Culture
cortex | February 28, 2007Here at Scienceblogs, we spent a lot of time debunking various types of unscientific falsehoods (aka "woo," religious believers, and the conservapedia.) As far as I'm concerned, that's just great. The world always is always suffering from a shortage of skepticism. We need more empiricism and less certainty.
But it's worth reminding ourselves of the obvious: peer-reviewed science is also vulnerable to bad biases, false suppositions and sloppy interpretations. Data doesn't generate itself. Over at Overcoming Bias, they've compiled a short list of recent examples. Here are the most damning:
A…
cortex | February 27, 2007Last year, a Cornell University economist named Michael Waldman noticed a strange correlation: the more precipitation a region received, the more likely children were to be diagnosed with autism.
[This] soon led Prof. Waldman to conclude that something children do more during rain or snow -- perhaps watching television -- must influence autism. Last October, Cornell announced the resulting paper in a news release headlined, "Early childhood TV viewing may trigger autism, data analysis suggests.
The resulting paper was a nifty trove of complicated statistics and unexpected correlations. But…
cortex | February 27, 2007Over at Mixing Memory, Chris has an excellent post complicating the recent psychological study which demonstrated that reading selected passages from the Bible about retributive violence makes people more aggressive. He reminds us that other studies have found the opposite effect. Chris' sobering conclusion is exactly right:
Religion, like any other social institution, can cause good and bad behavior, depending on the context and the ways in which it is used. Overall, religion and similar secular institutions may serve to promote prosocial behavior, but when individuals focus on certain parts…
razib | February 25, 2007John Emerson has a long post about the relationship between irrationality and the emergence of new cultural forms. Worth reading. The other day I had a thought: many cultural traits are basically hitch-hiking along. Consider circumcision and the ban against pork consumption for Muslims, in places like Indonesia when tribes convert to Islam they abandon their pigs and circumcision becomes the norm. Why? People have been inventing strange functional rationales for these customs for decades. It seems likely that these practices have a role as ingroup vs. outgroup markers, that is, they're…
cortex | February 23, 2007I like Paul Krugman's column today for two reasons.
1) He works in a nice allusion to Chomsky. His headline is "Colorless Green Ideas".
2) He makes an important point about California and energy conservation:
Let me tell you about a real-world example of an advanced economy that has managed to combine rising living standards with a substantial decline in per capita energy consumption, and managed to keep total carbon dioxide emissions more or less flat for two decades, even as both its economy and its population grew rapidly. And it achieved all this without fundamentally changing a lifestyle…
cortex | February 22, 2007From Der Spiegel:
The football World Cup from June 9 to July 9 last year appears to have sparked a baby boom in the host country Germany, where hospitals are reporting a marked rise in imminent births nine months after the tournament, remembered here as a month-long fairy-tale of sunshine, parties and soccer success.
The head of the largest birth clinic in the city of Kassel, Rolf Kliche, estimates that births at his hospital will be up by 10 to 15 percent, which he described as a "minor sensation" given the usually stable birth statistics.
Kliche said he wasn't surprised because happiness…
cortex | February 22, 2007It's a gripping video, a youtube window into the autistic mind:
And now Dr. Sanjay Gupta, the telegenic brain surgeon on CNN, has spent time with Amanda, the "low-functioning" autistic woman produced and starred in the video:
She taught me a lot over the day that I spent with her. She told me that looking into someone's eyes felt threatening, which is why she looked at me through the corner of her eye. Amanda also told me that, like many people with autism, she wanted to interact with the entire world around her. While she could read Homer, she also wanted to rub the papers across her face…
cortex | February 21, 2007I spent a year studying theology at Oxford. I focused on the relationship between religion and science (lots of Galileo and Darwin and William James), but couldn't help learning a lot about the Bible along the way. I went in pretty unimpressed by Jesus (I'm a Jew who doesn't believe in God), but left the program convinced that Bush is essentially right*: Jesus is a fantastic philosopher, like Buddha if the Buddha had been influenced by Neo-Platonism. (In other words, worldly wealth is vanity and the secret to life is compassion.)
So I tend to ignore those atheist voices who bemoan the obvious…
cortex | February 21, 2007I'm all for clean air regulations, but sometimes they don't make very much sense. Case in point: California, along with four Northeastern states, has imposed strict limits on the type of pollutants coming out of the tailpipe of a car. There's only one problem: these regulations make diesel engines illegal, since even the most modern diesel engines emit slightly too much NOx (nitrides of oxygen). Fancy diesel engines (like the Mercedes Bluetec) go to great lengths to reduce their NOx emissions, such as injecting ammonia-rich urea into the exhaust stream. But it's still not clear that they will…
cortex | February 20, 2007I had a happy and healthy American childhood, but perhaps I was an exception. According to a new report by UNICEF on children in developed countries, the US and UK rank last and second to last in the "well-being" of their children. (The Netherlands and Sweden were first and second.) The report looked at a variety of factors, from rates of teen pregnancy to infant mortality to poverty. But perhaps the most convincing evidence, at least for some observers, was the fact that American and British children are most likely to describe their own health as "fair" or "poor". In other words, kids in…
cortex | February 20, 2007Who knew B flat was so strange? Robert Krulwich explains, as only he can:
During World War II, the New York Philharmonic was visiting the American Museum of Natural History. During rehearsal, somebody played a note that upset a resident live alligator named Oscar. Oscar, who'd been in the museum on 81st Street, suddenly began to bellow. Naturally, with so many scientists in residence, an experiment was quickly devised to see how to get Oscar to bellow again. Various musicians -- string, percussive and brass -- were brought to Oscar to play various notes. It turned out the culprit was B flat,…
razib | February 17, 2007Do you remember the age before polling in politics? I don't. Today we bemoan the emphasis on polls and idealize the past, before candidates knew in scientific and statistically significant detail the temperature of the democratic water. But no one is going to ban polls in the near future, for every person who complains about survey data there are hundreds who are clicking refresh over & over to find the most recent tracking results on their website of choice.
I think something similar is necessary for the sciences (or scholarship in general). Is George Lakoff a laughing stock (as Chris…
cortex | February 15, 2007There's an interesting evolutionary psychology paper in the new Nature. It's by Tooby and Cosmides, and it investigates the roots of the incest taboo. The researchers found that, on average, our repulsion at the idea of having sex with a sibling correlates with two variables: how long we lived with that sibling and how long we watched our mother care for that sibling (their "perinatal association"). We use these two variables to compute a "kinship index" that "corresponds to an estimate of genetic relatedness between self and other." Siblings with a high "kinship index" not only triggered the…
cortex | February 15, 2007When sexual education classes in the Montgomery County public schools were outsourced to the Rockville Pregnancy Center, an "evangelical, antiabortion clinic," the education part of the class took a dramatic turn for the worse. Instead of actually learning about birth control or STD's, Rockville high schoolers played edifying games like the "gum game," where the students are forced to share the same piece of gum. They also play the "ex-lax game":
In this game, students were handed squares of Hershey's chocolate, but before they popped the candy, they were told that a few kids had instead…
cortex | February 14, 2007Irony and wit can be very patriotic, although my patriotism has never felt this sad:
cortex | February 14, 2007Greg Clark, an economist at UC Davis, has come out with a new paper arguing that natural selection accounts for the rise of "capitalist" attitudes. Simply put, the rich capitalists had more offspring than the poor serfs, so humans evolved a "set of preferences that were consistent with capitalism." Here's the abstract:
Before 1800 all societies, including England, were Malthusian. The average man or woman had 2 surviving children. Such societies were also Darwinian. Some reproductively successful groups produced more than 2 surviving children, increasing their share of the population,…
cortex | February 13, 2007Since the 2008 election appears to be in full swing, and the political prognosticators have started peddling their predictions, I thought it was worthwhile to remind everybody that political experts are not to be trusted. The psychologist Philip Tetlock has spent decades following the predictions of these so-called "experts," and seeing if their predictions are prophetic. The results are pretty dismal:
People who make prediction their business -- people who appear as experts on television, get quoted in newspaper articles, advise governments and businesses, and participate in punditry…
cortex | February 10, 2007So Hillary Clinton came to my town today. She packed the local high school gym and brought with her a phalanx of television cameras, hordes of reporters and a hefty dose of political celebrity. (The doors opened at 1:15, and the gym was filled to capacity by 1:30.)
What did she say? Nothing particularly revelatory, apart from the fact that she took the stage to Jesus Jones' "Right Here, Right Now." She was predictably eloquent on issues where the crowd was behind her (universal health care, Bush's incompetence, abortion, stem-cell research, etc.) and predictably evasive/nuanced on issues…
cortex | February 9, 2007This is the Milgram experiment come to life. Eric Fair was a civilian interrogater in Iraq, working for the 82nd Airborne. The Washington Post published his op-ed today:
The lead interrogator at the DIF had given me specific instructions: I was to deprive the detainee of sleep during my 12-hour shift by opening his cell every hour, forcing him to stand in a corner and stripping him of his clothes. Three years later the tables have turned. It is rare that I sleep through the night without a visit from this man. His memory harasses me as I once harassed him.
Despite my best efforts, I cannot…
cortex | February 8, 2007That didn't take long. As soon as a gallon of gas stabilized around $2 and change, hybrid sales started to flatline. Now Toyota needs to use incentives to push the Prius:
In April, Toyota will begin its first national advertising campaign for Prius since it began selling the hybrid in the United States in 2000. Ads will begin appearing in local markets before then.
Toyota has also started offering the first incentives on the Prius, including some no-interest financing, and lease deals of as little as $219 a month.
The moves by Toyota come amid flat sales last year for Prius, whose first six…