Philosophy – Page 20 – artdiamondblog.com

“It Isn’t What You Know that Counts–It Is How Efficiently You Can Refresh”

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. A17) Knowledge, then, is less a canon than a consensus in a state of constant disruption. Part of the disruption has to do with error and its correction, but another part with simple newness–outright discoveries or new modes of classification and analysis, often enabled by technology.
. . .
In some cases, the facts themselves are variable. . . .
. . .
More commonly, however, changes in scientific facts reflect the way that science is done. Mr. Arbesman describes the “Decline Effect”–the tendency of an original scientific publication to present results that seem far more compelling than those of later studies. Such a tendency has been documented in the medical literature over the past decade by John Ioannidis, a researcher at Stanford, in areas as diverse as HIV therapy, angioplasty and stroke treatment. The cause of the decline may well be a potent combination of random chance (generating an excessively impressive result) and publication bias (leading positive results to get preferentially published).
If shaky claims enter the realm of science too quickly, firmer ones often meet resistance. As Mr. Arbesman notes, scientists struggle to let go of long-held beliefs, something that Daniel Kahneman has described as “theory-induced blindness.” Had the Austrian medical community in the 1840s accepted the controversial conclusions of Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis that physicians were responsible for the spread of childbed fever–and heeded his hand-washing recommendations–a devastating outbreak of the disease might have been averted.
Science, Mr. Arbesman observes, is a “terribly human endeavor.” Knowledge grows but carries with it uncertainty and error; today’s scientific doctrine may become tomorrow’s cautionary tale. What is to be done? The right response, according to Mr. Arbesman, is to embrace change rather than fight it. “Far better than learning facts is learning how to adapt to changing facts,” he says. “Stop memorizing things . . . memories can be outsourced to the cloud.” In other words: In a world of information flux, it isn’t what you know that counts–it is how efficiently you can refresh.

For the full review, see:
DAVID A. SHAYWITZ. “BOOKSHELF; The Scientific Blind Spot.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., November 19, 2012): A17.
(Note: ellipses added, except for the one internal to the last paragraph, which was in the original.)
(Note: the online version of the article was dated November 18, 2012.)

The book under review, is:
Arbesman, Samuel. The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date. New York: Current, 2012.

Econometrician Leamer Argues for Methodological Pluralism

(p. 44) Ignorance is a formidable foe, and to have hope of even modest victories, we economists need to use every resource and every weapon we can muster, including thought experiments (theory), and the analysis of data from nonexperiments, accidental experiments, and designed experiments. We should be celebrating the small genuine victories of the economists who use their tools most effectively, and we should dial back our adoration of those who can carry the biggest and brightest and least-understood weapons. We would benefit from some serious humility, and from burning our “Mission Accomplished” banners. It’s never gonna happen.

Source:
Leamer, Edward E. “Tantalus on the Road to Asymptopia.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 24, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 31-46.

Econometric “Priests” Sell Their New “Gimmicks” as the “Latest Euphoria Drug”

The American Economic Association’s Journal of Economic Perspectives published a symposium focused on the thought-provoking views of the distinguished econometrician Edward Leamer.
I quote below some of Leamer’s comments in his own contribution to the symposium.

(p. 31) We economists trudge relentlessly toward Asymptopia, where data are unlimited and estimates are consistent, where the laws of large numbers apply perfectly and where the full intricacies of the economy are completely revealed. But it’s a frustrating journey, since, no matter how far we travel, Asymptopia remains infinitely far
away. Worst of all, when we feel pumped up with our progress, a tectonic shift can occur, like the Panic of 2008, making it seem as though our long journey has left us disappointingly close to the State of Complete Ignorance whence we began.

The pointlessness of much of our daily activity makes us receptive when the Priests of our tribe ring the bells and announce a shortened path to Asymptopia. (Remember the Cowles Foundation offering asymptotic properties of simultaneous equations estimates and structural parameters?) We may listen, but we don’t hear, when the Priests warn that the new direction is only for those with Faith, those with complete belief in the Assumptions of the Path. It often takes years down the Path, but sooner or later, someone articulates the concerns that gnaw away in each of (p. 32) us and asks if the Assumptions are valid. (T. C. Liu (1960) and Christopher Sims (1980) were the ones who proclaimed that the Cowles Emperor had no clothes.) Small seeds of doubt in each of us inevitably turn to despair and we abandon that direction and seek another.
Two of the latest products-to-end-all-suffering are nonparametric estimation and consistent standard errors, which promise results without assumptions, as if we were already in Asymptopia where data are so plentiful that no assumptions are needed. But like procedures that rely explicitly on assumptions, these new methods work well in the circumstances in which explicit or hidden assumptions hold tolerably well and poorly otherwise. By disguising the assumptions on which nonparametric methods and consistent standard errors rely, the purveyors of these methods have made it impossible to have an intelligible conversation about the circumstances in which their gimmicks do not work well and ought not to be used. As for me, I prefer to carry parameters on my journey so I know where I am and where I am going, not travel stoned on the latest euphoria drug.
This is a story of Tantalus, grasping for knowledge that remains always beyond reach. In Greek mythology Tantalus was favored among all mortals by being asked to dine with the gods. But he misbehaved–some say by trying to take divine food back to the mortals, some say by inviting the gods to a dinner for which Tantalus boiled his son and served him as the main dish. Whatever the etiquette faux pas, Tantalus was punished by being immersed up to his neck in water. When he bowed his head to drink, the water drained away, and when he stretched up to eat the fruit hanging above him, wind would blow it out of reach. It would be much healthier for all of us if we could accept our fate, recognize that perfect knowledge will be forever beyond our reach and find happiness with what we have. If we stopped grasping for the apple of Asymptopia, we would discover that our pool of Tantalus is full of small but enjoyable insights and wisdom.

For the full article, see:
Leamer, Edward E. “Tantalus on the Road to Asymptopia.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 24, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 31-46.

Reality Is Not Always “Elegant”

Source of book image: http://images.betterworldbooks.com/067/Ordinary-Geniuses-Segre-Gino-9780670022762.jpg

(p. C9) In the summer of 1953, while visiting Berkeley, Gamow was shown a copy of the article in Nature where Watson and Crick spelled out some of the genetic implications of their discovery that DNA is structured as a double helix. He immediately realized what was missing. Each helix is a linear sequence of four molecules known as bases. The sequence contains all the information that guides the manufacture of the proteins from which living things are made. Proteins are assembled from 20 different amino acids. What is the code that takes you from the string of bases to the amino acids? Gamow seems to have been the first to look at the problem in quite this way.

But he made a physicist’s mistake: He thought that the code would be “elegant”–that each amino acid would be specified by only one string of bases. (These strings were dubbed “codons.”) He produced a wonderfully clever code in which each codon consisted of three bases. That was the only part that was right. In the actual code sometimes three different codons correspond to the same amino acid, while some codons do not code for an amino acid at all. These irregularities are the results of evolutionary stops and starts, and no amount of cleverness could predict them.

For the full review, see:
JEREMY BERNSTEIN. “The Inelegant Universe.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., August 13, 2011): C9.

The book under review is:
Segrè, Gino. Ordinary Geniuses: Max Delbruck, George Gamow, and the Origins of Genomics and Big Bang Cosmology. New York: Viking, 2011.

“The New Upper Class Must Start Preaching What It Practices”

Source of book image: http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-RO889_bkrvmu_DV_20120130124608.jpg

(p. C2) There remains a core of civic virtue and involvement in working-class America that could make headway against its problems if the people who are trying to do the right things get the reinforcement they need–not in the form of government assistance, but in validation of the values and standards they continue to uphold. The best thing that the new upper class can do to provide that reinforcement is to drop its condescending “nonjudgmentalism.” Married, educated people who work hard and conscientiously raise their kids shouldn’t hesitate to voice their disapproval of those who defy these norms. When it comes to marriage and the work ethic, the new upper class must start preaching what it practices.

For the full essay, see:
CHARLES MURRAY. “The New American Divide; The ideal of an ‘American way of life’ is fading as the working class falls further away from institutions like marriage and religion and the upper class becomes more isolated. Charles Murray on what’s cleaving America, and why.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., January 21, 2012): C1-C2.

The essay quoted above is related to Murray’s book:
Murray, Charles. Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. New York: Crown Forum, 2012.

A True Tall Tale: Mankiw Lays a Reductio Ad Absurdum on the Egalitarians

(p. 155) Should the income tax system include a tax credit for short taxpayers and a tax surcharge for tall ones? This paper shows that the standard utilitarian framework for tax policy analysis answers this question in the affirmative. This result has two possible interpretations. One interpretation is that individual attributes correlated with wages, such as height, should be considered more widely for determining tax liabilities. Alternatively, if policies such as a tax on height are rejected, then the standard utilitarian framework must in some way fail to capture our intuitive notions of distributive justice.

For the full article, from which the above abstract is quoted, see:
Mankiw, N. Gregory, and Matthew Weinzierl. “The Optimal Taxation of Height: A Case Study of Utilitarian Income Redistribution.” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 2, no. 1 (Feb. 2010): 155-76.

How a Group of “Natural Philosophers” Created Science in a London “Full of Thieves, Murderers and Human Waste”

Source of book image: http://www.edwarddolnick.net/images/clockworkuniverse-cover.jpg

(p. 19) London before the mid-1600s was a general calamity. The streets were full of thieves, murderers and human waste. Death was everywhere: doctors were hapless, adults lived to about age 30, children died like flies. In 1665, plague moved into the city, killing sometimes 6,000 people a week. In 1666, an unstoppable fire burned the city to the ground; the bells of St. Paul’s melted. Londoners thought that the terrible voice of God was “roaring in the City,” one witness wrote, and they would do best to accept the horror, calculate their sins, pray for guidance and await retribution.

In the midst of it all, a group of men whose names we still learn in school formed the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge. They thought that God, while an unforgiving judge, was also a mathematician. As such, he had organized the universe according to discernible, mathematical law, which, if they tried, they could figure out. They called themselves “natural philosophers,” and their motto was “Nullius in verba”: roughly, take no one’s word for anything. You have an idea? Demonstrate it, do an experiment, prove it. The ideas behind the Royal Society would flower into the Enlightenment, the political, cultural, scientific and educational revolution that gave rise to the modern West.
This little history begins Edward Dolnick’s “Clockwork Universe,” so the reader might think the book is about the Royal Society and its effects. But the Royal Society is dispatched in the first third of the book, and thereafter, the subject is how the attempt to find the mathematics governing the universe played out in the life of Isaac Newton.
. . .
To go from sinful “curiositas” to productive “curiosity,” from blind acceptance to open-eyed inquiry, from asking, “Why?” to answering, “How?” — this change, of all the world’s revolutions, must surely be the most remarkable.

For the full review, see:
ANN FINKBEINER. “Masters of the Universe.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., March 27, 2011): 19.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 25, 2011, and had the title “What Newton Gave Us.”)

The full reference for the book under review, is:
Dolnick, Edward. The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2011.

Neglecting Valid Stereotypes Has Costs

(p. 169) The social norm against stereotyping, including the opposition to profiling, has been highly beneficial in creating a more civilized and more equal society. It is useful to remember, however, that neglecting valid stereotypes inevitably results in suboptimal judgments. Resistance to stereotyping is a laudable moral position, but the simplistic idea that the resistance is costless is wrong. The costs are worth paying to achieve a better society, but denying that the costs exist, while satisfying to the soul and politically correct, is not scientifically defensible.

Source:
Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.

Faraday and Einstein Were Visual and Physical Thinkers, Not Mathematicians

Source of book image: http://www.rsc.org/images/Faraday_Chemical_History-of-a-Candle_180_tcm18-210390.jpg

(p. C6) Michael Faraday is one of the most beguiling and lovable figures in the history of science. Though he could not understand a single equation, he deduced the essential structure of the laws of electromagnetism through visualization and physical intuition. (James Clerk Maxwell would later give them mathematical form.) Albert Einstein kept a picture of Faraday over his desk, for Einstein also thought of himself primarily as a visual and physical thinker, not an abstract mathematician.
. . .
Faraday’s text is still charming and rich, a judgment that few popular works on science could sustain after so many years. Though he addresses himself to an “auditory of juveniles,” he calls for his audience to follow a close chain of reasoning presented through a series of experiments and deductions.
. . .
. . . : “In every one of us there is a living process of combustion going on very similar to that of a candle,” as Faraday illustrates in his experiments.
In his closing, he turns from our metabolic resemblance to a candle to his deeper wish that “you may, like it, shine as lights to those about you.”

For the full review, see:
PETER PESIC. “BOOKSHELF; Keeper of the Flame.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., January 7, 2012): C6.
(Note: ellipses added.)

Book under review:
Faraday, Michael. The Chemical History of a Candle. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press 2011.

Upper Class “Have Lost the Confidence to Preach What They Practice”

Source of book image:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-K9jKNHD0vwE/Tzn4yKgEtII/AAAAAAAAC8Q/2wZqk1Hl1V4/s1600/murray-coming-apart.jpg

(p. 9) The problem, Murray argues, is not that members of the new upper class eat French cheese or vote for Barack Obama. It is that they have lost the confidence to preach what they practice, adopting instead a creed of “ecumenical niceness.” They work, marry and raise children, but they refuse to insist that the rest of the country do so, too. “The belief that being a good American involved behaving in certain kinds of ways, and that the nation itself relied upon a certain kind of people in order to succeed, had begun to fade and has not revived,” Murray writes.

For the full review, see:
NICHOLAS CONFESSORE. “Tramps Like Them; Charles Murray Argues that the White Working Class Is No Longer a Virtuous Silent Majority.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., February 12, 2012): 9.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date February 10, 2012 and has the title “Tramps Like Them; Charles Murray Examines the White Working Class in ‘Coming Apart’.”)

Hero Was Oblivious to What Others Thought

Author Eyal Press. Source of photo: online version of the NYT review quoted and cited below.

(p. C26) Maybe the refined intellectual, engaged with ideas, manages to think herself above petty concerns like nationalism? That was what Mr. Press suspected he would find in Aleksander Jevtic, the Serb who pulled many Croatians from a line of men destined to be tortured or killed in 1991.

“Aleksander Jevtic had somehow avoided internalizing this us-versus-them thinking,” Mr. Press writes, “which I assumed had something do with his education and intellect, a rare skepticism and levelheadedness that enabled him to see past the blinding passions and compellingly simple ideas that drove the logic of hate.”
But when Mr. Press at last meets Mr. Jevtic, he finds not a Balkan Isaiah Berlin, nor a soldier-philosopher like Orwell. This lifesaver, this ethical prince among men, turns out to be a slovenly couch potato living off rents he collects from a building he owns: “He also liked sleeping late, hanging out with friends, and watching sports” on his “giant flat-screen television.”
Mr. Press surveys the findings of social scientists and neuroscientists, but none of them have entirely figured out where bravery comes from. Every beautiful soul is different.
Mr. Jevtic’s wife is Croatian, which certainly helped him think of the enemy as human. But Mr. Jevtic is also a misanthrope, and his natural social isolation helped him hear the call of an instinctive decency; he didn’t care what his fellow Serbians, including his commanding officers, might think.
He “wasn’t in the business of making good impressions,” Mr. Press writes. “His obliviousness to what others thought wasn’t necessarily his most becoming feature. But it had served him well in 1991.”

For the full review, see:

MARK OPPENHEIMER. “BOOKS OF THE TIMES; The Loneliness in Doing Right.” The New York Times (Fri., February 24, 2012): C26.
(Note: the online version of the review is dated February 23, 2012.)

The book under review is:
Press, Eyal. Beautiful Souls: Saying No, Breaking Ranks, and Heeding the Voice of Conscience in Dark Times. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.

Source of book image:
http://jacketupload.macmillanusa.com/jackets/high_res/jpgs/9780374143428.jpg