Six generations

I have often wondered what is the fewest number of generations of selective evolutionary pressure before you can see a clear bifurcation between the current and the ancestral generation. The context was the discovery a few years ago that both lactose tolerance and blue eyes only emerged in Europeans within the past seven thousand years. Both those traits spread very rapidly in the scheme of things. But how fast can a trait spread?

This article, Scientists turn a brown butterfly purple—in just six generations by John Timmer, answers that question. Six Generations is the answer.

The researchers started by checking the absorption spectrum of their existing lab strain of butterflies. This showed a peak of reflection at 300nm wavelengths, well within the UV range of the spectrum. But the peak was broad and varied from individual to individual, so the researchers selected the males and females that had the peak shifted closer to the visible spectrum, then mated them to produce the next generation. They repeated the process of mating and measuring reflection for five additional generations.

After six generations of selective breeding, the peak reflection had shifted well into the purple at 400nm.

(Six generations in this species take less than a year. The experiment actually involved eight generations total, though, because two generations saw low numbers of offspring and were simply allowed to mate randomly to build up the numbers again.)

Obviously the determinants of attribute plasticity are the nature of the trait, the species involved, etc. Still. Six generations is a lot fewer than I would have expected.

None of it is bad but all of it is change

Hans Rosling does some really interesting work with global measures of well-being, both past, present and projected into the future.

I watched this video of his Dr. Hans Rosling: Facts and Fiction on Global Health NMD 2014 which is, as usual, both entertaining and enlightening. I was struck by the importance and materiality of his work in terms of demographics in comparison with the triviality of some similar themes that are bandied about in the US in highly irresponsible ways.

There are groups in the US that are particularly interested in fostering division by race, and income, and gender. You can speculate as to their motives but it is not hard to judge them as irresponsibly fostering divisiveness that is unlikely to have a happy outcome.

You hear in many forums arguments that are often grounded on the assertion that the face of America is changing and we need to do X because of that. In a country founded on the idea of natural rights and the equality of man, it is a little hard to see the philosophical connection between race and policy. But it is a given in many corners.

What is ironic is the logical inconsistency of many of the arguments. Many attempt to use scare tactics such as "People of Color are growing fast and will at some time in the nearer future be the majority population". That argument is not much more than racial fear-mongering of the worst sort and oddly has the embedded assumption of negative and positive race attributes. Yuck.

It is indisputably true that the face of America is changing. It has always been changing. It likely will always be changing. It is a beacon of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I suspect it will always exert an attraction.

So how is the changing face a threat? The only significant challenge is the danger that we import the divisiveness of other cultures and that we admit new people faster than they can be acculturalized and assimilated.

And is it really changing all that much. African-Americans are basically at steady-state as are Native Americans. The only growth areas are among Asian Americans and Hispanics. Asian Americans are proving both hugely successful (on average) and with an enormous capacity to acculturalize and assimilate. I don't think there is anyone particularly concerned about those sets of changes. Hispanics in turn are a somewhat different circumstance in that it is not a race at all but a geographic construct. Yes there are assimilation issues but likely not unachievable. In terms of race, if you accept the self-identification of Hispanics, the overall race distribution in the US, for all the global admissions since the 1965 reforms, is a remarkably stable 80% white, 13% Black, 6% Asian and 1% Native American. Everyone fears change but there are some who are trying to stoke that fear in the basest of terms.

There have been a couple of articles recently that have sought to deflate the paranoia and fear these advocate groups seek to foster. Why Hispanics Don’t Have a Larger Political Voice by Nate Cohn is one and Republicans’ increasing reliance on white voters may not spell electoral doom just yet by Chris Cillizza is another. Cillizza is right, I think, to call into question whether a strategy of race based electioneering is in the interests of the commonweal.

What does this have to do with Hans Rosling? Watch the video. He debunks a lot of false information and he sheds light on where the real demographic changes are known to be occurring. What's going on in the US is small, small potatoes compared to what is happening at the global level. None of it is bad but all of it is change and change is what we all tend to most fear.

"I’m not going to call it a ‘sketchy’ neighborhood" - but evidence suggests that it is.

Sometimes, you just cannot credibly make up what actually does occur. DC news crew robbed while reporting on app that identifies ‘sketchy’ neighborhoods by Scott Kaufman. This sounded so pat that I couldn't believe it. However, googling around, it does appear to be a legitimate story.

A District of Columbia news crew reporting on an app that identifies “sketchy” neighborhoods had their van burglarized while they were interviewing individuals who lived in a neighborhood the app identified as “sketchy.”

WUSA9 reporter Mola Lenghi said that he, photographer James Hash, and intern Taylor Bisciotti were in the Petworth area interviewing residents who lived there.

“We were doing a story on an app that describes ‘sketchy’ neighborhoods,” Lenghi said. “It led us to the Petworth neighborhood of Northwest, and I’m not going to call it a ‘sketchy’ neighborhood, but as folks were telling us that it was a good neighborhood, and that not much activity happens around there — as that was being told to us, our van was being robbed.”

“We got back to the news van,” he continued, “and noticed that the lock was popped out. Got in there, and noticed that all of our stuff was gone. I had a backpack full of electronics.”

Sounds like the politically correct/excessively polite journalist might have benefited from reading some Shakespeare during college.

What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;

Alternatively - sketchy is as sketchy does.

There’s a sense in which everybody is a competitor because everybody is doing the same thing

From WSU researchers see violent era in ancient Southwest by Eric Sorensen.

I was just out in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado and visited both Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde. These were epicenters of quite sophisticated urban communities circa 900-1200 AD before they were abandoned. As we walked around the ruins we would often pose a question "I wonder why . . ." and then read in the pamphlet "We don't really know why . . . ". It became our standing joke "We don't know . . .".

I commented at the time that there seemed to be a deliberate effort to deemphasize the role of violence in the downfall of these communities. I was able to recall enough history to know that it was material. I read Constant Battles by Steven Le Blanc a number of years ago. His archaeological work was originally in this area though the book was about the larger issue of the destructive nature of low level warfare in ancient communities. The casualties in any encounter are, in part because of the primitiveness of their technology, very low in absolute terms compared to modern warfare. However, given that such low level warfare was both common and constant, the cumulative death rates were far higher than in modern history.

The work Sorensen is reporting is entirely consistent with both Le Blanc's work as well as that of Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature. But there is an intriguing insight thrown in.

Both the central Mesa Verde and northern Rio Grande experienced population booms, said Kohler, but surprisingly, the central Mesa Verde got more violent while the northern Rio Grande grew less so.

Kohler offers a few explanations.

Social structures among people in the northern Rio Grande changed so that they identified less with their kin and more with the larger pueblo and specific organizations that span many pueblos, such as medicine societies. The Rio Grande also had more commercial exchanges where craft specialists provided people both in the pueblo and outsiders with specific things they needed, such as obsidian arrow points.

But in the central Mesa Verde, there was less specialization.

“When you don’t have specialization in societies, there’s a sense in which everybody is a competitor because everybody is doing the same thing,” said Kohler. But with specialization, people are more dependent on each other and more reluctant to do harm.

Kohler and his colleagues also cite Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker’s thinking in his book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.”

“Pinker thought that what he called ‘gentle commerce’ was very important in the pacification of the world over the last 5,000 years,” said Kohler. “That seems to work pretty well in our record as well.”

So there are three factors hypothesized to make a material difference in the level of community violence in otherwise culturally common communities - 1) Broad community identification versus narrow community identification; 2) Community institutions that facilitate that broader identification; and 3) Complex, specialized economic systems which foster trade (and therefore interdependencies).

I suspect all three are both pertinent and material. Factors One and Two are partly why I am so concerned by the proliferation of victimhood groups and advocates of race and gender identity. If we are all Americans, we have common problems to solve. If I define my community only based on race and/or gender and/or religion then instead of a synthesized solution that optimizes everyone's needs, we are indulging in zero-sum competition in which there is a winner and a loser.

It is the third root cause that I find especially intriguing, greater and lesser specialization.

Comparative advantage, as first formulated by David Ricardo, takes some of the sting out of two individuals/groups/countries producing identical goods. As long as they each have other economic activities, there will be some advantage to trade between them which increases the cost of warfare. In other words, independent of the cost of the war, the loss of economic advantage from trade fueled by comparative advantage also reduces the putative benefits of war.

But there is more to specialization than just comparative advantage. Adam Smith of course was exploring this more than two hundred years ago in both The Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiments.

With specialization, the disappearance of others who produce that upon which I depend, harms me very directly and very immediately. I may not particularly interested or concerned about their well-being, but I am concerned about anything that impacts them in such a way as to impact me. Just a reformulation of Smith's "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."

But beyond this retreading of established philosophy and economics, I wonder if there is more that can be eked out from this insight.

It is well documented that the level of violence among the upper class is dramatically lower than that in the lowest class (whether by socioeconomic class or in economic terms such as income). In the popular narrative, this is cast as a product of economic deprivation though there is very little evidence to support that argument and the evidence there is tends to be both muddied and equivocal.

There are numerous other theories, most culture-based. Violence is a product of bad behaviors and bad behaviors are a function of bad culture. There is more empirical evidence for these types of theories but it still seems somewhat lacking.

I wonder if Kohler's observation isn't part of the explanation. I live in an upper middle class neighborhood characterized by lots of professionals. You can probably go fifty houses in any direction and not hit another management consultant (or any other specific profession). Everyone has spent years in education and experience becoming increasingly specialized. Even among an umbrella group such as Attorney, there are patent lawyers, real estate lawyers, intellectual property lawyers, defence lawyers, etc. All specialized and none in zero-sum competition with one another. Because no one, or virtually no-one, is in direct competition for their livelihood, it permits much more cooperation for communal activities that benefit everyone.

If you go to a poor neighborhood, I wonder if it isn't a very different profile. Store clerk, cashier, day-laborer, etc. I am guessing that you have both a smaller range of jobs and that the overlap (non-specialization) is much greater. These are all lower skilled jobs. Lower skills, lower barriers to entry, less specialization and differentiation, greater personal competition with one another. In that environment, you do approach a zero-sum game. If you get the McDonalds job, I don't. This breeds much more personal and intimate competition and potentially conflict.

Not that bitter rivalry is confined to those whose skill sets are generic and unspecialized. In recently discussing the narcissism of small differences, I mentioned that that was a variation on Kissinger's observation that, "University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small."

Lack of differentiation and low return to effort. Put them together and you have, perhaps, an explanation for the violence and abandonment of Mesa Verde as well as the pathologies of inner cities.

What that suggests is that policy ought to focus on enabling people to improve their skill set differentiation as well as improving their return to effort (non-cognitive skills and decision-making).

When we discover that our powers of persuasion are limited to those who were already predisposed to agree with us

Via Judith Curry's post, there is Political psychology or politicized psychology? Is the road to scientific hell paved with good moral intentions? by Philip Tetlock. From Tetlock's paper.

What exactly is scientific hell? I use the concept to denote the complete collapse of our credibility as a science. We find ourselves in scientific hell when we discover that our powers of persuasion are limited to those who were already predisposed to agree with us (or when our claims to expertise are granted only by people who share our moral-political outlook). Thoughtful outsiders cease to look upon us as scientists and see us rather as political partisans of one stripe or another.

How do we fall into scientific hell? The principal temptation in political psychology-the forbidden fruit-is to permit our political passions to trump normal scientific standards of evidence and proof . Researchers sometimes feel so passionately about a cause that those passions influence key methodological and conceptual decisions in re­search programs. When journal reviewers, editors, and funding agencies feel the same way about the cause, they are less likely to detect and correct potential logical or methodological bias. As a result, political psychology becomes politicized.

It is one thing, however, to argue that values can easily influence inquiry and quite another to argue that values inevitably drive and determine the conclusions of inquiry. Value neutrality is an impossible ideal, but it still remains a useful benchmark for assessing our research performance. Indeed, the price of abandoning value neutrality as an ideal is prohibitively steep: nothing less, I believe, than our collective credibility as a science.

Do we seek scientific knowledge of causal relationships? Or do we seek to advance certain moral or political causes by stigmatizing groups with whom we disagree and applauding groups with whom we sympathize? These skeptics raise serious questions that merit serious responses. We should be candid about our motives as political psychologists. Very few of us, I suspect, are driven by purely epistemic motives or by purely partisan motives of policy advocacy. We are motivated, in part, by causal curiosity and in part by the desire to make the world a better place in which to live. And, being human, we don’t like to acknowledge that these goals occasionally conflict.

My own view is that epistemic and advocacy goals frequently collide. The most overt cases of politicization tend to occur when evidence of causality is particularly weak and the policy stakes are particularly high. It is understandable that political psychologists as citizens often lend their voices to one or another political cause; it is less understandable when political psychologists (consciously or unconsciously) bend normal scientific standards of evidence and proof to advance those same causes.

This paper is from twenty years ago, 1994, and was in many ways prescient. According to a recent poll,

Only 36 percent of Americans reported having "a lot" of trust that information they get from scientists is accurate and reliable. Fifty-one percent said they trust that information only a little, and another 6 percent said they don't trust it at all.

Science journalists fared even worse in the poll. Only 12 percent of respondents said they had a lot of trust in journalists to get the facts right in their stories about scientific studies. Fifty-seven percent said they have a little bit of trust, while 26 percent said they don't trust journalists at all to accurately report on scientific studies.

What’s more, many Americans worry that the results of scientific studies are sometimes tainted by political ideology -- or by pressure from the studies’ corporate sponsors.

A whopping 78 percent of Americans think that information reported in scientific studies is often (34 percent) or sometimes (44 percent) influenced by political ideology, compared to only 18 percent who said that happens rarely (15 percent) or never (3 percent).

To be fair, abysmal as those number are, they aren't as bad as those for Congress (8%) or local politicians (14%). but that's a pretty low bar to set.

In some ways, this isn't unexpected. As we become a more complex and sophisticated society there are two trends that almost necessarily militate the reputation of scientists. 1) All the easy knowledge problems are solved. Only the really complex issues remain. We are at the knowledge frontier where everything is dominated by precise definitions, measures, risks, and uncertainty. At that frontier, scientific investigators are simply more likely to be wrong more often. 2) In an increasingly connected world, it is harder to hide being wrong AND it is harder to hide motivated research (research that is intended to find a specific outcome).

But I think Tetlock's call for increased rigor is still relevant. Motivated research has brought many fields in to disrepute. Motivated research intended to support specific advocacy agendas likewise has brought particular researchers and organizations into disrepute.

Ideally, all parties would start behaving more in a fashion to warrant trust, and degrees of trust would rise overall. Hopefully there will be some conjunction of trends that might aid such an outcome. We are not there yet.

A canary in an epistemological coalmine

This is a rather tangled set of subjects but there are some interesting apsects. From Kardashian Index by Judith Curry.

Curry is commenting on an article by Neil Hall, The Kardashian index: a measure of discrepant social media profile for scientists.

Abstract

In the era of social media there are now many different ways that a scientist can build their public profile; the publication of high-quality scientific papers being just one. While social media is a valuable tool for outreach and the sharing of ideas, there is a danger that this form of communication is gaining too high a value and that we are losing sight of key metrics of scientific value, such as citation indices. To help quantify this, I propose the ‘Kardashian Index’, a measure of discrepancy between a scientist’s social media profile and publication record based on the direct comparison of numbers of citations and Twitter followers.

You could take Hall at face value. Does modern technology and social media potentially change things, including academic reputations? Sure. Are those changes potentially damaging as well as potentially positive? Again, Sure.

This is a case where close textual reading is beneficial to unearth that which has been hidden.

For example, what does it really mean to say that "there is a danger that this form of communication [social media] is gaining too high a value"? Does that mean that social media, as a tool can as easily distribute bad information as good? Surely not because that is true for all other media. And how would you know that it is "gaining too high a value"? What is the value you are measuring and where is the dividing line between enough and too much. The whole sentence carries very little information - all noise and no signal. All we can possibly infer is that Hall doesn't think it is a particularly wise idea for scientists to communicate via social media. That is not an unreasonable argument to make but you do have to make it directly rather than indirectly.

And is it true that we are "losing sight of key metrics of scientific value, such as citation indices"? Again, notice the unstated premises. 1) the existing citation indices are useful, and 2) that the existing citation indices are being used less. Are either of these premises correct?

Then we enter grade school argumentation. If you want to demean someone, you associate them with someone or something that is reviled. In common discourse there is always Godwin's Law - an argument is lost by the person who first compares their opponent to Hitler or the Nazi's. Technically:

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1

The conclusion is that when a person advancing an argument reaches a point where they make comparisons to Hitler or Nazis, then it means that their forgoing arguments are insufficient and unavailing.

In this case, Hall hasn't quite reached a Godwin's Law level of anemic argumentation but he certainly approaches it. I assume that in academic circles, being compared to Kim Kardashian might have a similar effect as comparing someone in the general public to Hitler might have.

Here's what I find interesting. I think Hall is actually exploring an interesting and worthwhile topic. What is the relationship between academic standing (citations) and academic accessibility (social media usage)? These are independent issues that are not necessarily in conflict with one another. Is there a relationship? If so, what is the nature of the relationship?

But Hall comes across as an old guild member trying to protect ancient privileges of the guild rather than exploring an issue with an open mind. Is the old citation system a good measure of scientific impact. Like almost everything, there is more than one way to measure something, and there are always multiple ways to game the system. It depends on what your goal is.

If you want to measure impact within a particular scientific community, then citation isn't bad. But what if you want to measure cross-fertilization. A string theorist in physics might be highly cited among his/her peers but in no other field whereas an experimental physicist might easily be frequently cited in both physics and biology (and chemistry). Which is more influential? Different questions, different measures.

Hall's discussion rather undermines these interesting questions.

In an age dominated by the cult of celebrity we, as scientists, need to protect ourselves from mindlessly lauding shallow popularity and take an informed and critical view of the value we place on the opinion of our peers. Social media makes it very easy for people to build a seemingly impressive persona by essentially ‘shouting louder’ than others. Having an opinion on something does not make one an expert. But on Twitter, for example, the ‘top tweet’ on any given subject will not necessarily come from an expert, it will come from the most followed person. If Kim Kardashian commented on the value of the ENCODE project, her tweet would get more retweets and favorites than the rest of the scientific community combined. Experts on the Syrian conflict will tell you how frustrating that can be.

I propose that all scientists calculate their own K-index on an annual basis and include it in their Twitter profile. Not only does this help others decide how much weight they should give to someone’s 140 character wisdom, it can also be an incentive - if your K-index gets above 5, then it’s time to get off Twitter and write those papers.

There is a rank stench of status envy and privilege assertion. It comes across as "Just leave it to the experts, don't bother your pretty head about these complicated matters." And it is not as if we don't know and haven't extensively documented the epistemological dangers and shortfalls of relying either on Science (see the current furor regarding the large percentage of science papers withdrawn or not replicated) or on experts (see Nate Silver in The Signal and the Noise for a popular summary).

Curry quotes a contrasting view of the role communication (and social media) plays in the field of science from neuroscientist Micha Allen.

While a (sorta) funny joke, it is this point that is done the most disservice by Neil’s article. We (the Kardashians) are democratizing science. We are filtering the literally unending deluge of papers to try and find the most outrageous, the most interesting, and the most forgotten, so that they can see the light of day beyond wherever they were published and forgotten. We seek these papers to generate discussion and to garner attention where it is needed most. We are the academy’s newest, first line of defense, contextualizing results when the media runs wild with them. We tweet often because there is a lot to tweet, and we gain followers because the things we tweet are interesting. And we do all of this without the comfort of a lofty CV or high impact track record, with little concert assurance that it will even benefit us, all while still trying to produce the standard signs of success. And it may not seem like it now – but in time it will be clear that what we do is just as much a part of the scientific process as those lofty Nature papers. Of course – we are only fallible human beings, trying to find and create utility within a new frontier. We may not be the filter science deserves – but we are the one it needs. Wear your Kardshian index with pride.

Among Curry's commentary, she notes:

Here’s how I do the calculus for my own intellectual activities. As per google scholar, I have a total of 12,000 citations of my publications (since my first publication in 1983). Climate Etc. gets on average about 12,000 ‘hits’ per day, and 300-400 comments. I can spend my time blogging, discussing topics on which there is significant public interest, or I can write an academic paper, pay $1500 to get it published (hopefully in a high impact journal), so that 300 or so people can read it behind paywall. Since I am a senior tenured faculty member, I have the luxury of choosing to spend a significant amount of my time on social media outreach and engagement, which is growing my impact as a scholar in ways that I think matter.

All this is merely a morsel of the transformations wrought by the internet and which we are still coming to terms with.

Back in the early 1800s a number of European countries achieved mass/universal literacy and numeracy which had many consequences in terms of industrialization, politics, economics, voting rights, etc. Literacy and numeracy were the grease that eased a lot of historic transitions.

Not dissimilarly, I think the grease of constant easy access to information both broad and deep will likewise have similar effect today. What it means and where it will lead us is hard to discern. Hall is a little bit of a canary in the coalmine. His distress, status envy, and fear of change are likely portents of things to come.

The effects of institutional weakness, absence of a common culture, and pervasive corruption are hard to escape

There has been a fair amount of press over the past two or three years about the perceived improvement in productivity in Africa and how those improvements were not yet making a dent in the general perception of Africa as an economic basket case. I suspect that there is probably a decadal improvement but that the ratio of noise to signal in Africa is so high that it is very hard to discern that improvement. I have also read a number of authors taking exception to the case that there is any improvement.

Ghana isn’t doing as well as many people think by Tyler Cowen calls the rosy scenario into question, at least as far as Ghana is concerned.

Ghana will turn to the International Monetary Fund for help after the west African country’s currency plunged roughly 40 per cent this year against the dollar, making the cedi the worst performing currency in the world in 2014.

Nearly three years after the start of oil production, which was meant to further strengthen the country’s fiscal position, the public purse is looking empty. Ghana is battling a double-digit fiscal deficit after a 75 per cent increase in public salaries over two years. Inflation is rising rapidly as the cedi plunges.

Ghana ran a fiscal deficit equal to 10.1 per cent of gross domestic product in 2013. The government has promised to lower the deficit to 8.5 per cent this year, but observers believe it would struggled to reduce it below 10 per cent.

Despite oil production, you have currency devaluation of 40%, 75% increase in public salaries, and annual fiscal deficit of 10%. The effects of institutional weakness, absence of a common culture, and pervasive corruption are hard to escape.

They don’t seem as eager to develop these skills

From An 'Ether Of Sexism' Doesn't Explain Gender Disparities In Science And Tech by Isaac Cohen.

Cohen makes the same point I have been making for a while. Gender disparities at the highest levels of performance (awards, patents, tenure, competitive success, partnership, etc.) are generally between 15-30% (i.e. only 15-30% of the "winners" are female) and that that figure tends to be correlated with those that are willing to put in long hours of effort/practice over long durations.

His article is a pretty good source of the current state of knowledge. I wasn't aware of this information.

More recent evidence confirms that men and women of formidable talent don’t make the same educational choices. Last year, women were still seriously underrepresented among those enrolled in Harvard and MIT online courses, including computer science (19%), circuits and electronics (9%), and elements of structures, a physics course with a side of linear programming (5%). Women who do take these courses get the same grades, and they actually have higher completion rates than their male counterparts. But on average, even in the privacy of their own homes and without the pressures and publicity of the classroom, they don’t seem as eager to develop these skills.

This is compelling. One of the hard to empirically measure issues is the feminist argument that there is a social dynamic in classrooms that inhibit the performance of women in science. MOOCs offer a natural experiment in testing that assumption. If you remove the classroom dynamics, as MOOCs do, then you would expect to see an increase in female interest and participation. But you don't see such a change. Women enroll in the same small numbers as they do classes.

It just makes it, for the time being, less credible.

You can find the most interesting things in the strangest of places. Slate is not one of my routine knowledge destinations: too biased, trivial, first world problemy, prejudiced, and otherwise profoundly unserious. But you just never know.

Why Psychologists’ Food Fight Matters “Important findings” haven’t been replicated, and science may have to change its ways. by Michelle N. Meyer and Christopher Chabris is an excellent summary of the state-of-play regarding the issue of replication of scientific studies. I endorse practically all of Meyer and Chabris's observations and recommendations.

Their case study is the rampant nonreplicability of dramatic findings in the fields of social sciences but they properly observe that the issue is prevalent in virtually all fields, just to a marginally lesser degree.

The recent special issue of Social Psychology was an unprecedented collective effort by social psychologists to do just that—by altering researchers’ and journal editors’ incentives in order to check the robustness of some of the most talked-about findings in their own field. Any researcher who wanted to conduct a replication was invited to preregister: Before collecting any data from subjects, they would submit a proposal detailing precisely how they would repeat the original study and how they would analyze the data. Proposals would be reviewed by other researchers, including the authors of the original studies, and once approved, the study’s results would be published no matter what. Preregistration of the study and analysis procedures should deter p-hacking, guaranteed publication should counteract the file drawer effect, and a requirement of large sample sizes should make it easier to detect small but statistically meaningful effects.

The results were sobering. At least 10 of the 27 “important findings” in social psychology were not replicated at all. In the social priming area, only one of seven replications succeeded.

[snip]

The incivility and personal attacks surrounding both this latest replication attempt (and prior attempts) may draw the attention of researchers away from where it belongs: on producing the robust science that everyone needs and deserves. Of course, researchers are human beings, not laboratory-dwelling robots, so it’s entirely understandable that some will be disappointed or even feel persecuted when others fail to replicate their research. For that matter, it’s understandable that some replicators will take pride and satisfaction in contributing to the literature by challenging the robustness of a celebrated finding.

But worry over these natural emotional responses should not lead us to rewrite the rules of science. To publish a scientific result is to make a claim about reality. Reality doesn’t belong to researchers, much less to any single researcher, and claims about it need to be verified. Critiques or attempts to replicate scientific claims should always be—and usually are—about reality, not about the researchers who made the claim. In science, as in The Godfather: It’s not personal, it’s business.

Meyer and Chabris observe.

A final salutary change is an overdue shift of emphasis among psychologists toward establishing the size of effects, as opposed to disputing whether or not they exist. The very notion of “failure” and “success” in empirical research is urgently in need of refinement. When applied thoughtfully, this dichotomy can be useful shorthand (and we’ve used it here). But there are degrees of replication between success and failure, and these degrees matter.

For example, suppose an initial study of an experimental drug for cardiovascular disease suggests that it reduces the risk of heart attack by 50 percent compared to a placebo pill. The most meaningful question for follow-up studies is not the binary one of whether the drug’s effect is 50 percent or not (did the first study replicate?), but the continuous one of precisely how much the drug reduces heart attack risk. In larger subsequent studies, this number will almost inevitably drop below 50 percent, but if it remains above 0 percent for study after study, then the best message should be that the drug is in fact effective, not that the initial results “failed to replicate.”

I think they are right to call out effect size as an unaddressed issue but I would place even more emphasis on it.

Say we have a new treatment that reduces the risk of mortal Condition X. That is on its own, not enough. We also need to know the effect size, as M&C point out. New treatment reduces risk of X by 30% is important to know. But it doesn't stop there. What is the original probability of Condition X. If we have a 50% chance of succumbing to Condition X, then a 30% reduction in that risk is material and might be worthwhile.

On the other hand, if Condition X is a real but rare condition then perhaps not. If there is only a 0.05% chance of developing Condition X, then perhaps a 30% reduction in that chance doesn't make much sense.

I alluded to the credulity of policy advocates in Does religion make you impressionably gullible or rigorously skeptical? and pointed out the elements you look for in a rigorous study which are usually notably absent in the social sciences fields (randomization of participant selection, double blind, null hypothesis testing, large population size, longitudinal design, etc.). As M&C note, that doesn't make social sciences any less important than it is or could be, it just makes it, for the time being, less credible.

It is interesting to juxtapose this call for intellectual rigor with an example of magical thinking that I came across this morning.

Roslyn Chavda is an African American professor in Political Science. She was hired some years ago by the University of New Hampshire on an affirmative action basis to increase professorial diversity. After six years her annual contract was not renewed and she was taken off the tenure track. The basis for the decision was low research productivity and poor student reviews of her teaching.

She claimed that "At no point did they attempt . . . to . . . help me with teaching, help me with publishing, take me under their wing." She did not dispute the evidence of poor performance but sought to justify that poor performance with the claim that that poor performance was the result of others not intervening to improve her performance. She claimed racial discrimination, gender discrimination, and status discrimination - claims which were summarily dismissed by the court as lacking any evidence. In her deposition, she affirms a couple of different times that "I have no evidence for this. I think my race set me apart from them, not from my perspective but from theirs."

The court's summary is:

Chavda has produced no evidence of any racial animus on the part of any of her colleagues in the political
science department. She has produced evidence that her colleagues knew that the only reason the department was able to hire her was her race. But, she has not produced any evidence that any member of the department was displeased by the circumstances of Chavda’s hiring or harbored any animosity toward African Americans specifically or people of color generally. Although she refers to “venom” hurled by her colleagues, the only venom of which she provides any evidence consists of comments about her deficiencies in teaching, scholarship, and interactions with colleagues in the department.

The court dismisses the entire suit.

The upshot of this is that a person is hired in a racially discriminatory fashion (affirmative action) and is later fired for poor performance and makes a claim of racial discrimination but with zero evidence other than her own speculation that they must have been biased against her in order for them to fire her.

The link to the M&C report is this leitmotif of feelings and emotions as determinants of reality rather than replicable empirical information.

When independent researchers failed to replicate the critical research she had produced, Prof. Simone Schnall responded by telling Science (the magazine) that

the entire process made her feel “like a criminal suspect who has no right to a defense and there is no way to win.” The Science article covering the special issue was titled “Replication Effort Provokes Praise—and ‘Bullying’ Charges.” Both there and in her blog post, Schnall said that her work had been “defamed,” endangering both her reputation and her ability to win grants. She feared that by the time her formal response was published, the conversation might have moved on, and her comments would get little attention.

The focus here is on the negative consequences to her and how she feels about the process, rather than whether her experiment was accurate or not.

Similarly, Roslyn Chavda is focused not on her actual performance but on how she feels and how the outcome will inconvenience her and not on whether there was actual discrimination.

We are all fallible and invariably we all make both unintentional mistakes as well as occasionally really boneheaded decisions. What is disturbing is the departure from reality displayed here where the focus is not on what is true or false but is on feelings and emotions and imagined conditions. Some of the biggest traitors to the age of reason are safe harbored in the very institutions that ought to be cultivating a passion and thirst for truth.

Poverty leads to fear leads to obesity . . . or something.

From Why Are So Many Low-Income People So Overweight? by James McWilliams.

I think McWilliams is both right and wrong.

You’d think that only the surliest contrarian would challenge the premise that access to fresh food results in improved health. But the idea—which is embodied in the notion of a “food desert”—has come under friendly fire in the last couple of years. It appears that the evidence weakening the connection between food accessibility and personal health is frustratingly, annoyingly, peevishly convincing.

Back in 2012, in the New York Times, Gina Kolata wrote that “there is no relationship between the type of food being sold in a neighborhood and obesity among its children and adolescents.” She quotes Kelly Brownell, director of Yale’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, as saying, “if you are looking for what you hope will change obesity, healthy food access is probably just wishful thinking.” More recently, in Slate, Heather Tirado Gilligan cites peer-reviewed research to conclude: “[M]ore fresh food closer to home likely does nothing for folks at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Obesity levels don’t drop when low-income city neighborhoods have or get grocery stores.”

I hate this kind of news. But given that scores of expensive food-access initiatives, most of them following the lead of Michelle Obama, have been established to eradicate so-called food deserts, and given that many food reformers are working under the impression that “if you stock it they will eat it,” these relatively recent studies should inspire a more skeptical look at what seems to be the sensible move of making more fresh food available to obese, low-income consumers. Unfortunately, too much evidence indicates that the matter isn’t quite so simple. When it comes to food, nothing is.

He's right. Food deserts have been a convenient myth conjured by advocates and used as a rationale to waste a lot of federal money solving a problem that doesn't exist. See an earlier post for a humorous example, They really need to try harder.

McWilliams acknowledges the facts but doesn't like them for two reasons. 1) It makes it harder to figure out what to do to address obesity, and 2) "it becomes very, very easy to blame the overweight victim".

He's right that it does mean that the solution is probably far harder to achieve. Why? Fundamentally, it is no longer possible to argue that it is ignorance and inaccessibility that causes obesity. People know they need to eat better, they broadly know what they ought to eat and what they ought not to eat, and the food that is good for them is readily available. They are simply choosing not to eat the way that would allow them to be less obese. What that really means is that they have different goals they are pursuing than those who want them to be thinner. So getting people to change their ways that will diminish their own objectives and improve the advocates objectives is a pretty tough sell.

But to me the interesting thing is the characterization of the individual as a victim. Why do that? You are disempowering them and you are stripping them of their agency. You are also creating a hierarchy where you, the smart advocate, know better what's good for them than they do themselves.

So McWilliams drifts from being right to being a self-anointed altruist, wanting to take over other's decisions and help them escape their false consciousness and make the decisions he wants them to make. There's a term for that - pathological altruism.

But then he drifts back to what I think is a valuable insight and one that I discussed in The brittleness of tactical decision-making. Part of the challenge for the poor is that with scarce resources, most of their decision-making is very tactical and there is very little resiliency in terms of making bad tactical decisions. The decision is made and the consequences are immediate. With strategic decisions you usually have some latitude to adjust the decision as new information becomes available. Not so for the poor.

There’s a critically important aspect to McMillan’s story that’s essential to this shift in perspective: the people she profiles live lives defined by persistent scarcity—not necessarily food scarcity, but a generalized and even traumatizing kind of material instability. Absolutely nothing about their lives is secure.

He's so close, but then he goes off the rails again.

Critics of McMillan’s piece complained about how the low-income cohort she profiled possessed houses, cell phones, decent clothing, and televisions. Nobody mentioned how precariously close these people were to losing those things, much less the anguish such anxiety entails. One unexpected medical bill, one glitch with the car, one minor brush with the law, one argument with your shift manager—all these events could have sent the entire edifice of material life crumbling. And that’s terrifying. The subjects pictured and videotaped in McMillan’s story are not just overweight. They’re scared out of their minds.

I understand McWilliams revulsion at the demonizing of the obese. But in his eagerness to hold individuals not accountable for their own behaviors, McWilliams descends into psycho babble.

The part I think is right is that scarcity constrains the nature of decisions one can make and puts one at greater risk. But I disagree with McWilliams that people are scared into bad eating. There's no evidence of that. However, it does allow McWilliams to reach the conclusion that "you remain, in fact, a victim" which seems to be the important thing.

Just as the availability of healthy food does not necessarily lead to healthy eating, the availability of unhealthy food need not lead to unhealthy eating. But for that to happen—for more Americans to choose healthier food—they must have a basic sense of security about their future. No matter how much fresh produce is imported into our food deserts, it will never compete with the junk when life is marked by scarcity.

Its hard to imagine how you arrive at a more incorrect conclusion than McWilliams in his final paragraph.