Meme - "And of course today was a Wal-Mart day in court. Literally all but one of my clients on today was for a larcenous charge from WalMart. Maybe it is time to hold the company accountable."
Hot Takes Nobody Asked For - Posts | Facebook - "Hold Walmart accountable for making people commit crimes? Were they asking for it because of their merchandising? Maybe they shouldn't be showing their goods at those hours?"Shoplifting means you are a victim
Ida Bae Wells on Twitter - "Why do “school choice” advocates never advocate eliminating school district boundaries/funding schools by local property tax and allowing poor, Black students to attend white, wealthy schools in neighboring municipalities? They don’t really want choice, just privatization."
Weird. What world is she living in? That's exactly what they want
Covid and the “Birthday Effect” - Freakonomics - "We did not find that the link between birthdays and Covid-19 changed if the majority of the people in the county voted for Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton in 2016. It also didn’t seem to matter if there was a shelter-in-place policy in effect, which makes sense, since these policies were kind of toothless to police smaller, private social gatherings. And, for good measure, we even looked at the weather. We thought that rainy days might drive people indoors more. But turns out there was no relationship between rainfall during the week of a birthday and a Covid-19 diagnosis afterwards...
PRASAD: If your goal is to have sort of a sustained and reasonable pandemic response, to some degree, you have to count on the fact that not everyone’s going to do everything you say, not everyone’s going to do everything you wish they did. People are people... I think appreciating that people are primates and primates have needs has to be a part of any sort of public health response. That might’ve been a missed opportunity of the pandemic. When it comes to important life events, like a child’s birthday, people want to celebrate those events. And so, the strict thing is to say, “You can’t do that.” Another strategy might’ve been to say, “Maybe there are ways you can do that more safely.”"
Understanding means you can't mock and hate other people
Do As Docs Say, Not As They Do - Freakonomics - "my colleagues Michael Frakes, Jon Gruber and I evaluated a very similar question using data from the U.S. We used military health records. And we found only trivial differences between how much doctors and non-doctors did things like get vaccinations or go in for an M.R.I. to help diagnose back pain. Another 2013 study in the Netherlands estimated the effects of attending medical school on health outcomes of doctors vs. non-doctors. The results showed only modest impacts of becoming a doctor on health outcomes. Doctors drank a little less alcohol. But the study also found that they exercised less. And being a doctor had no significant impact on smoking or obesity rates. And in 2019, Dr. Hannah Wunsch and her colleagues did an interesting analysis of doctors in Canada. They found that the care doctors receive at the end of their lives is actually not that different from the care that non-doctors receive. I thought my fellow doctors would actually tend to choose less aggressive end-of-life care. But Wunsch and her team showed that just wasn’t true. In their study, doctors and non-doctors were equally likely to spend their last days in the hospital. All of this is to say that what doctors may advise their patients may not, really, fully square with the decisions they make for themselves when they’re faced with the same incredibly difficult choices...
Doctors and their families were 3.8 percent less likely to follow the guidelines about prescriptions...
Driving down costs may help. But even in settings like Sweden where people don’t have large out-of-pocket medical costs, people only take their prescribed medications about half the time...
PERSSON: I think trust is important here. It’s easy for us to sit in our ivory tower and think everyone ought to know that you should stick to taking prescribed medications. But out there in the real world, there are many competing sources of information. So in that cloud of information, sometimes misinformation, we found it plausible that access to an expert, but not just an expert but a trusted expert, a family member who’s a nurse or a doctor, can make a difference for health behaviors. But if the trusted expert has to be a family member, then that’s a little bit of bad news if we’re trying to design policy."
How to Solve a Medical Mystery - Freakonomics - "I did a study a few years back that showed that the older a doctor was, the worse the outcomes were for their patients. That may seem a bit disheartening, but we did find that doctors who treated a lot of patients as they got older— these are doctors who were still in the thick of it, learning— those doctors didn’t see the mortality of their patients affected by their age in the same way... Where I work, Mass General in Boston, many doctors actually wear short white coats. Normally, you only see those coats on medical students. But the purpose for wearing them is for us all to remember that we should always be learning."
The Mystery of the Man with Confusion and Back Pain - Freakonomics - "cognitive biases. For example, my colleague Dan Ly showed that doctors who recently treated a patient with a pulmonary embolism – which is a clot in the blood vessels that supply the lung – those doctors increased their rates of pulmonary embolism testing in subsequent patients, some of whom were unlikely to actually have that condition. This is just one example of how diagnostic decisions of doctors can be affected by cognitive biases, in this case something that Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman termed the “availability heuristic.” For doctors who’ve recently treated a patient with a pulmonary embolism, the diagnosis may just be more front of mind or mentally available, leading them to prioritize testing for that condition over other more likely diagnoses in future patients."
Why Fridays May Be Dangerous for Your Health - Freakonomics - "companies and even governments take advantage of our inattention and release reports and news on Fridays that they’d rather we didn’t pay much attention to. The goal is to avoid unflattering media coverage. For example, any story that might impact a company’s stock price...
Luis and his research partners found that alerts were more likely to be communicated on a Friday than any other day of the week. They also found that alerts released on a Friday were shared 34 percent less on social media, and they were 12-51 percent less likely to receive news coverage."
Where Do All the Bad Ideas Go? - Freakonomics - "JENA: We looked at people who worked in a Veterans Affairs hospital. And often V.A. researchers, they write about health care issues and quality-of-care issues in the V.A. system. And I thought “Hm, I bet that V.A. researchers, when they write studies about the V.A., are going to be finding things that are positive.” Like, “The V.A. does this good, the V.A. does that good, etc.” And we didn’t find that. We actually wrote that up because I thought this question of ideological bias no matter what you found would be interesting. And we got it published...
LEVITT: Somebody approached me and they asked me if I could study texting and driving and what the effect was. And I had never thought about the problem and I didn’t have any great ideas. So almost on a lark, I called up a friend I had at a big insurer and I said, “Hey, if I could link the data you have on driving to data on texting, would you be interested?” And he said, sure. And then I called up a really big telecom company, a friend I had there, and I said, “Hey, if I could link your data to this insurance data, would you be happy to do it?” And amazingly, they said, yes. And we developed this partnership where we were the trusted third party of these data that they wouldn’t give to the other company, but they would give to us. And we went to a lot of trouble to put it together and it wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty good. Now, part of the problem was the insurance company didn’t actually know when people crashed. They just knew when they slammed on the brakes. But it turned out that when people were texting, they just slowed way down. They hardly ever slammed on their brakes because I think they were driving so slow and were so far away from other cars that they probably weren’t driving very well, and they weren’t doing anything that was discernible that was dangerous. And in the end, we found that there was no impact of texting on any bad driving outcomes. And it could have been a good paper, but I think nobody would have believed it. And the companies we were working with weren’t very excited about it. And then my R.A. went off to grad school and the project never died, it just didn’t happen. It was one of those cases where this bias that arises in publication, which is we had a perfectly good result. We had a draft of a paper, but everybody just ran out of steam because we knew it’d be such a war to try and get it published because it would go so much against people’s priors, but not in a way that will make people excited, just in a way that will make them angry and frustrated"
So much for conflict of interest
Should introverts act more extraverted? - "extraverted behaviour and social situations can promote pleasant emotions. There may be limits, but acting extraverted seems beneficial for most people, at least in some circumstances. We have no interest in forcing extraverted behaviour on anyone, but introverts might think of it as a helpful tool to boost moods or get certain tasks accomplished"
Did Cold Weather Cause the Salem Witch Trials? - "the most active era of witchcraft trials in Europe coincided with a 400- year period of lower-than-average temperature known to climatologists as the "little ice age."Oster, now an associate professor of economics at the University of Chicago, showed that as the climate varied from year to year during this cold period, lower temperatures correlated with higher numbers of witchcraft accusations... Weather patterns continue to trigger witchcraft accusations in many parts of Africa, where witch killings persist. According to a 2003 analysis by the Berkeley economist Edward Miguel, extreme rainfall — either too much or too little — coincides with a significant increase in the number of witch killings in Tanzania. The victim is typically the oldest woman in a household, killed by her own family."
Do Checklists Make People Stupid? (NSQ Ep. 26) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "‘There are many things that I love about New York. And I think many of those fall within the parameters of one word, which is propinquity… it's kind of an active form of density, it means that there's a certain amount of density that lends itself to collaboration or collisions, some of which are intentional, and some of which are unintentional. And that generally produces a greater output than you might have elsewhere. That's how I define propinquity’...
‘What about the argument that things have changed… and with Zoom, and with WiFi, you don't need to live in New York to discover your tribe, that you could do it virtually?’
‘They said that when the telegraph happened, they said that when the telephone happened, they said that when the fax machine happened. You know, I was a young writer, when the fax machine was coming out and the personal computer was getting really popular. And the conventional wisdom across the board was, oh, nobody, especially a writer, will ever have to live in a city. Why on earth would you want to live in a city? Because you can do what you do from anywhere. And I can tell you, I could give probably 1000 examples in my life, where an idea or a story or a way of thinking about something was informed by the result of propinquity’
‘I think you're right, this all comes down to propinquity. And whether human beings from millennia of evolution, get the same rewards from real propinquity and virtual propinquity. And being on a Zoom call with 10 people is different than being in a park with 10 people’...
‘My friend James altucher wrote a piece about his having left New York and he says forever, although I don't believe him, and that New York City is over forever... And then others attacked him including Jerry Seinfeld in the New York Times writing an op ed. And basically Seinfeld's take was like this guy James Altucher is a putz who is not loyal and I certainly wouldn't want him on any team of mine. But the irony of that is that Jerry Seinfeld is writing this piece defending New York City from his house in the Hamptons because he too left’"
How Should You Ask for Forgiveness? (NSQ Ep. 27) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "‘It is interesting though, in medicine, for instance, for years, there was essentially a prohibition for doctors to apologize to patients if things went wrong, because that might lead to malpractice.’
‘Right, because it's an admission of responsibility.
‘And then a bunch of states passed what came to be called I'm sorry laws that allowed doctors to apologize without having any liability accrued to them. And they found that that actually cut down on malpractice lawsuits.’...
‘Recently, the director of the CDC, Dr. Robert Redfield said that if you just got everyone to wear masks, it would be even more effective than there being a vaccine. Masks are extremely effective, you know, they’re primitive technology and vaccines are great, but vaccines tend to not be 100% effective for all people’...
‘Kurt Lewin was this amazing scientist, you know, you've really made it when your name becomes an adjective. So you know, it's Lewinian. If you read these old articles that he wrote, he has all these like force diagrams, just like we learned in physics, like the arrows pointing different ways. And he really thought of behavior change as essentially a problem where you have promoting forces, like I could be healthier if I started exercising, maybe it would be a way to meet other people. But then you have restraining forces, like I don't have any of the stuff to exercise. I get out of breath very quickly. I feel kind of silly, doing things that I don't know how to do. So Lewin had the insight that when we tried to change our own behavior, and especially when we try to change somebody else's behavior, our romantic partner or colleague, what we tend to do is we try to pile on more promoting forces. We tell people all the reasons why they should exercise, we try to make it sound better’
‘Which can come off as preaching and scolding, by the way’
‘It tends not to work for various reasons, including that one. And then the further insight was that you can actually get more leverage in many cases by removing the restraining forces, by identifying the reasons why the person isn't yet exercising, and then taking them out of the way.’"
Mask fetishism strikes again. Why even bother with a vaccine then, since we are told that vaccines will end the epidemic, and masks are even better? Those who won't get the vaccine won't wear masks anyway
Which Incentives Are Best at Boosting Vaccination, and Why? - Freakonomics - "Stephen says that blood-pressure readings in a doctor’s office tend to be much higher than elsewhere. Among patients who exhibit high blood pressure at a doctor’s office, 15 to 30 percent of them may have what’s called “white-coat hypertension” — or high blood pressure that occurs during an appointment with a physician, but not in other settings. But the reverse effect is also true — “masked hypertension” occurs when patients display normal blood pressure at their doctor’s office but a higher range in other settings. According to the National Center of Biotechnology Information, the prevalence of masked hypertension lies between 8% and 20% of untreated adults, and up to 61% of treated adults!"
Why Do So Many Donated Kidneys End Up in the Trash? - Freakonomics - "Alvin ROTH: Transplant centers are measured in a way that penalizes them for unsuccessful transplants, but doesn’t penalize them for transplants that they decide not to... If you have a kidney that has an 85% chance of success, that might look like a life-saving opportunity to a patient, but it might look to a transplant center like risking censure you can’t have a 15% failure rate in the United States...
Transplant centers are kept under watch by the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients and also the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. And according to their criteria, hospitals get dinged when their one-year survival rate after transplant surgery falls below 98 percent — in other words, they get penalized when fewer than 98 percent of the patients who received new kidneys at the hospital survive 12 months after the surgery., Sumit Mohan again.
MOHAN: Those centers that fall about a percent and a half below that? So about 96, 97 percent get flagged as underperforming transplant centers. And that’s important because patients who are on the transplant waitlist, who are on dialysis, have a 20 percent annualized mortality rate. So the survival rate for patients who are on dialysis compared to patients who have received a transplant is not really comparable. And that one and a half percent difference between an as expected performing transplant center versus an underperforming transplant center? While it may be statistically significant, it’s not clinically, meaningfully different. And that becomes part of the problem. Transplant centers are not incentivized to transplant their patients...
And there’s a strange thing that’s missing from the criteria in this system. The powers that be … don’t seem to care about wasted kidneys. That’s not a thing that they even look at... the national standards don’t necessarily represent what patients may want. A person facing death might be happier living five years with an imperfect kidney than living only five months on dialysis. And measuring quality by a one-year survival rate is also questionable."
Why Does the Richest Country in the World Have So Many Poor Kids? (Ep. 475) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "ROMNEY: There are substantial penalties in our safety-net system for individuals who might get married. So a single person with a couple of children at home is going to do better off not married than he or she would do if they did become married. And guess what? Incentives have an impact. And so people don’t get married. And we know that one of the keys to being able to help people get out of poverty is being married and having two people in the home that can invest their time and talents raising a child."
Introducing a New “Freakonomics of Medicine” Podcast (Ep. 465) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "For patients in areas near marathon routes, the percentage who died within 30 days of being hospitalized — the 30-day mortality rate — was 13 percent higher if they had a heart attack or cardiac arrest on race day than if they had either one of those conditions on a non-race day. We didn’t find any increase in mortality on marathon days in those people who lived in nearby ZIP codes that were unaffected by the race route, which makes a lot of sense. Their trip to the hospital shouldn’t have been affected by blocked roads. You might be thinking — correlation isn’t causation. When we do a study like this, we have to be sure to eliminate all the other possible reasons for the effect that we’re seeing. So what are some of those other possible explanations? What if the people having heart attacks were actually running in the race? Well, we studied patients aged 65 years and older — and, okay, there are lots of runners who are over 65. So we looked at people with multiple medical conditions — people who were chronically ill and therefore were really unlikely to be running a marathon. Or what if, for some reason, the patients having heart attacks on marathon days were just different from patients on any other day? It doesn’t seem plausible, at least not to me, but to double-check, we compared patient characteristics — like their age, or other cardiac problems. And we found that those characteristics were about the same on race days vs. non-race days. What if hospitals are short-staffed on marathon day? That didn’t explain it either, because hospitals were performing all of their typical cardiac procedures on marathon days. Which suggests that there were plenty of people on hand to care for heart attack patients. It occurs to me that those folks must have gotten an early start on their commute so they didn’t get stuck in traffic! What if ambulances took patients to hospitals that were further away to avoid roadblocks. We found that the hospitals that patients were taken to were actually the exact same on marathon days and non-marathon days. It just took patients longer to get there. All we were left with to explain the difference in mortality was a delay in treatment. So what kind of delays are we talking about here? On a typical, non-marathon day, the average travel time in an ambulance for patients with a heart attack or cardiac arrest was 13.7 minutes. On a race day? That went up to 18.1 minutes. That means, on average, it took about four and a half minutes longer — 32 percent longer — for patients to get treatment on the day of a marathon. That may not seem like a long delay for your average commuter, but even small delays in care can lead to significant heart damage — which, by the way, is why we say in medicine that when it comes to heart attacks, “time is tissue.”"
How to Stop Worrying and Love the Robot Apocalypse (Ep. 461) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "In the spring of 2018, David Autor was asked to co-chair an M.I.T. task force called The Work of the Future. It included researchers from a variety of disciplines — economics, engineering, political science, anthropology even. The mission was to explore how new technologies like robotics and automation will affect labor markets, especially whether certain groups of workers would be left behind. Keep in mind that this sort of prediction is really hard — as evidenced by the predictions that economists made about globalization. They predicted that when the U.S. offshored manufacturing jobs to China, that Americans who worked in manufacturing would be made better off, since they’d theoretically be “reallocated” into better jobs. But as David Autor told us in that earlier episode, this didn’t happen.
AUTOR: Some people are leaving the labor market, some people are going into unemployment, some people are going on to disability, and so the reallocation process seems to be slow, frictional, and scarring. The real differentiator is the skill level of the worker. So, higher-paid and more highly educated workers, they seemed to reallocate successfully out of manufacturing into other jobs.
DUBNER: So, the H.R. person at a big textile firm gets an H.R. job elsewhere and the manufacturers on the line are probably not."
The Future of New York City Is in Question. Could Andrew Yang Be the Answer? (Ep. 462) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "Andrew Yang has parlayed his quixotic presidential campaign into front-runner status in the race to become the next mayor of New York City. As such, he’s being attacked from a variety of angles. A group called Asians Against Yang, for instance, opposes him in part because he has taken some pro-police stances...
We’re going to make outdoor dining permanent in part because it is shown to drive small-business revenue up for adjacent businesses by something like 45 or 50 percent."
Given that Asians are generally pro-police, this is ironic
Facebook - "Chris Pratt follows fascists on twitter. He is NOT our Mario. I just checked and he's still following these accounts. This is not made up. It's his verified account."
The tolerant left at it again - cancelling someone because of who he follows on Twitter and what church he goes to
Women are less likely to date men posing with cats, study finds - "Men who like cats are less likely to get a date... "Men holding cats were viewed as less masculine; more neurotic, agreeable, and open; and less dateable""
zay🗿 on Twitter - "Our Founding Fathers wouldn't recognize the America we live in today. They would be horrified, and rightfully so."
"founding fathers: you freed the WHAT"
Max Adams On The Dark Ages | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "'Britain in 400, looks very, very different from Britain in 600. So you've got this black hole into which our history tumbles. And this is the period when archaeology has to deliver. Unfortunately, the tools that we normally have at our disposal are either missing for this period, or we're not sure how to use them. And by that, I mean, first of all, we rely on things we can date. So that means wet pieces of wood, which have tree rings in them. Roman coins don't arrive here after about 390, 400. So are, we can say when things happened after a certain time, but not when. Pottery, which we also use to date sites, is not really being made in industrial quantities anymore. And the other sort of help me get out of jail free card for archaeologists is radiocarbon dating, which can normally supply dates within sort of 50 years, or even 50 years is not much cop for those 200 years. But in particular, for those 200 years, we have this frustration that radiocarbon dating relies on the amount of carbon in the atmosphere being absorbed by living things being not absolutely constant, but being on a sort of gentle curve. For those two centuries, it just so happens that the carbon atmospheric content goes haywire. So so even radiocarbon dating is not helping us... People eat McDonald's and drive Japanese cars and use and use German technology. But we're not actually subject to military conquest by those people. So the artifacts that archaeologists find are not biographies of the people with whom we find them...
If you, if as I do, you spend a lot of time walking through the British Isles, you actually see some of those regional identities change really quite, quite quickly. I mean, for example, you know, the north south divide, which is always jokingly said to begin at the Watford gap, a really interesting place. It really is the divide because no Viking ever settled southwest of the Watford gap on Watling Street. Why? Because Watling Street is the line between all the rivers that flow north and east and all the rivers that flow south and west. It's a real, it's a real internal frontier in Britain's landscape. And, right into the Viking period, people are sensitive to those very small geographical niceties, if you like’
‘Of course, this this period is traditionally referred to as the Dark Ages. But in recent years, a lot of historians have pushed back against that title saying that they they find it a bit, a bit too negative about the kind of cultural, the culture of the time. What's your opinion on that debate? Do you think we should still call it the Dark Ages?’
‘I suppose, first of all, I don't care. Second of all, if Bede has only got 19 lines to say about it, that's dark. I mean, dark as in obscure. I mean, in terms of cultural exuberance, and poetry and art, and culture and sophistication. No, no, not dark at all. But in terms of obscurity, I mean, if, you know, I, I use the term early medieval to my academic colleagues. And they know exactly what I mean. You know, we talk, we talk an internal language between us, you know, just the way archaeologists talk about an archaeological site in a way that, you know, an archaeologist would never call it an excavation a dig. Dig is a public word for an excavation, but it's an excavation. So you know, we all use different terms, I'm very happy to, I get told off all the time for calling it the Dark Ages. I don't really care because, because it's, it's like calling the Roman period, the Roman period. It’s not really the Roman period, it's a useful tag. And for a period that is so, it's the most obscure period in our history. It's dark in the sense that you have to hold up a candle to get the merest glimpse of what's going on, but you, you, it's no more than candlelit. So for me, it can stay the Dark Ages, but I can call it the early medieval. I can be, you know, I can call it the period 425 to 585 if you really, you know if we want to get that nerdy about it, but I don't really. Dark Ages is, you know, we've gonna call it something. We call it the Arthurian period, and it drives us mad as well.’"
Hungary's fertility rate returns to pre-1995 levels - "the rate was 1.59 in the January-November period this year, up from 1.57 in 1995, before austerity measures introduced by Lajos Bokros, the then finance minister. The fertility rate had been declining since 1979, when Hungary’s fertility rate was above 2.0. It declined to 1.8 at the time of the 1989-90 change in political system before dropping even further, to an all-time low of 1.2 after the 2008 “crisis management” of the previous Gyurcsány-Bajnai left-wing government, Rétvári said. Rétvári, a lawmaker of the co-ruling Christian Democrats, said their government “strongly believes in families”, which is why, he added, it had introduced a multitude of schemes to help couples wanting to raise children."
Women patients at greater risk when male surgeon operates, study finds
Men treated by women also had better outcomes, supposedly. Strangely, the usual "correlation is not causation" crowd will be awfully silent, since they like the results. Yet, the paper itself mentions that: "female surgeons in both relevant dyads were younger and had lower annual surgical volumes than male surgeons" and "female surgeons treated younger patients with less comorbidity than male surgeons." This suggests that XY surgeons get the harder cases; though they claim that "there is not an underlying rationale to support that male surgeons are more likely to perform a more complex subset of each procedure", earlier research tells us that there is "sexism" because female surgeons perform less complex procedures than male ones.
Gender may not be the biggest factor in women doctors’ lower patient mortality - "The mortality rate among patients cared for by female physicians was 0.47% lower than for male physicians, tracking closely the results of a large American study published in 2017 that showed a 0.43% lower 30-day mortality for the patients of female doctors. This gap held when the Canadian researchers adjusted for patient characteristics such as age, gender, and disease acuity, and for hospital differences. But when they accounted for physician characteristics such as years of experience, the difference between male and female doctors’ patient mortality rates wasn’t statistically significant, except marginally so in cases where the “most responsible physician” was also the attending and discharging physician... The researchers also compared differences in processes of care, such as prescribing medications and ordering diagnostic imaging and bloodwork. They found that women physicians requested more diagnostic tests than men but that didn’t have any bearing on patient mortality."
