant from himself and me. Again, it is too indistinct to take highlighting. But there have been two corrections with not much tension, and the reality of the speaker himself is beginning to slip. What will this become?

The red sun is high, the blue

The ellipsoid has changed hue. But the repetition in the syntatic arrangement of the description momentarily threatens to dissolve all reality, landscape, speaker, and sun, into a mannered listing of bucolica. The whole scene dims. And the final correction?

The red sun is high, the blue low.

Look! We are world and worlds away. The first sun is huge; and how accurate the description of its color turns out to have been. The repetition that predicted mannerism how fixes both big and little sun to the sky. The landscape crawls with long red shadows and stubby blue ones, joined by pur­ple triangles. Look at the speaker himself. Can you see him? You have seen his doubled shadow …

Though it ordinarily takes only a quarter of a second and is largely unconscious, this is the process.

When the corrections as we move from word to word produce a muddy picture, when unclear bits of information do not resolve to even greater clarity as we progress, we call the writer a poor stylist. As the story goes on, and the pic­tures become more complicated as they develop through time, if even greater anomalies appear as we continue correcting, we say he can't plot. But it is the same quality error com­mitted on a grosser level, even though a reader must be a third on three-quarters of the way through the book to spot one, while the first may glare out from the opening sentence.

In any commercial field of writing, like s-f, the argument of writers and editors who feel content can be opposed to style runs, at its most articular:

“Basically we are writing adventure fiction. We are writ­ing it very fast. We do not have time to be concerned about any but the grosser errors. More importantly, you are talking about subtleties too refined for the vast majority of our readers who are basically neither literary nor sophisticated.”

The internal contradictions here could make a book. Let me outline two.

The basis of any adventure novel, s-f or otherwise, what gives it its entertainment value—escape value if you will—what sets it apart from the psychological novel, what names it an adventure, is the intensity with which the real actions of the story impinge on the protagonist's conscious­ness. The simplest way to generate that sense of adventure is to increase the intensity with which the real actions im­pinge on the reader's. And fictional intensity is almost en­tirely the province of those refinements of which I have been speaking.

The story of an infant's first toddle across the kitchen floor will be an adventure if the writer can generate the infantile wonder at new muscles, new efforts, obstacles, and detours. I would like to read such a story.

We have all read, many too many times, the heroic attempts of John Smith to save the lives of seven orphans in the face of fire, flood, and avalanche.

I am sure it was an adventure of Smith.

For the reader it was dull as dull could be.

"The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth" by Roger Zelazny has been described as “…all speed and adventure…” by Theodore Sturgeon, and indeed it is one of the most exciting adventure tales s-f has produced. Let me change one word in every grammatical unit of every sentence, replacing it with a word that “…means more or less the same thing …” and i can diminish the excite­ment by half and expunge every trace of wit. Let me change one word and add one word, and I can make it so dull as to be practically unreadable. Yet a paragraph by paragraph synopsis of the “content” will be the same.

An experience I find painful (though it happens with increasing frequency) occurs when I must listen to a literate person who has just become enchanted by some hacked-out space-boiler begin to rhapsodise about the way the blunt, imprecise, leaden language reflects the hairy-chested hero's alienation from reality. He usually goes on to explain how th “…s-f content…” itself reflects our whole society's divorce from the real. The experience is painful because he is right as far as he goes. Badly-written adventure fic­tion is our true anti-literature. Its protagonists are our real anti-heroes. They move through un-real worlds amidst all sorts of noise and manage to preceive nothing meaningful or meaningfully.

Author's intention or no, that is what badly written s-f is about. But anyone who reads or writes s-f seriously knows that its particular excellence is in another area altogether: in all the brouhaha clinging about these unreal worlds, chords are sounded in total sympathy with the real.

“ … You are talking about subtleties too refined for the vast majority of our readers who are basically neither literary nor sophisticated.”

This part of the argument always throws me back to an incident from the summer I taught a remedial English class at my Neighborhood Community Center. The voluntary nature of the class automatically restricted enrollment to people who wanted to learn; still, I had sixteen and seventeen-year-olds who had never had any formal education in either Span­ish or English continually joining my lessons. Regardless, after a student had been in the class six months, I would throw him a full five hundred and fifty page novel to read: Dmitri Merezhkovsky's The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci. The book is full of Renaissance history, as well as sword play, magic, and dissertation on art and science. It is an ex­tremely literary novel with several levels of interpretation. It was a favorite of Sigmund Freud (Rilke, in a letter, found it loathesome) and inspired him to write his own Leonardo da Vinci: A Study in Psychosexuality. My students loved it, and with it, lost a good deal of their fear of Literature and Long Books.

Shortly before I had to leave the class, Leonardo ap­peared in paperback, translated by Hubert Trench. Till then it had only been available in a Modern Library edition translated by Bernard Gilbert Gurney. To save my last two students a trip to the Barnes and Nobel basement, as well as a dollar fifty, I suggested they buy the paperback. Two days later one had struggled through forty pages and the other had given up after ten. Both through the book dull, had no idea what it was about, and begged me for something shorter and more exciting.

Bewildered, I bought a copy of the Trench translation myself that afternoon. I do not have either book at hand as I write, so I'm sure a comparison with the actual texts will prove me an exaggerator. But I recall one description of a little house in Florence:

Gurney: “Grey smoke rose and curled from the slate chimney.”

Trench: “Billows of smoke, grey and gloomy, ele­vated and contorted up from the slates of the chimney.”

By the same process that differentiated the four ex­amples of putting books on a desk, these two sentences do not refer to the same smoke, chimney, house, time of day; nor do any of the other houses within sight remain the same; nor do any possible inhabitants. One sentence has nine words, the other fifteen. But atomize both as a series of corrected images and you will find the mental energy expended on the latter is greater by a factor of six or seven! And over seven­eights of it leaves that uncomfortable feeling of loose-end­edness, unutilized and unresolved. Sadly, it is the less skilled, less sophisticated reader who is most injured by bad writing. Bad prose requires more of your mental energy to correct your image word to word, and the corrections them­selves are less rewarding. That is what makes it bad. The sophisticated, literary reader may give the words the benefit of the doubt and question whether a seeming clumsiness is more fruitfully interpreted as an intentional ambiguity...

Scott Aaronson on How to Do Science

Scott sez:

Brains! Brains!

From Gordon's Notes:

The puzzle of cetacean brains: When I was a child there was a lot of excitement about dolphin brains and dolphin language. It didn't seem to go anywhere, but the cognitive sciences have been moving onwards. In an era where almost every aspect of thought that seemed purely human has been found to be commonplace, it's time to reexamine the cetacean brain. Scientific American features a brief review of the science. In short, there's no obvious neuro-anatomic reason to suppose that cetaceans should be less "clever" than humans. Indeed, sperm whales ought to be prodigies of thought. So why do they need such massive brains? Those calorie sucking engines require an immense amount of food; sperm whale brains ought to be doing something to justify their costly upkeep.

But what?

Predawn Paradise Lost Book 3 iPhone Blogging

May I just say that mainstream "orthodox" Calvinist Protestantism contains things orders of magnitude more bats--- insane than any of the "special" doctrines of the Book of Mormon?

Paradise Lost 3:

Man shall not quite be lost, but sav'd who will;
Yet not of will in him, but grace in me
Freely vouchsaf'd; once more I will renew
His lapsed powers, though forfeit; and enthrall'd
By sin to foul exorbitant desires;
Upheld by me, yet once more he shall stand
On even ground against his mortal foe;
By me upheld, that he may know how frail
His fallen condition is, and to me owe
All his deliverance, and to none but me.
Some I have chosen of peculiar grace,
Elect above the rest; so is my will:
The rest shall hear me call, and oft be warn'd
Their sinful state, and to appease betimes
The incensed Deity...
But hard be harden'd, blind be blinded more,
That they may stumble on, and deeper fall...

To change topics completely, the coming of the iPod/iPhone has changed how I hear the literary world. I had never been able to get long poems. The Odyssey and the Iliad and Gilgamesh I found gripping to the extent that I could read them in prosy or semi-prosy translation, and occasional stanzas ripped out and presented to me were poewrful and affecting. But all the rest, or the Iliad and Odyssey in verse translations, were annoying and painful. When I read them at my normal pace the syntax was awkward and confusing. When I read them more slowly, the plot and the ideas dragged and came through much much too slowly--almost as painful as watching the uniformed pundits babble on CNN, where at most one thought a minute emerges, and that is usually wrong. And the rhythm and assonance and rhyme--well, I have never heard what I read in my mind's ear, or if I ever did it was forty years ago and that faculty I have lost.

But when you have an iPod/iPhone, you have no excuse not to put the audiotext on it and carry it around with you, and when you attend to it the poetry forces itself upon your brain, and you don't mind nearly as much that the plot and ideas are as from an eyedropper because the words are so glorious, and then you crest the top of Burton Ridge at 7:13 AM on December 8, 2007 while hearing:

Paradise Lost 3:

Satan from hence, now on the lower stair,
That scaled by steps of gold to Heaven-gate,
Looks down with wonder at the sudden view
Of all this world at once. As when a scout,
Through dark and desert ways with peril gone
All night; at last by break of cheerful dawn
Obtains the brow of some high-climbing hill,
Which to his eye discovers unaware
The goodly prospect of some foreign land
First seen, or some renowned metropolis
With glistering spires and pinnacles adorned,
Which now the rising sun gilds with his beams:
Such wonder seised, though after Heaven seen,
The Spirit malign, but much more envy seised,
At sight of all this world beheld so fair...

And you get Paradise Lost in a way that you had never gotten it before.

And America's Silliest Dog^TM, as the rays of the rising sun first strike her eyes, jumps three feet in the air like a nut five times, and then frantically runs in 40-foot circles for four minutes before calming down again. (At least she is obedient enough not to go running over to make friends with Wile E. Coyote who we saw watching us from amidst the cell phone towers 150 yards away.)

And here, courtesy of http://dailycoyote.blogspot.com/, is Mr. Coyote:

---

One more thing: Milton on his blindness:

Paradise Lost 3:

I sung of Chaos and eternal Night;
Taught by the heavenly Muse to venture down
The dark descent, and up to re-ascend,
Though hard and rare: Thee I revisit safe,
And feel thy sovran vital lamp; but thou
Revisit'st not these eyes, that roll in vain
To find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn....

Seasons return; but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
But cloud instead, and ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
Cut off, and for the book of knowledge fair
Presented with a universal blank
Of nature's works to me expung'd and ras'd,
And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.
So much the rather thou, celestial Light,
Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate; there plant eyes, all mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight...

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Gustave Dore http://www.artsycraftsy.com/dore/dore_satan_falls.jpg:

Slate Incompetence and Mendacity Watch

Outsourced to Matthew Yglesias:

Matthew Yglesias: Racists Polluting My Race Science!: I'm a little bit confused by Will Saletan's mea culpa here:

For the past five years, J. Philippe Rushton has been president of the Pioneer Fund, an organization dedicated to "the scientific study of heredity and human differences." During this time, the fund has awarded at least $70,000 to the New Century Foundation. To get a flavor of what New Century stands for, check out its publications on crime ("Everyone knows that blacks are dangerous") and heresy ("Unless whites shake off the teachings of racial orthodoxy they will cease to be a distinct people"). New Century publishes a magazine called American Renaissance, which preaches segregation. Rushton routinely speaks at its conferences.

I was negligent in failing to research and report this. I'm sorry. I owe you better than that.

Saletan, basically, is apologizing for having cited a racist's work in penning his column. Which would be a reasonable thing to do, except that the thesis of Saletan's column was that one of the key empirical claims of white supremacism is true. In particular, calling on whites to "shake off the teachings of racial orthodoxy" is exactly what Saletan was doing in his own article. Similarly on the crime front. It's well known that African-Americans commit violent crimes at a higher rate than do white Americans. And if the Saletan Thesis of intrinsic African-American genetic intellectual inferiority is true, extending the analysis to explain the observed gap in violent crime rates seems like an obvious move.

Saletan was busy trying to have his cake and eat it, to, and when confronted with Rushton's rhetoric suddenly finds himself choking on it. But of course the research "proving" blacks' genetic inferiority to whites is shot through with racism; what else would the race-science paradigm possibly be infused with? Somehow, Saletan was so busy with his counterintuitive pirouettes that he didn't notice what side he'd landed on.

Australian Actresses Are Plagiarizing Scott Aaronson's Quantum Mechanics Lecture to Sell Printers

I am not sure that "plagiarizing" is the right word here. But it is a remarkable situation--and there ought to be a way for Robin Hanson's friend Scott Aaronson's to get a printer out of it:

Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » Australian actresses are plagiarizing my quantum mechanics lecture to sell printers: I tried to think of a witty, ironic title for this post, but in the end, I simply couldn’t. The above title is a literal statement of fact...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saWCyZupO4U

Scott Aaronson: PHYS771: Quantum Computing Since Democritus

A course I would like to take:

PHYS771: Quantum Computing Since Democritus:

PHYS771 Lecture 1: Atoms and the Void; PHYS771 Lecture 10: Quantum Computing; PHYS771 Lecture 10.5: Penrose; PHYS771 Lecture 11: Decoherence and Hidden Variables.

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http://www.cs.princeton.edu/theory/complexity/; http://www.amazon.com/Emperor-New-Mind-Concerning-Computers/dp/0192861980/sr=8-1/qid=1158134107/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-6440007-3621459?ie=UTF8&s=books; http://www.springerlink.com/content/w236774414114626/.

Scott Aaronson: PHYS771: Lecture 10.5: Penrose

Aha!: Scott Aaronson on Roger Penrose: "if we can only approach mathematical truth with the same unreliable, savannah-optimized tools that we use for doing the laundry, ordering Chinese takeout, etc. -- then it seems we ought to grant computers the same liberty of being fallible. But in that case, the claimed distinction between humans and machines would seem to evaporate...":

PHYS771 Lecture 10.5: Penrose: So, you guys finally finished reading Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind? What did you think of it? (Since I forgot to record this lecture, the class responses are tragically lost to history. But if I recall correctly, the entire class turned out to consist of -- YAWN -- straitlaced, clear-thinking materialistic reductionists who correctly pointed out the glaring holes in Penrose's arguments. No one took Penrose's side, even just for sport.)

Alright, so let me try a new tack: who can summarize Penrose's argument (or more correctly, a half-century-old argument adapted by Penrose) in a few sentences? How about this: Gödel's First Incompleteness Theorem tells us that no computer, working within a fixed formal system F such as Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory, can prove the sentence: G(F) = "This sentence cannot be proved in F." But we humans can just "see" the truth of G(F) -- since if G(F) were false, then it would be provable, which is absurd! Therefore the human mind can do something that no present-day computer can do. Therefore consciousness can't be reducible to computation.

Alright, class: problems with this argument?

Yeah, there are two rather immediate ones:

Why does the computer have to work within a fixed formal system F?

Can humans "see" the truth of G(F)?

Actually, the response I prefer encapsulates both of the above responses as "limiting cases." Recall from Lecture 3 that, by the Second Incompleteness Theorem, G(F) is equivalent to Con(F): the statement that F is consistent. Furthermore, this equivalence can be proved in F itself for any reasonable F. This has two important implications.

First, it means that when Penrose claims that humans can "see" the truth of G(F), really he's just claiming that humans can see the consistency of F! When you put it that way, the problems become more apparent: how can humans see the consistency of F? Exactly which F's are we talking about: Peano Arithmetic? ZF? ZFC? ZFC with large cardinal axioms? Can all humans see the consistency of all these systems, or do you have to be a Penrose-caliber mathematician to see the consistency of the stronger ones? What about the systems that people thought were consistent, but that turned out not to be? And even if you did see the consistency of (say) ZF, how would you convince someone else that you'd seen it? How would the other person know you weren't just pretending? (Models of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory are like those 3D dot pictures: sometimes you really have to squint...)

The second implication is that, if we grant a computer the same freedom that Penrose effectively grants to humans -- namely, the freedom to assume the consistency of the underlying formal system -- then the computer can prove G(F). So the question boils down to this: can the human mind somehow peer into the Platonic heavens, in order to directly perceive (let's say) the consistency of ZF set theory? If the answer is no -- if we can only approach mathematical truth with the same unreliable, savannah-optimized tools that we use for doing the laundry, ordering Chinese takeout, etc. -- then it seems we ought to grant computers the same liberty of being fallible. But in that case, the claimed distinction between humans and machines would seem to evaporate. (Perhaps Turing himself said it best: "If we want a machine to be intelligent, it can't also be infallible. There are theorems that say almost exactly that.")

In my opinion, then, Penrose doesn't need to be talking about Gödel's theorem at all. The Gödel argument turns out to be just a mathematical restatement of the oldest argument against reductionism in the book: "sure a computer could say it perceives G(F), but it'd just be shuffling symbols around! When I say I perceive G(F), I really mean it! There's something it feels like to be me!" The obvious response is equally old: "what makes you so sure that it doesn't feel like anything to be a computer?"...

Opening the Black Box:

Alright, look: Roger Penrose is one of the greatest mathematical physicists on Earth. Is it possible that we've misconstrued his thinking? To my mind, the most plausible-ish versions of Penrose's argument are the ones based on an "asymmetry of understanding": namely that, while we know the internal workings of a computer, we don't yet know the internal workings of the brain. How can one exploit this asymmetry? Well, given any known Turing machine M, it's certainly possible to construct a sentence that stumps M: S(M) = "Machine M will never output this sentence." There are two cases: either M outputs S(M), in which case it utters a falsehood, or else M doesn't output S(M), in which case there's a mathematical truth to which it can never assent.

The obvious response is, why can't we play the same game with humans? "Roger Penrose will never output this sentence." Well, conceivably there's an answer: because we can formalize what it means for M to output something, by examining its inner workings. (Indeed, "M" is really just shorthand for the appropriate Turing machine state diagram.) But can we formalize what it means for Penrose to output something? The answer depends on what we believe about the internal workings of the brain (or more precisely, Penrose's brain)! And this leads to Penrose's view of the brain as "non-computational." A common misconception is that Penrose thinks the brain is a quantum computer. In reality, a quantum computer would be much weaker than he wants! As we saw before, quantum computers don't even seem able to solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time. Penrose, by contrast, wants the brain to solve uncomputable problems, by exploiting hypothetical collapse effects from a yet-to-be-discovered quantum theory of gravity....

In Shadows, Penrose offers the following classification of views on consciousness:

Consciousness is reducible to computation (the view of strong-AI proponents)

Sure, consciousness can be simulated by a computer, but the simulation couldn't produce "real understanding" (John Searle's view)

Consciousness can't even be simulated by computer, but nevertheless has a scientific explanation (Penrose's own view, according to Shadows)

Consciousness doesn't have a scientific explanation at all (the view of 99% of everyone who ever lived)

Now it seems to me that... Penrose is retreating from view C to view B. For as soon as we say that passing the Turing Test isn't good enough -- that one needs to "pry open the box" and examine a machine's internal workings to know whether it thinks or not -- what could possibly be the content of view C that would distinguish it from view B?... I want to bend over backwards to see if I can figure out what Penrose might be saying. In science, you can always cook up a theory to "explain" the data you've seen so far: just list all the data you've got, and call that your "theory"! The obvious problem here is overfitting. Since your theory doesn't achieve any compression of the original data -- i.e., since it takes as many bits to write down your theory as to write down the data itself -- there's no reason to expect your theory to predict future data. In other words, your theory is a useless piece of shit....

Now, here's the point I keep coming back to: if this is what Penrose means, then he's left the world of Gödel and Turing far behind, and entered my stomping grounds -- the Kingdom of Computational Complexity. How does Penrose, or anyone else, know that there's no small Boolean circuit to simulate Winston Churchill? Presumably we wouldn't be able to prove such a thing, even supposing (for the sake of argument) that we knew what a Churchill simulator meant! All ye who would claim the intractability of finite problems: that way lieth the P versus NP beast, from whose 2n jaws no mortal hath yet escaped....

Let's set aside the specifics of Penrose's ideas, and ask a more general question. Should quantum mechanics have any affect on how we think about the brain?... When people try to make the question more concrete, they often end up asking: "is the brain a quantum computer?" Well, it might be, but I can think of at least four good arguments against this possibility:

The problems for which quantum computers are believed to offer dramatic speedups -- factoring integers, solving Pell's equation, simulating quark-gluon plasmas, approximating the Jones polynomial, etc. -- just don't seem like the sorts of things that would have increased Oog the Caveman's reproductive success relative to his fellow cavemen.

Even if humans could benefit from quantum computing speedups, I don't see any evidence that they're actually doing so. (It's said that Gauss could immediately factor large integers in his head -- but if so, that only proves that Gauss's brain was a quantum computer, not that anyone else's is!)

The brain is a hot, wet environment, and it's hard to understand how long-range coherence could be maintained there. (With today's understanding of quantum error-correction, this is no longer a knock-down argument, but it's still an extremely strong one.)

As I mentioned earlier, even if we suppose the brain is a quantum computer, it doesn't seem to get us anywhere in explaining consciousness, which is the usual problem that these sorts of speculations are invoked to solve!...

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (Yet Another IQ and Heredity Edition)

Hoisted from the Archives: August 17, 2005:

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Brad DeLong's Website: Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (Michael Barone: Intellectual Garbage Scow Edition): Mark Thoma does intellectual garbage pickup on the overrated Michael Barone.

He tackle's Barone's claim that "maybe" the fall in social mobility in America is due to the fact that a high IQ genetic elite has risen to the top of the fair meritocracy that is our society. And Mark's head explodes:

Economist's View: Does Michael Barone Believe the Poor Lack the Genetic Intelligence and Drive Needed to Compete in the Emerging U.S. Meritocracy?: Am I reading this column by Michael Barone correctly? Does it blame being poor on lack of intelligence? Do you believe, as he does, that if you are poor it is most likely because your parents were unintelligent?... Read it yourself....

Michael Barone: [P]olls show that Americans think their chances of moving up are better than a generation ago. Statistics tell a different story: There is a higher correlation today between parents' and children's income than in the 1980s, and the income gap between college graduates and non-graduated doubled between 1979 and 1997.

"America," concludes Parker, "is becoming a stratified society based on education: a meritocracy."... [This] is exactly what Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray predicted for America in their controversial book The Bell Curve, published 11 years ago. Herrnstein and Murray noted that intelligence is both measurable and in some large but unquantifiable part hereditary, an unexceptionable finding for experimental psychologists but maddening to social engineers. As college education becomes open to all with the requisite intelligence, graduates will tend to marry graduates and produce children with similar intelligence, while others will tend to produce children without it.

"Unchecked, these trends," Herrnstein and Murray wrote, "will lead the U.S. toward something resembling a caste society, with the underclass mired ever more firmly at the bottom and the cognitive elite ever more firmly anchored at the top."... Are we there yet?... [M]aybe so.

Yet should we be so gloomy?... Not everyone has an emotional need to be on top: How many people, if they thought seriously about it, would really want the burdens of a CEO, however lavish the pay?... As Murray has written, all you need to do to avoid poverty in this country is to graduate from high school, get and stay married, and take any job. The intelligence needed to get a place in the cognitive elite may become more concentrated in a fair meritocratic society, but the personal behaviors needed to find a valued place in society are available to everyone. Meritocracy may mean less mobility, but that is bearable if, as Brooks says, "America is becoming more virtuous."...

The inheritance of inequality is strikingly large in America today: if the father's lifetime was 100% above the American average for his day, the son's lifetime income will on average be 65% above the American average for his day. That's a lot of inherited inequality. Is this unequal distribution of wealth, income, and status in the United States today the result of the fact that a genetic elite has risen to the top in a "fair" IQ-driven meritocracy?

No.

This high degree of inherited inequality isn't because high IQ genetic eliteness genes are being passed down from fathers to sons. As Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis (2002), "The Inheritance of Inequality," report:

The direct effect of IQ on earnings... presented in Bowles, Gintis, and Osborne (2002a)... is 0.15, indicating that a [one] standard deviation change in the cognitive score, holding constant... remaining variables... changes... earnings by about one-seventh of a standard deviation.... An estimate of the causal impact of childhood IQ on years of schooling... is 0.53 (Winship and Korenman 1999). A rough estimate of the direct and indirect effect of IQ on earnings... is then... 0.15+(0.53)(0.22) = 0.266....

h is the heritability of IQ.... The value cannot be higher than 1, and most recent estimates are substantially lower, possibly more like a half or less.... [C]ouples tend to be more similar in IQ than would occur by random mate choice.... [The] genetic correlation of parent and offspring [is] (1 + m)/2....

Using the values estimated above, we see that the contribution of genetic inheritance of IQ to the intergenerational transmission of income is (h²(1+m)/2)(0.266)² = .035(1 + m)h². If the heritability of IQ were 0.5 and the degree of assortation, m, were 0.2 (both reasonable, if only ball park estimates) and the genetic inheritance of IQ were the only mechanism accounting for intergenerational income transmission, then the intergenerational correlation [of lifetime income] would be 0.01, or roughly two percent the observed intergenerational correlation [of lifetime income between parents and children].

Two percent is simply not a large number. Factors that currently account for two percent of lifetime earnings inequality are simply not yet a big deal, and cannot be responsible for the fall in social mobility.

If there is ever to be a genetic elite, its members will surely exhibit two behavioral traits: a facility with math, and a near-intinctive tendency to do back-of-the-envelope quantitative checks of assertions. We can conclude only one thing from Barone's column: neither he nor his descendents (unless they get really lucky in their mates) are plausible candidates for membership in any "genetic elite".

It is worth pointing out that neither Richard Herrnstein nor Charles Murray are plausible candidates for membership in any "genetic elite" either. Let me turn the microphone over to impeccably right-wing Jim Heckman, who comments on The Bell Curve:

The Book fails for five main reasons. 1. The central premise of this book is the empirically incorrect claim that a single factor - g or IQ - that explains linear correlations among test scores is primarily responsible for differences in individual performance in society at large.... There is much evidence that more than one factor -- as conventionally measured -- is required to explain conventional correlation matrices among test scores.... They do not emphasize how little of the variation in social outcomes is explained by AFQT or g. There is considerable room for factors other than their measure of ability to explain wages and other social outcomes. 2. In their empirical work, the authors assume that AFQT is a measure of immutable native intelligence. In fact, AFQT is an achievement test that can be manipulated by educational interventions. 3. The authors[']... implicit assumption of an immutable g that is all-powerful in determining social outcomes leads them to disregard a lot of evidence that a variety of relevant labor market and social skills can be improved. 4. The authors present no new evidence on the heritability of IQ or other socially productive characteristics.... [T]hey... [compare] IQ... [to] a crude measure of parental environmental influences. This comparison is misleading. It fails to recognize the crudity of their environmental measures and the environmental component that is built into their measure of IQ, which biases the evidence in favor of their position. Moreover, the comparison as they present it is intrinsically meaningless. 5. Finally, the authors' forecast of social trends is pure speculation... the social policy recommendations have an ad hoc flavor to them.... The appeal to Murray's version of communitarianism as a solution to the emerging problem of inequality among persons is a deus ex machina flight of fancy that is not credibly justified.

And take a look at http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001975.html as well.

Matthew Yglesias Falls into a Trap...

Matthew Yglesias writes:

Matthew Yglesias: Horatio Alger's IQ: One thing that always occurs to me when these race/IQ blowups occur is that this issue is kind of in the neighborhood of a different point that doesn't merely recapitulate the race science of yore, does seem to me to have real policy implications, and is really well-supported by the data. This is the fact that IQ test results are meaningfully predictive of various indicators of success in the United States and the main factors that influence how people score on these tests all happen in childhood or earlier (in the fetal environment, in the genes, etc.).

This then becomes one of several available lines of argument that the image of the United States as a magical place where hard work always pays off and the rewards go to those willing to put in the effort is wrong. What's more, the imagine of the United States as a fallen version of that magical place — a country that could become magical if we just improved urban high schools or adopted a better student loan system — is also wrong. Better high schools and better student loan systems are things worth doing on their own terms, but absolutely nothing one can do changes the fact that where people end up is substantially out of their hands...

This seems to me to be substantially wrong. The inheritance of inequality is strikingly large in America today: if the father's lifetime was 100% above the American average for his day, the son's lifetime income will on average be 65% above the American average for his day. That's a lot of inherited inequality. Is this unequal distribution of wealth, income, and status in the United States today the result of the fact that a genetic elite has risen to the top in an IQ-driven meritocracy?

No.

This high degree of inherited inequality isn't because high IQ genetic eliteness genes are being passed down from fathers to sons. As Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis (2002), "The Inheritance of Inequality," report:

The direct effect of IQ on earnings... presented in Bowles, Gintis, and Osborne (2002a)... is 0.15, indicating that a [one] standard deviation change in the cognitive score, holding constant... remaining variables... changes... earnings by about one-seventh of a standard deviation.... An estimate of the causal impact of childhood IQ on years of schooling... is 0.53 (Winship and Korenman 1999). A rough estimate of the direct and indirect effect of IQ on earnings... is then... 0.15+(0.53)(0.22) = 0.266....

h is the heritability of IQ.... The value cannot be higher than 1, and most recent estimates are substantially lower, possibly more like a half or less.... [C]ouples tend to be more similar in IQ than would occur by random mate choice.... [The] genetic correlation of parent and offspring [is] (1 + m)/2....

Using the values estimated above, we see that the contribution of genetic inheritance of IQ to the intergenerational transmission of income is (h²(1+m)/2)(0.266)2 = .035(1 + m)h². If the heritability of IQ were 0.5 and the degree of assortation, m, were 0.2 (both reasonable, if only ball park estimates) and the genetic inheritance of IQ were the only mechanism accounting for intergenerational income transmission, then the intergenerational correlation [of lifetime income] would be 0.01, or roughly two percent the observed intergenerational correlation [of lifetime income between parents and children]...

If inherited genetically-based IQ were the source of the extra edge that the children of the rich get in our society, than we would expect a parent with 4 times average lifetime full-time earnings--say $200,000 a year--to have a kid with a lifetime average income of $51,500 instead of the average of $50,000. But it is not $51,500. It is $150,000.

I agree with Matt that "where people end up [in our society] is substantially out of their hands" (although not by any means completely): luck and inheritance of many kinds of things are incredibly important. But this does not mean that equality of opportunity is a mirage. For most of the things that are out of the hands of the individual are not out of our collective hands at all. Genetic influence on IQ is one of the big things that are out of our collective hands--and it turns out it is really not that big a thing at all.

William Saletan and the Editors of Slate Demonstrate that They Are Not Members of the Genetic Elite

The average IQ score of America's "white" population today is 100. According to Ulric Neisser, America's "white" children in 1932 had an average today's-test IQ score of 80. Dutch army conscripts in 1952 scored 30 IQ points lower than conscripts in 1982. Dickens and Flynn (2006) estimate that the African-American IQ test average rose by 6 points relative to the "white" average between 1972 and 2002. According to Brierley (1970), in the 1960s African-Americans from Ohio had an average IQ score greater than that of whites from Arkansas by 10 points. Thomas Sowell reports that in Northern Ireland the Catholic average lags the Protestant average by 15 IQ points.

What do William Saletan and his editors at Slate do with this? Here:

Race, genes, and intelligence. - By William Saletan - Slate Magazine: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights... -- Declaration of Independence."... I wish these assurances were true. They aren't. Tests do show an IQ deficit, not just for Africans relative to Europeans, but for Europeans relative to Asians. Economic and cultural theories have failed to explain most of the pattern.... It's time to prepare for the possibility that equality of intelligence, in the sense of racial averages on tests, will turn out not to be true.

If this suggestion makes you angry... you're not the first to feel that way. Many Christians are going through a similar struggle over evolution. Their faith in human dignity rests on a literal belief in Genesis.... But this time, the threat is racial genetics, and the people struggling with it are liberals.... [I]f you choose to fight the evidence, here's what you're up against. Among white Americans, the average IQ, as of a decade or so ago, was 103. Among Asian-Americans, it was 106. Among Jewish Americans, it was 113. Among Latino Americans, it was 89. Among African-Americans, it was 85. Around the world, studies find the same general pattern: whites 100, East Asians 106, sub-Sarahan Africans 70. One IQ table shows 113 in Hong Kong, 110 in Japan, and 100 in Britain....

[T]here's a mountain of evidence that differential evolution has left each population with a balance of traits that could be advantageous or disadvantageous, depending on circumstances. The list of differences is long and intricate. On average, compared to whites, blacks mature more quickly in the womb, are born earlier, and develop teeth, strength, and dexterity earlier. They sit, crawl, walk, and dress themselves earlier. They reach sexual maturity faster, and they have better eyesight. On each of these measures, East Asians lag whites and blacks. In exchange, East Asians get longer lives and bigger brains.

How this happened isn't clear. Everyone agrees that the three populations separated 40,000 to 100,000 years ago. Even critics of racial IQ genetics accept the idea that through natural selection, environmental differences may have caused abilities such as distance running to become more common in some populations than in others. Possibly, genes for cognitive complexity became so crucial in some places that nature favored them over genes for developmental speed and vision. If so, fitness for today's world is mostly dumb luck. If we lived in a savannah, kids programmed to mature slowly and grow big brains would be toast. Instead, we live in a world of zoos, supermarkets, pediatricians, pharmaceuticals, and information technology. Genetic advantages, in other words, are culturally created.

Not that that's much consolation if you're stuck in the 21st century with a low IQ...

Let's turn the microphone over to the impeccably right-wing Thomas Sowell to deal with this:

Thomas Sowell on Race, Genes, and IQ: Vol. 28, American Spectator, 02-01-1995, pp 32: [They] seem to conclude... that... biological inheritance of IQ... among members of the general society may also explain IQ differences between different racial and ethnic groups.... Such a conclusion goes... much beyond what the facts will support....

[T]he greatest black-white differences are not on the questions which presuppose middle-class vocabulary or experiences, but on abstract questions such as spatial perceptual ability.... [the] conclusion that this "phenomenon seems peculiarly concentrated in comparisons of ethnic groups" is simply wrong. When European immigrant groups in the United States scored below the national average on mental tests, they scored lowest on the abstract parts of those tests. So did white mountaineer children in the United States tested back in the early 1930s. So did canal boat children in Britain, and so did rural British children compared to their urban counterparts, at a time before Britain had any significant non-white population. So did Gaelic-speaking children as compared to English-speaking children in the Hebrides Islands. This is neither a racial nor an ethnic peculiarity. It is a characteristic found among low-scoring groups of European as well as African ancestry.

In short, groups outside the cultural mainstream of contemporary Western society tend to do their worst on abstract questions, whatever their race might be....

Perhaps the strongest evidence against a genetic basis for intergroup differences in IQ is that the average level of mental test performance has changed very significantly for whole populations over time and, moreover, particular ethnic groups within the population have changed their relative positions during a period when there was very little intermarriage to change the genetic makeup of these groups.

While [Herrnstein and Murray's] The Bell Curve cites the work of James R. Flynn, who found substantial increases in mental test performances from one generation to the next in a number of countries around the world, the authors seem not to acknowledge the devastating implications of that finding for the genetic theory of intergroup differences, or for their own reiteration of long-standing claims that the higher fertility of low-IQ groups implies a declining national IQ level. This latter claim is indeed logically consistent with the assumption that genetics is a major factor in interracial differences in IQ scores. But ultimately this too is an empirical issue--and empirical evidence has likewise refuted the claim that IQ test performance would decline over time.

Even before Professor Flynn's studies, mental test results from American soldiers tested in World War II showed that their performances on these tests were higher than the performances of American soldiers in World War I by the equivalent of about 12 IQ points. Perhaps the most dramatic changes were those in the mental test performances of Jews in the United States. The results of World War I mental tests conducted among American soldiers born in Russia--the great majority of whom were Jews--showed such low scores as to cause Carl Brigham, creator of the Scholastic Aptitude Test, to declare that these results "disprove the popular belief that the Jew is highly intelligent." Within a decade, however, Jews in the United States were scoring above the national average on mental tests, and the data in The Bell Curve indicate that they are now far above the national average in IQ.

Strangely, Herrnstein and Murray refer to "folklore" that "Jews and other immigrant groups were thought to be below average in intelligence. " It was neither folklore nor anything as subjective as thoughts. It was based on hard data, as hard as any data in The Bell Curve. These groups repeatedly tested below average on the mental tests of the World War I era, both in the army and in civilian life. For Jews, it is clear that later tests showed radically different results--during an era when there was very little intermarriage to change the genetic makeup of American Jews.

My own research of twenty years ago showed that the IQs of both Italian-Americans and Polish-Americans also rose substantially over a period of decades. Unfortunately, there are many statistical problems with these particular data, growing out of the conditions under which they were collected. However, while my data could never be used to compare the IQs of Polish and Italian children, whose IQ scores came from different schools, nevertheless the close similarity of their general patterns of IQ scores rising over time seems indicative--especially since it follows the rising patterns found among Jews and among American soldiers in general between the two world wars, as well as rising IQ scores in other countries around the world.

The implications of such rising patterns of mental test performance is devastating to the central hypothesis of those who have long expressed the same fear... that the greater fertility of low-IQ groups would lower the national (and international) IQ over time. The logic of their argument seems so clear and compelling that the opposite empirical result should be considered a refutation of the assumptions behind that logic....

A man who scores 100 on an IQ test today is answering more questions correctly than his grandfather with the same IQ answered two-generations ago, then someone else who answers the same number of questions correctly today as this man's grandfather answered two generations ago may have an IQ of 85.

Herrnstein and Murray openly acknowledge such rises in IQ and christen them "the Flynn effect," in honor of Professor Flynn who discovered it. But they seem not to see how crucially it undermines the case for a genetic explanation of interracial IQ differences. They say:

The national averages have in fact changed by amounts that are comparable to the fifteen or so IQ points separating blacks and whites in America. To put it another way, on the average, whites today differ from whites, say, two generations ago as much as whites today differ from blacks today. Given their size and speed, the shifts in time necessarily have been due more to changes in the environment than to changes in the genes.

While this open presentation of evidence against the genetic basis of interracial IQ differences is admirable, the failure to draw the logical inference seems puzzling. Blacks today are just as racially different from whites of two generations ago as they are from whites today. Yet the data suggest that the number of questions that blacks answer correctly on IQ tests today is very similar to the number answered correctly by past generations of whites. If race A differs from race B in IQ, and two generations of race A differ from each other by the same amount, where is the logic in suggesting that the IQ differences are even partly racial?... It is a question of the validity of the conclusion that differences between genetically different groups are due to those genetic differences, whether in whole or in part. When any factor differs as much from Al to A2 as it does from A2 to B2, why should one conclude that this factor is due to the difference between A in general and B in general?...

A remarkable phenomenon commented on in the Moynihan report of thirty years ago goes unnoticed in The Bell Curve--the prevalence of females among blacks who score high on mental tests. Others who have done studies of high- IQ blacks have found several times as many females as males above the 120 IQ level. Since black males and black females have the same genetic inheritance, this substantial disparity must have some other roots, especially since it is not found in studies of high-IQ individuals in the general society, such as the famous Terman studies, which followed high-IQ children into adulthood and later life. If IQ differences of this magnitude can occur with no genetic difference at all, then it is more than mere speculation to say that some unusual environmental effects must be at work among blacks. However, these environmental effects need not be limited to blacks, for other low-IQ groups of European or other ancestries have likewise tended to have females over-represented among their higher scorers, even though the Terman studies of the general population found no such patterns.

One possibility is that females are more resistant to bad environmental conditions, as some other studies suggest. In any event, large sexual disparities in high-IQ individuals where there are no genetic or socioeconomic differences present a challenge to both the Herrnstein- Murray thesis and most of their critics.

Black males and black females are not the only groups to have significant IQ differences without any genetic differences. Identical twins with significantly different birthweights also have IQ differences, with the heavier twin averaging nearly 9 points higher IQ than the lighter one. This effect is not found where the lighter twin weighs at least six and a half pounds, suggesting that deprivation of nutrition must reach some threshold level before it has a permanent effect on the brain during its crucial early development.

Perhaps the most intellectually troubling aspect of The Bell Curve is the authors' uncritical approach to statistical correlations. One of the first things taught in introductory statistics is that correlation is not causation. It is also one of the first things forgotten, and one of the most widely ignored facts in public policy research. The statistical term "multicollinearity," dealing with spurious correlations, appears only once in this massive book.

Multicollinearity refers to the fact that many variables are highly correlated with one another, so that it is very easy to believe that a certain result comes from variable A, when in fact it is due to variable Z, with which A happens to be correlated. In real life, innumerable factors go together. An example I liked to use in class when teaching economics involved a study showing that economists with only a bachelor's degree had higher incomes than economists with a master's degree and that these in turn had higher incomes than economists with Ph.D.'s. The implication that more education in economics leads to lower incomes would lead me to speculate as to how much money it was costing a student just to be enrolled in my course. In this case, when other variables were taken into account, these spurious correlations disappeared. In many other cases, however, variables such as cultural influences cannot even be quantified, much less have their effects tested statistically....

Seatbelt Sam Rides Again!

We were just passed by a Prius going 85...

In my experience there are two kinds of Prius drivers:

• Those who focus on the fact that their instantaneous gas mileage is always looking them in the right eye, and spend most of their time coasting and trying to squeeze an extra mpg out of the car.
• Those who follow Seatbelt Sam and say: I have spent a fortune on a fuel-efficient car, and now I am going to get some of that back by saving time!

It is a surprisingly zippy car for something that looks likecthe bastard mutant offspring of s Vollswagon Beetle and the pods from 2001...

A Few Thoughts on "The Plight of the Fortune Tellers"

(A) I suppose that the first lesson from talking to people about Riccardo Rebonato's The Plight of the Fortune Tellers is how foolish we academics are in thinking that there are things that go without saying: a great deal of the very large value of the book comes in saying things that, when I would say them in academic seminars, would be followed by somebody saying "But of course that goes without saying." The biggest example is Rebonato's hammered-home point that the 99.9% value-at -risk for a weekly return distribution cannot be determined. You would need 200 years of data from an unchanging return distribution before you could expect to have ten observations above the 99.9th percentile.

We academics say: of course. You cannot estimate the tails: they are tails. What 99.9 VaR, 1000-year flood, and their cousins mean is that you (a) took the standard deviation in the normal-time non-tail data you observed, and (b) multiplied it by 3.3. To call it the "thousand observation" level does not mean it is a one-in-a-thousand chance because the central limit theorem does not help you out in the tails. But talking to non-academics who have read this book I have found that they feel betrayed by the idea that a breach of the 99.999 weakly VaR can take place much more often than once every 2000 years--it is, after all, only 5.1 times the normal weekly change as defined by the standard deviation.

So: things that are to without saying should instead be said: as often as possible.

---

(B) I do think Rebonato has a tendency to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The tools of modern finance are very useful in dealing with one kind of risk: that associated with frequently-repeated transactions in normal times. Then the central limit theorem is your best friend, and the tools are wonderful. But there are a number of ways things go wrong:

• When transactions are not frequently-repeated enough so that you do not learn that your model is wrong, and you then discover that you were trading against somebody who had a much better mode of the situation.
• When for exogenous reasons times stop being normal, and you wind up in the tails.
• When you and your friends and your peers through your own actions create abnormal times.

These are three very different cases that deserve very different handling, but Rebonato runs them together...

---

(C) The four-part classification of transactions:

• Sold lottery tickets
• Bought insurance
• Sold insurance
• Bought lottery tickets

is very useful, and I wish that he had expanded on it more.

---

(D) The Greenspan quote:

the management of systemic risk is properly the job of the central bank. Individual banks should not be required to hold capital against the possibility of overall financial breakdown. Indeed, central banks, by their existence, appropiately offer banks a form of catastrophe insurance against such events...

Is true but incomplete. Banks should carry out their operation anticipating rescue by the central bank from systemic risk. But banks need to take care that they do not by their actions greatly multiply the systemic risks that otherwise exist.

(E) All in all, a highly recommended book.

Note to Self: Brainstorming: A Health Care Symposium?

What would I most like to see in a quick health care symposium this fall/winter for The Economists' Voice?

(A) Ask representatives of the three major Democratic campaigns to comment on the excellences of the other campaigns' plans:

• Obama rep. on the excellences of Clinton and Edwards
• Clinton rep. on the excellences of Edwards and Obama
• Edwards rep. on the excellences of Obama and Clinton

(B) Ask people who know the legislative politics to explain:

• What significant improvements are impossible because the pharmaceutical lobbyists will block them?
• What significant improvements are impossible because the insurance lobbyists will block them?
• What significant improvements are impossible because the doctor lobbyists will to block them?

(C) Taking a broader view:

• What's wrong with all three plans: the view from the right?
• What's wrong with all three plans: the view from the left?

(D) Taking a broadest view:

• What public-policy mediated changes in health care financing, delivery, education, and information would produce the biggest improvements in Americans' health status, and why?

Tyler Cowen: Underappreciated Economist E. Glen Weyl

Tyler Cowen writes:

Marginal Revolution: Underappreciated economists: a continuing series: Today I will pick E. Glen Weyl, a mere Youngling, who is studying at Princeton University.  Here is his paper on neural networks, and the abstract:

I consider a potential neural basis of overconfidence, the well-documented tendency of individuals to overestimate the precision of their predictions. I present a simple, classic connectionist model for predicting a binary variable. I show that while the network initially makes weak predictions (in the middle of the probability range) regardless of input, after observing randomly generated data it learns to be overconfident in the sense that when presented with other, unrelated random data it makes strong predictions. The model matches behavioral data in that it shows overconfidence growing with experience and then, eventually, declining. The model shows how overconfidence, far from being a surprising fallacy, can be seen as a natural outgrowth of statistical over-fitting in the brain.

Glen probably won't be underappreciated for long.  Here is his seminal paper on two-sided markets (e.g., Match.com).  There is already talk he will be a leading economist of the next generation...

Tyler Cowen on IQ Tests and Development

If the seventeen-year-old had dropped out of school at 15, stopped reading and writing and stopped going to math class and doing math homework, and gone to work on a farm in poor rural Mexico, his math SAT score right now would be close to his PSAT score then rather than 210 points higher, and his reading and writing SAT scores right now would be close to his PSAT score then rather than 180 points higher.

Tyler Cowen on IQ and development:

Marginal Revolution: IQ and the Wealth of Nations: IQ How many more times will someone suggest this book in the comments section of this blog?  I like this book and I think it offers a real contribution.  Nonetheless I feel no need to suggest it in the comments sections of other peoples' blogs. I do not treat this book as foundational because of personal experience.  I've spent much time in one rural Mexican village, San Agustin Oapan, and spent much time chatting with the people there.  They are extremely smart, have an excellent sense of humor, and are never boring.  And that's in their second language, Spanish. I'm also sure they if you gave them an IQ test, they would do miserably.  In fact I can't think of any written test -- no matter how simple -- they could pass.  They simply don't have experience with that kind of exercise.

When it comes to understanding the properties of different corn varieties, catching fish in the river, mending torn amate paper, sketching a landscape from memory, or gossiping about the neighbors, they are awesome. Some of us like to think that intelligence is mostly one-dimensional, but at best this is true only within well-defined peer groups of broadly similar people.  If you gave Juan Camilo a test on predicting rainfall he would crush me like a bug.

OK, maybe I hang out with a select group within the village.  But still, there you have it.  Terrible IQ scores (if they could even take the test), real smarts. So why should I think this book is the key to understanding economic underdevelopment?

With What Measure Ye Mete, It Shall Be Measured to You AgaIn

Jerry Falwell is dead.

Yeshua ben Yosef said:

Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye. Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you. Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: 8For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened. Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent?...

The answer to Yeshua's question is: Jerry Falwell's father would. If Jerry asked his father for bread, he would be given a stone; if Jerry asked his father for fish, he would be given a serpent.

Here's Jonathan Schwarz:

A Tiny Revolution: Jerry Falwell, Explained: Have you ever wondered how Jerry "Gays and Feminists Caused 9/11" Falwell became such a vicious, bloodthirsty lunatic? Via the New Yorker, this section from Falwell's 1987 autobiography, Strength for the Journey, goes a long way toward explaining it:

There were times that Dad's pranks bordered on cruelty. One of his oil-company workers, a one-legged man he nicknamed "Crip" Smith, complained about everything. Dad and Crip's co-workers got tired of the old man's bellyaching and decided to take revenge. One morning Crip called in sick and Dad volunteered to send by lunch to his grateful but suspicious employee. Dad and his chums caught Crip's old black tomcat, killed it, skinned it, and cooked it in the kitchen of one of Dad's little restaurants. They called it squirrel meat and delivered it to Crip on a linen-covered tray. When Crip returned to work the next morning, Dad and his co-conspirators asked him how he liked his meal. They knew he would complain even about a free home-cooked lunch, and when Crip called it "the toughest squirrel meat" he had ever eaten, they were glad to tell him why.

I can't decide what's most insane about this. Is it:

1. that Falwell grew up with a father this batshit crazy; or
2. that Falwell seems to have little recognition of how batshit crazy his father was? And shows no signs of wondering how growing up in a family like that warped his own view of the world?

Falwell's childhood must have been a complete hell--and it is no surprise that Falwell made God in his own father's image. Given the hand that he was dealt, I cannot judge Jerry Falwell.

The Republican politicians who built Falwell up--who sought his endorsement and magnified his influence--them will I judge.

DeLong Sapience Watch...

Is Brad DeLong sapient? If so, how sapient? The evidence is mixed. Here is some more evidence:

There I was, procrastinating by looking at the iTunes music store, trying to figure out what my children had been buying. And I see a name? Aimee Mann. "That looks interesting," I think to myself. Why did it seem interesting? I didn't know. So I typed "Aimee Mann" into the search box, and...

...discovered that I had heard one of her songs, "Going Through the Motions," on the radio that day. Did I know that that song was sung by Aimee Mann? If you had asked me while I was listening to it if I knew who the singer was, I would have said no.

But something inside there did know.

Brad DeLong: sapient intellectual rational and reasonable being, or jumped-up East African plains ape running off a neural net and capable at times of putting forth an almost-convincing simulacrum of sapience?

Is Brad DeLong sapient? Express your opinion:

Today's Whorfian Linguistic Blogging: Country Names in Chinese

Jim Fallows points out a feature of the Chinese language:

It's not bad that they [call themselves Zhongguo] 中国 ["central country"] as long as they keep calling us 美国 "beautiful country"...

What Inside Here, Exactly, Knows the First Name of the Attorney General?

What Inside Here, Exactly, Knows the First Name of the Attorney General?

It was about a week ago. I was in a subway train underneath San Francisco Bay, writing a weblog post about Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. But I wrote not Alberto Gonzales but Henry Gonzales--and when I proofread it twice for typos, grammaros, and mindos, I decided both times that Henry Gonzales was correct, what I wanted to write.

So why did I think, while underneath San Francisco Bay, that Henry Gonzales was the name of the Attorney General?

The answer is in where I was going: I was going to a meeting at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. The late Henry Gonzalez (he died in 2000) was a congressman. He was one of the last honest Texas populists, and was chair of the House Banking Committee and a strident and effective critic of the Federal Reserve during the 1990s. Do any kind of concept search on "Federal Reserve" and "last name Gonzalez" and the first name "Henry" will pop up.

So there I was, underneath San Francisco Bay, trying to write about the U.S. attorney scandal and Alberto Gonzales while part of my brain is thinking about the fact that I am going to the Federal Reserve. When it comes time to tell my fingers whether to type A-l-b-e-r-t-o or H-e-n-r-y, that part of my brain that is thinking "Federal Reserve" votes that "Gonzales" goes with "Henry," while that part of my brain that is thinking "Bush administration" votes that "Gonzales" goes with "Alberto," and the first part of my brain is larger and stronger and remains larger and stronger as I proofread the post, come out of the subway, and stop off to borrow Starbucks's electrons to send the post out onto the internet...

The interesting thing, from my perspective at least, is that it doesn't seem like there was any thought going on here. I didn't (mistakenly) think that "Henry Gonzales is the Attorney General." I didn't think about it at all. There was just a bunch of neurons sending electrical signals to one another that culminate in impulses out to the fingers on the keyboard--a bunch of neurons that most of the time present a convincing simulacrum of sentient intelligence, until the mask slips.

The Muffin Joke Is So Funny!

Jack Balkin says that the muffin joke is so funny:

Balkinization: Repeat after me: The Muffin Joke is NOT funny: This article [by John Tierney] in the New York Times asserts that the muffin joke is not funny; we only laugh at it because we want to get along with other people in social situations.I disagree. When I first heard the muffin joke, I thought it was very funny. Still do.... The muffin joke is funny because it is self-undermining. The punch line undermines the suspension of disbelief that the joke's narrative presumes. It is kind of like breaching the fourth wall in drama. It's like the line in Dr. Strangelove "You can't fight in here. This is the War Room!" or the Atheist Hymn we came up with in high school: "There is no God, there is no God, He told me so himself"...

I agree: I think the muffin joke is so funny. Why, it is even funny when told by as low-status an individual as John Tierney:

What’s So Funny? Well, Maybe Nothing - New York Times: Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Kant, Schopenhauer, Freud and the many theorists who have tried to explain laughter based on the mistaken premise that they’re explaining humor. Occasionally we’re surprised into laughing at something funny, but most laughter has little to do with humor. It’s an instinctual survival tool for social animals, not an intellectual response to wit. It’s not about getting the joke. It’s about getting along....

“Laughter is an honest social signal because it’s hard to fake,” Professor Provine says. “We’re dealing with something powerful, ancient and crude. It’s a kind of behavioral fossil showing the roots that all human beings, maybe all mammals, have in common.”... Professor Panksepp thinks the brain has ancient wiring to produce laughter so that young animals learn to play with one another. The laughter stimulates euphoria circuits in the brain and also reassures the other animals that they’re playing, not fighting. “Primal laughter evolved as a signaling device to highlight readiness for friendly interaction,” Professor Panksepp says. “Sophisticated social animals such as mammals need an emotionally positive mechanism to help create social brains and to weave organisms effectively into the social fabric.”...

Which brings us back to the muffin joke. It was inflicted by social psychologists at Florida State University on undergraduate women.... The women put in the underling position were a lot more likely to laugh at the muffin joke (and others almost as lame) than were women in the control group.... In some cases the woman watching was designated the boss; in other cases she was the underling or a co-worker of the person on the videotape. When the woman watching was the boss, she didn’t laugh much at the muffin joke. But when she was the underling or a co-worker, she laughed much more, even though the joke-teller wasn’t in the room to see her. When you’re low in the status hierarchy, you need all the allies you can find, so apparently you’re primed to chuckle at anything even if it doesn’t do you any immediate good...

The Meddling Idiot! As Though DeLong's Ape Brain Could Contain the Wisdom of the Krell!

Berkeley Letters and Science Faculty Forum. January 22, 2007. I always have problems understanding what John Campbell http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/0199243816/braddelong00 is saying. He says that he is saying:

• There is an important and unbridgeable gulf between our notions of physical causation and our notions of psychological causation.
• Martian physicists--intelligences vast, cool, and unsympathetic with no notions of human psychology or psychological causation--could not understand why, could not put their finger on physical variables and factors explaining why, the fifty or so of us assemble in the Seaborg Room Monday at lunch time during the spring semester.

He says that he is not saying any of:

• The universe has a dual nature, in which mind is different from not-mind.
• Reductionism is wrong because there are important emergent properties of complicated systems, and reductionist and holistic explanations are quantitatively different.
• There is an important and unbridgeable gulf between understanding based on physical laws and understanding based on human empathy. Instead, Campbell says, there is only one kind of understanding and explanation, but it is applied to different sets of causal factors in different circumstances.

The word "supervenience" was not mentioned by anybody.

I had two questions for him. I think I would have understood him if I could have understood the answers to either of them:

• If I were a member of a team of tentacled Martian physicists (don't get me started on the image of mollusc-like Martians living on an essentially desert planet), my physical-description model of Berkeley would include a model of Assistant Dean Chuck Stroup's brain at the subatomic level. I would then be able to say: "Aha! Suppose we were to decrease the levels of serotonin in the particular half-cubic-foot of space that is Chuck Stroup's brain; then the email messages containing the string "L&S Faculty Forum today" don't get sent, and we don't assemble here for lunch. Wouldn't that be a way for Martian physicists with no concept of human psychology to begin to understand why we are all here in the Seaborg Room right now?

• Let me roughly quote from a lecture from a course, Physics 140, that I took as a junior from Ed Purcell: "How about the lithium atom? We can't calculate the joint orbitals of all three electrons--that's too hard. But we can get an approximate solution for the valence electron. It wants to be in the ground state, but the Pauli Exclusion Principle forbids it. So we can model the orbital of the third, valence electron as a single electron moving in the field of the nucleus partially shielded by the other two electrons in the next stable energy level above the ground state. The Schrodinger equation is... [Purcell starts doing math.]" Here we have a mixture of physical and psychological causation. The physical causation--the math driven by the physical laws of quantum mechanics--comes at the end. Before that comes psychological causation: Purcell attributes human-like intelligence to the electron that has desires and needs and to the brooding overall universal presence that is the Pauli Exclusion Principle, and so reduces the physical-causation problem to a simpler one that is approximately right and that he can solve. The resort to psychological causation is a way to get an answer even though the math for the three-electron problem is beyond our grasp. What is the difference between Ed Purcell's use of psychological causation here and your use of psychological causation as a factor in addition to serotonin levels in understanding human psychological depression?

But alas! I did not understand his answers--although I have no doubt that he did.

I can't help but think that the rhetorical trope of "Martian physicists" is a problem here. I take it for granted that "Martian physicists" have models of human brains at a subatomic level and understand the dynamic evolution of brain states and the connection of brain states to human actions, and do so at a level that makes "psychology" needless save as a shorthand way of dividing brain states into categories. Philosophers' "Martian physicists" don't seem to be able to do that.