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I've got an RA this week, and I've got him working on a lit review on empirical topics like replication, p-hacking, sub-group analysis, pre-specified analysis plans, publication bias, etc.

Anyway, that reminded me of this New Yorker article on how scientific results tend to fail replication: "The Decline Effect." Unfortunately, this article is by Jonah Lehrer, who lost his job because he made up quotes. In a mildly interesting diversion, I came across these articles about Lehrer and the TED conference.

Felix Salmon wrote about Lehrer and the TED conference, and though Lehrer never spoke at TED, he lumps them (and Malcolm Gladwell and David Brooks) together. Appropriately, I think. Basically, they don't really understand science very well.

Yes, that's right: I strongly dislike TED. I think it's style over substance. Despite saying TED talks have "a somewhat vaporous tone," this (gated, unfortunately) New Yorker article by Nathan Heller about the history of TED is mostly laudatory:

Why speak rigorously to an audience of hundreds when you can ham it up a bit and spread the fruits of your research to millions?

Wow, that is aggravating. I much prefer the argument of Evgeny Morozov in The New Republic:

But surely, "modern attention spans" must be resisted, not celebrated.

Agreed. I don't think the world is simple. I don't think many useful answers are that simple. Conservatives like to mock the number of pages in Dodd-Frank, or they like to mock the fact that salmon are regulated by a different agency when in freshwater than when in saltwater, and we all know what crap John Kerry got when he said he voted for it before he voted against it, but guess what? The world is complicated. Policy, in order to be good, is most likely going to be complicated. More complicated than a TED talk.

(The salmon and Dodd-Frank bits are from this good Yglesias blog post.)

Hypocrisy or Empathy

A while ago I posted about what I called hypocrisy, in the form of conservatives' inability to imagine what it's like to be underprivileged or underrepresented unless someone in their immediate family brings it home to them. You might consider that a lack of empathy. Now there's a recent essay in The New Yorker called "The Case Against Empathy." Basically, empathy is horrible at math (read: cost-benefit analysis). Also, conservatives claim they're being empathetic too, just with the over-regulated small business owner instead of the polluted-on inner-city minority, so just claiming we need more empathy doesn't really solve many arguments. And today there's a short bit in The Atlantic about the same thing: military intervention to stop atrocities is really expensive, so likely less cost-effective than other ways to save lives.

I suppose it just boils down to your definition of empathy. If you think it's a blind emotion with no reason, sure, it's not that useful, but that's really only a straw man. The New Yorker piece talks about everyday gun crimes compared to massacres, and preventable diseases and starvation compared to Katrina or the Boston bombing, and says that Americans' over-fascination with the latter of those pairs, along with babies who fall down wells and white girls who get abducted in Aruba, is somehow proof that those who call for a "global empathic consciousness" are wrong. But that's exactly the same point that those who call for more empathy are making--we'd be better off if we spent less money on American babies who fell down wells than we spent on malnourished sub-Saharan African children, and we'd be better off if we sent fewer stuffed animals to the wealthy suburb of Newtown, Connecticut and more cash to something like Haitian orphanages. We're already pretty good at showing empathy for people who are similar to ourselves. It's people who are different that we need to work on.

Tim DeChristopher Released

Climate activist Tim DeChristopher is out of prison, and saying good stuff on Democracy Now!

Intense staring contest

One Gallon

I've never met One Gallon, but I've heard good things from hiker friends. Justifiably, it would seem.

English Countryside

These 360-degree panoramas of landscapes in England and Scotland are pretty.

To Be Or Not Because It's There, according to Mallory

“The first question which you will always ask and which I must try to answer is this, ‘What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?’ and my answer must at once be, ‘It is no use.’ There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behaviour of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation. But otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron. We shall not find a single foot of earth that can be planted with crops to raise food. It’s no use. So, if you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life.” [via Adventure Journal]

Economist Deep Thoughts

I have trouble taking economic models seriously. I suppose ever since I learned that increasing the minimum wage doesn't increase unemployment (Card and Krueger, Dube, Lester, and Reich), I've basically come to the conclusion that for most models, the exceptions to the rule (externalities, indivisibility of goods, etc.) are more common than things that actually follow the rule. The one exception is that I still do believe that the bias in policy should be towards free trade, but I admit that neither trade models nor trade empirics are my specialty. And instead I heavily lean towards empirical regression analysis. Of course this requires a whole new set of assumptions (linearity, normal distributions), and maybe I'm just not good enough at math to know that these assumptions are just as stupid as assuming magical perfect free markets. Some statisticians (David Freedman, he of "randomization does not justify regression" fame) would probably think I'm foolishly naive for how much faith I put in (well-identified) OLS, even though I think I'm healthily skeptical about things like omitted variable bias, p-hacking, specification searching, publication bias, etc. I hope I'm not deluding myself.

I'm thinking about all this because of the classes I'm teaching. I have very little interest in the standard undergrad models, and I think I just taught a development economics course without drawing a supply and demand curve a single time. I just skipped all that and went straight to regression, the "real" way to get an answer. It might be crazy, but I think maybe not. Several in my cohort in grad school had not been econ majors as undergrads, and I don't recall having seen many supply and demand curves in grad school, so they might be perfectly wonderful economists and not know what a Cournot competition graph looks like.

It also came up in a discussion with an older colleague whom I very much like and respect.  He said something offhand to the effect of "we'll have to see if all this quasi-experimental literature is still with us in another 15 years..." which can do nothing but belittle to the point of nothingness everything I know and value.  So reasonable people can have different opinions on the matter, apparently. Like many things, the truth is likely somewhere in the middle. (But left of center. Definitely left of center.)