This tickles several of my happy places (via Will), and while I could quibble with some details of the account of the etymology of "fair" -- e.g. that the aesthetic origins of "fair" and "foul", if you go all the way back to the Middle Ages, can tell you a lot about the origins of morality and shouldn't be ignored -- the whole thing is pretty good ( Read more... )

"If you throw money at an effect and it doesn't get larger, that means it's not real."
-- Wolfgang Panofsky

I've said before that drug companies owe much of their profitability to their spectacular marketing departments, but have perhaps not emphasized enough that this is true on almost every level of decision-making between development and consumption; people make a big deal about DTC ads, but that's perhaps the least insidious route. Far, far more ( Read more... )

I'm used to the low buzz of annoyance that I get from reading about bad theory in the social sciences -- especially in "hot" fields like hedonics, decision-making, and moral judgment -- but reading this gee-whiz article (via tdj) on some recent work in moral psychology evoked the kind of visceral resentment that comes from being acutely disappointed ( Read more... )

This here has got to be the most gloriously confusing op-ed I've read in a long while (via simonoff). I mean, let's just look at the by-line for a start: it's as if Paul Wolfowitz and Jeffrey Sachs managed to set aside their differences and team up with Bill Gates to advocate micro-lending as a solution to third world poverty. Three people of disparate ( Read more... )

John hits on yet another problem while riffing off the latest paper looking at recent regional adaptation in humans:
Imagine if you had a sample of men and women, and you chose an arbitrary cutoff of stature to distinguish them. Say, everyone over 5 foot 7 is a man. Well, that will do better than chance, but you've included a lot of women in your ( Read more... )

In an earlier post I explained how genomic association studies run into a special case of the Birthday Problem in identifying genes mediating variance on complex traits. But there's a second problem they run into as well, which is analogous to the Winner's Curse in auction theory: in a silent auction where none of the bidders are sure just what the ( Read more... )

Say you're doing a genome scan of ~500K SNPs, looking for alleles associated with Syndrome X. Assuming the test you're using has a statistical resolution that allows for p-values of 1%, ~5K sites can still be expected to come up positive purely by chance. Even with a 0.01% threshold, you can expect 50 associations purely by chance, even if there ( Read more... )

"False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutory pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path towards error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened ( Read more... )

Nassim Taleb on civil servants:
"It's totally irresponsible to make people rely on you without telling them you're incompetent."
The article has a few other funny nuggets of wisdom, and a few characteristic eye-rollers. I like Taleb because he's really a philosopher in the old sense that Diogenes and Epicurus were: they don't merely propound ( Read more... )