Klout is a service that measures your clout on the Internet and assigns you a score based on how many people you reach via social networking.

From xkcd

Dartmouth professor Brendan Nyhan points out that Republicans are running in 2012 the same guy Democrats ran in 2004: "a flip-flopping, out-of-touch elitist from Massachusetts."

What it boils down to is that Democrat or Republican, when your guy’s in office and bad stuff happens, it’s not his fault; when the other team’s guy is in office, it’s all his fault — facts be damned. NPR has some commentary on this which explains the situation via cognitive dissonance, which is the feeling you get when you find out your good friend Mike got fired: since he’s your good friend, and since you don’t associate with incompetent people, clearly his boss made some mistake or was out to get him.

In order to get rid of the discomfort of knowing you’re friends with an unsavory character (or that you voted for the wrong guy), you have to either change your loyalties and drop the friend (or politician), or rationalize the facts away. It turns out the latter is a lot easier — probably because we see loyalty as a pillar of the morality on which society is built. With society comes friends and happiness, but the facts never hugged you. And so, loyalty is greater than truth, simply to avoid being forever alone.

See also:

• More Drilling Doesn’t Make Gas Cheaper
• Morality In Liberals And Conservatives

From The Washington Post, via NPR

If you don’t get it, or just feel like hearing the song again:

Via LOLbrary

Along with the economy, the powers that be have been tinkering with the food supply since the unprecedented government expansion following The Great Depression. Due to the permeating despair of the time, a school of thought became very popular which advocated a middle way between socialism, in which the government completely controls the economy, and libertarianism or classical liberalism, in which the government doesn’t control the economy at all. This middle way is now known as Keynesian Economics and advocates for some level of government control over the economy, the idea being that smart people in charge can make better decisions than the market can. Economists from the libertarian camp — known as the Austrian School — included influential figures such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, who over the decades persuaded government to swing its pendulum somewhat back toward libertarianism, because systems like the economy were too complex for any person to grasp, and therefore it was impossible to predict all ramifications of policies. Interestingly, after the 2008 recession, both the Keynesian and Austrian schools of thought experienced a resurgence, since both are touted as the best strategy for the economy, by their respective backers.

Returning to the food supply: during the late 1800s, after the Civil War, the government heavily encouraged farming by subsidizing land; the most famous of these measures was the Homestead Act, which gave people 160 acres of free land west of the Mississippi if they built a farm on it. The subsidy was extremely successful and resulted in populating the West, as well as turning America into the world’s breadbasket. Unfortunately, it also resulted in overproduction of food, which caused a drop in the price of food, which created a class of impoverished farmers that couldn’t sell enough crops to make ends meet.

Rather than let the surplus of farmers work itself out, during the Great Depression in the 1930s, another subsidy was introduced, this time to raise crop prices: the Agricultural Adjustment Act paid farmers to destroy crops and livestock in order to keep food prices from plummeting. Some forty years later in the 1970s, this backfired in a period of drought during which food prices rose, so yet another adjustment was made: instead of limiting the food supply to keep crop prices high so that farmers can make a living, they simply decided to get rid of the farmers. Subsidies for small farms were ended and new tax subsidies on corporate farms were introduced, since they would be big enough to deal with low crop prices. This resulted in the best of both worlds: cheap food and no impoverished farmers.

However, agricultural policy is a lot like a game of Whack-a-mole: one problem gets whacked, and another pops up. The new corporate farms starting producing corn on a scale never seen before, and they needed a way to sell all of it. They started feeding it to cows, making fuel with it in the form of ethanol, and making sugar out of it in the form of high-fructose corn syrup. Cows now had high-energy, cheap food, so livestock production rose and hamburgers became cheap. Cheap sugar also meant cheap sodas and cheap desserts. Add in cheap potatoes and the fuel for the rise of fast food becomes obvious. But cheap food didn’t stop at the fast kind: for a few dollars more, you could hire some cooks and waitresses and open a cheap sit-down restaurant. The result: Americans now eat out an average of five times per week, and are rewarded with ridiculously large portions for doing so.

To recap: we solved conquering the West with the Homestead act, which resulted in poor farmers, which we solved by paying some of them not to farm, which resulted in high food prices, which we solved by converting farming into a corporate venture, which resulted in the current obesity epidemic. The average American now eats 1,000 calories a day more than in the 1970s, two out of three people are overweight, and half of those are obese. All thanks to Manifest Destiny, good intentions and lack of willpower.

On the other hand, in spite of what the signs of homeless people will have you believe, we live in the land of milk and honey: every person in the country has access to enough food, be it for free from a food kitchen, inexpensively from grocery stores, McDonald’s or Applebee’s, or for European prices at Whole Foods and Carrabba’s. Take into account the similarly falling price of entertainment — free music, movies, news and series on TV and the Internet — and we have the modern version of the Roman panem et circenses (bread and circuses). Hopefully, it won’t be followed by a future president marching the army on Washington.

The name of the country in which Hunger Games takes place, Panem, comes from "panem et circenses"

See also:

• How To Make And Break Habits

From The New York Times

From YouTube, via Laughing Squid

Sorkin is arguably the best screenwriter in the business, having written more critically- and popularly-acclaimed scripts than probably anyone alive. While scripts for episodes of TV series are normally shuffled between a team of writers, Aaron Sorkin wrote every one of the first four seasons of The West Wing — a superhuman feat that was only possible due to his coke addiction. Since then, he’s written a play, a couple of movies, and is making a new TV show for HBO. One of the movies he made, The Social Network, was, like Steve Jobs also an adaptation of a book about a young guy striking it rich in Silicon Valley.

See also:

• Aaron Sorkin Is Making ‘The Newsroom’ For HBO

Via iMore

The fact that Paul raised so much money probably means that a lot of people agree with what he’s saying, which makes sense given that a majority of Americans might actually be Libertarian — whether they know it or not. In any case, it must feel very good for him that after 40 years of campaigning and prophesying, the Libertarian platform has gained enough ground to make him a household name. Given that his popularity has been driven substantially by young people — not to mention celebrities from Kelly Clarkson to Vince Vaughn to Snoop Dog — who want to see the TSA abolished, pot legalized, wars ended, and disappearing entitlements revamped, it seems likely that the movement will continue to grow.

See also:

• Ron Paul Is A Prophet Now
• Money Doesn’t Buy Elections
• Majority Of Americans Might Now Be Libertarian
• Mr. Romney Sounds A Lot Like Mr. Burns
• Fun With Newt
• ‘Mad Men’ On Romney

From The LA Times and The New York Times, via Slashdot

• Researcher bias: this can be confirmation bias, where the researcher, maybe even unconsciously, sets the experiment up to succeed out of fear of bring proven wrong; there are plenty of ways to massage every experiment, or to interpret the numbers, so that the outcome is the one hoped for. The bias can also be incentive-based, in which the researcher skews the results because of what’s at stake: a good job, grant money, a promising career, or even prestige and scientific stardom.
• Selective reporting: the vast majority of studies published have positive results — that is, they confirmed what the researcher was looking for, e.g. that cell phones cause brain cancer. But if the research shows no effect from cell phones, it doesn’t get sent in for publication. And even if it does, the journal may decide to not publish because it’s not sexy enough.
• Poor study design: maybe the samples were too small, the study wasn’t double-blinded or not randomized, it tested too many relationships, or relied on self-reporting; it could be the question was too broad, the results were mis-analyzed, or any of dozens of possible flaws that can make its way into a study, usually due to constraints on time or money.

John Ioannidis

The paper became the most downloaded article in the PLoS Medicine journal. The author, John Ioannidis, was the subject of an in-depth profile by The Atlantic in 2010. He has made it his mission in life to root out bad studies and prove them wrong. From the article, emphasis added:

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 Atlantic, November 2010)

Ioannidis then published a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which confirmed his predictions: 22% of the 49 most widely cited medical studies in the most widely cited journals were never even replicated; and 29% of the ones that were, were proven wrong. Therefore, his advice is to largely ignore studies: besides the fact that they often contradict each other, there are so many factors at play in something as complex as the human body, that researchers most often find flukes in large, but limited data sets — not actual facts. It’s somewhat like claiming words in a giant bowl of alphabet soup have some significance.

But even if researchers stumble onto something significant, the study can only predict effects in a test environment, not in the real world. And very few studies go on for long enough to see if a factor affects important things, like death rate. (The few that do, generally contradict shorter studies.) Then, even in a magical unicorn of a perfect study, the results are averages over hundreds or thousands of people and are not even remotely tailored to our individual needs. And finally, even if you are the unlikely beneficiary of a perfect study done on a subset of the population that you belong to, the effects found are generally meager. In fact, we can’t even be sure that a study hasn’t already been refuted: sometimes it takes over ten years for researchers to stop citing a study which was proven to be wrong. For example, people still think plastic water bottles leech toxic chemicals, even though the original study was severely flawed.

“The odds that anything useful will survive from any of these studies are poor,” says Ioannidis—dismissing in a breath a good chunk of the research into which we sink about $100 billion a year in the United States alone. (The Atlantic, November 2010)

And these problems exist in all fields of research, not just in bio-medicine. The New Yorker also interviewed Ioannidis in 2010, as part of an article on a related problem in scientific research, known as the Decline Effect. A very curious phenomenon, it makes significant findings of studies disappear over time — and it happens a lot. A study will find a drug very effective, then a subsequent study will find it less effective, and a third one even less so; the effect is generally explained as flukes being worked out of the studies over time, known as regression toward the mean.

It has even been shown that all economic studies might be wrong, and throughout history, instances where reality didn’t agree with the laws of physics have caused our understanding of the universe to become more and more complex — from the Earth sitting on the back of a turtle, to being suspended in the void by a force we can measure, but do not quite understand. And after centuries of discovering the laws of physics and building the complex language of advanced mathematics to describe them, scientists now faced with the similar feat of discovering the laws that govern the other important and extremely complex systems: our bodies, our environment and our society.

All of the evidence points to us not even being close to understanding those systems. But eventually, we will get to the same level of clarity about them that we have about classical physics. Until then, Ioannidis came up with some rules for judging truthiness:

A study is more likely to be wrong if

• it is small
• the effect sizes are small
• there are large financial interests, or prejudices
• the scientific field is flexible with respect to study design
• the scientific field is teeming with competing teams

See also:

• Number Needed To Treat

From Nature, PLoS Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, The New Yorker and The Atlantic

If you want to feel even older, check out the Beloit Mindset List, which explain’s the current college freshman’s world view in terms of things they’re not familiar with, like the Soviet Union.

From FAIL Blog

• Its annual revenue is on par with New Zealand’s GDP
• It has over 100B$ in cash, with which it could buy T-Mobile, Nokia, Netflix, Adobe, Twitter and RIM (who makes Blackberry).
• It also could use that money to build and run a station on the moon for 8 years, buy all their employees mansions, buy everyone in the world a meal at McDonald’s (including dessert), end world hunger for three years, hire the Russian military for two years, or buy all the sports teams in America and pay for the Olympics.
• 30% of smartphone users have an iPhone
• There are 600,000 apps in the app store, and they’ve been downloaded 25 billion times

From Sortable, via iMore