The Buck Stops Here

Peer Review

2009-11-22T22:59:00.006-06:00

Out of all the recent emails that were apparently hacked or leaked from a prominent laboratory in England ("Climategate," some are calling it), this one bothers me. It shows how "peer review" worked from the inside:

From: Keith ***
To: Edward ***
Subject: Re: Review- confidential REALLY URGENT
Date: Wed Jun 4 16:02:09 2003

[OMITTED]

At 09:50 AM 6/4/03 -0400, you wrote:

Hi Keith,
Okay, today. Promise! Now something to ask from you. Actually somewhat important too. I got a paper to review (submitted to the Journal of Agricultural, Biological, and Environmental Sciences), written by a Korean guy and someone from Berkeley, that claims that the method of reconstruction that we use in dendroclimatology (reverse regression) is wrong, biased, lousy, horrible, etc. They use your Tornetrask recon as the main whipping boy. I have a file that you gave me in 1993 that comes from your 1992 paper. Below is part of that file. Is this the right one? Also, is it possible to resurrect the column headings? I would like to play with it in an effort to refute their claims.

If published as is, this paper could really do some damage. It is also an ugly paper to review because it is rather mathematical, with a lot of Box-Jenkins stuff in it. It won't be easy to dismiss out of hand as the math appears to be correct theoretically, but it suffers from the classic problem of pointing out theoretical deficiencies, without showing that their improved inverse regression method is actually better in a practical sense. So they do lots of monte carlo stuff that shows the superiority of their method and the deficiencies of our way of doing things, but NEVER actually show how their method would change the Tornetrask reconstruction from what you produced. Your assistance here is greatly appreciated.

Assuming that this email is valid -- and no one seems to be claiming that any emails were altered -- this guy is being asked to peer review a manuscript. Does he think the manuscript is actually wrong? No -- he admits that it's full of math that "appears to be correct" (to be sure, he implies that he finds the math hard to understand). The only thing he can find wrong with the paper is that it's too theoretical, but he obviously isn't content recommending rejection on that basis. So he's worried that the paper "could really do some damage" to another paper by Keith Briffa. Unable to determine the paper's merits quite yet, but also without any doubts about trying his best to get the paper rejected anyway, he seeks help from the very person being criticized as to how to ding the article.

Is this any way for the peer review mechanism to work? I could hardly imagine anything more directly opposite to the ideal of giving manuscripts on a blinded basis to independent and unbiased reviewers who have sufficient expertise to judge an article's merit for themselves.

Cert petition in Massachusetts free speech case

2009-11-22T18:44:00.003-06:00

My good friend and classmate Mark Rienzi, now of Catholic Univ. Law School, has just filed a cert petition with the U.S. Supreme Court in a First Amendment case -- McCullen v. Coakley, No. 09-592. The Supreme Court should grant cert, given the important issues at stake.

The case involves a Massachusetts law penalizing people who engage in speech near abortion clinics -- including peaceful speech, or even holding a sign silently. (Keep in mind: Your position on abortion shouldn't affect how you think of the free speech issue here, any more than the Klan's or Greenpeace's right to free speech depends on whether their message is agreeable to everyone.)

Now many people may think immediately that such a challenge is hopeless. After all, didn't the Supreme Court uphold speech restrictions outside abortion clinics in the case of Hill v. Colorado?

There are three responses to this.

First, the Massachusetts law is worse -- far worse -- in First Amendment terms than the Colorado law at issue in Hill. Here are three stark differences:

(A) The Colorado law applied to all medical facilities. But the Massachusetts law applies only to abortion clinics (not even to hospitals where some abortions may be performed). This is more worrisome in terms of the legislature's intent to focus on abortion-related speech.

(B) The Colorado law applied to all speakers -- which is "the level of neutrality that the Constitution demands," in the Supreme Court's express words. But the Massachusetts law applies only to abortion protestors, with exemptions for all “persons entering or leaving” an abortion clinic or all “employees or agents of [a clinic] acting within the scope of their employment.” In other words, an anti-abortion protestor could go to jail for silently and peacefully offering someone a leaflet on a public sidewalk, while the clinic employee would be exempt for saying, "Ignore that leaflet."

(C) The Colorado law applied only to unwanted speech -- speech directed at an unwilling listener. But the Massachusetts law prohibits offering leaflets, displaying signs, engaging in conversation with even willing listeners, speaking with others at a “normal conversational distance,” or even merely remaining stationary and silently holding signs on public streets and sidewalks, whether or not any listeners (let alone unwilling listeners) are present.

Indeed, the Supreme Court's Hill decision expressly relied on these aspects of the Colorado law in upholding it. Yet the Massachusetts law thumbs its nose at all three.

Second -- and this is a bit of legal inside baseball -- the First Circuit's decision uses a ridiculous version of the Salerno doctrine, which has been read to suggest that in a facial challenge, a plaintiff must show that all applications of the statute are unconstitutional. As I and other legal scholars have shown, that doctrine does not and should not mean that, say, in a First Amendment or equal protection case, the plaintiff has the responsibility of affirmatively proving something about all specific applications, both real and hypothetical. Instead, the only thing the doctrine can mean is that where the plaintiff shows content or viewpoint discrimination (for example), all applications of the statute are in fact unconstitutional.

But the First Circuit, like some other courts, has been misusing Salerno such that a First Amendment content- and viewpoint-discrimination case is now being judged using a rational basis test. As long as the court can imagine just one hypothetical reason for the statute, the state wins against a facial challenge.

This is a stunning and dangerous development. Rational basis has no place in these types of cases.

Third, the Supreme Court's decision in Hill was wrong, and should be overruled. Commentators and scholars from Michael McConnell to Laurence Tribe have said that Hill was inconsistent with the First Amendment's protection of free speech ("slam-dunk simple and slam-dunk wrong," is how Tribe put it).

* * *

As of now, Massachusetts has waived its right to respond to the petition. The Supreme Court likely wouldn't grant cert without having a response. Thus, the next step is for the Court to consider whether to require Massachusetts to respond, or to reject the petition outright. Given that the law is much more egregious than Hill -- such that even the three remaining members of the Hill majority (Justices Breyer, Stevens, and Ginsburg) might oppose it because it is so much more targeted and restrictive -- a call for response by someone seems likely. Time will tell.

Krugman on Education

2009-11-16T11:21:00.004-06:00

A recent Paul Krugman column made a puzzling assertion about education:

The rise of American education was, overwhelmingly, the rise of public education — and for the past 30 years our political scene has been dominated by the view that any and all government spending is a waste of taxpayer dollars. Education, as one of the largest components of public spending, has inevitably suffered.

It's hard to know what precisely he's saying here, but he seems to be trying to imply that education has "inevitably suffered" because of a lack of government spending.

Any such implication would be difficult to defend. As you can see in the above graph (from an Education Next article by Arthur Peng and James Guthrie), education spending has skyrocketed in real terms precisely during the period during which, according to Krugman, our politics were "dominated" by an anti-government-spending view. So what's the counterfactual here -- how much more does Krugman think we should have been spending?

Can Anybody Be A Genius? A Combined Book Review

2009-11-14T08:47:00.004-06:00

This is a combined book review that I shopped around a while back:

Anders Ericcson is now one of the most famous cognitive psychologists in the nation. Currently teaching at Florida State, Ericcson has spent his career pioneering the study of how experts become experts. He is particularly known for his research supporting the finding (originally due to polymath Herbert Simon) that expertise in any subject -- whether it be music, science, golf, or darts, to quote his webpage -- comes only after 10,000 or so hours of deliberate practice.

Ericcson's scholarly work is considerable (in addition to publishing numerous articles in scholarly journals, Ericcson has edited and contributed to four books on expertise, including the magisterial "Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance"). But his recent fame is due to his prominence in several popularizations: Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers: The Story of Success," Daniel Coyle's "The Talent Code: Greatness Isn't Born, It's Grown: Here's How," Geoff Colvin's "Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else," and I suspect David Shenk's optimistically-titled "The Genius in All of Us" (due to be released in 2010).

Following Ericcson's research, a running theme of all these books is that innate talent is heavily overrated, and that what we think of as a natural genius is actually the result of many hours of deliberate practice. Deliberate practice means not just mindlessly running through musical scales or hitting golf balls on the range while chatting with friends about the stock market, but deliberately and intensely focusing on every aspect of what you are doing, carefully monitoring for errors and analyzing how to improve, and doing so ad nauseam.

The importance of practice is not new, of course. That is why we have jokes about how to get to Carnegie Hall ("practice, practice, practice"), and why we so often quote Thomas Edison's famous saying that "genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration." Still, it is worth being reminded that great talents almost never spring out of the blue; instead, they turn out to have had many years of deliberate practice before they emerged into greatness. Tiger Woods, for example, didn't just spontaneously become the world's best golfer; his father was an obsessive golf addict, and started having Tiger practice by age 2. Neither was Mozart (who is discussed in all three books) as effortless a genius as is often believed; his father was an accomplished musician and teacher, and drilled Mozart in piano and music theory from an early age.

Indeed, at times, these authors seem to dismiss the very possibility of innate talents and abilities. Says Colvin, "when it comes to innate, unalterable limits on what healthy adults can achieve, anything beyond [] physical constraints is in dispute." Or in the words of Gladwell, "the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play." In this sentiment, they are indebted to Ericcson, who writes that expert performance is not "due to innate talent."

The actual evidence against innate talent turns out to be rather unclear. Both Gladwell and Colvin highlight ("Exhibit A," says Gladwell) one of Ericcson's studies, in which he and two colleagues studied 30 violinists at the Music Academy of West Berlin. After the students were divided into three ability-based groups (potential concert soloists, merely good violinists, and a group of students studying to be music teachers), it turned out that the groups had differing estimates of the total amount of time spent practicing before age 18: 7,410 hours for the best violinists, 5,301 hours for the good violinists, and 3,420 hours for the would-be music teachers.

But this sort of study doesn't prove that innate talent is irrelevant or non-existent. These students all already had enough ability to get into a music school in the first place, and the study therefore ignores all of the people who might have given up the violin because they had so little aptitude for it that practice never paid off. Then there are selection effects that may have affected who was in which program: perhaps the students with the least innate ability all applied to the music education program, which demanded less practice, while those with the most innate talent applied to study for a solo career.

On top of that, innate talent could itself cause students to spend more time practicing, because it's pleasurable to spend time mastering something at which you have the ability to excel. As Ericcson and his colleagues briefly concede, “heritable individual differences might influence processes related to motivation and the original enjoyment of the activities in the domain and, even more important, affect the inevitable differences in the capacity to engage in hard work.”

Now, if researchers were able to do a random assignment study -- say, assigning a random group of 7-year-olds to spend 20 hours a week practicing the violin for the next 10 years, and another random group of 7-year-olds to serve as a control group by not playing the violin -- then, and only then, would we be able to see whether anyone who practices 10,000 hours is virtually assured of turning into the next Itzhak Perlman. Needless to say, no one has ever carried out any such study, and no one ever will.

Moreover, it seems intuitively obvious that even if genius arises out of years of intense training, there was often some innate ability to start with. Take, for example, Bart Conner, the gold-medal Olympic gymnast, who startled his parents when he suddenly started walking on his hands at age 6 (as Ken Peterson notes in a recent book). Although Conner didn't rise to Olympic status until spending many hours in training, his sudden ability to walk on his hands in childhood was neither typical (as most parents could tell you), nor was it preceded by 10,000 hours of deliberate practice at handstands.

Indeed, while the fact that Michael Jordan excelled at basketball and Bill Gates excelled at computer programming is inexorably tied to the many hours each of them practiced their respective fields, it's still rather dubious to imply that it could just as easily have been Jordan who founded Microsoft and Gates who dunked from the free throw line, had they only switched what they chose to practice.

* * *

As for the merits of each book standing alone, Coyle's book is perhaps the most intellectually satisfying. Although it's very much a book for non-scientist readers, it delves into the neuroscience behind expertise. The key to expertise, from a physical perspective, is a substance known as myelin, a sort of fatty "insulation" that wraps around neuronal fibers in the brain in proportion to how often that brain circuit is fired. When you engage in deliberate practice -- or any repeated activity at all -- your brain responds by focusing more myelin on the brain circuits involved in that activity. The key role of myelin sheds light on why deliberate practice develops good habits, and conversely why bad habits are so hard to break: once myelinated, a brain circuit doesn't easily lose that myelination. Thus, "the only way to change [habits] is to build new habits by repeating new behaviors -- by myelinating new circuits."

Given that Colvin is a senior editor at Fortune Magazine, it is unsurprising that his book is aimed at delivering lessons for the time-pressed businessman looking to get an edge on the competition. Some of the lessons are no doubt useful (practice giving a presentation beforehand), but some don't seem to have much to do with the expertise research. One chapter ("Applying the Principles in Our Organizations") consists mostly of advice such as "deliberately putting managers" into new jobs that will force them to learn new areas, or avoiding "picking the wrong team members," or trying to build "trust" among fellow business associates, or trying to block "the inevitable personal agendas." All of this may be good business advice, but the citations to expertise research are rather thin.

Moreover, in many areas that businesses worry most about -- such as forecasting market developments, or making good strategic decisions -- there may not be any such thing as "expertise" in the first place. Philip Tetlock's superb book "Expert Political Judgment" collected some 80,000 predictions from people reputed to be political or economic "experts," and then waited to see if the predictions came true; the so-called "experts" turned out to be little more accurate than random chance.

Business is likely no different. Because the world is so complex, and because so many intervening events can arise, it is extraordinarily easy for managers, economists, and politicians to fool themselves into believing that their preferred course of action really was a good idea at the time. Moreover, it may be years or decades between a manager's or politician's decision, and the ultimate results of that decision. All of this, in turn, prevents them from receiving instantaneous and unambiguous feedback on their performance -- something that is absolutely necessary to deliberate practice. When you miss a golf shot, you instantly know that you've missed, by how much, and in what direction. None of that is true as to many business or political decisions.

Gladwell broadens his focus far beyond the expertise research, discussing the way in which extreme outcomes are due to communities (he opens by discussing a community of Italian immigrants that was abnormally healthy, apparently due to its small town atmosphere), culture (one chapter analyzes how Korean pilots are more likely to crash since co-pilots feel too timid to point out when the pilot is in error), and sheer luck in timing (one chapter notes that many current giants of the computer industry were born around 1955, just in time to be college-age when computers became more widely usable in the mid-1970s, but not so old that they were already safely esconced in corporate jobs). From these motley collection of these fascinating stories -- Gladwell has clearly spent 10,000 hours practicing the art of storytelling -- Gladwell draws the conclusion that we get too caught up "in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made," whereas success really depends heavily on circumstances or cultural backgrounds.

That conclusion is true enough, but Gladwell immediately veers in an odd direction with his policy prescription: "To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success -- the fortunate birth dates and the happy accidents of history -- with a society that provides opportunities for all."

What? Gladwell has just spent pages and pages telling us that Asian children do well at math because they come from a cultural heritage "where, for hundreds of years, penniless peasants [were] slaving away in the rice paddies three thousand hours a year," and that to be a "great New York lawyer," the perfect combination is someone born in the 1930s to Jewish immigrant parents who worked in the garment district. All of that may be true, but these advantages, such as they are, are impossible to confer on anybody, let alone all of society.

Even the advantage that Bill Gates had -- Gladwell points out that "our world only allowed one thirteen-year-old unlimited access to a time-sharing terminal in 1968" -- doesn't provide a useful guide. In 1968, no one had any clue that personal computers would one day become as common as telephones (IBM's Thomas Watson once said, "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers," an infamous example of the impossibility of predicting future business developments). No one could possibly have known that Gates's teenage hobby of programming was actually a huge headstart on an industry that would one day be worth billions. Similarly, it makes no sense to suggest that we need a national policy of giving "all" children a headstart on whatever will be a brand-new multi-billion dollar industry in the year 2040. No one knows how to do such a thing.

More on Deas Vail

2009-11-01T14:02:00.010-06:00

I've been a huge fan of Deas Vail since discovering them nearly 2 years ago. The best way to describe them would be this: indie pop-infused rock with soaring and haunting melodies sung by one of the best vocalists in rock. Having seen them three times in concert, I can say that they're far better live than most bands are in the studio with the benefit of editing, autotune, etc.

As of October 27, their new album "Birds and Cages" is available on Amazon, or Itunes, or through their new record label Mono vs. Stereo (for only $7.00!).

I have to admit, even as much as I loved their first album "All The Houses Look the Same," I was a little bit nervous last year when they announced that they were recording both a 5-song EP ("White Lights") and a full-length album, all at the same time. I wondered if maybe they would be stretched too thin.

Boy was I ever wrong. To my ears, it's one of the best albums I've ever bought, let alone in 2009. If anything, they've taken their music to a new level. Wes Blaylock (the lead singer) is just as jaw-dropping with his soaring vocal pyrotechnics, and his wife Laura (keyboardist) is featured more often in some quite lovely vocal duos. Andy Moore (guitar) is constantly pushing the envelope with different sounds and effects. Kelsey Harelson's drumming rarely just keeps a steady beat; instead, he manages, in song after song, to use the offbeats in a way that propels the music forward and gives it a sense of mission and urgency. Finally, Justin Froning's energetic bass playing rounds out the band nicely.

.

The tunes are just as full of earworms (i.e., melodic hooks that you can't get out of your head) as ever, but the music is often adventurous and arresting. "Sunlight" has a progressive rock sound that is hard to place in a single key, and the verses are in 7/8 time. The intro to "The Great Physician" has a really nice chord progression that is far different from your traditional I-IV-V. The verses in "Atlantis" are in 5/4 time. "Puzzles and Pieces" is just beautiful -- I could easily hear this song featured in one of the many television shows that run out the clock by playing a poignant song while the various characters look pensive.

As another reviewer put it, "Deas Vail is one of the few bands who can take pop/rock music and force the listener to apply 'beautiful' to it as an adjective." If that sounds appealing to you, "Birds and Cages" should be the first thing you purchase.

Deas Vail

2009-10-29T13:42:00.002-05:00

One of my very favorite bands -- Deas Vail -- has a new album out, "Birds and Cages." Just got a CD in the mail yesterday. Lots of wonderfully melodic tunes sung by one of the best vocalists in all of rock. Buy it here, here, or here.

UPDATE: Much longer post on Deas Vail here.

Great Blog

2009-10-24T13:02:00.004-05:00

"The Last Psychiatrist." Lots of long thought-provoking essays on medical and conceptual topics. It's good enough that I'm gradually reading through the entire archives (the fact that it avoids short links to yesterday's news helps). Lots of posts are worth pointing to; a few examples would be The Bubble in Academic Research, Off Label Prescribing, Which is Worse, and Where Does a Tree Get Its Mass.

UPDATE: See also Are Drug Companies Hiding Negative Studies?.

White House Communications Director and Mao

2009-10-19T17:11:00.004-05:00

By now, many people have heard about the White House Communications Director who gave a speech including praise of Mao as one of her favorite political philosophers.

The odd thing is that what seems to have impressed her as a deep political thought was this saying of Mao's: "you fight your war, and I'll fight mine." She emphasizes it: "And think about that for a second. You don't have to accept the definition of how to do things, and you don't have to follow other people's choices and paths. OK? It is about your choices and your paths."

That's it? That's her idea of profound political advice? Something so anodyne and banal ("follow your own path") that it has been featured in any number of after-school specials, pop songs, and so on ad nauseam? For that bit of triteness she had to look up one of history's most notorious mass murderers? A word of advice to would-be fans of political philosophy: you're probably better off citing the wisdom of Sammy Davis, Jr..

Two Dietary Studies on Heart Disease

2009-10-14T21:05:00.003-05:00

Both are opposed to the usual advice to avoid dietary fat. Not random experiments, mind you, but still interesting:

Sara Holmberg, Anders Thelin and Eva-Lena Stiernström. Food Choices and Coronary Heart Disease: A Population Based Cohort Study of Rural Swedish Men with 12 Years of Follow-up. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2009, 6, 2626-2638.

Nutritional recommendations are frequently provided, but few long term studies on the effect of food choices on heart disease are available. We followed coronary heart disease morbidity and mortality in a cohort of rural men (N = 1,752) participating in a prospective observational study. Dietary choices were assessed at baseline with a 15-item food questionnaire. 138 men were hospitalized or deceased owing to coronary heart disease during the 12 year follow-up. Daily intake of fruit and vegetables was associated with a lower risk of coronary heart disease when combined with a high dairy fat consumption (odds ratio 0.39, 95% CI 0.21-0.73), but not when combined with a low dairy fat consumption (odds ratio 1.70, 95% CI 0.97-2.98). Choosing wholemeal bread or eating fish at least twice a week showed no association with the outcome.

In other words, eating fruit and vegetables was associated with a 70% higher risk of heart disease if not accompanied by dairy fat.

Leosdottir, Margret; Nilsson, Peter M.; Nilsson, Jan-Åke; Berglund, Göran. Cardiovascular event risk in relation to dietary fat intake in middle-aged individuals: data from the Malmo Diet and Cancer Study. European Journal of Cardiovascular Prevention & Rehabilitation, October 2007, 14 no. 5, 701-706.

The hypothesis that diets rich in total and saturated fat and poor in unsaturated fats increase the risk for cardiovascular disease is still vividly debated. The aim of this study was to examine whether total fat, saturated fat, or unsaturated fat intakes are independent risk factors for cardiovascular events in a large population-based cohort.

Methods: 28 098 middle-aged individuals (61% women) participated in the Malmö Diet and Cancer Study between 1991 and 1996. In this analysis, individuals with an earlier history of cardiovascular disease were excluded. With adjustments made for confounding by age and various anthropometric, social, dietary, and life-style factors, hazard ratios (HR) were estimated for individuals categorized by quartiles of fat intake [HR (95% confidence interval, CI), Cox's regression model].

Results: No trend towards higher cardiovascular event risk for women or men with higher total or saturated fat intakes, was observed. Total fat: HR (95% CI) for fourth quartile was 0.98 (0.77-1.25) for women, 1.02 (0.84-1.23) for men; saturated fat: 0.98 (0.71-1.33) for women and 1.05 (0.83-1.34) for men. Inverse associations between unsaturated fat intake and cardiovascular event risk were not observed.

Conclusions: In relation to risks of cardiovascular events, our results do not suggest any benefit from a limited total or saturated fat intake, nor from relatively high intake of unsaturated fat.

Swiss Health Care

2009-10-01T18:33:00.002-05:00

I like the sound of the Swiss health care system, judging from this New York Times article (which may, of course, be missing all sorts of relevant information).

New Jersey ≠ Arkansas

2009-09-26T10:03:00.001-05:00

There has been some controversy over a video from a New Jersey school wherein third graders were led in chants of praise to Barack Obama. The New Jersey school is named B. Bernice Young Elementary, which is quite similar in name to Bernice Young Elementary in my Arkansas hometown. Unfortunately some people aren't quite able to figure out the difference between New Jersey and Arkansas:

Officials at an elementary school in northwest Arkansas say they're getting angry calls over a You Tube video by students at a New Jersey school with a similar name.

Bernice Young Elementary School in Springdale is getting calls from across the nation and Canada from people mad about students shown singing about President Barack Obama. Principal Debbie Flora says the callers claim the school is teaching political opinion and that some "did not use very kind language."
. . .

Flora says that, so far, she has received no calls from Arkansas.

As a public service announcement, I would like to remind Americans and Canadians that New Jersey ≠ Arkansas.

People Who Don't Believe in Their Beliefs

2009-09-22T12:59:00.002-05:00

So I was reading Reading Beyond Race, by Paul M. Sniderman and Edward G. Carmines (Harv. Univ. Press, 1997), which analyzes a bunch of survey work about racial attitudes.

In an initial chapter, they point out that white opposition to affirmative action was overwhelming even among "the most racially tolerant 1 percent of whites." My immediate reaction was, "So then how did affirmative action ever come about, if almost no one supported it?"

A subsequent chapter had the answer. The researchers came up with a very clever idea that they called the "List Experiment," which consisted of giving people a survey in which the interviewer reads a list of things that could possibly upset people (pollution, an increase in gas taxes, etc.), and then asks simply to know how many of the listed items (not which particular items) upset the person being interviewed. But some of the interviewees got an extra item in the list: affirmative action. This allowed the researchers to know that if the average number goes up when affirmative action is included in the list, some number of people are picking affirmative action in addition to the other items.

What were the results? Here's where things get interesting. When liberals are asked directly about their attitude toward affirmative action, they largely support it. But this is "a result of liberals saying what they think they should say, not what they really think. . . . it turns out that about 57 percent of white liberals include 'black leaders asking the government for affirmative action' among the things that make them angry or upset, compared with 50 percent of conservatives (and 55 percent of moderates . . .). These three figures are statistically indistinguishable."

I wonder how much of politics (and religion?) is a matter of people saying what they think others want to hear, not what they really believe. But by the same token, how much of the very fact that we have civilized society at all is because we squelch our true feelings and say what other people will find acceptable? (Witness the difference between the vast majority of face-to-face conversations vs. the sorts of things that anonymous Internet commenters will say when unencumbered by the social pressure to hide their true feelings.)

Charter Schools and Merit Pay

2009-09-21T11:39:00.001-05:00

In a new post, educational historian Diane Ravitch says, among other things:

As I predicted on this blog, President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are now the spear carriers for the GOP's education policies of choice and accountability. An odd development, don’t you think? The Department of Education dangles nearly $5 billion before the states, but only if they agree to remove the caps on charter schools and any restrictions on using student test scores to evaluate teachers.

What is extraordinary about these regulations is that they have no credible basis in research. They just happen to be the programs and approaches favored by the people in power.

* * *

There is also no research that justifies the Obama administration’s belief that tying teacher evaluations to student scores will improve schools.

No research?

Take the charter school point first. In a study that Ravitch herself cites, the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University found that "states that have limits on the number of charter schools permitted to operate, known as caps, realize significantly lower academic growth than states without caps, around .03 standard deviations."

To be sure, .03 standard deviations isn't huge. But it's something. And it's a "credible basis" for the Obama administration to give states a financial incentive to eliminate charter school caps. I am aware of no studies finding any benefit whatsoever from state laws restricting the number of charter schools that can open. Incidentally, Arkansas currently restricts the number of charter schools statewide to 24. There is no basis for this limit.

Second, take the merit pay issue. No research? Consider David N. Figlio and Lawrence W. Kenny, "Individual Teacher Incentives and Student Performance," Journal of Public Economics 91 no. 5-6 (2007): 901-14. Looking at national data from the National Education Longitudinal Study, they find that "test scores are higher in schools that offer individual financial incentives for good performance." To be sure, Figlio and Kenny concede that their cross-sectional study can't tell definitively whether it was better schools that adopted performance pay, rather than vice versa.

But here are a few studies that weren't cross-sectional:

1) Gary Ritter and Josh Barnett, "When Merit Pay is Worth Pursuing," Educational Leadership 66 no. 2 (2008). Ritter and Barnett studied a Little Rock merit pay program. After two years, "schools implementing the program achieved average gains of approximately seven percentile points for students in mathematics and reading. Scores of students in the pilot schools improved, whereas those of students in comparison schools decreased."

2) Adele Atkinson, Simon Burgess, Bronwyn Croxson, Paul Gregg, Carol Propper, Helen Slater and Deborah Wilson, "Evaluating the impact of performance-related pay for teachers in England", Labour Economics 16 no. 3 (June 2009): 251-261 (a working version is available here). Atkinson et al. use a sophisticated methodology to evaluate a merit pay scheme in Englnad, controlling for pupil effects, school effects, and teacher effects. They find that "the scheme did improve test scores and value added increased on average by about 40% of a grade per pupil."

3) Victor Lavy, "Performance Pay and Teachers' Effort, Productivity, and Grading Ethics," NBER Working Paper 10622. Lavy evaluates a merit pay program in Israel that gave cash bonuses to teachers whose students earned more "credits" on national graduation exams. He used two sophisticated methods: regression discontinuity design and propensity score matching. His results are substantively significant: As to one estimation, he notes that "the effect of treatment on credits earned in math is 0.256, a 18 percent improvement relative to the mean of the control schools (1.46). The effect of treatment on awarded credits in English is 0.361, a 17 percent improvement relative to the mean of the control schools (2.11)."

These aren't the only studies, of course, and incentive schemes sometimes don't show much benefit. Still, to claim that there is no evidence in their favor isn't accurate. Once again, the position that lacks evidence here is the position that Obama and Duncan are trying to combat, i.e., that it should be illegal to use test score data to assess a teacher's performance (as is the case in several states). These states might as well have passed a law stating that because so much of a patient's health depends on factors outside a doctor's control, it should therefore be illegal to consider whether a doctor's patients were killed by incompetence.

On the bright side, I applaud Diane Ravitch's announcement of the Partnership for 19th Century Skills.

Fallibility of Eyewitness Testimony

2009-09-15T12:46:00.002-05:00

If the legal system ever started to take into account studies like this, there would be drastic changes.

My Investing Advice

2009-09-13T22:27:00.002-05:00

If you took my investment advice 11 months ago, you'd have earned about 13.65% since that time.

The Broken Windows Theory of Schools

2009-09-12T13:34:00.000-05:00

In a famous article in the 1982 Atlantic Monthly, James Q. Wilson and George Kelling argued that a good way to prevent serious crime would be for police to intervene as to seemingly low-level crimes or misdemeanors:

[D]isorder and crime are usually inextricably linked, in a kind of developmental sequence. Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken.
* * *

We suggest that "untended" behavior also leads to the breakdown of community controls. A stable neighborhood of families who care for their homes, mind each other's children, and confidently frown on unwanted intruders can change, in a few years or even a few months, to an inhospitable and frightening jungle. A piece of property is abandoned, weeds grow up, a window is smashed. Adults stop scolding rowdy children; the children, emboldened, become more rowdy. Families move out, unattached adults move in. Teenagers gather in front of the corner store. The merchant asks them to move; they refuse. Fights occur. Litter accumulates. People start drinking in front of the grocery; in time, an inebriate slumps to the sidewalk and is allowed to sleep it off. Pedestrians are approached by panhandlers.

At this point it is not inevitable that serious crime will flourish or violent attacks on strangers will occur. But many residents will think that crime, especially violent crime, is on the rise, and they will modify their behavior accordingly. . . . Such an area is vulnerable to criminal invasion. Though it is not inevitable, it is more likely that here, rather than in places where people are confident they can regulate public behavior by informal controls, drugs will change hands, prostitutes will solicit, and cars will be stripped. That the drunks will be robbed by boys who do it as a lark, and the prostitutes' customers will be robbed by men who do it purposefully and perhaps violently. That muggings will occur.

Via the New York Times' Idea Blog, Folwell Dunbar (Louisiana's academic adviser for charter schools) describes his very similar rules of thumb for guessing whether a school is any good. The title: "You don't always need a standardized test to know a school is in trouble. Just look in the boys' john." In other words, just as broken windows are a sign of a bad neighborhood, a school bathroom with graffiti, trash, and unflushed toilets is a good sign that the academic achievement level isn't too hot. That is, the fact that school administrators are incapable of monitoring bad behavior is a sign that students are probably being hampered from learning.

To be sure, Dunbar's theory doesn't rest solely on bathrooms. He lists many other conditions that, in his experience, indicate a poorly run school, such as:

Administrators are unwilling to let credentialed visitors roam. Instead, they insist on "giving a tour" of the usual, safe suspects.

Teachers read newspapers and take cell phone calls during professional development events.

Teachers play solitaire on their computers during planning periods (or class). Or: the Web sites most visited by teachers include eBay, ESPN and Monster.com.

Teachers and staff talk more about their latest degree or certification program than what they are doing with the kids.

The whole thing is worth reading.

Meaningless Polls

2009-09-11T11:07:00.004-05:00

Gallup Poll, yesterday:

A new Gallup poll finds half of Americans believe the court is “about right” ideologically, an all-time high and an increase of 7 percentage points over last year.

Sixty-one percent of Americans surveyed approve of the job done by the U.S. Supreme Court, the highest level since 2001, when the court had an approval rating of 62 percent, Gallup reports.

Given this Zogby poll, which famously found that 3 times as many Americans could name two of Snow White's dwarfs as could name two Supreme Court Justices, asking Americans to rate the Supreme Court's performance is a meaningless exercise. It's like asking people who have never heard of any physicists at all, other than maybe Stephen Hawking, to rate the world's top 10 physicists.

Obama's speech

2009-09-09T10:57:00.001-05:00

For all of the controversy over Obama's speech to schoolchildren, the actual speech turned out to have some valuable advice. The following sounds like something that I've said many times, almost verbatim:

But at the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, and the best schools in the world – and none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities. Unless you show up to those schools; pay attention to those teachers; listen to your parents, grandparents and other adults; and put in the hard work it takes to succeed.

Education reformers usually focus on all of the supply-side questions: how to spend money on schools, how to get good principals and teachers, how to inject competition and choice, what are the right standards and curricula, what are the right pedagogical techniques, what are the best accountability systems and merit pay, etc.

But all of that leaves out the demand-side: the students' willingness (or not) to learn. We can deliver the perfect curriculum via perfect teachers led by perfect principals in perfect schools operating under perfect accountability standards and choice, but if the students have the attitude that "I refuse to learn, because it's not cool, or it's acting white," they won't learn very much. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.

In fact, I might classify the cultural factors -- whatever affects a student's willingness to learn -- as more important than anything we do with the schools themselves. A motivated child can learn a lot on his or her own (say, by checking out books from the library) even if the school system is poorly run from top to bottom.

On the other hand, consider this alternative speech that Obama could have delivered.

The Evolution of God

2009-09-06T19:54:00.002-05:00

Robert Wright's new book The Evolution of God sounds like an interesting read, although I can't help but be reminded of this passage from G.K. Chesterton's Everlasting Man:

One of my first journalistic adventures, or misadventures, concerned a comment on Grant Allen, who had written a book about the Evolution of the Idea of God. I happened to remark that it would be much more interesting if God wrote a book about the evolution of the idea of Grant Allen. And I remember that the editor objected to my remark on the ground that it was blasphemous; which naturally amused me not a little. For the joke of it was, of course, that it never occurred to him to notice the title of the book itself, which really was blasphemous; for it was, when translated into English, 'I will show you how this nonsensical notion that there is God grew up among men.' * * *

The editor had not seen the point, because in the title of the book the long word came at the beginning and the short word at the end; whereas in my comments the short word came at the beginning and gave him a sort of shock. I have noticed that if you put a word like God into the same sentence with a word like dog, these abrupt and angular words affect people like pistol-shots. Whether you say that God made the dog or the dog made God does not seem to matter; that is only one of the sterile disputations of the too subtle theologians. But so long as you begin with a long word like evolution the rest will roll harmlessly past; very probably the editor had not read the whole of the title, for it is rather a long title and he was rather a busy man.

Muscles and Mortality

2009-09-04T21:42:00.003-05:00

Several of the studies showing a relationship between muscle strength or mass and mortality:

1. Metter, Talbot, Schrager, and Conwit, "Skeletal Muscle Strength as a Predictor of All-Cause Mortality in Healthy Men," Journals of Gerontology Series A 57 (2002): B359-B365.

2. Newman et al., "Strength, but not Muscle Mass, Is Associated With Mortality in the Health, Aging and Body Composition Study Cohort," Journals of Gerontology Series A 61 (2006): 72-77.

3. Wannamethee et al., "Decreased Muscle and Increased Central Adiposity are Independently Related to Mortality in Older Men," American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 86 no. 5 (Nov. 2007): 1339-1346.

4. Marquis et al., "Midthigh Muscle Cross-Sectional Area Is a Better Predictor of Mortality than Body Mass Index in Patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease," American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine 166 (2002): 809-13.

5. Mador, "Muscle Mass, Not Body Weight, Predicts Outcome in Patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease," American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine 166 (2002): 787-89. A key passage:

Correlation, however, does not prove causation.Thus, we cannot say whether a reduction in muscle mass causes an increase in mortality or whether a reduction in muscle mass is merely a reflection of severity of disease. If a reduction in muscle mass is responsible for the increased mortality, then interventions that successfully increase muscle mass should lead to improvement in mortality. No study addressing this issue has been performed.

Words of Wisdom from Seth Roberts

2009-08-30T21:22:00.001-05:00

Here:

Professors teach how to be professors. Most students don’t want to be professors. Every Berkeley prof I ever met was extremely good at research; a few were extremely good lecturers. And every one of them sounded like an idiot the moment they started talking about how they taught “critical thinking” or whatever grand-sounding term they had for it. “Teaching students to think” was a common way to describe teaching students how to be professors. To say such a thing to a psychology professor is like saying to a chemistry professor that the world consists of four elements (earth, air, fire, water). “Are you aware how stupid you sound?” I felt like saying. But instead I would say that there are many kinds of thinking.

Cancer

2009-08-26T10:35:00.001-05:00

This may be good news, if it pans out.

Atul Gawande

2009-08-25T19:16:00.000-05:00

I enjoyed this Harvard Magazine profile of surgeon and medical writer Atul Gawawnde.

My Qualm about Universal Health Insurance

2009-08-11T14:00:00.002-05:00

Just going by personal interest, I should be wildly in favor of universal health insurance. But as to the country at large, I worry about the rationing issue.

To be clear, I'm not worried that there will be too much rationing, I'm worried that there won't be enough. For a wide variety of reasons, I'm suspicious of the value of a lot of so-called "healthcare." Healthcare (not the lack of it) is one of the leading causes of death in America (doctor error, risks of surgery, hospital-borne infections, etc., etc.). And many treatments lack valid evidence that they even work.

Will there be enough rationing in a universal system? Probably not. Many people are frantic that there might be rationing (in the form of a refusal to pay for any requested service whatsoever), and the response of liberals is usually to proclaim that there will be less rationing under a government program than in the private market. So both sides will be on board for trying to limit rationing.

Thus, a universal system in America would, thanks to the political forces at work, serve to increase the total amount of healthcare consumed. Even though some people would benefit from more healthcare, that wouldn't be an average effect: lots of people would be harmed by having more healthcare. Thus, the American population would probably become less healthier on average, while paying more.

Not a good deal. There's got to be a better way to subsidize catastrophic insurance for the means-tested portion of the population that is most likely to need help there.

1950 Childhood vs. Today

2009-08-07T20:21:00.003-05:00

In an excellent post, Bryan Caplan points out that childhood is far safer in many ways today compared to 1950, a supposedly idyllic time of "Leave it to Beaver," etc. I suspect that the availability heuristic may play some role here. As childhood risks become lower, they ironically become better fodder for the news media, which tends to focus on rare sensational stories. In turn, the average person tends to overestimate risks that have been the subject of news coverage, and that are readily called to mind.