Twisted Cheney

It is how you approach an issue that determines what you see.

dick_cheney_patriot

(Click thumbnail to download 640×480 version to do with as you please)

 

Michael Wehner vs. Denialist Geeks

It’s a pity that Leo Laporte didn’t save his Michael Wehner interview for until after the new podcast, Dr. Kiki’s Science Hour, had been officially launched. It would have been good to have pointers to this episode from the official Twit site, but as it stands one has to do a bit of Googling to find the video. Leo and Dr. Kiki originally asked Michael Wehner, a climate modeller at Laurence Berkeley Labs, to be interviewed to discuss his recently released analysis of the temperature record and why one could not conclude that global warming had stopped based on a short terms cooling trends. Wehner also did an excellent job explaining why there is scientific consensus on global warming being anthropogenic. Of course, this being a Twit interview, the chat room was populated by a strongly opinionated geek community whose familiarity with all things tech did not exactly translate to a likewise grasp of science. The comments from the chatroom that Leo passed to Wehner reflected this. But on the whole, Wehner did stick to the science of climate modelling while steering well clear of politics and policy making. His succinct explanation for why climate change is most likely due to CO2 and not to changes in the sun was particularly impressive — observed cooling of the stratosphere is consistent with a CO2 heat trapping blanket. If the sun was causing it, the stratosphere should warm up. Though I do wonder what the cosmic ray theory of climate change would predict for the stratosphere.

Things did get a bit repetitive towards the end where Wehner seemd to be answering the same denialist challenges he had already given answers for earlier in the hour. Just goes to show that some geeks only hear what they want to hear. Denialism is not reserved solely for the ignorant, but apparently highly intelligent technology fans can sometimes succumb to its lure.

Update: I now realise what Leo was refering to when he alluded to his own personal experience of a heated public exchange with someone on the subject of anthropogenic climate change. Perhaps this was part of the reason he has now teamed up with Dr. Kiki Sanford to produce her new science oriented podcast. There is a strong denialist bias that seems to thrive in the  Libertarian segment of the geek community. Given Dr. Kiki’s views on the matter, it will only be a matter of time before Leo alienates this segment of geeks, although I do wonder why libertarians in particular so easily fall victim to denialist arguments. Leo Laporte is also a fan of the Skepticality podcast and the scientific skepticism movement features quite a few Libertarians such as Michael Shermer, whose views on climate change are now consistent with the IPCC report. So there is hope yet for denialist geeks and hats off to Leo for at least trying to bring scientific enlightenment to the Twit Army, and for his continued engagement with denialist geek celebrities.

 

Steepening costs of starting a family

I recently got back in touch with a classmate who graduated  a decade ago and had migrated halfway around the world to marry the women he fell in love with back then. I had promptly lost contact with him while dealing with my own personal issues, but thanks to the current global popularity of social networking websites we were able to update each other  via messages sent back and forth. Proudly he told me of his two kids and in reply I revealed that I’m still single and childfree, and that given my age and the uncertainties in the British economy, it looks likely to stay that way indefinitely. However, he was of the opinion that being a male, I still had plenty of time to start a family of my own. As if by coincidence, I happened to stumble upon this blog posting on recent research on male fertility. It seems, that men approaching midlife need to be everybit as aware of the ticking of their biological clocks as women already are today. Raising a child in today’s resource constrained and environmentally challenged world is already a significant gamble for healthy couples in their 20’s. Couples who waited until their financial situation was more secure before starting to have kids could face additional financial burdens due to increased health risks to their children. Furthermore, some of the problems their kids might face, such as autism, lower IQ,  and schizophrenia, may not be easily compensated for through financial means alone.

What time I have left to begin healthily reproducing offspring is most likely a lot shorter than most of my friends think.

But I’m not bitter. In fact, I’ve been a subscriber and advocate of the childfree philosophy for over three years now. And when I read in monetary terms how much new parents spend and have given up during the first few years of a baby’s upbringing, I find myself even more convinced that I’ve made the right choice.

Parents spend an average of £13,696 in their baby’s first year with more than £2,000 of that going towards childcare.

In the first three years of their child’s life, parents spend £1,496 on feeding them, £1,142 on clothes and £1,289 on books and toys.

However, one should not infer that I think all parents have made the wrong choice, since everyone’s situation is different and we all should be left to make up their own mind. But I cannot help but wonder how much forethought goes into such an important decision when I read about the conditions some struggling families are forced to endure due to the worsening economy. But is it really fair to demand that couples who are contemplating the step toward parenthood, should be able to predict economic conditions over the two decades it takes to raise a human from birth to adulthood, when top economists cannot even tell whether the recovery will come this year or next? And yet there are parents out there who expect way too much of themselves and end up overreaching. When circumstances do not go the way they hoped the consequences can be disasterous.

A spate of high-profile mass killings in the United States in recent months — including half a dozen rampages since March — shows the impact the economic meltdown is having on rising violence, experts say.

…

Direct correlations may not always immediately surface, but criminologist Jack Levin, a professor at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, says the trends are clear.

“Catastrophic losses serve as inspiration, or precipitant,” he told AFP.

In a severe recession there are simply more people suffering such a loss, he says.

In an economic downturn, the United States often sees “many more large-body-count murders — on the job, in the family — as many more Americans feel desperate in a situation they feel got completely out of control.”

Parenthood is indeed a leap into the unknown and I think anyone making that leap, especially after considering the same things that I have, are very courageous people.

 

Teabagging explained

I wondered what they meant when a republican grassroots movement said they were going to “teabag the whitehouse“  this April 15th

Now it all makes sense.

 

The Gangland Economics of Detroit CEOs

When the CEOs of the major American car companies travelled to Washington to beg Congress for a bailout, the most memorable moment in the popular media was when Representative Brad Sherman grilled the CEOs about their use of individual corporate jets.

The issue was deemed sufficiently important for public relations that General Motors wants to block the public from tracking its leased planes. Japanese CEOs seem to have a completely different attitude when dealing with potentially embarrassing corporate perks:

Why the big difference in approach between US and Japanese company leadership? According to Steven Levitt, in his TED talk on Crack Economics, the Americans seem to be following a fairly new principle in economics that is common in gangland hierarchies. This principle is so new that economists don’t have a proper academic term for it, so Levitt uses a gang leader’s parlance:

Indeed, the “weak and shit” hypothesis seems to fit the car company CEOs quite well.

 

Obama: I believe in science, evidence, and facts

That’s a good start. Hopefully this is one campaign promise the president elect does not break in the next four years. What is really sad however is that the audience was moved to loudly applaud such a basic statement of belief. That just goes to show how damaging the past eight years of the Republican war on science has been to human progress.

 

In Science, Not All Bridges Lead to Nowhere

The trouble with treating all basic science research as an earmark in the same class as that infamous bridge to nowhere, are all those nasty unintended consequences.

Is it now a scientist’s responsibility to defend the funding of basic research against cuts made by a Christian fundamentalist who denies anthropogenic global warming, defends creationism being taught alongside evolution as science, entertains thoughts of banning books, and believes she needs protection from witchcraft?

UPDATE: Keith Olbermann also weighs in:

 

The Ultimatum Game of Banking Bailouts

As stock markets collapse across the globe, the US House of Representatives were already deeply mired in a game of finger pointing to lay blame for the failure of the $700 billion bailout bill on one party.  But the truth of the matter is that several factors are to blame for the bill’s defeat.

A sweeping rescue plan for US financial markets foundered in the US House Monday on a combination of doubts about the plan, reelection concerns, disdain for bailing out Wall Street bankers, and a deep philosophical distaste for massive government intervention in the private sector among conservatives.

The freezing of the credit markets could not have come at a worse time, when many of the lawmakers are up for reelection, giving their constituents unusually large influence on how they would vote. Many were inundated by e-mails, calls and faxes from the voting public all voicing opposition to the bill. And in a tight election who could blame lawmakers for adopting the populist position.

“We could lose seats over this,” said Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D) of New York, who nonetheless voted for the plan.

Many Wall Street insiders are shocked that Main street would hold such a self destructive position.  After all, we are told that without the bailout it is the ordinary citizen, the mortgage owner, the pensioner, and the blue collar worker who will suffer the most. Who in their right minds would wish upon themselves a worldwide recession, unemployment, negative-equity, bankruptcy, foreclosure, and a retirement in poverty? It may be irrational but it certainly should not be surprising. The late Stuart Sutherland cited the following example in his book, Irrationality:

The rivalry between groups may be so irrational that each may try to do the other down even at its own expense. In an aircraft factory in Britain the toolroom shop stewards tried to preserve this difference, even when by doing so they would receive a smaller wage themselves. They preferred a settlement that gave them £67.30 a a week and the production workers a pound less, to one that gave them an extra two pounds (£69.30) but gave the production workers more (£70.30)

This anecdotal evidence of group rivalry distorting value-based decisions has been subsequently confirmed and independently studied in surveys and controlled experiments. Often it arises from an innate sense of social relativism as noted by Michael Shermer in his article, “Why People Believe Weird Things About Money“

Would you rather earn $50,000 a year while other people make $25,000, or would you rather earn $100,000 a year while other people get $250,000? Assume for the moment that prices of goods and services will stay the same.

Surprisingly — stunningly, in fact — research shows that the majority of people select the first option; they would rather make twice as much as others even if that meant earning half as much as they could otherwise have. How irrational is that?

This result is one among thousands of experiments in behavioral economics, neuroeconomics and evolutionary economics conclusively demonstrating that we are every bit as irrational when it comes to money as we are in most other aspects of our lives. In this case, relative social ranking trumps absolute financial status.

To further investigate the motivations behind behaviour that flies in the face of what classical economic theory would predict, economics researchers proposed what is now known as The Ultimatum Game:

a man approaches with a proposition. He offers you $20 in one-dollar bills and says you can keep the money, under one condition: You have to share some of it with your friend. You can offer your friend as much or as little as you like, but if your friend rejects your offer, neither of you get to keep any of the money. What do you do?

…

The ultimatum game is the brainchild of Israeli game theorist Ariel Rubinstein, who predicted in 1982 that a person asked to decide in such a game would choose to offer the least amount possible. This notion describes a behavior called rational maximization — the tendency to choose more for oneself.

The following year, Rubinstein’s prediction was tested by three economists — Werner Güth, Rolf Schmittberger and Bernd Schwarze. The three researchers found results from their test of the ultimatum game that directly contradicted Rubinstein’s prediction — the average offer from one participant to the other was around 37 percent of the money. Further studies found an average offer between 40 and 50 percent. Even more, approximately half of the receivers turned down offers under 30 percent.

What these experiments revealed is that people’s individual measure of fairness plays a big role in whether one favours or rejects what is offered to them. Humans are prepared to pay to deliver punishment against those judged not to be playing fairly. Such a strategy has been observed in many similar experiments, especially those set up as a non-zero sum game such as the Prisoners’ Dilemma. In iterated forms of the game, a punishment regime often emerged as a consequence -  When Wall Street enriches themselves through massively unsustainable leveraging then begs for a bailout when things go wrong, it is like opting to defect. Main street defects when they refuse to play along in order to punish the investment banks. The flipside of this strategy is that punishment of unfairness may have been a necessary component toward the eventual evolution of reciprocal altruism. Perhaps the rejection of unfair bailout deals by the ordinary citizen is not so irrational after all.

 

Money, Monkeys, Mortgages, and Motivation

In 2005, the Department of Psychology at Yale University taught capuchin monkeys how to use money, then observed what spending decisions they made when faced with various purchasing scenarios.

In their studies monkeys were given a budget of disks and asked to decide how much to spend on apples, and how much to spend on the gelatin cubes, even as the prices of these goods and the size of their budgets fluctuated. Capuchins performed much like humans do. Capuchins, like humans, react rationally to these fluctuations.

In a second experiment, capuchins were asked to choose between spending a token on one visible piece of food that half the time gave a return of two pieces, or two pieces of visible food, that half the time gave a return of only one piece. Economic theory predicts that consumers should not care which of these outcomes they receive since they are essentially both 50-50 shots at one or two pieces of food. The capuchins, however, vastly preferred the first gamble, which is essentially a half chance at a bonus, than the second gamble, which is essentially a half chance at a loss.

Loss avoidance is a key feature of prospect theory which explains why we tend to work harder to prevent the loss of £10 than we would to gain £10. What we own is valued more than the equivalent that we do not own. The Yale experiment with capuchins points to loss aversion being deeply rooted in our evolutionary past, and as such this primitive irrational bias is very difficult to overcome when we go through life making everyday financial decisions. One major consequence of this can now be observed in the mortgage market as the housing bubble deflates. Last June, mortgage approvals hit a record low which implies that the house prices that sellers are asking for are too high in relation to the credit that is available to buyers. This reluctance to lower prices can easily be explained by the seller’s aversion to the loss perceived when the stratospheric house evaluations of one year ago are used as reference.  The bias is only made worse if the owner is in negative equity.

Michael Shermer, author of The Mind of the Market, has long recognised the role that loss aversion and other irrational biases play in market making decisions. He writes of the Yale research:

This research goes a long way toward debunking one of the biggest myths in all of psychology and economics, known as “Homo economicus.” This is the theory that “economic man” is rational, self-maximizing and efficient in making choices.

What is interesting is that Shermer is generally in favour of minimally regulated free markets – a libertarian ideal he shares with followers of the Austrian School of Economics. Rational individualism forms one of the key pillars upon which the system of laissez-faire capitalism relies.  Due to a deeply ingrained mistrust of regulation and big government, there is a strong tendency for libertarian capitalists to be in denial about global warming issues.  However, Shermer seems to be one of those rare individuals with libertarian leanings who has become convinced of the reality of anthropogenic climate change and the need to adopt measures to mitigate against it. He has since voiced support for tradeable emissions permits via carbon credits, a scheme intended to harness free market mechanisms to bring down CO2 output globally. In effect, CO2 pollution becomes a scarce right much like private property.

If recognition of our inherent psychological irrational tendencies is what allows people like Shermer to overcome the ideologically-driven confirmation bias that is endemic within the libertarian movement, then perhaps it is the exploitation of these same psychological mechanisms that holds the best promise for overcoming our reluctance to change course toward a more sustainable future. A major obstacle for taking decisive action in the face of peak oil and climate change, is the fact that most people frame this decision as losing the fossil-fueled lifestyle of convenience. This is why off-shore drilling has such an appeal in the US because it offers a chance, however small, that they would not have to give up their high energy consuming existence.  Expert lifehackers are well versed at motivating productive activity by working with one’s emotional biases rather than directly opposing them.  With an appropriate reframing, even loss aversion can become a powerful ally when pursuing changes in lifestyle one may be reluctant to make initially. It is a strategy that everyone, on both sides of the sustainability debates, would do well to adopt.

 

Miffed happens!

It’s been over a year since the original “Did You Know?” video went viral and since then a second version had been made about one year ago:

It was originally intended to provoke discussion about the suitability of the US education system for the fast paced globalised world in which we now live. However, in light of the fact that globalisation is not panning out to be as rosy as the authors of that video seemed to be portraying a couple years ago — what with the credit crunch, recession worries, energy crisis, food crisis, and general reduction in freedom — I thought it would be a good time to create my own version this video:

(In case you need to see the URL references blocked by the YouTube logo, you can also view it on the YouTube website)

One can consider this to be the flipside of the globalisation coin — the side that the authors of the original video deliberately left out. Not sure if K-12 can tolerate this level of cynicism and reality in one 10 minute sitting however.