The problem now is that we’re rapidly expanding our ability to do tests. Various speakers pointed to data sources as diverse as gene expression chips and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which provide tens of thousands of individual data points to analyze. At the same time, the growth of computing power has meant that we can ask many questions of these large data sets at once, and each one of these tests increases the prospects than an error will occur in a study; as Shaffer put it, “every decision increases your error prospects.” She pointed out that dividing data into subgroups, which can often identify susceptible subpopulations, is also a decision, and increases the chances of a spurious error….
It’s pretty obvious that these factors create a host of potential problems, but Young provided the best measure of where the field stands. In a survey of the recent literature, he found that 95 percent of the results of observational studies on human health had failed replication when tested using a rigorous, double blind trial. So, how do we fix this?
The consensus seems to be that we simply can’t rely on the researchers to do it. As Shaffer noted, experimentalists who produce the raw data want it to generate results, and the statisticians do what they can to help them find them. The problems with this are well recognized within the statistics community, but they’re loath to engage in the sort of self-criticism that could make a difference. (The attitude, as Young described it, is “We’re both living in glass houses, we both have bricks.”)
To me, the central problem appears to be that few scientists understand statistics and probability well enough to be permitted to make use of them in a manner which merits any credibility. The widening gap between econometric models and the performance of the real economy, combined with situations like the recent revelation that many, if not most genetic studies purporting to show natural selection were based entirely upon false positives, highlights the importance of performing actual science according to the scientific method rather than substituting a derivative and passing it off as science.
Like logic and philosophy, statistical analysis is informative and useful, but it is not intrinsically science.
LS emails a 2003 essay by R.B. Calco published in the American Conservative. Here’s an excerpt:
The Father of free trade was no globalist.
Adam Smith is commonly regarded as the father of modern economics. Free traders claim he is also the father of free trade and credit him with the first systematic attack on government regulation of trade ever written. This is true as far as it goes. This is not to say, however, that Adam Smith was a free trader in the same sense that the term is promoted today. Since David Ricardo and the Austrians took hold of it, the term has acquired a dimension and a purpose that was, to paraphrase Smith, no part of his intention. Or, in any event, it was no part of his definition. Smith’s argument for trade was rooted in what economists today refer to as “Absolute Advantage”; it was left to the crafty mind of David Ricardo half a century later to invent a justification for trade on the basis of the far more subjective “Comparative Advantage” that today the economists tell us we need to consider instead.
While the dull, pencil-headed, pocket calculator logic of Comparative Advantage works fine for the textbook laboratory example f two nations and two products, it falls apart entirely the minute real-world constraints or considerations are introduced. It becomes absurd when you attempt to factor “comparative advantage” across three nations and three products, let alone the hundreds of nations and millions of products of the real world. Try it – you will lose your mind.
All Comparative Advantage amounts to, reduced to its essential components, is a sophistic argument for international division of labor — for global economic union — without dealing with any issues of political union. It is the economic equivalent of living in sin, so to speak. For whatever intuitive sense it claims to have, this argument relies on a fundamental confusion between trade — economic activity between economic systems — and division of labor — economic activity between individuals in a single economic system.
At bottom, this argument is a bait-and-switch for a global system, not a plan for any one nation to become wealthy, least of all the United States, which, according to the law of equilibrium, would be forced under a free-trade regime to sustain massive losses of jobs and wealth to pull all other nations up in the new global wage and price structure.
There is little question that global free trade tends to raise the overall level of global wealth. But what consequence-blind Ricardians stubbornly refuse to understand is that Comparative Advantage simply does not work on a macroeconomic level. The falsity of their assumptions is easily determined both logically and empirically; in RGD, for example, I show how the historical trade statistics prove that the Smoot-Hawley tariff could not possibly have played a major role, let alone a causal one, in causing the Great Depression.
The important logical question that the Ricardians have to answer is this: Does the level of rising global wealth come at the benefit or the expense of the wealthiest nations? The important empirical question is this: What is the rate of increase in U.S. national wealth per capita compared to the rate of increase in global wealth per capita? Those who are intellectually honest enough to contemplate answering those straightforward questions of applied theory instead of retreating to the safety of the abstract will soon recognize that the Comparative Advantage is a fundamentally incorrect doctrine and the Ricardian case for free trade is strictly dependent upon circumstances that do not apply to many situations, presently including that of the United States.
Those who disagree are certainly welcome to answer those two questions so long as they provide an amount of reason and evidence in support of their answers. And it is worth keeping in mind, as Joseph Schumpeter pointed out, that David Ricardo was first and foremost a political creature and an ideologue, he was not an intellectual driven by a natural interest in the truth of the matter. This is not to argue that what is known as the Ricardian theory of Comparative Advantage is incorrect on an ad hominem basis, I am merely pointing out the historical fact that his case was a political one with a specific policy objective in mind. It is also worth noting that the this case was not even original to him, as the idea of Comparative Advantage was first introduced by Robert Torrens in An Essay on the External Corn Trade two years before Ricardo published On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation.
Mr. B.A.D.: Does your greater intelligence give you grace for dealing with people less capable than you, or do you spend most of the day sighing and irritated?
Vox Day: Absolutely not. Unfortunately, it took me a very long time to learn to regard people of relatively normal intelligence with sympathy and amusement rather than simple contempt. What still remains annoying are the people of moderate intelligence, say the 110 to 120 range, who simply don’t understand that they are closer to the normal people to whom they condescend than I am to them. So it’s annoying when they assume I’m talking gibberish just because they aren’t capable of understanding something.
This was for Facebook or Myspace or something. I’m not entirely clear on why, but I have to admit that it was the first time I have ever thought about fictional characters and with whom I might identify.
The Labor Department reported Thursday that productivity jumped at an annual rate of 6.9 percent in the fourth quarter, even better than an initial estimate of a 6.2 percent growth rate. Unit labor costs fell at a rate of 5.9 percent, a bigger drop than the 4.4 percent decline initially estimated.
In the real world this means:
Work harder and get more done. Get paid less. Suck it up, don’t complain, or you’re fired. That’s all.
And by the way, reduced pay per unit of work spells DEFLATION.
That’s not necessarily so. Inflation and an increase in the supply of labor can lead to reduced pay per unit of work; real weekly wages haven’t increased in the USA since 1973. But in general, declining labor costs do tend to point towards deflation, especially if they are nominal as well as real. Productivity up and costs down is a good thing for corporations; whether that is good for the smaller number of workers working and the reduced pay they are receiving may not turn out to be good for an economy already facing widespread defaults. Especially if those corporations happen to be foreign corporations sending those profits overseas.
Carlton has a nice series of charts providing a graphic representation of the rapid growth of U.S. debt over at the RGD blog:
Even more striking is the annual percentage change in the debt. Between 2002 and 2006 there is a surge in growth, presumably to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, peaking in 2003 at around 9%, but the growth begins to slow down again until 2008, when it surges over 11%, and then in 2009 it jumps to almost 19%.
Needless to say, the recent post-2007 surge is in direct contradiction to the 10% contraction in private debt that has taken place over the same period.
There is a message to be delivered to men, and it may not be popular. We hear a lot about the injustices visited on fathers over divorce and access: for the record, I am largely on their side and dislike the thoughtless and sentimental favouring of mothers in residency disputes. We also hear a bit about the flailing ineffectiveness of the former Child Support Agency. What we do not often hear is the bald, uncompromising truth that if you father a child, you set up a non-negotiable duty.
Sorry, men, but it really is so. We may live in a shag-happy porno culture, where flings and “hotties” and zipless one-nighters are seen as the norm; we may be liberal about divorce, stepfamilies and serial cohabitation. Some of this is good, some of it bad. But none of it negates biology, or the entry-level ethical fact that when a sexual act creates a human child, that child is as much of a moral burden to its father as to its mother. Unless it is a matter of sperm donation or formal adoption with a clear contract, the man has, at the very least, a duty to monitor the child’s physical safety.
This is absolutely and utterly false under the current legal regime. It is totally unconscionable to claim that men who have been forcibly stripped of their paternal rights by the unilateral decision of the mother supported by the anti-paternal legal system have any duty whatsoever to the children that have been taken away from them. If it is the man’s decision to leave the family, then yes, his paternal responsibilities remain intact. If he fathers a child unintentionally his paternal responsibilities remain, barring the commission of intentional fraud on the part of the mother.
But if his paternal responsibilities have been stripped from him by the unholy alliance of ex-spouse and state, if he has been threatened with the full force of the law if he so much as attempts to contact them without the permission of the mother, then the onus for the children’s well-being lies with those who have assumed the full responsibility for it. It is absurd to write, as this woman does, that “men who turn aside from this duty should be looked at askance, stigmatised as dishonest weaklings.” The fact is that men who do not turn aside from this “duty” under these circumstances and this system are doing nothing more than enabling it. The writer’s real agenda is revealed in this sentence.
“Most mothers do their best but some are weak, depressed, drugged, or just lovelorn and intimidated by violent boyfriends.”
In other words, it’s the same old line that is based upon the underlying assumption that because women are children who can’t be held responsible for their actions, every female failing must ultimately be blamed on men. Clearly the logical solution is beyond her, which is to stop permitting mothers to unilaterally exclude fathers from the lives of their children. The concept is really not that hard to understand. Assuming that one considers the rule of law to be legitimate, once a man has been stripped of his status as a father by other parties, he no longer has any paternal responsibilities. They have been assumed by the parties that stripped it from him.
A sexbot won’t be your cook, cleaner, masseuse, secretary, arm candy, and public sex kinky bitch. She won’t be social with you, won’t laugh at your jokes, won’t adore you madly, and won’t make you feel alive and fulfilled.
Well, that should certainly end the silly notion that a Victoria’s Secret sexbot line might harbor some appeal to men. Everyone knows that romance has far more appeal to men than a combination of sex and cutting edge technology, right? One wonders if this individual has ever talked to a real man or woman.
I imagine more than a few men read that and immediately thought “On the other hand, she also won’t be my surrogate mother, thought police, social fuhrer, and ISO 9000 examiner. She won’t prefer TV to sex, won’t glare at me when I am insufficiently obedient to her momentary whims, won’t disrespect me, and won’t make me feel as if at any moment I am going to lose half of everything I have ever worked for.”
Some men are certainly fortunate enough to be married to beautiful women who love them and treat them well. However, I very much doubt that describes most men, especially the betas and gammas. And the simple fact is that men have no intention of trying to bitch, complain, and nag society into changing to accommodate their preferences, instead they are going to do what they always do and quietly go about finding a more acceptable solution. I’m just hoping that the technologists get those artifical wombs working before the sexbots are perfected, otherwise it is certain that it is the technophobic who will inherit the Earth.
There are very few equity investments I would advise making in this economy. AI-controlled sexbots, preferably with a solar-powered option, is definitely one of them.
If you were interested in picking up a copy of The Return of the Great Depression but hadn’t gotten around to it for one reason or another, WND is offering it for only $4.95 today. A hardcover for what used to be a paperback price, not a bad deal.
David Cameron’s backtrack on the promised Lisbon referendum was more revealing and will arguably be more electorally self-destructive than George Bush’s disavowal of “Read my lips.”
it is interesting to see that the Conservative lead started to narrow shortly after the Tories reneged on a pledge to hold a referendum on the EU’s Lisbon Treaty in the event that they were to be elected…. Then there was the spectacle of Ken Clarke, the most Europhile senior Tory, being dispatched to meet with EU high-ups in Brussels.
It is now clear that the so-called Conservative party is totally useless, they’re nothing more than the centrist wing of the UK’s EU party. Those who wish to see the restoration of a strong and independent UK, or at least an independent and sovereign England, shouldn’t even consider voting Tory. In effect, there is no Labour, there is no Tory, there is no LDP, there is only the BNP on the left, the EU party in the center and UKIP on the right. As of now, those are the only relevant choices for UK voters, which comes down to voting UKIP or abstimmen auf Deutsch.
It isn’t an exaggeration to say that I am a highly skilled gamer. I have been playing a variety of strategy, arcade, console, and computer games for nearly five times longer than Malcom Gladwell claims it takes to become unusually skilled at something. Now, I’m not a freakish game savant like Big Chilly, who has blown away even the most hard-core gamers away by playing through console games that he’s never played before without losing a single man. (Note: by hard-core, I don’t mean guys who like to play the occasional PS3 game online, but junior high friends who happen to be long-time editors at the one of the game industry’s leading magazines.) But if you give a me a shot or two at any given game, I can usually figure out the basic mechanics and figure out how to make effective use of them.
A teenage friend of ours once challenged me to a game of Maddens. He was in high school, was better than all his friends, and was utterly convinced that he would have no problem at all pwning the old guy. Not even a gentle pre-game reminder that I’d been playing Maddens since the original Genesis game dented his confidence. A 63-7 loss, on the other hand, just about had him in tears. Score one for the Original Gaming Generation!
Anyhow, Advanced Squad Leader is the Game of Games in my opinion. It occupies six shelves in my office, and while I’m not a rulesmeister or a member of the tournament elite, I can more than hold my own. I started playing Squad Leader and Cross of Iron by myself when I was ten, and over the years I never lost a single scenario at the monthly TCASL meetings, was well on the way to victory playing the Red Barricades campaign game as the Germans when we had to stop playing, won my beach in the two-day Normandy landings in Geneva, and have a ROAR record over .800. I now have the pleasure to be introducing a young commander to the game, and it’s wonderful to see the combination of interest, wonder, and awe at the vast horizon of possibilities that the game system contains.
We’ve started out with the excellent ASL Starter kit that MMP put together. I have to admit that I’d been a little annoyed by the switch to custom starter kit boards, since the first scenario I’d ever designed had been accepted for publication when the kit was going to make use of the standard boards. (It was a unique setup that involved the use of the Japanese counters against the Germans in a simulation of the 442nd’s rescue of the Lost Battalion.) But it’s really well-done, the abridged rules make for relatively easy reading, and the bite-sized scenarios are perfect for beginners. We started with scenario S1 Retaking Vierville, as you do, and my young apprentice chose the defending Americans with my encouragement since it’s usually a little easier on defense.
The image above showed how it finished. He was too cautious, as beginners usually are, and I took advantage of that to quickly grab the victory condition building hex L3. I didn’t give him time to react to that, and even briefly managed to punch two squads with an 8-1 leader into a second VC building, M4, before being broken and driven back by point-blank fire from three elite squads of 7-4-7 paratroopers. The key tactic was sending my reserve of two Fallschirmjager squads with a 9-1 leader to ambush the incoming American reinforcements coming from the north. They bounced back quickly from breaking thanks to their 9-2 leader, but it delayed their attack on the western edge long enough that not even repeated charges from a pair of HoB-created fanatic squads managed to drive all my second-line Grenadiers from L3.
He wasn’t bothered by the loss, as I’d warned him beforehand that it’s possible to play for a long time before you chalk up your first win, particularly if your only opponent is a very good player. We went on to play S2 War of the Rats, and again I had the attacking Germans. I thought his setup was much too exposed to the initial German prep fire, and expected that my death star under the command of the 9-2 leader would quickly blow a hole in the heart of his defense and allow me to hit the remnants from both sides after I rolled over his two conscript squads in the east and took the key VC L6 building with the 9-1 platoon. Things went exactly as I expected, the bulk of his forces were broken and my eastern platoon had L6 open for the taking when I made the mistake of deviating from the plan and advancing into close combat in the hex marked with the yellow-bordered red star in order to finish off the one remaining squad.
That was when he hit on a 1 in 36 chance and eliminated all three of my squads and my leader… and I blew my kill roll. That left me with no troops on the eastern side, which would permit him to regain control of all the buildings I’d just taken and force me to grab those buildings before his shock group of three 5-2-7 squads under a 9-2 showed up as randomly determined reinforcements. It looked pretty good for me, as they didn’t show up in turn four and I was rapidly rolling up his forces until two of my squads got locked in melee in the hex marked with a white-bordered red star with a half-squad in the process of taking control of the last Russian-controlled hex of building L6. Despite reinforcing the melee, I just couldn’t kill that conscript half-squad, which slowed me down enough so that I only had one squad in position to shoot at the reinforcements as they moved up hexrow O to claim VC building O6. I finally killed the half-squad and brought all my forces to bear on the shock group. I forced them out of O6, but my need to focus on the reinforcements allowed his broken 7-0 to rally a broken conscript squad in M2 and move in behind my forces to reclaim L6 and win the game.
Big Chilly plays ASL from time to time, so he knows how difficult it is to beat a more experienced player. He absolutely howled with laughter when he found out that my young apprentice not only wasn’t discouraged after playing his first two scenarios, but had actually beaten me without me pulling any punches. We discussed how his early decision to attack all three of my squads and leader at a 1-4 disadvantage instead of the more usual one-to-one attack had led to the timely snake-eyes looked like beginner’s luck, but concluded that it was actually the right decision to make given that 1 in 36 was probably better odds than you’d normally give a boy to beat a veteran ASL player.
“Did you give him the Balance?”
“No! I didn’t.”
“Good grief! He’s Ender!”
The next day, Ender and I set up S3 Simple Equation. Ender wanted to play the Americans despite being warned that it was a little more difficult being the attacker. And then he beat me again!
