EconTech

There will soon be another post on the role of theory in advancing knowledge. For the time being, Robin Hanson channels my favorite intellectual of the 20th century, von Neumann:
Keeping Math Real

John von Neumann:
As a mathematical discipline travels far from its empirical source, or still more, if it is a second and third generation only [...]

Via the Healthcare Economist, Jason:
Ghostwriting by Pharmaceutical Companies
Academic journals are places where medical practitioners can go to view the latest, most cutting-edge, medical technologies. These journals are peer reviewed and are supposed to be places where rigorous, unbiased research is conducted. Some of these articles may not be as unbiased as once thought.
NPR’s Marketplace reports [...]

I’ve long thought that licensed ‘purchased’ materials is an asinine business plan that some day some hero will come through and shatter. Much of our cultural history has been created through sharing and reshaping. Now that the technology has come along to do it, companies and governments are attempting to create technological and legal barriers [...]

As I have noted, I have serious concerns about how medical research is conducted. Now, there is evidence that we should be worrying about the authorship of the articles.
JAMA article on ghostwriting medical studies
The Journal of the American Medical Association published a piece today on ghostwriting of medical research. Thanks to the Vioxx lawsuits, the [...]

Or so some want it. I don’t disagree that this is a good idea. But, as the article points out, there are more ways to disguise unfavorable results. Let’s hope the regulators can outwit the cheaters in these other instances. Also, note that many problems are discovered using observational data. I resubmit EMR as a [...]

You may be familiar with the JPE paper on file sharing published about a year ago. For various reasons, it has garnered quite a bit of controversy and criticism, not the least of which comes from Stan Liebowitz. Even as someone who has railed against the idiocracy that is the major media producers, I have [...]

The linking of data in genomic and bibliomic (spelling?) studies and what it apparently allows (see article below) and what Hans Rosling is trying to do, in a slightly different way, for the social sciences could be possible with clinical data. Probably it cannot replace clinical experiments, but it can add to our ability to [...]

Occasionally, I peck away at my thoughts on race. One of the ‘meta-issues’ for me is how everyone thinks that their opinion on race is worth being heard. In a democratic sense, sure, you have the right to express it. But that does not make it a particularly informed opinion. Anyway, Robin and Eliezer pretty [...]

This definitely goes back to the question of what kind of data collecting techniques (explicit experimentation or observation) and statistical methodologies get us the answer to “Is X science?” However, if confronted by someone who responds to such an infinitesimally small  probability with “there is still a chance,” I may be driven to violence. This [...]

Maybe. Most of them do not conduct experiments (here, psychology probably wins as the social science most in line with “science” qua hypothesis-experiment-adjust-repeat, though I’m betting on the neurobiology people to take over vast swaths of psychology as the brain gets better pinned down.) However, sometimes, there are experiments (behavior economics). Despite the noise in [...]

Amusing and serious at the same time. I’m sure there is something evolutionary biology can tell us here too. The next question is, of course, if this is a market failure, what is the role of government in redistributing sex? Robin writes:

In this generous season, consider the greatest gift we regularly and personally give (even [...]

That’s right. If you are like me, and ignore 90% of YouTube clips that get across my screen due to the surprisingly (or not so surprisingly) small hit rate for clips worth watching, you can now sit down to some rather nice videos (and often, mp3’s, you can even avoid flash by downloading the mp4s) [...]

Evolutionary Psychology over at Overcoming Bias:
Like “IRC chat” or “TCP/IP protocol”, the phrase “reproductive organ” is redundant. All organs are reproductive organs. Where do a bird’s wings come from? An Evolution-of-Birds Fairy who thinks that flying is really neat? The bird’s wings are there because they contributed to the bird’s ancestors’ [...]

For a friend who consistently misses the difference between natural selection and adaptation (and yes, I will continue to call you out when you say an organism evolves):
Adaptation-Executers, not Fitness-Maximizers:
No human being with the deliberate goal of maximizing their alleles’ inclusive genetic fitness, would ever eat a cookie unless they were starving. But individual [...]

Alright, here’s a problem for all you bioinformatistas and inapproximabistas out there, which was inspired by this post of Eliezer Yudkowsky at Overcoming Bias (see also the comments there).
Let a DNA sequence be an element of {A,C,G,T}*, and suppose we’re allowed the following primitive operations: (1) insert a base pair anywhere we want, (2) delete [...]