The China question: worst case scenario?

Unless I am mistaken I have been to China 4 times in the last year or so (Hangzhou, Beijing, Shenzhen and Shanghai). Each time I am here I ask the following question (sample size may now be well over 20 or 30):

At 95 percent confidence, what is the worst case scenario for China in the next 10 years? (i.e., what is the worst case scenario that has at least 5 percent probability?)

To ask the question precisely I have to use English, in which case the people I'm talking to are scientists, engineers, professors, business people or students; now that I think about it, I even put the question to some government officials at the ministry of commerce over lunch. I have also asked a less precise version of the question in Mandarin to ordinary people like drivers or hotel staff.

I usually specifically prompt the person I'm asking whether social unrest or environmental catastrophe are possible, but almost no one thinks so. Some sophisticated academic types might acknowledge them as possible outcomes, but all considered them unlikely. The typical worst case scenario involves economic problems, perhaps an rmb-dollar crisis. No one mentioned the possibility of military conflict with the US, or the Taiwan problem.

My priors allowed for the "fragile China" scenario: a giant Potemkin bubble with massive mis-allocation of capital, inhuman working conditions and income inequality leading to social unrest, low-cost labor with little innovation, etc. But from what I've seen and heard that scenario is increasingly implausible.

Shanghai: PPP on the ground

1 USD = 6.64 RMB. Average salary in Shanghai is reportedly 65k RMB or about USD $10k per annum. A good Hadoop programmer might make USD $20k per year. The IMF estimates that the PPP (purchasing power parity) vs nominal exchange rate adjustment for China is about a factor of 2 (i.e., PPP GDP is about twice nominal GDP). That doesn't sound entirely crazy to me but it's very dependent on choice of goods for the PPP basket.

Haircut 10 RMB = $1.50. (My barber in Eugene = $11.)



Hiking shoes, 150 RMB = $23. (Equivalent pair probably $75-100 in US.)



Dinner on campus 9 RMB = $1.35. It's Sunday, and I saw lots of parents visiting their kids. The kids are much bigger than the parents. On the subway, it wasn't uncommon for me (183cm) to be the tallest or one of the tallest people in the train car. But on campus there are lots of kids (even girls!) taller than me.



I ate at this huge cafeteria across from the physics building. The kids were using their IDs as electronic cash cards and could pay separately at each food station. I had to buy exchange tickets at the doorway. I wasn't sure how much money to exchange for tickets. I asked the auntie; she looked at me and said "no way you can eat 20 RMB ($3 USD) worth of food!"



Visitor office at the physics institute. (Apple, where is my product placement fee?!?)




Random Shanghai observations:

Once you leave the highly developed downtown, or walk a few blocks away from the campus, you can see that the material level of society is still pretty low. It's dirty, and people are engaged in very low paying and labor intensive activities. You might see a storefront where people are sorting through trash for recyclables, or people selling roasted yams on the sidewalk. (OK, maybe not that different from NYC... at least you can walk through the roughest looking parts of town without fear of crime.)

The Minhang campus of SJTU is very far from the city center. It's $10-15 USD for a taxi; only $1 on the metro but you might end up standing the entire time. Either way it takes 40+ minutes to get to the center.

The Chinese government is ambitiously ramping up a lot of science projects. At the meeting we heard about a xenon dark matter detector built here at SJTU and a USD $100M cosmic ray observatory proposed in Tibet. I asked the group leader (who was a postdoc at Oregon when I first arrived as a professor) what a similar project would cost in the US, and he replied more than twice as much. I also notice that SJTU is looking to hire in many areas. A professor from Ohio State (not ethnically Chinese) recently left his chaired position and moved his whole family to join SJTU! I can't think of very many countries that have the ambition and optimism (a national-level "will to power") that China has.


From various conversations in Mandarin:

Taxi driver, after hearing me speak in Chinese: "Are you Korean ... Japanese?" "Oh, from America!"

Another taxi driver referred to me (to another Chinese person) as a "lao wai" or "rich foreigner"; usually this means a white person, but I suppose it applies to me as well.

A girl: "Your teeth are so white! Why do Americans have such white teeth?"

A student: "O-re-gon! that's in California?"

Me: "How long have you been in Shanghai?" (girl:) "About 5 months." "Do you like it?" Pause. "No."

Greetings from Shanghai

I'm in Shanghai for a physics meeting, at the Minhang campus of Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU). This new campus is about 15km south of downtown Shanghai.

View from the physics building:



Institute for particle/nuclear/cosmo physics.



Roof deck:





Lunch at the visitor center:




People in China often ask me about my Chinese name. Here it is (simplified characters):

Darkness on the Edge of Town

If you are a Bruce Springsteen fan this interview of the Boss by Ed Norton can't be missed. Who were Springsteen's influences when he wrote the songs for Darkness on the Edge of Town? Dylan, yes. Ginsberg, no. Terrence Malick, yes.

In 1975, the album Born to Run catapulted Bruce Springsteen from a regional critical favorite to a worldwide megastar.

But after Born to Run's release, a legal battle with his former manager, Mike Appel, kept Springsteen from making a follow-up album for nearly two years. Springsteen spent his time touring extensively across the U.S. with the E Street Band. When he returned to the studio, in 1977, he brought with him dozens of songs that he had written during his exile.

Those studio sessions produced Springsteen's fourth album, 1978's Darkness on the Edge of Town. It was musically very different from Born to Run — and drew thematically from the punk-rock movement, the Vietnam War and Springsteen's own reflections about wanting to stay connected to his roots. ...

Some lyrics from Badlands, the first track of Darkness on the Edge of Town.

Poor men wanna be rich, rich men wanna be kings,
And a king aint satisfied till he rules everything.
I wanna go out tonight, I wanna find out what I got.
Now I believe in the love that you gave me.
I believe in the faith that could save me.
I believe in the hope and I pray that some day it
Will raise me above these

Badlands...

For the ones who had a notion, a notion deep inside
That it aint no sin to be glad you're alive.
I wanna find one face that aint looking through me
I wanna find one place, I wanna spit in the face of these

Badlands...

On the mat

Title IX is killing a lot of non-revenue men's college sports, like swimming, gymnastics and wrestling. Oregon, which produced a number of NCAA individual champions (and UFC fighter Chael Sonnen), eliminated its wrestling program a few years ago.

An indication of the overall weakness of collegiate wrestling programs is that Cornell is the preseason #1 ranked team this year!

NYTimes: ... every N.C.A.A. wrestling championship since 1989 has been won by teams from Iowa, Oklahoma or Minnesota — with only 4 of 80 N.C.A.A. championships won from outside those states in history — this season, Cornell is the unanimous preseason No. 1.

It is the first time a team from the Ivy League, which prohibits athletic scholarships, has had the top ranking in wrestling and is one of the rare times an Ivy team has been ranked No. 1 outside sports like lacrosse, fencing, squash, and ice or field hockey.

But Cornell is carrying a flag for more than the Ivys. Cornell, which finished second to Iowa in last season’s N.C.A.A. championships, is seeking to become just the second Eastern-based team to win the national wrestling title. Penn State won it in 1953.

I grew up in Iowa, a wrestling hotbed. Both Dan Gable and Cael Sanderson, perhaps the greatest American wrestlers of all time, competed for Iowa State University, in my hometown. I never competed in wrestling, but I remember learning the techniques in gym class and on the playground. In HS it seemed like at every keg party you had to be ready to grapple because some drunk wrestler might grab you and want to roll around on the living room floor or in the back yard! Guys in other sports would try to get out of it by calling the wrestlers gay ("get off me, you homo!"), but in reality they (even football players) wanted nothing to do with close contact with a wrestler. (Note there are no wrestlers in this picture, although wimpier Ivy sports like swimming, cross country and tennis are well represented ;-)

The last actual fight I had (a long time ago!) was with a kid who went on to wrestle for ISU! It started with me hitting a single leg on him and tossing him into a locker. Then we hit each other in the face for what seemed like a long time before a teacher broke it up. One thing I learned from the fight is that two untrained guys can trade shots to the head for a long time before anyone goes down (this is also evident from early UFC fights). I was initially reluctant to hit the other kid in the face (I had never really had to do it before), but he showed no similar reluctance :-)

I did do Judo as a kid (my parents wouldn't let me do Karate or Tae Kwon Do) and later competed in both Judo and BJJ as an adult. I noticed that my Iowa background meant I could usually wrestle better than anyone who hadn't actually competed in wrestling (i.e., at a high school level or higher). If I wanted to get any judoka or jiujitsu player to the ground I could pretty much do it. Judokas would always complain that I was using leg attacks and not nice nagewaza (upper body throws), but this is basically just a convention and wrestling takedowns are all legal in Judo. In any first randori with another judoka I could always get a takedown by faking coming to grips and instead shooting for a leg.

I sometimes worked out at the ISU weight room in Beyer Hall, where the wrestlers trained. The summer between my junior and senior year of HS my schedule (I think determined by some math class I was taking) coincided with that of 1981 World Champion Chris Campbell, an ISU assistant coach. One of my wrestler friends had an amazing poster of Campbell hitting a souffle (suplex) on a Russian en route to winning his world title. Campbell and the Russian are both flying through the air and only the tip of Campbell's toe is touching the mat. He was by far the most amazing physical specimen I had seen at that point in my life. Campbell usually ran in the sweltering heat before lifting weights. He would warm up by doing hyperextensions with a 45 pound plate behind his head. You can see his exceptional lower back musculature in this video (yes, that bulge is his erector spinae), showing him competing in the 1992 Olympics at age 37 (he won the bronze -- see picture below)! But he was much more impressive as a younger man in the early 1980s. Unlike a lot of the Iowa kids, who had wrestling rooms in their basements and competed in tournaments while still in grade school, Campbell started wrestling fairly late. But his physical powers were such that he reached the highest levels of the sport. Somehow it was obvious to me even then that no matter how hard I trained I would never have strength, stamina or quickness like his.

Standard deviations around the world

In an earlier post I investigated the variance (standard deviation) in IQ by country using PISA scores. Looking for additional data, I came across this paper by Rindermann et al., which investigates smart and dumb fraction effects by country. It obtains some interesting results using an IQ estimate computed from PISA, TIMSS and PIRLS scores. I doubt you can do much better than these numbers for country-level estimates. Below is an excerpt from one of his tables; CA = cognitive ability, first column of numbers is the mean, second is the 5th percentile, third is the 95th percentile. As far as I can tell, wealthy, ethnically homogeneous countries have a spread of about 40 points (plus or minus a few points) between 5th and 95th percentile. While there is significant variation in means, the SD seems to vary by only a point or so. You can find countries with larger SD, but I suspect this is because of the amalgamation of sub-populations of different means.

Note: 5th to 95th percentile is about 3.3 SD. For some strange reason the SD in developed, homogeneous countries (e.g., Japan, Korea, Norway, Netherlands, etc.) is roughly 12 plus or minus about one in Rindermann's results, not 15. They claim they normalize the educational achievement scores to a "Greenwich (=UK?) mean IQ" of 100 with SD 15, but the SD for their UK entry is about 14, unless I made an arithmetic error.

Rindermann, in an earlier paper titled The g‐factor of international cognitive ability comparisons: the homogeneity of results in PISA, TIMSS, PIRLS and IQ‐tests across nations, showed that country IQ estimates of Lynn and Vanhanen were consistent with the educational performance data, and that a country level "G" factor explains most of the variation. The Rindermann link above goes to a 120 page pdf that contains Rindermann's paper and lots of commentary from leading intelligence researchers. Apparently his straightforward compilation of data had a big impact in that community ;-)

[See here for scatterplots of L-V estimates of national IQ vs tests of educational achievement.]

Genomics in Taipei, dark energy in Shanghai

Next Tuesday I will give the following colloquium at National Taiwan University (Taida).

Investigating the genetic basis of intelligence

I begin with a brief review of psychometric results concerning intelligence (sometimes referred to as the g factor, or IQ), emphasizing the stability, validity (predictive power) and heritability of adult IQ. Next, I discuss ongoing Genome Wide Association Studies which investigate the genetic basis of intelligence. Due mainly to the rapidly decreasing cost of sequencing (currently below $5k per genome), it is likely that within the next 5-10 years we will identify loci which account for a significant fraction of total IQ variation. Finally, I discuss the near term possibility of genetic engineering for intelligence.

This talk is aimed at physicists and should be accessible without specialized background in psychology or biology.

On Friday I'll be talking about dark energy (slides) at this meeting at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

"Too Asian?" in Canada

The article linked to below is about Asian students at elite Canadian universities. I spoke to the McLean's reporter about this while I was visiting BGI in Shenzhen, China. I had to duck out of a meeting into an unused conference room to take his call.

When I first wrote this post the McLean's article hadn't been up very long, but had started to accumulate a lot of heated comments. They pulled the article off the web overnight, probably because they didn't have anyone to filter the comments. Now it is back up.

Here is a very similar WSJ article from five years ago, discussing the high school situation in Silicon Valley.

McLean's: When Alexandra and her friend Rachel, both graduates of Toronto’s Havergal College, an all-girls private school, were deciding which university to go to, they didn’t even bother considering the University of Toronto. “The only people from our school who went to U of T were Asian,” explains Alexandra, a second-year student who looks like a girl from an Aritzia billboard. “All the white kids,” she says, “go to Queen’s, Western and McGill.”

Alexandra eventually chose the University of Western Ontario. Her younger brother, now a high school senior deciding where he’d like to go, will head “either east, west or to McGill”—unusual academic options, but in keeping with what he wants from his university experience. “East would suit him because it’s chill, out west he could be a ski bum,” says Alexandra, who explains her little brother wants to study hard, but is also looking for a good time—which rules out U of T, a school with an academic reputation that can be a bit of a killjoy.

Or, as Alexandra puts it—she asked that her real name not be used in this article, and broached the topic of race at universities hesitantly—a “reputation of being Asian.”

Discussing the role that race plays in the self-selecting communities that more and more characterize university campuses makes many people uncomfortable. Still, an “Asian” school has come to mean one that is so academically focused that some students feel they can no longer compete or have fun. Indeed, Rachel, Alexandra and her brother belong to a growing cohort of student that’s eschewing some big-name schools over perceptions that they’re “too Asian.” It’s a term being used in some U.S. academic circles to describe a phenomenon that’s become such a cause for concern to university admissions officers and high school guidance counsellors that several elite universities to the south have faced scandals in recent years over limiting Asian applicants and keeping the numbers of white students artificially high.

Although university administrators here are loath to discuss the issue, students talk about it all the time. “Too Asian” is not about racism, say students like Alexandra: many white students simply believe that competing with Asians—both Asian Canadians and international students—requires a sacrifice of time and freedom they’re not willing to make. They complain that they can’t compete for spots in the best schools and can’t party as much as they’d like (too bad for them, most will say). Asian kids, meanwhile, say they are resented for taking the spots of white kids. “At graduation a Canadian—i.e. ‘white’—mother told me that I’m the reason her son didn’t get a space in university and that all the immigrants in the country are taking up university spots,” says Frankie Mao, a 22-year-old arts student at the University of British Columbia. “I knew it was wrong, being generalized in this category,” says Mao, “but f–k, I worked hard for it.”

That Asian students work harder is a fact born out by hard data. They tend to be strivers, high achievers and single-minded in their approach to university. [Note I don't think the previous two sentences are attributable to me!] Stephen Hsu, a physics prof at the University of Oregon who has written about the often subtle forms of discrimination faced by Asian-American university applicants, describes them as doing “disproportionately well—they tend to have high SAT scores, good grades in high school, and a lot of them really want to go to top universities.” In Canada, say Canadian high school guidance counsellors, that means the top-tier post-secondary institutions with international profiles specializing in math, science and business: U of T, UBC and the University of Waterloo. White students, by contrast, are more likely to choose universities and build their school lives around social interaction, athletics and self-actualization—and, yes, alcohol. When the two styles collide, the result is separation rather than integration.

... Among Canadian universities, UBC is one of the few institutions that publishes the ethnic makeup of its student body. Toope says that the university’s Asian student population is not “widely out of whack with the community,” although the stats tell a slightly different story. According to a 2009 UBC report on direct undergraduate entrants, 43 per cent of its students self-identify as ethnically Chinese, Korean or Japanese, as compared to 38 per cent who self-identify as white. Although Vancouver is a richly diverse city, according to data from the 2006 census, just 21.5 per cent of its residents identify as a Chinese, Korean or Japanese visible minority.

... Alexandra, who chose to go to Western for the party scene, found she “hated being away from home” and moved back to Toronto. In retrospect, she didn’t like the vibe. “Some people just want to drink 23 hours a day.” Alexandra says she still has friends at Western who live in an “all-blond house” and are “stick thin.” Rachel, Alexandra’s friend, says Western suits them—“they work hard, get good grades, then slap on their clubbing clothes.” But it didn’t suit Alexandra. She now studies at U of T.

School daze 2

The picture above was taken in the early 80s (see earlier discussion here). Does it look more 70s or 80s to you? Our cohort grew up in between those decades, a bit later than Dazed and Confused, but, it seems to me, before the John Hughes era (e.g., Sixteen Candles, Breakfast Club, which I watched in college). At the time, I thought the most perfectly realized high school movie was Risky Business, which came out my senior year, and made Tom Cruise a star. His character, Joel Goodson, is obsessed with getting into Princeton.

Here are two songs from the period which always make me think of my first girlfriend. I don't think I've ever told her that! Our family had (for odd reasons) two old convertible Fiat Spyders. We lived out in the country, and my brother and I would often put the top down even in the winter, to better enjoy the night sky as the city lights faded to black.

Jack and Diane (John Mellencamp, 1982)

Little ditty about jack and diane
Two american kids growin up in the heartland
Jackies gonna be a football star
Diane debutante backseat of jackies car

Suckin on chilli dogs outside the tastee freeze
Diane sittin on jackies lap
Got his hands between her knees
Jackie say, hey diane lets run off
Behind shade tree
Dribble off those bobby brooks
Let me do what I please

The River (Bruce Springsteen, 1980)

I remember us riding in my brother's car
Her body tan and wet down at the reservoir
At night on them banks I'd lie awake
And pull her close just to feel each breath she'd take

It's wrong, but I like the way you think

A high school classmate (he's in the picture here) writes regarding wrong but flashy scientific results.

Incidentally, I also saw the Ioannidis article you posted, and I think the guy is exactly correct. And it's not just for medical trial-type science - it's all sorts of flashy hot science. One instance that I found interesting because I've watched it develop for several years is David Sinclair's work with resveratrol. This is a compound found in red wine that's supposed to have all sorts of fantastic effects in a bunch of organisms, including making them live longer. One of the things I find interesting is that this is an area where big business is making a big bet on what I believe they know is bogus science. Resveratrol is supposed to activate an enzyme called a sirtuin, and that's supposed to elicit these nice effects. The problem is that the data showing that it activates the enzyme is an artifact of the assay. My boss gave a talk at GlaxoSmithKline explaining all of this, showing the data, publishing the data (with another group publishing the same finding at the same time). Those big companies have top notch chemists and they understood all of this. And after all of this, GSK lays out $720 million for David Sinclair's resveratrol company. I used to think that once big money becomes involved, they would never do something like this. Now I think that they actually may have made a good financial decision. They're laying out less than 10% of their market capitalization, they get a bunch of hype with Sinclair on Oprah and people talking about red wine and this new wonder drug, they will end up taking a bit of a hit once it all unravels, but who cares - by then they're on to something new!

A Nobel laureate down the hall from me recently retracted articles in Nature, Science and PNAS because the underlying data were bogus, and a friend of mine who was in that lab is writing a book on how that fraud was perpetrated. I think this stuff is remarkably common and that Ioannidis is right in his analysis.

School daze

These are the 18 National Merit Finalists from my high school class. I'm in the back row near the middle and my brother is further to the left (he's older than I am but we both graduated the same year). The girl in the front row second from the left (next to the guy with the Ames shirt -- he's a plastic surgeon now!) was my prom date and first girlfriend :-)

In contrast to the current obsession with elite higher education, most of these kids attended public universities. The guy to my left turned down Cornell to attend Iowa State, the guy to my right went to Princeton, one of the girls in the front went to Stanford. There might have been someone who went to Chicago, but I can't remember for sure. There were several other smart kids who missed the Semi-Finalist cut on the PSAT but got equivalently high SAT scores. One of those kids turned down Caltech for Illinois (I think), and another went to Stanford and Columbia Law and is now the outside counsel for my current startup.

By my last year in high school I was spending the afternoons at the university. I took quantum mechanics, a course on ODEs/PDEs, a semester of complex analysis, and a semester of senior level advanced calculus before heading off to college. (I've actually never had a linear algebra class -- I just studied it by myself.) That was pretty exceptional for those days -- I was the first kid at my high school to have such an arrangement. These days I think schools are more open to acceleration. I think there are a few kids every year from Eugene high schools who take advanced math at Oregon. I actually took my first college course (in the comp sci department -- punch cards!) when I was 12.

Having a flexible schedule turned out to be a bad thing for my swimming career. I was so tired from two practices a day and all of that homework from the college classes that sometimes I'd skip afternoon lectures at the university and go home and sleep before practice. My coach noticed I wasn't having a good taper at the end of the season and I had to admit it was because I had been getting too much rest during the high volume part of our training!

Related posts: Some data on regression , Elite universities and human capital mongering

Medical science?

According to the article we spend $100 billion per annum on this in the US :-(

The Atlantic: Ioannidis [is] ... what’s known as a meta-researcher, and he’s become one of the world’s foremost experts on the credibility of medical research. He and his team have shown, again and again, and in many different ways, that much of what biomedical researchers conclude in published studies—conclusions that doctors keep in mind when they prescribe antibiotics or blood-pressure medication, or when they advise us to consume more fiber or less meat, or when they recommend surgery for heart disease or back pain—is misleading, exaggerated, and often flat-out wrong. He charges that as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed. His work has been widely accepted by the medical community; it has been published in the field’s top journals, where it is heavily cited; and he is a big draw at conferences. Given this exposure, and the fact that his work broadly targets everyone else’s work in medicine, as well as everything that physicians do and all the health advice we get, Ioannidis may be one of the most influential scientists alive. Yet for all his influence, he worries that the field of medical research is so pervasively flawed, and so riddled with conflicts of interest, that it might be chronically resistant to change—or even to publicly admitting that there’s a problem.

... He first stumbled on the sorts of problems plaguing the field, he explains, as a young physician-researcher in the early 1990s at Harvard. At the time, he was interested in diagnosing rare diseases, for which a lack of case data can leave doctors with little to go on other than intuition and rules of thumb. But he noticed that doctors seemed to proceed in much the same manner even when it came to cancer, heart disease, and other common ailments. Where were the hard data that would back up their treatment decisions? There was plenty of published research, but much of it was remarkably unscientific, based largely on observations of a small number of cases. A new “evidence-based medicine” movement was just starting to gather force, and Ioannidis decided to throw himself into it, working first with prominent researchers at Tufts University and then taking positions at Johns Hopkins University and the National Institutes of Health. He was unusually well armed: he had been a math prodigy of near-celebrity status in high school in Greece, and had followed his parents, who were both physician-researchers, into medicine. Now he’d have a chance to combine math and medicine by applying rigorous statistical analysis to what seemed a surprisingly sloppy field.

... In the paper, Ioannidis laid out a detailed mathematical proof that, assuming modest levels of researcher bias, typically imperfect research techniques, and the well-known tendency to focus on exciting rather than highly plausible theories, researchers will come up with wrong findings most of the time. Simply put, if you’re attracted to ideas that have a good chance of being wrong, and if you’re motivated to prove them right, and if you have a little wiggle room in how you assemble the evidence, you’ll probably succeed in proving wrong theories right. His model predicted, in different fields of medical research, rates of wrongness roughly corresponding to the observed rates at which findings were later convincingly refuted: 80 percent of non-randomized studies (by far the most common type) turn out to be wrong, as do 25 percent of supposedly gold-standard randomized trials, and as much as 10 percent of the platinum-standard large randomized trials. The article spelled out his belief that researchers were frequently manipulating data analyses, chasing career-advancing findings rather than good science, and even using the peer-review process—in which journals ask researchers to help decide which studies to publish—to suppress opposing views. “You can question some of the details of John’s calculations, but it’s hard to argue that the essential ideas aren’t absolutely correct,” says Doug Altman, an Oxford University researcher who directs the Centre for Statistics in Medicine.

... He zoomed in on 49 of the most highly regarded research findings in medicine over the previous 13 years, as judged by the science community’s two standard measures: the papers had appeared in the journals most widely cited in research articles, and the 49 articles themselves were the most widely cited articles in these journals. These were articles that helped lead to the widespread popularity of treatments such as the use of hormone-replacement therapy for menopausal women, vitamin E to reduce the risk of heart disease, coronary stents to ward off heart attacks, and daily low-dose aspirin to control blood pressure and prevent heart attacks and strokes. Ioannidis was putting his contentions to the test not against run-of-the-mill research, or even merely well-accepted research, but against the absolute tip of the research pyramid. Of the 49 articles, 45 claimed to have uncovered effective interventions. Thirty-four of these claims had been retested, and 14 of these, or 41 percent, had been convincingly shown to be wrong or significantly exaggerated. If between a third and a half of the most acclaimed research in medicine was proving untrustworthy, the scope and impact of the problem were undeniable.

... Of those 45 super-cited studies that Ioannidis focused on, 11 had never been retested. Perhaps worse, Ioannidis found that even when a research error is outed, it typically persists for years or even decades. He looked at three prominent health studies from the 1980s and 1990s that were each later soundly refuted, and discovered that researchers continued to cite the original results as correct more often than as flawed—in one case for at least 12 years after the results were discredited.

Carson Chow gives a Bayesian formulation of Ioannidis' argument here (click through to see the equations):

John Ioannidis published a very interesting paper in PLoS Biology in 2005 entitled “Why most published research findings are false.” In it he argued that most affirmative results in biology papers that are based on a statistical significance test (e.g. p-value less than 0.05) are probably wrong. His argument was couched in traditional statistics language but it is really a Bayesian argument. The paper is a wake up call that we may need to look more closely at how we use statistics and even how we do research.

The question he asked was Given some hypothesis, what is the probability that the hypothesis is true given that an experiment confirms the result (up to some level of statistical significance)? ...

In high energy physics (where we don't talk about p values, but rather number of SDs of significance of a result) it has been a common bit of folk wisdom since before I entered the field that at any given time there must be some number of multi-SD anomalies in recent experimental results, but that most (perhaps all) of these will eventually go away. (If you think about it, this is basically Ioannidis' claim.) Fortunately, because we are studying the fundamental laws of Nature (and because everyone in the field understands basic statistics; in medicine it seems almost no one does), these anomalies tend to be revisited, and meta-analyses are always done, so wrong results are not likely to become accepted conclusions for years or decades at a time.

Two honest economists

I highly recommend this podcast discussion between Russ Roberts and John Quiggin (of Crooked Timber) about Quiggin's recent book Zombie Economics. Both parties did a good job of putting aside priors and having an enlightening conversation. Quiggin argues that many economic theories such as the Great Moderation, the efficient markets hypothesis and others have been discredited by recent events and should be relegated to the graveyard.

I think at one point both participants agreed that (or at least entertained the idea that) economics doesn't make progress like a real science. Probably too strong a critique, but at least very honest.

Dark Energy talk

Slides for the talk I'm giving Saturday at this meeting. The talk is titled Dark Energy, with Signatures.

Taiwan photos 6

Happy birthday!



Bookstore.





Hats.





Lego sheep. My daughter made this and then added a party hat.



The office.

Cosmology versus Econophysics

We have a bit of a scheduling conflict here -- a meeting on econophysics from Thursday until Saturday, and another meeting on dark energy and dark matter on Friday-Saturday at Tsing Hua University. I'm already committed to speak at the latter on Saturday.

Which talks sound more appealing to you? :-)

The Market Impact of Boundedly Rational Traders, Relationship between bid-ask spreads and fluctuations in market prices, How do skilled traders change the structure of the market? Optimal Diffusion in Evolutionary Designed Networks

Updated Dark Matter Search with Sub-keV Germanium Detector, SUSY Dark Matter in Light of CDMS-II/XENON Limits, Determining the Dark Energy Equation of State from Gravitational-Wave Observations of Binary Inspirals, Thermodynamics in Modified Gravity Theories

(Plenty more talks, some with slides or the actual papers, at the links above.)

Marshmallow test (video)

Here's a charming video in case you haven't seen it. I posted about the experiment before here -- includes links to the actual papers.

A simple test administered to four year olds has impressive predictive power for later life outcomes. Are we talking about an IQ test? No, a test of self-discipline, or the ability to delay gratification.

Neuroscience, magic and misdirection

When I was growing up I did stage magic. I never reached the highest levels with sleights, but I did do shows for dozens of people at a time (usually birthday parties for younger kids). The most amazing thing I learned as a magician is how to manipulate the (surprisingly narrow) attention focus of the audience. This can come in very handy, although I've sworn never to use my super-powers in academic talks, where clarity and honesty are the main goals :-) (A little showmanship, however, will definitely liven up a classroom or VC presentation!) One thing I can do, even today, is get a laugh from a child by showing them a little sleight of hand.

Analyzing magic tricks is good training for the mind -- it teaches you to expand your mental models beyond what is immediately perceptible. (How does what I am seeing actually constrain what is really happening?) Anyone involved in due diligence should spend some time with a magician, study a few classic con games, or try to deconstruct a few illusions.

In the video below two neuroscientists analyze some street magic, with emphasis on the role of misdirection. (Via Simoleonsense.)

Go Ducks

The U Oregon Ducks are ranked #1 in college football, after a decisive win over USC yesterday (highlights). Even the NYTimes has taken notice :-)

NYTimes: ... To combat the notion that U.S.C. is down in talent, Kelly pointed out that on the Trojans’ 44-man depth chart they had 12 five-star recruits and 26 four-star recruits. Kelly then countered that Oregon has zero five-star recruits and 11 four-star recruits.

“They’re still living in the glory days from when Bush was here,” Oregon cornerback Cliff Harris said after the game, referring to Reggie Bush. “They get all these recruits. They thought their talent and five-star recruits was going to beat our hard work. Talent doesn’t beat hard work.”

[See related post: Success vs Ability. I used to love the Nebraska teams of the 80s and early 90s -- few blue chip recruits, but an amazing work ethic that transformed walk ons into top players.]

... What Kelly hints at, but never directly says, is that Oregon’s system has put it ahead of everyone else right now. The Ducks practice only two hours a day without running wind sprints, relying on a tempo so frenetic that it has enabled the Ducks to get into better condition than everyone else. The result? To slow down Oregon’s tempo and get substitutions in the game, teams like Arizona State and Stanford resorted to faking injuries.

One impressed bystander to Oregon’s blurring rise to the top of college football has been Tony Dungy, the former N.F.L. coach whose son Eric is a reserve freshman receiver for the Ducks.

“It’s more mental conditioning,” said Tony Dungy, now an analyst for NBC. “It puts such a strain on you, like Georgetown back when John Thompson was there and they were pressuring and attacking you. At some point, you say, ‘I need a break for a couple of minutes.’ Mentally, teams fatigue more than physically.”

In the back row of Kelly’s news conference under a makeshift tent at the Coliseum, an impressed observer sat stoically, wearing a black Oregon hat and a stylish sport coat. The man, Phil Knight, a Nike co-founder who knows a thing or two about innovation and leaving the competition behind, beamed as Kelly deflected query after query. Knight is Oregon’s chief booster and benefactor, who smiled broadly as he recalled the public address announcer at Oregon’s Autzen Stadium saying he had waited 43 years to introduce the Ducks as the country’s No. 1-ranked team.

Group effectiveness and intelligence

A colleague sent me this interesting Science paper on the effectiveness of groups at solving problems. The effectiveness of a particular group, while not strongly correlated with the average or maximum intelligence of group members, does depend on the nature of social interactions. I think this could be generalized to large societies as well -- some societies with less human capital might nevertheless be more effective for other reasons related to individual tendencies for cooperation or mode of organization (communism vs market economies is an obvious example). Some academic departments have a very low collective intelligence, not just due to the individual average ;-)

Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups

Psychologists have repeatedly shown that a single statistical factor—often called “general intelligence”—emerges from the correlations among people’s performance on a wide variety of cognitive tasks. But no one has systematically examined whether a similar kind of “collective intelligence” exists for groups of people. In two studies with 699 people, working in groups of two to five, we find converging evidence of a general collective intelligence factor that explains a group’s performance on a wide variety of tasks. This “c factor” is not strongly correlated with the average or maximum individual intelligence of group members but is correlated with the average social sensitivity of group members, the equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking, and the proportion of females in the group.

[Note: I find their use of a 10 minute Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices (RAPM) to measure individual intelligence a bit problematic. The correlation of 10 minute RAPM with full RAPM is probably not that high (say, < .7). So they only have a noisy measure of individual intelligence. I didn't see that they took this uncertainty into account in a sophisticated way when analyzing the relation between c and avg or max IQ. This information is in the supplement.]

These results remind me (perhaps tangentially) of remarks by W.D. Hamilton in his paper Innate Social Aptitudes of Man:

The incursions of barbaric pastoralists seem to do civilizations less harm in the long run than one might expect. Indeed, two dark ages and renaissances in Europe suggest a recurring pattern in which a renaissance follows an incursion by about 800 years. It may even be suggested that certain genes or traditions of pastoralists revitalize the conquered people with an ingredient of progress which tends to die out in a large panmictic population for the reasons already discussed. I have in mind altruism itself, or the part of the altruism which is perhaps better described as self-sacrificial daring. By the time of the renaissance it may be that the mixing of genes and cultures (or of cultures alone if these are the only vehicles, which I doubt) has continued long enough to bring the old mercantile thoughtfulness and the infused daring into conjunction in a few individuals who then find courage for all kinds of inventive innovation against the resistance of established thought and practice. Often, however, the cost in fitness of such altruism and sublimated pugnacity to the individuals concerned is by no means metaphorical, and the benefits to fitness, such as they are, go to a mass of individuals whose genetic correlation with the innovator must be slight indeed. Thus civilization probably slowly reduces its altruism of all kinds, including the kinds needed for cultural creativity (see also Eshel 1972).

This paper by Hamilton is also of interest because of the nice discussion of multi-level selection (what is the proper unit of selection in evolutionary biology: the gene, the individual, the group... ?), a subject of recent controversy. In physics we would call this "effective field theory" or "relevant degrees of freedom" :-) That one might specialize to the appropriate unit of selection in a given context is equivalent to noting that we need not consider quarks or quantum mechanics to analyze the aerodynamics of a 747. In some contexts (e.g., turbulence or strongly coupled systems), interactions on many scales are relevant and the corresponding dynamics very complex. The same may be true for human evolution: genes, individuals and groups, even cultures, all interact nontrivially.

Maxwell's Demon and genetic engineering

Ronald Fisher on positive alleles for intelligence, in Mendelism and Biometry (1911).

Suppose we knew, for example, 20 pairs of mental characters [loci in the genome]. These would combine in over a million pure mental types; each of these would naturally occur rather less frequently than once in a billion; or in a country like England about once in 20,000 generations; it will give some idea as to the excellence of the best of these types when we consider that the Englishmen from Shakespeare to Darwin have occurred within 10 generations; the thought of a race of men combining the illustrious qualities of these giants, and breeding true to them, is almost too overwhelming, but such a race will inevitably arise in whatever country first sees the inheritance of mental characters elucidated.

The amount of variation in intelligence within a particular family is almost as large as in the population as a whole, mainly due to the diploid nature of our genomes (half of the genes come randomly from each parent). Thus, as Fisher noted, superior characteristics do not "breed true" (see earlier discussion of regression and the residual SD of about 12 even after parental midpoint is fixed; note what is commonly referred to as regression to the mean has a large environmental component, which is distinct from what is discussed here). It is unlikely for a particular descendant to inherit most of the positive variants from both the mother and the father. If loci with positive effect on intelligence were identified, and selection performed on gametes (or zygotes), one could ensure offspring with many more advantageous alleles than normally obtained by chance. We would obtain the best from the set of possible offspring of a given mother and father. A process of this type can be thought of as a Maxwell's Demon of reproduction -- it suppresses fluctuations of the wrong sign.

The mathematical theory of additive (linear) genetics was elucidated by Fisher -- he even gave estimates for the non-additive part of heritability (CP9 and CP24 here). It seems likely to me that the first applications on humans (as opposed to selective breeding of plants and animals, which has already taken place) of Fisher's insights will come just over a hundred years later! Technology may finally allow us to explore the most interesting regions of the space of genetic variation :-)

PS I thought about titling this post They Might Be Giants, but the statistical mechanic in me won out :-) Fisher was well aware of the parallels between his use of multivariate statistics in genetics and the corresponding application in the theory of gases.

Acts of creation

Some artwork by my 4 year old kids. It ain't Picasso, but I like it :-)


Le sacre du printemps.




Wolverine.



Eat your Veggies.

Yellow Peril: 2010 and 1920

After watching this commercial, read the excerpt below from The Rising Tide Of Color, a 1920 bestseller (publisher: Charles Scribner) by Lothrop Stoddard (Harvard College class of 1905, Harvard PhD in History 1914).





From The Rising Tide Of Color (Amazon: "Stoddard's arguments were once taken seriously by the American establishment and President Warren G. Harding publicly praised this book at a public speech on 26 October 1922. The introduction to this book was written by Madison Grant, Chairman of the New York Zoological Society, and Trustee of the American Museum of Natural History."). Web version.

[Chapter 2]

... And another French observer, RenÈ Pinon, as far back as 1905, found the primary school children of Kiang-Su province chanting the following lines: "I pray that the frontiers of my country become hard as bronze; that it surpass Europe and America; that it subjugate Japan; that its land and sea armies cover themselves with resplendent glory: that over the whole earth float the Dragon Standard; that the universal mastery of the empire extend and progress. May our empire, like a sleeping tiger suddenly awakened, spring roaring into the arena of combats." (RenÈ Pinon, "La Lutte pour le Pacifique," p. 152 (Paris, 1906).)

... Nor are the Chinese themselves blind to the advantages of Chino-Japanese co-operation. They have an instinctive assurance in their own capacities, they know how they have ultimately digested all their conquerors, and many Chinese to-day think that from a Chino-Japanese partnership, no matter how framed, the inscrutable "Sons of Han" would eventually get the lion's share. Certainly no one has ever denied the Chinaman's extraordinary economic efficiency. Winnowed by ages of grim elimination in a land populated to the uttermost limits of subsistence, the Chinese race is selected as no other for survival under the fiercest conditions of economic stress. At home the average Chinese lives his whole life literally within a hand's breadth of starvation. Accordingly, when removed to the easier environment of other lands, the Chinaman brings with him a working capacity which simply appalls his competitors. That urbane Celestial, Doctor Wu-Ting-Fang, well says of his own people: "Experience proves that the Chinese as all-round laborers can easily outdistance all competitors. They are industrious, intelligent, and orderly. They can work under conditions that would kill a man of less hardy race; in heat that would kill a salamander, or in cold that would please a polar bear, sustaining their energies, through long hours of unremitting toil with only a few bowls of rice." (Quoted by Alleyne Ireland, "Commercial Aspects of the Yellow Peril," North American Review, September, 1900.)

This Chinese estimate is echoed by the most competent foreign observers. The Australian thinker, Charles E. Pearson, wrote of the Chinese a generation ago in his epoch-making book, "National Life and Character": "Flexible as Jews, they can thrive on the mountain plateaux of Thibet and under the sun of Singapore; more versatile even than Jews, they are excellent laborers, and not without merit as soldiers and sailors; while they have a capacity for trade which no other nation of the East possesses. They do not need even the accident of a man of genius to develop their magnificent future." (Charles H. Pearson, "National Life and Character," p. 118 (2nd edition).)

And Lafcadio Hearn says: "A people of hundreds of millions disciplined for thousands of years to the most untiring industry and the most self-denying thrift, under conditions which would mean worse than death for our working masses -- a people, in short, quite content to strive to the uttermost in exchange for the simple privilege of life." (Quoted by Ireland, supra.)

This economic superiority of the Chinaman shows not only with other races, but with his yellow kindred as well. As regards the Japanese, John Chinaman has proved it to the hilt. Wherever the two have met in economic competition, John has won hands down. Even in Japanese colonies like Korea and Formosa, the Japanese, with all the backing of their government behind them, have been worsted. ...

[Chapter 11]

... Thirty years ago, Professor Pearson forecast China's imminent industrial transformation. "Does any one doubt," he asks, "that the day is at hand when China will have cheap fuel from her coal-mines, cheap transport by railways and steamers, and will have founded technical schools to develop her industries? Whenever that day comes, she may wrest the control of the world's markets, especially throughout Asia, from England and Germany." (Pearson, p. 133.)

... Of course there is another side to the story. Low wages alone do not insure cheap production. As Professor Ross remarks: "For all his native capacity, the coolie will need a long course of schooling, industrial training, and factory atmosphere before he inches up abreast of the German or American working man." (Ross, p. 119.) In the technical and directing staffs there is the same absence of the modern industrial spirit, resulting in chronic mismanagement, while Chinese industry is further handicapped by traditional evils like "squeeze," nepotism, lust for quick profits, and incapacity for sustained business team-play. These failings are not peculiar to China; they hamper the industrial development of other Asiatic countries, notably India. Still, the way in which Japanese industry, with all its faults, is perfecting both its technic and its methods shows that these failings will be gradually overcome ...

Can I play, too?

Why am I in Shenzhen right now? Because I read an article a few months ago suggesting that BGI was going to attempt an IQ GWAS (genome wide association study). I've been thinking about this topic since I was a kid, waiting impatiently for the required technology to develop. (The usual situation in my main field of research, theoretical physics...) After reading the article I did a few calculations and realized that we are on the cusp of being able to find much of the genetic variance related to intelligence. I had to get involved!

The situation reminds me of the story of Caltech grad Eugene Myers and the Human Genome Project. Myers was one of the proposers of the whole genome shotgun sequencing technique. When he read in the Wall Street Journal that Celera might attempt the shotgun technique, he called them up to ask Can I play, too? I'm told there were a lot of techers on the Celera informatics team :-)

Even if our planned study fails, it's clear on the basis of trends in cost and capacity of sequencing that massive GWAS involving 10^5 or 10^6 individuals are right around the corner. It is of primary importance that phenotype data (including IQ!) on this first group of sequenced individuals be collected in a systematic fashion. Assuming this is the case, then under reasonable assumptions a significant fraction of the .6 or so of additive genetic variance will have been discovered within the next 5 (perhaps 10) years.


PS If you are interested in the original Human Genome Project, I highly recommend the book linked to above: The Genome War by James Shreeve.

g, math ability and their population distribution

I've been meaning to post about this report on high level math competitions which appeared in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society. The table below is a good summary of data in the paper. (Click for larger version.)



My guess is that this population is roughly +4 SD in math ability and +(3-4) SD in g. For detecting useful (very) high end ability I trust these competitions more than tests of g, with the proviso that training has a strong effect on performance.

Here's something about what psychometricians would call the "validity" of the test :-)

The skill sets necessary to excel in mathematical problem solving and mathematics research are not identical. Research requires the stamina to work on problems over extended periods of time without knowing whether solutions even exist; the competitions discussed here require the ability to solve difficult problems known to be solvable under timed conditions. Thus, some world-class research mathematicians exist who attempted, but did not excel in the Putnam, IMO, or its qualifying examinations. Nevertheless, a high correlation exists between exceptional ability in mathematical research and problem solving since both require outstanding mathematical intuition and creativity along with the interest in devoting considerable time and effort toward acquiring extensive knowledge in the field. Numerous Putnam Fellows have gone on to receive the Fields Medal (the so-called Nobel Prize of Mathematics) or the Nobel Prize in Physics. Some who never quite achieved Fellow status have also been awarded Nobel Prizes. Eight of the eighteen Fields medalists from 1990 through 2006 were IMO gold or silver medalists in their youth, with Grigorij Perelman, who recently resolved the Poincaré Conjecture, having achieved a perfect forty-two in the 1982 IMO.

See also Talent Selection.

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