Positive thinking’s negative results

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

Positive thinking can turn downright negative:

As the researchers report in Psychological Science, those with high self-esteem who repeated “I’m a lovable person” scored an average of 31 on their mood assessment compared with an average of 25 by those who did not repeat the phrase. Among participants with low self-esteem, those making the statement scored a dismal average of 10 while those that did not managed a brighter average of 17.

Dr Wood suggests that positive self-statements cause negative moods in people with low self-esteem because they conflict with those people’s views of themselves. When positive self-statements strongly conflict with self-perception, she argues, there is not mere resistance but a reinforcing of self-perception. People who view themselves as unlovable find saying that they are so unbelievable that it strengthens their own negative view rather than reversing it. Given that many readers of self-help books that encourage positive self-statements are likely to suffer from low self-esteem, they may be worse than useless.

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A Plant That Thrives When Used as a Toilet

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

Nepenthes lowii, a pitcher plant found in Borneo, thrives when used as a toilet by tree shrews:

Jonathan A. Moran of Royal Roads University in British Columbia, Charles M. Clarke of Monash University in Malaysia and colleagues describe this “novel nitrogen sequestration strategy” in a paper in Biology Letters. Using isotopic analysis, they estimate that shrew feces deposited in N. lowii’s pitchers are a significant source of nitrogen for the plants.

N. lowii is found at higher elevations where ants and other insects are less abundant, said Dr. Moran, who has studied pitcher plants for two decades. In its immature stage, the plant grows a bowl that is near the ground and makes do with the few ants available. “When you start small, you have to catch something,” Dr. Moran said.

But the mature plant grows pitchers that are in the air. Tree shrews visit the plants to eat nectar that oozes from the bowl’s open lid, positioning themselves directly over the bowl. “Form follows function,” Dr. Moran said. N. lowii’s bowls “even look like toilets,” he added, “though we were too polite to say that in the paper.”

Posted in Animals, Science | No Comments »

A Political History of SF

Monday, June 15th, 2009

Eric S. Raymond explains the history of science fiction through an unusual lens — politics:

There was also a political aura that went with the hard-SF style, one exemplified by Campbell and right-hand man Robert Heinlein. That tradition was of ornery and insistant individualism, veneration of the competent man, an instinctive distrust of coercive social engineering and a rock-ribbed objectivism that that valued knowing how things work and treated all political ideologizing with suspicion. Exceptions like Asimov’s Foundation novels only threw the implicit politics of most other Campbellian SF into sharper relief.

At the time, this very American position was generally thought of by both allies and opponents as a conservative or right-wing one. But the SF community’s version was never conservative in the strict sense of venerating past social norms — how could it be, when SF literature cheerfully contemplated radical changes in social arrangements and even human nature itself? SF’s insistent individualism also led it to reject racism and feature strong female characters decades before the rise of political correctness ritualized these behaviors in other forms of art.

Nevertheless, some writers found the confines of the field too narrow, or rejected Campbellian orthodoxy for other reasons. The first revolt against hard SF came in the early 1950s from a group of young writers centered around Frederik Pohl and the Futurians fan club in New York. The Futurians invented a kind of SF in which science was not at the center, and the transformative change motivating the story was not technological but political or social. Much of their output was sharply satirical in tone, and tended to de-emphasize individual heroism. The Futurian masterpiece was the Frederik Pohl/Cyril Kornbluth collaboration The Space Merchants (1956).

The Futurian revolt was political as well as aesthetic. Not until the late 1970s did any the participants admit that many of the key Futurians had histories as ideological Communists or fellow travellers, and that fact remained relatively unknown in the field well into the 1990s. As with later revolts against the Campbellian tradition, part of the motivation was a desire to escape the “conservative” politics that went with that tradition. While the Futurians’ work was well understood at the time to be a poke at the consumer capitalism and smugness of the postwar years, only in retrospect is it clear how much they owed to the Frankfurt school of Marxist critical theory.

But the Futurian revolt was half-hearted, semi-covert, and easily absorbed by the Campbellian mainstream of the SF field; by the mid-1960s, sociological extrapolation had become a standard part of the toolkit even for the old-school Golden Agers, and it never challenged the centrality of hard SF. The Futurians’ Marxist underpinnings lay buried and undiscussed for decades after the fact.

Perception of Campbellian SF as a “right-wing” phenomenon lingered, however, and helped motivate the next revolt in the mid-1960s, around the time I started reading the stuff.
[...]
The New Wave’s inventors (notably Michael Moorcock, J.G. Ballard and Brian Aldiss) were British socialists and Marxists who rejected individualism, linear exposition, happy endings, scientific rigor and the U.S.’s cultural hegemony over the SF field in one fell swoop. The New Wave’s later American exponents were strongly associated with the New Left and opposition to the Vietnam War, leading to some rancorous public disputes in which politics was tangled together with definitional questions about the nature of SF and the direction of the field.

But the New Wave, after 1965, was not so easily dismissed or assimilated as the Futurians had been. Amidst a great deal of self-indulgent crap and drug-fueled psychedelizing, there shone a few jewels — Brian Aldiss’s Hothouse stories (1961, retrospectively recruited into the post-1965 New Wave by their author) Langdon Jones’s The Great Clock (1966), Phillip José Farmer’s Riders of the Purple Wage (1967), Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream (1967), and Fritz Leiber’s One Station of the Way (1968) stand out as examples.

As with the Futurians, the larger SF field rapidly absorbed some New Wave techniques and concerns. Notably, the New Wavers broke the SF taboo on writing about sex in any but the most cryptically coded ways, a stricture previously so rigid that only Heinlein himself had had the stature to really break it, in Stranger In A Strange Land (1961) — a book that helped shape the hippie counterculture of the later 1960s.

Posted in Media, Policy, Robert Heinlein | No Comments »

ARhrrrr

Monday, June 15th, 2009

Augmented reality is what you get when you use virtual reality technology not to create a world, but to “annotate” the real world.

The most familiar example is the yellow first-down line projected onto football games. It looks like it’s there, but it isn’t.

People have been talking about augmented-reality games for some time, but I wasn’t expecting this approach — brought to you, by the way, by Skittles:

Posted in Games, Technology | No Comments »

Snow Roots

Sunday, June 14th, 2009

Professor Hans Cornelissen and his Russian-Dutch team have discovered that the small alpine plant Corydalis conorhiza has both normal roots that grow into the ground and snow roots that grow up into the snow:

Cornelissen’s team hypothesise that the additional snow roots allow C. conorhiza to take nitrogen directly from the snow. Many mountain plants take up nitrogen from melted snow soaking into the ground only after snow melt. However an impenetrable ice crust prevents C. conorhiza from doing this, therefore the plant is forced to depend upon the snow roots.

To test the hypothesis a small amount of fertiliser, heavily enriched with an uncommon isotope of nitrogen (15N), was added to the snow surrounding C. conorhiza plants. Days later the team discovered various sections of the plants contained high concentrations of 15N, including the snow roots, tubers and the leaves which had appeared after snow melt. In contrast, a species of dandelion growing close to the C. conorhiza plants did not possess any 15N. Further study confirmed the roots are anatomically very different from normal soil roots, making them specifically adapted for the fast uptake and transport of nitrogen.

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The underworked American

Sunday, June 14th, 2009

Americans work longer hours with less vacation time than Europeans — with one glaring exception:

American children have it easier than most other children in the world, including the supposedly lazy Europeans. They have one of the shortest school years anywhere, a mere 180 days compared with an average of 195 for OECD countries and more than 200 for East Asian countries. German children spend 20 more days in school than American ones, and South Koreans over a month more. Over 12 years, a 15-day deficit means American children lose out on 180 days of school, equivalent to an entire year.

American children also have one of the shortest school days, six-and-a-half hours, adding up to 32 hours a week. By contrast, the school week is 37 hours in Luxembourg, 44 in Belgium, 53 in Denmark and 60 in Sweden. On top of that, American children do only about an hour’s-worth of homework a day, a figure that stuns the Japanese and Chinese.

Americans also divide up their school time oddly. They cram the school day into the morning and early afternoon, and close their schools for three months in the summer. The country that tut-tuts at Europe’s mega-holidays thinks nothing of giving its children such a lazy summer.

That lazy summer gets blamed for American kids’ poor academic performance — and something more:

But the long summer vacation acts like a mental eraser, with the average child reportedly forgetting about a month’s-worth of instruction in many subjects and almost three times that in mathematics. American academics have even invented a term for this phenomenon, “summer learning loss”. This pedagogical understretch is exacerbating social inequalities. Poorer children frequently have no one to look after them in the long hours between the end of the school day and the end of the average working day. They are also particularly prone to learning loss. They fall behind by an average of over two months in their reading. Richer children actually improve their performance.

Time away from school hurts poor kids’ performance, but it improves rich kids’ performance? This suggests that school isn’t a particularly good learning environment — better than being left alone with the TV, but not by much.

So why should we be increasing the amount of time kids spend in school?

Posted in Education | No Comments »

The Extremely Male Brain

Friday, June 12th, 2009

When I first read about autism-expert Simon Baron-Cohen — whose theory is that autism results from an extremely male brain — his unusual name stuck with me:

If his name sounds familiar, that may be because his first cousin is Sacha Baron Cohen, of Borat fame. “We’re very proud of him in the family,” he says.

Posted in Autism, Media, Science | No Comments »

Behavioral Geneticists vs. Policy Implications

Friday, June 12th, 2009

Sandra Scarr’s summary of the research shows that child care has little impact on children’s development.

Bryan Caplan feels that the policy implications should be clear:

I realize that “good-quality care for all our children” is a popular, feel-good proposal. Behavioral geneticists will make their lives more difficult if they criticize it. Yet intellectual integrity demands it. Key points that people need to hear even if they’d rather not:
  1. We don’t face a binary choice between boring day care that makes kids miserable and stimulating day care that makes kids joyful. There’s a continuous trade-off between cost and quality.

  2. Adults accept “socially unsupportive, boring work environments” all the time. Why? Because there’s a trade-off between fun and money. Why should parents ignore this trade-off when they choose their children’s day care?

  3. If the rationale for our current behavior was (consumption + investment) benefits, and the investment benefits turn out to be less than we thought, common sense tells us to spend less. If the investment benefits turn out to be non-existent, common sense tells us to spend a lot less.

  4. Once we accept that the point of child care is entertainment, we can probably find much cheaper ways to supply it. High-quality investment in children might require people with Ph.D.s in education and child psychology. That’s expensive. High-quality entertainment for children, in contrast, probably only requires some high-energy kids in high school or college. That’s cheap.

Posted in Economics, Education, Policy | No Comments »

People prefer confidence to expertise

Friday, June 12th, 2009

People prefer confidence to expertise when they look for advice:

In [Carnegie Mellon professor Don Moore]‘s experiment, volunteers were given cash for correctly guessing the weight of people from their photographs. In each of the eight rounds of the study, the guessers bought advice from one of four other volunteers. The guessers could see in advance how confident each of these advisers was (see table), but not which weights they had opted for.

From the start, the more confident advisers found more buyers for their advice, and this caused the advisers to give answers that were more and more precise as the game progressed. This escalation in precision disappeared when guessers simply had to choose whether or not to buy the advice of a single adviser. In the later rounds, guessers tended to avoid advisers who had been wrong previously, but this effect was more than outweighed by the bias towards confidence.

The findings add weight to the idea that if offering expert opinion is your stock-in-trade, it pays to appear confident. Describing his work at an Association for Psychological Science meeting in San Francisco last month, Moore said that following the advice of the most confident person often makes sense, as there is evidence that precision and expertise do tend to go hand in hand. For example, people give a narrower range of answers when asked about subjects with which they are more familiar (Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, vol 107, p 179).

There are times, however, when this link breaks down. With complex but politicised subjects such as global warming, for example, scientific experts who stress uncertainties lose out to activists or lobbyists with a more emphatic message.

So if honest advice risks being ignored, what is a responsible scientific adviser to do? “It’s an excellent question, and I’m not sure that I have a great answer,” says Moore.

Posted in Policy, Science | No Comments »

When did video games become so boring? About 1998

Friday, June 12th, 2009

When did video games become so boring? About 1998 — when they changed into something subtly different:

If there is a single change that we can point to, it is that video games used to be tests of skill, and so were challenging (and frustrating), whereas now they are tests of having free time, and so hold the player’s hand through the game (and are boring). Today’s video game is more like a movie — as long as you turn the crank on the side of the projector, eventually you’ll experience the entire thing. That is the opposite of playing a game, since you are never guaranteed to win a game.

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Follow-up to A Non-Socratic Dialogue

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

Bryan Caplan cites Brad DeLong’s non-Socratic dialogue on social welfare functions and provides his own follow-up on how markets value the welfare of the poor:

Glaukon: “Now that we know how little weight the market puts on the poor, I’ve been trying to find a system that’s better from their point of view. We know it’s not communism – the poor starved by the millions.”

Agathon: “Sadly true, my dear Glaukon. The answer, of course, is social democracy. Communism kills the goose that lays the golden eggs. Social democracy, in contrast, gives the poor extra eggs so the market will treat them like human beings.”

Glaukon: “That sounds like a good answer, Agathon. But would you humor two objections I googled?”

Agathon: “I’d be delighted. Objection #1?”

Glaukon: “Well, here’s a little graph (Exhibit 1.13) that shows the income share of the poorest 10% as a function of countries’ economic freedom. It’s basically flat – however much latitude the market has, the poor get about 2.3% of national income.”

Agathon: “Hey, don’t start blaming social democracy for the evils of Third World kleptocracies!”

Glaukon: “I’m not trying to. Still, if the market is as indifferent toward the poor as you say, shouldn’t there be some noticeable tendency for their income share to be lower in countries where markets have more sway?”

Agathon: “Well, the fact that markets put a low weight on the welfare of the poor doesn’t necessarily mean that politics treats them any better.”

Glaukon: “Interesting you should say that, for it brings me to Objection #2. Remember how you highlighted the plight of the average Bengali peasant, who gets 1/16,000,000,000,000 the weight of Bill Gates in the market’s social welfare function?”

Agathon: “Indeed. A devastating critique of capitalism, isn’t it?”

Glaukon: “I’m not so sure. If those Bengalis somehow managed to get low-skilled jobs in the U.S., wouldn’t the market suddenly put vastly more weight on their welfare?”

Agathon: “Of course. That’s the golden rule – whoever has the gold (or dollars) makes the rules.”

Glaukon: “But what’s stopping those Bengalis from coming to the First World and taking those low-skilled jobs that are, by their standards, incredibly lucrative? Surely it’s not the price of a plane ticket.”

Agathon: “Fair enough. What’s your point?”

Glaukon: “Well, a very interesting paper I just read shows that in the absence of immigration restrictions imposed by First World governments, Third World workers could massively increase their income merely by moving here. It sounds like the market counts Bengalis very little largely because of governments’ labor market regulations. A free labor market would do vastly more for Bengalis than even the most internationally generous social democracy.”

Agathon: “But we can’t have a free international labor market! Without immigration restrictions, social democracy would collapse. Can you imagine all those Bengalis coming here and going on welfare? Not to mention their impact on domestic wages.”

Glaukon: “But isn’t your whole complaint about the market that it counts the welfare of the truly poor for virtually nothing? Now it sounds like you care less about their welfare than the market does. Maybe less than zero.”

Agathon: “‘Less than zero?’ Come now, Glaukon. You know I’m a compassionate man. How can you say such a thing?”

Glaukon: “Well, I read another piece that suggested an interesting compromise on immigration. We could keep the welfare state and improve the welfare of the truly poor if we made them the following deal: We admit them as second-class citizens who (a) can’t collect welfare and (b) pay a surtax to compensate low-skilled natives for the increased labor market competition.”

Agathon: “Sounds monstrous. It goes against the commitment to equality that defines social democracy.”

Glaukon: “But what’s so monstrous about it? Poor foreigners are much better off, and by hypothesis we’ve protected the natives as well. So what social welfare function does your rejection of this proposal imply?”

Agathon: “Sigh. Less than zero?”

Glaukon: “Verily, my dear Agathon. There may be good arguments out there for social democracy. But ‘It’s better for the poor than laissez-faire isn’t one of them.’”

Posted in Economics, Policy | No Comments »

The Spinach and Dessert of Health Care Reform

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

The purpose of the public health insurance plan, Arnold Kling says, is political:

Getting people to reduce their use of medical services is the spinach of health care reform. Expanding insurance coverage is the dessert. The Democrats want to enact dessert now, and worry about spinach later. For the dessert part, they want no Republicans involved. Down the road, when they are ready to tackle the spinach part, they will press for bipartisan cooperation and statesmanship from Republicans.

Posted in Arnold Kling, Economics, Policy | No Comments »

The Ernest Hemingway of super repo men

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

Apparently Nick Popovich is the Ernest Hemingway of super repo men:

Today Popovich, 56, is co-partner of Sage-Popovich, a repossession firm. (Sage is his wife, Pat, also the firm’s president.) Their clients include Citibank, Transamerica and Credit Suisse, and the firm annually earns, Popovich says, “into the low-to-mid seven figures.” That estimate isn’t ridiculous when you consider that the most difficult jobs can net Popovich anywhere from $600,000 to $900,000. Popovich’s specialty is big planes, jumbo jets, mostly; he’s repo-ed 1,300 of them in his career. And that’s just the solo gigs. Throw in the 65 repo men who work for him, and the number reaches closer to 2,000.

His mandate is simple. Someone misses a few payments. The bank wants to recover its plane. There will be an attempt to set up some kind of debt payment plan. Failing that, collateral has to be ponied up. If there is none, then an account executive reaches out to Popovich. But Jumbo Jets are expensive — a 747 will run you anywhere from $125 million to $260 million — and people who try to acquire such toys are loath to give them back. If the deadbeat gets wind that the bank is sniffing around his plane, he’s likely to spirit it away before anyone has a chance to grab it, and then it becomes a cat-and-rat game that can take months to complete.

And times have never been better.

Popovich’s first rule of firearms is pretty simple:

The man who tells you he’s going to shoot you will not shoot you.

Read the whole thing for the crazy stories.

(Hat tip à mon père.)

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Value of $125,000-a-Year Teachers

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

So what kind of teachers could a school get if it paid them $125,000 a year?

An accomplished violist who infuses her music lessons with the neuroscience of why one needs to practice, and creatively worded instructions like, “Pass the melody gently, as if it were a bowl of Jell-O!”

A self-described “explorer” from Arizona who spent three decades honing her craft at public, private, urban and rural schools.

Two with Ivy League degrees. And Joe Carbone, a phys ed teacher, who has the most unusual résumé of the bunch, having worked as Kobe Bryant’s personal trainer.

“Developed Kobe from 185 lbs. to 225 lbs. of pure muscle over eight years,” it reads.

A New York charter school called the Equity Project is hiring teachers like that, because it believes that teacher quality is the key to “achieving educational equity for low income students.” I suspect they’ll find out that student quality matters too.

I don’t doubt that teacher quality matters tremendously, but the real question is, what exactly is teacher quality?

The school’s founder, Zeke M. Vanderhoek, is the 32-year-old founder of Mahattan GMAT, is he thinks that contagious enthusiasm — a high “engagement factor” — is what matters. I suspect you can get that for a lot less than $125k.

Posted in Business, Education | No Comments »

A Share in Children’s Success

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

Daniel A. Epstein suggests that investors should be able to buy a share in children’s success:

It starts with a number: 17. A 17 percent compound annual growth rate, to be precise. That’s the astronomical potential return on investment of educational intervention on young children, according to the Nobel laureate economist James Heckman. The return manifests itself in increased future earnings and reduced social costs. Today, that 17 percent compound annual growth rate is inaccessible to investors, but if people could issue shares of their future cash flow, it would unleash that potential, initiating a massive influx of investment in children.

Consider a situation that is, unfortunately, all too common. A mother works two jobs, dropping her toddler off at a friend’s house early each morning and picking her up late at night. The mother can’t afford high-quality child care and, because of that, statistics show, years from now that child will be more likely to repeat grades, become pregnant while a teenager, commit crime, visit the emergency room and depend on welfare. One day that child will probably earn less than people with similar backgrounds who did receive high-quality child care.

But what if that toddler had something to offer investors? If she could sell a percentage of her future income in exchange for a coupon to receive child care and if the government offered tax credits to investors to compensate them for the decreased social cost that they finance, investors might compete to pay for her education. Millions of children would gain access to the financing that they need to reach their full potential, the government would reap significant savings and investors would profit handsomely. Furthermore, such a system would have revolutionary side effects.

Just as the stock market has allowed the invisible hand to guide funds to stocks that have promising growth potential, a human capital market would guide funds to people with promising potential to increase earnings and cut social costs.

My first thought is that there’s a huge information asymmetry problem here leading to quite a bit of moral hazard. In fact, when this was tried at the (Ivy League) university level, many of the students planning on going into non-profits, the arts, etc. took the alternative loan that asked them to pay back a fraction of their income, while the students planning on going into, say, finance stuck with an ordinary loan.

Not-so-starry-eyed investors would offer tremendously different rates to different students, based on test scores and career goals — and that would be politically unacceptable.

Robin Hanson goes further, and “shockingly” calls the piece a pro-slavery op-ed:

If we allowed this, observers would happily laud the initial influx of money to these kids and their families. But a few decades later, many would complain loudly about the “exploitative” and even “racist” extra “tax” these kids must pay as adults. Media coverage would focus on those who sold the largest fraction of their future income and made the worst educational investments, becoming a new “slave underclass” of “company town” parents who feel they can’t afford to raise kids without selling off most of those kids’ future.
[...]
I’d be reluctant to be an long-term investor, fearing that later political pressure would be irresistible to “free” these “slaves” from their payment obligations.

Posted in Economics, Education, Policy | No Comments »

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