Tyler Cowen Interview with Cliff Asness

An economist interviews an academic/investor (sic) on anomalies in the markets for stocks, bonds, and other investment products. A truly thought-provoking dialogue that reveals some interesting quirks about human nature.

Tyler Cowen is proving himself to be a great interviewer, mainly by avoiding the annoying features of most interviews (idle chatter, unnecessarily long introductions) and by unleashing a steady barrage of creative and thought-provoking questions.

"Buddhist Romanticism" by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Most do not yet realize it, but a defining moment in the history of the coming of the Dharma to the West has just occurred, with the publication of Thanissaro Bhikkhu's treatise Buddhist Romanticism.

In this treatise, Thanissaro discusses how Buddhism has been filtered through the "Dharma Gate" of Romanticism in Europe, the Americas, and elsewhere--just as Buddhism was filtered  through the Dharma Gate of Daoism when it came to China in the first few centuries of our era.

Thanissaro argues that many of the ideas popularly associated with Buddhism in the West, such as the oneness of all things, naturalness and spontaneity, following one's own inner genius, artistic self-expression, relativism, and the notion that religion needs to evolve to reflect changing social conditions, are actually ideas from the Romantic movement, many of which are incompatible with the teachings of the Buddha.

Thanissaro's treatise contains a patient and informative (and intellectually charitable) explanation of the early history of the Romantic movement, with a focus on its development among a clique of German intellectuals and artists in late 18th century Jena. Among other things, he explains how the Romantics regarded the modern novel (Roman) as the highest form of artistic expression, because it focused on the inner life of its characters, in a way that was less suited to other artistic media, such as epic poetry or tragedy. In this way, Thanissaro's work is a useful reference with regards to the history of ideas, as well as containing important insights into how the Romantic worldview continues to shape Western culture and the Western adoption of Buddhism.

Recent Study on Religion and Altruism

Here is a short critique of the recent religion and altruism study which has raised such a ruckus on social media. I do not agree with all of the points of the critique. The first point seems the strongest--the study did not control for enough possible confounds.

The second and third points of the critique seem weaker. The second is that the dictator game used in the study is not an effective measure of altruism. It's true that altruism is a difficult thing to measure, but the dictator game is widely used in research as a measure for altruism, and it's not obviously terrible (yeah, that's pretty faint praise--but this is social psychology, and everyone can agree that social psychology is tricky and messy and that we shouldn't expect transcendent perfection immediately in its methods and results, RIGHT?). For example, it has been used to show differences in sharing with strangers among people who live in different countries.

The third critique is that the effect size is small. But this is actually very typical for social science research. There typically are a lot of factors that go into causing complex psychological phenomena like altruistic behavior. It would be more of a surprise if the effect size of having atheist parents were large.

Still, even though this critique is not that strong, and even though I am an atheist and would no doubt enjoy seeing the study's findings confirmed, I am still skeptical about the way the study is being reported.

I am also disappointed about the way the study is being lionized by its defenders and demonized by its critics. It would be better if both sides could just acknowledge the limitations of the study but also acknowledge that it does provide some interesting or useful information that could help guide future research.

But no, people aren't like that. We primates have to band together with our in-group and verbally assault the out-group. The atheists instantly celebrate the study, the religionists instantly look for flaws or limitations in the study. Motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, the works. I.e., the usual disappointment.

More Quantum Woo-Woo?

This article seems to conflate three different concepts: quantum entanglement, quantum indeterminism, and the collapse of the wave function.

It seems that part of the reason why I can't understand quantum mechanics is that most attempts to describe it to a lay audience are so poor.

This experiment seems to give further evidence for quantum entanglement, but that was never really in doubt. The question the article seems to want to answer is the following: what are the metaphysical and epistemological implications of quantum entanglement? Unfortunately, this experiment does not answer that question.

R. Crumb on the Decline of Popular Music

A wide-ranging and fascinating interview with comic artist Robert Crumb. Among other things, here is Crumb's take on the decline of American music and the commercialization of American popular culture after the rise of radio in the 1930's:

The America that I missed died in about 1935. That’s why I have all this old stuff, all these old 78 records from that era. It was the golden age of recorded music, before the music business poisoned the people’s music, the same way that ‘agribusiness’ poisoned the very soil of the earth. In the old days, music was produced by common people, the music they produced to entertain themselves. The record industry took it and resold it, repackaged and killed it, spewed it out in a bland, artificial, ersatz version of itself. This goes along with the rise of the mass media, the spread of radio. My mother, born in the 1920s, remembered walking in the street in the summertime in Philadelphia, and in every other house, people were playing some kind of live music. Her parents played music and sang together. In her generation, her brothers didn’t want to play an instrument anymore. It was the swing era and all they wanted to do was to listen to Benny Goodman on the radio. The takeover of radio happened much later. In places like Africa, you can still find great recorded music from the ’50s. I have many 78s from Africa at that time that sound like some great rural music from America in the ’20s. In the U.S at that time there were thousands and thousands of bands, dance halls, ballrooms in hotels, restaurants had dance floors, school auditoriums, clubs in small towns. A small town of 10,000 would have a least a hundred bands. In the mid 30’s radio spread very fast in America and the depression killed a lot of the venues where live music was performed. You could go to the movies for 10 cents. Then in the 50’s TV finished it all off. Mass media makes you stay home, passive. In the 20’s there was live music everywhere in the States. I talked to old musicians who played in dance bands. This old musician bandleader Jack Coackley in San Francisco told me that in 1928 when you went downtown in the evening on the trolley car to play at a ballroom, the streets were full of musicians going to work, carrying instruments in cases. Same thing happened in France with the death of musette, the popular dance music of the working classes. There hasn’t been a decent popular music in America for a long time.

The Role of Anomalies in Scientific Research

In a recent blog post, neurologist and skeptic Steven Novella explains the useful role played by anomalies in scientific discovery, but also why skepticism about the very existence of an anomaly is often an appropriate initial response.

Purveyors of pseudoscience often point to anomalies as evidence for their own pet hypotheses, which would typically both put an end to further inquiry and not result in further useful predictions. Genuine scientists look at anomalies as opportunities to question their assumptions--either assumptions embedded into their underlying theory, or assumptions about the equipment and research methods.

Novella's story about an alleged anomaly--namely, neutrinos which traveled faster than the speed of light--also handily illustrates the limitations of Karl Popper's falsificationist view of scientific methodology. Specifically, in the case of an apparent falsification of a scientific theory, there is always the possibility that the theory was not in fact falsified, but rather some auxiliary hypothesis that was used to set up the test. An attempt to test a theory also always involves background assumptions about one's equipment, methods, and so on. In the case of the neutrinos, the research team which reported the results was at first unable to discover any problem with their equipment or methods, but later they discovered a wiring problem that caused their measurement of the neutrinos' speed to be inaccurate.

I would love to be able to use this example in a class on the philosophy of science!