The Ambrosini Critique

here.

At some point we’ll stop taking sides and start calling this sort of skepticism, on both sides, science.

Do you believe the science of anthropogenic global warming is locked? Wanna bet?

For a while now, I’ve had the impression that Chinese immigrants are more ‘American’ than other immigrant groups. No, I have no idea what I really mean by that.

Anyway, I wonder if we looked at the summary statitics for Americans if they’d be much different then those in this working paper (btw, you can safely ignore all the regressions and focus your attention to figure 1 and tables 2 and 5… oh, the size of social network is measured as the answer to the question “In the past year, how many relatives, friends, colleagues or acquaintances did you exchange gifts with or often maintain contact?”).

There’s too much pollution because the cost of producing it isn’t born by the producer. Bryan Caplan thinks there’s too much voter irrationality for the same reason:

In a sense, then, there is a method to the average voter’s madness. Even when his views are completely wrong, he gets the psychological benefit of emotionally appealing political beliefs at a bargain price. No wonder he buys in bulk.

For example, our tribal ancestors’ brains evolved to distrust strangers. Today there remains emotional resonance to that distrust and as a result people are more likely to support limitations on immigration. Bryan argues people bare no cost for this belief as they benefit, if even slightly, from the primordial emotional feedback. The result is people vote for irrational things like immigration restrictions.

Bryan goes on to claim that voters have systematic biases such as this on many other subjects. In the end, democracy creates a lot of pollution.

A professor forwarded this New Yorker article about the Large Hadron Collider in Europe.

One section of the article talks about tension between theorists and empiricists. The empiricists feel like they’ve been slaving away the last decade to build the collider and then the theorists are swooping in to claim credit for any of their discoveries. The theorist of course theorized the existence of any particles the empiricists might find.

Whatever the empirical physicists feel about the theorists, its clear that the LHC wouldn’t have been built, nor conceived of, if it wasn’t for theory. In physics, they have stories and then they run experiments to check those stories.

Economics has a different problem, I think. There’s too much data, not enough experimental data, and not enough theory. Econometrics allows a hundred ways to parse signal from noise. Given even with random data 5 of those ’signals’ will be statistically significant, we end up making up stories to explain the data even if the data is just noise.

In economics, we have it backwards. We find data sources, we dig around until we get statistical significance, and then we have a paragraph in the last section of the paper outlining the several stories that can be told to explain the data.

This is a weird coincidence. Both of my favorite shows ended tonight with a main character yelling into the Grand Canyon.

Tony Soprano: “I get it!”

Drama: “Victory!”

Weird.

(Both links are to the future episode permalink.)

The A’s are close to breaking ground on a new stadium in Fremont, West of 880 and South of Auto Mall Parkway.

The nice thing about the Coliseum is that you can basically BART right into the stadium. Even when/if BART expands south to Warm Springs, the proposed new stadium will be a mile away.

And what will they call the team after the move? The Fremont A’s? That sounds too much like a triple A team. The Cisco deal means the stadium will be called Cisco Field for 30 years. Maybe the should go the branding distance and buy the rights to the team name.

Actually, I’d prefer Cisco A’s to Fremont A’s.

My uncle Wight came to me to my office this afternoon to speak with me about Mr. Maes’s business again, and from me went to my house to see my wife, and strange to think that my wife should by and by send for me after he was gone to tell me that he should begin discourse of her want of children and his also, and how he thought it would be best for him and her to have one between them, and he would give her 500l. either in money or jewells beforehand, and make the child his heir. He commended her body, and discoursed that for all he knew the thing was lawful. She says she did give him a very warm answer, such as he did not excuse himself by saying that he said this in jest, but told her that since he saw what her mind was he would say no more to her of it, and desired her to make no words of it. It seemed he did say all this in a kind of counterfeit laugh, but by all words that passed, which I cannot now so well set down, it is plain to me that he was in good earnest, and that I fear all his kindness is but only his lust to her. What to think of it of a sudden I know not, but I think not to take notice yet of it to him till I have thought better of it.

— Diary of Samuel Pepys, May 11 1664