Links to Consider, 2/16
Ricardo Hausmann on specialization and trade; Publication Bias in Economics; Radley Balko vs Derek Chauvin; David Friedman vs. Michael Huemer
A podcast with Yascha Mounk and Ricardo Hausmann. Hausmann says,
we know many, many more people from farther and farther away that are closer to our areas of intellectual interest. And we know less and less people who are farther away from our areas of intellectual interest. In the good old days, it was kind of required, expected. It was a social norm that you would go to church. And in church, you would find different segments of society sharing an experience. And that experience, in some sense, reminded everybody that they were in contact with one another, that they were dependent somehow on one another.
They discuss themes that I emphasize in Specialization and Trade and in my writing here. The passage above is in the midst of a discussion of how most people were “somewheres” (closely tied to a particular place) before the modern era. That produces more local solidarity but less specialization and trade. Today, we are richer but less engaged with our neighbors.
František Bartos and others write,
Our results indicate that meta-analyses in economics are the most severely contaminated by publication selection bias, closely followed by meta-analyses in environmental sciences and psychology, whereas meta-analyses in medicine are contaminated the least. After adjusting for publication selection bias, the median probability of the presence of an effect decreased from 99.9% to 29.7% in economics, from 98.9% to 55.7% in psychology, from 99.8% to 70.7% in environmental sciences, and from 38.0% to 29.7% in medicine.
Pointer from Alexander Kruel.
The training slide that Chauvin’s defenders want you to think exonerates him? It also has text. It’s big, easy to read text. And that text is incredibly damning.
Balko argues that the documentary “The Fall of Minnesota,” which claims that Derek Chauvin was unfairly convicted of the murder of George Floyd, is highly misleading. I think that it is wise to be skeptical of any documentary. It seems to me that it is a genre that is supposedly used to expose the truth but often is used to do the opposite.
In a subsequent post, Balko writes,
I’ve been covering police violence and the problem of bias in forensics for my entire career. The George Floyd protests were the first in my lifetime that not only moved public opinion on these issues, but inspired real substantive change, particularly at the state and local level. What we’re now seeing is an insidious, deceitful campaign to roll back these hard-won reforms by sowing doubt about the incident that inspired them.
Which “hard-won reforms” is Balko worried will be rolled back? Let A be a list of the reforms that Balko has long championed, B be the list of reforms that have actually been enacted, and C be the list of reforms that conservatives are trying to roll back. Let the intersection of set A and set B be set D. What is the intersection of set C and set D?
Pointer from Glenn Loury.
Consider three possible approaches to the problem of forming an opinion on a controversial issue. One is to look at the arguments and evidence as best you can and on that basis form your opinion, what Huemer describes as “critical thinking” and rejects. Another is to find out who the experts are and what conclusion they support. A third option is to conclude that you do not have an adequate basis for an opinion. While both of us agree that the third option is sometimes correct, he rejects the first as unworkable and argues for trusting the experts. I take the opposite position.
I agree that we have no choice but to trust other people. The human being is a social learning animal. Most of what I claim to know consists of propositions that I have never verified myself.
As Friedman points out, we may find that there is no such thing as the experts. There may be disagreement among people who have expert credentials. There may be “experts” who know much less than they pretend to know. Our ability to navigate the world depends on knowing who to trust when.
As you know, I like the position that institutions help to sort out truth. Arguments in court, scientific evaluation, and market processes are examples of such institutions. I would say that we should trust experts who have had their beliefs tested by well-functioning institutions. We have seen important institutions, including academia and journalism, degraded in recent years, and that means that we have to be wary of credentialed people that in the past we could have trusted as experts.
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Arnold, I appreciate your thoughts on trust and the observation that institutions have failed to perform their function of sustaining trust, and being worthy to be trusted. The most basic, simplest measure of "expert opinion" is DOES IT WORK? Where expert opinion relates to complex systems mostly beyond our observation society must rely on experts. But even there the majority of humans have the intelligence to consider the simple question of DOES IT WORK?
Consider the two Space Shuttle failures, especially the 1986 incident. We all witnessed the failure. Many saw it in person. Millions saw it live on TV and hundreds of millions saw the failure on replay. We all are capable of forming an undeniably true observation: IT DID NOT WORK. Why did it not work? There we get experts and they go to work.
A huge problem in the 21st century is the experts don't want to acknowledge failure. They do not want to admit the thing DOES NOT WORK. Our elections do not work - the basic mechanics of receiving and counting ballots is fundamentally broken. Covid public health protocols did not work. Criminal justice reform does not work. Public education reforms do not work. The list goes on and on. We have failure everywhere! And yet the "Experts" refuse to acknowledge failure exists.
So the common person has every reason to distrust and discredit the "experts" and the institutions who give such experts a home and financial backing. The first step to the experts and institutions regaining trust is to respect common sense. Stop gaslighting the public and admit those things that are obviously broken are broken and the premises followed to build the broken system need to be examined.
Balko's repeated use of "far-right" and other epithets against those who see things differently casts doubt on his purported objective analysis which includes a number of misstatements, including that Floyd died at the scene. He did not; it was later that evening in the hospital. Floyd had a greater than lethal dose of Fentanyl in his system, plus multiple other drugs. He was a huge dangerous man with a record of criminal violence who was uncooperative with police. To base a murder conviction on the facts of the case was unwarranted, and it was done in an atmosphere, including jury intimidation, that can in no way be described as fair. Balko obviously does not want the politically useful anti-white racist narrative of the case to be diminished, particularly in an election year in which many blacks are beginning to rethink their blind allegiance to the Democratic Party which is faced with possible loss of the presidency.