Links - 12th November 2019 (2)

John Gray: Steven Pinker is wrong about violence and war
Good example of the logic of those who claim Pinker is wrong about violence declining:
- The Enlightenment had dark sides, so we can't credit it for reducing violence
- Potential deaths (e.g. due to nuclear weapons) are somehow as bad as certain ones (i.e. people who actually died)
- Pointing to increasing raw numbers of non-combat deaths (without comparing them to pre-modern combat deaths or correcting for greater population)
- Claiming that we can't measure war suffering so we can't compare modern and pre-modern war suffering to see if things have improved
- Claiming that some types of deaths are worse than others (in order to inflate the impact of lower modern deaths since we know the rate of death has gone down)
- Reclassifying imprisonment as violence
- Muttering 'what is truth?' and going on with a meta-critique - instead of addressing the facts

Flying economy doesn’t have to suck—these airlines offer great amenities you didn’t know about - "Singapore Sling cocktails—Singapore Airlines
Let’s start with the home airline and flag carrier. Did you know that Singapore Airlines was the world’s first carrier to offer free drinks to passengers in the main cabin? Flights were never the same after free alcohol in economy became a thing!
In-flight nanies—Etihad Airlines
Economy Skycouch—Air New Zealand
Their Economy Skycouch is something to behold. It’s a row of three economy seats that converts into a lie-flat bed or couch at the simple push of a button. All armrests go up and out of the way, and seat footrests can be adjusted (up or down, between 60 and 90 degrees) to make the couch wider. Bedding and pillows are included in the service.
Self-service buffet—Air France
Air France’s long-haul economy class passengers will enjoy gourmet dishes, a free glass of champagne, complimentary cocktails as starters, and even digestive liqueurs for after the meal. They have also introduced an onboard self-service buffet with a selection of sweet and savoury snacks, sandwiches, ice cream and other goodies."

M’sians Outraged By This British Chef’s Hainanese Chicken Rice Recipe Using Lime & Honey - "the recipe received widespread backlash from Singaporeans and Malaysians alike, who called the recipe blasphemous while others even deemed the chef “culturally insensitive”"
On Hainan Island, they are probably outraged by what Singaporeans have done with Wenchang Chicken

Malaysia's nasi lemak better than Singapore's? McDonald's new ad ignites food fight - "Heading back to the table with two plates of nasi lemak from a stall boldly called BEST Nasi Lemak Singapore, the man is puzzled when his friend rejects the food. It turns out she brought her own nasi lemak all the way from Malaysia.The voiceover then proudly proclaims, "Nothing comes between Malaysians and nasi lemak."...
'With the time spent to take away; travel and cross immigration into Singapore; head to LPS; wait for the guy to queue and order; her packet of nasi lemak must have been prepared many hours ago... questionable food safety. Ahoy! Malaysia boleh'...
Malaysian celebrity chef Datuk Redzuawan Ismail, better known as Chef Wan, called Singapore "arrogant" for nominating its hawker culture for Unesco listing. He said: "It's not necessary to announce to the world that you have this or that.""
Salty Malaysians as usual
Presumably Malaysians disapprove of Dondang Sayang and Mak Yong theatre being on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity

Decoding the Dutch - "Textbooks and popular belief have long held that America’s roots lie in the Pilgrims’ can-do spirit, and that this country inherited its spirit of enterprise from British colonists’ sense of adventure in the age of exploration. The Dutch had been in New York for only fifty-four years—most historians had written off this period as “a bunch of wild fur traders stabbing each other for their furs,” to use Gehring’s words. This, historians long agreed, had been the dark ages, enduring until the British captured New York and went on to civilize America. When the Dutch aren’t spoken of as savages and pirates, they are often portrayed as caricatures: The clueless tyrant Peter Stuyvesant with his wooden leg and the fanciful buffoonery of Diedrich Knickerbocker, the protagonist of Washington Irving’s satirical “A History of New York.”Gehring washed away centuries of historical understanding, as he established how present-day New York’s wild multiculturalism and mercantilism–often considered a microcosm of Americana–sprang from Amsterdam, not London... “Put seventeenth-century Beverwijk (present-day Albany) in any place in the Netherlands and people would recognize it as a Dutch village. Tradesmen, blacksmiths, coopers, hatmakers, shoemakers and others would operate just as in the Netherlands,” says Gehring. “You’d see the same types of buildings, with the same type of gables. The only differences would be mountains and snow in the background and hundreds of Indians moving around.” The Dutch history of New York was forgotten because the Dutch had been defeated by the British. In any war, after all, the victors write history.What is largely forgotten is that the Dutch were a leading trading power before the British, controlling key parts of Sri Lanka, India, Africa, Southeast Asia, Brazil and of course North America. “You could say the sun never set on the Dutch empire,” Gehring notes. The Netherlands’ status as a trading superpower was evident both on the streets of its capital and in its outposts. Amsterdam was a melting pot of people from all over Europe. As a mercantile power, the Netherlands opened its doors to all who had the monetary wherewithal to trade with it. The babel of German, Danish, Polish and other languages was heard in Amsterdam. New York (then New Amsterdam) had followed Amsterdam’s footsteps; more than eighteen languages are said to have been spoken in New Amsterdam in 1640. The colony’s raison d’ etre was to make money for its overseers at the Dutch West India Company. To refuse to trade with someone on the basis of his or her ethnicity would be bad business. This wasn’t the case in neighboring areas under British rule, where the only language you heard was English... Amsterdam’s liberalism stood on the bedrock of a free market—and inspired a similar economic system in New York. Amsterdam had thought up the novel idea of allowing citizens to support entrepreneurs by purchasing shares in companies—effectively establishing the world’s first stock market in 1602. New York was infected with this unfettered mercantilism."

How to monitor Facebook and Instagram screen time and limit activity - "You probably don’t need your phone or the apps on it how much time you waste looking at the screen, but the ability to monitor usage time is a hot new smartphone feature this year. Apple and Google have built their own tools to tell you how much time you waste on your smartphone or tablet, as well as features that help you reduce screen time. These new iOS and Android features will help you better manage the screen time of your children as well, on top of possibly helping you cure your own smartphone addiction.But iOS and Android aren’t the only ones to tell you how much time you waste on your phone or computer. Facebook just announced that the mobile apps for Facebook and Instagram will both include new tools to let you manage the time you spend in these apps...  You’ll be able to set daily reminders to stop you from abusing Facebook and Instagram usage, and you’ll be able to temporary mute notifications for each app"

Civic honesty around the globe - "Civic honesty is essential to social capital and economic development but is often in conflict with material self-interest. We examine the trade-off between honesty and self-interest using field experiments in 355 cities spanning 40 countries around the globe. In these experiments, we turned in more than 17,000 lost wallets containing varying amounts of money at public and private institutions and measured whether recipients contacted the owners to return the wallets. In virtually all countries, citizens were more likely to return wallets that contained more money. Neither nonexperts nor professional economists were able to predict this result. Additional data suggest that our main findings can be explained by a combination of altruistic concerns and an aversion to viewing oneself as a thief, both of which increase with the material benefits of dishonesty."
Another interesting thing about this paper: clear empirical proof that people in some countries are more honest than others - Switzerland, Norway and the Netherlands were the most honest countries (in descending order), with >60% of wallets with no money returned. While China, Morocco and Peru were the 3 least honest ones (in ascending order of return rates) with under 15% of wallets with no money returned. One might imagine that GDP is the deciding variable, but Poland did very well, and the US not very, while Malaysians were at least 5% less honest than Indians.

Civic honesty around the globe (letters) - "We have heard from concerned Chinese readers about the results of our recent study... our measure of wallet reporting rates are also consistent with existing data on country-level differences in honesty which include China in the analysis. Country-level reporting rates in our study are correlated with several measures of (dis)honesty: rates of cheating for money in experimental tasks (r = –0.53, p = 0.041; Gächter & Schulz 2016), the estimated size of the shadow economy (r = –0.51, p = 0.000; Hassan & Schneider 2016), the likelihood of returning a incorrectly-addressed letter to its rightful owner (r = 0.63, p = 0.000; Chong et al 2014), unpaid parking violations by UN diplomats (r = –0.41, p = 0.009; Fisman & Miguel 2007), a country’s ranking in Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (r = –0.78, p = 0.000, Corruption Perception Index 2018), and World Bank data on how effectively countries deal with corruption (r = 0.76, p = 0.000; Control of Corruption Index 2017)."
Lots of butthurt Chinese people sending in stupid complaints:
"Science may consider expand to a more diversed reviewer team to aviod the publiction of such biased and unscientific research."
"3. Does this "experiment" understand the culture and lifestyle of the tested countries?
4. Does the designer consulted any local people prior to conducting the survey?
5. The fundamental premise of any global experiment is to respect local knowledge and cultural relativism, which is literally missed in this paper.
6. Does the authors realize how the negative impacts will be on these tested countries, when they published such a biased conclusion?
I suggest to repeal the publishing of this paper, and further scientific and thorough experiments should be done in order to make objective judgement."
"400 wallets per country is a fixed quota according to this experiment design. However, 400 might not reflect as well in a country like China where population are much greater than those in Europe. So statistically the result is not actually indicative and reflective."
"This paper is a joke. The methodological flaws and stereotypical assumptions are so obvious that even someone not trained as a scientist can easily spot the fallacies. This makes a mockery of the credibility we associate with Science as a leading journal. Shame!
Competing Interests: None declared."
It's interesting how almost no people with non-Chinese names wrote in to complain, and many of the complaints are... weird

David Walter: Great Moments in Walletology - WSJ - "In 2007, as a way to measure social trust, Gallup asked people in 85 countries whether they thought strangers in their hometown would return a dropped wallet. New Zealand and Switzerland had the highest rate of trust, with 44% and 38% of respondents answering in the affirmative. Hong Kong was tops in Asia with 23%. Laos and Cambodia came in dead last, with only 1% believing they would ever see their wallet again. Both countries have friendly populations but decidedly unfriendly governments. Maybe that has something to do with it... As law professor Mark D. West writes in "Losers," his great 2002 contribution to the annals of walletology, Japanese people who turn in lost items to police are entitled to receive up to 20% of their discovery's value from owners. Any items that go unclaimed for three months belong wholly to the finders. Conversely, finders caught appropriating lost property without reporting it are often hauled in to face embezzlement charges.The Japanese reclaim millions of lost items each year, and report even more at the country's ubiquitous kōban police kiosks. When Mr. West conducted a lost wallet test in Tokyo, he recovered 17 out of 20 lost wallets, plus 95% of dropped cellphones.That's all well and good for peaceful Japan, you might say, where the police have the time to act as the world's most sophisticated lost-and-found. But Mr. West suggests that the country's lost-property system might be responsible for keeping the peace in the first place. He compares Japan's efforts to secure the return of lost wallets and umbrellas with New York's famed "broken windows" campaign against graffiti in the 1990s. In sweating the small stuff—by punishing acts of dishonesty and using selfishness to incentivize altruism—might Japan's lost-property system have a similar effect on law and order? Might it also build social trust?"

Honesty: The great "lost wallet" test - "Reader's Digest set out to discover just what people would do.First in big cities and small towns around the United States, and then in Europe, Asia, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Latin America,editors of the magazine dropped temptation in the path of unsuspecting people. We "lost" more than 1100 wallets to see just how many would be returned. Each contained up to $50 in local currency, but also a name and phone number so that the finder would have no trouble returning the billfold-presuming the finder wanted to return it. We left the wallets on sidewalks and in phone booths, in front of office buildings, discount stores and churches, in parking lots and restaurants. Then we sat back and watched. The results were … fascinating.
Percentage of lost wallets returned per country:
The countries where test had been taken:
(Country which is not in the list has not been tested)
Norway 100%
Denmark 100%
Singapore 90%
New Zealand 83%
Finland 80%
Scotland 80%
Australia 70%
Japan 70%
South Korea 70%
Spain 70%
Austria 70%
Sweden 70%
U.S. 67%
England 67%
India 65%
Canada 64%
France 60%
Brazil 60%
Netherlands 60%
Thailand 55%
Belgium 50%
Taiwan 50%
Malaysia 50%
Germany 45%
Portugal 45%
Argentina 44%
Russia 43%
Philippines 40%
Wales 40%
Italy 35%
Switzerland 35%
China (Hong Kong): 30%
Mexico 21%"