No introspective ability

The following quote from a recent New York Times article sums up one of my favorite conclusions of modern psychology:

“We seem to have to have approximately no introspective accuracy as to what it is we want in a partner,” said Eli J. Finkel, a Northwestern psychology professor

The mere fact it is psychology probably means that in twenty years the prevailing opinion will be entirely different, but I see enough of this happen that it seems plausible to me. The classic example of this is the girl who is constantly saying she just wants a nice guy but ends up dating guys who are anything but. Either relationships work, or they don't, there is really no way to predict in advance what will happen.

Cost of Government Day was Months Ago.

I ran into this page the other day claiming that the "cost of government" day was August 12th. By this they mean that Americans work until this day to pay for the cost of government.

This claim is absolutely bogus. I was tipped off by the fact that they were not only including the cost of the government, but the cost of the "regulatory burden" imposed by government. By this they mean they have a giant fudge factor that they can manipulate at will(if say they disagree with the party in power).

On top of this they include the costs, but they don't include the benefits. Surely Americans benefit from our road system. We would waste days of our lives if it wasn't as good as it is. There are many of these benefits we get from the government. An honest calculation would try to include time the government saves us in the equation to give an actual cost of government. Every day of work government saves you from doing would be subtracted, and every day they make you work to pay taxes or sit in line at DMV would be added to it.

Pretending we can calculate the balance of costs and benefits is silly though. It is too easy to manipulate numbers political gain. The only intellectually honest way of calculating "cost of government" day is to simply look at what percentage of the GDP is government spending. That is the percentage of our work that goes to supporting the government. In 2009 this was 45.2%. Which works out to "cost of government" day being June 4th. Still rather scary in how late in the year it is, but it is more than two months earlier than the Americans for Tax Reform Center would have you believe(they claim it is 224 days, the real number is 164 days).

What a poor professor job market does

Here is an interesting statistic:

"Over the last century and a half, the average age of a Nobel Prize winner at the moment of his great breakthrough has risen more than five years, from 34 to almost 39 years old."

The authors take it as a sign that the amount of pre-existing work means that you have to be older to contribute to science, you just need to know more before you catch up with the state of the art.

I read it and think this is just a sign of how bad the job market is. You have to be so much older to get a chance at doing independent research. What the heck are we doing giving most of our funding to old people when the average age of a noble prize generating idea is a 39 year old! While I don't feel like looking up the exact number, right now the average age someone gets their first NIH grant is about 43. If they are in the life sciences they don't even get a tenure track position until something like 38. This means that most of the NIH grant money is being thrown at people with a comparatively low probability of generating truly breakthrough research, while the best minds languish in other people's labs waiting for someone to finally die or retire opening up a real position. Some sort of reform is needed so that the career path into science on average ends at people doing independent research by about 30.

Americans wait longer for health care.

One thing I keep hearing in this debate is talk about the horrible wait times in single payer healthcare systems... When I tried to get my first doctors appointment the other week, the soonest they would take me was two weeks! Now, if I had anything urgent than I am sure it would be quicker, but it sure seems like a long time to wait.

Turns out that is not unusual. The United States ranks among the worst in the world in wait times to see a doctor. The only area we do a lot better is elective surgeries. This is why Republicans always use hip replacements as their example of something that takes a lot longer to get in Canada. They prefer to ignore that we wait a lot longer than people in most countries for primary care.

Narcocorrido

I commonly wander around my neighborhood looking for somewhere interesting to go. I have wandered across a few reasonably interesting places, most notably a ridiculously nice restaurant that really is quite hidden...

However one of the places right across the street from me just got listed at the end of a New York Times article as one of the best places to go listen to live Narcocorrido music. Apparently I shall have to stop by the El Rodeo. I have walked past it many times when looking for food but never stopped to see if it was interesting. I guess I shall have to try sometime when it doesn't look deserted. Although given the subject matter of the music, and my dancing abilities it probably won't be a regular hang out spot.

Death from natural causes

I am often in a conversation with someone about some medicine, dietary supplement, or food additive when they make some point like "its not chemical, its all natural, it's from a plant so it can't be bad for you!" At this point a little bit of me dies and I get the urge to go track down their high school biology or chemistry teacher and demand they do a better job.

Plants have had several billions of years experience with chemical warfare. Under most circumstances they really don't want to be eaten so they have developed some of the nastiest poisons known to man to protect themselves. A great example is the hemlock that killed Socrates. Others include Ricin, which you will likely hear about in connection to terrorism and Nicotine. Tobacco kills more people than any other plant I know of... Really, we all know this. Very few of us go out in fields and eat random plants, even I usually know what I am eating when I do because it is really dangerous. Extract any chemical out of one of these random potentially deadly plants and put it in a bottle. Suddenly legions of people will buy into its safety with no further thought.

Skills verses Information.

I played Rock Band the other night. Despite having not played in many months it was nowhere near as painful as the first time I played. In fact it was hard to tell from my playing that I ever took a break at all...

This is hardly a new observation, anyone who has tried to ride a bike after a break of a decade or longer has seen much the same thing. It seems reasonable to me that skills do not degenerate at anywhere near the rate of knowledge. I realized long ago that I seem to be forgetting knowledge at nearly the rate I am learning it. This was easiest to see in my colege bowl scores. Despite learning a great deal in undergrad, my scores in trivia competitions were about the same every year. I forgot my history nearly as fast as I was learning science.

If this is the case it seems that I should be trying as hard as I can to learn new skills rather than new information. Getting better at things like computer programming, drawing, math, public speaking, and so on seems like one of the best uses of my time.