Delicious LiveJournal Links for 12-11-2008

[andrewducker]

• 8 really, really scary predictions about the economy
  (tags: economics 2008 depression predictions)
• The digested read: The Tales of Beedle the Bard by JK Rowling
  Very, very funny
  (tags: funny books harrypotter)
• Chinese girl gets 'kiss of deaf'
  The chorus of warnings was echoed by the Shanghai Daily, which wrote: "A strong kiss may cause an imbalance in the air pressure between two inner ears and lead to a broken ear drum."
  (tags: weird biology kissing)
• Man's genes 'key to baby's sex'
  Raar! My sperm have The Power!
  (tags: genetics gender)

Comments

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

The odds, he said, would favour fathers with more sons - each carrying the "boy" gene - having a son return from war alive, compared with fathers who had more daughters, who might see their only son killed in action.

Good grief! What utter and complete statistical bollocks. I'd expect it of the BBC, but not from an original source.

[andrewducker]

Care to explain in more detail?

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

The fathers of the military have nothing to do with the generation following the war. All that matters to a generation is the genetics of its direct progenitors.

The above statement, while true, can be reduced to "fathers with more boys in the war stand a greater chance of having a boy survive the war". It's trivially true, and doesn't explain anything at all.

In order to explain the post-war boom in baby boys using the data they claim to have, their data would suggest that soldiers with higher numbers of brothers are more likely to have survived the war than those with lower numbers, or with more sisters. Now you could draw all sorts of interesting conclusions from that and speculate on explanations, such as: "kids with lots of brothers are better prepared for war because they'll have been playing at soldiers since they were wee", but the data doesn't do anything more than -suggest- that sort of thing. The data is certainly no "explanation".

[andrewducker]

Got it - the war wipes out boys without reference to what family they come from/their genetics, so killing (say) 50% of them would leave the same proportions of the genetics as before the war, yes?

The only way the proportions would be changed would be if the draft only took one son from each family - thus increasing the survival rate for boys in multi-boy families.

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

Now that never occurred to me. The idea that the draft would be anything other than fair, with any eligible individual having an equal chance of being drafted, seems morally repugnant to me.

[randomchris.livejournal.com]

I'm inclined to agree with your analysis of the stats on the face of it, but I think you may be forgetting the "Saving Private Ryan" factor - if somebody dies in the war and they have a brother who is still out there, they may be moved to a safer position; at the very least, they'll get a little bit of leave to attend the funeral, thus increasing their chances of survival at least a small amount.

However, a more useful point is possibly that somebody with more sons would have a higher chance of at least one of them being too young / too infirm / too short-sighted to fight (too young being the most likely), and thus a better chance of passing on their genes.

[andrewducker]

Not really - the proportion of boys who are age 1-15 who have this gene will be the same as the general proportion - so letting them off fighting won't increase the number of boys who have the gene.

[randomchris.livejournal.com]

I can sort of see what he means with the proportions; if, say, there are odds of 50% of returning alive, then if you've got two sons at war, there's a 75% chance that one or both will return alive (87.5% for three, etc.)

[kurosau.livejournal.com]

A thought occurs about those 'scary predictions'.

The value of an economist isn't in predicting whether or not a bubble is a bubble or whether or not it will crash. I don't know what it is, but it isn't that. Any idiot can see bubbles forming, it was obvious to a whole wack of people during the dot-com bubble, and it was obvious to a whole bunch of people during the housing bubble.

Also, tulips.

I mean, seriously, any idiot could order videos from Kozmo.com, along with laundry and grocery service, and realize that they weren't going to go anywhere, and that's what most of the dot-coms were!

But now I'm just complaining by rote, as I don't like seeing economists take hard stands on issues and advise people to do the sort of things that'll prevent the market from regaining confidence.

I should go into economics just to develop a branch of econ theory centered around the idea that we're just guessing what's going to happen.

[andrewducker]

You say that anyone could have predicted the crash, and it was obvious - but during the bubble the vast majority of people seemed to think exactly the opposite. I spent the entirety of the dotcom bubble wondering why nobody else could see it - but for some reason the majority of them couldn't.

We should celebrate the occasional person who is capable of seeing the obvious.

[kurosau.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's the matter of the majority not being able to see it, I think it's a matter of the way confidence in the market works, combined with the market's momentum.

In other words, at the start of the bubble, it looks awesome and is. Bubbles collapse though, and that gets factored for. And then the evidence shows up that it's a bubble, and everyone knows that it's a bad idea because of the crap companies that are making millions overnight. But by then, the ball is rolling and it takes a while to catch up, because most of the people who know it's a bad idea are still making money off of it.

I keep wanting to paint it as a plane full of money that's going down, where everyone is packing money into suitcases until the very last minute.

[andrewducker]

I disagree - an awful lot of people just don't get it. I had an argument with someone at work about a year ago because they said they didn't need to put money into a pension because their house was worth a small fortune and house prices always go up faster than inflation.

This person was reasonably smart (decent coder, capable of walking and breathing at the same time), and we work at a financial company. He just didn't understand markets.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

If he had got a pension he'd be no better off now...

[andrewducker]

Depends on the guarantees on it. I have a career average pension, which doesn't rely on the stock market doing well...

[anef.livejournal.com]

Warren Buffett (hope that's how you spell it) refused to buy into dotcoms on the basis that he didn't understand them and didn't want to put the time into researching them. And was widely ridiculed at the time. His point was that some of them were good businesses and would survive, but the vast majority weren't. That seemed very sensible to me.

[andrewducker]

Absolutely. If you don't understand something then you have no way of telling whether you're buying a complete fraud.

I remember, at the height of the DotComBoom, seeing the stock price of a telecoms company double purely because it had added ".com" to the end of its name...