Research and Data
"Bullshitting, a style of communication characterized by an intent to be convincing or impressive without concern for the truth, is ubiquitous within human societies. Across two studies (N = 1,017), we assess whether participants’ ability to produce satisfying and seemingly accurate bullshit (i.e., explanations of fake concepts) acts as an honest signal of their intelligence. Consistent with our hypotheses, we find that bullshit ability is predictive of participants’ intelligence and individuals capable of producing more satisfying bullshit are judged by second-hand observers to be higher in intelligence."
"the sex of students in any country can be reliably predicted based on regression models created from the data of all other countries, indicating a common (universal) sex-specific component...the sex of 69% of students can be correctly classified using this approach"
Similar to the results in the gender-STEM paradox paper:
"the universal component of these sex differences is stronger in countries with relative income equality and women's participation in the labor force and politics."
4. Both tribes are always trying to convince themselves that the other team is well funded, while they're trying to scrap by without the help of big corporate industries.
Here are the most heavily partisan industries from open secrets.
"Multitasking imposes an onerous mental load and is associated with elevated stress, which appears to trigger the displayed sadness. The simultaneous onset of fear is intriguing and is likely rooted to subconscious anticipation of the next disruption,"
My favorite days at work are when I'm in a multitasking flow state. Musicians and athletes often have multitasking mastered, and I suspect they're happy doing it. My cheap read of this research is that doing more of what you don't want to do compiles the negative emotionality, as one would expect.
Both sexes reacted less positively to the male-favouring differences, judging the findings to be less important, less credible, and more offensive, harmful, and upsetting.
7. Free will is linked to a desire to hold others accountable for their actions. When liberals and conservatives agree that something is wrong they attribute the same amount of free will. When either of them think something is wrong but the other doesn't, they attribute more free will to the decision. This is merely to say, everyone thinks responsibility is contained in what you have control over.
Perhaps more interestingly, both liberals and conservatives attribute more free will to the same moral violation when the other does it.
8. Research on DILFS (Sci-Hub)
"Female participants were randomly assigned to one of two possible male profile conditions of the same attractive man (with children versus without children). Overall, results revealed that women rated the male target with children as possessing more positive attributes relative to the male target without children."
9. Research showing students evaluate teachers more positively for lenient grading and easy courses, and teachers want good student evaluations. The upshot: less challenging classes and grade inflation.
11. Spouses are very sorted along party lines. Is it fair to say they're more assorted by party than by race?
12. I've been something like an optimist regarding Coronavirus, but I remained skeptical toward people who thought COVID deaths were overblown because deaths from other causes were being tracked as virus deaths. I thought it might be true in principle, but it seemed way too small to be significantly inflating the official COVID death count. It turns out data on mortality from all causes supports me.
Reading
1. This meta-political spectrum compass comes from Oliver Traldi on Twitter. Although there is no test (yet) that places one somewhere on the compass, I believe I am firmly on the left side and a little bit on the top.
3. With people starting to mass-produce and sell face masks, it's a great time to reread the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics
5. Almost no one is falsely accused of rape is an article I linked to in When to Believe All Women
Also, Alex Tabbarok says his libertarian view of the FDA is quickly becoming conventional wisdom.
Tyler asks Tetlock what we're not getting right about Coronavirus:
8. Every year since 2003, Google hosts an international coding competition. One woman has ever made it to the finals
"Observing how much moral and material progress we’ve already made, despite our perennial flaws, gives me hope. Rarely do I encounter a person who is worse off than, say, their great-grandparents were. It may sound crazy to say it during a pandemic, but the world is safer, wealthier, and more stable than it’s ever been in recorded history. If we can achieve that, then we can achieve much more."
11. Herd immunity is misleading, recommended by Bryan Caplan
"The data show that nine percent of infected people are responsible for 80% of the transmissions, she says. Why? For one thing, the disease is apparently very infectious but only for a short window, and perhaps only in some cases. Contact tracing studies show people are most infectious right around the onset of symptoms, as well as a couple of days before and after."
“I’d like people to stop wasting mental energy on the wrong things,” Bromage says. “To stop worrying about outdoors and bike riders since it’s such a low risk.”
14. I've probably spent too much time verifying the fish tank cleaner story. Trump says chloroquine phosphate might cure Coronavirus, couple drank fish tank cleaner, man dies. But wait! She's under investigation for murder! But wait again! Assigning cases like this to a homicide detective is boring protocol, and there's no reason to believe it was actually a homicide.
A lot of this story is understood in the context of whether Donald is to blame for this man's death, so let's cut to the chase. Taking Trump's words to mean "go drink fish tank cleaner" is completely insane and Trump is not responsible for completely insane interpretation of his words.
16. Voting by mail gives neither party an advantage, which is good for preventing Coronavirus. Otherwise, it's hard to see why we would want to increase voter turnout if the effect basically cancels itself out.
17. After I wrote, Rewire your Brain to be Skeptical, I wondered if anyone else was saying the same thing. After a bit of digging, I found this post from 2011 in Psychology today. It corresponds to the arguments I made almost exactly.
18. Thing of the week: Aella on trauma narratives, drugs, and society induced feelings.
I often think about (and almost published a post about) how the ancient greeks had sex with young boys all the time, and how much of that cultural difference traumatized these boys - or how much of it didn't traumatize these boys because they didn't have a culture that told them they were supposed to feel traumatized? Aella deals with this idea eloquently, gracefully, and with sufficient nuance. I love this piece.
Listening
1. Someone finally says what I've been thinking since the Bret Kavanaugh case (quote from shortly after the 30 min mark)
"If there is a... default position when an allegation surfaces and that default for the Metoo movement or Democratic elected officials shifts from 'believe women' to 'everyone should get a chance to be heard and all claims should be seriously investigated' it's important to realize that if that shift happens, that shift will have to do with allegations surfacing in the context of politics. And that's important because there are reasons why allegations might surface in politics that don't exist in everyday life. False allegations in everyday life is exceedingly rare... in the context of politics that's a little different."
I continue to think this is true about the Joe Biden case.
2. Phillip Tetlock has a Conversation with Tyler. "Tetlock is one of the greatest social scientists, period"
"Well, is it a mistake if you’re a public health expert who feels that one mistake is much worse than the other? It’s much better to overestimate the threat of the virus than to underestimate it because you have to influence public opinion and public behavior. There, you’re not forecasting. You’re engaged in manipulation, social influence.
It comes back to your original question about what do we want from our forecasters? And accuracy is only one of the things we want from them. We look to forecasters for a lot of things, be it to inspire confidence, inspire fear, and so forth."
4. The lawyer who defended Wesley Snipes when he was facing 16 years in prison, talks about the Ahmed Aubrey case,
"Certain cases have been deliberately politicized and I have a theory about that. I've had cases that are perfect high-profile public cases - cases including where the treated an African American man like a garbage bag as they walked him around a jail cell until he died... while he was suffering from severe medical conditions. I have people who's babies died while they were in custody - they gave birth while in custody. They were completely ignored and woke up to a dead baby in their arms. These are cases that should be uniting cases. They should be high profile cases. But the same politicized organizations connected to BLM and some others that will promote those other cases, won't promote these cases. At first I was totally baffled. And then I started noticing a pattern. The cases which fit a certain political narrative out of the gate one would get locked into. But the facts underlying the cases would be bad facts. So people who are driven to look at facts rather than driven by the original narrative would come to a different opinion."
5. Famous to me doesn't mean famous. Bryan Caplan is famous to me. Ricky Gervais and Russel Brand are famous. That's why I'm glad to hear such a good talk about God Vs. Atheism. Are there higher quality conversations out there? Yes, but it's not being had by famous people so it's less likely to make an impact on the mainstream.
7. E-Sports is very different from traditional sports in the sense that developers like Activision, EA, and Nintendo own the entire sport. Traditional sports leagues like NFL or NBA each individual team is owned, but nobody owns the whole sport, so the economics plays out very differently.
8. Video games utilize physics engines, but what's a chemistry engine? 90 minutes with the developers of Breath of the Wild.
9. Eric Weinstein and Balaji Srinivasan talk a lot about Coronavirus. It picks up significantly around the 1 hour mark.
This part is Weinsteinian if I ever heard it:
"Why can't I talk about the Wuhan lab?"
"Well that's actually come back within the somewhat mainstream to discuss"
"Oh, I'm sorry, I can talk about it again?"
10. With Sam Harris, Daniel Markovits advocates a one-time wealth tax, which is something Donald advocated years ago. I do not believe Trump has actually changed very much since then.
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