Viewing entries in
Scientific Encounters
Our apprehension of reality is always subjective, in that what we perceive and pay attention to is guided by our desires, goals, expectations, and preconceived notions. But humans would not have survived without an ability to track the world outside their heads, the world as it is, aka the objective reality.
Diversion is an intervention in the criminal justice system that provides offenders with a chance to avoid conviction and a criminal record by undergoing a period of community supervision. The study found that diversion for first-time felony offenders cut reoffending rates in half and increased employment rates by nearly 50% over 10 years.
As for Biden’s infrastructure plan, 59% of those surveyed in the NBC poll thought it was a good idea, 21% disagreed, and 19% had no opinion. Which got me thinking: what is it about the infrastructure plan that these people think is a good idea (or not)? Biden’s infrastructure plan is immense and involves dozens of large-scale projects, including …
Why do so many Covid deaths go unreported? One reason is that most people die at home in developing countries and out-of-hospital deaths are rarely medically certified. For example, only around a fifth of all deaths are medically certified in India. Even in countries with substantial hospital data, cause-of-death is often misclassified, often a result of insufficient physician training. Sometimes, though, misclassification is deliberate, as in some hospitals in India, where officials have directed doctors to list cause-of-death as “sickness” and not Covid, possibly to avoid a panic. And then there’s Russia…
Non-native species are typically described as “invasive” species, clearly not a term of endearment. However, many biologists and conservationists are having a change of heart regarding these much-maligned “aliens” (another common descriptor): they’re not all bad - and some may even help native species survive and thrive, especially in biological communities under stress from habitat loss and a changing climate. A zero-tolerance approach to non-native species makes no sense when their effects are often neutral or positive.
The Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration, or SEED, was founded in early 2019 by the then-mayor of Stockton, a city of about 292,000 in California. SEED is midway through an experimental project to demonstrate the advantages of a guaranteed basic income. The project includes a “treatment” group of 125 individuals who will receive a guaranteed monthly stipend of $500 for two years, as well as a control group that does not receive the stipend. Of the 125 in the treatment group, 100 comprise the core research sample and 25 serve as a “politically purposive, or storytelling cohort, or who publicly spoke about their experience with SEED.” (Preliminary Analysis: SEED's First Year, March 2021).
Hill himself was ambivalent about the utility of these criteria. On the one hand, he asked “in what circumstances can we pass from this observed association to a verdict of causation?” Yet he disagreed that any “hard-and-fast rules of evidence” existed by which to judge causation…
The BMJ is a weekly peer-reviewed medical trade journal, published by the trade union the British Medical Association. A week ago, it published Covid-19: Russia admits to understating deaths by more than two thirds. An extended excerpt:…
Motivated by love of truth, glory, and tenure, scientists tend to be a critical bunch: they like to pick holes in each others’ arguments and evidence. To defend themselves against this critical onslaught, scientists adhere as much as possible to various procedural norms governing the gathering and analysis of evidence - also known as the scientific method.
But bounded rationality fails spectacularly when untethered to something real, - that is, unless it is grounded in the real world…
According to psychologist Gary Klein, confirmation bias leads us to:
Search only for evidence that confirms our beliefs
Prefer evidence that supports our beliefs
Best remember information in keeping with our beliefs
Interpret evidence in a way that supports our beliefs
Rely on favored beliefs to misunderstand what is happening in a situation
Ignore opportunities to test our beliefs
Explain away data that don’t fit with our beliefs
All the above countries have been hit hard by Covid, especially as colder weather set in, but Spain, Belgium, the UK, France, and Italy are managing to turn things around. Why not the US? What did the European countries do differently? Well, for one thing…
Before anyone assumes that remote workers moving from Blue to Red areas will change the politics of their new home, consider the opposite possibility: their new home may change the Blue transplants even more. That’s because political views aren’t fixed for life and where one lives can have a big effect on how one thinks about politics. At least that’s according to Jeffrey Lyons, a political scientist who studies why people change their political views over time. The rest of this post summarizes Lyons’ findings on factors that make some people more likely to change their politics than others.
Of course, schools shouldn’t be re-opened in areas with high rates of Covid infection. But what’s happening in many communities is that local residents are demanding schools remain closed, even when infection rates are low and well within state, CDC, and WHO guidelines for reopening schools.
According to the Hate Crime Statistics Act, hate crimes are incidents motivated by bias against the victim due to his or her race, ethnicity, gender or gender identity, sexual orientation, religion or disability. Around half the hate crimes in the US are not reported to law enforcement and hence are not documented in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR). However, the US Bureau of Justice National Crime Victimization Surveys (NCVS) supplement the FBI stats and provide a more comprehensive picture of hate crime frequency, victims, offenders and trends.
The US murder rate was 5.0 per 100,000 inhabitants, and the robbery rate was 81.6 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2019. Here’s what the five-year trend looks like: …
…Which got me thinking: if human experience and behavior is the product of gene-environment interactions, what does liberty even mean? The dictionary says liberty is “the condition of being free from control or restrictions”, but being a “product” of genes+environment doesn’t leave any room for being free from control.
Long story short: The US continues to be ravaged by the Covid beast. Sweden got off to an awful start but has regained the upper hand. Denmark and Norway hit back hard in the beginning, then eased up rather quickly. Now the Nordic kids are back in school while a good number of their US counterparts still have to contend with online instruction.
As for the relationship between inequality and happiness, it’s complicated. Inequality alone - that is, controlling for poverty and social mobility - does not appear to a strong, consistent or direct effect on society-wide levels of happiness. And in the US and elsewhere, surveys have consistently found that inequality simply isn’t a pressing issue for most people. Still, the very thought of inequality does makes some people very angry and indignant. But those reactions are often based on ideas, e.g. social justice or a zero-sum understanding of economics.
People often change their political minds as they get older. Adolescents and young adults tend to form political opinions that reflect those of their peers or are more extreme versions of their parents’ politics (as befits the intensity of youth). Then something happens: the intrepid fledglings leave home and school, enter the greater world of work and responsibility, and begin to doubt their old certainties about how the world is and should be. Or at least some do.