> This one’s notable in that it puts an entire passage in quotes, but it turns out the passage was not in Cheung (1983) at all—not on page 8 or anywhere else in that article—it actually came from a collection from 1998 of old Harvard Business School exam questions.
One of my pet peeves is the chain of citations that will inevitably spawn from this. No author can be bothered to go find the original source and just cite that, so this inaccurate (and since retracted) quote will end up propagating itself for decades if not centuries, with each author citing the work that they got the story from. Eventually, hundreds of years from now, someone will be crazy enough to try to work their way down the chain to track down the original, only to discover it isn't there.
When a paper contains an “invalid reference”, flag that paper in a database. Expose a service that allows you to share a list of references and receive any flags and the reasons. You can then more carefully scrutinize the papers you’re citing that might have referencing issues.
Bonus: display an entire reference tree and show branches with issues. Not that an issue invalidates a branch, but it might bring into question the integrity of the branch, especially if the reference in question is so key to the claims.
from the same folks that brought you quiet quitting, the death of wfh, privatized healthcare is the best in the whole wide world, and trickle down economics comes the tale of how awesome it is to be a slave on a boat.
> Most of us believe that we do stuff because we want to be good people, and that other people act the same. But the dominant political philosophy for the last half-century, "economism," views us as slaves to "incentives" and nothing more.
> Economism is the philosophy of the neoclassical economists, whose ideology has consumed both the Democrats and Republicans. They dismiss all "non-market" solutions (that is, projects of democratically accountable governments) as failed before they're begun, due to the "incentives" of the individuals in the government.
Just because some people's incentives are altruistic doesn't mean they don't act on incentives.
Most of us believes there's more to be done than people want to do out of their own good will, and that some things nobody will want to do without an incentive. (I bet garbage truck workers don't do it from being good people).
You might have the privilege of enjoying what you work for. So maybe take some time to realize that you're the outlier here.
By the way, your so called "democratic accountability" is up for sale by your media, and their so called projects are incredibly corrupt because they were bought. If you took some time to understand economism, maybe you'll realize why your Congress budget bills look like they do.
So you've defined "incentive" to mean anything which causes someone to decide to do something, including altruism.
Making it impossible - by definition - for anyone to do something without incentive.
Making the term a catch-all term-of-the-art, with a meaning quite different from the general meaning of "incentive".
(Eg, the general term "incentive pay" is meaningless using the economism definition since all pay is incentive.)
> some things nobody will want to do without an incentive
By your definition, "out of their own good will" is an altruistic incentive, so of course it's impossible for someone to do this without incentive - you've defined it to be impossible.
The problem with economism is how this technical definition gets confused with the general definition. I think you just did that.
> I bet garbage truck workers don't do it from being good people
That's .... a really sad view you have there of garbage truck workers. And of people.
Literally no one is saying there are enough people like David Sedaris, who picks up rubbish as a hobby, to meet the garbage hauling needs.
But if "incentive" includes altruism, then we know some garbage truck workers are partially incentivized by the public health role they play as sanitation workers, and the pride they get from helping keep the street clean. (Source: my cousin's husband was a garbage truck worker.)
The problem is when economism reduces everything to strictly financial measures.
> maybe you'll realize why your Congress budget bills look like they do
I don't regard the US as having a healthy democratic system.
> You might have the privilege of enjoying what you work for. So maybe take some time to realize that you're the outlier here.
If every other day I come home from work crying, because I'm stuck in a position I can't change, would that change your opinion?
Of course there is. It’s in support of the narrative that people need overseers and that some people know what’s best for the world and others don’t. We live in a time where there are a couple of agendas that everyone is trying to push, it’s all deeply related
This story is another example that societies where complex humour is rare can be manipulated to believe almost anything. There are many examples in the last few years, some of them with global consequences.
Humor has the same quality that PG describes in his discussion of programming languages, although PG only considers the language "power" continuum and perhaps there is more than one relevant dimension for humor. (I'm not sure about this multidimensionality; more consideration is required.) When one uses a language, one pities those who use less powerful languages at the same time is simply confused by more powerful languages. When one "gets" a joke, one also gets all simpler jokes of the same sort. When one doesn't get a joke, it is deeply offensive to suggest that the joke even exists.
Of course you're right about the global consequences. Many people would rather that the world be destroyed in a nuclear conflagration, than that some politician they don't like had told a joke and they hadn't laughed. A few wise people long ago realized that everything is a joke; they also program in Lisp.
Humour was one of the skills tested by the original Dunning-Kruger paper. The paper suggested that the underskilled overestimated their ability to judge if people would find something funny, and the highly skilled underestimated their skill. See section 4.1 of https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12688660_Unskilled_...
Participants were 65 Cornell University undergraduates from a variety of courses in psychology who earned extra credit for their participation. We created a 30-item questionnaire made up of jokes we felt were of varying comedic value. Jokes were taken from Woody Allen (1975), Al Frankin (1992), and a book of “really silly” pet jokes by Jeff Rovin (1996). To assess joke quality, we contacted several professional comedians via electronic mail and asked them to rate each joke on a scale ranging from 1 (not at all funny) to 11 (very funny). [. . .] Although the ratings provided by the eight comedians were moderately reliable (a = .72), an analysis of interrater correlations found that one (and only one) comedian's ratings failed to correlate positively with the others (mean r = -.09).
Reminds me of nothing so much as the oft repeated line that if you toss a frog in boiling water it'll jump out but if you slowly raise the temperature it'll allow itself to be boiled alive.
The truth of either illustration is wholly beyond the point; if you have a problem with the point you might as well limit yourself to that rather then take the view that anecdotes need to be refuted.
Nobody objects to Aesop's fables about a mouse talking to a lion. But I think it's fair to object to stories that are presented as fact. They attempt to implicitly derive credibility from the "this actually happened" aspect.
The frog story is an effective anecdote because even if it isn't true it is extremely plausible. The whipping story is casually racist and by advocating for the most extreme and unbelievable end of a spectrum of possible iterations of an idea it serves rather to discredit it rather than promoting it by inspiring disgust and disbelief.
When I read about the frog I suspend scientific analysis of the frog long enough to get the anecdote. When I read the whipping story I think wow British people are so racist, so disconnected from reality, and so stupid they believe that the people they subjugated in their land are such natural slaves that when not crushed under a British heel they pay to be likewise abused in their own lands.
If you wanted to simultaneously smear the modern Brit and the modern American you could do no better than to let Michael Munger talk.
if you throw a frog in boiling water it will die immediately. If, instead, you heat up that water slowly, the frog will eventually be unable to maintain homeostasis and will leave, just like you would if it got too hot.
But the whole point is that it is not true. There have been experiments and what the anegdote fails to mention is that step one in boiling the frog by slowly increasing the temperature is removing its brain.
There's this school of thought where difficult or counterintuitive concepts aren't adequately explained without a folksy anecdote. Obviously, I prefer hard data over folksy anecdotes, but I'm starting to think the folksy anecdote is a sideshow to distract from poor data or a lack of data to back up a claim.
Ever since I was made aware of Betteridge's law of headlines, and I started noticing it was correct based on my own experiences, I more or less refuse to read anything with a question as the title. I'm sure I'm missing a few good things with this practice, but I'm saving a lot of time missing out on wastes of time. Enough so that I consider it a net benefit.
Similarly, from now on, I'm going to be immediately suspicious of all claims that are served up with a side of folksy anecdotes.
The whole thing seems like a fallacy by appeal to "common sense".
“I more or less refuse to read anything with a question as the title.”
Same here. Most of the content titled in this way is essentially vapid click-bait or a list of obvious facts with no real research, conclusions, or novel ideas.
"I started noticing it was correct based on my own experiences...I'm going to be immediately suspicious of all claims that are served up with a side of folksy anecdotes."
So Betteridge's Law is true based on your own, shall we say, anecdotal experience?
Economists play the role of the medieval clergy in today's society. They may tell the people what to think, so long as they don't threaten the position of the king.
from the snarky tone of your comment it sounds like you think I’m saying this out of some ideology. I’m in fact very anti-capitalist. however that doesn’t change the fact that you’re taking an extremely western-centric viewpoint
without a shadow of a doubt there have been Soviet or Red Chinese capitalist economists that had much worse done to them than losing their jobs
No, bullshit, you can't just assume something awful happened somewhere. All governments oppress, but you're not making an accusation against all governments. You're red-baiting, which is the thing that capitalists would like most for you to do. Especially in time of war, it's stupid to let our imaginations run wild about how horrible the people on the other side of the planet are. If you know anything at all about this topic you've shoehorned into this discussion, tell us now. Otherwise, you're a troll.
why have you jumped to this extremely adversarial rhetoric?
I actually agree with the principle of your statement, which is why I’m partly surprised that you’ve replied with such vitriol. I’m simply pointing out that throughout time and space there have been scenarios where capitalistic economic viewpoints - and therefore economists who hold them - are absolutely non-grata, contradicting your blanket statement.
please try to be more conducive to discussion and debate, and less accusatory and insulting. it made me feel bad to read, and I don’t know why you pursue it
Accusing half the world of awful behavior with absolutely nothing to back it up literally is trolling. When I'm called a troll (it happens!) and I feel bad, I resolve not to troll in that particular way in future. Sometimes being called a troll feels good, which has a different result.
I often make "blanket statements" online, but the implication is not what you seem to think. Such propositions invite correction with specific contradictory information, which helps me learn. I don't always see such correction, which imparts a different lesson. I don't need to always be "correct", which is why I'm comfortable writing this way.
Try to respond to the literal meaning of others' writing, rather than how it makes you feel. You could have responded to my first request with a simple "I don't have a link" and we would all have forgotten this silliness.
first of all, saying "no Western" is not the same as "every single Eastern". that's a pretty heavy logical error you seem to be unable to steer around
second, no one needs "a link" to prove that it was unacceptable to promote capitalistic interests in the USSR or the old CCP. I'm sure I could find one, but I'm not going to do your research for you, especially considering your horrendous attitude towards discussion. if you want to find out how you're wrong, you can go and do so yourself. it's not my job to educate you
>it happens!
somehow I'm not surprised by this
this whole "I don't mind being wrong" business doesn't make it acceptable for you to get all accusatory when it is pointed out that you are in fact wrong, and in fact it contradicts the sentiment in the first place. if you didn't mind being wrong, would you have jumped to calling me a troll? I doubt that. question yourself a bit more
The title suggests the story is known to be fake, but the body doesn’t provide evidence of this.
I don’t like Gelman’s arrogant style, and a number of his posts have struck me as sneering at some idea or method without any good counter argument provided. At this point my prior is that everything he says should be taken with a grain is salt.
This is the explaination given by the originator of the story (from the article). As a parent, it's pretty clear to me that this was a story invented by a mom who didn't feel it was the right time to have a conversation about slave labor.
> In 1970, Toronto’s John McManus was my guest in Seattle. I chatted to him about what happened when I was a refugee in wartime Guangxi. The journey from Liuzhou to Guiping was by river, and there were men on the banks whose job was to drag the boat with ropes. There was also an overseer armed with a whip. According to my mother, the whipper was hired to do just that by the boatmen! My tale went the rounds, and it was seized by a number of neo-institutional economists. . . . However, this could be a story invented by my mother – the smartest person I have ever known – to entertain a boy of seven!
He doesn't come right out and say he thinks it wasn't true, but it's pretty obvious from the quote that he doubts it.
When the original teller doesn't believe his own story and the story flies in the face of everything we know about human nature and the story can be fully explained as a mom trying to shelter her son (which is very much human nature), I think we can go with "fake story" as the most likely hypothesis.
The problem I find with the smug tone, is that to me, the story is eminently plausible.
In college I played in a club rugby team. Everyone who was on the team had to pay dues, and one of the things the dues paid for was our coach. Now I understand the big differences between being whipped by an overseer and having a coach make you run wind sprints, but at the same time there is a similarity to outsourcing this unpleasant activity to an outsider who will do it at arms length.
You might also hire a tough coach or personal trainer as an individual, though. So that makes the original story less applicable as a parable about outsourcing collective responsibility.
One of my pet peeves is the chain of citations that will inevitably spawn from this. No author can be bothered to go find the original source and just cite that, so this inaccurate (and since retracted) quote will end up propagating itself for decades if not centuries, with each author citing the work that they got the story from. Eventually, hundreds of years from now, someone will be crazy enough to try to work their way down the chain to track down the original, only to discover it isn't there.
For an excellent and humorous example, see CGP Grey's search for the original Tiffany: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qEV9qoup2mQ