Links (10)

Collection of papers and articles that I’ve spotted since my previous links post that seem interesting.

Economics

• Quid pro quo? Corporate returns to campaign contributions 
• A replication of Education and catch-up in the Industrial Revolution
• The practitioner's challenge
• Evolving_moloch
  • The entire twitter account. Interesting stuff about cultural evolution
• The private production of roads
  • The stupidity of libertarian privatised roads
• Does social insurance crowd out? The case of Bismarck's system of social insurance
• A critical behavioural economics and behavioural science reading list
• Political regime type and warfare
  • Parliamentary regimes were more belligerent than absolutist monarchies in the 1200-1800 era
• The optimal inflation rate
• Yet more evidence that there is no short termism in US firms

Psychology

• Support for redistribution is shaped by compassion, envy, and self-interest, but not a taste for fairness
  • N=282-1032. Data from the US, UK, Israel, and India
• Giving, fast and slow. Reflection increases costly (but not uncostly) charitable giving
  • N=121, MTurk
• Childhood family income, adolescent violent criminality and substance misuse: quasiexperimental total population study
  • N=Almost everyone born in Sweden between 1989 and 1993
  • No association between child poverty and later criminality and substance abuse
• The effect is too large heuristic
• Did boys use to wear pink?
  • The plot thickens
• Critical thinking ability is a better predictor of life decisions than intelligence
  • N=244. They used the Halpern Critical Thinking Assessment for critical thinking. IQ and HCTA correlated with r=.38 Negative events were measured using the Real World Outcomes inventory and includes stuff like paying late fees for a movie rental(!) to contracting an STD for not wearing a condom. Correlation between HCTA and RWO was r=-.33, for IQ, r=-.264. When both predictors are used, the standarised coefficients for HCTA and IQ are -.323 and -.158.
  • Thread
  • This sounds like a win for rationality training(As in, making it worth it) , but one should be cautious: the existing literature shows that it is really hard to debias people.
• Replication report of Reflection and reasoning in moral judgement
  • Failed to replicate. That is, CRT, a measure of rationality, does not correlate with utilitarianism.
  • In line with results by Royzman: Are thoughtful people more utilitarian?
• Moral pluralism on the trolley tracks
  • Why do people choose what they choose in the dilemmas? Just ask them!
  • Apparently, for people who say they are utilitarians, some have traits correlated with psychopathy, and others with being actual utilitarians in the real world. Many studies do not disentangle this.
• Judgement before emotion: people access moral evaluations faster than affective states
  • N=111-241, MTurk
  • Could it be that moral judgement causes emotions?

AI

• Neuroscience-inspired artificial intelligence
• The limitations of deep learning
  • Say, for instance, that you could assemble a dataset of hundreds of thousands—even millions—of English language descriptions of the features of a software product, as written by a product manager, as well as the corresponding source code developed by a team of engineers to meet these requirements. Even with this data, you could not train a deep learning model to simply read a product description and generate the appropriate codebase. That's just one example among many. In general, anything that requires reasoning—like programming, or applying the scientific method—long-term planning, and algorithmic-like data manipulation, is out of reach for deep learning models, no matter how much data you throw at them. Even learning a sorting algorithm with a deep neural network is tremendously difficult.
  • This is because a deep learning model is "just" a chain of simple, continuous geometric transformations mapping one vector space into another.
• Deep neural networks do not recognize negative images
• Machine creativity beats some modern art
  • Objective evidence of sorts for the superiority of classical art, imho. Harder to replicate with machines due to greater complexity.

Tech

• Utilitites fighting against rooftop solar are only hastening their own doom

Philosophy

• Tax cuts for the wealthy are not income redistribution
  • The (Nagel-Sunstein-Holmes-Murphy) argument that "the current scheme of income, property ownership, and wealth would not exist without the government and taxes that support it. My current income causally depends upon certain institutional facts, including social conventions created by or at least maintained by my government. In the state of nature, I’d make, let’s say, 1/200th of my current income. Murphy and Nagel conclude that I don’t thereby have a natural right to my income, since it’s not as though I would have that income in the state of nature." is a bad one. But is still around.
• Luke Muehlhauser AMA about consciousness and moral patienthood
• Do philosophers care too much about fallacies?

Other

• Universal mediocrity: why do Britons like their sub-par health-care system so much
  • Related links
• Evidence on the deleterious impact of sustaned use of polynomial regression on causal inference
  • Higher order polynomials are evil
• bayes: a kinda-sorta masterpost
  • See also the thread
• A numerical linear algebra course
• Introducing Asabiyah
• Basic assumptions of physics might require the future to influence the past
  • Or MWI to be true.
• Policy-based evidence making
• The alphabet was originally designed by illiterate miners from the templates of a few hieroglyphs

Comments from WordPress

• Linv 2017-07-23T05:25:56Z

  Why is Nagel-Sunstein-Holmes-Murray bad?

• Linv 2017-07-23T05:26:33Z

  Murphy****

• Rational Feed – deluks917 2017-07-22T22:29:29Z

  […] Links 10 by Artir (Nintil) – Tons of links. Economics, Psychology, AI, Philosophy, Misc. […]