Links - 22nd May 2020

Does Birth Order Affect Personality? - "first borns are less likely to participate in dangerous sports because of fears of physical injury. And a 1980 study of 170 female and 142 male undergraduates showed lower anxiety and higher ego in firstborns... scientists who analyzed large, transnational data and compared different families with each other have found the effect of sibling succession on personality disappears almost completely... the size of one’s family is another factor that’s intertwined with sibling position... the fact that many astronauts are firstborns does not necessarily speak to the special qualities of those born first. It’s likely that many astronauts come from smaller families... in a 2015 study, which included 377,000 high school students, psychologist Rodica Damian and her colleague Brent W. Roberts, both then at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign discovered that firstborns tended to be more conscientious, extraverted and willing to lead. Contrary to expectations, they were also more tolerant and emotionally stable than adolescents with older siblings. Yet the differences were very small, and the researchers concluded that the importance that is generally attached to sibling position in shaping one’s character is exaggerated...on average, firstborns enjoy a small IQ advantage over their younger siblings. Those born first also tend to complete their education with a higher degree and opt for traditionally prestigious careers, such as medicine or engineering... Norwegian researchers Petter Kristensen and Tor Bjerkedal cleverly showed that the difference in intelligence is not linked to biological factors (some had suspected it might be related to physical conditions during pregnancy). They tested children whose older siblings had died early. The researchers’ assumption was that although these children were biologically younger siblings, they assumed the role of the firstborn in the family. Compared with other younger siblings, they achieved better results in intelligence tests."

The Behavior of Individual Investors by Brad M. Barber, Terrance Odean - "We provide an overview of research on the stock trading behavior of individual investors. This research documents that individual investors (1) underperform standard benchmarks (e.g., a low cost index fund), (2) sell winning investments while holding losing investments (the “disposition effect”), (3) are heavily influenced by limited attention and past return performance in their purchase decisions, (4) engage in naïve reinforcement learning by repeating past behaviors that coincided with pleasure while avoiding past behaviors that generated pain, and (5) tend to hold undiversified stock portfolios. These behaviors deleteriously affect the financial well being of individual investors."

The Illogic of Active Trading - The New York Times - "A series of academic studies done by Terrance Odean and Brad Barber found conclusively that investors who trade a lot experience reduced returns. In fact, the more they trade the worse their return is likely to be"

The Courage of Misguided Convictions: The Trading Behavior of Individual Investors by Brad M. Barber, Terrance Odean - " It is difficult to reconcile the volume of trading observed in equity markets with the trading needs of rational investors. Rational investors make periodic contributions and withdrawals from their investment portfolios, rebalance their portfolios, and trade to minimize their taxes. Those possessed of superior information may trade speculatively, though rational speculative traders will generally not choose to trade with each other. It is unlikely that rational trading needs account for a turnover rate of 76 percent on the New York Stock Exchange in 1998. We believe there is a simple and powerful explanation for high levels of trading on financial markets: overconfidence.  Human beings are overconfident about their abilities, their knowledge, and their future prospects. Odean (1998b) shows that overconfident investors trade more than rational investors and that doing so lowers their expected utilities. Greater overconfidence leads to greater trading and to lower expected utility.We present evidence that the average individual investor pays an extremely large performance penalty for trading. Those investors who trade most actively earn, on average, the lowest returns. And the stocks individual investors purchase do not outperform those they sell by enough to even cover the costs of trading. In fact, the stocks individual investors purchase, on average, subsequently underperform those they sell. This is the case even when trading is not apparently motivated by liquidity demands, tax-loss selling, portfolio rebalancing, or a move to lower-risk stocks."

Cancer link to red meat consumption may not exist for Asians: Study - "Researchers in Korea have discovered that the link between meat consumption and colorectal cancer may not apply to Asians... The study also reported that there do not exist any conclusive reports proving a significant correlation between meat consumption and colorectal cancer, whether it involves processed meats, raw meats or the relevant cooking methods."

Reality check: Can cat poop cause mental illness? - "scientists published the first study to address timing in more than 80,000 Danish blood donors. Yet even in this large group, the number of schizophrenia diagnoses was fairly small: 151 people. The study found that people who were exposed to T. gondii had 47% increased odds of being diagnosed with schizophrenia. When the researchers looked at the timing issue—narrowing their analysis to 28 people who were first diagnosed with schizophrenia after testing positive for T. gondii exposure—they found that these individuals were 2.5 times more likely to develop the disease post-exposure.That number lines up with other large, correlational studies, which have also found a roughly 2.5-fold increase in the odds of schizophrenia diagnosis in infected people... Yolken and other researchers suspect that T. gondii may not cause mental illness by itself, but interacts with genetic variants that make some people more susceptible. This adds T. gondii to the list of environmental factors that increase schizophrenia risk by a small but measurable amount, such as prenatal infection and socioeconomic status"

Ask Your Doctor These Four Questions About Any Treatment - "What are the chances this will help me?
What are the chances this will harm me?
What are the alternatives?
What happens if we do nothing?"

Dana Schwartz on Twitter - "Hello Dana, I noticed you didn't reply to my tweets the other day, even though I was defending you against all the Nazi trolls. I hope we can meet for lunch someday and you can figure out how to make it up to me"
"Trolls are bad, but this might be worse?"

Video Games Could Be Serious Tools for Historical Research - "“Most of the students report that learning history through a video game has a critical immersive component,” say the team. That leads to better recollection and analysis of events... good models have huge potential. In the same way that climate models allow scientists to explore different ways we can influence the climate, good models of history could help historians study alternative outcomes."

Why is pop culture obsessed with battles between good and evil? - "Stories from an oral tradition never have anything like a modern good guy or bad guy in them, despite their reputation for being moralising. In stories such as Jack and the Beanstalk or Sleeping Beauty, just who is the good guy? Jack is the protagonist we’re meant to root for, yet he has no ethical justification for stealing the giant’s things. Does Sleeping Beauty care about goodness? Does anyone fight crime? Even tales that can be made to seem like they are about good versus evil, such as the story of Cinderella, do not hinge on so simple a moral dichotomy. In traditional oral versions, Cinderella merely needs to be beautiful to make the story work. In the Three Little Pigs, neither pigs nor wolf deploy tactics that the other side wouldn’t stoop to. It’s just a question of who gets dinner first, not good versus evil... The ostensibly moral face-off between good and evil is a recent invention that evolved in concert with modern nationalism – and, ultimately, it gives voice to a political vision not an ethical one... The corollary of uniting the Volk through a storified set of essential characteristics and values is that those outside the culture were seen as lacking the values Germans considered their own... As part of this new nationalist consciousness, other authors started changing the old stories to make a moral distinction between, for example, Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham. Before Joseph Ritson’s 1795 retelling of these legends, earlier written stories about the outlaw mostly showed him carousing in the forest with his merry men. He didn’t rob from the rich to give to the poor until Ritson’s version – written to inspire a British populist uprising after the French Revolution... The one thing the good guys teach us is that people on the other team aren’t like us. In fact, they’re so bad, and the stakes are so high, that we have to forgive every transgression by our own team in order to win."

Born to Win, Schooled to Lose - "The American Dream promises that individual talent will be rewarded, regardless of where one comes from or who one’s parents are. But the reality of what transpires along America’s K-12-to-career pipeline reveals a sorting of America’s most talented youth by affluence—not merit. Among the affluent, a kindergartner with test scores in the bottom half has a 7 in 10 chance of reaching high SES among his or her peers as a young adult, while a disadvantaged kindergartner with top-half test scores only has a 3 in 10 chance."
Ironically, the same people who downplay the importance of tests and test scores would like this research.
The headline takeaways are misleading - it's kindergarten performance that isn't that correlated with SES; by 10th grade the correlation is stronger. This is very compatible with increasing heritability of outcomes with age and is hardly an indictment of meritocracy - unless one believes that that talent should only be measured once but rewarded forever (ironically, something the Singapore scholarship system is accused of doing). College aspirations are mentioned at the start - and then ignored, replaced by the usual talk about 'bias' etc. And of course the full report magicks away Asian advantage and doesn't mention twin studies

Want To Know The Language Of The Future? The Data Suggests It Could Be...French - "French may be a beautiful language, but few would argue it's the most useful, and almost nobody would argue it's the language of the future. John McWhorter spoke for many when he wrote an immediately viral piece titled, "Let's Stop Pretending That French Is an Important Language," attacking New York City's bilingual education programs.Here's the thing: the data suggests that French language just might be the language of the future.French isn't mostly spoken by French people, and hasn't been for a long time now. The language is growing fast, and growing in the fastest-growing areas of the world, particularly sub-Saharan Africa. The latest projection is that French will be spoken by 750 million people by 2050.A study by investment bank Natixis even suggests that by that time, French could be the most-spoken language in the world, ahead of English and even Mandarin. The study's methodology is somewhat questionable, since it counts as French-speakers all the inhabitants of countries where French is an official language, which probably won't be the case. And almost certainly, as a second language, English will remain the lingua franca (pun intended). But the point still stands: French is still a fast-growing, global language. The other mooted language of the future, Mandarin, despite being excruciatingly hard to learn for most Westerners, will probably not be that given China's certain demographic slide. Meanwhile, French will be present on all continents, and particularly predominant in a continent that, by 2050, should be a fast-growing economic powerhouse--Africa."

The nine French words you need to be very, very careful when pronouncing - The Local - "1. Cou/cul/queue
These three look very different on paper but when spoken sound virtually identical. All refer to parts of the body, but very different ones. Le cou is the neck, while la queue has a literal meaning of tail, but is also used as a slang term for penis.And cul is a slang term for bottom so arse or ass. So while telling a colleague that J'ai mal au cou (I have a sore neck) is perfectly acceptable office chat, telling them J'ai mal à la queue (I have a sore dick) or j'ai mal au cul is likely to get you at best an odd look and at worst a complaint to HR.Unhelpfully both cou and cul are masculine while penis here is feminine (look we never said French made sense, OK?) so paying careful attention to the pronouns will help a bit.If you want a substitute slang for penis French, like most languages, is tripping over them - try bite or zizi. And a more polite term for bottom would be la fesse...
2. Baisser/baiser/un baiser
The perfectly innocuous verb baisser means to lower and is frequently heard in businesses discussions - Je pense que nous devrions baisser nos prix (I think we should lower our prices) or news reports - Le gouvernement espère que ces mesures fera baisser le prix de l'essence (the government hopes these measures will lower the price of petrol).The verb baiser on the other hand is a crude way of talking about sex - it's usually translated as to fuck or to screw... And frighteningly similar is the noun un baiser - a kiss (or perhaps a snog or making out, it generally means a kiss within a sexual context). So great is the potential for mortification when mixing up these two that more paranoid souls have been heard to suggest that the French are doing it on purpose to laugh at foreigners...  You will also hear bisous which means kisses and is sometimes used as a very informal farewell or sign-off, while the verb to kiss is the distinctly less problematic embrasser.If you'd rather not take the risk, you can often substitute baisser with réduire (to reduce) while if you must brag about your sexual conquests, niquer has roughly the same meaning as baiser. Or you could just use faire l'amour or one of the many examples from the link below.
3. Salut/salaud
Salut is a cheery and informal greeting, while salaud is a term of abuse that has roughly the same meaning as bastard in English. The word salaud is only used for men, for women you use salope, which is much less likely to get mixed up with anything else... If you want a person to be absolutely clear that they are being insulted and not greeted you could call them a connard (or connasse if they are a woman) which is usually translated as dickhead in English
4. Connard/canard
Un canard is a duck, a common sight on French menus, particularly in the south of the country. Un connard, as discussed above, is not something you want to call the waiter, unless you like the thought of someone spitting in your food.
5. Con/quand (and don't forget Caen)
Un con is an idiot or a fool, as seen in the title of the famous French farce Le Dîner de cons, where the plot revolves around people inviting unwitting idiots round for dinner. The word was also memorably used by former French president Nicolas Sakozy, who rather lost it one day on the campaign trail and told a member of the public Casse-toi, pauvre con (get lost, you bloody idiot).Quand, on the other hand, is a perfectly innocuous word meaning when, as in Quand nous reverrons-nous demain? When shall we meet up tomorrow?And Caen is of course a town in Normandy.
6. Gare/guerre
Local reader Claire Koberman said: "When asking a gentleman where the train station was, he politely informed me that the war had ended in 1945. La gare n'est pas la guerre."
8. Boules/Bulles
Les bulles means the bubbles, so if you want a fizzy drink that would be avec bulles.Except that les boules means balls - most famously in the French game also known as pétanque, but also in the sense of a slang term for testicles.
9. Putin/putain
And sometimes, just sometimes, the French will change a word to avoid confusion - but only if you're a tremendously powerful world leader.Russian president Vladimir Putin has been the beneficiary of this, as his name sounds similar to a common French swearword.Putain is a fabulously versatile French swearword that is most commonly translated into English as fuck. As in Putain de connard, tu as failli me frapper! (You fucking asshole, you nearly hit me) which you might find handy to yell at people riding scooters on the pavement.And as Vlad has the kind of reputation that suggests that swearing at him is not wise, the French have opted to change his name and refer to him as Poutine. In Canada a poutine is a popular and delicious snack involving chips, cheese and gravy, but it's probably still better than accidentally swearing at the strongman of the Kremlin."