While on the subject of evolution...

I can't miss a chance to recommend Ian Stewart's "Through the Evolvoscope," a clever and elegant discussion of fitness landscapes. I believe this originally appeared in Stewart's Scientific American column, but you can find it in Another Fine Math You've Gotten Me Into.

Way cool.

Is Tea Party extremism simply aspect dominance?

It has been widely suggested that the coverage of the Tea Party has been focused on a few offensive and unrepresentative cases. Many of the arguments have gone something like this (from the LA Times:

A new Gallup Poll out this morning of 1,033 finds nothing fringe about self-proclaimed Tea Party adherents; they are slightly more likely to be employed, male and definitely more conservative. But otherwise Gallup's Lydia Saad writes, "their age, educational background, employment status,and race -- Tea Partiers are quite representative of the public at large."

But in an excellent post, Tom Schaller at FiveThirtyEight has a different take:

But the Gallup results only confirm that tea partiers are "mainstream" in their demographics, when what really matters are their attitudes. Results released Friday of a new multi-state poll of white voters conducted by the University of Washington's Christopher Parker paint a more complicated picture. The survey asked white respondents about their attitudes toward the tea party movement--and their attitudes toward non-whites, immigrants and homosexuals.

Evolution in the Lab

I try to link to pretty much everything that appears in Olivia Judson's Wild Side, but this piece on the implications of the continued evolution of lab animals should be particularly interesting to readers of this site.

A second area where laboratory evolution can be a serious problem is in the study of subjects like the evolution of aging, and the diseases associated with it. For example, the study of laboratory populations may give a misleading impression of how easy it is to extend lifespans: since laboratory organisms tend to have unnaturally short lifespans, discovering ways to make them live longer may not be especially informative. We may simply be reversing the unnatural shortening that we created in the first place, a view supported by the fact that selection to increase lifespan in laboratory populations often simply restores it to levels seen in the wild.

Definitely worth a look.

You can always get the answer you want if you ask the right question

In today's Wall Street Journal op-ed page, Arthur C. Brooks claims that most Americans oppose progressive taxation. This would seem to contradict most recent polling on the subject but Brooks has his own data:

A 2009 survey conducted by the polling firm Ayers-McHenry asked respondents to choose which of the following statements came closer to their views: "Government policies should promote fairness by narrowing the gap between rich and poor, spreading the wealth, and making sure that economic outcomes are more equal"; or "Government policies should promote opportunity by fostering job growth, encouraging entrepreneurs, and allowing people to keep more of what they earn." Respondents chose the second option over the first, 63% to 31%.

Jonathan Chait responds:

Ayers-McHenry is a Republican polling firm, and the question Brooks cites is an advocacy poll, not a legitimate survey of public opinion. Public opinion experts understand that loading the terms of a question can produce almost any result. The question cited in this poll is filled with loaded language to an almost comical degree.

Straightforward measure of public opinion show strong public support for a progressive tax system and higher taxes on the rich. Gallup finds that Americans overwhelmingly think the rich pay too little:

Raising taxes on the rich enjoys broad support, including among Republicans, though this belief is not reflected at all among Republican elites:

The Quinnipiac University poll found that 60 percent of Americans among both major political parties think raising income taxes on households making more than $250,000 should be a main tenet of the government's efforts to tame the deficit. More than 70 percent, including a majority of Republicans, say those making more than $1 million should pay more.

Polling on progressive versus proportional or regressive taxes is hard to come by. The conservative Tax Foundation asked a loaded question last year: "Would you support or oppose the government redistributing wealth by a much higher income tax on high income earners?" The language seems clearly designed to prompt a negative response, but respondents said yes anyway, by a 52%-31% margin. (This is probably why the Ayers-McHenry poll cited by Brooks threw in even more loaded terms in order to produce the desired result.)

Four things you probably didn't know about the Boston Tea Party

Bruce reblogs (am I using that right?) a piece by tax historian Joseph Thorndike. It's a great read. Here enough to give you a taste:

1. The Tea Party was not a protest against high taxes. The Boston Tea Party was certainly a tax protest, but it was not a protest against high taxes. In fact, it was sparked by a tax cut, not a tax hike.

2. The Tea Party was prompted by a corporate bailout. What's not to like about cheap tea? Plenty, at least when it comes as part of a corporate bailout. Because that's what the Tea Act was: an 18th-century version of corporate welfare.

3. The Tea Party was a grass-roots movement -- with an element of AstroTurf. What moved Bostonians to activism? Ideology certainly played a role. But so did political leadership, particularly on the part of the Sons of Liberty, Adams, and Boston's merchant class.
4. The Tea Party wasn't always a touchstone of American nationalism. The Tea Party looms large in the annals of American civil disobedience. Who can't warm to the notion of outraged citizens moved to public action against monopolistic tyranny?

Well, as it turns out, quite a few people.

"Health And Virtue"

Once again we go to Chait:

This is of a piece with what, as I wrote last month, has become the dominant right-wing view of health care: that it's a matter of personal responsibility. Just as rich people are rich because they work hard (and the poor and poor because they don't), good health is largely attributable to responsible personal behavior, and poor health to sloth. Here's Jim DeMint:

In the closing chapter of “Saving Freedom,” DeMint outlines an action plant that starts with the individual. It encourages every individual to take responsibility for themselves.

“As we look at the health care of our nation, we’ve got to look at our own health care and the health care of family –– what we can do to lower the cost of health care just by taking care of ourselves.

And here's Newt Gingrich:

I think you want to re-establish that the individual has a big responsibility for their own health, because otherwise you can't deal with diabetes and obesity and things that are chronic conditions.

First Spider-Man, now Rush

You may have known that Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko was a dedicated objectivist. Now we learn that the Canadian band Rush was heavily and openly influenced by Ayn Rand.

Jonathan Chait has the whole story here.

How about an alternative to p-value?

Or, more accurately, a complement.

I think we can all agree that the quality of a study cannot be described by a scalar. Given that, is it possible to come up with a fairly small set of standard metrics that would give us a better picture?

P-value should be included and the set shouldn't have more than four metrics. Other than that, does anyone have any suggestions?

The ongoing tyranny of statistical significance testing in biomedical research

This is the title of an article that appears in the Europen Journal of Epidemiology. I think that it is a good contribution to the recent discussions on p-values. The authors seem to be focusing on the difference between clincial significance and statistical significance (and pointing out the many cases where the two may diverge).

Usually this is happens for strong effects with small samples sizes (real associations are hard to establish) and weak effects with very large sample sizes (where unimportant differences can be demonstrated).

I was surprised that the authors did not consider the possibility of observational meta-analysis -- which seems to me to be one of the possible ways to handle the issue of small sample sizes in any specific experiment. But I think the message is in concordance with the larger mesage that these tests are not a substitute for personal judgement. In the context of designed experiments they may be fine (as the experiment can be created to fit this criterion) but the uncritical use of p-values will also be an issue in the interpretation of observational research.

Another financial piece from This American Life

TAL provided some of (if not the) best stories to come out of the crisis and they've been on top of it since the beginning. Click here for their piece (free this week) paralleling Magnetar and Mel Brooks' The Producers.

There's also a fascinating profile of an ex-cop turned crusader against the war on drugs.

Good piece on education funding

Kevin Carey has the details at the New Republic.

This is great news

I was listening to Marketplace on my way to the gym this evening and I heard the following:

Kai Ryssdal: You've seen them at gas stations and at the gym probably. Maybe even in the elevators at work. Small television screens showing news and weather, and more often than not, a whole lot of ads. But really, how many people do you suppose are actually paying attention to those things? Nielsen, the company behind the television rating system, well, they know. They released their first report for those little screens today.

...

Nielsen tracked the impact of ads you see when you leave the house. But how does the company know when someone running on the treadmill is actually paying attention to what's on the screen in front of her?

BRENNAN: We actually measured the proximity to the machines and that they were actually on the machine and watched the content. And then we asked them to recall what it was that they watched and what they remembered.

Turns out those ads you see when you're exercising sink in.

BOB MARTIN: This report shows that what a quarter billion impressions are generated every month.

Bob Martin is chief marketing officer at RMG Networks. It's one of the 10 networks, including Gas Station TV and the Hotel Networks, that Nielsen included in this report. Martin says the new measurements could help his network sell more ads.

Why is this great news? Because my gym keeps its channels tuned to three stations, none of which I like. If they put screens on the bikes, I can stop watching videos on my really small $24 media player.

The Complexity of the Commons

This passage from an interesting interview with Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom has been making the rounds. (I picked it up from Mark Thoma). Take a look:

Fran: Do you have a favorite example of where people have been able to self-organize to manage property in common?

Elinor: One that I read early on that just unglued me—because I wasn’t expecting it—was the work of Robert Netting, an anthropologist who had been studying the alpine commons for a very long time. He studied Swiss peasants and then studied in Africa too. He was quite disturbed that people were saying that Africans were primitive because they used common property so frequently and they didn’t know about the benefits of private property. The implication was we’ve got to impose private property rules on them. Netting said, “Are the Swiss peasants stupid? They use common property also.”

Let’s think about this a bit. In the valleys, they use private property, while up in the alpine areas, they use common property. So the same people know about private property and common property, but they choose to use common property for the alpine areas. Why? Well, the alpine areas are what Netting calls “spotty.” The rainfall is high in one section one year, and the snow is great, and it’s rich. But the other parts of the area are dry. Now if you put fences up for private property, then Smith’s got great grass one year—he can’t even use it all—and Brown doesn’t have any. So, Netting argued, there are places where it makes sense to have an open pasture rather than a closed one. Then he gives you a very good idea of the wide diversity of the particular rules that people have used for managing that common land.

Fran: Why were Netting’s findings so surprising to you?

Elinor: I had grown up thinking that land was something that would always move to private property. I had done my dissertation on groundwater in California, so I was familiar with the management of water as a commons. But when I read Netting, I realized that when there are “spotty” land environments, it really doesn’t make sense to put up fences and have small private plots.

Mixed messages

From Valuing Another Degree by Jonnelle Marte

These days, however, as employers continue to cut spending, expectations for such higher pay could backfire when you're competing against less educated -- and less expensive -- candidates.

For example, entry-level teachers with master's degrees often have a harder time getting hired than those with bachelor's degrees because schools typically pay more to teachers with master's degrees, says Steven Rothberg, founder of CollegeRecruiter.com.

One of the best teacher's I've known was the wife of an army officer who had to move every few years. Despite her outstanding resume and glowing references, she had a hard time getting jobs because her years of experience made her too expensive.

This is, after all, a write in haste-repent at leisure medium

[make sure to check out the comments section]

There's a common type of blog post that consists of sarcastic dismissal of a statement followed by critical statements. Though they tend to be mean, they can be fun read and, if the criticisms are valid, can add quite a bit to the conversation.

The main problem with this type of post is that has an ugly habit of devolving into just a sarcastic dismissal and those devolved posts are not so defensible (even if I'm the one writing them). This is not only mean but cowardly. By leaving out the reasons behind your sarcasm you deny your subjects the chance to defend themselves.

A couple of days ago, I made a sarcastic comment about this passage from the New York Times. Here is the quote:

The road between the two cultures — science and literature — can go both ways. “Fiction provides a new perspective on what happens in evolution,” said William Flesch, a professor of English at Brandeis University.

To Mr. Flesch fictional accounts help explain how altruism evolved despite our selfish genes. Fictional heroes are what he calls “altruistic punishers,” people who right wrongs even if they personally have nothing to gain. “To give us an incentive to monitor and ensure cooperation, nature endows us with a pleasing sense of outrage” at cheaters, and delight when they are punished, Mr. Flesch argues. We enjoy fiction because it is teeming with altruistic punishers: Odysseus, Don Quixote, Hamlet, Hercule Poirot.

And here are comments to my post by Prof. Flesch.

My problems with Prof. Flesch's statement and more importantly with the NYT article are as follows.

Altruistic punishment has become a bit of a flavor of the month, one of those fashionable ideas that people like to work into conversations and op-ed pieces. Unfortunately this often leads to the ideas being applied where they don't fit or being used as labels for related ideas. This can (and, I would argue, should) prompt greater scrutiny and that scrutiny should always start with the question, is the concept being used correctly?

What are the requirements of altruistic punishment?

The punisher has to proceed knowing that not punishing the offender would produce a better outcome for the punisher. Outcome here needs to be broadly defined to include not only the material but also reproductive and reputational – the loan shark who has a defaulter killed is not engaged in altruistic punishment even though he probably would have collected more from a living customer; he is investing in a reputation that will make future defaults less likely.

To make sure not to confound the problem, researchers often focus on unrelated strangers with whom no future encounters are anticipated.

Altruistic punishment is normally discussed in the context of the evolution of large-scale cooperation. "Unlike other creatures, people frequently cooperate with genetically unrelated strangers, often in large groups, with people they will never meet again, and when reputation gains are small or absent." (Fehr and Gächter) The behavior suggests that individuals are biologically programmed to want to enforce the rules that make complex societies possible.

With all that out of the way, can we reasonably say that Odysseus (or, for that matter, Hamlet or Poirot) is an altruistic punisher?

The mythic world of the Odyssey was small and greatly concerned with reputation and social standing. It was clearly in Odysseus' interest to be seen as a dangerous and vengeful opponent. Acts that enhance that reputation can't really be considered altruistic punishment even if (as with Polyphemus and his father) the acts turn out to be more costly than expected.

It is even more difficult to make the case for altruistic punishment in the killing of the suitors. Here we have a group that has threatened to take his property (material), marry his wife and kill his son (genetic) and humiliate him in the process (reputational). It is the trifecta of self-interest. There was a high potential cost to this act but that alone is not sufficient to make it altruistic punishment. (besides, the consequences were based not only on the deaths of the suitors but also on the loss to those who accompanied him to Troy. He might well have faced an angry mob if he had simply told the suitors to go home.)

I admit my knowledge of the Odyssey is weak and I may well have missed some important aspect that supports the hypothesis that Odysseus was an altruistic punisher and not simply someone who pursued great goals at great costs, but they aren't obvious to the casual reader.

As for the other examples, Don Quixote probably does qualify. Hamlet is more problematic. He is acting in the interest of his father which brings in a genetic component (I'm not sure what the evolutionary psychology implications are of his father being a ghost). There's also a self-preservation aspect (perhaps more obvious in the Amleth version). As for Poirot, both his livelihood and his reputation rely on his ability to solve crimes. There are cases (most notably Curtain) where his goal is clearly altruistic punishment, but in most of his cases there is a clear element of self-interest. You could, however, make a pretty good argument for Lord Peter Whimsey.

And there are certainly examples of altruistic punishment out there. The Count of Monte Cristo is a good fit since there is no apparent material or reproductive gain and most of the revenge is carried out anonymously. Crime fiction also provides numerous protagonists (Lew Archer, Travis McGee, Matt Scudder) who take cases from strangers then continue to pursue them after their clients had stopped paying them. In one book, Scudder went so far as to make a suicide look like a murder then frame the man who was morally responsible for the death.

We could go on (anyone care to make the case for Miss Havisham?) but I don't know what it would accomplish. Like every other imaginable human behavior, altruistic punishment occurs in literature. We can take that as a not very interesting given.

There are cases where analyzing a work in terms of evolutionary psychology can provide real and unique insights. All too often, though, when an idea like altruistic punishment becomes fashionable, juxtaposition often replaces analysis. References to trendy terms like market forces or the prisoner's dilemma are stuck into arguments where they contribute little and often don't even apply (such as trying to use the prisoner's dilemma to describe a stag hunt).

We should always welcome new ideas and cross-pollination, but when we see a headline in the New York Times that starts with the words "Next Big Thing," it's probably a time to be a bit more critical.

(and if I had an issue with an New York Times article, I suppose I should have done more than slam one quote.)