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Comment by J-dawg | Hacker News Reader

Freakonomics etc made us fall in love with that particular kind of story where the outcome is kinda counter-intuitive and surprising and clever all at the same time.

For example - the legalised abortion and crime effect. I'm sure you can think of plenty more.

I think these stories are like crack to "rational" people. They have all the thrill of a good conspiracy theory, feel rebellious and anti-establishment, yet they're backed up by "real science". And you get to sound clever when you tell your friends about them. I know I'm a sucker for them.

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These stories become like memes that get reposted over and over.

There was a "study" about drug testing welfare applicants in Florida a few years ago where the authors claimed that it only caught a handful of people and cost more than the money saved.

I looked up the numbers and found that applications took a historic plunge when the law went into effect, and an equally large increase after the law was suspended. It was a huge multi-stage funnel where the study only looked at one stage after thousands of applicants had already self-selected for drug-freeness. Applications went down by thousands, and payouts by millions.

Basically if you hired a data scientist who told you this about some funnel you were analyzing, like a purchase or sign-up flow, you would fire this person within five minutes. But people repeated this gotcha story everywhere.

Citation?

https://www.kolotv.com/home/headlines/1597_Welfare_Applicant...

This does not support your claim.

I found a reference that 1600 applicants declined the mandatory testing from July-October 2011. Meanwhile 7000 applicants underwent testing, of which 1% failed.

I haven't been able to find monthly figures for before, during, and after -- so I, too, would like to see kwillet's data.

http://fga.wpengine.com/2011/10/floridas-drug-test-law-for-w...

This is heavily slanted, but I believe their numbers are factual.

>feel rebellious and anti-establishment

I wonder what this is and why it is so prevalent (and maybe how it made our species/specific cultures successful).

You can list a large number of groups that wrap up their identity and value systems around being opposed to or having knowledge that counters their perception of "the majority". It is both incredibly attractive and a way to signal your value by going against the grain in some way or another, in some field or another.

Some philosopher/pyschologist/neurologist/evolutionary biologist could probably do a very compelling analysis about the human need to rebel or obey.

One of the societal ills of the 21st century is that we're running out of big clear cut things to rebel against but are continuing to rebel with the same intensity while directing it somewhat aimlessly all over the place, and now mostly just at each other's rebellion itself. Political parties in America these days are less anchored in particular issues and more about believing strongly in something your opponent is against and making sure your team wins.

"I rebel — therefore we exist." - Albert Camus

"One of the societal ills of the 21st century is that we're running out of big clear cut things to rebel against but are continuing to rebel with the same intensity while directing it somewhat aimlessly all over the place, and now mostly just at each other's rebellion itself."

Yeah but the key phrase is clear cut. We have plenty of big institutions and one can see them do terrible things. It's just they fade into each and so challenging a single one becomes a dubious interest. Health care is a mess but blaming say, insurance companies in particular, is problematic. The environment and global warming are huge problems but blaming single institutions misses the point, etc.

Moreover, large institutions are adept at harnessing issues-as-social-signal and directing them according to their interests. One can fight all this but such a fight doesn't follow the path of least resistance. And boy, are people trained, today, to follow that path, whether in rebellion or conformity.

What we have are complex problems instead of simple ones.

For example, slavery up to 150 years ago vs. segregation up to 50 years ago vs. subtle often unconscious racism today.+ Fighting to abolish slavery is a lot simpler than fighting for racial equality. It is not that there are not problems, but there are not so many obvious problems with obvious solutions today.

+ I'm trying to make a broad point here not perfectly depict the history of racism in America, forgive any unjust implications

Stopping global warming seems very simple - just limit C02 production. The main thing is institutions are complex and so even simple change requires complex processes.

I would strongly disagree that any plan to limit CO2 production would be simple.

Simplest are carbon credits.

The good news here is we're all going to find out very soon just how hard it might be.

> Health care is a mess but blaming say, insurance companies in particular, is problematic.

I think this attitude is the key problem: fuck blame. Seriously, who cares? There absolutely are concrete things we can do about healthcare and climate change and so on, but not if we collectively think that blaming this or that institution is going to motivate people to fix the problem.

Someone has to pay for any change that happens - for example if a company is dumping toxic waste into the environment, $100M is going to be lost from their pockets if they have to stop (cleanup + price of proper disposal). That $100M could come from anywhere in the economy, so unless you want Amazon warehouse workers to start paying in to an industrial waste disposal subsidy system you better start constructing arguments that look something like, "the perpetrator should pay to clean it up."

Being intelligent is the most prized human trait, so being seen as "stupid" hurts our egos really bad.

Being contrarian in this manner is proof that you're smarter than everyone else, plus you get to take a jab at the pretend smarty-pantses. I bet this same effect is why political opinions are so difficult to change.

It probably as simple as it helps your chance of getting laid a small bit by being the archetypal "rebel" as the opposite sex like a vicarious thrill.

"we're running out of big clear cut things to rebel against"

Or we're getting much better at the PR processes that muddy up any public discussion of problems and you lack the history education to know how rare actual clear cut historical political problems were.

Do you really think it is more likely that everyone else is virtue signaling than that you have a status quo bias from living in a culture that pushes that message (and I'm guessing you are quite successful as well?).

When has the majority been right about any complex issue anyway? What a bunch of reactionary anti-intellectual nonsense.

The Tipping Point came out five years earlier.

Also, I think it's important to note that these stories are not actually anti-establishment, even if they have such an appearance; they don't offend any powerful interests. In fact, they're often quite the opposite (consider that Malcolm Gladwell wrote an entire book arguing that being disabled or growing up poor or whatever else is actually an advantage! The people most likely to take exception to that thesis do not have bylines in the New York Times, nor do they have the editor's personal phone number)

See also: anything by Malcolm Gladwell

Indeed many of the exact claims are not to be trusted, though on the other hand keeping this sort of mentality/thinking framework when analyzing the world around us can still be helpful. Putting it as a "conspiracy theory, rebellious and anti-establishment" is really quite a mischaracterization. I'd say quite the contrary, those who sit at the top of the society, of the "establishment", definitely think in very different manners than the population. We all know we need to look beyond what's being mass produced and fed to people on the surface to understand how a lot of things truly work. You may be one of the minority that are closer to the truth, but you're not alone in your understanding of the matters. This is very different from some bunkers conspiracy theory that is dreamt out of nowhere.

Basically, being "rebellious, anti-establishment" means denying/rejecting everything about how the society works and searching for an alternative. Being "smart" means understanding exactly how the society actually works instead of how it's "claimed" to work under propaganda and falsehoods, and maybe using the mechanism to your advantage as much as possible. They are very, very different things.

I think "pattern addiction" is definitely a thing. Human beings are constantly searching for order and patterns. Getting other people to buy into your pattern/narrative/whatever is probably as old as the human race, but in the last 100-150 years we've gotten really fucking good at tricking each other on a massive scale. I think this is why people seem to intuitively understand that political media manipulation, advertising, junk science, etc. are related phenomena. They're all about hijacking the pattern recognition capacity of human beings for personal gain. It's essentially a form of parasitism.

The books were more about finding common patterns and behaviors among seemingly disparate markets than exploring counter-intuitive outcomes. Like how you can spot cheating by looking at whether latter outcomes match former. There's only really one chapter about counter-intuitive outcomes, and that's the one on parents and education, and that's not even counter-intuitive.

You say all that like there's a better way of learning about how the world works that doesn't involve getting another university degree...

>For example - the legalised abortion and crime effect. I'm sure you can think of plenty more.

source on why this is shoddy science?

e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_e... or https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2005/12/01/o...

> It was a good test to attempt. But Messrs Foote and Goetz have inspected the authors' computer code and found the controls missing. In other words, Messrs Donohue and Levitt did not run the test they thought they had—an “inadvertent but serious computer programming error”, according to Messrs Foote and Goetz.

> Fixing that error reduces the effect of abortion on arrests by about half, using the original data, and two-thirds using updated numbers. But there is more. In their flawed test, Messrs Donohue and Levitt seek to explain arrest totals (eg, the 465 Alabamans of 18 years of age arrested for violent crime in 1989), not arrest rates per head (ie, 6.6 arrests per 100,000). This is unsatisfactory, because a smaller cohort will obviously commit fewer crimes in total. Messrs Foote and Goetz, by contrast, look at arrest rates, using passable population estimates based on data from the Census Bureau, and discover that the impact of abortion on arrest rates disappears entirely. “I am simply not convinced that there is a link between abortion and crime,” Mr Foote says.

>In 2005 Levitt posted a rebuttal to these criticisms on the Freakanomics weblog, in which he re-ran his numbers to address the shortcomings and variables missing from the original study. The new results are nearly identical to those of the original study. Levitt posits that any reasonable use of the data available reinforces the results of the original 2001 paper.[10]

>The effect of legalized abortion reported by Donohue and Levitt (2001) is largely unaffected, so that abortion accounts for a 29% decline in violent crime (elasticity 0.23), and similar declines in murder and property crime. Overall, the phase-out of lead and the legalization of abortion appear to have been responsible for significant reductions in violent crime rates."

According to your link it doesn't appear to be shobby science.

Wow, you cherry-picked parts of that out and left out the part where they admit their science was wrong and say there is no way to prove/disprove. Re-read the last paragraph of that 2005 criticism section to see the authors admitting it was bad.

Sounds like you're the one cherry picking by focusing on only one part of the link the OP posted.

That was not a rebuttal against the pointing out of the software error, but to the Lott and Whitley criticism.

The rebuttal to the Foote and Goetz criticism of a programming error is this:

> Donohue and Levitt subsequently published a response to the Foote and Goetz paper.[12] The response acknowledged the mistake, but showed that with different methodology, the effect of legalized abortion on crime rates still existed.

That's troubling to me. They had a hypothesis, and when the experiment didn't confirm that hypothesis, they simply tried a different methodology that might still show it. That feels like moving the goalposts to me.

It's also representative of the negative feeling I had all the time when reading their book: after all their praise of rigorous scientific methods and of not confusing correlation with causation, they follow that up with making those same mistakes themselves. (And I guess the reason that rubbed me wrong is because that is interjected with continuous praise all the time of Levitt. That in turn probably makes me more likely to criticise, so perhaps you should take my criticism with a grain of salt...)

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