"I don’t like introspection. There’s something not right, not in my life, not in my existence. I try to avoid it."

Said Werner Herzog, on the Freakonomics podcast, right after he denied that his childhood was traumatic, even though he went hungry in the post-WWII years. He continues:

This is why I believe that psychoanalysis is one of the great mistakes of the 20th century.... I think it is not good if you illuminate all the dark recesses of the human soul. It’s good that we can forget and that we forget traumas. We do not have to unearth them and articulate them in endless sessions with a psychiatrist. And the 20th century is full of very, very deep mistakes. Psychoanalysis is only one. But because of all these monstrous mistakes of this century, I do believe that the 20th century in its entirety was a mistake....

I was also interested in his opinion of art museums:

"A total of 87 out of 91 former NFL players have tested positive for... the degenerative disease known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy..."

"The disease is widely believed to stem from repetitive trauma to the head, and can lead to conditions such as memory loss, depression and dementia."

“People think that we’re blowing this out of proportion, that this is a very rare disease and that we’re sensationalizing it,” said [Dr. Ann McKee, the facility’s director and chief of neuropathology at the VA Boston Healthcare System]. “My response is that where I sit, this is a very real disease. We have had no problem identifying it in hundreds of players.”

ADDED: This is a good time to revisit the old Freakonomics episode, "The Dangers of Safety":

DUBNER: So wait a minute. Let’s figure this out. If the helmet, which we think of as a safety device, is being used as a weapon — why not get rid of the weapon? There are sports we play without helmets — rugby, Australian rules football. What happens if you try to play American football like they did in the old days, without a helmet? Here’s Quintin Mikell again.

MIKELL: It would probably be—there’d be a lot less head injuries, I know that for a fact, and I can tell that the tackling would actually be a lot different. You know, you can’t–nobody wants to mess their face up willingly, so, you wouldn’t go in head first, you wouldn’t go in trying to destroy somebody, you’d go in just to get them on the ground. And maybe it wouldn’t be as exciting, or, I’m not sure, but I know there’d definitely be—there wouldn’t be as many injuries.

"The Pointless Banishment of Sex Offenders."

A NYT editorial. Excerpt:

Far from protecting children and communities, the California court found, blanket restrictions in fact create a greater safety risk by driving more sex offenders into homelessness, which makes them both harder to monitor and less likely to get essential rehabilitative services like medical treatment, psychotherapy and job assistance.

Residency laws often lead people to live apart from their families, obliterating what is for many the most stabilizing part of their lives....

[N]ot all people who have been convicted of sex offenses pose a risk to children, if they pose any risk at all. Blanket residency-restriction laws disregard that reality — and the merits of an individualized approach to risk assessment — in favor of a comforting mirage of safety.

And let me recommend this episode of the Freakonomics podcast, "Making Sex Offenders Pay — and Pay and Pay and Pay." Transcript here. Excerpt:

LEVITT: I think that the registry is really, if you are a sex offender, the registry is just a brutal way of making sure you can never hide. For most other crimes, you’re essentially anonymous. There’s no really easy way for people to know that you’ve done the crimes. And true, when you apply for a job, you’re supposed to say you’re a convicted felon, but nobody really does anyway, and the worst that could happen to you if you don’t say it, is that they just fire you after awhile when they find it out. But the registry is really a different kind of beast because the registry means that no matter where you go or what you’re doing, there are easy, virtually costless ways for people to find out who you are. And it’s hard to say, is that a good thing or a bad thing? I mean, from a deterrence perspective, you think it’s got to be a good thing. That if you know ahead of time that your entire life you’re going to be labeled as a sex offender, it’s got to have some effect in terms of trying to, you know, it’s gotta have some effect in terms of keeping you from doing the crime. But-

DUBNER: Well you said, “if it’s a good deterrent, then it might be worth it, as costly as it may be to the individuals.” What do you know about how much of a deterrent it is? The registry?...

West Point pillow fight ends with 24 concussions, a broken leg, and dislocated shoulders.

"Colonel Kasker said the annual fight is organized by first-year students as a way to build camaraderie after the summer program that prepares them for the rigors of plebe year."

Photos posted later on Twitter show plebes, as freshmen are called, with bloody faces and bloody pillows, and at least one person being loaded into an ambulance.

“My plebe was knocked unconscious and immediately began fighting when he came to,” an unnamed upperclassman, who was apparently observing from the sidelines, wrote on the social media forum Yik Yak. “I was so proud I could cry.”

ADDED: "But this year the fight on the West Point, N.Y., campus turned bloody as some cadets swung pillowcases packed with hard objects, thought to be helmets...."

That made me think of the old Freakonomics episode, "The Dangers of Safety":

Modern [football] helmets do a good job of preventing skull fractures and on-field deaths: that’s why those numbers are way down historically. But getting lots of concussions isn’t very healthy either. To prevent them, Dr. Cantu could make a more cushioned helmet — but then you might be more worried about skull fractures again. And then there’s this problem: if you did give football players a more heavily cushioned helmet, what are they going to do with it? A lot of people think the biggest problem in the game today is that players use their helmets not so much as protection … but as a weapon.

A sleep researcher "told us that if you want to sleep well, you should avoid all screens for half an hour before going to bed. And yet she doesn’t."

"But she promised... [f]or one week, she would not look at a single screen – no TV, no computer, no smartphone – between nine at night and seven in the morning."

HALE: The real challenge is try it for a week and see if you feel better, if you’re sleeping more, if you’re going to bed earlier, and see how you feel.

DUBNER: So how did it go?

HALE: It went great. I was shocked at how many times I wanted to check my phone, turn on the TV, go to the computer, any number of screens as they were all yelling out to me, but I held back and I slept so much better I can hardly believe it.

From the earlier episode:

"Drunken falls cause more deaths than drunken driving in Wisconsin."

"The most recent figures available show 349 deaths in Wisconsin from alcohol-related falls in 2012. That compares to 223 alcohol-related traffic deaths that year."

The article (in the Capital Times) does not mention the (comforting?) thought that, unlike drunken driving, drunken falling is only killing the drunk. Or so I presume. Another annoying thing in this article is that it takes a gratuitous swipe at old people:

Julia Sherman, coordinator of the Wisconsin Alcohol Policy Project... said older people are already at risk from falls and adding alcohol or alcohol in combination with drugs or medications only adds to the problems. “When I hear about happy hours in retirement communities I get worried,” said Sherman. “With the population aging, it’s an area we haven’t looked closely enough at.”

But we're given no statistics about the ages of the the falling-down-dead drunks and the only anecdotal evidence is of a 32-year-old woman who fell off a fire escape.

Another thing about falling is that it's a standard type of accident, drunk or sober. Some of the people who fall are going to have had something to drink. It doesn't mean the person was falling-down drunk. For all I know, there are falls that are avoided because those who have had something to drink are walking more slowly and paying more attention to where they are stepping or they are just not walking that much. Whatever, people need to walk from one place to another, and drinking and walking isn't morally wrong, like drinking and driving.

Back in 2011, there was a lot of talk about drinking and walking. The Freakonomics guys popularized the topic:

Steven Levitt: For every mile walked drunk, turns out to be eight times more dangerous than the mile driven drunk. So just to put it simply, if you need to walk a mile from a party to your home, you’re eight times more likely to die doing that than if you jump behind the wheel and drive your car that same mile...  For 20 years, we’ve been told you should never, ever drive drunk. We should have been told you should never, ever walk drunk and you should never, ever drive drunk. And because nobody thought about it when we were coming up with what was moral and immoral, somehow now, drunk walking just can’t find its way into the immoral box.

Oh, I'm sure some folks are working on that.

ALSO: The use of the word "drunken" is unsupported by the text of the article, which only speaks of "alcohol-related" accidents. 

"An intellectual crisis in the age of TED talks and Freakonomics."

"Can Social Scientists Save Themselves?"

In 2011, a psychologist named Joseph P. Simmons and two colleagues set out to use real experimental data to prove an impossible hypothesis. Not merely improbable or surprising, but downright ridiculous. The hypothesis: that listening to The Beatles’ “When I’m Sixty-Four” makes people younger. The method: Recruit a small sample of undergraduates to listen to either The Beatles song or one of two other tracks, then administer a questionnaire asking for a number of random and irrelevant facts and opinions—their parents’ ages, their restaurant preferences, the name of a Canadian football quarterback, and so on. The result: By strategically arranging their data and carefully wording their findings, the psychologists “proved” that randomly selected people who hear “When I’m Sixty-Four” are, in fact, younger than people who don’t....

The kind of manipulation that went into the “When I’m Sixty-Four” paper, for instance, is “nearly universally common,” Simonsohn says. It is called “p-hacking,” or, more colorfully, “torturing the data until it confesses.”...

David Lee Roth explains the "no brown M&Ms" contract term.

The brown M&Ms strategy is discussed by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen Dubner, in "How to Trick the Guilty and Gullible into Revealing Themselves/It starts with a basic understanding of game theory and incentives."

Levitt and Dubner are the "Freakonomics" guys. They have a new book coming out Monday: "Think Like a Freak."

IN THE COMMENTS: I Have Misplaced My Pants said: "This American Life covered that territory years ago (explaining the brown M&Ms clause)." I don't know when the video I've embedded was recorded but it was uploaded in 2012. The "This American Life" episode — here, "Fine Print" — originally aired in April 2011, but Ira Glass is quoting David Lee Roth's autobiography, and that was published back in 1998. So Roth told his own story first. I'm just seeing it today because of that "Think Like a Freak" piece. I figure if I haven't seen something before, maybe you haven't. That said, I'm a big fan of "This American Life," and I've listened to nearly all the episodes, but I don't always remember what I've heard before. That "Fine Print" episode is one of the most law-oriented ones.

"Obama Punks the GOP on Contraception."

That's the spin from Slate's Amanda Marcotte (and I think she may have it right!):

After two solid weeks of Republicans rapidly escalating attacks on contraception access under the banner of "religous [sic] freedom," Obama finally announced what the White House is proposing an accomodation [sic] of religiously affiliated employers who don't want to offer birth control coverage as part of their insurance plans. 

Yeah, rotten spelling/proofreading, but give her a chance. Normally, I can't stand Marcotte, but I think she's homing in on the truth:

In those situations, the insurance companies will have to reach out directly to employees and offer contraception coverage for free, without going through the employer. Insurance companies are down with the plan... contraception actually saves insurance companies money, since it's cheaper than abortion and far cheaper than childbirth. 

Remember the economies of the "blue pill" and the don't-call-them-death-panels for end-of-life human beings? There's lots of money to be saved at life's onset. Insurance companies (and the safety-net-providing government) stand to save lots of money through pregnancy — and child! — prevention. It makes economic sense to incentivize the use of birth control. A woman has a right to choose whether to have children or not, but the government may nudge the woman toward its preferred choice. It is good economic policy to push women to avoid having babies until they've got a stable relationship and a solid economic foundation, so clear the path to the relatively inexpensive pills and poisons and devices that keep the sperm and the egg from acquiring a will of their own.

Another point, which Marcotte doesn't make, is that many, many healthy individuals are about to be forced to spend thousands of dollars a year on health insurance, and there needs to be a decent flow of seemingly "free" things so that they don't get too upset about it. Birth control is perfect for this. It's something women use — continually — when they are perfectly healthy. Face it: Birth control is about preventing an important bodily function from working. Now, the birth control won't be free, because everyone paying into the insurance pool will be covering the cost, but the women who use the birth control will have the feeling that they're getting something. That's a special kind of palliative care that the designers of Obamacare are going to want to cover.

So did Obama "pull a fast one" on conservatives, as Marcotte surmises?

He drew this out for two weeks, letting Republicans work themselves into a frenzy of anti-contraception rhetoric, all thinly disguised as concern for religious liberty, and then created a compromise that addressed their purported concerns but without actually reducing women's access to contraception, which is what this has always been about....

Now, those who complained about the old rule have a choice whether to move on to some other traditional-values issue or to find a way to say that the problem is still there. If they do the latter — as Rush Limbaugh did a series of semi-coherent rants on his show yesterday — they're going to annoy/scare the millions of women who use contraception and the millions and millions of women and men who want other people to use contraception. (Don't forget the "Freakonomics" theory connecting the avoidance of unwanted pregnancy to a reduction in crime.)

Marcotte thinks the conservatives will give up on this issue and exults that "the damage has already been done."

[W]hat most people will remember is that Republicans picked a fight with Obama over contraception coverage and lost. This also gave Obama a chance to highlight this benefit and take full credit for it. Obama needs young female voters to turn out at the polls in November, and hijacking two weeks of the news cycle to send the message that he's going to get you your birth control for free is a big win for him in that department.

And let's not forget — Marcotte doesn't mention this — that the birth control fracas peaked precisely when a story was breaking that should have made the administration look weak on a women's rights issues: the decision limiting women in the military. As I noted yesterday, Michelle Obama was deployed on a nutrition-in-the-military mission on the very day that decision was announced. So there is good reason to think the Obama campaign is sharply focused on manipulating the minds of constituents who care about women's issues.

As Marcotte said: "It's all so perfect that I'm inclined to think this was Obama's plan all along."

"With surprising candor, Chris Dodd tells Obama that the Hollywood purse strings are about to get tight."

A Metafilter post, linking to this Fox News piece, and continuing:

Angry over the Obama administration's siding against SOPA and PIPA, Dodd says openly that the money the Democratic party regularly counts on Hollywood for might not be there this election cycle. One view is that Hollywood considers that it bought something very specific with it's money, and it's angry it's not getting it. Should Obama be worried about this? Perhaps not. The guys from Freakanomics say that our assumption that money is the most important factor in deciding elections is a fallacy.

The 3d comment says:

We petition the Obama administration to: Investigate Chris Dodd and the MPAA for bribery after he publicly admited to bribing politicans to pass legislation.

(currently 7,312 signatures out of 25,000 needed for response)

It's up to 10,378 as I write this. Christopher Dodd has learned something in the last few weeks about how the internet works in a democracy. I suspect he's about to learn a whole lot more.

"What’s an externality?"

"My friends tell me that in the Vondelpark, a delightful reserve in central Amsterdam, it is illegal to let your dog off a leash. But it’s perfectly legal to have sex in the park, so long as it is not in view of a children’s playground. The argument is that the dog may make a mess that imposes costs on the unwary walker, while the couple imposes no costs on other park users. I wonder which of these two actions would be more likely to be outlawed in the U.S. Implicitly, how do attitudes toward negative externalities, as expressed in city ordinances, differ between the U.S. and the Netherlands—or among other Western countries?"

Blasphemonomics.

Those Freakonomics guys have shocked the high priests of science.

Suppose... that the best solution [to global warming] involves a helium balloon, several miles of garden hose and a harmless stream of sulfur dioxide being pumped into the upper atmosphere, all at a cost of a single F-22 fighter jet.

That freaks out Al Gore, et al.

[S]ubversively, ["SuperFreakonomics" authors Steven Levitt and writer Stephen Dubner] suggest that climatologists, like everyone else, respond to incentives in a way that shapes their conclusions. "The economic reality of research funding, rather than a disinterested and uncoordinated scientific consensus, leads the [climate] models to approximately match one another."

Even assuming the global warming alarm is justified, the Stev(ph)ens still freak out the alarmists by pointing to easier, cheaper solutions:

[I]t may well be that global warming is best tackled with a variety of cheap fixes, if not by pumping SO2 into the stratosphere then perhaps by seeding more clouds over the ocean. Alternatively, as "SuperFreakonomics" suggests, we might be better off doing nothing until the state of technology can catch up to the scope of the problem.

All these suggestions are, of course, horrifying to global warmists, who'd much prefer to spend in excess of a trillion dollars annually for the sake of reconceiving civilization as we know it, including not just what we drive or eat but how many children we have. And little wonder: As Newsweek's Stefan Theil points out, "climate change is the greatest new public-spending project in decades." Who, being a professional climatologist or EPA regulator, wouldn't want a piece of that action?

Part of the genius of Marxism, and a reason for its enduring appeal, is that it fed man's neurotic fear of social catastrophe while providing an avenue for moral transcendence.

For some people, it needs to be a religion, and to the extent that it is a religion, we need the blasphemers.

The Paul Krugman Theory of the Disparate Effect of Partisan Annoyance.

He posits:

I have a theory here, although it may not be the whole story: it’s about careerism. Annoying conservatives is dangerous: they take names, hold grudges, and all too often find ways to take people who annoy them down. As a result, the Kewl Kids, as Digby calls them, tread very carefully when people on the right are concerned — and they snub anyone who breaks the unwritten rule and mocks those who must not be offended.

Annoying liberals, on the other hand, feels transgressive but has historically been safe. The rules may be changing (as Dubner and Levitt are in the process of finding out), but it’s been that way for a long time.

What? This does not connect with my observation of the world. What is he thinking of? Can we get some examples? A counter-example is what just happened to Rush Limbaugh (though I think Rush has taken names and will look for ways to take down the people who came after him).

I love the way Krugman is completely open about wanting to sic the liberals on Dubner and Levitt. And don't they deserve it for daring to look critically at climate change issues... and for pleasuring themselves with transgressiveness?

The “tell”, I’d suggest, is that once you get beyond those for whom the decision about whom to laugh at is a career move, people don’t, in fact, seem to find mocking liberals funnier than mocking conservatives.

I can't even get beyond that sentence. Krugman is never going to with the Nobel Prize for Syntax.

But here's a humor idea if we're talking about humor ideas. How about mocking whatever deserves mockery at any given time? I'm mocking Krugman right now, for example, mainly because he doesn't make too much sense. You know, that is the tell, not making sense. You must really want to take down Dubner and Levitt, because you are blogging repeatedly and incoherently against them. Without transition, you went from a theory about annoying liberals/conservatives — by questioning their beliefs and policies — to a theory about what's funnier.

Now, the Ste[v/ph]ens, Dubner and Levitt, are about to make a ton of money with "SuperFreakonomics" — as they did with plain old "Freakonomics" — and that is, indeed, pretty annoying. I think it's pretty clear that Krugman is irked that contrarianism sells and that — in a media world where liberalism dominates — there's a temptation to veer right just to be exciting. Krugman, I think, would like to make sure that that sort of transgression is punished. It's just not fair — I picture him thinking — for people who are supposed to be liberal — to reap $$$$ by hurting liberal causes, so let's damn any liberal who doesn't toe the liberal line as a careerist. 

***

I followed Krugman's Digby link and see "this kewl kidz and mean girls nonsense from the press has to stop." Krugman seems to have missed the "z." But he might be better off that way. I looked up "kewl kidz" and "kewl kids" in Urban Dictionary and got nothing. I looked up "kewl" and the #1 definition, by a wide margin is:

1.  A stupid way of spelling "cool". Made up by morons.
"I'm a stupid whore who spells cool "kewl"

So, I'm thinking it's not too cool to write "kewl" — and certain it's uncool to write "kewl" and link to Digby.

Paul Krugman censors the comments on his global warming post.

"I’m going to block comments here, because I know it will be overwhelmed," he says.

What is the theory here, economist guy? You don't want too many people on your webpage? The obvious theory is that you don't like what people are going to say on your post that demands that we all bow to the scientific consensus on global warming. As Barack Obama likes to say the time for debate is over. We need to shut up now.

Krugman, like quite a few others, is writing about the new Freakonomics book — "SuperFreakonomics" — which says some inconvenient things about global warming:

The chapter [on global warming] opens with the “global cooling” story — the claim that 30 years ago there was a scientific consensus that the planet was cooling, comparable to the current consensus that it’s warming.

Um, no.... What you had in the 70s was a few scientists advancing the cooling hypothesis, and a few popular media stories hyping their suggestions....

What you have today is a massive research program involving thousands of scientists...

And then we come to a bit of economics. The book asks

Do the future benefits from cutting emissions outweigh the costs of doing so? Or are we better off waiting to cut emissions later — or even, perhaps, polluting at will and just learning to live in a hotter world?

The economist Martin Weitzman analyzed the best available climate models and concluded that the future holds a 5 percent chance of a terrible-case scenario....

Yikes. I read Weitzman’s paper, and have corresponded with him on the subject — and it’s making exactly the opposite of the point they’re implying it makes. Weitzman’s argument is that uncertainty about the extent of global warming makes the case for drastic action stronger, not weaker.

I don't see what's all "yikes" about taking an economist's assessment of the chance of something happening and then drawing a different conclusion about what policies ought to be adopted. And Krugman is accusing the authors — Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner — of misrepresenting what Weitzman said. I haven't read Weitzman or "SuperFreakonomics," but on the face of it, the accusation is incoherent.

And Krugman blocks commenting, on the purported theory that he can't be overwhelmed. Ha ha. He would be overwhelmed by comments saying he hasn't made a coherent point.  He's hoping we will bow to his economics expertise and the fact that he's read Weitzman, he knows Weitzman. And it's harder to make gullible NYT readers buy that when the comments are ruthlessly poking holes in it.

The global warming "consensus" is all about telling us to stop talking and bow to expertise. That pose is laughable in a world of new media where you can no longer turn off the comments.

What the Lorax got wrong.

And the Once-ler got right.

(Via Freakonomics.)

Remember Blagojevich's plan to send every pre-kindergarten baby or child a book every month?

It was in "Freakonomics":

In early 2004, Governor Rod Blagojevich announced a plan to mail one book a month to every child in Illinois from the time they were born until they entered kindergarten. The plan would cost $26 million a year. But, Blagojevich argued, this was a vital intervention in a state where 40 percent of third graders read below their grade level. “When you own [books] and they’re yours,” he said, “and they just come as part of your life, all of that will contribute to a sense … that books should be part of your life."

The book portrayed the plan as a mistake about cause and effect. (The real reason why children with books in their houses do well is that their parents are well-educated.) I note the book's assumption that the reason for the plan was to help kids.

Does the 6-year-old boy want to be seen reading "Freakonomics" (the book) on Freakonomics (the blog)?

It is a cute picture, especially if you love kids reading, but:

My husband is K.C. and the kids are Jacob (10) and Jared (6). We live in Connecticut, and K.C. commutes into New York City to work as a portfolio manager. I am a stay-at-home mom with a medical degree.

A few months ago, I thought Jacob would like reading Freakonomics, which he thoroughly enjoyed. After he finished that, I thought he might also like Malcolm Gladwell, so he is now in the midst of Blink.

Our copy of Freakonomics was lying around the house, so Jared started to get interested as well...

I have to share a funny story with you. When I told/asked Jacob about being included in your blog, at first he seemed pleased, but then a slight cloud passed over his face, and he said, “Well, I don’t want to be recognized …” Whereupon my husband reassured him that he would not be followed by paparazzi.

First commenter, one "sunshine" says:

Weird, a child asked not to have his photo put up on a highly-read Web page and both the parent and the editor refused to honor his request. Nonconsensual blogging. This concern may seem like a trivial joke, but look for this issue to increase in coming years.

Is sunshine's criticism apt? Or can we see from the context that the child imagined that once his photograph appeared on a popular blog, strangers would accost him in the street?

And more generally, I do wonder about putting pictures of children up on line. People love to see pictures of kids. It's a nice, happy part of life to see children. Yet some people seem to think that children should not be seen -- that it's dangerous for their children to be visible at all.

On the subject of children reading: I can see why "Freakonomics" and "Blink" make excellent reading for the young. We're so intent on foisting fiction on children, but there is a lot of nonfiction out their to stir their thinking.