This week's links (2)

Collections of papers and articles that I've spotted this week that seem interesting. Comments on some of them.

Psychology

• Does religious priming increase the prosocial behaviour of a Japanese sample in an anonymous economic game?
  • Seemingly not
  • Sample size = 106
• Reconstruction of a train wreck: How priming research went off the rails
  • Kahnemann admits in a blog comment that he made some mistakes about priming in the famous Thinking fast and Slow
• Destroying God's Temple? Physical inactivity, poor diet, obesity, and other "sin" beaviours
  • Again, religion not related to that
• Therapy experience in naturalistic observational studies is associated with negative changes in personality
  • Psychotherapy is bad for you?????
  • Sample sizes are good, over 1000
  • "Overall, therapy experiences were associated with significant increases in undesirable traits and markers (e.g., chronic stress, depression, neuroticism), and significant decreases in desirable traits (e.g., self-esteem, conscientiousness)."
• Religiosity and crime revisited: Accounting for non-believers
  • Religious people commit as much crime as nonbelievers
  • But religious people who are not 'full believers'/have some doubts, commit more crime
• Sexually violent women: The PID-5, everyday sadism, and adversarial sexual attitudes predict female sexual aggresion and coercion against male victims
  • 10% of women are sexual offenders(!)
  • Sample size ~ 600.
  • Hmm. Time will tell if this is actually true.

Consciousness

• Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering how the brain codes our thoughts
  • Recommended to me and queued

Philosophy

• No excuses for moral realism
  • Most people would accept things like 'He was drunk' or 'She didn't know she was feeding bleach to her baby' as excuses, but not things like 'He didn't know that murder was wrong'.
  • The author uses this as an argument against moral realism
  • Here at Nintil we of course go edgy and say that moral ignorance is exculpatory. We used this argument against Bryan Caplan b4 it was cool and it appeared on journals.

Economics

• Reading Robert C. Allen: Farm to Factory: A reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution
  • Brad DeLong joins yours truly in an analysis of Allen's book
  • He doesn't cite me! :(
  • While he comes against Allen's conclusions, I think he is a bit more optimistic than me
• Why the Middle East fell behind
  • Follow also the twitter discussion
• The Great Recession: A Macroeconomic Earthquake
  • "One particularly notable set of advances is seen in recent research by Mark Gertler, Nobuhiro Kiyotaki and Andrea Prestipino. (See Gertler and Kiyotaki 2015 and Gertler, Kiyotaki and Prestipino 2016.) In their models, banks finance long-term assets with short-term liabilities. This liquidity mismatch between assets and liabilities captures the essential reason that real world financial institutions are vulnerable to runs."
  • This is what Neo-Austrian economist Juan Ramón Rallo has been sayingfor almost a decade now. Nice to see macro catching up :-)
• The effects of Academic incubators on university innovation
  • Some crowding out going on there
• Macroinvention vs Microinvention?
  • As mentioned elsewhere in this blog, inventions are mostly gradual, and we tend to remember those who were successful, forgetting those who, in some alternate world, would have been the pioneers of a different technological path
  • The concepts we use to discuss the importance of inventions is important
  • And so is studying individual inventions to see where they come from.

Artificial intelligence

• We need to go deeper, a practical guide to Tensorflow and Inception
• Attacking machine learning with adversarial examples
  • The more you study ML, the more fascinating it is
  • But the more removed from fully general AI it seems. Adversarial examples just reveal the fact that neural networks still do not know what they are seeing (in the sense that AlphaGo does not know it is playing Go). Neural nets are a clever form of approximating almost any function, but the way they do it seems to be brittle. A human would never fall for adversarial examples as depicted in the literature about adversarial examples.
  • This will be probably fixed in the coming years

Other

• Human nature is good: A sketch of the argument
  • "If we think well enough, we all can see the basic outlines of moral right and wrong; and something in us doesn't like to choose the wrong. This is true of pretty much everyone who isn't seriously socially deprived, regardless of the specifics of their cultural training. Furthermore, this inclination toward what's good -- I hope and believe -- is powerful enough to place at the center of moral education."
• George Church indicates reversal of aging will be a reality within ten years
• Empirical assessment of published effect sizes and power in the recent cognitive neuroscience and psychology literature
  • Methodological ~~nihilist terrorist ~~criticism from Ioannidis, this time in a different field
  • Another replication crisis in the making?