Paul M. Jones

[E]very time in the past that these researchers had claimed that an association observed in their observational trials was a causal relationship, and that causal relationship had then been tested in experiment, the experiment had failed to confirm the causal interpretation -- i.e., the folks from Harvard got it wrong. Not most times, but every time. No exception. Their batting average circa 2007, at least, was .000.

...

I never used the word scientist to describe the people doing nutrition and obesity research, except in very rare and specific cases. Simply put, I don’t believe these people do science as it needs to be done; it would not be recognized as science by scientists in any functioning discipline.

Science is ultimately about establishing cause and effect. It’s not about guessing. You come up with a hypothesis -- force x causes observation y -- and then you do your best to prove that it’s wrong. If you can’t, you tentatively accept the possibility that your hypothesis was right. Peter Medawar, the Nobel Laureate immunologist, described this proving-it’s-wrong step as the ”the critical or rectifying episode in scientific reasoning.” Here’s Karl Popper saying the same thing: “The method of science is the method of bold conjectures and ingenious and severe attempts to refute them.” The bold conjectures, the hypotheses, making the observations that lead to your conjectures… that’s the easy part. The critical or rectifying episode, which is to say, the ingenious and severe attempts to refute your conjectures, is the hard part. Anyone can make a bold conjecture. (Here’s one: space aliens cause heart disease.) Making the observations and crafting them into a hypothesis is easy. Testing them ingeniously and severely to see if they’re right is the rest of the job -- say 99 percent of the job of doing science, of being a scientist.

...

[B]ecause this is supposed to be a science, we ask the question whether we can imagine other less newsworthy explanations for the association we’ve observed. What else might cause it? An association by itself contains no causal information. There are an infinite number of associations that are not causally related for every association that is, so the fact of the association itself doesn’t tell us much.

...

[A]s we move from the bottom quintile of meat-eaters (those who are effectively vegetarians) to the top quintile of meat-eaters we see an increase in virtually every accepted unhealthy behavior -- smoking goes up, drinking goes up, sedentary behavior (or lack of physical activity) goes up -- and we also see an increase in markers for unhealthy behaviors -- BMI goes up, blood pressure, etc. So what could be happening here?

...

[P]eople who comply with their doctors’ orders when given a prescription are different and healthier than people who don’t. This difference may be ultimately unquantifiable. The compliance effect is another plausible explanation for many of the beneficial associations that epidemiologists commonly report, which means this alone is a reason to wonder if much of what we hear about what constitutes a healthful diet and lifestyle is misconceived.

...

[W]henever epidemiologists compare people who faithfully engage in some activity with those who don’t -- whether taking prescription pills or vitamins or exercising regularly or eating what they consider a healthful diet -- the researchers need to account for this compliance effect or they will most likely infer the wrong answer. They’ll conclude that this behavior, whatever it is, prevents disease and saves lives, when all they’re really doing is comparing two different types of people who are, in effect, incomparable.

...

[O]bservational studies may have inadvertently focused their attention specifically on, as Jerry Avorn says, the “Girl Scouts in the group, the compliant ongoing users, who are probably doing a lot of other preventive things as well.”

...

It’s this compliance effect that makes these observational studies the equivalent of conventional wisdom-confirmation machines.

...

So when we compare people who ate a lot of meat and processed meat in this period to those who were effectively vegetarians, we’re comparing people who are inherently incomparable. We’re comparing health conscious compliers to non-compliers; people who cared about their health and had the income and energy to do something about it and people who didn’t. And the compliers will almost always appear to be healthier in these cohorts because of the compliance effect if nothing else. No amount of “correcting” for BMI and blood pressure, smoking status, etc. can correct for this compliance effect, which is the product of all these health conscious behaviors that can’t be measured, or just haven’t been measured. And we know this because they’re even present in randomized controlled trials. When the Harvard people insist they can “correct” for this, or that it’s not a factor, they’re fooling themselves. And we know they’re fooling themselves because the experimental trials keep confirming that.

...

This is why the best epidemiologists -- the one’s I quote in the NYT Magazine article -- think this nutritional epidemiology business is a pseudoscience at best. Observational studies like the Nurses’ Health Study can come up with the right hypothesis of causality about as often as a stopped clock gives you the right time. It’s bound to happen on occasion, but there’s no way to tell when that is without doing experiments to test all your competing hypotheses. And what makes this all so frustrating is that the Harvard people don’t see the need to look for alternative explanations of the data -- for all the possible confounders -- and to test them rigorously, which means they don’t actually see the need to do real science.

...

Now we’re back to doing experiments -- i.e., how we ultimately settle this difference of opinion. This is science. Do the experiments.

...

So we do a randomized-controlled trial. Take as many people as we can afford, randomize them into two groups -- one that eats a lot of red meat and bacon, one that eats a lot of vegetables and whole grains and pulses-and very little red meat and bacon -- and see what happens. These experiments have effectively been done. They’re the trials that compare Atkins-like diets to other more conventional weight loss diets -- AHA Step 1 diets, Mediterranean diets, Zone diets, Ornish diets, etc. These conventional weight loss diets tend to restrict meat consumption to different extents because they restrict fat and/or saturated fat consumption and meat has a lot of fat and saturated fat in it. Ornish’s diet is the extreme example. And when these experiments have been done, the meat-rich, bacon-rich Atkins diet almost invariably comes out ahead, not just in weight loss but also in heart disease and diabetes risk factors. I discuss this in detail in chapter 18 of Why We Get Fat, ”The Nature of a Healthy Diet.” The Stanford A TO Z Study is a good example of these experiments. Over the course of the experiment -- two years in this case -- the subjects randomized to the Atkins-like meat- and bacon-heavy diet were healthier. That’s what we want to know.

Now Willett and his colleagues at Harvard would challenge this by saying somewhere along the line, as we go from two years out to decades, this health benefit must turn into a health detriment. How else can they explain why their associations are the opposite of what the experimental trials conclude? And if they don’t explain this away somehow, they might have to acknowledge that they’ve been doing pseudoscience for their entire careers. And maybe they’re right, but I certainly wouldn’t bet my life on it.

Ultimately we’re left with a decision about what we’re going to believe: the observations, or the experiments designed to test those observations. Good scientists will always tell you to believe the experiments. That’s why they do them.

...

Conventional methods assume all errors are random and that any modeling assumptions (such as homogeneity) are correct. With these assumptions, all uncertainty about the impact of errors on estimates is subsumed within conventional standard deviations for the estimates (standard errors), such as those given in earlier chapters (which assume no measurement error), and any discrepancy between an observed association and the target effect may be attributed to chance alone. When the assumptions are incorrect, however, the logical foundation for conventional statistical methods is absent, and those methods may yield highly misleading inferences.

...

Systematic errors can be and often are larger than random errors, and failure to appreciate their impact is potentially disastrous.

Via Science, Pseudoscience, Nutritional Epidemiology, and Meat.

Haidt wants to change how people think about the culture wars. He first plunged into political research out of frustration with John Kerry's failure to connect with voters in 2004. A partisan liberal, the University of Virginia professor hoped a better grasp of moral psychology could help Democrats sharpen their knives. But a funny thing happened. Haidt, now a visiting professor at New York University, emerged as a centrist who believes that "conservatives have a more accurate understanding of human nature than do liberals."

...

"Liberals need to be shaken," Haidt tells me. They "simply misunderstand conservatives far more than the other way around."

...

In 1739 the philosopher David Hume wrote that "reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them." Hume disagreed with philosophers who aspired to reason their way to moral truth without examining human nature. An honest inquiry, he argued, reveals that reason is biased and weak while intuition propels our moral lives.

...

In 2001, Haidt chambered a bullet at rationalism in a classic paper that tied together moral dumbfounding, philosophy, and recent psychology findings on human judgment, while also bringing in anthropology and primatology. His conclusion: "Most of the action in moral psychology" is in our automatic intuitions. "People do indeed reason, but that reasoning is done primarily to prepare for social interaction, not to search for truth."

...

Haidt sees morality as a "social construction" that varies by time and place. We all live in a "web of shared meanings and values" that become our moral matrix, he writes, and these matrices form what Haidt, quoting the science-fiction writer William Gibson, likens to "a consensual hallucination." But all humans graft their moralities on psychological systems that evolved to serve various needs, like caring for families and punishing cheaters.

...

In The Righteous Mind, Haidt attributes his own ideological shift to an intellectual awakening. He came to appreciate the right's insights about social cohesion after reading Conservatism, an anthology edited by the historian Jerry Z. Muller. But he also credits another factor: the end of George W. Bush's presidency. Haidt hated Bush. He couldn't shift his views until that animosity disappeared--until he was no longer an angry partisan fighting another team "for the survival of the world."

In other words, his intuition ruled.

...

Via Jonathan Haidt Decodes the Tribal Psychology of Politics - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education.

When we watch a race where some runners are shackled, we recognize it as unfair. We see the liberty of the shackled runners restricted if they are weighted down by the force of law. When we call out for greater equality, should we be satisfied if the laws are changed so as to shackle all runners equally, or should we remain unsatisfied until shackles are removed, and no one is weighted down? 

The quoted paragraph made me think of Harrison Bergeron. via You Say You Want A Revolution...: Is the Pool of Liberty Drying Up?.

The violence in the story has to be given sufficient dramatic weight so that the moral dilemma it poses can be seen in the right context. It is absolutely essential that Alex is seen to be guilty of a terrible violence against society, so that when he is eventually transformed by the State into a harmless zombie you can reach a meaningful conclusion about the relative rights and wrongs. If we did not see Alex first as a brutal and merciless thug it would be too easy to agree that the State is involved in a worse evil in depriving him of his freedom to choose between good and evil. It must be clear that it is wrong to turn even unforgivably vicious criminals into vegetables, otherwise the story would fall into the same logical trap as did the old, anti-lynching Hollywood westerns which always nullified their theme by lynching an innocent person. Of course no one will disagree that you shouldn't lynch an innocent person -- but will they agree that it's just as bad to lynch a guilty person, perhaps even someone guilty of a horrible crime? And so it is with conditioning Alex.

...

Films and TV are also convenient whipping boys for politicians because they allow them to look away from the social and economic causes of crime, about which they are either unwilling or unable to do anything.

...

Q: Alex loves rape and Beethoven: what do you think that implies?

A: I think this suggests the failure of culture to have any morally refining effect on society. Hitler loved good music and many top Nazis were cultured and sophisticated men but it didn't do them, or anyone else, much good.

...

Q: In your films, you seem to be critical of all political factions. Would you define yourself as a pessimist or anarchist?

A: I am certainly not an anarchist, and I don't think of myself as a pessimist. I believe very strongly in parliamentary democracy, and I am of the opinion that the power and authority of the State should be optimized and exercized only to the extent that is required to keep things civilized. History has shown us what happens when you try to make society too civilized, or do too good a job of eliminating undesirable elements. It also shows the tragic fallacy in the belief that the destruction of democratic institutions will cause better ones to arise in their place.

Certainly one of the most challenging and difficult social problems we face today is, how can the State maintain the necessary degree of control over society without becoming repressive, and how can it achieve this in the face of an increasingly impatient electorate who are beginning to regard legal and political solutions as too slow? The State sees the spectre looming ahead of terrorism and anarchy, and this increases the risk of its over-reaction and a reduction in our freedom. As with everything else in life, it is a matter of groping for the right balance, and a certain amount of luck.

The Kubrick Site: Kubrick's comments regarding 'A Clockwork Orange'.

No administration has embodied credentialism as thoroughly as the current one. Of Obama’s first thirty-five cabinet appointments, twenty-two had a degree from an Ivy League university, MIT, Stanford, the University of Chicago, Oxford, or Cambridge. No one would advocate staffing the country’s ministries with wealthy imbeciles, as was the custom under George W. Bush; but the President?--?a meritocrat himself?--?has succumbed to what might be called the “complexity complex,” which leads us to assume that public policy is so complicated that you need a stack of degrees to figure it out. But major political questions are rarely complex in that sense. They are much more likely to be complicated, in the Avril Lavigne sense, meaning that they involve reconciling disagreements among competing stakeholders?--?or, as the situation may demand, ratcheting them up.

via n+1: Death by Degrees.

The knock-down argument against the 1-2-3 studies of happiness comes from the philosopher’s (and the physicist’s) toolbox: a thought experiment. “Happiness” viewed as a self-reported mood is surely not the purpose of a fully human life, because, if you were given, in some brave new world, a drug like Aldous Huxley’s imagined “soma,” you would report a happiness of 3.0 [on a 1-2-3 scale] to the researcher every time. Dopamine, an aptly named neurotransmitter in the brain, makes one “happy.” Get more of it, right? Something is deeply awry.

...

One of the proponents of happiness studies, the eminent British economist Richard Layard, is fond of noting that “happiness has not risen since the ’50s in the U.S. or Britain or (over a shorter period) in western Germany.” Such an allegation casts doubt on the relevance of the “happiness” so measured. No one who lived in the United States or Britain in the ’50s (I leave judgments on West Germany in the ’70s to others) could possibly believe that the age of Catcher in the Rye or The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner was more fulfilling than recent times.

...

In 2004, there appeared a gratifyingly sensible compendium of positive psychology, closely edited by two leaders in the field, Seligman and Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification. In 664 large pages, 40 scientists from clinical and social psychology and related fields present a “manual of the sanities.” The conclusion? The same as Groundhog Day: People are happier when they perform the virtues, in fact the very seven virtues of the Western tradition (found also in the literature and philosophy of the East and South and no doubt the North): prudence (the virtue beloved of economists), justice, temperance, courage, faith (as identity), hope (as purpose), and love.

...

The result is that while income growth makes it possible for people better to attain their aspirations, they are not happier because their aspirations, too, have risen.”

...

Hedonics has become a branch of the century-old campaign by the American clerisy against “consumerism”--that is, the getting of the silly stuff to which the non-clerisy are so enslaved, unlike our own refined consumption of opera tickets and adventure holidays.

...

“Consumerism,” such as the extra-caloric value of a meal of rabbit meat shared over the campfire by beloved fellow Bushmen in German East Africa in 1900 or of beer and chips shared over a dollar-limit poker table with beloved colleagues in Hyde Park in 1980, characterizes all human cultures. Sneers at “consumerism,” or the hedonics now used to back the sneers, are scientifically and politically unjustified.

...

And, if seen through history rather than through Hellenistic pastoralism or German Romanticism, the gemeinschaft of olden times looks not so nice. The murder rate in villages in thirteenth-century England was higher than the worst police districts now. Medieval English peasants were in fact mobile geographically, “fragmenting” their lives. The imagined extended family of “traditional” life never existed in England. The Russian mir was not egalitarian, and its ancientness was a figment of the German Romantic imagination. The once-idealized Vietnamese peasants of the ’60s did not live in tranquil, closed corporate communities. The sweet American family of “I Remember Mama” or “Father Knows Best” must have occurred from time to time. But most were more like Long Day’s Journey Into Night or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. As the feminist economist Nancy Folbre remarks, “We cannot base our critique of impersonal market-based society on some romantic version of a past society as one big happy family. In that family, Big Daddy was usually in control.”

...

The descendent in today’s Glasgow of the dairy maid or the cook, in whom the old intelligence shines, is richer because the society in which she lives has moved from $3 to $125 a day. She has hugely greater scope, capabilities, potential, real personal income for what Wilhelm von Humboldt described in 1792 as Bildung, “self-culture,” “self-development,” life plans, the second-order preferences fulfilled that make for inner and outer success in life. She leads a life in full--fuller in work, travel, education, health, acquaintance, imagination.

via Deirdre N. McCloskey: Happyism | The New Republic.

The Second Amendment is Obsolete, some say.  The idea that the United States could ever turn tyrannical is pure paranoia, some say.

Well, let's look at that.

Rounding up people and sending them to concentration camps (whether called "reservations" or "relocation centers"). Check. (Treatment of Native Americans.  Japanese-American "Relocation Centers" during World War II).

Illegal medical experiments involving infecting people with diseases, not treating them, and observing the effects done on people without their knowledge or consent. Check. (Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment--and particularly interesting how that was "explained" to the victims as they were getting free health care from the US Government.)

Arbitrary searches of American citizens' households aimed at the seizure of property without either probable cause or any kind of warrant. Check. (post-Katrina gun Confiscation)

Laws passed allowing the indefinite detention of American Citizens without due process of law. Check. (NDAA 2012)

American citizens going about their daily business being stopped and searched again without probable cause or any kind of warrant (or even the "reasonably articulable suspicion" for a "Terry Stop"). Check. (TSA, not just at Airports, but at bus terminals, rail and subway terminals, highways, even High School Proms.)

"Can't happen here?" It has and is happening here.

via coldservings - "It can't happen here.".

Gun Free Zones are supposed to protect our children, and some politicians wish to strip us of our right to keep and bear arms. Those same politicians and their families are currently under the protection of armed Secret Service agents. If Gun Free Zones are sufficient protection for our children, then Gun Free Zones should be good enough for politicians.

via Eliminate armed guards for the President, Vice-President, and their families, and establish Gun Free Zones around them | We the People: Your Voice in Our Government.

For those of us fighting for our traditional rights, the US 2nd Amendment is a rare light in an ever darkening room. Governments will use the excuse of trying to protect the people from maniacs and crime, but are in reality, it is the bureaucrats protecting their power and position. In all cases where guns are banned, gun crime continues and often increases. As for maniacs, be it nuts with cars (NYC, Chapel Hill NC), swords (Japan), knives (China) or home made bombs (everywhere), insane people strike. They throw acid (Pakistan, UK), they throw fire bombs (France), they attack. What is worse, is, that the best way to stop a maniac is not psychology or jail or "talking to them", it is a bullet in the head, that is why they are a maniac, because they are incapable of living in reality or stopping themselves.

The excuse that people will start shooting each other is also plain and silly. So it is our politicians saying that our society is full of incapable adolescents who can never be trusted? Then, please explain how we can trust them or the police, who themselves grew up and came from the same culture?

No it is about power and a total power over the people. There is a lot of desire to bad mouth the Tsar, particularly by the Communists, who claim he was a tyrant, and yet under him we were armed and under the progressives disarmed. Do not be fooled by a belief that progressives, leftists hate guns. Oh, no, they do not. What they hate is guns in the hands of those who are not marching in lock step of their ideology. They hate guns in the hands of those who think for themselves and do not obey without question. They hate guns in those whom they have slated for a barrel to the back of the ear.

So, do not fall for the false promises and do not extinguish the light that is left to allow humanity a measure of self respect.

via Americans never give up your guns - English pravda.ru.

... I learned a lesson that has no doubt been absorbed by many political leaders in recent years. If you're going to lie about the fact that there is an elephant in the room, do it while you're standing right next to the thing. If you try to hide the critter or distract people's gaze from it, they will immediately know that you are lying. But if you come right up to it and give it a pat on the shoulder, they'll start to think maybe the elephant is lying.

-- Matthew Stewart, "The Management Myth"