Paul Krugman writes about Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan, and Lawrence Summers, who appeared on the cover of Time in 1999:
Two… have since succumbed to the magazine cover curse, the plunge in reputation that so often follows lionization in the media.
Umm, hey Mr. Krugman… think this might just be regression to the mean? Sports Illustrated knows what I’m talking about. So does your fellow Nobel-in-economics laureate Daniel Kahneman.
According to an article appearing in BMC Psychiatry, 4% of British psychiatrists say that if a patient asked to be “cured” of homosexuality, they would try to do so. And 17% of psychiatrists state that they have previously helped a patient to reduce same-sex attraction. (I almost wrote “tried to help,” but that’s not how it’s worded in the abstract. Perhaps they actually think they were successful.)
In light of the spotted legacy of homosexuality and psychiatric diagnosis, I suppose you could spin this positively and say that we’ve come a long way — 96% of British psychiatrists know better. Still…
(H/T to Scientific American.)
Alan Kazdin and Carlo Rotella have a sensible essay on Slate discussing how to change your child’s problematic behaviors. Key principle: it isn’t enough to punish the bad behavior. You have to find an opposite behavior and reward it.
They also discuss some of the frustrations and challenges of trying to eliminate problem behavior — things like extinction bursts and a tendency of stressed parents to unwittingly engage in variable reinforcement, which entrenches rather than eliminates the behavior.
But part of their sensible answer is: do you really want to bother? I was generally familiar with the learning-theory stuff, but a little surprised at how common many of these behaviors are.
Many unwanted behaviors, including some that disturb parents, tend to drop out on their own, especially if you don’t overreact to them and reinforce them with a great deal of excited attention…
Approximately 60 percent of 4- and 5-year-old boys can’t sit still as long as adults want them to, and approximately 50 percent of 4- and 5-year-old boys and girls whine to the extent that their parents consider it a significant problem. Both fidgeting and whining tend to decrease on their own with age, especially if you don’t reinforce these annoying behaviors by showing your child that they’re a surefire way to get your (exasperated) attention. Thirty to 40 percent of 10- and 11-year-old boys and girls lie in a way that their parents identify as a significant problem, but this age seems to be the peak, and the rate of problem lying tends to plummet thereafter and cease to be an issue. By adolescence, more than 50 percent of males and 20 percent to 35 percent of females have engaged in one delinquent behavior—typically theft or vandalism. For most children, it does not turn into a continuing problem.
Kids!
According to an article at Ars Technica, the faculty at MIT have voted to require that all academic publications be open-access. More specifically, the policy requires that when submitting an article to a journal publisher, authors must grant MIT a license to distribute the work for free, and authors have to provide the publication to the MIT provost. If you want to publish with a journal that refuses to allow open access, you have to submit a written request and get approval from the provost.
I’m all for open public access. But I am also all for academic freedom. When a university dictates where its faculty can publish, that seems to me to set a dangerous precedent. If a university can say that faculty cannot publish in Journal X because the university doesn’t like the journal’s copyright policy, who’s to say that the next step isn’t “Don’t publish in Journal Y because we don’t like their editorial position on [fill in controversial issue here]”?
In her blog at Discover, marine biologist Sheril Kirshenbaum writes about her experiences being judged based on her gender, especially in combination with her age and appearance, rather than her professional qualifications. It’s a great read. Sadly, I’ve heard too many similar tales from female colleagues.
But there’s one thing missing from her story… Who is the household-name scientist who propositioned her? Kirshenbaum doesn’t say, but inquiring (and gossipy) minds want to know. She does write: “I remind[ed] him I have a popular science blog and warn never to call back.”
Am I a terrible, awful person because a small part of me wants him to call back?
I just read a very interesting Salon interview with Alva Noe. Noe is a philosopher who has a new book out, titled Out of Our Heads: Why Your Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness.
In the interview, Noe argues that many attempts by neuroscientists to explain consciousness are misguided. He stipulates that understanding the brain is necessary for understanding consciousness. But understanding the brain is not sufficient. Thus, he takes exception to statements like the following from Francis Crick:
You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.
At the outset of the interview, I wondered if Noe was going in the direction of fuzzy, anti-scientific holism. But that was not the case at all. When Noe says that the brain is necessary but not sufficient for consciousness, he is arguing for a rigorous scientific approach to studying the mind, but one that takes a fundamentally different view of what consciousness is. To Noe, consciousness is irreducibly about the relationship between the brain and the outside world. That “irreducibly” is key. It’s not just enough for neuroscientists to say, “Well, yeah, I’ve got stimuli in my fMRI designs.” In accounting for conscious experience, you have to go deeper.
The core of Noe’s argument reminds me a lot of the early conflict in psychology between structuralists and functionalists. The structuralists believed that if you want to understand some aspect of mind, you needed to break it down into its lower-level constituent pieces. The functionalists believed that to understand an aspect of the mind, you needed to understand how it relates to the organism and its environment. So, for example, a structuralist might study emotions by trying to identify components of emotion: stimulus, appraisal, physiological response, expressive behavior, etc. And in modern times, many structuralists try to understand emotions by understanding the interactions of brain networks. By contrast, a functionalist might study emotions by asking what does and does not trigger them, how emotions relate to the individual’s goals and beliefs, and how an emotion can change an organism’s relationship with its environment.
The structuralism-functionalism debate was a contentious one in the early days of psychology. If you think the obvious answer is “you need to do both,” you’re right, but only trivially so. It’s easy to pay lip service; but in practice, it’s a challenge to do research and formulate theories in a way that doesn’t hew to one or the other approach. Many neuroscientists would repudiate overt expressions of greedy reductionism, but they approach conscious experience like structuralists. This approach leads to hidden assumptions that affect how they set their agenda and formulate their theories. And occasionally the hidden assumptions are not so well hidden, like in the Crick quote above, or when misguided neuroscientists assume a direct, invariant relationship between physiological activity and mental experience. (To wit: “they exhibited high levels of activity in the part of the brain called the amygdala, indicating anxiety.” Seriously?)
So although it’s easy to say “you need to do both,” it’s a hell of a lot harder to actually do both in a smart way. The interview mostly focuses on how Noe thinks that neuroscientists are doing things wrong. I’m curious to see whether his book has good ideas about how to do it right.
A new rule under consideration by the FTC (see also here) will require that ads with customer testimonials show typical results, not just best-case outcomes.
Of course, following best practices in data visualization would mean you should show the central tendency and the variability (in all directions). I’m not holding my breath for density plots on the nightly news, though. A single, typical exemplar would still be an improvement over a single, cherrypicked extreme.
However… Maybe I’m too jaded, but I wonder about unintended consequences. For example, will there be a flood of crappy research after this rule? If companies are required to depict “typical” results, they may churn out poorly designed studies to get the numbers they want, hoping to lend more credibility to bogus products. And if these studies are marketed as “scientific” and then easily (and publicly) disputed, that could feed into kneejerk cynicism in the public about science more broadly.
Consider that FDA clinical trials are one of the most highly regulated forms of research around, with numerous checks and balances designed to ensure integrity. The system mostly works, but there are still serious concerns about conflicts of interest. How well is the FTC going to ensure the quality of research on consumer products, herbal supplements, diet plans, and the like? Will there be independent investigators, peer review, mandatory publication of negative results, etc.?
Is there an epidemic of narcissism? Maybe so, maybe not — but it’s certainly becoming fashionable to call people narcissists.
At Slate, Emily Yoffe writes, “This is the cultural moment of the narcissist.” She’s certainly doing her part — the article names plenty of putative narcissists. Called out by Yoffe or her sources: Harvard MBAs, Arnold Schwarzenegger, John Edwards, journalists who twitter, Rod Blagojevich, the Octomom, Leona Helmsley, Bill Clinton, Ingmar Bergman, Frank Lloyd Wright, Stanley Kubrick, and Salvador Dali. (Plus we get a bonus diagnosis: Bernie Madoff is a psychopath.)
Yoffe’s article draws on Jean Twenge’s theory that a cultural shift is causing an increase in narcissism among younger generations. The article doesn’t mention that Twenge’s data and interpretations are disputed, which has led to a lively and at times contentious debate. But rather than discuss that controversy head-on (maybe some other time), I want to address a different though related issue:
Why is it becoming fashionable to label other people as narcissists?
One answer, of course, would be that if Twenge is right, then there are more narcissists around to be noticed. But I don’t think that could be the whole picture. The generational theory wouldn’t explain most of the examples named in the article, who are too old to qualify as “Generation Me.”
Another possibility, I think, comes in a way from flipping Twenge’s argument on its head. Twenge argues that (among other influences) social media like Youtube, Facebook, etc. help make people narcissistic by giving them an outlet and an audience to cultivate their self-aggrandizing impulses. But I think it’s important to also consider the ways that new technology makes people accountable. If I boast on Facebook about how cool I was in high school, the firsthand witnesses will call me out right there on my wall. If I claim a raft of prestigious achievements, anybody can use Google to quickly check the facts (and forward them to their friends). In short: the Internet may allow narcissists to reach a wider audience for their boasts, but it has also led to some spectacular takedowns. The takedowns can get more publicity than the original material, in the process putting narcissism on the map.
Oh, and as an aside, this passage from Yoffe’s article irritates me to no small degree:
Personality disorders … differ from the major mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia and manic-depression, which are believed to have a biological origin. Personality disorders are seen as a failure of character development.
False dichotomy FAIL.
Or maybe you could just ease the tenure requirements a bit. Yeah, that’ll fly.
In today’s NYT, Nicholas Kristof writes about the implications of people choosing their own media sources. His argument: traditional newspapers present people with a wide spectrum of objective reporting. But when people choose their own news sources, they’ll gravitate toward voices that agree with their own ideology.
Along the way, Kristof sort of references research on confirmation bias and group polarization, though he doesn’t call them that, and weirdly he credits Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein for discovering group polarization.
But my main thought is this… Neither confirmation bias nor group polarization are new phenomena. Is it really true that people used to read and think about a broad spectrum of news and opinion? Or are we mis-remembering a supposedly golden era of objective reporting? Back when most big towns had multiple newspapers, you could pick the one that fit your ideology. You could subscribe to The Nation or National Review. You could buy books by Gore Vidal or William F. Buckley.
Plus, confirmation bias isn’t just about what information you choose to consume — it’s also about what you pay attention to, how you interpret it, and what you remember. Did everybody watch Murrow and Cronkite in the same way? Or did a liberal and a conservative watching the same newscast have a qualitatively different experience of it, by virtue of what they brought to the table?
No doubt things have changed a whole heck of a lot in the media, and they’re going to change a lot more. But I’m skeptical whenever I hear somebody argue that society is in decline because of some technological or cultural change. It’s a common narrative, but one that might be more poorly supported than we think.