Links to Consider, 7/18

Nabeel S. Qureshi on thought processes; Christopher Rufo on the Trans Empire; TLP watch; Emily Oster and Anupam Jena on research methods

Nabeel S. Qureshi writes,

I came across a fantastic book called Think Like A Super-GM, by Michael Adams and Philip Hurtado. The authors take 100 or so chess puzzles, of varying difficulty, and then ask chess players of different skill levels (amateur to grandmaster) to solve them, while recording their thinking process out loud.

…the ratio of time you spend trying to falsify your idea to the time you took coming up with it in the first place. For grandmasters, this is 4:1 — they’ll spend 1 minute finding the right move, and another 4 minutes trying to falsify it, whereas for amateurs this is something like 0.5:1 — 1 minute finding the move, 30 seconds making a cursory effort to falsify it.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

Christopher Rufo says,

So how did the trans movement suddenly move  from the fringes to the center of public life?   Because they built one of the most sophisticated  ideological pipelines in American politics.

He places the wealthy Pritzker family at the center.

In 2013, Pritzker announced a male to female   gender transition. …almost immediately Pritzker began donating  untold millions to universities, schools,   hospitals and activist organizations to promote  queer theory and trans medical experiments. 

The short video does not really explain how the ideological effort succeeded so well.

Possibly related: I have just started to read Up From Conservatism, a collection of essays from the Claremont Institute. They advocate for a New Right that is more pugnacious and less libertarian than mainstream conservatism. When Donald Trump was winning in 2016, he was their man, a bit less so after his defeat. The volume is edited by Arthur Milikh, whose introduction concludes with

Ruling requires taking responsibility for the good of your people and defending them against their enemies. Ruling in this sense is inspiring, invigorating, and beautiful to behold. The New Right must become the party of beauty, vitality, strength, truth, high purpose, and fierceness. It must view itself as the guardian and ruthless defender of a sacred thing: our civilization.

Readers of The Three Languages of Politics know that I say that conservatives like to claim ownership of the civilization-barbarism access. I’ll probably have more to say about the Claremont book at some later date.

Emily Oster talks with Anupam Jena, author of Random Acts of Medicine. The title refers to ways in which Jena teases quasi-experimental evidence out of observational data in order to assess how various factors affect health. Too often, observational data is misused. Jena thinks that in medicine, the incentives for junk science come from the journals.

my view is that if the journals celebrate this type of work, if they publish relationships between exercise and mortality, or coffee consumption and cancer, whatever it may be, if they reward authors by publishing it, why wouldn’t we expect to see this? I think that researchers are probably responding to the incentives that they have available to them. So, take the converse in economics. In economics, do we not see this sort of poorly-thought-out research because economists are better trained? Yeah, they probably are better trained, but it’s also the fact that you will never be able to get these kinds of studies into economics journals. It’s just not going to fly. So there’s no incentive to try to do that kind of work.

Oster responds,

The journal’s incentive is attention, right? And the media loves “peanuts cause dementia”; “peanuts cause dementia” is a great headline. People like to read that. And so that is the incentive for the media. Then that is the incentive for the journal. It’s actually not that interesting to publish a paper that says there’s no link between any known foods and dementia, which is more or less true. It’s not getting you on the BBC or in the New York Times. 

Jena adds,

I don’t actually think that the New York Times is at fault here. I don’t expect a really well-trained journalist to be able to parse out these issues. This is something that the journals should be the gatekeeper for. But for whatever reason, they’re not.

I don’t think that the economics publication pipeline suffers as much from “this will get attention in the press” bias. But I think it suffers a lot from what Bryan Caplan calls social desirability bias. If you find evidence that an educational intervention works or that a market is doing bad things, the paper is much more likely to be accepted than if you find nothing of the sort.

Substacks referenced above:

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Random Acts of Data

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Notes on Puzzles