Daily Archives: February 10, 2018

The tricks propagandists use to beat science

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MIT Technology Review has the article The tricks propagandists use to beat science from January 22, 2018.

It’s a mildly interesting article, but I would be very, very wary of the suggested “solution”.

…the solution is clear: bigger, more highly powered studies. “Given some fixed financial resources, funding bodies should allocate those resources to a few very high-powered studies,” argue Weatherall and co, who go on to suggest that scientists should be given incentives for producing that kind of work. “For instance, scientists should be granted more credit for statistically stronger results—even in cases where they happen to be null.”

I have noticed this in the electrical engineering technical papers I have read over my 40 year career. One respected university had one bent in their work and a different respected university had a different bent. Knowing authors from both universities, I could tell which side of the discussion a paper would fall on based on which school the author came from. Faculty from both universities were the peers reviewing the papers published in peer reviewed journals. In this case, I don’t even think the bias was from the sponsor’s of the research because the companies I worked for sponsored research from both universities. Although I don’t doubt that there were influential engineers in the company that had received their advanced degrees from one university or the other.

Neither of the universities discussed above were MIT. However, I have had my dealings with sponsoring research at MIT, and I can tell you that the people there are human, too. To that, I guess I have to say #MeToo. I am aware that I have my own biases.

I have posted this article in the category of Greenberg’s Law of The Media – “If a news item has a number in it, then it is probably misleading.” This category applies to the subject of the article and to the article itself.

Why New Economics Needs a New Invisible Hand

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Evonomics has the article Why New Economics Needs a New Invisible Hand. From the title alone, I didn;t know what the author was driving at, nor ehwther I could accept it or agree with it. Perhaps this excerpt is a spoiler.

The main take-home message is easy for anyone to understand. We must learn to function in two capacities: As designers of large-scale social systems and as participants in the social systems that we design. As participants, we don’t need to have the welfare of the whole system in mind, but as designers we do. There is no way around it. Anything short will result in social dysfunction.

This seems to fit nicely with the idea of social reflexivity that I first heard enunciated by George Soros. (I am not saying Soros invented the idea. I am just saying that I first heard about it from him.)

Economic philosopher George Soros, influenced by ideas put forward by his tutor, Karl Popper (1957), has been an active promoter of the relevance of reflexivity to economics, first propounding it publicly in his 1987 book The Alchemy of Finance. He regards his insights into market behavior from applying the principle as a major factor in the success of his financial career.
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Reflexivity asserts that prices do in fact influence the fundamentals and that these newly influenced set of fundamentals then proceed to change expectations, thus influencing prices; the process continues in a self-reinforcing pattern. Because the pattern is self-reinforcing, markets tend towards disequilibrium. Sooner or later they reach a point where the sentiment is reversed and negative expectations become self-reinforcing in the downward direction, thereby explaining the familiar pattern of boom and bust cycles An example Soros cites is the procyclical nature of lending, that is, the willingness of banks to ease lending standards for real estate loans when prices are rising, then raising standards when real estate prices are falling, reinforcing the boom and bust cycle.