Black or White–Michael Jackson

 

It’s easier to keep track of your personal convictions when they’re simple, black and white, propositions: huge corporations are bad, any product with the word natural or organic on it is good and if the Canadiens would have won game 7 last season against the Bruins they would have won the Cup. When we have to start breaking up those beliefs into more complicated, smaller beliefs–smaller beliefs that might actually be closer to reality–it gets hard to remember all the nuances of our positions.

That’s (probably) why there are people who think that genetically modified organisms have a universally negative impact on human well being or that pharmaceutical companies are so profit driven that nothing they do is beneficial. But GMOs do have some positive aspects (see Golden Rice) and, let’s face it, without pharmaceuticals, a good chunk of us would probably be dead right now. The only thing in this world that is singularly bad is seeing a grey world in black and white (see what I did there?)

Matthew Herper drives this point home with respect to pharmaceutical companies:

My other worry here is that an oversimplified view of how financial conflicts affect medicine leads people to miss the point. One problem is that a view of a demonic industry that is simply paying off doctors and cannot be trusted, and thereby leads people to avoid good products like vaccines (see yesterday’s post about Merck and GlaxoSmithkline’s rotavirus vaccines cutting the death rate from diarrhea in Mexico by half) and cheap, generic statins that have been proved to prevent second heart attacks.

Now, the real problem is, and this ties into yesterday’s post about the role of experts, how are busy people supposed to know what pharmaceutical products are the real deal and which are the result of an industry with a seemingly insatiable thirst for profit?

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I know there’s an answer–The Beach Boys

 

I never know quite what to think about experts. In one sense believing an expert is putting your faith in their knowledge or expertise, but how are you supposed to judge an expert from a non-expert? Based on someone else’s word? Based on how many books they’ve written? Based on who they work for?

It’s not easy. So, should we ever even believe experts? It’s tempting to say no but what would it be like to go through life having to research everything you’re interested in or that might affect you. For health purposes, for instance, you’d have to learn human anatomy, epidemiology, statistics, biochemistry–it very clearly impossible for one person to do their own research on their health, never mind economics, politics, culture, style, etc.

So we’re stuck. We feel vulnerable putting our faith in what experts say, but we can’t live without them because we don’t have the time to do all the research ourselves.

I have  feeling The Trouble with Experts–airing on CBC this Thursday at 9pm–is going to hammer away at the faith we have in experts but I’m curious to know if it will suggest what we should do if we have no experts to do the research for us? Either way, I’m looking forward to sitting down–maybe with a glass of wine–and watching this documentary.

Here’s an excerpt from an interview in the Toronto Star with the The Trouble With Experts’ maker Josh Freed:

Q: Which field is the most rife with bad experts?

A: That’s tough to say. I think maybe health. There are a million of those so-called nutrition and diet experts who claim to have specific foods or cures to help you live forever. Many of them are self-made experts who belong to some association. Ben Goldacre (the British doctor who writes yjr weekly Bad Science column in The Guardian) applied for membership in a nutrition consultants’ association in the name of his dead cat, Henrietta. He now has a fancy certificate saying Henrietta is a member.

I wonder if he considers himself an expert on experts…

(via: Ben Goldacre’s Twitter)

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Unfair–Pavement

Leave it to a conservative paper to talk about inequality the way I think it we should talk about it and the way, I think, this issue would resonate best with Canadians. Inequality is at its most debilitating, not when we’re talking about material inequalities–although we shouldn’t ignore the negative impacts of material inequalities–but when we’re talking about inequalities of opportunity: when people can work hard and not get ahead. From Armine Yalnizyan in the National Post (via Margaret Atwood’s twitter):

For most Canadians, the issue isn’t that the rich are getting richer. The dilemma they face on a daily basis is getting and staying in the middle class. Canadians rightly believe that hard work should lead to upward mobility. They believe most people won’t need help if the market is fair and they play by the rules – get educated, work hard.

It’s the promise of their own upward mobility that has many Canadians willing to brush aside the handsome gains enjoyed by the rich in the past 20 years. But rising inequality, in good times and bad, makes it increasingly feel like the game is rigged, destabilizing foundational values and expectations.

And she backs it up with staggering numbers as well:

Back in 1979, it took six weeks working the minimum wage full-time to cover my fulltime undergraduate tuition in Toronto. Working all summer, I covered my books, administration fees, rent and food and even had some beer money left over.

Today’s typical student in Ontario has to work 16 weeks at the minimum wage to cover just the cost of tuition, let alone anything else. Yet most are still frozen out of the job market, with 180,000 fewer 15-24-year-olds employed across Canada than when the debt crisis broke in 2008.

Oddly, there’s no comment section open on the article. I’d be interested in seeing how readers of the National Post would respond to an article like this. Although, people who comment on articles in any forum don’t seem to very representative of the whole in any case.

(Image source: thinkaboutpoverty.com)

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As you may already know, Paul Farmer is a personal hero of mine–and he’ll be in Montreal tomorrow. At noon, he’ll be speaking with Arcade Fire’s Régine Chassagne at UQAM and at 5:30pm they’ll be speaking at Concordia. Here’s a taste of the kind of thing those going to see him will be in for (it was uploaded today!):

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Race for the Prize–The Flaming Lips

Ira Glass is a great radio producer. If you’ve never heard This American Life, stop lying to me. And that’s why listening to him pick up on what makes Radiolab such a great show means so much. He first points out that Radiolab does all the right things to make the listener not feel like he/she is in a classroom, like every other science show you’ve ever heard of:

Take the opening of their show on the mathematics of random chance, stochasticity. The first aesthetic choice Jad and Robert make is that they don’t say you’re about to listen to a show about math or science. They don’t use the word stochasticity. They know those things would be a serious turn off for lots of people. In doing this, Jad and Robert sidestep most of the conventions of a normal science show – hell, of most normal broadcast journalism. I think our fellow public broadcasters do lots of accidentally counterproductive things without thinking twice, things that prevent lots of people from connecting with their work. On the very fine PBS science show Nova, the narration is that chipper TV style that says: “I’m talking to you in a big official voice. I’m talking to you like a grownup who’s teaching you something.” They accidentally make it feel like school. Radiolab avoids that entirely. I love science, but never watch Nova, because of the old-fashioned aesthetics. Nova can be corny. But I never miss Radiolab.

The result of keeping mum on this particular point? Rob Walker, writing in the New York Times, admitted something I experienced myself: “I heard several episodes of Radiolab before I figured out that it was supposed to be about science. I thought the ‘lab’ part of the title referred to experimentation with the medium.”

So now, the real question is: why can’t Radiolab pump out a show a week like This American Life!!!

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Waiting for the end of the world–Elvis Costello

 

Here’s what Noam Chomsky has to say about the Republican leadership debates:

“[W]hat’s going on there is just off the international spectrum of sane behavior.”

You may have heard about how the frontrunners for the leadership of the Republican party are massacring science. Michelle Bachmann (left) is probably winning on that front having claimed that Hurricane Irene was God warning the US about government spending or that the HPV vaccine causes, in her words, “mental retardation.” I’m sure we don’t even have to get started on climate change. It’s now a given that if you even want to consider running the Republican party, you have to deny that humans are modifying the climate. How have these people who could potentially lead the most powerful nation on Earth completely lost any contact with reality? Paul Nurse, in the New Scientist, says it best:

One problem is treating scientific discussion as if it were political debate. When some politicians try to sway public opinion, they employ the tricks of the debating chamber: cherry-picking data, ignoring the consensus opinions of experts, adept use of a sneer or a misplaced comparison, reliance on the power of rhetoric rather than argument. They can often get away with this because the media rely too much on confrontational debate in place of reasoned discussion.

Maybe these people, having been in politics or law for too long, have forgotten that not all debates are winnable by pure showmanship. Of course, you can win a scientific debate in the short term on showmanship–and that is surely the only thing these politicians are interested in–but reality doesn’t obey the results of such debates. Reality, be it climate change or vaccines or evolution, is going to keep doing what it does and if we’re not on board with what it’s doing, there will be no debating our way out of the consequences.

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Well, I can’t get you in. But here’s the next best thing: you can attend Professor Michael Sandel’s class about justice on Youtube or via his website.

In the first episode he brings up some philosophical puzzles like the trolley problem that I’ve discussed here on RadarLake and, through the 12 episodes he moves on to many other topics I’ve skimmed the surface of. I enjoy listening the opinions of the students, who Sandel calls on all the time. The diversity of opinions is much broader than I would have expected. I’ve only given the first episode a listen but I’m slowly going to work my way through the series.

I think that everyone should be exposed to this kind of thinking at some point in their lives. Even if you don’t agree with everything that’s said, it’s always fun to have your own beliefs challenged.

And don’t forget about the NASA announcement at 2pm I talked about yesterday. I’ll bet you $10 it’s an Earth-like planet. Not a super-Earth like they’ve been finding, but a something in the ballpark of Earth’s size and, maybe, if we’re lucky, evidence that it has liquid water. The liquid water isn’t part of my $10 bet though.

UPDATE: I lost the bet. They found Tatooine! Or at least a planet orbiting around a binary star system.

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Changing gears from yesterday, NASA is set to announce a new finding from Kepler its plant-hunting satellite tomorrow at 2pmEDT. That in itself isn’t what’s peaking people’s attention. The press conference includes its usual assembly of astronomers (including someone from the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute), but, oddly also includes someone from Industrial Light & Magic, a division of Lucas Film. Whatever they’re announcing–I assume, or maybe just hope, it’s going to be the discovery of an Earth-like planet–it should be interesting.

Here’s Carl Sagan, of course, on the search for extraterrestrial life:

 

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Lucky 1′s–Shad

I came across this Facebook note a couple weeks ago from Ian Brodie, a former Chief of Staff to Stephen Harper. You’ll notice it says a bunch of stuff at the end about not quoting this or re-printing it or whatnot so I’ll just summarize what he says.

His main point is about how just because Harper has continually run against poor leaders, that doesn’t make him a weak leader. Fair enough, but that also doesn’t make him a strong leader. I’d like to see how he’d do against Chretien back in the day. But that’s not the point I want to tackle.

He goes into this whole spiel about how the real difference between liberals and conservatives is that liberals believe success is being lucky and conservatives believe it is achieved by working hard. If that’s the difference, I’m neither a liberal nor a conservative because the real world clearly falls between those two extremes. A Sam Harris quote I posted a couple weeks ago sums this up nicely:

Many of my critics pretend that they have been entirely self-made. They seem to feel responsible for their intellectual gifts, for their freedom from injury and disease, and for the fact that they were born at a specific moment in history. Many appear to have absolutely no awareness of how lucky one must be to succeed at anything in life, no matter how hard one works. One must be lucky to be able to work. One must be lucky to be intelligent, to not have cerebral palsy, or to not have been bankrupted in middle age by the mortal illness of a spouse.

On the health side of things, there are many ways you can be lucky or unlucky in a way that is entirely undeserved, but there are also ways you can work hard to be healthier by exercising or eating well. Health is a mixture of the cards you’re dealt and the way you play them. I don’t see how financial or career success is any different. Working hard will get you so far, but there are things that will happen that are entirely out of your hands.

I think this is one of the most fundamental misconceptions people have about what makes success: not acknowledging or even being aware of the degree to which events out of your control influence your life. I wanted to write a whole post about this but, thankfully given the free time I have these days, I don’t have to because someone else did and they a way better job than I could have done. From Namit Arora at 3 Quarks Daily:

A pivotal question in market-based societies is ‘What do we deserve?’ In other words, for our learning, natural talents, and labor, what rewards and entitlements are just? How much of what we bring home is fair or unfair, and why? To chase these questions is to be drawn into the thickets of political philosophy and theories of justice. In this short essay, inspired by American political philosopher Michael Sandel’s Justice, I’ve tried to synthesize a few thoughts on the matter by reviewing three major approaches to distributive economic justice: libertarian, meritocratic, and egalitarian, undermining en route the dominant narrative on my own well-being.

Read it and let me now if it changes how you see the world.

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Don’t Let it Bring you Down–Neil Young

I came across an article on how a lot of the positives of public health randomized control trials don’t necessarily translate to economics on Dan Gardner’s twitter (see left). Hard to not read it with that kind of endorsement. I have to say, I don’t think I share the enthusiasm.

I have written a lot about RCTs and am clearly a supporter of using them when possible though my context is epidemiology. I’m not an economist, but I’ve come across many development oriented RCTs that have clearly created readily applicable, useful knowledge.

The main criticism of RCTs from this blog post is something called “external validity” and, simply put, is this: just because an RCT works in one place doesn’t mean it will work in another. I can test, say, an educational intervention using an RCT in Inukjuak, Quebec but, if I find an effect, that doesn’t mean that intervention will have the same effect in Windhoek, Namibia. The criticism is entirely valid if you’re doing one of two things:

1) Conducting an RCT on a very specific portion of the population like left-handed nine-year-old boys who are hockey fans and live on a specific street. Clearly, assuming you even have a big enough sample size to being with, any result won’t apply to everyone (or even most people).

2) Looking for a one-size-fits-all solution to economic development. If you find an economic intervention works in one place, there’s no guarantee it’ll work in a different cultural context even, maybe, within the same economic context.

I don’t see how this makes RCTs entirely useless however even for economics. Clearly we have a range of possibilities for which RCTs can be used within populations. The proposed solution confuses me even more:

What does work in areas outside of public health? How is it possible to design, test, and implement effective solutions in environments where complexity and volatility are dominant? The general principle applies: Success requires adaptability as well as structure, flexibility as well as structure—a societal capacity to scale successful efforts combined with an ingrained practice of entrepreneurial exploration. As the uniquely insightful Mancur Olson wrote in his classic Power and Prosperity (pp. 188-189):

Because uncertainties are so pervasive and unfathomable, the most dynamic and prosperous societies are those that try many, many things. They are societies with countless thousands of entrepreneurs who have relatively good access to credit and venture capital.

What works in development, according to Olsen, is entrepreneurial exploration. Why? Because we don’t know what works.

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