How to increase altruism in toddlers

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

A recent study demonstrates how to increase altruism in toddlers:

Sixty 18-month-old infants were shown eight photos of household objects, such as teapots, books or shoes. Crucially, infants were divided into four groups, with each group shown one of four versions of these photos. One “affiliated” version featured in the background two dolls standing together side by side; another version featured a doll in the background on its own; the third version featured two dolls facing away from each other; and the final version merely had toy bricks in the background.

After they’d been shown these photos, another experimenter walked over to the infants and dropped a bunch of pens on route. Amazingly, the infants who’d seen the photos with the companionable dolls in the background were three times as likely as the other infants to help the experimenter by spontaneously picking up one or more sticks and handing it to the experimenter.

Further analysis showed it’s not that the infants who’d seen the photos with companionable dolls were caused to be in a better mood, nor that they spent longer looking at the photos, than the other infants. Rather, according to the researchers, “the connections between affiliation to the group and prosocial behaviour are … so fundamental that, even in infancy, a mere hint of affiliation is sufficient to increase helping.”

(Hat tip to Tyler Cowen.)

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Innovation is Not Rewarded

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

Innovation is not rewarded, Eric Falkenstein says, because thinking different generally isn’t a good idea:

I personally have known a lot of really smart people and have to say they are more unconventional in their ideas, yet most of their ideas are crazy. If you have ever been to a Mensa meeting (IQ but little formal education), you realize how things like homeopathy, or truthers, get their bearings. If you have ever hung out with PhDs, you know how limited their competence scope is (at research universities they have the same IQ as Mensans, but are more disciplined and less creative). It’s no wonder guys like stereotypical MBAs, who are not so analytical but rather personable and articulate, tend to dominate society. I suspect MBA rule is less catastrophic than PhD or Mensa rule, if only because they aren’t as certain of themselves. This all gets back to the idea there is an optimal IQ, and it’s not 180, but rather, say, 125 (probably the modal IQ for any large group leader, such as Presidents and CEOs).

Being smart is a good thing, and I’m happy when my kids do well on cognitive tests because of what this portends for their life (as Charles Murray noted, most people would prefer their kid had 15 more IQ points than get $1 million on their 21st birthday). Yet highly intelligent people tend to innovate more, and such innovation tends to be counterproductive for the innovator. So, the fact really smart people can answer a question faster or more accurately than others, is at some point offset by the fact that when they have to supply the question — as is the case once they leave formal schooling — they will be attracted towards less conventional, usually irrelevant or wrong, paths. For every Steve Jobs or Albert Einstein there were many who lived and died in obscurity; for every Black-Derman-Toy there are hundreds of insanely convoluted, in-house models, of no value.

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Let’s get the facts on AIDS straight

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

Let's get the facts on AIDS straight, Patri Friedman says:

So, tell me how I am misinterpreting the following stats from the CDC.
AIDS Cases by Transmission Category
Six common transmission categories are male-to-male sexual contact, injection drug use, male-to-male sexual contact and injection drug use, high-risk heterosexual (male-female) contact, mother-to-child (perinatal) transmission, and other (includes blood transfusions and unknown cause).

Looking at their table of total number of AIDS cases through 2007, we have a total of 1,009,219 cases. Of these, 48% were from MSM and 25% were from IDU, and 7% from both, for a total of 81% of cases directly from MSM or IDU. I think that 4/5ths qualifies as “mainly”.

Furthermore, the next largest category by far is “high-risk heterosexual contact”, defined as “Heterosexual contact with a person known to have, or to be at high risk for, HIV infection.” I don’t know the exact definition (does anyone else?), but I believe that this includes the partners of people who engage in MSM and IDU (as well as, of course, partners of those who have HIV).

This category makes up an additional 17.5%! Which leaves the total proportion of cases that is from other means, including hemophilia, blood transfusion, mother-to-child, and normal heterosexual contact as 1.8% of all cases.

It is not true that AIDS is a gay male disease. But it is true, according to all the stats I’ve seen, that AIDS is a disease of gay men, IV drug users, and those who sleep with them. The heterosexual transmissions rates are simply too low for it to have spread in the general population.

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Following in the tradition of Palestinian terrorist Sirhan Sirhan

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

Steve Sailer argues that Ft. Hood shooter Hasan was following in the tradition of Palestinian terrorist Sirhan Sirhan:

For example, if you stop and think about it, you’ll notice that Hasan, whose mother was born in Jerusalem, was following in the tradition of Palestinian terrorist Sirhan Sirhan, who shot Sen. Robert F. Kennedy on June 5, 1968.

Few conceive of Sirhan as a Palestinian terrorist because nobody in American thought much about Palestine or terrorism before George Habash masterminded the skyjacking of four jetliners in 1970. Hence, most Americans mentally lump Sirhan in with the 1960s domestic assassins Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray.

Yet, Sirhan certainly saw himself as a Palestinian terrorist. Sirhan murdered Bobby Kennedy on the first anniversary of Israel’s June 5, 1967 attack on its Arab neighbors because RFK promised to send 50 fighter jets to Israel.

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Sherlock Holmes

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

Have Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay teamed up to produce a new Sherlock Holmes movie?

After watching that trailer, I assumed so, but the new film is directed by Guy Ritchie — who has yet to recapture the magic of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.

As someone with a more than passing interest in Sherlock Holmes, self-defense with a walking stick (or single-stick), and exotic weapons, I nonetheless do not want to watch a Holmes-Matrix mash-up with buddy-cop clichés borrowed from Lethal Weapon and Bad Boys. Sigh.

I won’t complain the Robert Downey Jr. is miscast though — not after Iron Man.

Posted in Martial Arts, Media, Weapons | No Comments »

Successful environmentalism

Monday, November 9th, 2009

Actually, there are a lot of examples of environmental policies working, Steve Sailer says:

You don’t hear much about them, though. For whatever reason, nobody ever promotes environmentalism by referring to past successes.

Ozone layer – Saved by getting rid of certain chemicals, although their replacements might be causing global warming.

Acid rain – Better scrubbers on smokestacks have largely fixed this problem. It turned out that the technology wasn’t as costly as it seemed.

Smog in LA – About an order of magnitude better than when I was a kid, although the cost in poorer miles per gallon must be huge. You may recall that there used to be two different MPG ratings from the government on cars, one for California and one for the rest of the country, with the California one about, I don’t know, one-tenth worse. Now, everybody has the California smog-fighting equipment on their cars, so that must increase our oil bill by many billions annually.

Lead – Here’s where one environmental improvement caused another improvement. The catalytic converter (invented by GM and given free to other car companies — thanks, GM!) would be ruined by leaded gasoline, so unleaded gas was introduced.

Redwoods – Saved by the Save the Redwoods League, co-founded by Madison Grant.

Pelicans – Very rare at the beach when I was a kid, now plentiful due to ban on DDT, which makes eggshells brittle

Bald Eagles – Not plentiful, but they’re back. (This is one you occasionally hear about, because people like large vicious animals.)

You might think that environmentalists would promote an image for themselves that says, “Trust us. We fixed problems in the past and we know how to fix them now,” but, instead, apocalypse and misanthropy seems to sell a lot better.

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Is this a red flag?

Monday, November 9th, 2009

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the “alleged” Fort Hood gunman, told US military colleagues that infidels should have their throats cut:

Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the gunman who killed 13 at America’s Fort Hood military base, once gave a lecture to other doctors in which he said non-believers should be beheaded and have boiling oil poured down their throats.

He also told colleagues at America’s top military hospital that non-Muslims were infidels condemned to hell who should be set on fire. The outburst came during an hour-long talk Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, gave on the Koran in front of dozens of other doctors at Walter Reed Army Medical Centre in Washington DC, where he worked for six years before arriving at Fort Hood in July.

Colleagues had expected a discussion on a medical issue but were instead given an extremist interpretation of the Koran, which Hasan appeared to believe.

t was the latest in a series of “red flags” about his state of mind that have emerged since the massacre at Fort Hood, America’s largest military installation, on Thursday.

Hasan, armed with two handguns including a semi-automatic pistol, walked into a processing centre for soldiers deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan, where he killed 13 and injured more than 30.

Fellow doctors have recounted how they were repeatedly harangued by Hasan about religion and that he openly claimed to be a “Muslim first and American second.”

One Army doctor who knew him said a fear of appearing discriminatory against a Muslim soldier had stopped fellow officers from filing formal complaints.

Another, Dr Val Finnell, who took a course with him in 2007 at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Maryland, did complain about Hasan’s “anti-American rants.” He said: “The system is not doing what it’s supposed to do. He at least should have been confronted about these beliefs, told to cease and desist, and to shape up or ship out. I really questioned his loyalty.”

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Lean manufacturing helps companies survive recession

Monday, November 9th, 2009

Lean manufacturing helps companies survive recession, USA Today reports:

Sealy is among thousands of manufacturers that have remained profitable during the recession by using a practice called lean manufacturing to become more cost-efficient. It entails making each widget in an uninterrupted flow, rather than as part of unfinished batches; producing only what customers order; and ruthlessly chopping billions of dollars in inventory.

We used to call that just in time inventory. There is more to lean though:

Bed assembly has been streamlined at every turn. Before, mattress makers asked workers in carts to fetch raw materials from mammoth shelves 100 feet away, sometimes causing delays.

Top panels and side borders were made with no coordination. As a panel spilled off a long conveyor, a dedicated “match-up” worker grabbed it and sifted through mounds of borders to find its mate. In the course of a day, workers spent hours “hunting and pecking,” says plant manager Ricky Johnson. Employees cranked out as many units as they could to ensure colleagues down the line had sufficient materials. They were paid based on the number they produced.

Today, raw materials are arrayed neatly a few feet from quilters and mattress makers. Workers hew to a precise schedule that reflects orders from retailers such as Mattress Discounters or Macy’s. A woman who cuts the borders to length ensures that matching panels are being produced at the same time.

After putting the final stitching on a panel, a worker strides to a rack about 10 feet away, picks up the matching border and places them together in a cart.

Each bed is completed in four hours, down from 21, because there’s less wasted time between production stages, and median delivery times have been cut to 60 hours from 72. Plants have cut their raw-material inventories by 50% to 16 days’ worth. By eliminating thousands of square feet of “work in process” — piles of partly finished beds — and moving workers closer together, the Williamsport facility last year freed enough space to combine two shifts, slicing costs.

Companywide, Sealy has reduced its workforce by 30% in five years through attrition and temporary staff cuts, Hofmann says. It now employs far fewer material handlers. Productivity is up 50%.

The shift by Sealy and others represents a new perspective. For nearly a century, manufacturers believed that cranking out hundreds or thousands of parts then shifting the load to the next worker was most efficient. It ensured makers never ran out of parts or finished goods. And it minimized equipment changeovers to make different parts that could take hours or even days.

Yet along with forcing companies to carry too much inventory, the strategy yields a high rate of defects: A worker down the line finds a flaw only after hundreds of tainted parts had been made, Sharma says.

(Hat tip to Bill Waddell.)

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The jobs of tomorrow are not what you’d expect

Monday, November 9th, 2009

The jobs of tomorrow are not what you’d expect, Michael Lind says:

Since the beginning of the industrial revolution more than two centuries ago, sectors that have adopted labor-saving machinery have shed labor to other sectors. The mechanization of agriculture and mining — “primary production” — freed up labor for factories. Increasing productivity in the “secondary production” like manufacturing, by allowing one person with advanced technology to do the work of dozens, freed up workers who were then employed in “tertiary production” — office work and business services that support primary and secondary production. Thus the evolutionary progression, from yeoman farmer to factory worker… to Dilbert in his cubicle.

With the ruthlessness of Skynet in The Terminator,computerization in the tertiary sector is now committing mass Dilberticide, replacing receptionists with automated phone systems and travel agents with services like Priceline. The emptying of the cubicles won’t result in permanent mass unemployment, the present prolonged crisis notwithstanding. As it has always done in the past, labor will shift from more mechanized to less mechanized sectors. But what will those jobs be?

We already know the answer.

The most numerous and stable jobs of tomorrow will be those that cannot be offshored, because they must be performed on U.S. soil, and also cannot be automated, either because they require a high degree of creativity or because they rely on the human touch in face-to-face interactions. The latter are sometimes called “proximity services” and they include the fastest-growing occupations, healthcare and education.

Most job growth in the last decade has been concentrated in three sectors: healthcare, education and government, mostly state and local government. Since the recession began, healthcare has added 559,000 jobs. Even more remarkable, the average monthly gain of 22,000 jobs during 2009 has been only slightly lower than the average increase of 30,000 jobs a month in 2008.

Last July, in a study titled “Preparing the Workers of Today for the Jobs of Tomorrow,” the Council of Economic Advisers predicted that between 2008 and 2016 employment will decline in manufacturing, retail and wholesale, business and financial services and other sectors. Public-sector employment will remain steady, and there will be growth in transportation and utilities and construction. The greatest job growth, according to the White House, will be in the health and education sectors. Healthcare-related jobs make up seven out of the 20 fastest-growing occupations, and 14 out of the 20 fastest-growing jobs. The fastest-growing occupations are home health aides and registered nurses.

I don’t think the public sector is growing because it offers proximity services.

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How an Engineer Turned a Cellphone Into a Microscope

Monday, November 9th, 2009

Using software he developed and about $10 worth of off-the-shelf hardware, UCLA professor Aydogan Ozcan has adapted cellphones to substitute for microscopes:

In one prototype, a slide holding a finger prick of blood can be inserted over the phone’s camera sensor. The sensor detects the slide’s contents and sends the information wirelessly to a hospital or regional health center. For instance, the phones can detect the asymmetric shape of diseased blood cells or other abnormal cells, or note an increase of white blood cells, a sign of infection, he said.
[...]


For this electronic system of magnification, inexpensive light-emitting diodes added to the basic cellphone shine their light on a sample slide placed over the phone’s camera chip. Some of the light waves hit the cells suspended in the sample, scattering off the cells and interfering with the other light waves.

“When the waves interfere,” Dr. Brady said, “they create a pattern called a hologram.” The detector in the camera records that hologram or interference pattern as a series of pixels.

The holograms are rich in information, Dr. Ozcan said. “We can learn a lot in seconds,” he said. “We can process the information mathematically and reconstruct images like those you would see with a microscope.”
Dr. Ozcan’s system may someday lead to a rapid way to process blood and other samples, said Bahram Jalali, an applied physicist and professor of electrical engineering at U.C.L.A. “It is potentially much faster than a microscope,” he said. “You don’t have to scan mechanically” as people must with a microscope with its small field of view.

“Instead you capture holograms of all the cells on the slide digitally at the same time,” he said, so that it’s possible, for example, to see immediately the pathogens among a vast population of healthy cells. “It’s a way of looking quickly for a needle in a haystack,” he said.

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Empirical Thinking

Sunday, November 8th, 2009

The empirical style of thinking is a minority taste, John Derbyshire reminds us:

The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, social, and personal. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the approval of those around us; we want to get even with that s.o.b who insulted us at the last tribal council. For most people, wanting to know the cold truth about the world is way, way down the list.

Scientific objectivity is a freakish, unnatural, and unpopular mode of thought, restricted to small cliques whom the generality of citizens regard with dislike and mistrust. Just as religious thinking emerges naturally and effortlessly from the everyday workings of the human brain, so scientific thinking has to struggle against the grain of our mental natures. There is a modest literature on this topic: Lewis Wolpert’s The Unnatural Nature of Science (2000) and Alan Cromer’s Uncommon Sense: The Heretical Nature of Science (1995) are the books known to me, though I’m sure there are more. There is fiction, too: in Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s 1960 sci-fi bestseller A Canticle for Leibowitz, the scientists are hunted down and killed… then later declared saints by the Catholic Church.

When the magical (I wish this to be so: therefore it is so!) and the religious (We are all one! Brotherhood of man! The universe loves us!) and the social (This is what all good citizens believe! If you believe otherwise you are a BAD PERSON!) and the personal (That bastard didn’t show me the respect I’m entitled to!) all come together, the mighty psychic forces unleashed can be irresistible — ask Larry Summers or James Watson.

The greatest obstacle to calm, rational, evidence-based thinking about human nature, is human nature. Pessimism doesn’t come easily. You have to struggle your way towards it.

Posted in John Derbyshire, Policy, Science | No Comments »

Pigeons From Hell

Sunday, November 8th, 2009

Robert E Howard’s much-loved gothic bayou horror classic, Pigeons From Hell, has been adapted into a graphic novel — and updated:

Lansdale’s update of the story — the new protagonists are a pair of sisters descended from the slaves who inherited the house from their masters; they go to take possession with their friends in a kind of Scooby Doo pack — only lightly changes the material, leaving the scare intact.

Only lightly changes the material? Seriously? Adding a Scooby gang? And shifting the story from when slavery was within living memory to now, in the 21st century?

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Deep-Seated Attitudes

Saturday, November 7th, 2009

Deep-seated attitudes, like the colonial-bumpkin image that the English have had of Americans for 300 years and more, are very resistant to change, John Derbyshire notes — especially when they are self-flattering:

The English will go on believing that they are Athens (ancient, cultured, wise) to our Rome (brash, militaristic, dumb), though the current truth is probably that the whole Anglosphere is just Constantinople (tired, frivolous, gullible), waiting for the Sultan and his army to show up with their humongous cannons.

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The “Wacky Sitcom Mixup” School of Foreign Policy

Saturday, November 7th, 2009

Shannon Love suggests that the current administration follows the “wacky sitcom mixup” school of foreign policy:

Major sustained conflicts don’t arise from misunderstandings and miscommunications. In the vast majority of cases, all sides understand all too well what the other side wants. They fight because they have a zero sum dynamic in which the gain of one side means the loss of another.

In most cases, the conflict is driven by an autocratic elite in one or more parties who view the conflict as their primary vehicle for maintaining power within their own polity. They often care nothing for the suffering of their people or even the economic damage it might cause the polity as a whole. Most autocrats operate from a “better to rule in hell than serve in heaven,” model in which they would rather be the despotic rulers of a poor and crippled country than share power within a richer country. Such autocrats have no incentive to in resolve a conflict on terms equitable to the other party.

Worse, as I noted before, they often operate from seriously delusional world models that make it almost impossible for anyone else to find common ground with them. Hitler really believed a vast and ancient Jewish conspiracy existed that targeted all racial Germans. Stalin and Mao really believed in historical inevitability and the consequential inescapable conflict with all non-Communist states. The Mullahs of Iran really believe in their apocalyptic prophesy of conflict with all Jews. They really believe that America opposes them out of a hostility to Islam. The Palestinians really believe in Dar-al-Islam and therefore believe that both God and honor requires them to destroy Israel by force of arms. No negotiator has the power to alter the fundamental world view of such autocrats.

Consequently, all such deluded autocrats view negotiations as a means of buying time and/or gaining temporary advantage. They demand physical concessions up front in return for vague promises of moderating their own future behavior. (See the template for the Israeli-Muslim conflict. Israel gives up strategic territory and exposes itself to greater danger of attack. Muslims promise in return to not attack Israel and then do anyway. Then the cycle starts all over again with Muslims promising that this time they really will behave.) They never give away a serious advantage or do anything that would weaken their internal standing.

Simple honest misunderstandings don’t drive most serious conflicts. No one is going to hear something from the other side and have an, “Ah ha!” moment that resolves everything. People who appear evil aren’t just misunderstood, they’re actually evil. Anyone who goes into negotiations with such people with a naif-like belief that the conflict arises from a wacky sitcom mixup will only empower the autocrats and accelerate the conflict.

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The signs are not good

Friday, November 6th, 2009

The signs are not good, says John Derbyshire:

It’s tough getting through life by your own efforts in a world as crowded and sophisticated as this one. Postindustrial society has huge surpluses of wealth that can be harvested by the state and handed out as benefits. There’s a squeaky-wheel bias to it all — groups that can manipulate the process, for example by making emotional-blackmail (sometimes actual blackmail) appeals, tend to do best, but everyone gets something.

It’s pretty popular. That’s why the old self-support ideal of American life is dead, dead as mutton. It lingers on among some Americans as a fading dream; and to the degree that there is any difference between Democrats and Republicans, it is that Republicans appeal to that dream, while Democrats paint the old order as a scheme of oppression and cruelty. It’s a dream, though, a fading dream. The real difference between Democrats and Republicans is that Democrats want the authorities to confiscate 34 percent of your income for purposes of redistribution, while Republicans think 32 percent would be better.

Modern socialism — neosocialism, the socialism of Clinton and Blair — in which capitalism is given a pretty free rein, so that the state can harvest and redistribute the surpluses, is successful and very popular. A lot of conservatives are in denial about that. Sure, neosocialism has a vast bureaucratic overhead — tens of millions of paper-shufflers doing nothing useful with their working lives — but it can afford that. And sure, it destroys that fine spirit of adventure, striving, self-support and self-improvement that was instrumental in building our civilization.

So what? Nobody really wanted to build a civilization. Harsh necessity forced them to do something with their lives. If Cortez, or Shakespeare, or Gauss, or Mozart, or the Founding Fathers, or the prairie settlers, could have got nice cushy cube-jockey jobs as Administrative Assistants in the Department of Administrative Affairs, and gone home at night to watch American Idol from the comfort of a Barcalounger — well, they probably would have.

There is a quote I read 25 years or so ago, when I was working through a lot of Soviet-dissident literature. I am sure it was either Shafarevich or Zinoviev, but I have never been able to re-find it. It is to the effect that communism was not just imposed on a passive populace, but that as communism descended on the people, their spirits rose to meet it.

This strikes me as a profound and true insight, and applicable to the whole human race. It was a mistake to think that the people of the USA would forever remain indifferent to the attractions of socialism. Nations change, often very quickly. The wild and terrible Vikings became the pale, pacifistic Scandinavians. The savage Magyar horde became — much more quickly, in just a couple of generations — the Christian Kingdom of Hungary. Pious, priest-ridden, poverty-stricken Ireland became, as I watched with my own eyes through the 1980s and 1990s, a hedonistic, skeptical, bustling hive of entrepreneurial vigor that had to import priests from the Third World to keep churches open.

Just so, the land of the brave and the home of the free could become the land of the timid and the home of the servile. This could happen, could be happening. The signs are not good.

Posted in Economics, John Derbyshire, Policy | No Comments »

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