Link: If you don’t already read Bad Science
So there’s this blog called Bad Science, consisting mostly of the articles that medical doctor Ben Goldacre writes for the Guardian. It’s about pseudoscience, medicine and medical research. And also awesome.
The recent article was a wonderful bit of emotional whiplash, and is about as subject I think is useful to keep in mind when contemplating research. But really, I recommend reading everything.
http://www.badscience.net/2011/05/existential-angst-about-the-bigger-picture/
Also, the second-most-recent article, which should appeal to LW-types:
I put the randomized-trials-for-policy thing on facebook earlier today. I love that idea. It is one of those obvious-to-me ideas that I once I had it, I couldn’t believe that we weren’t doing it routinely. As if people weren’t thinking or something. You want to know whether something works? Try it and find out.
I had a similar feeling when I found out about homosexuality in ancient greece. When I was a kid: Many cultures are weird about homosexuality? Oh, it must be a new thing. What? It has been a well-known, standard minority fraction of human sexuality for thousands of years?
Indeed, but the way people think about sexuality and “sexual orientation” has changed a lot.
Ben Goldacre in general is a really good writer. I remember in his most recent book when he talks about publication bias he included a study suggesting that there was a publication bias in studies about publication bias.
I think using randomized trials to search for successful policies is more likely to happen in China than in the United States. Large chunks of Chinese policy are not up for discussion, let alone experimentation, but their authoritarian leaders are mostly engineers and can just mandate policy.
I’ve been seeing this meme a lot lately, that the PRC leadership are engineers. It seems to be used in an implicit sense of ‘they are practically scientists, and will be cool & rational & open to broader application of the scientific method (whatever their other failings), and we can generally expect rational actions of them’.
This bothers me.
There’s the obvious point that even if they are rational actors, they may share few of our values and their rationality be a bad thing from our point of view; it’s a common interpretation of the Party that it is ruthless, murderous, and determined to keep China intact and under its control (and there are racial undertones here of Han supremacy).
It’s not clear at all that engineering is associated with the better parts of the scientific tradition and with rationality in general, given the connection between engineers and terrorism (and creationism is mentioned).
I would seek out information on what the PRC leadership actually thinks and does. What you find in the media is extremely misleading when it comes to the modern Chinese Communist Party (contrary to popular belief it has undergone considerable political reform as well as economic reform). Indeed, the PRC actually does already roll out policy in an experimental way before making it widespread. I recommend reading Mark Leonard’s What Does China Think? for a short, popular introduction. David Shambaugh’s China’s Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation is a scholarly account that gives an idea of what’s going on in China’s many think tanks.
Note: I’m not condoning the Chinese Communist Party’s actions or recommending their political system. It’s just one area where I’ve done some research and discovered the truth is very, very far from what’s ordinarily presented. The PRC leadership have, as far as I can tell, at least been trying to build a meritocratic political system in which there are no general elections but a great deal of experimentation in ways to elicit and respond to feedback from the citizenship. Whether they’ve succeeded or not is another matter. At the very least they’ve managed to create a system where power is exchanged peacefully and the leadership has a relatively high level of education.
One of the things that seems to be emphasized in what I’ve read is how difficult it is for Westerners to understand what is going on inside the Party, but the reviews of that sound interesting (especially the talk http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/events/2008/0415_china/20080415_china.pdf ), so I’ll put it on my list.
I don’t look at Chinese politics and immediately think rational. I don’t see or expect much rationality from Chinese leaders with respect to Taiwan for instance. But why are so many of China’s top leaders educated as engineers? I don’t know what process they go through to gain political power in China, but it sure seems to lead to different demographics than for US politicians.
One piece of Chinese policy that seems pretty smart/rational is their long term infrastructure projects. Even if keeping the Chinese Communist Party in power is their first priority, long term thinking is a high priority for them. From the news of big infrastructure projects I’ve read about, China has much clearer thinking on infrastructure than the US.
For the types of policy that aren’t tabooed, China is more likely to be able to experiment than the US—if for no other reason than that they don’t care about hurting people for the ‘greater good’ (not necessarily a good thing). Also, they are less accountable to local people for their actions, so “Not in my backyard” is much less of a constraint.
Smart from one point of view, perhaps.
I see a great deal of criticism of it—that the investments are terrible, the market is over-saturated, things like high-speed rail are leading to perverse consequences like migrants overloading the bus system to avoid the necessarily high-priced tickets, and the whole shebang is basically welfare to keep the house of cards going until someone finally eats all the bad debt from the railroads (http://chovanec.wordpress.com/2011/06/02/beijings-bad-debt-bailout-problem-solved/) and other big projects you laud.
I’m pretty sure I found Overcoming Bias through one of the links on the Bad Science blog. Either that or the Mind Hacks blog, which I...uh...found out about through Bad Science.
He’s not been maintaining the miniblog links for the past month or so because he’s been on tour with Uncaged Monkeys (a very awesome live show about science), but they’re usually about the sorts of things I imagine most LW readers would appreciate.
I’ve wondered how I found Overcoming Bias. I’ve determined the approximate date I found it from a facebook post I made, but I don’t remember how I found it. It could have been from Bad Science.
The first link reminds me very much of Yvain’s Never Leave Your Room in the sense that both discuss priming and implicit association and both are really, really awesome. Thanks for the links! I look forward to some interesting reading.