- Intervention bias by Nassim Taleb
- article about self-tracking in the Economic Times (India).
- Autism and PFCs
- Two weeks of FitBit
- Psychology professor Marc Hauser resigns from Harvard
- Stay classy, Larry Summers. Calling people far less powerful than himself “assholes” is entirely consistent with this. I like to think if Spy magazine still existed, it would run a Larry Summers Watch.
Thanks to Dave Lull and Aaron Blaisdell.
> Because of refined screening techniques, autism can be diagnosed at younger and younger ages, getting closer and closer to the birth of the child, indicating that whatever is triggering autism must be affecting the child while still in the womb.
what in the devil is he talking about?
autism isn’t generally diagnosed until people are several YEARS of age.
and “advanced screening” is — what exactly?
that invalidates his entire argument, as far as i can tell. which is not to say that he is wrong, necessarily, but that he has NO IDEA what he is talking about.
The intervention bias is interesting to me, because unlike other cognitive biases like confirmation bias, it seems to be deliberate and strategically rather than an unconscious, systematic error in thinking. I think many decision makers are smart enough to know that often non-intervention is the best course of action, but micro-management pre-emptively deflects the “you didn’t do anything to prevent this!” criticism. Nixon knew well the consequences of price controls in the 70′s, yet he invoked them anyway for fear of being accused of not “doing anything” to fix the economy. For this reason I don’t blame the decision makers for erring on the side of over-managing. They are simply reacting to the ignorance of the general population, who in my opinion are the people who truly lie at the root of the problem.
Steven Pinker … “Marc is a scientist of enormous creativity…”: sure is.
“that invalidates his entire argument”. No, I would say he hasn’t been clear about what “refined screening techniques” are. They are tests that predict the outcome when a child is tested for autism later in life.
“They are reacting to the ignorance of the general population.” I would say they are taking advantage of the ignorance of the general population. Doctors are paid for intervention; they are paid much less for doing nothing.
Why don’t you have a Fitbit, Seth? Mine just became 3x more valuable to me now that I can download the raw data.
I might get a FitBit, but I am less interested in measuring inputs (e.g., amount walked) than outputs (e.g., sleep). It’s the outputs I want to control but don’t know how to. Whereas I know how to control the amount I walk. I know roughly how much I’ve walked without a FitBit.