More Links for March 2014

I remember discussing why we couldn’t do this with a couple of people. Now we can – fecal transplant now in pill form. Still less gross than other ways of a getting fecal transplant!

Doing it right: pro-Israel American Jewish groups nevertheless oppose legislative attempt to financially penalize boycotting Israel because of free speech issues.

Stanford Social Innovation Review claims other forms of charity are probably much more effective than GiveDirectly-style cash transfers. GiveWell, which supports GiveDirectly, responds here.

Pretty much everything you hear about test preparation for the SAT is wrong – it doesn’t help that much, it’s not too related to wealth, and it’s disproportionately used by black families. So all the arguments you’re hearing for various changes to the SAT are not only wrong, but diametrically opposite reality. Especially when they cite race. Surprise, surprise.

86% of Americans expect their first marriage to last forever, even though over a third of first marriages end in divorce, almost as if there was some kind of “overconfidence bias” or something.

!!! Decentralized bitcoin prediction markets !!! I doubt that these will overcome the technical problems, if they do I doubt they will overcome the user interface and popularization problems to ever take off, but I don’t think I’ve ever salivated so much thinking about a new technology.

And speaking of prediction, who predicted Russia’s invasion of Crimea? Answer: no one did a very good job, but Russia experts and security experts did slightly better than others. People who identified with any particular “paradigm” of international relationships did worse than those who didn’t (keep your identities small!) and people working for a Top 25 institution did worst of all (reverse meritocracy)?

After years of hearing how checklists change everything, a new study shows surgical checklists not having much of an effect on patient outcomes. Interesting, but let’s not fall victim to the “one study contradicts dozens of previous studies, therefore we throw out the dozens of previous studies” effect.

The kind of libertarianism everyone should be able to get behind: unused government buildings costing gov billions in maintenance, but they won’t sell them because it’s too much trouble complying with all appropriate regulations.

2225 Things Mr. Welch Can No Longer Do During An RPG. Number 108: “No, I do not get XP for every single crewman on that Star Destroyer.”

The Onion’s fake reporting on evolutionary psychology is probably more accurate than most newspapers’ real reporting: Researchers Find Human Beings Naturally Evolved Towards Monogamy And Carrying On Fun Little Flings On Side.

A while ago I posted on here that hospital-acquired infections had plummeted after Medicare said it would no longer pay for them. I can no longer find that link so I can’t double-check, but I recently found a trustworthy source claiming the opposite – that changing the incentives didn’t affect levels of hospital-acquired infections much at all.

The army’s top official in charge of prosecuting sexual assault was suspended after being accused of sexual assault at a conference about sexual assault, a year after the Air Force’s top sexual assault official was acquitted of a similar allegation. I wonder whether sexual assault is just so common they can’t find anyone who doesn’t do it to serve as a prosecutor, whether assaulters are disproportionately attracted to take anti-sexual assault positions for some reason, whether false accusations disproportionately accrue around top anti-assault officials because of the shock value, or a mixture of all three.

This blog does some really neat things with Renaissance art, collages, and animation. Less pretentious than that sounds. Much less pretentious.

Russian lawmaker wants to abolish the letter ы from the Cyrillic alphabet, because it is used by “Asiatic people”, who are “primitive”. Says that “this is the reason people don’t like us in Europe”. This must be why people keep putting sanctions on Russia, right?

The spite house.

Halloween prank: attach a Grim Reaper to a hexacopter, have it hover over cemeteries and pursue visitors. Hilarity ensues. Warning: YouTube video.

A few weeks ago I mentioned that while saturated fat is not as bad as most people think, most studies do continue to support a link between it and heart disease. Well, the latest study that just came out doesn’t.

We all know what jobs make more money than others, but some of that could be class-related – ie primarily upper-class people go into those jobs. Another interesting question is – what jobs are most likely to cause people to earn more or less than their parents did? NPR gives us the list.

Tumblr on diagnosis and self-diagnosis. For a second I worried I might have been the psychiatrist in the first story until I remembered I haven’t been given any ADHD cases yet. Apparently other people have stolen my secret patented medical techniques!

@jsperera sent me The Germ Theory Of Democracy, telling me it would tie in nicely to my theory of political differences. Which it does: “Severe pathogen stress leads to high levels of civil and ethnic warfare, increased rates of homicide and child maltreatment, patriarchal family structures, and social restrictions regarding women’s sexual behavior. Moreover, these pathogen-avoidant collectivist tendencies, they wrote, coalesce over time into repressive and autocratic governmental systems.” This also holds the potential to address what I consider one of the most important unanswered sociological questions: how did segregation and proud explicit racism collapse so quickly and thoroughly when other political battles like abortion are totally unwinnable – their answer is because it corresponded with the eradication of most traditional Southern American diseases.

Scott Sumner: Why We Debate Unimportant Issues. A good supplement to Robin Hanson’s idea of pulling policy ropes sideways.

If you have some of your genetic code from a site like 23andMe, help advance the progress of science by donating your results to OpenSNP, which feeds the anonymized possible-to-derive-personal-information-from data to scientists studying genetics.

Russia is invading the Crimea, and soon we may witness the return of La Serenissima Repubblica di Venezia. For like twenty years. Before it sinks into the sea. Are you sure this is a good time to try to go it alone?