Overcoming Bias

Baby Selling

Before visiting Guatemala a few weeks ago, I read this travel advisory:

In 2007 particularly virulent rumors of child stealing and of murder for organ harvesting have been reported in several different areas of Guatemala frequented by American tourists.   This year numerous Guatemalan citizens have been lynched for suspicion of child stealing.

Saturday the Post said: 

A year after Guatemala's emergence as the second-largest foreign source of babies for adoption to the United States, a new push by the Guatemalan government to wrest control of the process from private agencies has stirred an emotional backlash from thousands of prospective adoptive parents in the United States. ...

Guatemala's solicitor general, Mario Gordillo, ... worries that thousands of desperately poor Guatemalan women are being induced to conceive children for adoption by private brokers offering as much as $3,000 a baby.

"Guatemala has converted into a baby-producing nation," Gordillo said at his office in Guatemala City. "Our children come into this world to be products for sale. . . . It's as if they were a car. What model is it? And who wants to buy it?"   The debate raging in Guatemala echoes previous controversies that have led to the suspension of adoptions from Romania to Cambodia. ...

Merry Hallowthankmas Eve

In a Time oped titled "Merry Hallowmas", Nancy Gibbs complains that corporations are forcing a longer holiday season on us, for nefarious reasons:

"A perpetual Holiday," George Bernard Shaw said, "is a good working definition of hell." This year the perennial ruckus over little girls' slutty Halloween costumes was still going strong even as the perennial ruckus over the War on Christmas began. It's as though we've supersized our holidays, so that they start sooner, last longer and cost more, until the calendar pages pull and tear, and we don't know which one we are meant to be celebrating. ...

August is the rare month with no shared celebration in it, when we gasp along for weeks on end without collective permission to overspend, overeat and overindulge.  Given that hardship, retailers seize the opportunity. Now it's not only school that starts the day after Labor Day; so does Halloween. Target and Wal-Mart had their spooky gear out by the following weekend. Monthly magazines do Halloween in the September issue, so Christmas can hit in October.

Sorry, I don't see a conspiracy of thugs beating up retailers who refuse to join a holiday campaign.  Instead, I see a vigorous competition among retailers trying to attract customers who want a longer holiday season.  Complaining that retailers force a long holiday season makes no more sense than saying studios force violent movies, or that newspapers force horse-race style election-coverage.  Retailers, studios, and newspapers mostly just anticipate consumer demand for such things.  If you want someone to blame, stand in a crowd and look around.

Why Are Individual IQ Differences OK?

Idang Alibi of Abuja, Nigeria writes on the James Watson affair:

A few days ago, the Nobel Laureate, Dr. James Watson, made a remark that is now generating worldwide uproar, especially among blacks.  He said what to me looks like a self-evident truth.  He told The Sunday Times of London in an interview that in his humble opinion, black people are less intelligent than the White people...

An intriguing opening.  Is Idang Alibi about to take a position on the real heart of the uproar?

I do not know what constitutes intelligence.  I leave that to our so-called scholars.  But I do know that in terms of organising society for the benefit of the people living in it, we blacks have not shown any intelligence in that direction at all.  I am so ashamed of this and sometimes feel that I ought to have belonged to another race...

Darn, it's just a lecture on personal and national responsibility.  Of course, for African nationals, taking responsibility for their country's problems is the most productive attitude regardless.  But it doesn't engage with the controversies that got Watson fired.

Later in the article came this:

As I write this, I do so with great pains in my heart because I know that God has given intelligence in equal measure to all his children irrespective of the colour of their skin.

This intrigued me for two reasons:  First, I'm always on the lookout for yet another case of theology making a falsifiable experimental prediction.  And second, the prediction follows obviously if God is just, but what does skin colour have to do with it at all?

Congratulations to Paris Hilton

...on signing up for cryopreservation with the Cryonics Institute.

(No, it's not a joke.)

Anyone not signed up for cryonics has now lost the right to make fun of Paris Hilton,
because no matter what else she does wrong, and what else you do right,
all of it together can't outweigh the life consequences of that one little decision.

Congratulations, Paris.  I look forward to meeting you someday.

Addendum:  On Nov 28 '07, Paris Hilton denied being signed up for cryonics.  Oh well.

Regulation Ratchet

A recent email asked me to admit that the current credit crunch shows we need more government regulation; the author thought it "easy to see" regulators could have foreseen and avoided the problem. This made me realize that we often hear claims that bad economic news, such as the dotcom crash, rising oil prices, or rising medical prices, suggests we need more regulation.  But we rarely hear claims that bad news suggests we need less regulation, or that good news suggests we need less regulation. 

Now perhaps it makes sense to change policy more in bad times than good, though even this is not clear; after all, we can better afford to experiment with change in good times. But it seems biased to call for more regulation given a certain cue, without calling for less regulation given some other cue.  If we all agreed we have too little regulation, then we should just add more regardless of whether news is good or bad.

This bias would seem to produce a regulation ratchet: increased regulation after bad times, but little change after good times.  Of course this by itself doesn't say if we have too much or not enough regulation; it just says the time trend is wrong.

Perhaps this regulation ratchet arises from a hindsight bias, i.e., an illusion that regulators could have foreseen current crises, combined with a tendency to more often think "something must be done" in bad times, combined with the Politician's Syllogism, (which I previously called Caplan's fallacy):

Something must be done.
This is something.
Therefore, this must be done.

They're Telling You They're Lying!

Robert Aumann, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics for his contributions to game theory, is vocally opposed to peace gestures that Israel either has made or that people have suggested it should make.  His basic message can be summarized in the following passage:

Social Norms Need Neutrality, Simplicity

On April 4, shock jock Don Imus called the Rutgers women's basketball team "nappy-headed hos," and was soon fired.  Last week the Washington Post noted:

Two weeks past its news expiration date, the debate seems to be gathering renewed strength.  .. On Monday hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons, who just two weeks ago was arguing for the rights of rappers to express themselves as artists, did a seeming about-face and called for the voluntary banning of "bitch," "ho" and the N-word from the lexicon as "extreme curse words." 

Monday we heard:

A panel discussion titled "Does Hip-Hop Hate Women?" drew more than 400 people indoors on a sunny day -- a sign that the furor that erupted over Don Imus' comments isn't over yet.  As Imus struggled in vain to keep his job earlier this month, he claimed that rappers routinely "defame and demean black women" and call them "worse names than I ever did." Some speakers criticized music executives ... Others ... said hip-hop shouldn't be made a scapegoat for what's wrong in America.

James Poniewozik asked the key question on Time's April 12 cover: "Who Can Say What?"

EH Hunt helped LBJ Kill JFK?

An audio tape has been released of Watergate conspirator and longtime CIA operative E. Howard Hunt confessing on his deathbed to helping Lyndon B. Johnson assassinate John F. Kennedy.  I have no special expertize on this topic, but this seems on its face hard evidence to dismiss.  I would dearly love to see a betting market on this topic, but since almost a half century has already passed, we may well have to wait another half century or more to see a clear resolution.

The topic is fascinating because such claims have long been dismissed by "establishment" media and academia, yet a minority of passionate advocates keep the topic alive.  There are plenty of potential biases each side can use to explain why the other side disagrees.   So at what odds would you bet?

Added: The lack of media coverage of this is odd (exceptions here, here, here.) 

None Evil or All Evil?

In yesterday's Washington Post Shankar Vedantam had another fascinating bias article, "Disagree About Iraq? You're Not Just Wrong -- You're Evil."

What is interesting about the [Iraq war] clash from a psychological perspective is not that supporters and critics disagree, but that large numbers of people on both sides claim to know the motives of people who disagree with them. ... A wide body of psychological research shows that on any number of hot-button issues, people seem hard-wired to believe the worst about those who disagree with them. ... said Glenn D. Reeder, a social psychologist at Illinois State University ... "We find it difficult to grant that other people come to their conclusions in good faith if they reach a conclusion that is different than ours." ...

When Reeder and his colleagues asked pro-war and antiwar Americans how they would describe the other side's motives, the researchers found that the groups suffered from an identical bias: People described others who agreed with them as motivated by ethics and principle, but felt that the people who disagreed with them were motivated by narrow self-interest. ...

Studies have found, for example, that people believe that those who disagree with them are less informed and that those who agree with them are better informed. On issues in which information is widely available, people concede that their opponents are knowledgeable but insist that their conclusions are self-serving and biased.  Another study found that liberals and conservatives not only overestimate their opponents' partisan motives on questions such as abortion and same-sex marriage but also overestimate the partisan motives of people on their own side.

The article neglected to mention that in addition to over-estimating self-serving biases in others, we probably also underestimate them in ourselves.  I suspect this was not a random oversight. 

Unequal Inequality

President Bush just spoke of "income inequality" for the first time, Tyler Cowen (the most impressive mind I've met) said last week that "inequality as a major and chronic American problem has been overstated," while Brad DeLong just said that "on the level of individual societies, I believe that inequality does loom as a serious political-economic problem."

I find it striking that these discussions focus almost entirely on the smallest of these seven kinds of inequality: 

1. Inequality across species
2. Inequality across the eras of human history
3. Non-financial inequality, such as of popularity, respect, beauty, sex, kids
4. Income inequality between the nations of a world
5. Income inequality between the families of a nation
6. Income inequality between the siblings of a family
7. Income inequality between the days of a person's life