6 ms·

Freakonomics etc made us fall in love with that particular kind of story where the outcome is kinda counter-intuitive and surprising and clever all at the same

by J-dawg 8y ago

Freakonomics etc made us fall in love with that particular kind of story where the outcome is kinda counter-intuitive and surprising and clever all at the same time. For example - the legalised abortion and crime effect. I'm sure you can think of plenty more. I think these stories are like crack to "rational" people. They have all the thrill of a good conspiracy theory, feel rebellious and anti-establishment, yet they're backed up by "real science". And you get to sound clever when you tell your friends about them. I know I'm a sucker for them.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
smogcutter 8y ago
See also: anything by Malcolm Gladwell
ellius 8y ago
I think "pattern addiction" is definitely a thing. Human beings are constantly searching for order and patterns. Getting other people to buy into your pattern/narrative/whatever is probably as old as the human race, but in the last 100-150 years we've gotten really fucking good at tricking each other on a massive scale. I think this is why people seem to intuitively understand that political media manipulation, advertising, junk science, etc. are related phenomena. They're all about hijacking the pattern recognition capacity of human beings for personal gain. It's essentially a form of parasitism.
colechristensen 8y ago
>feel rebellious and anti-establishment I wonder what this is and why it is so prevalent (and maybe how it made our species/specific cultures successful). You can list a large number of groups that wrap up their identity and value systems around being opposed to or having knowledge that counters their perception of "the majority". It is both incredibly attractive and a way to signal your value by going against the grain in some way or another, in some field or another. Some philosopher/pyschologist/neurologist/evolutionary biologist could probably do a very compelling analysis about the human need to rebel or obey. One of the societal ills of the 21st century is that we're running out of big clear cut things to rebel against but are continuing to rebel with the same intensity while directing it somewhat aimlessly all over the place, and now mostly just at each other's rebellion itself. Political parties in America these days are less anchored in particular issues and more about believing strongly in something your opponent is against and making sure your team wins.
- johnzhou 8y ago
  "I rebel — therefore we exist." - Albert Camus
- joe_the_user 8y ago
  "One of the societal ills of the 21st century is that we're running out of big clear cut things to rebel against but are continuing to rebel with the same intensity while directing it somewhat aimlessly all over the place, and now mostly just at each other's rebellion itself." Yeah but the key phrase is clear cut. We have plenty of big institutions and one can see them do terrible things. It's just they fade into each and so challenging a single one becomes a dubious interest. Health care is a mess but blaming say, insurance companies in particular, is problematic. The environment and global warming are huge problems but blaming single institutions misses the point, etc. Moreover, large institutions are adept at harnessing issues-as-social-signal and directing them according to their interests. One can fight all this but such a fight doesn't follow the path of least resistance. And boy, are people trained, today, to follow that path, whether in rebellion or conformity.
  - colechristensen 8y ago
    What we have are complex problems instead of simple ones. For example, slavery up to 150 years ago vs. segregation up to 50 years ago vs. subtle often unconscious racism today.+ Fighting to abolish slavery is a lot simpler than fighting for racial equality. It is not that there are not problems, but there are not so many obvious problems with obvious solutions today. + I'm trying to make a broad point here not perfectly depict the history of racism in America, forgive any unjust implications
    - joe_the_user 8y ago
      Stopping global warming seems very simple - just limit C02 production. The main thing is institutions are complex and so even simple change requires complex processes.
      - 8y ago
mywittyname 8y ago
The books were more about finding common patterns and behaviors among seemingly disparate markets than exploring counter-intuitive outcomes. Like how you can spot cheating by looking at whether latter outcomes match former. There's only really one chapter about counter-intuitive outcomes, and that's the one on parents and education, and that's not even counter-intuitive.
kwillets 8y ago
These stories become like memes that get reposted over and over. There was a "study" about drug testing welfare applicants in Florida a few years ago where the authors claimed that it only caught a handful of people and cost more than the money saved. I looked up the numbers and found that applications took a historic plunge when the law went into effect, and an equally large increase after the law was suspended. It was a huge multi-stage funnel where the study only looked at one stage after thousands of applicants had already self-selected for drug-freeness. Applications went down by thousands, and payouts by millions. Basically if you hired a data scientist who told you this about some funnel you were analyzing, like a purchase or sign-up flow, you would fire this person within five minutes. But people repeated this gotcha story everywhere.
- sjg007 8y ago
  Citation?
  - kwillets 8y ago
    https://www.kolotv.com/home/headlines/1597_Welfare_Applicants_Decline_Drug_Test_in_Fla_131555628.html https://www.kolotv.com/home/headlines/1597_Welfare_Applicant...
    - sjg007 8y ago
      This does not support your claim.
  - VintageCool 8y ago
    I found a reference that 1600 applicants declined the mandatory testing from July-October 2011. Meanwhile 7000 applicants underwent testing, of which 1% failed. I haven't been able to find monthly figures for before, during, and after -- so I, too, would like to see kwillet's data.
    - kwillets 8y ago
      http://fga.wpengine.com/2011/10/floridas-drug-test-law-for-welfare-cash-assistance-first-quarter-facts-2/ http://fga.wpengine.com/2011/10/floridas-drug-test-law-for-w... This is heavily slanted, but I believe their numbers are factual.
diminoten 8y ago
You say all that like there's a better way of learning about how the world works that doesn't involve getting another university degree...
wnevets 8y ago
>For example - the legalised abortion and crime effect. I'm sure you can think of plenty more. source on why this is shoddy science?
- ajtulloch 8y ago
  e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_effect#2001_Donohue_and_Levitt_study https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_e... or https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2005/12/01/oops-onomics https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2005/12/01/o... > It was a good test to attempt. But Messrs Foote and Goetz have inspected the authors' computer code and found the controls missing. In other words, Messrs Donohue and Levitt did not run the test they thought they had—an “inadvertent but serious computer programming error”, according to Messrs Foote and Goetz. > Fixing that error reduces the effect of abortion on arrests by about half, using the original data, and two-thirds using updated numbers. But there is more. In their flawed test, Messrs Donohue and Levitt seek to explain arrest totals (eg, the 465 Alabamans of 18 years of age arrested for violent crime in 1989), not arrest rates per head (ie, 6.6 arrests per 100,000). This is unsatisfactory, because a smaller cohort will obviously commit fewer crimes in total. Messrs Foote and Goetz, by contrast, look at arrest rates, using passable population estimates based on data from the Census Bureau, and discover that the impact of abortion on arrest rates disappears entirely. “I am simply not convinced that there is a link between abortion and crime,” Mr Foote says.
  - wnevets 8y ago
    >In 2005 Levitt posted a rebuttal to these criticisms on the Freakanomics weblog, in which he re-ran his numbers to address the shortcomings and variables missing from the original study. The new results are nearly identical to those of the original study. Levitt posits that any reasonable use of the data available reinforces the results of the original 2001 paper.[10] >The effect of legalized abortion reported by Donohue and Levitt (2001) is largely unaffected, so that abortion accounts for a 29% decline in violent crime (elasticity 0.23), and similar declines in murder and property crime. Overall, the phase-out of lead and the legalization of abortion appear to have been responsible for significant reductions in violent crime rates." According to your link it doesn't appear to be shobby science.
emodendroket 8y ago
The Tipping Point came out five years earlier. Also, I think it's important to note that these stories are not actually anti-establishment, even if they have such an appearance; they don't offend any powerful interests. In fact, they're often quite the opposite (consider that Malcolm Gladwell wrote an entire book arguing that being disabled or growing up poor or whatever else is actually an advantage! The people most likely to take exception to that thesis do not have bylines in the New York Times, nor do they have the editor's personal phone number)
SZJX 8y ago
Indeed many of the exact claims are not to be trusted, though on the other hand keeping this sort of mentality/thinking framework when analyzing the world around us can still be helpful. Putting it as a "conspiracy theory, rebellious and anti-establishment" is really quite a mischaracterization. I'd say quite the contrary, those who sit at the top of the society, of the "establishment", definitely think in very different manners than the population. We all know we need to look beyond what's being mass produced and fed to people on the surface to understand how a lot of things truly work. You may be one of the minority that are closer to the truth, but you're not alone in your understanding of the matters. This is very different from some bunkers conspiracy theory that is dreamt out of nowhere. Basically, being "rebellious, anti-establishment" means denying/rejecting everything about how the society works and searching for an alternative. Being "smart" means understanding exactly how the society actually works instead of how it's "claimed" to work under propaganda and falsehoods, and maybe using the mechanism to your advantage as much as possible. They are very, very different things.

by J-dawg 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

smogcutter 8y ago

See also: anything by Malcolm Gladwell

ellius 8y ago

I think "pattern addiction" is definitely a thing. Human beings are constantly searching for order and patterns. Getting other people to buy into your pattern/narrative/whatever is probably as old as the human race, but in the last 100-150 years we've gotten really fucking good at tricking each other on a massive scale. I think this is why people seem to intuitively understand that political media manipulation, advertising, junk science, etc. are related phenomena. They're all about hijacking the pattern recognition capacity of human beings for personal gain. It's essentially a form of parasitism.

colechristensen 8y ago

>feel rebellious and anti-establishment I wonder what this is and why it is so prevalent (and maybe how it made our species/specific cultures successful). You can list a large number of groups that wrap up their identity and value systems around being opposed to or having knowledge that counters their perception of "the majority". It is both incredibly attractive and a way to signal your value by going against the grain in some way or another, in some field or another. Some philosopher/pyschologist/neurologist/evolutionary biologist could probably do a very compelling analysis about the human need to rebel or obey. One of the societal ills of the 21st century is that we're running out of big clear cut things to rebel against but are continuing to rebel with the same intensity while directing it somewhat aimlessly all over the place, and now mostly just at each other's rebellion itself. Political parties in America these days are less anchored in particular issues and more about believing strongly in something your opponent is against and making sure your team wins.

johnzhou 8y ago
"I rebel — therefore we exist." - Albert Camus
joe_the_user 8y ago
"One of the societal ills of the 21st century is that we're running out of big clear cut things to rebel against but are continuing to rebel with the same intensity while directing it somewhat aimlessly all over the place, and now mostly just at each other's rebellion itself." Yeah but the key phrase is clear cut. We have plenty of big institutions and one can see them do terrible things. It's just they fade into each and so challenging a single one becomes a dubious interest. Health care is a mess but blaming say, insurance companies in particular, is problematic. The environment and global warming are huge problems but blaming single institutions misses the point, etc. Moreover, large institutions are adept at harnessing issues-as-social-signal and directing them according to their interests. One can fight all this but such a fight doesn't follow the path of least resistance. And boy, are people trained, today, to follow that path, whether in rebellion or conformity.
- colechristensen 8y ago
  What we have are complex problems instead of simple ones. For example, slavery up to 150 years ago vs. segregation up to 50 years ago vs. subtle often unconscious racism today.+ Fighting to abolish slavery is a lot simpler than fighting for racial equality. It is not that there are not problems, but there are not so many obvious problems with obvious solutions today. + I'm trying to make a broad point here not perfectly depict the history of racism in America, forgive any unjust implications
  - joe_the_user 8y ago
    Stopping global warming seems very simple - just limit C02 production. The main thing is institutions are complex and so even simple change requires complex processes.
    - 8y ago

mywittyname 8y ago

The books were more about finding common patterns and behaviors among seemingly disparate markets than exploring counter-intuitive outcomes. Like how you can spot cheating by looking at whether latter outcomes match former. There's only really one chapter about counter-intuitive outcomes, and that's the one on parents and education, and that's not even counter-intuitive.

kwillets 8y ago

These stories become like memes that get reposted over and over. There was a "study" about drug testing welfare applicants in Florida a few years ago where the authors claimed that it only caught a handful of people and cost more than the money saved. I looked up the numbers and found that applications took a historic plunge when the law went into effect, and an equally large increase after the law was suspended. It was a huge multi-stage funnel where the study only looked at one stage after thousands of applicants had already self-selected for drug-freeness. Applications went down by thousands, and payouts by millions. Basically if you hired a data scientist who told you this about some funnel you were analyzing, like a purchase or sign-up flow, you would fire this person within five minutes. But people repeated this gotcha story everywhere.

sjg007 8y ago
Citation?
- kwillets 8y ago
  https://www.kolotv.com/home/headlines/1597_Welfare_Applicants_Decline_Drug_Test_in_Fla_131555628.html https://www.kolotv.com/home/headlines/1597_Welfare_Applicant...
  - sjg007 8y ago
    This does not support your claim.
- VintageCool 8y ago
  I found a reference that 1600 applicants declined the mandatory testing from July-October 2011. Meanwhile 7000 applicants underwent testing, of which 1% failed. I haven't been able to find monthly figures for before, during, and after -- so I, too, would like to see kwillet's data.
  - kwillets 8y ago
    http://fga.wpengine.com/2011/10/floridas-drug-test-law-for-welfare-cash-assistance-first-quarter-facts-2/ http://fga.wpengine.com/2011/10/floridas-drug-test-law-for-w... This is heavily slanted, but I believe their numbers are factual.

diminoten 8y ago

You say all that like there's a better way of learning about how the world works that doesn't involve getting another university degree...

wnevets 8y ago

>For example - the legalised abortion and crime effect. I'm sure you can think of plenty more. source on why this is shoddy science?

ajtulloch 8y ago
e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_effect#2001_Donohue_and_Levitt_study https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_e... or https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2005/12/01/oops-onomics https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2005/12/01/o... > It was a good test to attempt. But Messrs Foote and Goetz have inspected the authors' computer code and found the controls missing. In other words, Messrs Donohue and Levitt did not run the test they thought they had—an “inadvertent but serious computer programming error”, according to Messrs Foote and Goetz. > Fixing that error reduces the effect of abortion on arrests by about half, using the original data, and two-thirds using updated numbers. But there is more. In their flawed test, Messrs Donohue and Levitt seek to explain arrest totals (eg, the 465 Alabamans of 18 years of age arrested for violent crime in 1989), not arrest rates per head (ie, 6.6 arrests per 100,000). This is unsatisfactory, because a smaller cohort will obviously commit fewer crimes in total. Messrs Foote and Goetz, by contrast, look at arrest rates, using passable population estimates based on data from the Census Bureau, and discover that the impact of abortion on arrest rates disappears entirely. “I am simply not convinced that there is a link between abortion and crime,” Mr Foote says.
- wnevets 8y ago
  >In 2005 Levitt posted a rebuttal to these criticisms on the Freakanomics weblog, in which he re-ran his numbers to address the shortcomings and variables missing from the original study. The new results are nearly identical to those of the original study. Levitt posits that any reasonable use of the data available reinforces the results of the original 2001 paper.[10] >The effect of legalized abortion reported by Donohue and Levitt (2001) is largely unaffected, so that abortion accounts for a 29% decline in violent crime (elasticity 0.23), and similar declines in murder and property crime. Overall, the phase-out of lead and the legalization of abortion appear to have been responsible for significant reductions in violent crime rates." According to your link it doesn't appear to be shobby science.

emodendroket 8y ago

The Tipping Point came out five years earlier. Also, I think it's important to note that these stories are not actually anti-establishment, even if they have such an appearance; they don't offend any powerful interests. In fact, they're often quite the opposite (consider that Malcolm Gladwell wrote an entire book arguing that being disabled or growing up poor or whatever else is actually an advantage! The people most likely to take exception to that thesis do not have bylines in the New York Times, nor do they have the editor's personal phone number)

SZJX 8y ago

Indeed many of the exact claims are not to be trusted, though on the other hand keeping this sort of mentality/thinking framework when analyzing the world around us can still be helpful. Putting it as a "conspiracy theory, rebellious and anti-establishment" is really quite a mischaracterization. I'd say quite the contrary, those who sit at the top of the society, of the "establishment", definitely think in very different manners than the population. We all know we need to look beyond what's being mass produced and fed to people on the surface to understand how a lot of things truly work. You may be one of the minority that are closer to the truth, but you're not alone in your understanding of the matters. This is very different from some bunkers conspiracy theory that is dreamt out of nowhere. Basically, being "rebellious, anti-establishment" means denying/rejecting everything about how the society works and searching for an alternative. Being "smart" means understanding exactly how the society actually works instead of how it's "claimed" to work under propaganda and falsehoods, and maybe using the mechanism to your advantage as much as possible. They are very, very different things.