John Myles White: Die Sudelbücher

As part of an ongoing project on the behavioral consequences of tryptophan depletion, I read an article today that claimed to have found a positive correlation between high levels of corn consumption and homicide across many nations. The researchers claimed that corn, being deficient in tryptophan, chronically depletes serotonin levels, thereby increasing incidents of physical violence.

I was fascinated by the claim, albeit rather incredulous. But, rather than pursue the question of tryptophan’s effects on suicide, I decided to look into a question I’ve often wondered about: the correlation of GDP and suicide rates.

After some data diving of my own, using GDP data from the IMF and suicide data from WHO, I found no meaningful correlation between suicide rates and GDP. Interestingly, a simple scatterplot of the relevant data sets reveals that, for each gender separately, there are several very substantial outliers that make any such correlation impossible to find, as you can see below.

So the question I’m left with is, “what variables explain the very different suicide rates seen across nations in this data set?”

It is not the person we love, but the very act of loving, that redeems us.

Liberalism and conservatism are often presented as two opposite ways of thinking, but it would be more honest to call them two different ways of not thinking. One is liberal to the extent that one refuses to consider the harm our attempts to improve the world may cause; one is conservative insofar as one refuses to acknowledge that the world could be improved by some changes.

Several of my favorite economics bloggers have praised Robert Nozick during the past few days, whose 70th birthday would have been this past Sunday. I have considerable respect for Nozick, but must admit that this anecdote from David Henderson’s post on Econlog strikes me as more impressive than any specific part of Nozick’s considerable philosophical output:

The second thing I remember that always stands out was from an interview Nozick did in the 1970s or 1980s, I believe with Reason, in which he talked about a left-wing student who threatened to forcibly prevent Nozick from teaching a class on capitalism at Harvard. Nozick took the man aside and, in his recounting, threatened to “beat the s**t out of him.” The class went on as scheduled.¹

1. David Henderson : EconLog : Nozick — An Appreciation↩

To say it once and for all: using ” as the escape character for ‘ within single-quoted strings is a poor decision in language design.

This week a table of average GRE scores for different academic disciplines has been circulating around the economic blogosphere. You can see it at Greg Mankiw’s blog here.

After a colleague pointed the chart out to me today, I decided that I would combine the GRE scores with self-identification scores of political correctness from another chart that made its way around my circle of friends a few months ago. Below you’ll find the resulting scatterplot and regression line.

The correlation coefficient in the chart is -0.63, indicating a noticeable decline in GRE performance as one transitions to groups that are more PC. You can figure out the implications of that statement for yourself.

Evidently, Barack Obama still intends to impose involuntary servitude upon our nation’s youth. To quote Obama’s new website, Change.gov:

The Obama Administration will call on Americans to serve in order to meet the nation’s challenges. President-Elect Obama will expand national service programs like AmeriCorps and Peace Corps and will create a new Classroom Corps to help teachers in underserved schools, as well as a new Health Corps, Clean Energy Corps, and Veterans Corps. Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year. Obama will encourage retiring Americans to serve by improving programs available for individuals over age 55, while at the same time promoting youth programs such as Youth Build and Head Start.¹

Fortunately for those of us troubled by this scheme, it seems like that it won’t take very long for the Supreme Court to rule that such a proposal violates the 13th Amendment, which reads,

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime where of the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.²

There is, of course, one solution to the daunting problem the Constitution creates for Obama: we can simply make it a crime to be a teenager. Who likes that idea?

1. Change.gov : America Serves↩
2. United States Constitution : Thirteenth Amendment↩

I must say: it would be absolutely amazing — and truly wonderful — if Barack Obama were to choose Larry Summers as his Secretary of Treasury.

Responsibility, in the moral sense, is not a property of actors, but merely a confabulation on our part designed for one and only one purpose: to justify the suffering we inflict upon others. This holds equally well in regard to matters of retributive and distributive justice: responsibility is a mere holdover from an antiquated conception of the world.

It is not responsibility, but the estimation of conditional recidivism that should concern any legal system.

Equations force a model to be precise, complete, and self-consistent, and they allow its full implications to be worked out. It is not difficult to find word models in the conclusions sections of older neuroscience papers that sound reasonable but, when expressed as mathematical models, turn out to be inconsistent and unworkable. Mathematical formulation of a model forces it to be self-consistent and, although self-consistency is not necessarily truth, self-inconsistency is certainly falsehood.¹

These reasons are, in my mind, the entirety of the rationale behind mathematical modeling. Those who have read Marvin Minsky’s “Why Programming is a Good Medium for Expressing Poorly Understood and Sloppily-Formulated Ideas” will almost surely appreciate Abbott’s argument.

1. L. A. Abbott : Neuron : 60, November 6, 2008 : Theoretical Neuroscience Rising↩