Letters Remain

  • Workforce Cuts vs. Wage Cuts

    As part of the excellent Lectures on Macroeconomics series, Arnold Kling discusses why companies tend to cuts jobs rather than wages in times of hardship. The core arguments:

    Cutting wages is not standard practice, therefore:

    • The best workers will leave and seek better opportunities: it’s better to choose which workers to lose.
    • Wage cuts demoralise, harming productivity.

    However, there are rare circumstances that call for wage cuts:

    • There is general deflation. Cuts will “keep wages from rising relative to prices and productivity”.
    • A major sectoral decline requires it, in order to help maintain employment.

    It’s interesting to note that, according to a recent survey, the primary concern for 69% of American workers is keeping their job, yet only 17% would be willing to take a pay cut to keep their job.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Misunderstanding and Rethinking Expertise

    The public’s distrust of scientific experts has been growing in recent years, as is worryingly evident with subjects such as Creationism and particle physics (think: the LHC)—but why is this happening? Harry Collins and Robert Evans, sociologists at my alma mater, Cardiff University, believe it has to do with a “misunderstanding of expertise itself”. They talk about what determines an ‘expert’, different ‘types’ of expertise and the main concepts of their theory in the book Rethinking Expertise and in these excellent interviews:

    Scientists Know Better Than You—Even When They’re Wrong: why fallible expertise trumps armchair science.

    The key to the whole thing is whether people have had access to the tacit knowledge of an esoteric area—tacit knowledge is know-how that you can’t express in words. The standard example is knowing how to ride a bike. My view as a sociologist is that expertise is located in more or less specialized social groups. If you want to know what counts as secure knowledge in a field like gravitational wave detection, you have to become part of the social group. Being immersed in the discourse of the specialists is the only way to keep up with what is at the cutting edge.

    What is an expert, and how can we assess the advice of others?

    It is vital to preserve the separate spheres of the technical and the political. In practice this can never be achieved, but if we don’t try we will destroy the very idea of science and of expertise as a whole. I would say that the danger to democracy that my own discipline—social studies of science—is not doing enough to combat is the collapse of the idea of expertise.

    The expertise project’s Publications page contains a wealth of excellent information on the subject (including sample chapters from the book)—well worth a look if you’re interested in this topic.

    via Mind Hacks

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Trends in Counterfeit Currency

    Bruce Schneier comments on the growing prevalence of low-tech currency counterfeiting: “Counterfeits are becoming easier to detect while people are becoming less skilled in detecting it”.

    Part of the problem, Green said, is that the government has changed the money so much to foil counterfeiting. With all the new bills out there, citizens and even many police officers don’t know what they’re supposed to look like.

    Moreover, many people see paper money less because they use credit or debit cards.

    The result: Ink-jet counterfeiting accounted for 60 percent of $103 million in fake money removed from circulation from October 2007 to August 2008, the Secret Service reports. In 1995, the figure was less than 1 percent.

    It seems the EURion constellation isn’t doing its job well enough.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Corruption in the (Legal) Drug Trade

    Marcia Angell reviews three books for The New York Review of Books and in the process creates an article that acts like an in-depth primer on the whole sordid business of “fraud, undisclosed payments, data burying and off-label promotion that pervades the pharmaceutical industry”.

    Like David Balan on Overcoming Bias, I felt this was the most damning admission in the article, especially coming from a person who spent 20 years as editor of the New England Journal of Medicine:

    The problems I’ve discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.

    This isn’t the first time Marcia Angell has written such a piece for the publication: she did so with the equally fascinating The Truth About the Drug Companies in 2004.

    Update: In the latest instalment of its ‘…in 100 words’ series the (closed access) British Journal of Psychiatry has tackled this exact issue, if not in a slightly more concise form. To read the article visit Mind Hacks‘ Psychiatry and Big Pharma – in 100 Words.

    via Mind Hacks

    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Power of Your Smallest Finger

    I completely forgot about this article on the astonishing power of your little finger until David’s post reminded me of its existence (and the most surprising fact therein).

    So what would you lose if you didn’t have one?

    “You’d lose 50 percent of your hand strength, easily…”

    via Seed

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Short Introduction to Molecular Gastronomy

    A (very) short introduction to molecular gastronomy, by Jonah Lehrer for The Boston Globe. In the graphic four tips are shared which we can all add to our culinary repertoires right away (if you haven’t already):

    • Don’t fret about salting meat
    • For juicy meats, don’t sear: you’re evaporating the juices.
    • Pasta sticking together? Don’t add oil, add something acidic.
    • Season with salt: it makes food smell better (and therefore taste better).

    For more molecular gastronomy, check out Khymos: a website dedicated to ‘molecular gastronomy and the science of cooking’. The Khymos blog is good, too!

    via Seed

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Richard Dawkins and Derren Brown on Psychics

    For the documentary The Enemies of Reason the ‘psychological illusionist’ Derren Brown gets interviewed by Richard Dawkins, and the two discuss psychics and the techniques they use (e.g. Forer—or Barnum—effects).

    This hour-long ‘uncut’* interview also covers Derren’s fascinating account of moving from faith to scepticism to atheism: definitely worth a watch, even if you already know most of the cold reading (and hot reading) techniques used.

    *Apart from the odd occasion, the entire interview is filmed by one camera and as one long take. Even more pleasing is the fact that the whole thing is completely devoid of ‘noddy shots‘.

    via Seed

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • How to Do What You Love

    Paul Graham, he of Y Combinator fame, offers up some learned and insightful advice on how to do what you love.

    What you should not do […] is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. You shouldn’t worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world. When you can ask the opinions of people whose judgement you respect, what does it add to consider the opinions of people you don’t even know?

    This is easy advice to give. It’s hard to follow, especially when you’re young. Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.

    via Link Banana

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Advice on Being a Consultant

    Consultant Steve Friedl offers some fantastic advice on being a consultant. I found this comment interesting:

    I purposely put the technical part of this Tech Tip last, to reinforce the notion that “customer service”, not “computer science” skills are the biggest factors in a successful consulting practice. But it’s foolish to think that technical skills don’t matter: you don’t have a business unless you can offer a service that a customer is willing to buy.

    What counts here is truly learning the subject matter.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Contagion of Happiness

    In a 20-year study of almost 5,000 people it was found that happiness is more contagious than previously thought.

    While there are many determinants of happiness, whether an individual is happy also depends on whether others in the individual’s social network are happy. Happy people tend to be located in the centre of their local social networks and in large clusters of other happy people. The happiness of an individual is associated with the happiness of people up to three degrees removed in the social network. Happiness, in other words, is not merely a function of individual experience or individual choice but is also a property of groups of people. Indeed, changes in individual happiness can ripple through social networks and generate large scale structure in the network, giving rise to clusters of happy and unhappy individuals. These results are even more remarkable considering that happiness requires close physical proximity to spread and that the effect decays over time.

    The New York Times covers the findings, producing two typically elegant graphics to display some of the fascinating results (for example, it was found that a neighbour’s mood effects your happiness drastically more than a cohabiting spouse’s).

    The authors of the study—who evidently specialise in social network analysis—have previously found that both obesity and quitting smoking are socially contagious; but should we really be inferring these “network effect” conclusions?

    Another article, printed in the same issue of the British Medical Journal, uses the same research design to show how it can lead to conclusions that disappear once environmental confounders are controlled—in this case finding that height, headaches, and acne are contagious, when this conclusion is evidently a confusion between correlation and causation.

    via Mind Hacks

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    Lloyd Morgan