Author: Seth Roberts

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Thanks to Aaron Blaisdell and Peter Lewis.

Signaling and Higher Education: Email With Bryan Caplan

Seth Roberts4 Comments

I recently emailed back and forth with Bryan Caplan about a signaling view of higher education, which Bryan elaborates in these slides. I wrote to him:

Having looked at your slides, I would say we pretty much agree. I think employers have little control over the content of college education and, as you say, use quality of college because it works better than IQ tests and the like — as you say.

Perhaps we also agree that just as British aristocrats have a lot less power now than they did 200 years ago — the message of Downton Abbey — so are American college professors slowly losing power. MOOCs are one example, blogs are another. Parents and professors are quite happy with the current system, students and employers are not, and they are gaining power. That is my theory, anyway.
I think a signaling explanation does a very good job of explaining why sense of humor matters so much, especially in mate choice. Sense of humor = Nature’s IQ test. Sense of humor signals problem solving ability, which really matters but is hard to measure directly. I used to think that we have two basic tasks in life, manipulating things and manipulating other people (long ago nobody was depressed, etc.) and they were really different.

TV Shows I Like

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Something compels me to tell you the TV shows I really like. In no special order:

  1. The Fall. Gillian Anderson is an out-of-town detective called in to solve a string of murders. On Netflix.
  2. Mom. Humor with a sad undercurrent (this show) is much better than less-layered humor (The Big Bang Theory, by the same people).
  3. Nashville. As good as Thelma and Louise (by the same person), but longer.
  4. Downton Abbey. No show portrays kindness better.
  5. Survivor. Current season (Blood versus Water), in which returning players playing against their loved ones, might be the best ever.
  6. The Mindy Project. The wittiest TV show. (Hello Ladies is good.)
  7. Masters of Sex. About Masters and Johnson. Early personal science — sex mystified Masters.
  8. Homeland. The first episode makes me think this season will be even better than the first.
  9. Peaky Blinders. About a Birmingham crime family post World War I.
  10. Mad Men (between seasons).
  11. Episodes (between seasons). Matt LeBlanc plays Matt LeBlanc. Very funny.
  12. Separated at Birth (between seasons).
  13. The Fosters (between seasons). About a foster family.
  14. Veep (between seasons). My favorite show — well, either this or Downton Abbey or Nashville.

The “Disgusting” Foods I Eat

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In a review of Anna Reid’s new book, Leningrad: Tragedy of a City Under Siege, I learned that one of the calorie sources that starving Leningraders came to eat was:

‘macaroni’ made from flax seed for cattle

To which I say: Damn. The implication is that, before the famine, “flax seed for cattle”, which is roughly the same as flax seed, was considered unfit for human consumption. Only when starving did Leningraders stoop to eat it. I can buy flax seed in Beijing. But not easily.

The triangle is complete. I have now learned that the main things I care about in my diet, which I go to great lengths to eat every day, are all considered “disgusting” by a large number of people:

1. Flax seed. It is the best source of omega-3 I have found. I eat ground flax seeds every day. Flaxseed oil goes bad too easily.

2. Butter. Perhaps the most reviled food in America, at least by nutritionists. A cardiologist once told me, “You’re killing yourself” by eating it.

3. Fermented foods. Many fermented foods are considered disgusting — after all, they are little different than spoiled foods.

JFK Assassination Diary by Edward Jay Epstein

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Edward Jay Epstein has just published a new book called The JFK Assassination Diary based on the diary he kept when he wrote Inquest. It is available on Kindle, Nook and as an Itunes ebook. It will soon be available in paperback.

He wrote me about it:

As you know I was the only person to interview the Warren Commission as well as its staff and liaisons with the intelligence services. I did these interviews as an undergraduate at Cornell with no credentials as a journalist, scholar, or author. My interviews also produced a revelation that shook the journalistic establishment, which had been blithely reporting until the publication of my book Inquest that the Commission had left no stone unturned in an exhaustive investigation. In fact, as I showed, it was a brief, sporadic, and incomplete investigation. Indeed one in which the senior staff lawyer in charge of the crime scene investigation quit after two days, and the young lawyer who took his place, Arlen Specter, was never able to view the single most crucial piece of evidence — the autopsy photographs. The Commission was never able to obtain them, nor other pieces of evidence, because Robert Kennedy blocked it. For the same reason, the Commission was not provided with any information about a parallel plot to kill Castro in 1963. The Commission could not connect dots to which it was denied access.

I had no problem getting this information. Many of the young lawyers on the staff were furious with the way the investigation had been handled and the time pressure imposed on them. So they gave me FBI reports, payroll records and their memos, without me even asking. This raises a question. As these lawyers and Commission members were not bound by any secrecy agreement, as amazing as that might seem nowadays, why had not journalists from major news organizations sought the same information from them? After all, in 1963, the Kennedy assassination was the crime of the century. Fifty years later, I still cannot answer this question.

A very good question. Why weren’t journalists from major news organizations more . . . enterprising? It is another variation on The Emperor’s New Clothes, where a Cornell undergraduate manages to see what many much more experienced and credentialed experts failed to see, or avoided seeing. I would answer Epstein’s question like this: The experts were disinterested in gathering evidence that might contradict their world view. That world view included a belief in the competence of exceedingly important government commissions. They didn’t want to gather evidence that might make them uncomfortable. I see this every year at Nobel Prize time. No journalist ever questions the claims in the press releases that accompany the prizes.

The Willat Effect With Gin

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The Willat Effect — named for Carl Willat, whose limoncello comparison tasting made me notice it — may happen when you experience two similar versions of one thing close together. (For example, sip one limoncello and then sip another.) The differences between them become clearer, of course. The Willat Effect is the less obvious hedonic change: suddenly the differences matter. Suddenly one version is more pleasant, the other less pleasant. The hedonic changes are large enough to change how I spend money (I buy the better version more, the worse version less). I believe this effect turns people into connoisseurs.

I recently noticed the Willat Effect with gin. As part of a project to buy every type of not-too-expensive alcohol in a nearby liquor store, I bought a bottle of Bombay Sapphire London Dry Gin. I neither like nor dislike gin, it was just something they sold I hadn’t tried. It was medium-priced (about $20). I liked it okay.

I returned to the liquor store. This time I bought two brands of London dry gin: Tanqueray (about $20) and Greenall’s Special (about $15). At home I tasted them side by side. The Tanqueray was much better, I noticed right away. It was softer, more rounded, and had floral overtones absent from the Greenall’s. Where was the Bombay Sapphire gin on these dimensions? Did it have floral overtones? I had no idea. Now I was curious. One close comparison shifted my buying habits in two ways: (a) I want to make more of these comparisons. I want to try every brand of gin in the liquor store to see if the cheaper brands tasted worse. (b) Apart from these comparisons, I will never buy inferior gin again.

The Willat Effect happens only if the two things being compared are neither too similar nor too dissimilar. Perhaps differently-priced versions of London dry gin are roughly the right distance apart and are a convenient way to demonstrate the effect. It’s easy to get different versions of London dry gin.

The effect interests me because it is (a) practical (a source of enjoyment), (b) a subtle comment on intellectuals (who complain about our “consumerist” society) and economics (I look forward to an economist’s explanation of connoisseurship), and (c) it supports my theory of human evolution, which says connoisseurs came to exist because they promote technological innovation. Connoisseurs make it easier for the most skilled craftsmen — the ones most likely to innovate — to make a living.

 

 

How Things Begin: Duke Check

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Ed Rickards, a retired lawyer and journalist, writes Duke Check, a blog about Duke University, which I enjoy reading even though I have no connection with Duke. It emphasizes scandals and bad governance but also praises. He started it in 2009. There have been plenty of scandals since then, including the Anil Potti cancer research fraud.

I recently asked him a few questions.

Why did you start Duke Check?

I started DukeCheck — originally Duke Fact Checker — because of a lack of transparency and accountability on the part of the school’s administration. You may want to review this Chronicle profile, especially the comments from the late law professor John (Jack) Johnston, about the need for such a column and my goals. I want to provide stakeholders in Duke — students, parents, faculty, alumni, workers, everyone — with the information so that they can participate and have their thoughts count. I really do not care if they agree with me or not, just so long as they step forward.

After you graduated from Duke, did you have further association with the school (e.g., worked there)?

I graduated from Duke 1963 and Duke Law 1966. No, I never worked for Duke or had any relationship other than alum. I continued to stay in touch, I wrote various letters about my feelings, but the internet is what opened it all up. and made it possible for me to write my blog from either NY (where I used to live) or Coconut Grove (dead of the winter). I have recently closed up NY and live near Princeton NJ . . . on a golf course which is a big switch.

Have you ever been a professional writer?

After brief flirtation with the law, and a job in private equity that was totally boring, I returned to my first love, Journalism, which attracted me while I was in college, and also during the summers when I worked for a local daily newspaper in my hometown. I have worked at the Associated Press, ABC, CBS and NBC, so I have been all around!

[This makes Duke Check a super-hobby — combining the freedom of a hobby with the skills of a professional. This blog, too, is a super-hobby.]

Duke has just opened a campus in China, in Kunshan, which is near Shanghai. The campus is called Duke Kunshan University (DKU). Does the DKU story point to/illustrate any general lesson(s)?

The DKU story will end with an empty campus in Kunshan. Many colleges have hit brick walls with their international adventures and this will be another. 15 years ago, Duke was gung-ho to open in Frankfurt; our president at the time, Nan Keohane, held an international news conference linked by satellite with reporters asking questions in Durham, NY, and Frankfurt. Six years, $15 to 20 million later, it died.

Duke should pursue international opportunities; but trying to export bricks and mortar to China will not fly. For one thing, academic freedom is a very strong tradition at Duke, and no Chinese leader will tolerate it. The new campus cannot teach nor allow religious services. We were founded by Quakers and Methodists.

We also see our administration going overboard on finances. At a time when money is tight, unbelievably tight, we’re exporting green like mad. The numbers do not add up: number of students, amount we can charge them. This may well be the first thing to implode, academic freedom the 2nd.

“A Debt-Ceiling Breach Would be Very, Very, Very Bad”

Seth Roberts5 Comments

At the end of an article by Kevin Roose in New York about the effects of a debt-ceiling breach:

The bottom line: A debt-ceiling breach would be very, very, very bad.

Keep in mind that these are all hypothetical scenarios. Reality could be better, or much worse. The truth is that while we sort of know what a government shutdown would look like (since it’s happened in the past), we have no idea what chaos a debt-ceiling breach could bring. If, in a month, we reach the X Date, run out of money, and are stuck in political stalemate, we’ll be entering truly uncharted waters. And we’ll be dealing our already-fragile economy what could amount to a knockout blow.

This is an example of something common: Someone who has never correctly predicted anything (in this case, Roose) telling the rest of us what will happen with certainty. If Roose is repeating what experts told him, he should have said who, and their track record. Roose is far from the only person making scary predictions without any evidence he can do better than chance. Here is another example by Derek Thompson in The Atlantic.

The same thing happens with climate change, except that it is models, not people, making predictions. Models that have never predicted climate correctly — for example, none predicted the current pause in warming — are assumed to predict climate correctly. We are supposed to be really alarmed by their predictions. This makes no sense, but there it is. Hal Pashler and I wrote about this problem in psychology.

A third example is the 2008 financial crisis. People who failed to predict the crisis were put in charge of fixing it. By failing to predict the crisis, they showed they didn’t understand what caused it. It is transparently unwise to have your car fixed by someone who doesn’t understand how cars work, but that’s what happened. Only Nassim Taleb seems to have emphasized this. We expect scary predictions based on nothing from religious leaders — that’s where the word apocalypse comes from. From journalists and the experts they rely on, not so attractive.

I don’t know what will happen if there is a debt-ceiling breach. But at least I don’t claim to (“very very very bad”). And at least I am aware of a possibility that Roose (and presumably the experts he consulted) don’t seem to have thought of. A system is badly designed if a relatively-likely event (debt-ceiling breach) can cause disaster — as Roose claims. The apocalyptic possibilities give those in control of whether that event happens (e.g., Republican leaders in Congress) too much power — the power to scare credulous people. If there is a breach, we will find out what happens. If a poorly-built system falls down, it will be much easier to build a better one. Roose and other doom-sayers fail to see there are plausible arguments on both sides.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Thanks to Alex Chernavsky.

“Science is the Belief in the Ignorance of Experts” — Richard Feynman

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“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts,” said the physicist Richard Feynman in a 1966 talk to high-school science teachers. I think he meant science is the belief in the fallibility of experts. In the talk, he says science education should be about data – how to gather data to test ideas and get new ideas — not about conclusions (“the earth revolves around the sun”). And it should be about pointing out that experts are often wrong. I agree with all this.

However, I think the underlying idea — what Feynman seems to be saying — is simply wrong. Did Darwin come up with his ideas because he believed experts (the Pope?) were wrong? Of course not. Did Mendel do his pea experiments because he didn’t trust experts? Again, of course not. Darwin and Mendel’s work showed that the experts were wrong but that’s not why they did it. Nor do scientists today do their work for that reason. Scientists are themselves experts. Do they do science to reveal their own ignorance? No, that’s blatantly wrong. If science is the belief in the ignorance of experts, and X is the belief in the ignorance of scientists, what is X? Our entire economy is based on expertise. I buy my car from experts in making cars, buy my bread from bread-making experts, and so on. The success of our economy teaches us we can rely on experts. Why should high-school science teachers say otherwise? If we can rely on experts, and science rests on the assumption that we can’t, why do we need scientists? Is Feynman saying experts are wrong 1% of the time, and that’s why we need science?

I think what Feynman actually meant (but didn’t say clearly) is science protects us against self-serving experts. If you want to talk about the protection-against-experts function of science, the heart of the matter isn’t that experts are ignorant or fallible. It is that experts, including scientists, are self-serving. The less certainty in an area, the more experts in that area slant or distort the truth to benefit themselves. They exaggerate their understanding, for instance. A drug company understates bad side effects. (Calling this “ignorance” is too kind.) This is common, non-obvious, and worth teaching high-school students. Science journalists, who are grown ups and should know better, often completely ignore this. So do other journalists. Science (data collection) is unexpectedly powerful because experts are wrong more often than a naive person would guess. The simplest data collection is to ask for an example.

When Genius by James Gleick (a biography of Feynman) was published, I said it should have been titled Genius Manqué. This puzzled my friends. Feynman was a genius, I said, but lots of geniuses have had a bigger effect on the world. I heard Feynman himself describe how he came to invent Feynman diagrams. One day, when he was a graduate student. his advisor, John Wheeler, phoned him. “Dick,” he said, “do you know why all electrons have the same charge? Because they’re the same electron.” One electron moves forward and backward in time creating all the electrons we observe. Feynman diagrams came from this idea. The Feynman Lectures on Physics were a big improvement over standard physics books — more emotional, more vivid, more thought-provoking — but contain far too little about data, in my opinion. Feynman failed to do what he told high school teachers to do.