大惨事でパニックするエリートと機能しない政府
どん底で助け合う普通の人々と機能する市民社会
100年の災害史が示す人間コミュニティの真実とは
――「災害ユートピア」著者レベッカ・ソルニット
2012年3月17日土曜日
2011年12月2日金曜日
2011年10月21日金曜日
2011年10月2日日曜日
2011年9月24日土曜日
2011年9月23日金曜日
2011年9月20日火曜日
Maybe we should put rats in charge of foreign aid research
Maybe we should put rats in charge of foreign aid research
The usual statistical procedures are designed to keep this possibility small. The convention is that we believe a result if there is only a 1 in 20 chance that the result arose at random. So if a researcher does a study that finds a positive effect of aid on growth and it passes this “1 in 20” test (referred to as a “statistically significant” result), we are fine, right?
Alas, not so fast. A researcher is very eager to find a result, and such eagerness usually involves running many statistical exercises (known as “regressions”). But the 1 in 20 safeguard only applies if you only did ONE regression. What if you did 20 regressions? Even if there is no relationship between growth and aid whatsoever, on average you will get one “significant result” out of 20 by design. Suppose you only report the one significant result and don’t mention the other 19 unsuccessful attempts. You can do twenty different regressions by varying the definition of aid, the time periods, and the control variables. In aid research, the aid variable has been tried, among other ways, as aid per capita, logarithm of aid per capita, aid/GDP, logarithm of aid/GDP, aid/GDP squared, [log(aid/GDP) - aid loan repayments], aid/GDP*[average of indexes of budget deficit/GDP, inflation, and free trade], aid/GDP squared *[average of indexes of budget deficit/GDP, inflation, and free trade], aid/GDP*[ quality of institutions], etc. Time periods have varied from averages over 24 years to 12 years to to 8 years to 4 years. The list of possible control variables is endless. One of the most exotic I ever saw was: the probability that two individuals in a country belonged to different ethnic groups TIMES the number of political assassinations in that country. So it’s not so hard to run many different aid and growth regressions and report only the one that is “significant.”
This practice is known as “data mining.” It is NOT acceptable practice, but this is very hard to enforce since nobody is watching when a researcher runs multiple regressions. It is seldom intentional dishonesty by the researcher. Because of our non-rat-like propensity to see patterns everywhere, it is easy for researchers to convince themselves that the failed exercises were just done incorrectly, and that they finally found the “real result” when they get the “significant” one. Even more insidious, the 20 regressions could be spread across 20 different researchers. Each of these obediently does only one pre-specified regression, 19 of whom do not publish a paper since they had no significant results, but the 20th one does publish their spuriously “significant” finding (this is known as “publication bias.”)
The usual statistical procedures are designed to keep this possibility small. The convention is that we believe a result if there is only a 1 in 20 chance that the result arose at random. So if a researcher does a study that finds a positive effect of aid on growth and it passes this “1 in 20” test (referred to as a “statistically significant” result), we are fine, right?
Alas, not so fast. A researcher is very eager to find a result, and such eagerness usually involves running many statistical exercises (known as “regressions”). But the 1 in 20 safeguard only applies if you only did ONE regression. What if you did 20 regressions? Even if there is no relationship between growth and aid whatsoever, on average you will get one “significant result” out of 20 by design. Suppose you only report the one significant result and don’t mention the other 19 unsuccessful attempts. You can do twenty different regressions by varying the definition of aid, the time periods, and the control variables. In aid research, the aid variable has been tried, among other ways, as aid per capita, logarithm of aid per capita, aid/GDP, logarithm of aid/GDP, aid/GDP squared, [log(aid/GDP) - aid loan repayments], aid/GDP*[average of indexes of budget deficit/GDP, inflation, and free trade], aid/GDP squared *[average of indexes of budget deficit/GDP, inflation, and free trade], aid/GDP*[ quality of institutions], etc. Time periods have varied from averages over 24 years to 12 years to to 8 years to 4 years. The list of possible control variables is endless. One of the most exotic I ever saw was: the probability that two individuals in a country belonged to different ethnic groups TIMES the number of political assassinations in that country. So it’s not so hard to run many different aid and growth regressions and report only the one that is “significant.”
This practice is known as “data mining.” It is NOT acceptable practice, but this is very hard to enforce since nobody is watching when a researcher runs multiple regressions. It is seldom intentional dishonesty by the researcher. Because of our non-rat-like propensity to see patterns everywhere, it is easy for researchers to convince themselves that the failed exercises were just done incorrectly, and that they finally found the “real result” when they get the “significant” one. Even more insidious, the 20 regressions could be spread across 20 different researchers. Each of these obediently does only one pre-specified regression, 19 of whom do not publish a paper since they had no significant results, but the 20th one does publish their spuriously “significant” finding (this is known as “publication bias.”)
2011年9月18日日曜日
ZCommunications | The Chomsky Sessions II, Science, Religion and Human Nature, Part I by Noam Chomsky | ZSpace
ZCommunications | The Chomsky Sessions II, Science, Religion and Human Nature, Part I by Noam Chomsky | ZSpace
"Now let's take concrete examples of fundamentalist irrationality, I'll give you a real example. Actually it's an example I knew about five years ago, but I didn't publish it 'cause it sounded so crazy it couldn't be true. It turns out to be true. It's now verified. In January 2003, immediately before the invasion of Iraq, George Bush was trying to round up international support for the invasion, and he met the French president, president Chirac. And in this meeting with Chirac, he started ranting about a passage from Ezekiel, the book of Ezekiel, a very obscure passage that nobody understands. It's a passage about Gog and Magog, nobody knows if they're people or places or whatever they are. But Gog and Magog are supposed to come from the North to attack Israel, and then we get off into ultra-fanatic Christian Evangelical madness. There's a whole big story about how Gog and Magog come down to attack Israel, there's a battle in Armageddon, everybody gets slaughtered, and the souls who are saved rise to Heaven.
OK, some kind of story like that. Reagan apparently believed it. When his handlers didn't control him enough and he was kind of off by himself, he'd start raving about this stuff. For him, Gog and Magog were Russia. For Bush, Gog and Magog were Iraq. So he told this to Chirac, and Chirac hadn't a clue what he was talking about. So he approached the French Foreign Office, the Elysée, and said: ”Do you know what this madman is raving about?”. And they didn't know either. So they approached a pretty well-known Belgian theologian who wrote sort of a disposition on this passage and the way it's interpreted and whatever it might mean and so on. OK, how do I know? Well, I know because that Belgian theologian [inaudible] sent me a copy of it, with a background of the story. I never published it because this just sounded too off the wall.
Finally, I was talking to an Australian academic, researcher, and I mentioned it to him. He decided to look into it. It turns out to be correct. In fact the story appears in the biographies of Chirac and in other evidence. So yeah, that actually happened. So here's the world in the hands of a raving lunatic who, you know, is talking about Gog and Magog and Armageddon and the souls rising to Heaven. And the world survived. Well, OK, that's, that's not a small thing in the United States. I don't know what the percentage is, but it's maybe 25, 30 percent of the population. Yeah, that's pretty serious irrationality."
A French Revelation, or The Burning Bush
JAMES A. HAUGHT
"Now let's take concrete examples of fundamentalist irrationality, I'll give you a real example. Actually it's an example I knew about five years ago, but I didn't publish it 'cause it sounded so crazy it couldn't be true. It turns out to be true. It's now verified. In January 2003, immediately before the invasion of Iraq, George Bush was trying to round up international support for the invasion, and he met the French president, president Chirac. And in this meeting with Chirac, he started ranting about a passage from Ezekiel, the book of Ezekiel, a very obscure passage that nobody understands. It's a passage about Gog and Magog, nobody knows if they're people or places or whatever they are. But Gog and Magog are supposed to come from the North to attack Israel, and then we get off into ultra-fanatic Christian Evangelical madness. There's a whole big story about how Gog and Magog come down to attack Israel, there's a battle in Armageddon, everybody gets slaughtered, and the souls who are saved rise to Heaven.
OK, some kind of story like that. Reagan apparently believed it. When his handlers didn't control him enough and he was kind of off by himself, he'd start raving about this stuff. For him, Gog and Magog were Russia. For Bush, Gog and Magog were Iraq. So he told this to Chirac, and Chirac hadn't a clue what he was talking about. So he approached the French Foreign Office, the Elysée, and said: ”Do you know what this madman is raving about?”. And they didn't know either. So they approached a pretty well-known Belgian theologian who wrote sort of a disposition on this passage and the way it's interpreted and whatever it might mean and so on. OK, how do I know? Well, I know because that Belgian theologian [inaudible] sent me a copy of it, with a background of the story. I never published it because this just sounded too off the wall.
Finally, I was talking to an Australian academic, researcher, and I mentioned it to him. He decided to look into it. It turns out to be correct. In fact the story appears in the biographies of Chirac and in other evidence. So yeah, that actually happened. So here's the world in the hands of a raving lunatic who, you know, is talking about Gog and Magog and Armageddon and the souls rising to Heaven. And the world survived. Well, OK, that's, that's not a small thing in the United States. I don't know what the percentage is, but it's maybe 25, 30 percent of the population. Yeah, that's pretty serious irrationality."
A French Revelation, or The Burning Bush
JAMES A. HAUGHT
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