Health Care (scary music)

Posted on by David Wright

Everyone is all fired up about Megan McArdle’s recent contributions to the health care debate. (two links there).

I mostly ignore this stuff (and haven’t read her articles, actually) because I don’t think there are many interesting or constructive conversations going on about healthcare. Robin Hanson is talking some sense, as usual, and is homing in on my own instinctive aversion to this debate.

First, the bottom line:

For many decades health economists have known that the best available evidence shows little or no relation at the margin between med and health. 

So, uh… huh?

neither side wants to contradict the US public, which has a religious-style faith in the healing powers of medicine. 

This strikes a chord with me. In the past, have I been more likely to be impressed by a doctor’s knowledge or surprised by his/her ignorance? Definitely the latter. I’ve walked in assuming they know everything. It’s the highest status profession on earth. Maybe that’s a problem.

This has been making the rounds

Posted on by David Wright

Remarkable

I at first liked MR’s commenter’s Andrew:

“The median voter is a dumbass.”

But then commenter Wagster had to ruin the fun:

Andrew – not dumbass, just too damn nice.

It’s important to understand why the response changes. The respondent doesn’t like gay men and lesbians more than homosexuals, but he/she is speaking to a stranger over the phone about a volatile subject. If the interviewer uses words gay people use to self-identify, then the respondent — in order to not offend — will respond favorably. If the interviewer uses the words that gay rights opponents use, again the respondent will attempt to not offend, and bend with the direction the interviewer is signaling.

It’s true, folks, MR’s comments are the best

Statistics Joke

Posted on by David Wright

via Felix Salmon’s twitter feed:

If you’re doing a PhD in Applied Statistics, specialising in sampling theory, how many times do they make you write your dissertation?

And it goes on:

(This was the basis of an actual conversation between me and a colleague, where we were arguing over what I believed to be an entirely sensible generalisation from a single case. He pointed out that he had a degree in statistics and thus could be assumed to have expertise in the area; I countered that he only had a single degree in statistics and would have to take his finals at least 30 times before I could be confident he hadn’t passed them by luck).

Woah. Pretty Sci-Fi

Posted on by David Wright

On Neanderthals and Cloning. It’s not just for Asimov, anymore. Or Brendan Fraser.

Loads of wicked quotes in this one:

Six years ago if you wanted to sequence E. coli [a species of bacteria], which is about 4 million base-pairs in length, it would have taken one or maybe two million dollars, and it would have taken a year and 150 people,” says Jarvie. “Nowadays, one person can do it in two days and it would cost a few hundred dollars.”

and…

“Neanderthals are not just sort of funny Eskimos who lived 60,000 years ago,” says Jean-Jacques Hublin, a paleoanthropologist at Max Planck. “They have a different way to give birth to babies, differences in life history, shape of inner ear, genetics, the speed of development of individuals, weaning, age of puberty.”

And the obligatory:

“I think there would be no question that if you cloned a Neanderthal, that individual would be recognized as having human rights under the Constitution and international treaties,”

h/t Tyler Cowen