Avoiding the Oedipus Trap

 Megan McArdle was interviewed for EconTalk about The Oedipal Trap. She tells of Walter Freeman, the doctor who gave us the lobotomy. The interview has three major themes:

1. The options available for mental health treatments were poor and the outcomes without treatment were horrible. Condemnation of lobotomy in the early years was not such a clear case. (Also, due to positive press treatment, opposition was not just unclear, it was politically untenable.)
2. Freeman’s work method was admirable, maybe exemplary. He took detailed patient histories and did careful follow-up. He was active in his work: alert to the latest research and accumulated a vast body of  results on his own. He appears to be driven by a desire to be a great figure in medicine.
3. Somehow, Freeman could not see the emerging theme that his chosen treatment was destructive. (The good stuff starts at 35 min.)

“The first principle of science is not to fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”

McArdle tells the story of Oedipus (36 min) and concludes that “there are some mistakes that no-one can live with, even if they were made innocently”. The trap is that if you have made such a mistake, it is better not to know that you have done so. If you have made a mistake this bad, you will do everything in your power to avoid recognizing that you have done it. Much of what you will do is psychological and unconscious.

Dangers of O traps shows up in cancer treatment and foreign policy. You must choose between options that will have horrible outcomes. You are likely to make a decision with a horrible outcome. If you are not careful and conscious, you will lock yourself into an Oedipus trap.

How to avoid O traps (1:06): 

1. If the stakes are really high, go in slowly. Do a little bit and follow-up with long term feedback. Don’t stake your reputation early on.
2. Pre-commit beforehand to check your results and be willing to be wrong.
3. Recognize that no matter how shattering it is to admit you are wrong, it is less shattering than continuing to make that mistake.

Marshmallow is Not Soft

Buckets of ink have been spent on the “marshmallow study”. Walter Mischel started the test in the 1960s; finished it in the 1980s and people have been buzzing about it ever since.

The most famous version goes like this. A 4-5 yr-old child is placed in a room with a marshmallow. She is told that she is welcome to eat it now, but if she waits until the adult comes back, she will get two marshmallows. The wait was usually 15 minutes, all alone, in a bare room with a table, two chairs and a plate with a marshmallow. (You will find no shortage of (very cute) videos on this study.)

• The result: decades later, the kids who resisted were dramatically more successful.
• The moral: self-control is they key to success.

The study’s fame grew until it is now one the ten best-known stories in psychology, maybe the best. Then, in 2018, Watts published a study claiming Mischel’s conclusion was too simple.

Popular press articles exploded: the marshmallow study is wrong! Debunked! There were lots of takes. One says that it’s really about education: kids from poor families have less willpower. Another says it is about trust in adults: kids from un-trustworthy parents didn’t believe they were ever going to see that second marshmallow. Well, Watts never really thought his study “dubunked” the original, just that it told a more nuanced story.

Well, now a study from New Zealand, originating back in 1972, says...self-control is an excellent predictor of future success. We’re sorry, Walter Mischel.

Expired Drugs Probably Aren't

All those medications have expiry dates. Did you ever wonder what they mean?

They  mean that during the approval process someone showed that the drug could last this long without degradation. If the drug is manufactured in 1990 and in 1992 it was tested and it contained enough of the drug, the U.S. FDA will allow the manufacturer to claim a two year shelf life. It does not mean that anyone ever showed any drug degradation after two years.

That test is rarely done. When it is performed, tests regularly show shelf lives of four years beyond the advertised life. What's more, even if the drug decays, that is not evidence that it has become harmful. The two doctors in this article (Cantrell and Clancy) have never heard or read “of anyone being harmed by any expired drugs”.

Dinosaurs Had Feathers

We have long imagined dinosaurs as mighty lizards: scales and all. Every once in a while it is good to be reminded just how little of what we know is fact and how much is speculation.

Our beliefs about dinosaurs are based on reconstructions of skeletons or parts of skeletons. No one has ever seen dinosaur skin. (Whoops, we have, or at least impressions of dinosaur skin.)

Only now, it seems we may have seen the tail of a dinosaur, down to the smallest detail of texture, possibly even some hints of coloring.

(Jun'17 - ...or maybe not.)

DDT and the 100 Million

"In the last days of September 1943, as the U.S. Army advanced to the rescue of Italian partisans — some as young as nine — battling the Germans in the streets of Naples, the enraged Nazis, in a criminal act of revenge against their erstwhile allies, deployed sappers to systematically destroy the city’s aqueducts, reservoirs, and sewer system. This done, the supermen, pausing only to burn irreplaceable libraries, including hundreds of thousands of volumes and artifacts at the University of Naples — where Thomas Aquinas once taught — showed their youthful Neapolitan opponents their backs, and on October 1, to the delirious cheers of the Naples populace, Allied forces entered the town in triumph."

"But a city of over a million people had been left without sanitation, and within weeks, as the Germans had intended, epidemics broke out. [read on]"

Gravity Waves

The news says gravity waves have been discovered. The headlines say "Einstein proven right" though really, the physics world was not all that apprehensive. The excitement is that we now have a new way to look at the world.


Space.com has a good news release with a video on the implications. Ricochet explains the experiment for an adult layman audience. This Verge video has the background, like how Einstein's concept of gravity is like bending space instead of Newton's idea of a force.

A Global Warming Consensus

At last someone has done a systematic study of the opinions of meteorologists, geoscientists and engineers on the subject of climate change. One-third of the 1100 surveyed agree with the pro-Kyoto "prevailing wisdom". Of course, if 2/3 disagree, it's not exactly prevailing.

Teasing aside, the paper identifies five frameworks of opinions it calls "models". 36% are in the "Comply with Kyoto” model. and "express the strong belief that climate change is happening, that it is not a normal cycle of nature, and humans are the main or central cause.” 24% go by the“Nature Is Overwhelming” model:  “they strongly disagree that climate change poses any significant public risk and see no impact on their personal lives.” 17%, they call “Fatalists” who “consider climate change to be a smaller public risk ... are skeptical that the scientific debate is settled...” 10% are of the “Economic Responsibility” model. They “diagnose climate change as being natural or human caused. ... they point to the harm the Kyoto Protocol ... will do to the economy.”  5% are“Regulation Activists” . These scientists “diagnose climate change as being both human- and naturally caused...”  “They are also skeptical with regard to the scientific debate being settled and are the most indecisive whether IPCC modeling is accurate.”
 
Had you heard that 97% of scientists "agree with global warming"? Here is where that number comes from.

The Backyard Scientist

Mario Fireballs in high-res, slow motion video, home-made foundry, CO₂ rocket launcher. Do I really need to add the “do not try this at home”, except, maybe the Lichtenberg figures. Maybe!

Ground-Breaking Study that Should Change Your Life

An important study has been published

This spring, Dr. Johannes Bohannon and a team of German scientists discovered that people on low-carbohydrate diets could lose weight faster if they used one weird trick: Eat a bar of chocolate every day.
Newsrooms around the world responded eagerly to Bohannon's findings.
"Excellent News: Chocolate Can Help You Lose Weight!" Huffington Post India declared in a report...Even Europe's highest-circulation newspaper, Bild, got in on the action, publishing a report titled "Slim by Chocolate!"
Journalists and readers looked past the too-good-to-be-true nature of the findings and devoured the story wholesale.
But Bohannon's research was a hoax.
The health study was deliberately faked to test the hypothesis that scientists and reporters rarely detect junk science. No one caught on to this ruse.

No, not the one about the chocolate, the study about the quality of science reporting in our news. Bottom line: you need to learn science, method and critical reasoning because your betters aren't going to do it for you.

How Much of Human Nature is Optional?

Rachel Ryan doesn't feel like a man... but she feels a little guilty of that fact. She thinks that gender is not a social construct and discovered that makes her transgressive!

Nowhere is this oppression more apparent than in the workplace. God forbid

a young, ambitious career woman admit to wanting romance and a family as much as she wants that corner office. Instead, feminist champions of our gender-neutral society encourage “single young women in their sexual prime” to suppress conventional female desires in favor of “more-important things… such as good grades and internships and job interviews and a financial future of their own.”

Since entering the professional world, I’ve found amusement in openly admitting to wanting a family in the not-so-distant future. After all, I’m a fan of shock-value, and this statement is almost always guaranteed to raise eyebrows.

She is also a social science type and reads journal articles.

Science with Tom

Every week, some article he read in a newspaper...rapped. I believe this guy gives off my level of cool.

(Aug'15) Plus Inside Out and My Charon-a

Science Fair Projects

Raymond Wang from St. George's high school in Vancouver has won the world's largest high school science fair. His project was to provide fresh air to airline passengers while sharing a minimum of germs from other passengers.

This is Raymond's second science fair project that went international. The first was in 2012 (grade 8), when he generated electricity from the impact of raindrops.

Smarter Every Day at the Motocross Track

There are some really good YouTube video sites. My favorite science channel must be Smarter Every Day. In 3-8 minutes, Destin finds some interesting thing to describe and investigate. His giddy enthusiasm, unfailing wonder and wholesome, humble southern demeanor make it awesome*.
(Having a $100,000 camera that shoots 250,000 frames per second doesn't hurt, either.)
Here is Destin investigating angular momentum at the motocross track.

*Destin-approved vocabulary

Having watched every video, here is my annotated list of Smarter Every Day episodes.

Two Views of Intelligence

Do you think you're a natural at science? ...math? ...English? Sorry to hear that.

The mastery-oriented children, on the other hand, think intelligence is malleable and can be developed through education and hard work. They want to learn above all else. After all, if you believe that you can expand your intellectual skills, you want to do just that. Because slipups stem from a lack of effort or acquirable skills, not fixed ability, they can be remedied by perseverance. Challenges are energizing rather than intimidating; they offer opportunities to learn. Students with such a growth mind-set, we predicted, were destined for greater academic success and were quite likely to outperform their counterparts.

Math Story of the Year

skepticism failure

The Big Picture of the Summer Job

 It looks like summer jobs are harder to get than they used to be. It's not just the recession. That was 7 years ago.
So what explains the trend? Are kids today lazy? Do they feel unprepared? Is minimum wage pressure pushing the lowest skill workers off the bottom? Are students competing with China or adults (who are competing with China?) This is US data. Is it competition from low-skill immigration?

(Dec'14) Megan McArdle talks a little about the effect of raising the minimum wage and a lot about how to read a social science study.
The Curmudgeon (p.42-4,91-5) says you should look for a lousy summer job (that pays well), or at least a real one. Avoid internships or cushy jobs with impressive titles.

You're Over-Thinking It

Scientific progress went much quicker in the 1800's. We figured out the electric motor, electricity,  steam train, engine, car, typewriter, mechanical calculator, telegraph, fiber optics, telephone, record player, movie, sewing machine, rubber, plastic, photograph, revolver, dynamite, antiseptic, pasteurization,


Nowadays, electronic devices become ever-smaller, medicine becomes ever more sophisticated but it seems our massive research efforts are just fine-tuning details. At best, we are just optimizing the great discoveries of yesteryear.

Around 1900, people discussed the idea that science must end. We had already discovered everything. My father ruminated on the thought through the 50's and asked me during the 80's whether there was anything left to discover about cars. Then a science prof of mine planted a slightly different explanation; we have already made all the easy discoveries. From here on, advances would only happen through careful analysis of subtle, hard-to-interpret results. Math, especially statistics, was about to get a whole lot harder.

Alternative explanation.

Global Warming Crisis

Larry Bell makes the case that global warming is causing a crisis: its effect on science.The latest IPCC report deals with the fact that the climate models (computer programs) that it has relied upon for predictions of the next 50-200 years have been proven spectacularly wrong. The IPCC response:

2001: “Most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations”.
2007: “Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.”
2013 (leaked draft): “It is extremely likely that human influence on climate caused more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010.”

That's right, the first half-decade of test results show no evidence to support the hypothesis.
      conclusion: we are "very likely" right.
The second half decade of results are an undeniable refutation.
      conclusion: we are "extremely likely" to be right.

This, my friends, is a dramatic new development in the scientific method. For those of us who liked the old scientific method, it is a crisis.

Forbidden History of Unpopular People

Talk of a scientific consensus always gives me a moment of unease. This entertaining video tells of Ignaz Semmelweis, who had some funny ideas that were contrary to the scientific consensus and insulting to his peers.

Contrast with the news last September that an experiment has measured neutrinos traveling faster than light. To do so would violate Einsein's special relativity (E=mc2),The reaction among scientists was anything but hostile. Most people assumed there was a mistake, but couldn't find the mistake. Discussions of what the mistake might be were open and good-natured. In the meantime, the physics community lit up with speculation of what it might mean if it were true. 

Yes, there are ideas in science that are commonly accepted. Call it "consensus" if you like. But science needs to remain receptive to falsifying evidence. If, for whatever reason, a set of principles is not open to challenge from empirical evidence or alternate explanations, we shouldn't call it "science". Instead, we should use the older, broader term: "natural philosophy".

Is it Science? Or is it Pseudoscience?

Matt Ridley looks at science, pseudoscience and how we tell the difference. It turns out experts are not very good at it. There is also an extended detour looking at climate change.

The speech is so good, I need to link to his book, The Rational Optimist.