The fate of great research

In one of the more poignant remarks to come from stand-up comedians, Conan O'Brien once wonderfully observed that, eventually, all graves go unattended. 

I was reading a while back this fantastic talk by Richard Hamming, "You and Your Research". Byrne Hobart linked to it in one of his newsletters, when describing the nature of remote work:

[Hamming]: "I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, “The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.” I don’t know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame."

[Hobart]: Working remote is a modern analog to Hamming’s closed-door policy: there’s an immediate productivity boost from reduced interruptions, but some of those interruptions are long-term course-corrections, and they’re valuable.

 Hamming's whole talk is fantastic, talking about how to do what he calls "great research"

And for the sake of describing great research I'll occasionally say Nobel-Prize type of work. It doesn't have to gain the Nobel Prize, but I mean those kinds of things which we perceive are significant things. Relativity, if you want, Shannon's information theory, any number of outstanding theories - that's the kind of thing I'm talking about. 

Well I now come down to the topic, ``Is the effort to be a great scientist worth it?'' To answer this, you must ask people. When you get beyond their modesty, most people will say, ``Yes, doing really first-class work, and knowing it, is as good as wine, women and song put together,'' or if it's a woman she says, ``It is as good as wine, men and song put together.'' And if you look at the bosses, they tend to come back or ask for reports, trying to participate in those moments of discovery. They're always in the way. So evidently those who have done it, want to do it again. But it is a limited survey. I have never dared to go out and ask those who didn't do great work how they felt about the matter. It's a biased sample, but I still think it is worth the struggle. I think it is very definitely worth the struggle to try and do first-class work because the truth is, the value is in the struggle more than it is in the result. The struggle to make something of yourself seems to be worthwhile in itself. The success and fame are sort of dividends, in my opinion.

So what happens when you do good research, or even great research? Does everything suffer the Conan O'Brien fate?

Let us start with a simple observation, so basic as to almost be trite.

All knowledge only exists in people's heads. 

In the limit, if great knowledge is written down in a book, and then people never read the book, in some practical sense, it may as well not have existed. Sometimes, it has to be rediscovered again and again, after being forgotten. This happened with the cure for scurvy, until vitamin C was isolated.

How does information get into people's heads? Well, they either have to read something, or get told it, or rediscover it themselves. 

So far, so obvious. 

For all the advances in technology, has our ability to read improved, or our ability to listen to conversation? Not obviously. Reading speed may have variation across people, but I've yet to come across anything indicating that it's improving. So let's assume that people's ability to read new source material is no better than in the past. 

Now, as you look out on the world, you see that ever more people are doing research, and writing books and papers. Even if some large fraction of this is junk, and some proportion is active stupidity and anti-knowledge, the amount of genuine new knowledge is surely going up every year. 

The amount of hours of life you have to read it all, even just the most important bits, in order to make advances at the frontier, is a little higher, but not much. And most of the increase happens at ages long past when you're likely to do any of Hamming's first-class work.

So how do people actually learn enough to advance knowledge? 

Well, one way is to spend longer studying and become more specialised. The number of genuine polymaths making contributions in lots of different areas seems to be a lot less than in the days of the Royal Society. This is not a coincidence. Every now and then you get a Von Neumann or a Frank Ramsey, but they are towering and rare geniuses.

The other fate of great research, which is less discussed, is that if it is not to be forgotten, it must be summarised. 

How much debate and experiment went into establishing that matter is discrete, and made of atoms, rather than continuous? Or that atoms contain protons, neutrons and electrons? These were colossal contributions, made in painstaking ways by very smart people, resolving a debate that had gone back to the ancient Greeks and before. How do we reward such great work? They become the first sentence of a chemistry class. "Matter is made up of atoms". Boom. Next. There simply isn't time. One can go back to first principles, and read the individual experiments of Dalton and others that established this - that certain combinations of gases tended to combine in fixed proportions, for instance. The Royal Society had the wonderful motto of "Nullius in verba" - take no man's word for it. This is a great aspirational attitude to have, but in practice one can't run all the experiments that make up all of human knowledge. You may well want to know what the experimental evidence actually is. But you probably will end up taking someone's word for it, somewhere, about how those experiments proceeded. How could it be otherwise? How many hours are there in a life?

For the true giants like Newton, their names stay attached to the principles they come up with. But even this is rare. Knowledge of authorship is additional bits of information that people have to carry around in their heads. Is it crucial to know who established each experiment? Or could the time spent learning this be better spent learning more actual facts or principles about the world?

In the fullness of time, if you actually do great work, the praise of posterity will sooner or later be that your work becomes a sentence or two in a summary of a textbook, a contribution to the body of research that every scientist must ingest as fast as possible in order to be able to spend the rest of their lives advancing the frontiers of knowledge. Every page you write, every concept you advance, competes for space in the heads of readers, the pages of textbook authors, and the minutes of this short life. The competition is brutal and Darwinian. Knowledge must evolve to get condensed into shorter and crisper forms, or it risks simply being forgotten. As the time increases, and the amount of new work increases too, the probability of one or other of these outcomes goes to one. 

In this respect, one of the great unappreciated works of public service are the efforts of those who do the reading and summarising. Scott Alexander is extremely high on this list - his summaries of other people's books are fantastic, often way more pithy than the original, and include important editorial judgment on strengths and weaknesses. Mencius Moldbug did a similarly great service by reading and synthesizing a huge number of old primary sources that you and I would never have come across otherwise. I have a strong suspicion that over 99% of people currently living who have read Thomas Hutchinson's Strictures Upon the Declaration of Independence are no more than one degree removed from a Moldbug reader.

I think that from this point of view, one should also not be ashamed about mostly reading the abstracts of papers. You can convert the number of hours left in your life, to a number spent reading, to a reading speed, to a total number of pages of text that you will be able to absorb before you die. What shall that text contain? Every paper and book you read in its original and entirety is taking something from the budget available to other great works. Do budget constraints not bind, even for speed readers?

The other point that is worth noting is the disparity between fiction and non-fiction. Science can be summarised. History can be summarised. But fiction and poetry largely cannot, except without stripping out all the art and beauty that made them great. The idea of all of us reading only the cliff notes version of Shakespeare is simply too tragic to bear. But the result of this love is that fiction works stand a much higher chance of being forgotten altogether. 

If a man has a genetic mutation that is reproductively advantageous, in the short run, he has more children, and all his traits get passed on. Then his children have more children, and the advantageous gene and the other tag-alongs also get passed on. But roll the tape forward 100 generations, and the only thing left of the original man is the advantageous gene itself. This gets selected on, and the rest gets forgotten.

So too it shall be with memes. You may bequeath an entire volume, but after 100 generations of re-learning, only the crispest, shortest version shall remain. And that is your final contribution to posterity.

The Covid19 death rate is higher than 2%

I understand why Moldbug wanted to write a post on the coronavirus. As usual, Moldbug was ahead of the curve. The reason is that he reads sources that other people don’t read. If you read the same as everyone else, you think the same as everyone else. This is the main (respectable) reason I’m on twitter, (other than the shitposting which is like terrible cheap carbs of reading material). 95% of it is garbage, but the remaining 5% is stuff you just don’t find anywhere else.

And what Moldbug, and MorlockP, and Loki Julianus and some others have figured out is that there’s a decent chance that this is the start of the shit hitting the fan, but nobody in the west seems much concerned yet. It’s a fascinating insight into how people respond to gradually unfolding disaster. We expect disaster to strike out of the blue. One day, the Soviets nuke us, or an asteroid strikes. Or, failing that, we expect to see a fairly rapid and linear growth of things getting worse, like in a disaster movie where the plot has to unfold in a predictable manner to all be wrapped up in 90 minutes.

What our instincts don’t work well for, however, is exponential growth. It just doesn’t fit people’s casual intuitions about what’s going to happen. The probably mythical story about the inventor of chess is that he asked to be paid as a reward by the king in a grain of rice for the first square, two grains for the second square, four for the third square, and so on. Of course, the point of the story is that the king was an idiot and by the end figured out he couldn’t possible pay. Ha ha ha. Nobody would be that dumb.

Well, here’s some grains of rice accumulating.

If you take the number of coronavirus cases reported, it’s close to an exponential curve. Not quite, however. If you plot things on a log scale, you can see the rate of increase in reported cases slowing down.

By eyeballing the log scale graph, you can see that things started to decline starting around Jan 30^th. If you run a regression of log number of cases on number of days since outbreak, from Jan 30^th until February 13^th, you get a coefficient on time of 0.126, or e^0.126= 13.4% growth per day. If you want to be conservative, and just use the February 5^th – 11^th data, excluding the big jump on February 12^th when they changed reporting standards, you still get an average growth of e^0.078, or 8.1% growth per day. The R2 of this regression is 0.98, by the way, so this is a shockingly good fit. If you use the whole period, you get a whopping e^0.199=22.0% average growth per day. And even with the slowdown, the R2 is still over 0.92.

Since these are only rough data, because God knows how many unreported cases there are, suppose the number of cases is growing about 10% per day. There’s a rule of thumb for turning growth rates into doubling times called the rule of 72. Divide 72 by the growth rate and you get a decent estimate of the doubling time. So in this case, 72/10 = 7.2. In other words, on current trends we expect the number of cases to double every week. Even at the low rate of 7.8%, the number of cases is expected to double in around 9 days. We won’t use this rule exactly, but it’s pretty good for thinking about intuition.

And this causes all sorts of weird mistakes. One, which I think is underappreciated by most people, is wildly distorted estimates of the death rate.

The number that keeps getting currently quoted in the press is a death rate of around 2%. As of February 13th, there have been 1,384 deaths out of 64,473 cases, according to worldometer. This gives a death rate of 2.15%. Which sounds pretty encouraging. It seems like you have to get very unlucky to actually die from it.

But the strange thing is, there’s another, smaller set of people talking about a death rate of 16%. What’s that? Well, it’s the ratio of deaths (1,384) to closed cases (8,566), or 16.16%.

Now, you might look at it be concerned about the definition of closed cases. Maybe they’re just very reluctant to declare someone cured, so there’s lowball numbers here (whereas they’re less reluctant to declare someone dead). Many of the diagnosed will eventually recover, but it takes ages to classify them as healthy again. So no big deal! 16% is too high, and the true number will be much lower.

Well, here’s a pretty strong reason to prefer the ratio using closed cases. From the descriptions you read about the progression of cases in places like Hong Kong, the disease generally takes 2-3 weeks from diagnosis to actually kill you.

Why is this a big deal?

Because the number of cases is growing at around 8-10% a day. And as long as that holds, the number of deaths will always be lagging the total number of cases in the growth phase. The death rate actually ought to be compared with the number of cases from 2-3 weeks earlier, because that’s the number of people who could have reasonably died by this point. It’s also the expectation of the fraction of currently alive new cases who will eventually die. Again, this may seem like pedantry. Except that the number of cases is growing 8% per day!

Let’s start with lower bounds. Assume that average growth in cases is conservatively 7.8%. Also, let’s assume the disease kills you quickly, on average in two weeks (which is optimistic for the purposes of our estimated death rate being on the low side). In this case, the number of cases in the denominator is too high by a factor of e^(14*0.078) = 2.98. So the true death rate will end up being 2.15*2.98 = 6.42%

If it takes 2.5 weeks on average to kill you, the death rate will end up being 2.15* e^(17.5*0.078) = 8.43%.

But we’re using a pretty conservative estimate of growth rates. Suppose you take dates since February 5^th, but include the increase in cases on Feb 12^th and 13^th. Then the average growth rate is 9.75%. Add a 2.5 week average time to death, and the death rate is actually 2.15*e^(17.5*0.0975) = 11.85%. If the disease takes three weeks on average to kill you, the true death rate is 16.67%. Which sounds very close to the death rate from closed cases. Add in growth rates from the earlier period, and the numbers get even higher.

Plug in your own assumptions or data fiddling, and the answers fall right out. There’s obviously big standard errors on this stuff. But one thing is pretty clear. There is more than enough evidence at this point, no matter how you cut it, that the overall death rate is going to be a lot higher than 2%. I’m betting on 5-10%. You ought to be making plans accordingly.

This doesn’t tell you about the rate of transmission, of course, either in China or the US. Maybe we’ll lucky, and it won’t turn into a pandemic outside China. Want to bet on that?

The good news from all this is that most people don’t care about China, haven’t read reports of any major outbreak in the US, and so aren’t really concerned. Which means that if you do think that there’s a non-trivial chance that the porridge may totally hit the propeller in a month or two, it’s still relatively easy to buy at least several months of storable food supplies. Amazon will still deliver them in a few days. Prices will be the same as normal. The guy delivering them has a very low chance of having the coronavirus. Maybe those things will still be true in three months. Maybe they won’t.

For the sake of a few hundred bucks, you’d be mad not to. You want to have a viable strategy in place to be able to not leave your house for an extended period of time. This is just basic finance. You want to hedge left tail outcomes, especially if the outcome is a catastrophe, and the cost of hedging it is very cheap. Surely everyone who understands finance is doing this, right?

Ha ha, no, of course they’re not. We’ve ignored the largest reason smart people don’t do this stuff. It’s unfashionable. It’s for loser, tin foil prepper types. Do you really want to be doing this stuff? Tell your friends you’ve started buying large quantities of canned food and you think they should too, and they’ll look at you like you’re a conspiracy theory loon. They’ll have a good laugh.

So did the King, when they were only up to the fourth chess square.

A good heuristic for a certain type of BS

One phrase that in practice means almost the exact opposite of what it claims is the expression 'scientifically proven'.

I have known a good number of scientists, both social and physical, and I've never once heard them use this expression non-ironically to describe either their own, or anyone else's work. Mathematics proves things, by formal theorems. Science, on the other hand, provides evidence that supports some hypotheses and which rejects other hypotheses. But even when a null hypothesis is formally rejected, knowledge in the sciences is contingent. At any time, your theory is making falsifiable predictions that are so far consistent with the data, but which might be overturned at any time.

And even in places like economics, theory models, which do use formal mathematical proofs of particular ideas and thus may loosely be justified in terms of speaking of 'proof', almost never use the term when referencing the broad idea they're trying to advance. Economists will say 'I solve a model which shows how information asymmetry affects trading volume', not 'Information asymmetry is scientifically proven to decrease trading volume'. What has been solved is one particular model, but there are many other competing models that may be consistent with the data too. Nobody would dream of saying that science proved their theory result.

'Oh sure', you might say, 'we understand that there's a distinction among the finer points of philosophy of science. But in practice, saying science has proved something just means there's lots of evidence consistent with it. Why be such a purist?'

A good question, since you asked.

The reason my heuristic works, however, is that most people who perform actual science do understand the distinction, and are likely to use the right language. By contrast, people who like the phrase 'scientifically proven' are almost always sneaking in an appeal to authority in order to paper over either a) their lack of understanding of the complexity of the issue, or b) the annoyingly inconclusive evidence for the particular proposition that they think it would be politically desirable for more people to believe.

The claim in the above paragraph, of course, is a hypothesis. In the name of science, we should see whether the evidence supports the hypothesis or not.

To check, here's the top 5 results that come up when I type in the phrase 'reject the null hypothesis' into Google News:

1. Do Teams Undervalue European Skaters in the Draft?
2. Hypothesis Testing in Finance: Concept & Examples
3. Culture war in the deep blue sea: Science’s contentious quest to understand whales and dolphins
4. WaPo Climate Fail on Missouri
5. Using a fund manager? You'd get the same results at a casino

So that may not sound stellar, but they're all somewhat related to formal evaluation of evidence for and against ideas in the social or physical sciences. Now compare it with what comes up for 'scientifically proven':

1. Scientifically proven herbal aphrodisiacs
2. Writing Exercises Scientifically Proven To Redirect Your Life
3. 10 scientifically proven ways love can heal!
4. Emojis Are Now Scientifically Proven To Help You Get Lucky
5. Ryan Gosling’s Face Has Been Scientifically Proven To Make Men More Supportive Of Feminism

In other words, worthless clickbait. Colour me shocked.

The results, while not subjected to formal statistical testing, directionally support the hypothesis that 'scientifically proven' is a brain-dead appeal to authority by lazy English majors who wish to unjustifiably associate their claims with the patina of scientific credibility.

They're all IQ tests, you just didn't know it

Here's one to file under the category of 'things that may have been obvious to most well-adjusted people, but were at least a little bit surprising to me'.

Many people do not react particularly positively when you tell them what their IQ is, particularly when this information is unsolicited.

Not in the sense of 'I think you're an idiot', or 'you seem very clever'. Broad statements about intelligence, even uncomplimentary ones, are fairly easy to laugh off. If you think someone's a fool, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

What's harder to laugh off is when you put an actual number to their IQ.

Having done this a couple of times now, the first thing you realise is that people are usually surprised that you can do this at all. IQ is viewed as something mysterious, requiring an arcane set of particular tasks like pattern spotting in specially designed pictures, which only trained professionals can ascertain.

The reality is far simpler. Here's the basic cookbook:

1. Take a person's score on any sufficiently cognitively loaded task = X

2. Convert their score to normalised score in the population (i.e. calculate how many standard deviations above or below the mean they are, turning their score into a standard normal distribution). Subtract off the mean score on the test, and divide by the standard deviation of scores on the test. Y = [ X - E(X) ] / [ σ(X)]

3. Convert the standard normal to an IQ score by multiplying the standard normal by 15 and adding 100:

IQ = 100 + 15*Y

That's it.

Because that's all IQ really is - a normal distribution of intelligence with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15.

Okay, but how do you find out a person's score on a large-sample, sufficiently cognitively-loaded task?

Simple - ask them 'what did you get on the SAT?'. Most people will pretty happily tell you this, too.

The SAT pretty much fits all the criteria. It's cognitively demanding, participants were definitely trying their best, and we have tons of data on it. Distributional information is easy to come by - here, for instance. 

You can take their score and convert it to a standard normal as above - for the composite score, the mean is 1497 and the standard deviation is 322. Alternatively you can use the percentile information they give you in the link above and convert that to a standard normal using the NORM.INV function in excel. At least for the people I looked at, the answers only differed by a few IQ points anyway. On the one hand, this takes into account the possibly fat-tailed nature of the distribution, which is good. On the other hand, you're only getting percentiles rounded to a whole number of percent, which is lame. So it's probably a wash.

And from there, you know someone's IQ.

Not only that, but this procedure can be used to answer a number of the classic objections to this kind of thing.

Q1: But I didn't study for it! If I studied, I'm sure I'd have done way better.

A1: Good point. Fortunately, we can estimate how big this effect might be. Researchers have formed estimates of how much test preparation boosts SAT scores after controlling for selection effects. For instance:

When researchers have estimated the effect of commercial test preparation programs on the SAT while taking the above factors into account, the effect of commercial test preparation has appeared relatively small. A comprehensive 1999 study by Don Powers and Don Rock published in the Journal of Educational Measurement estimated a coaching effect on the math section somewhere between 13 and 18 points, and an effect on the verbal section between 6 and 12 points. Powers and Rock concluded that the combined effect of coaching on the SAT I is between 21 and 34 points. Similarly, extensive metanalyses conducted by Betsy Jane Becker in 1990 and by Nan Laird in 1983 found that the typical effect of commercial preparatory courses on the SAT was in the range of 9-25 points on the verbal section, and 15-25 points on the math section. 

So you can optimistically add 50 points onto your score and recalculate. I suspect it will make less difference than you think. If you want a back of the envelope calculation, 50 points is 50/322 = 0.16 standard deviations, or 2.3 IQ points.

Q2: Not everyone in the population takes the SAT, as it's mainly college-bound students, who are considerably smarter than the rest of the population. Your calculations don't take this into account, because they're percentile ranks of SAT takers, not the general population. Surely this fact alone makes me much smarter, right?

A2: Well, sort of. If you're smart enough to think of this objection, paradoxically it probably doesn't make much difference in your case - it has more of an effect for people at the lower IQ end of the scale. The bigger point though, is that this bias is fairly easy to roughly quantify. According to the BLS, 65.9% of high school graduates went on to college. To make things simple, let's add a few assumptions (feel free to complicate them later, I doubt it will change things very much). First, let's assume that everyone who went on to college took the SAT. Second, let's assume that there's a rank ordering of intelligence between college and non-college - the non-SAT cohort is assumed to be uniformly dumber than the SAT cohort, so the dumbest SAT test taker is one place ahead of the smartest non-SAT taker.

So let's say that I'm in the 95th percentile of the SAT distribution. We can use the above fact to work out my percentile in the total population, given I'm assumed to have beaten 100% of the non-SAT population and 95% of the SAT population

Pctile (true) = 0.341 + 0.95*0.659 = 0.967

And from there, we convert to standard normals and IQ. In this example, the 95th percentile is 1.645 standard deviations above the mean, giving an IQ of 125. The 96.7th percentile is 1.839 standard deviations above the mean, or an IQ of 128. A surprisingly small effect, no?

For someone who scored in the 40th percentile of the SAT, however, it moves them from 96 to 104. So still not huge. But the further you go down, the bigger it becomes. Effectively you're taking a weighted average of 100% and whatever your current percentile is, and that makes less difference when your current one is already close to 100.

Of course, the reality is that if someone is offering these objections after you've told them their IQ, chances are they're not really interested in finding out an unbiased estimate of their intelligence, they just want to feel smarter than the number you told them. Perhaps it's better to not offer the ripostes I describe.

Scratch that, perhaps it's better to not offer any unsolicited IQ estimates at all. 

Scratch that, it's almost assuredly better to not offer them. 

But it can be fun if you've judged your audience well and you, like me, occasionally enjoy poking people you know well, particularly if you're confident the person is smart enough that the number won't sound too insulting.

Of course, readers of this august periodical will be both a) entirely comfortable with seeing reality as it is, and thus would nearly all be pleased to get an unbiased estimate of their IQ, and b) are all whip-smart anyway, so the news could only be good regardless.

If that's not the case... well, let's just say that we can paraphrase Eliezer Yudkowsky's advice to 'shut up and multiply', in this context instead as rather 'multiply, but shut up about it'.

The strange thing is that even though people clearly are uncomfortable having their IQ thrown around, they're quite willing to tell you their SAT score, because everybody knows it's just a meaningless test that doesn't measure anything. Until you point out what you can measure with it. 

I strongly suspect that if SAT scores were given as IQ points, people would demand that the whole thing be scrapped. On the other hand, the people liable to get furious were probably not that intelligent anyway, adding further weight to the idea that there might be something to all this after all.

Magical thinking about evolution and the environment

It is almost an article of faith among certain parts of the left that they are the party of science. The right is full of knuckle-dragging, global-warming denying, creationism-boosting ignoramuses. Obviously science will confirm progressive principles.

Of course, this is generally false when it comes to matters of race. But it's also frequently wrong when it comes to various aspects of environmental policy too.

Take, for instance, the problem of species extinction.

Environmentalists take it practically as a given that the potential extinction of any species is a source of grave concern necessitating immediate action, almost regardless of cost. Some tiny fish that you've never heard of might be endangered? Better shut down the water flow to lots of California farmland!

Of course, they never explain exactly what large problem would occur if the damn delta smelt were to go extinct after all. Occasionally, they'll appeal in vague terms to the interconnectedness of ecosystems, and how the whole edifice might come crashing down if any one part is changed, but they never seem to present much evidence for this contention. It's almost as if they feel that they identify so much with all the parts of the natural environment that this excuses them of the need to identify a likely problem for the environment as a whole. Species extinction is an inherent problem in their world.

Here's the actual reality - by the time a species is on the endangered list, it would create very few environmental problems if it actually became extinct.

Mostly this is a simple matter of accounting. If there are in fact only 900 mountain gorillas left in the wild, how much of the rest of the ecosystem can they possibly be sustaining? Not very much. This isn't to say that if the entire continent of Africa were blanketed with mountain gorillas, there would be no consequence to killing them all. But that's not the world we live in. If most of the mountain gorillas have already died out over the decades, this tells you that most of the ecosystem has already adjusted just fine to the absence of mountain gorillas. Whatever the consequences of their absence might be, you're already seeing most of them. Do you see an environmental problem in the world today that you can attribute to a lack of gorillas? I sure don't.

Do you know what part of science tells me that species extinction is not, in fact, an inherent problem for the environment? @#$%ing evolution, that's what. For all the joy that leftists take in using evolution as a club to beat the right (not without some justification, it must be noted), lots of them seem to display a pretty dim grasp of its basics.

You might have thought that the phrase 'survival of the fittest' would have given them a clue, but no. The flip side of 'survival of the fittest' is 'extinction of the unfit'. This is the feature of evolution, not the bug. Some species are hardy and survive. Those that don't either evolve to something sturdier, or they die.

Every glorious species in today's ecosystem is there because some previously glorious species was no longer able to compete and went extinct. We have the Delta smelt because it evolved from or out-competed some other fish that used to be there but now isn't.

You may feel sad that a species goes extinct, but the environment itself doesn't give a rat's. The earth's ecosystem as a whole is incredibly tough and resilient. The form it takes will differ over time, but life will survive. Do you think humans could really destroy all life on the planet deliberately, let alone by accident or negligence? We can't kill all the weeds on our front lawn. We can't even kill all the cockroaches in the average house, despite an entire industry equipped with modern technology devoted exclusively to the task!

Now, there is another reason why we perhaps should mourn species extinction - that we as humans enjoy seeing the splendours of nature in all her forms, and wish to preserve as much of it as possible.

I am actually quite sympathetic to this argument. But proponents should be honest enough to admit that this is only an aesthetic argument. There is no inherent moral basis why all species should be preserved, or why the species is even a relevant unit of account if you cared about animal welfare.

In other words, preserving all the world's species is only an important goal because modern humans generally value it so.

But this is a highly contingent argument - people value lots of stuff, and there are tradeoffs. Perhaps they value the delta smelt to some extent, but they also value cheap food, and farmers not being put out of jobs, and democratic decision-making. There is no particular reason why the continued existence of a relatively unimportant type of fish should dominate all these other things as a categorical imperative. Would you mourn the extinction of the Ebola virus or polio? If not, why should you mourn the possible extinction of man-eating sharks? I'd celebrate it. Good riddance! Think of all the families who would never know that in an alternative universe where the environmentalists got what they wanted, their father might have been eaten by a shark.

Of course, if environmentalists actually acknowledged that this is an aesthetic and contingent argument, they'd need to try to convince people that they actually ought to care about some damn fish they'd never heard of until yesterday.

That, of course, would be beneath their dignity. A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy, after all, and if you don't see it they're not in the mood to explain why.

Me, I'm pro-human, and I'm pro things that humans think are important. Sometimes that includes preserving certain species, particularly ones that are cuddly and photogenic. Sometimes it doesn't.

But doubt it not, the environment will be just fine either way.

Race and Genes

From the comments to the previous post:

How about this argument?

I think you're just pushing the social construct down (up?) a level from phenotype to genotype. The fact that phenotypes are reflective of genotypes is a trivial observation. The fact that genotypes are geographically distributed is a trivial observation.

The fact that a particular constellation of phenotypic/genetic characteristics get lumped together and called 'race' is a social construct. Granted, the phenotypic variations that we call 'race' are generally pretty glaringly obvious, (as opposed to say, innie vs outie belly-button), but that doesn't make it any less a social construct. Not a particularly useful one, either.

Interesting point. A few responses.

I think that most people, if they bothered to give serious consideration to the question, would readily agree that phenotypes are caused by genotypes (e.g. dark skin vs. white skin is caused by genes, not just magic or sun exposure or nutrition) and that phenotypes have geographical distribution (i.e. there are more dark skinned people in Africa than in Iceland.)

I think that if you pushed the point with them they would probably also be forced to conclude that these two premises indeed imply that certain genotypes must also have geographical properties (whatever genes cause dark skin are more common in African countries than in Iceland). Add in the assumption that geography is related to ancestry, and that one way of thinking about race is as a crude description of where most of your ancestors lived 500 or so years ago, and we're a long way to a good understanding of the issue.

I would assert, however, that many people do not actually seem to display such understanding in the way they discuss the matter, notwithstanding that you could convince them of the truth of each premise. When you point out the conclusion, they still act surprised. Acknowledging that C follows from A plus B is different from people instinctively believing C. Even if race as popularly described were nothing but skin color, as long as that's genetic, would you really describe conclusion C as being consistent with 'race doesn't exist' or 'race has no biological basis' or 'race has no genetic component'? It seems like a bit of a weird stretch.

And the reason this seems striking to me is that I've actually had conversations with quite intelligent sociologists who started out the conversation asserting that race didn't exist, or that the fact that there is more genetic variation within each race than between them meant that race was meaningless. When I posed the conundrum below, they appeared to have genuinely never considered the paradox. They were truly puzzled, and didn't have any answer.

I don't mean to be trite, but nothing in your argument actually answers the narrowly defined question. 23andme is able to reconstruct, to a high degree of accuracy, analogous descriptions to the ones people use such as 'black', 'white' and 'asian', out of purely genetic information. I never asserted that race is not partly a social construct. It is. But that is very different from saying that race is purely a social construct.

Race as popularly described may focus more on some phenotypical variations than others (as you note with skin versus belly buttons). But people still seem to manage to identify most of the main principle components of genetic variation in the labels they attach. In other words, even if 'race', in terms of how people describe it in common speech, is just a crude description of how you look like, that description seems to be correlated with the various principle components of genetic variation. That's the key part. If 23andme had merely identified the genes for skin color, then attaching race labels that correspond to skin color would be a trivial observation. But my understanding is that they don't look for these specific things, but large clusters of genetic variation. That's why they're able to say much more about the full breakdown of your ancestry, rather than just 'your skin is probably brown-ish'.

In other words, the labels that people attach are indeed correlated with large principle components of genetic variation, which are in turn associated with self-reported descriptions of ancestry. Which is exactly what you'd expect if those genes were associated with groups of people who had been geographically separated for extended periods of time. Which, of course, they had been.

From this point of view, the real information is of course in the genes, not the crude description. In other words, it's much more useful to identify the genetic information if you want to say meaningful things about someone's likely characteristics, rather than just the socially defined markers of appearance. Once I know someone's full genetic information, there's not informational content left in the popularly described concept of 'race' (other than than purely social effects like cultural traits). But that doesn't mean that the socially defined markers are worthless if you don't actually have the ancestry or genetic information.

Seen this way, the only real remaining question (and it is a large and separate issue) is the usefulness of these classifications. If you buy the argument that these classifications are picking up large principle components of genetic variation, do you really think that such variation would have no useful predictive power at all? It's possible, but it only would seem likely if you think that genetic variation itself don't matter much - that it's all environment, in other words. That's a whole separate debate, and entirely possible, but my reading of the literature is that heritability estimates of around 50% for lots of characteristics seem to suggest that it's not entirely environment. Even if it were, though, I still get to my initial conclusion - what people identify as 'race' is indeed partly genetic, because it's highly correlated with genetic variation.

A non-rhetorical question for people who believe race has no genetic basis

A certain class of trendy lefty and soft social science academic is fond of asserting loudly that 'race doesn't exist', or 'race is only a social construct', or other such nonsense. Bonus points are awarded when it is also asserted that 'science' has determined that race doesn't actually exist.

If there are any such people reading this diary, I have a proposition for you. I will bet you $1 at 1000-1 odds in your favor that by the end of this article I can ask you a question that you will not be able to give any coherent answer to if race has no genetic basis at all. If I'm right, you can pay me a dollar. If I'm wrong, I'll pay you a grand. Sound fair? We economists believe that those who think they're right should put their money where their mouth is, so here's mine.

One example of the 'race is just a social construct' acolyte is noted nitwit Justice Mordecai Bromberg at the Australian Federal Court. From his judgment in the disgraceful Andrew Bolt case:

"It is now well-accepted among medical scientists, anthropologists and other students of humanity that ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ are social, cultural and political constructs, rather than matters of scientific ‘fact’. 

Despite what is now known about the invalidity of biology as a basis for race or ethnicity, legal definitions of Aboriginality, at least until the 1980s, exclusively concentrated on biological descent."

Got that? Mordecai Bromberg's lazy appeal to authority has declared it from the temple mount that everyone knows that race has no biological basis.

For sure, there are aspects of the way that we describe racial groups in casual conversation that vary over time and across countries. There were large changes over time in social acceptability of the Irish and Italians in America, for instance (although it's not clear they were thought of as being 'not white' as much as just 'not desirable'.) Barack Obama's race is viewed differently in America than it would be in Kenya or Brazil.

But this is a very different claim from the one they make, namely that race actually has no genetically identifiable basis at all.

I assert, dear reader, that this claim is laughably, demonstrably stupid, and that it is not hard to show that this is so.

To do this, there are two strands of argument you might consider.

First, you can patiently explain things like Lewontin's Fallacy, and the idea that race is best thought of as capturing the principle components of genetic variation in lots of alleles all at once. Want to bet on how much impact that's going to have?

But a much simpler technique is to pose the following conundrum:

If you go to 23andme, for a hundred bucks they'll send you a tube into which you can put a saliva sample. Send that tube back to them, and they'll analyse it in their lab and tell you the percentage of your ancestry made up by each different racial group.

Now, granted, if you're a diehard sceptic it's hard to prove that there answers are actually correct. But I would wager large amounts of money that if you have a reasonably good knowledge of what your family history is, they will give you answers that line up with that. I will also wager my entire life savings that they will not find that you have a majority of your DNA from an ethnic group that you neither look like nor have any known family history of. If you look white, and your parents look white, and they tell you that their parents came from England, it is vanishingly unlikely that 23andme will tell you that the majority of your ancestors 500 years ago were living in Sub-Saharan Africa.

So here's my $1000 question to Mordecai Bromberg:

How do you think they're able to do that?

No joke. No rhetorical flourish. Take as long as you want to think about the answer. I've got my stack of hundreds at the ready.

In your own mind, how is 23andme actually generating these answers?  How are they able to pretty accurately describe the very same 'social constructs' that your parents were talking about using only information contained in your saliva?

Bear in mind that this is a huge puzzle even if the answers they're giving are imperfect and error prone. How are they able to generate any answers whatsoever? Dumb luck? Guessing? IP or postal addresses? Traces of food you've been eating recently contained in your saliva? Private Investigators?

Be careful which of these you answer, because they're all easily refutable. If it's private investigators digging into your family history, that's easy to test - just secretly send in a saliva sample from someone of a different race and don't tell them, and see what comes back.

But this aside, I genuinely have absolutely no idea how the blank slate see-no-race-hear-no-race crowd explains this magic to themselves.

Jim Goad very aptly described this kind of race fantasy. He called it 'liberal creationism'. And he's exactly right. It is an article of faith, not science. Science made up its mind long ago. The hypothesis that race has no genetic basis is not just falsifiable, but falsified.

Australia as a Triumph of Reversion to the Mean

Not many people really understand the idea of reversion to the mean in the context of genetics. If it’s discussed at all, it’s usually in terms of the rich smart guy having an idiot son who ruins the family business. But there’s more to it than that.

The first part you need to realise is that it’s often unhelpful to think of your genes as a deterministic set of instructions that will be replicated over and over in your children unless mutations.

Instead, one crude metaphorical way to think of the process of Mendelian Inheritance is that your genetic outcomes are the process of a random variable that is drawn from the joint distribution of your mother’s family and your father’s family. Combined, you can think of this as your family genetic distribution.

Your particular genes contain information both about you (i.e. the one particular realization of that variable) and the overall distribution of traits in your family (the possible range of other realizations of you and your siblings). When you have children, each child is a realization of the joint distribution of your family traits and your husband or wife’s family traits. If you have enough children, you’ll start to see the outlines of the whole distribution of possible traits – ranges of height, ranges of facial features, ranges of hair colors, etc.

So what this means is that when it comes to whether your children will be smart, the question is not just whether you and your wife are smart. The question is whether you and your wife come from families that are generally smart. If you and your wife are both smarter than the rest of your families, unfortunately your children will probably be less smart than either of you. They’ll be closer to the average of the joint distributions, whereas you two are closer to your respective maximums.

So what’s this got to do with Australia?

Australia was a society settled from the dregs of British society. Not the absolute dregs, mind you – it didn’t take too much to get the gallows in those days, but mid-level crime like larceny or burglary might get you transported. But it’s fair to say that the convicts getting transported were likely below average for Britain at the time, like most convicts in most societies.

Suppose you take a cross-section of people from the lower end of the genetic distribution and put them in an environment with British laws and institutions. What happens next?

 The crucial part is that we’ve got people who are probably below their familial averages. But these cases get the benefit of mean reversion – if you’re dumber or more aggressively antisocial than your family average, your children will be on average smarter and less anti-social than you.

Run this forward a few generations, and you’re basically back to where you started. The convict starting point still lingers a little in terms of anti-authoritarian cultural attitudes, but that’s about it. You can take the dregs of society, but the next generation won’t be the same dregs. Thankfully. Mean reversion taketh away, but mean reversion giveth as well. So while the British who were sending convicts to Australia probably thought they were going to create a permanent colony of antisocial idiots, what they actually ended up creating was Britain #2, but with much better weather. The joke’s on them, really.

The practical punch line, of course, is that if you’re worried about how your children might turn out, pay close attention to the extended family, not just your partner. A son or daughter who’s not too bright but who has lots of doctors and lawyers and scientists in the family is still a pretty good bet.

Almost Great Moments in Science

Let's take a moment to celebrate the uncommon genius of  Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov.

What did Professor Ivanov do, you well may ask?

He was the first man to attempt to create a human/ape hybrid using artificial insemination.

Wikipedia calls this proposed beast a 'humanzee'. While this is pretty good, I personally would prefer 'humangatan', but I'll take either.

So how does one attempt to create such a monstrosity, well may you ask?

On February 28, 1927, Ivanov inseminated two female chimpanzees with his own sperm. On June 25, his son inseminated a third chimpanzee with his sperm. 

This guy is really trying to give Giles Brindley a run for the money in the stakes of 'most outrageous science experiments conducted on oneself'.

The Ivanovs left Africa in July with thirteen chimps, including the three used in his experiments. They already knew before leaving that the first two chimpanzees had failed to become pregnant. The third died in France, and was also found not to have been pregnant.

Boo-urns.

So putting human sperm into female chimps wasn't doing the trick. Did he just pack up and call it quits then? Oh no he did not!

Upon his return to the Soviet Union in 1927, Ivanov began an effort to organize hybridization experiments at Sukhumi using ape sperm and human females.... In the spring of 1929 the Society set up a commission to plan Ivanov's experiments at Sukhumi. They decided that at least five volunteer women would be needed for the project.

Great news, comrade sisters! The Party has selected you to 'volunteer' to be impregnated by a chimp. For the glory of the Soviet Union!

Okay, those women would have won hands down the 'human self-experimentation award'. 

However, in June 1929, before any inseminations had taken place, Ivanov learned that the only postpubescent male ape remaining at Sukhumi (an orangutan) had died. A new set of chimps would not arrive at Sukhumi until the summer of 1930.

Given that you haven't heard of humanzees, you can probably guess that things didn't work out.

In the course of a general political shakeup in the Soviet scientific world, Gorbunov and a number of the scientists involved in the planning of the Sukhumi experiments lost their positions. In the spring of 1930, Ivanov came under political criticism at his veterinary institute. Finally, on December 13, 1930, Ivanov was arrested. He was sentenced to five years of exile to Alma Ata, where he worked for the Kazakh Veterinary-Zoologist Institute until his death from a stroke on 20 March 1932. 

Lame. You can always rely on the commies to spoil everybody's fun.

This whole thing is apparently not as wacky as you may think:

In 1977, researcher J. Michael Bedford discovered that human sperm could penetrate the protective outer membranes of a gibbon egg. Bedford's paper also stated that human spermatozoa would not even attach to the zona surface of non-hominoid primates (baboon, rhesus monkey, and squirrel monkey), concluding that although the specificity of human spermatozoa is not confined to man alone, it is probably restricted to the Hominoidea.

Okay, so humaboons and humonkeys are out, but humibbons might be a possibility. How is nobody investigating this?

Frankly, I think there should be way more research into creative mixed breeds of animal. Consider some of the awesomeness we already know is out there:

Ligers and Tigons

Grolar Bears (or Pizzly Bears, if you prefer):

I think to stimulate interest, these need to be referred to as 'mashup animals'. Sure, the purists at the zoo think this kind of thing is an abomination. Tell it to Charles Darwin, you ninnies! Do you think nature cares about your foibles? Grolar bears occur in the wild, for crying out loud.

The singular advantage of the humanzee, however, is the possibility of a hilarious spectacle whereby earnest people debate whether current law requires that the humanzee be allowed to vote. At which point universal suffrage will have jumped the shark even more than you already thought was possible.

In the long run...

...we are all dead, as Mr Keynes put it.

But in the long long run, the Earth is dead too.

For a thoroughly fascinating description of how, Wikipedia has this amazing 'history of the far future'. Gaze, reader, into the abyss:

600 million

As weathering of Earth's surfaces increases with the Sun's luminosity, carbon dioxide levels in its atmosphere decrease. By this time, they will fall to the point at which C3 photosynthesis is no longer possible. All plants which utilize C3 photosynthesis (~99 percent of species) will die.

1 billion

The Sun's luminosity increases by 10%, causing Earth's surface temperatures to reach an average of 47°C and the oceans to boil away. Pockets of water may still be present at the poles, allowing abodes for simple life.

14.4 billion

Sun becomes a black dwarf as its luminosity falls below three trillionths its current level, while its temperature falls to 2239 K, making it invisible to human eyes.

Read on.

If Isaac Asimov's brilliant story 'The Last Question' is the death of the universe written as a dramatic ode, this is the same story told as a coroner's report.

Asimov was correct though, that in the end the only question that matters is whether entropy can be decreased. The Earth's oceans boiling away may sound pretty darn scary, but if human beings are still around in a billion years time, it's a pretty darn good bet that they'll have figured out how to live on all sorts of other planets. The chances that humans could be confined to earth for a billion years and not nuke each other out of existence is pretty damn low.

I guess it's my nod to irrationality that reading this kind of thing fills me with foreboding, even though I'll be millions or billions of years dead.

Look upon the fate of your works, ye mighty, and despair!

Random observations on the intersection of science and art, from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

1. If you want another great example of historical applications of the curse of knowledge (how much you take for granted that everyone knew, when in fact only modern people know), you'd do well to consider the painting 'Joshua commanding the sun to stand still upon Gibeon', by John Martin. It's a wonderful painting:

(Photo credit from the blog 'writing the city', which has an interesting writeup about the painting here)

But I want to focus on a small section of the painting near the storm cloud, which looks like this:

What's that diagonal scratch coming down the mountain? Did someone drop a knife on the painting?

No, my friends. That is the artist's depiction of lightning.

Which, to a modern reader, looks absurdly crude alongside everything else in the painting. Bolt lightning looks more like this:

(image credit)

So how did John Martin get it so badly wrong?

Well, think about it. How do you know what lightning looks like? Answer: because professional photographers using extremely high speed shutters are able to capture precise images of it, which you now take for granted.

If you were alive in 1816, where would your image of lightning come from? Answer: the quarter of a second flash in the sky that you saw maybe a couple of times in your life. Which, from your hazy recollection, probably looked like the line above.

It's amazing how much knowledge you take for granted.

2. Georges Seurat painted in a style called pointillism. In it, lots of tiny coloured points are placed next to each other to create the image of different colours when viewed from a distance. The National Gallery of Art example is called 'The Lighthouse:

(image credit)

What's amazing is that Seurat managed to figure out a primitive version of the RGB pixel displays that you're reading this on. The modern screens we look at are extreme forms of Seurat's pointillism - instead of lots of colours making up the points, we have only three, and instead of the points being large enough to see up close, they're so small that you're not meant to notice them. If you looked at TV screens back from the 80s up really close, you'd get to see the different colours. 

Cross-Price Elasticity of Sexual Demand

Via jwz comes this story of a crazily effective birth control method for men:

The procedure called RISUG in India (reversible inhibition of sperm under guidance) takes about 15 minutes with a doctor, is effective after about three days, and lasts for 10 or more years. A doctor applies some local anesthetic, makes a small pinhole in the base of the scrotum, reaches in with a pair of very thin forceps, and pulls out the small white vas deferens tube. Then, the doctor injects the polymer gel (called Vasalgel here in the US), pushes the vas deferens back inside, repeats the process for the other vas deferens, puts a Band-Aid over the small hole, and the man is on his way.

...

[T]he polymer lines the wall of the vas deferens and allows sperm to flow freely down the middle (this prevents any pressure buildup), and because of the polymer’s pattern of negative/positive polarization, the sperm are torn apart through the polyelectrolytic effect. On a molecular level, it’s what supervillains envision will happen when they stick the good guy between two huge magnets and flip the switch.

With one little injection, this non-toxic jelly will sit there for 10+ years without you having to do anything else to not have babies. Set it and forget it. Oh, and when you do decide you want those babies, it only takes one other injection of water and baking soda to flush out the gel, and within two to three months, you’ve got all your healthy sperm again.

I'd predict that if this became widespread among young single men, the rates of STDs would increase a lot.

My guess is that the risk of pregnancy motivates people to wear condoms a lot more than STDs do. At the point that the average guy is about to get laid, the prospect of 18 years of child support payments concentrates the mind in a way that the unlikely event of getting chlamydia doesn't.

Condoms are nobody's idea of the ideal contraceptive. But the reason that guys want to use them is that they don't generally want to rely on the fact that the girl is on the pill or will take the morning after pill. And for good reason too - maybe they forget to take the pill, or maybe they're just crazy (in which case you've got the worst scenario - having a kid with a nutcase). But either way, there's a tail risk of bad outcomes that's now beyond the guy's control.

But if the guy knows he doesn't face pregnancy risk for any of his sexual partners, my guess is that the rate of condom use will drop off a cliff, with a resulting spike in STDs. (I tried to find estimates of condom use for straight and gay men to get a crude approximation of what the effect of removing pregnancy risk might be for condom use, but a few minutes of googling didn't turn up an obvious answer).

The only thing that makes me guess that this won't happen is that having an injection into your scrotum seems more likely for a man in a long-term relationship (e.g. as a vasectomy substitute) than for single men (e.g. as a condom substitute).

I'm guessing that the doctors treating STDs would probably be privately relieved.

On Human Adaptability

Every now and again, I find myself rather impressed at just how adaptable the human body is.

A great example of this is jet lag. This is a phenomenon that is essentially unique to the last hundred years of human existence, out of the god knows how long period that we've been evolving. The body's circadian rhythm is designed to work with fairly evenly spaced days. While the period of day and night changes with the seasons, these changes are very smooth.

Hopping on a plane from New York to Brisbane, however, is an incredibly abrupt change that evolution didn't design us for. There's no particular reason to think that this might not result in you taking months to get back to a proper schedule, if ever.

And yet, it takes a couple of days and things are pretty much back to normal. The systems designed to deal with gradual changes to the seasons are able to deal with a random 36 hour day thrown in without skipping much of a beat.

Evolution may be the blind idiot god, but it makes some pretty damn fine optimisation procedures nonetheless.

Classic!

You have to be both a chemist and skeptic of government policy (which I know applies to at least GS, and possibly others) to enjoy this one , but it's comedy gold - how to synthesise pseudoephedrine from N-methylamphetamine, from the Journal of Apocryphal Chemistry, Feb. 2012:

Pseudoephedrine, active ingredient of Sudafed®, has long been the most popular nasal decongestant in the United States due to its effectiveness and relatively mild side effects [1].  In recent years it has become increasingly difficult to obtain psuedoephedine in many states because of its use as a precursor for the illegal drug N-methylamphetamine (also known under various names including crystal meth, meth, ice, etc.)[1,2].  While in the past many stores were able to sell pseudoephedrine, new laws in the United States have restricted sales to pharmacies, with the medicine kept behind the counter.  The pharmacies require signatures and examination of government issued ID in order to purchase pseudoephedrine.  Because the hours of availability of such pharmacies are often limited, it would be of great interest to have a simple synthesis of pseudoephedrine from reagents which can be more readily procured.

A quick search of several neighborhoods of the United States revealed that while pseudoephedrine is difficult to obtain, N-methylamphetamine can be procured at almost any time on short notice and in quantities sufficient for synthesis of useful amounts of the desired material.  Moreover, according to government maintained statistics, Nmethylmphetamine is becoming an increasingly attractive starting material for pseudoephedrine, as the availability of Nmethylmphetamine has remained high while prices have dropped and purity has increased [2].  We present here a convenient series of transformations using reagents which can be found in most well stocked organic chemistry laboratories to produce psuedoephedrine from N-methylamphetamine.  

 Ha!

(via jwz)

Facts...

...which I can report to you with a fair degree of confidence.

1. Indo Mie brand Mi Goreng are the best instant noodles in the whole world, and totally delicious at an absolute level (in case you thought the first clause corresponded to something like 'the fastest lawnmower' or 'the most fiscally responsible member of the Greens Party'). If you're eating any other type of Ramen (or Maggi Noodles, for the Aussies), you've got rocks in your head. Find an Asian Supermarket and buy them.

2. Mi Goreng noodles that claim to expire on August 28th, 2008 can be eaten well into 2010 without too much deterioration in taste, and no adverse health consequences.

3. An outstanding commitment to scientific inquiry led to to establish empirically that  Mi Goreng noodles that claim to expire on August 28th 2008 can still be eaten in a pinch around about, ooh, say, January 30th 2012. They do however lose a certain je ne sais quoi, in part driven by the fact that flavouring powder has turned into bricks that have to be discarded. You may not actually want to get through them.

4. George Orwell was really on to something when he observed:

It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs — and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.

Rock bottom - it makes a comfortable place to rest one's body!

Orwell had the excuse that he was talking about extremes of poverty, as opposed to just, say, being an immense slob. Ah well, close enough.

Less Sugar, More Fibre

Via Mama Holmes, comes this very interesting lecture on how the over-consumption of fructose (and sucrose, which breaks down into fructose and glucose) appears to drive a large amount of the obesity-related health problems in the US. Robert Lustig makes the case that fructose ought to properly be considered a toxin. Big words, but he backs them up.

One of the motivating questions, which I think is a good one, is this:

What do the Atkins diet (all fat and protein, no carbohydrates) and the Japanese diet (all carbohydrates, no fat) have in common, other than that they're both reasonably effective?

They both eliminate fructose.

See for yourselves...




The measure of how much I liked this video is as follows - I couldn't conceive that I would watch a 90-minute youtube lecture when I first clicked on it, but I kept wanting to see more until I'd seen the whole thing. For a powerpoint presentation, that's pretty damn good.

Personally, I'm not in great need of dieting, but it's inspired me to try to nudge my sugar consumption away from the slow path towards type 2 diabetes, which is roughly where it is today.

Outstanding Science!

Suppose it is 1983, and you are a doctor who has developed a drug that can produce an erection when injected into the penis. You need to provide evidence of this to an audience of other doctors at a conference.

How might you go about doing this?

Perhaps you'd produce pictures of erections that had been obtained by the injection of the drug. But how could you convince people that these pitctures hadn't been obtained by additional stimulation, or by watching erotic movies or magazines, or even just thinking erotic thoughts?

Science demands proof. And there is one sure way to provide this:

But the mere public showing of his erection from the podium was not sufficient. He paused, and seemed to ponder his next move. The sense of drama in the room was palpable. He then said, with gravity, ‘I’d like to give some of the audience the opportunity to confirm the degree of tumescence’. With his pants at his knees, he waddled down the stairs, approaching (to their horror) the urologists and their partners in the front row. As he approached them, erection waggling before him, four or five of the women in the front rows threw their arms up in the air, seemingly in unison, and screamed loudly. The scientific merits of the presentation had been overwhelmed, for them, by the novel and unusual mode of demonstrating the results.

Yes, really. This is peer-reviewed science, documented in the British Journal of Urology International.

Giles Brindley, for outstanding services to medicine, science, and hilarity, you are hereby inducted into the Shylock Holmes Order of Guys Who Kick Some Series Ass (Third Class).

(via jwz)

Why Do Toilets Explode?

I remember GS used to complain to me about Yank toilets, and how when you flushed them, often they would have such a violent flushing mechanism that you'd end up with water on the seat. I never understood why they didn't design them so that they didn't explode everywhere. Surely this is something that toilet designers think about? I can't imagine there's an active demand from customers along the lines of 'No, unless it just goes KABOOM I can't be certain that it will never block'.

Anyways, I had reason recently to reflect on the hubris of this in the context of Chesterton's Fence. As Megan McArdle described it:

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."

This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion.

(Her article is about the so-called tax loophole for hedge fund managers that Democrats wanted to close, and is well worth reading, but that's another story).

Anyway, I wish I could tell you that I had reflected unprompted on possible reasons that toilets might be so violent and figured it out, but this is not the case.

Instead, I had observed a semi-exploding toilet on the fifth floor of a building one day. For some reason I had cause later in the day to be on the eighth floor of the same building, and the toilet was considerably more quiet. Same building, same toilet, different effect.

And suddenly it was obvious - water pressure! I imagine that it probably is quite an engineering challenge to have exactly the same water pressure at every floor of an eight-storey building, particularly if the pipe system is somewhat old. In order to get acceptable pressure everywhere, the simplest setup is just to have pressure that's slightly too high on the lower floors and slightly too low on the higher floors. Hence the fifth floor toilet explodes a bit, and the eighth is less powerful.

I made a mental note to check this - when there's a toilet with a violent flushing mechanism, I'm going to take note of what floor I'm on, and how many floors the building has. We'll see how well this hypothesis holds up.

But in the mean time, until you understand why toilets explode, you may want to hold off on demanding that they be fixed.

Gravity and the Curse of Knowledge

The problem with knowing something is that it makes it very hard to accurately put yourself in the shoes of someone who doesn't know it. Try as you might, it's very difficult to properly imagine the thought processes of someone who lacks knowledge. Things you know always seem obvious, even though they're not obvious at all when you don't know them. Psychologists call this the curse of knowledge.

When you suffer from the curse of knowledge, previous generations tend to look remarkably stupid. How can anyone believe the earth was flat? What morons they must have been!

But think about it - do you believe that humans now are genetically much smarter than people 500 years ago? Or are you just taking for granted the obviousness of the things that someone else told you, but you didn't have to figure out for yourself. I'd say you're safer to bet on the latter.

One case that always struck me was gravity. The earliest theories of gravity were from Aristotle's Physics. If you fired a cannonball, that cannonball would proceed in rectilinear motion, then fall straight back down to the earth. This was because it was made of the earth element, which wanted to be close to the earth.

So this predicts that if you fire a cannonball, it should look like this:

So here's the problem - clearly cannonballs don't actually fly like this! Now, admittedly it's hard to trace out the path of a rock in the air. But there's one very easy way for (male) physicists to check - just look at the path of your urine when you take a pee! Does it look like a triangle shape? No, not even close. It looks like a parabola. And that should immediately suggest a relationship of y = x^2 . 

It took until Newton, almost two millenia after Aristotle, to formalise a better theory of gravity. This theory actually predicted that the cannonball should follow a parabolic shape:

So why did people take so long to figure this out? Couldn't they see that the relationship was a parabolic  y = x^2, and figure out the rest from there?

Oh, you fools, cursed by knowledge! The first step is the known knowns - the curses you know you have. You know that you know about gravity, and thus your ancestors not knowing seems particularly idiotic.

But what about the unknown knowns - the curses that you don't even know you have?

Let's step back a second - when exactly in human history did people even have a clear idea of what a parabola was, and what y = x^2 meant?

When you draw a graph of y versus x for some function, the area you draw it on is known as a Cartesian Plane. This is named after Rene Descartes, who lived from 1596 until 1650.

In other words, even the idea of graphing y versus x (for anything, let alone being able to spot a parabola) dates all the way back to ... the 17th Century. 

Are you starting to see how much you're taking for granted when you look at modern science and think of how dumb people in the past were.

Rene Descartes was a muthaf***ing genius. And that's how smart you had to be to even come up with the idea of drawing a parabola on a graph, let alone understanding what that might have implied about a theory of gravity.

Understanding the curse of knowledge leads to a much greater humility about previous generations. The vast majority of your knowledge is unearned by you, and if you hadn't had it gifted to you by the accumulated wisdom of generations of men much smarter than you, it's highly doubtful that you would have figured it out on your own.

Just like your ancestors didn't.

Woolly Mammoth Update

Via SMH, apparently there are now betting odds on when the Woolly Mammoth will be cloned, and they are the following:

2014 or earlier: 8 to1.
2015 or 2016: 2 to 1.
2017 or 2018: 5 to 2.
2019 or 2020: 11 to 4.

It's easy to miss the enormous picture that these odds are conveying. To bring it into focus, let's convert those odds to probabilities and work out the market's estimate of the cumulative probability that a Woolly Mammoth will be cloned by the end of year X:

2014:     11.11%
2016:     44.44%
2018:     73.02%
2020:     99.68%!!!!


Hoo-ah! According to the market, the dream is looking good!