Dakryn's Batshit Theory of the Week

http://qz.com/527844/im-a-phillips-and-even-i-dont-trust-the-phillips-curve/

As a Phillips, I take little pleasure in saying this. But all curves—Phillips included—are economic models. And economic models, as we’ve written before, are always wrong.

Don’t take it from me. Take it from Nobel Prize-winning economist Lars Hansen, who said this in a discussion on the terrific Econtalk podcast.

Models are always wrong. It seems kind of strange to hear that initially, but there is a sense in which models are simplifications; they are abstractions. And they are wrong.
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Was reading an article on autism Land linked to at SSC, and then it linked to this, which was just as interesting as a sort of a confirmation of my bias:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biology-is-mutable/

Society is really hard to change. We figured drug use was “just” a social problem, and it’s obvious how to solve social problems, so we gave kids nice little lessons in school about how you should Just Say No. There were advertisements in sports and video games about how Winners Don’t Do Drugs. And just in case that didn’t work, the cherry on the social engineering sundae was putting all the drug users in jail, where they would have a lot of time to think about what they’d done and be so moved by the prospect of further punishment that they would come clean.

And that is why, even to this day, nobody uses drugs.

On the other hand, biology is gratifyingly easy to change. Sometimes it’s just giving people more iron supplements. But the best example is lead. Banning lead was probably kind of controversial at the time, but in the end some refineries probably had to change their refining process and some gas stations had to put up “UNLEADED” signs and then we were done. And crime dropped like fifty percent in a couple of decades – including many forms of drug abuse.

Saying “Tendency toward drug abuse is primarily determined by fixed brain structure” sounds callous, like you’re abandoning drug abusers to die. But maybe it means you can fight the problem head-on instead of forcing kids to attend more and more useless classes where cartoon animals sing about how happy they are not using cocaine.

What about obesity? We put a lot of social effort into fighting obesity: labeling foods, banning soda machines from school, banning large sodas from New York, programs in schools to promote healthy eating, doctors chewing people out when they gain weight, the profusion of gyms and Weight Watchers programs, and let’s not forget a level of stigma against obese people so strong that I am constantly having to deal with their weight-related suicide attempts. As a result, everyone…keeps gaining weight at exactly the same rate they have been for the past couple decades. Wouldn’t it be nice if increasing obesity was driven at least in part by changes in the intestinal microbiota that we could reverse through careful antibiotic use? Or by trans-fats?

What about poor school performance? From the social angle, we try No Child Left Behind, Common Core Curriculum, stronger teachers’ unions, weaker teachers’ unions, more pay for teachers, less pay for teachers, more prayer in school, banning prayer in school, condemning racism, condemning racism even more, et cetera. But the poorest fifth or so of kids show spectacular cognitive gains from multivitamin supplementation, and doctors continue to tell everyone schools should start later so children can get enough sleep and continue to be totally ignored despite strong evidence in favor.
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Makes sense SA is a psychiatrist (or at least claims to be). Seems to be a particular outlook that attracts people to the field of psychology.
 
Einherjar86 said:
If biology is the problem, then why would psychologists be necessary?
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Well if you perceived psychology as a Freudian profession, it wouldn't be necessary. ;)

Of course, psych hasn't done itself any favors with making nearly everything potentially a "disorder", but there's a need for people to provide real talk or to "smash some mirrors". But people don't want that, they want their Prozac and Xanax. Or they want a politician to announce some new program, of the reform of some old program that will fix all their/our problems.
 
Good share from Land:

http://evonomics.com/the-real-power-of-free-markets-not-efficiency-but-innovation-and-dumb-luck/

The market mechanism is loosely efficient. But the idea that efficiency is the main virtue of free markets is wrong. Competition itself is highly inefficient. In my home town, I can buy food from about eight different places; I’m sure this system could be much more ‘efficient’ if Waitrose, M&S and Lidl were forcibly merged into one huge ‘Great Grocery Hall of The People No. 1306’. I am equally confident that after a few initial years of success, the shop would be terrible. […] The missing metric here is semi-random variation. Truly free markets trade efficiency for a costly process of market-tested innovation heavily reliant on dumb luck. The reason this inefficient process is necessary is that, though we pretend otherwise, no one knows anything about anything: most of the achievements of consumer capitalism were never planned; they are explicable only in retrospect, if at all.
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I would say the point is to expand the definition of "efficiency" beyond the scope of single enterprises or annual reports. Evolution is efficient in a way that doesn't reduce to a single organism or even species. Economics can be thought of in this way, but it requires expanding the framework of efficiency. And as the author says, we can only really identify efficiency at that scale in retrospect.
 
http://savageminds.org/2015/11/23/the-ruination-of-written-words/

What got me thinking about the ruination of written words is Stephen Greenblatt’s fascinating (if uneven) book The Swerve, which narrates how in 1417 a book-hunter discovered Lucretius’ The Nature of Things in a remote monastery. In my book Rubble, I examined how different forms of ruination, from the Spanish conquest to the soy boom, have created constellations of nodes of rubble in northern Argentina, many of which are perceived by locals to be haunted (Gordillo 2014). I therefore read The Swerve with an eye sensitive to the destruction of places and matter and the affective materiality of their debris. The richness conveyed by Greenblatt’s story of the vanishing of Roman books reveals that the physical disintegration and afterlives of rubble also involve the written word, which in the modern world is often presented as an emblem of human endurance.
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I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.

- John Adams

Looks like things are coming full circle. No end of history for a perpetual poet class.
 


Outside of the present day hatred for Islam, the historical impact of both 'religious' peoples is pretty interesting (including Jews with Christians)
 
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