They don’t test that directly. From what they report, it looks like the average is more accurate than the second guess, but not statistically significantly so. The average is 7.6 better than the first guess (with mean errors of 123.2 vs. 130.8, looking at all participants’ first guesses, and the averages of only those in the dialectical bootstrapping condition). The second guess (of those in the dialectical bootstrapping condition) is only 4.5 better than their first guess, which is not reliably different from zero (95% CI = −1.0 to +10.4).
Unnamed
Karma: 7,547
Based on this, you may want to call it “Trope and Liberman’s near/far theory,” rather than attributing it to Robin Hanson.
The Poverty Action Lab at MIT aims to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of other organizations’ anti-poverty programs. They use rigorous experimental social science methods, conducting randomized studies to evaluate the effectiveness of programs around the world. They partner with anti-poverty organizations to help them evaluate and improve their programs, publish their evaluations on their website and sometimes in academic journals, and consult with other aid organizations (including the World Bank) to encourage them to use more of an experiment-based methodology. They take donations.
For more info you can look through the Poverty Action Lab website, see this Esquire article, or this subscription-only article in Nature.
This sounds like a huge project to put together from scratch. I recommend looking into some of the existing research on individual differences in rationality, such as Keith Stanovich’s books (Who Is Rational? and What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought seem most relevant) and papers (Stanovich & West 1997 looks particularly useful—they measure people’s sensitivity to argument quality on a range of real-life issues).
There is evidence of something similar to choking among other species, including rats and cockroaches. Social psychologists have found that the presence of others tends to make people do better on easy or well-practiced and worse on difficult, complex tasks, and these effects have been found among cockroaches running through easy or difficult mazes. They call this effect social facilitation.
I don’t know about the Congresscritters, but there are a bunch of very smart, educated, informed people in Washington who have a lot of say over how the government spends its money. Whatever their flaws, people like Henry Paulson, Tim Geithner, and Larry Summers are not lacking the basic tools of economic analysis, and they have had more influence over the shape of our current recovery effort than almost(?) anyone in Congress. And there are also the bureaucrats—the people at the CBO who analyzed the stimulus package, and the staff at the various government agencies that are getting the stimulus money to spend—who have plenty of specialized expertise.
In other words, Washington is a mixture of hacks and wonks, and things won’t go well unless the wonks have a substantial role in setting policy.
This OB post covered similar ground. What I took away from that post was that log odds are the natural units for converting evidence into beliefs, and probabilities are the natural units for converting beliefs into actions.
There was a .453 correlation between this number and actual IQ; that is, 45% of the variance in how likely you thought you were to have a higher-than-average IQ could be explained by your actual IQ.
Correlation is r and percent of variance explained is r^2, so I think that should be 21% rather than 45%. There’s also a typo where you say ”.5 level” and presumably mean .05.
The “I’m listing the ones that are significant at the <.5 level” typo is still there.
This phenomenon is more commonly known as “confirmation bias”—I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone call it “positive bias” besides Eliezer (and those who got the term from him), although it might be out there somewhere. I’d recommend at least including the term “confirmation bias”, if not replacing “positive bias.”
Fandom is social—a big part of it is interacting with other fans. So here’s an alternative hypothesis: works that especially appeal to a narrow subset of the population are more likely to develop a fanatic fandom (with things like conventions), because they allow fans to get together with other people like them, form a fanatic community, and radicalize as a group. With broadly popular works, fans won’t be all that similar to each other so they’ll be less likely to come together to form a fanatic community. Trekkies and Randians seem consistent this hypothesis.
“Sometimes men come by the name of genius in the same way that certain insects come by the name of centipede; not because they have a hundred feet, but because most people cannot count above fourteen.”
-- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
related: The Level Above Mine
The study showing a correlation between “IQ” and quality of government (reference 3) estimated IQ based on the performance of public school 4th and 8th graders on standardized tests in math and reading. With that measure, the opposite causal direction seems far more likely: high quality state government leads to better public schools and thus higher test scores (which the author uses as a proxy for IQ).
State IQ was estimated from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) standardized tests for reading and math that are administered to a sample of public school children in each of the 50 states. … State data were available for grades 4 and 8. … For each year, for each test, the national mean and standard deviation was used to standardize the test to have a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. This standardization places the scores on the typical metric for IQ tests. The means of the standardized reading scores for grades 4 and 8 were averaged across years as were the means of the standardized math scores. State IQ was defined as the average of mean reading and mean math scores.
I think that Bernatzi & Thaler (1995) were the first to do an analysis of this sort (using the results of behavioral decision making research to explain why people didn’t buy stocks), although this new paper seems to include more of the features of prospect theory. Bernatzi & Thaler’s abstract:
The equity premium puzzle refers to the empirical fact that stocks have outperformed bonds over the last century by a surprisingly large margin. We offer a new explanation based on two behavioral concepts. First, investors are assumed to be “loss averse,” meaning that they are distinctly more sensitive to losses than to gains. Second, even long-term investors are assumed to evaluate their portfolios frequently. We dub this combination “myopic loss aversion.” Using simulations, we find that the size of the equity premium is consistent with the previously estimated parameters of prospect theory if investors evaluate their portfolios annually.
I don’t see why it matters if everyone who’s overweight loses 2 points or if a fifth of them each lose 10 points. Instead of having one person cut their BMI from 40 to 30, we could have one person go from 40 to 38, another from 38 to 36, …, and a fifth from 32 to 30. None of them will feel like they accomplished much, but the overall public health benefit will be the same.
The one way that unequal weight losses could be better would be if people who benefit more from losing weight (which would presumably be the people who are the most overweight) tend to lose more than other people. That seems like a plausible outcome for some policies (like junk food taxes), but with other policies (like subsidies on gym memberships) you might get the opposite.
I’m disappointed that he didn’t say more about the specific public health policies that have been proposed. Policies like taxing junk food, making cities more walkable, requiring menu calorie labeling, and cutting corn subsidies all seem like they could make our society a little healthier and thinner, on the margin, without much of a cost. Instead of engaging with the question of whether these sorts of policies were good ideas, he incorporated the public health questions into his overarching narrative of the obesity panic. (See: Missing the Trees for the Forest)
I agree that it matters who is losing the weight (that is, where in the BMI distribution they are). That’s the point I was trying to make in my 2nd paragraph. But it doesn’t matter what increment they’re losing the weight in. It makes almost no difference if a group of people all lose 2 points of BMI or if a randomly selected half of that group all lose 4 points.
If I’m reading them correctly, Paul Campos suggested that a 2 point drop in BMI was too small to make a difference, and Jonathan Graehl responded that a 2 point average drop in BMI could be big enough to matter if it results from some people having a much larger drop (which is big enough to make a difference) and others not dropping at all. My response was that any drop in BMI helps at the margin (as long as it happens to someone who is unhealthily overweight), and in the aggregate a lot of people each losing a tiny amount of weight can be just as good for public health as a smaller number of people each losing a substantial amount of weight. All that matters (if we pretend that health is solely a function of BMI) is the distribution of BMIs in the population beforehand and the distribution afterwards; it doesn’t matter which individuals are responsible for the shift in the distribution.
There’s the specific sense of “debate,” which are talking events where people on different sides of an issue argue with each other in front of an audience. Then there’s the more general sense of “debate,” which is a long-term public discussion in which people on different sides of an issue make arguments in various formats (books, blog posts, radio interviews, etc.) and respond to some of each other’s arguments. “Refusal to debate” in the general sense seems like a bad thing—it’s worth publicly knocking down their arguments to help the public learn the truth and to keep the marketplace of ideas open so that you don’t mistakenly shield established views from accurate criticisms.
I’m not as clear on the problems with “refusal to debate” in the specific sense of not holding talking events. Is the idea just that debates (meaning talking events) are an essential component of the public discussion, without which we’d be worse at educating the public and testing established ideas? They don’t seem like a great way to find truth, especially when one of the debaters is just trying to win the debate or create doubt or confusion. Among other things, audience members (who are the targets of the debate) have a limited amount of time to process information, the debaters can manipulate what they attend to, they can’t access any independent sources of information, and their impressions are heavily influenced by the personal characteristics of the debaters (their charisma, confidence, and so on). Maybe it’s all just about public perceptions of your willingness to debate rather than the debate itself, where you don’t want to seem scared to debate but you also don’t want to issue to seem like something debatable where a reasonable person could easily reach either conclusion.
Psychologists have noticed that there are sex differences on questions like 1-3, even though there cannot be sex differences in those behaviors, and have tried to explain that finding. See, for instance, this paper (pdf) by Baumeister, Catanese, & Vohs (2001) which argues that men have a stronger sex drive than women. They write (p. 250):
… Men actually report significantly more sex partners than women, across all studies (e.g., Janus & Janus, 1993; Laumann et al., 1994). Unfortunately this difference suffers from being logically impossible, insofar as heterosexual intercourse involves one man and one woman (so the mean tallies of partners should be equal). Several studies have sought to explain this recurrent finding, and the answers converge on motivated cognition: Some men, but fewer women, tend to rely on estimating the number of sex partners and hence round up, whereas women are more likely to rely on trying to enumerate all prior partners, which tends to lead to occasionally forgetting some partners and hence to producing an undercount (N. R. Brown & Sinclair, 1999; Wiederman, 1997).
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In our view, the difference in the way people count sex partners is itself an indication that men want more than women.
They also note a study showing that men were more likely than women to classify oral or manual stimulation as sex.
Prestigious scientists can play this role even with anonymous review. They can publicize their support of a new and radical idea through talks at conferences, word of mouth, and other informal channels (like blogging). This will increase attention to their new idea, especially since many scientists like to keep track of what the top researchers in their field are doing. And if other scientists give extra weight to the views of their high status colleagues, they will also raise their probability estimates for the hypothesis. So the new idea can receive a boost before any paper is published. Then when papers supporting the radical new hypothesis are submitted for anonymous review, they will have a better chance of being published whether or not the prestigious scientist is an author.