Books I've Read in the Past Couple of Years

Not even halfway to an exhaustive list, but these are highly recommended:

More Good Music

Sucre, "When We Were Young." Sucre is a side project with Stacy DuPree-King of Eisley, her husband Darren King of MuteMath, and Jeremy Larson. Just lovely.



Wolf Gang, "The King and All Of His Men"



The Temper Trap, "Sweet Disposition"



Death Cab for Cutie, "Meet Me On the Equinox"



Taylor Swift and the Civil Wars, "Safe and Sound"



Brandon Flowers, "Crossfire"

A Useful Quote for Social Scientists

A less profound application of the less-is-more principle is to our habits of reporting numerical results. There are computer programs that report by default four, five, or even more decimal places for all numerical results. Their authors might well be excused because, for all the programmer knows, they maybe used by atomic scientists. 

But we social scientists should know better than to report our results to so many places. What, pray, does an r = .12345 mean? or, for an IQ distribution, a mean of 105.6345? For N = 100, the standard error of the r is about .1 and the standard error of the IQ mean about 1.5. Thus, the 345 part of r = .12345 is only 3% of its standard error, and the 345 part of the IQ mean of 105.6345 is only 2% of its standard error. These superfluous decimal places are no better than random numbers. Theyare actually worse than useless because the clutter they create, particularly in tables, serves to distract the eye and mind from the necessary comparisons among the meaningful leading digits. Less is indeed more here.

Jacob Cohen, Things I Have Learned (So Far), American Psychologist 45 no. 12 (1990): 1304-12.

New Music

Keane's forthcoming album seems very promising, from the sound of the new video (below), which returns to the melodic piano-based pop sound of their first two albums. Tom's voice sounds stronger than ever.

 

 Nick Pitera, whose day job is animation with Pixar, has an amazingly versatile voice, as shown by his performance of selections from Phantom of the Opera (and no, he's not lip-syncing the female voice):
 

Switchfoot, which I've liked since 2000's "Learning to Breathe, has a new album, and they're even playing here locally in a couple of weeks. May have to catch that one.

 

 Other new stuff I've liked:

 Animal Kingdom, "Strange Attractor":
 

 The Shins, "Simple Song":
 

 Young the Giant, "Apartment":

 

 Pentatonix, "Somebody That I Used to Know" (remake of Gotye/Kimbra):

The China Study: Invalid from the Start

I recently read one of the most famous books defending veganism: The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted And the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss, And Long-term Health. The title of the book derives from a massive nutritional study carried out in China, the original of which I procured as well (Junshi et al., Diet, Life-style, and Mortality in China: A study of the characteristics of 65 Chinese counties, Oxford Univ. Press, 1990).

The "China Study" has been amply criticized elsewhere, but I wanted to highlight one criticism that, to my mind, is fatal.

Here's what Colin Campbell and his co-authors did when they studied China (for more details, see here and here). They started with county-by-county death rates from some 2,400 Chinese counties in 1973-75. They then went to China 10 years later in 1983 and 1984, whereupon they visited 65 selected counties out of 2,400.

In each county, they picked 100 people randomly and tested their blood ("Diet," p. 9). They gave three-day diet surveys to 30 families in each county (p. 16). At the end of all this, they came up with 367 different variables about mortality, urine and blood characteristics, diet, etc.

They originally published this research in the Junshi et al. book mentioned above. Roughly 800 of this book's 894 pages consist of listing each variable one by one, along with that variable's correlation with every other variable. One can hardly imagine anything more tedious and useless, except perhaps for this spoof:

FORTHCOMING WORKS BY DR. BOLI.  

Dr. Boli’s Handy Table of Computations. Every number in the world added to, subtracted from, multiplied by, and divided by every other number, with complete operations shown, for the benefit of students of mathematics. The largest and most comprehensive work of its kind. Now available: Vol. 1, “1, Part 1.”

Tediousness is the least of the China Study's faults, however. We all know that correlation is not causation, but the China Study doesn't even rise to the level of producing meaningful correlations in the first place.

This is because of the ecological fallacy. This fallacy lies in attributing characteristics to an individual when all you know is information about a group that he belongs to. For example, Alabama is more likely to vote Republican than Massachusetts. Alabama also has more black people than Massachusetts. But it would be completely wrong to conclude that black people are Republicans. Within both Alabama and Massachusetts, black people are more likely to vote Democratic than white people. And that's what matters if you're trying to predict how individual people will vote.

So go back to the China Study. They purported to find, for example, that liver cancer was inversely related to blood cholesterol (see The China Study book, p. 78). It would be one thing if the China Study authors were claiming to have tested liver cancer patients and to have found high cholesterol levels. That wouldn't show anything about what causes liver cancer, of course: perhaps liver cancer causes high cholesterol, perhaps there's a third factor that causes both liver cancer and high cholesterol, or perhaps people who are prone to liver cancer are also prone to have high cholesterol for completely separate reasons.

But all of that is beside the point, because there isn't any genuine correlation between liver cancer and high cholesterol in the first place. The researchers didn't test the blood of anyone who died of liver cancer (or anything else, for that matter). The death rates all come from 1973-75, a full decade before the researchers went around testing different people's blood. All that the researchers really found was that if there's a Chinese county with a high liver cancer death rate in 1973-75, and if you go there 10 years later to test the blood of people who almost certainly don't have liver cancer and who are up to four decades younger than those who died in the 1970s, you might find high cholesterol levels.

This is about as valid as a study finding that because I can run a marathon, and because my grandmother died from breast cancer a little over 10 years ago, marathons are correlated with breast cancer.  (The new bestselling book: "The Marathon Study: Why Running Endangers Your Health.").  

It's a bit sad. For all of the effort and good intentions of the researchers, the China Study isn't even relevant. It certainly isn't a reason to advise people to do anything different about their diet.

A Lovely Bach Piece

One of my favorite Bach pieces: Cantata No. 54, written for today (3rd Sunday of Lent). Here, it's played by Glenn Gould and chamber orchestra, with introductory comments by Gould himself:

Good Quote on Multitasking

From Peter Bregman, 18 Minutes:

Our minds move considerably faster than the outside world. You can hear far more words a minute than someone else can speak. We have so much to do, why waste any time? While you're on the phone listening to someone, why not use that extra brainpower to book a trip to Florence?

What we neglect to realize is that we're already using that brainpower to pick up nuance, think about what we're hearing access our creativity, and stay connected to what's happening around us. What we neglect to realize is that it's not extra brainpower. It may be imperceptible, but it's all being used, right then and there, in the moment. And diverting it has negative consequences.

All of us can probably recognize the following experience: you're talking to someone on the phone, and you suddenly realize that he is checking his email or browsing a webpage or doing something else. How do you know? Because he stops responding normally (e.g., he says "yeah" or "right" at the wrong times or with too much delay). Whoever you're talking to probably thinks that he can multitask just fine, but you know otherwise, because the conversation suddenly feels like it's going nowhere.

If you can tell when someone else is multitasking during a conversation, it's probably a good idea not to try it yourself.

How Economic Specialization Led to the Welfare State

A smart bit of analysis of economic history:

Something I haven't seen mentioned in any economics text I've read -- book, article, blog post, etc. -- is why the welfare state, in some form or other, always pops up when people begin to specialize.

It is not some far-off side effect of specialization that gave birth to the welfare state, but the very fact of specializing more and more narrowly in our job tasks.

How Much Does Testing Cost?

From Douglas Harris' book "Value-Added Measures in Education," p. 203:

"Currently, less than 2 percent of current K-12 expenditures go to fund the entire state and federal systems of standards, assessments, and accountability, and switching from tests now in use to IB tests, for example, would increase costs from $15 to $34 per student to $113 to $161 per student."

A Trivia Quiz for Dogs

Inspired by Dr. Boli (see here and here), here is a trivia quiz for your dog:

1. Who was the American author of The Morning After and Last Night in Paradise?
2. Who was the Danish pietist preacher who died in 1738?
3. Who was the French author of La vie et la passion de Dodin-Bouffant, gourmet (translation: The Passionate Epicure)?
4. Who was the President of Germany from 2010 to 2012?
5. Who has been described as “most eminent German philosopher between Leibniz and Kant”?
6. What is the common English name for the wading bird Philomachus pugnax?

ANSWERS AFTER THE BREAK: 
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