What Big Eyes You Have

According to the BBC, a new study has found that northern peoples have bigger eyes - and bigger brains.


Actually, the paper in question talked about eyes but didn't make much of the brain finding, which is confined to the Supplement. Nonetheless, they did find an effect on brain size too. Peoples living further from the equator have larger eye sockets and also larger total cranial capacity (brain volume), apparantly. The authors include Robin Dunbar of "Dunbar's Number" fame.

Their idea is that humans evolved larger eyes because further from the equator, there's on average less light, so you need bigger eyes to collect more light and see well.

They looked at 19th century skulls stored in museum collections, and measured the size of the eye sockets (orbits). They did this by filling them with a bunch of little glass balls and counting how many balls fit. They had a total of 73 "healthy adult" skulls from 12 different places, ranging from Scandinavia to Kenya.

Latitude essentially meant northern-ness because only one population (Australian Aborigines) were from far south of the equator.

Total brain size also increased with latitude, but eye size increased even faster, so the eye:brain ratio increased. They don't really discuss the brain size finding, except to suggest that it might be accounted for by increased visual cortex (though there's no direct evidence of that), but here it is, showing latitude vs. cranial capacity in ml.

The idea that northern peoples are brainier unfortunately has a long history. For example, it's been suggested that the coldness of northern climes meant that life was harder, so people evolved to be smarter to survive.

The heat of the Sahara was easy living compared to the deadly horrors of an English winter, in other words. Hmm.

The idea that higher latitudes are darker, so you'd need bigger eyes, and then a bigger brain (at least the visual parts of the brain) to process what you see, is certainly more plausible than that theory. However, the data in this paper seem pretty scanty.

Measuring skulls by filling them with little balls was cutting edge neuroscience in the 19th century. However, nowadays, we have MRI scanners. Although usually intended to image the brain, many MRI scans of the head also give an excellent image of the skull and eyes. Millions of people of all races get MRI scans every year.

Nowadays, people have medical records, so we can tell exactly how healthy people are. The people who became these skulls in a museum were said to be healthy, but how healthy a 19th century Indian or Kenyan could hope to be, by modern standards, I'm not sure. Certainly there's an excellent chance that they were malnourished and I suspect this would make your eyes and skull smaller.

Pearce, E., & Dunbar, R. (2011). Latitudinal variation in light levels drives human visual system size Biology Letters DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2011.0570

What Big Eyes You Have

According to the BBC, a new study has found that northern peoples have bigger eyes - and bigger brains.


Actually, the paper in question talked about eyes but didn't make much of the brain finding, which is confined to the Supplement. Nonetheless, they did find an effect on brain size too. Peoples living further from the equator have larger eye sockets and also larger total cranial capacity (brain volume), apparantly. The authors include Robin Dunbar of "Dunbar's Number" fame.

Their idea is that humans evolved larger eyes because further from the equator, there's on average less light, so you need bigger eyes to collect more light and see well.

They looked at 19th century skulls stored in museum collections, and measured the size of the eye sockets (orbits). They did this by filling them with a bunch of little glass balls and counting how many balls fit. They had a total of 73 "healthy adult" skulls from 12 different places, ranging from Scandinavia to Kenya.

Latitude essentially meant northern-ness because only one population (Australian Aborigines) were from far south of the equator.

Total brain size also increased with latitude, but eye size increased even faster, so the eye:brain ratio increased. They don't really discuss the brain size finding, except to suggest that it might be accounted for by increased visual cortex (though there's no direct evidence of that), but here it is, showing latitude vs. cranial capacity in ml.

The idea that northern peoples are brainier unfortunately has a long history. For example, it's been suggested that the coldness of northern climes meant that life was harder, so people evolved to be smarter to survive.

The heat of the Sahara was easy living compared to the deadly horrors of an English winter, in other words. Hmm.

The idea that higher latitudes are darker, so you'd need bigger eyes, and then a bigger brain (at least the visual parts of the brain) to process what you see, is certainly more plausible than that theory. However, the data in this paper seem pretty scanty.

Measuring skulls by filling them with little balls was cutting edge neuroscience in the 19th century. However, nowadays, we have MRI scanners. Although usually intended to image the brain, many MRI scans of the head also give an excellent image of the skull and eyes. Millions of people of all races get MRI scans every year.

Nowadays, people have medical records, so we can tell exactly how healthy people are. The people who became these skulls in a museum were said to be healthy, but how healthy a 19th century Indian or Kenyan could hope to be, by modern standards, I'm not sure. Certainly there's an excellent chance that they were malnourished and I suspect this would make your eyes and skull smaller.

Pearce, E., & Dunbar, R. (2011). Latitudinal variation in light levels drives human visual system size Biology Letters DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2011.0570

Kanazawa's Black Day

Satoshi "The Scientific Fundamentalist" Kanazawa has suddenly become the most talked-about neuro/psychology blogger in the world, getting a BBC News article all to himself.


There's no need for the rest of us to feel jealous though. There may be no such thing as bad publicity, but I think that being accused of being a racist and a sexist who should be sacked, for something you wrote on your blog, something that swiftly got pulled, must come pretty close.

You can read the controversial article here, and in other places, because it was helpfully archived. It used to be here.

Kanazawa based his argument on the Add Health project which was a massive observational study of American adolescents and young adults.

Add Health is huge. It's produced over 3,000 scientific papers, presentations and other documents. That's because it collected a wealth of data on everything from genetics to blood chemistry to social relationships and emotional issues.

Kanazawa looked at the data on physical attractiveness. Attractiveness was rated by an interviewer. Each subject got interviewed for a couple of hours by one interviewer and at the end the interviewer rated how hot they found them.

The fateful post claimed that, according to the Add Health data, black women were rated less attractive, on average, than white, Asian and Native American ones. Let's assume that he's done his sums correctly and that this is true of the data.

The obvious problem is that maybe the interviewers were biased against black women, and rated them lower for that reason. Kanazawa didn't consider this in his post, which is unquestionably an oversight, but he did go on to speculate as to the biological reasons why they might be less attractive.

However, looking at the original Add Health data, can we check whether this bias was at play or not?

Short answer: I found no evidence either way.

Long answer: I first looked over the Add Health website but it doesn't seem to mention anything about who the interviewers were. It doesn't mention their own ethnicity, which would be helpful, although even if they were all black themselves, they might have internalized racism, so that wouldn't be conclusive. They were trained, but then, you can't train someone to not be a racist.

Then I decided to look at the publications. I searched Google Scholar for "Add Health" + attractiveness. This reveals a number of articles, including a 2007 one by Kanazawa ironically, but only one seemed really relevant: Weight Preoccupation as a Function of Observed Physical Attractiveness. (There are other hits, but I skimmed the most likely looking ones and they didn't address bias.)

The details are unimportant, but it involved race and attractiveness, so the authors had to deal with the question of potential rater bias. Unlike Kanazawa they didn't just brush this under the carpet:

Although the interviewers were different races and ethnicities, there is no information about the race or ethnicity of the interviewer for any one respondent to examine systematic bias.

However, post hoc cluster analyses that controlled for an interviewer effect yielded similar results; thus, it is unlikely that interviewers had any substantial biases against any one ethnic group or that they rated attractiveness significantly differently from each other.

The point about "post-hoc cluster analysis" is the key here. To try to control for rater effects (not just racial ones) they analyzed the data covarying for which interviewer rated each girl. They didn't know what races the interviewers were, but they did know which girls got rated by the same interviewer. They found that controlling for the rater did not affect their results.

So does that mean there was no bias? No. Because - this only applies to their results, which were not about attractiveness per se, but about the interaction of attractiveness with other factors to predict an outcome variable (dieting and concern about weight) within a given race.

Even supposing that half of the raters were KKK members who cruelly subtracted, say, a million points from the rated attractiveness of any given black subject, so long as they still rated some black subjects as more attractive than others, all of the comparisons within the black subjects would still work fine: the millions would all cancel out.

So in my judgement, we just can't tell. Unless I've missed something, in which case, please tell us about it in the comments.

Kanazawa's Black Day

Satoshi "The Scientific Fundamentalist" Kanazawa has suddenly become the most talked-about neuro/psychology blogger in the world, getting a BBC News article all to himself.


There's no need for the rest of us to feel jealous though. There may be no such thing as bad publicity, but I think that being accused of being a racist and a sexist who should be sacked, for something you wrote on your blog, something that swiftly got pulled, must come pretty close.

You can read the controversial article here, and in other places, because it was helpfully archived. It used to be here.

Kanazawa based his argument on the Add Health project which was a massive observational study of American adolescents and young adults.

Add Health is huge. It's produced over 3,000 scientific papers, presentations and other documents. That's because it collected a wealth of data on everything from genetics to blood chemistry to social relationships and emotional issues.

Kanazawa looked at the data on physical attractiveness. Attractiveness was rated by an interviewer. Each subject got interviewed for a couple of hours by one interviewer and at the end the interviewer rated how hot they found them.

The fateful post claimed that, according to the Add Health data, black women were rated less attractive, on average, than white, Asian and Native American ones. Let's assume that he's done his sums correctly and that this is true of the data.

The obvious problem is that maybe the interviewers were biased against black women, and rated them lower for that reason. Kanazawa didn't consider this in his post, which is unquestionably an oversight, but he did go on to speculate as to the biological reasons why they might be less attractive.

However, looking at the original Add Health data, can we check whether this bias was at play or not?

Short answer: I found no evidence either way.

Long answer: I first looked over the Add Health website but it doesn't seem to mention anything about who the interviewers were. It doesn't mention their own ethnicity, which would be helpful, although even if they were all black themselves, they might have internalized racism, so that wouldn't be conclusive. They were trained, but then, you can't train someone to not be a racist.

Then I decided to look at the publications. I searched Google Scholar for "Add Health" + attractiveness. This reveals a number of articles, including a 2007 one by Kanazawa ironically, but only one seemed really relevant: Weight Preoccupation as a Function of Observed Physical Attractiveness. (There are other hits, but I skimmed the most likely looking ones and they didn't address bias.)

The details are unimportant, but it involved race and attractiveness, so the authors had to deal with the question of potential rater bias. Unlike Kanazawa they didn't just brush this under the carpet:

Although the interviewers were different races and ethnicities, there is no information about the race or ethnicity of the interviewer for any one respondent to examine systematic bias.

However, post hoc cluster analyses that controlled for an interviewer effect yielded similar results; thus, it is unlikely that interviewers had any substantial biases against any one ethnic group or that they rated attractiveness significantly differently from each other.

The point about "post-hoc cluster analysis" is the key here. To try to control for rater effects (not just racial ones) they analyzed the data covarying for which interviewer rated each girl. They didn't know what races the interviewers were, but they did know which girls got rated by the same interviewer. They found that controlling for the rater did not affect their results.

So does that mean there was no bias? No. Because - this only applies to their results, which were not about attractiveness per se, but about the interaction of attractiveness with other factors to predict an outcome variable (dieting and concern about weight) within a given race.

Even supposing that half of the raters were KKK members who cruelly subtracted, say, a million points from the rated attractiveness of any given black subject, so long as they still rated some black subjects as more attractive than others, all of the comparisons within the black subjects would still work fine: the millions would all cancel out.

So in my judgement, we just can't tell. Unless I've missed something, in which case, please tell us about it in the comments.

Left Wing vs. Right Wing Brains

So apparently: Left wing or right wing? It's written in the brain

People with liberal views tended to have increased grey matter in the anterior cingulate cortex, a region of the brain linked to decision-making, in particular when conflicting information is being presented...

Conservatives, meanwhile, had increased grey matter in the amygdala, an area of the brain associated with processing emotion.

This was based on a study of 90 young adults using MRI to measure brain structure. Sadly that press release is all we know about the study at the moment, because it hasn't been published yet. The BBC also have no fewer than three radio shows about it here, here and here.

Politics blog Heresy Corner discusses it...

Subjects who professed liberal or left-wing opinions tended to have a larger anterior cingulate cortex, an area of the brain which, we were told, helps process complex and conflicting information. (Perhaps they need this extra grey matter to be able to cope with the internal contradictions of left-wing philosophy.)

This kind of story tends to attract chuckle-some comments.

In truth, without seeing the full scientific paper, we can't know whether the differences they found were really statistically solid, or whether they were voodoo or fishy. The authors, Geraint Rees and Ryota Kanai, have both published a lot of excellent neuroscience in the past, but that's no guarantee.

In fact, however, I suspect that the brain is just the wrong place to look if you're interested in politics, because most political views don't originate in the individual brain, they originate in the wider culture and are absorbed and regurgitated without much thought. This is a real shame, because all of us, left or right, have a brain, and it's really quite nifty:

But when it comes to politics we generally don't use it. The brain is a powerful organ designed to help you deal with reality in all its complexity. For a lot of people, politics doesn't take place there, it happens in fairytale kingdoms populated by evil monsters, foolish jesters, and brave knights.

Given that the characters in this story are mindless stereotypes, there's no need for empathy. Because the plot comes fully-formed from TV or a newspaper, there's no need for original ideas. Because everything is either obviously right or obviously wrong, there's not much reasoning required. And so on. Which is why this happens amongst other things.

I don't think individual personality is very important in determining which political narratives and values you adopt: your family background, job, and position in society is much more important.

Where individual differences matter, I think, is in deciding how "conservative" or "radical" you are within whatever party you find yourself. Not in the sense of left or right, but in terms of how keen you are on grand ideas and big changes, as opposed to cautious, boring pragmatism.

In this sense, there are conservative liberals (i.e. Obama) and radical conservatives (i.e. Palin), and that's the kind of thing I'd be looking for if I were trying to find political differences in the brain.

Links: If right wingers have bigger amygdalae, does that mean patient SM, the woman with no amygdalae at all, must be a communist? Then again, Neuroskeptic readers may remember that the brain itself is a communist...

Left Wing vs. Right Wing Brains

So apparently: Left wing or right wing? It's written in the brain

People with liberal views tended to have increased grey matter in the anterior cingulate cortex, a region of the brain linked to decision-making, in particular when conflicting information is being presented...

Conservatives, meanwhile, had increased grey matter in the amygdala, an area of the brain associated with processing emotion.

This was based on a study of 90 young adults using MRI to measure brain structure. Sadly that press release is all we know about the study at the moment, because it hasn't been published yet. The BBC also have no fewer than three radio shows about it here, here and here.

Politics blog Heresy Corner discusses it...

Subjects who professed liberal or left-wing opinions tended to have a larger anterior cingulate cortex, an area of the brain which, we were told, helps process complex and conflicting information. (Perhaps they need this extra grey matter to be able to cope with the internal contradictions of left-wing philosophy.)

This kind of story tends to attract chuckle-some comments.

In truth, without seeing the full scientific paper, we can't know whether the differences they found were really statistically solid, or whether they were voodoo or fishy. The authors, Geraint Rees and Ryota Kanai, have both published a lot of excellent neuroscience in the past, but that's no guarantee.

In fact, however, I suspect that the brain is just the wrong place to look if you're interested in politics, because most political views don't originate in the individual brain, they originate in the wider culture and are absorbed and regurgitated without much thought. This is a real shame, because all of us, left or right, have a brain, and it's really quite nifty:

But when it comes to politics we generally don't use it. The brain is a powerful organ designed to help you deal with reality in all its complexity. For a lot of people, politics doesn't take place there, it happens in fairytale kingdoms populated by evil monsters, foolish jesters, and brave knights.

Given that the characters in this story are mindless stereotypes, there's no need for empathy. Because the plot comes fully-formed from TV or a newspaper, there's no need for original ideas. Because everything is either obviously right or obviously wrong, there's not much reasoning required. And so on. Which is why this happens amongst other things.

I don't think individual personality is very important in determining which political narratives and values you adopt: your family background, job, and position in society is much more important.

Where individual differences matter, I think, is in deciding how "conservative" or "radical" you are within whatever party you find yourself. Not in the sense of left or right, but in terms of how keen you are on grand ideas and big changes, as opposed to cautious, boring pragmatism.

In this sense, there are conservative liberals (i.e. Obama) and radical conservatives (i.e. Palin), and that's the kind of thing I'd be looking for if I were trying to find political differences in the brain.

Links: If right wingers have bigger amygdalae, does that mean patient SM, the woman with no amygdalae at all, must be a communist? Then again, Neuroskeptic readers may remember that the brain itself is a communist...

XMRV - Innocent on All Counts?

A bombshell has just gone off in the continuing debate over XMRV, the virus that may or may not cause chronic fatigue syndrome. Actually, 4 bombshells.

A set of papers out today in Retrovirology (1,2,3,4) claim that many previous studies claiming to have found the virus haven't actually been detecting XMRV at all.

Here's the rub. XMRV is a retrovirus, a class of bugs that includes HIV. Retroviruses are composed of RNA, but they can insert themselves into the genetic material of host cells as DNA. This is how they reproduce: once their DNA is part of the host cell's chromosomes, that cell is ends up making more copies of the virus.

But there are lots of retroviruses out there, and there used to be yet others that are now extinct. So bits of retroviral DNA are scattered throughout the genome of animals. These are called endogenonous retro-viruses (ERVs).

XMRV is extremely similar to certain ERVs found in the DNA of mice. And mice are the most popular laboratory mammals in the world. So you can see the potential problem: laboratories all over the world are full of mice, but mouse DNA might show up as "XMRV" DNA on PCR tests.

Wary virologists take precautions against this by checking specifically for mouse DNA. But most mouse-contamination tests are targeted at mouse mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). In theory, a test for mouse mtDNA is all you need, because mtDNA is found in all mouse cells. In theory.

Now the four papers (or are they the Four Horsemen?) argue, in a nutshell, that mouse DNA shows up as "XMRV" on most of the popular tests that have been used in the past, that mouse contamination is very common - even some of the test kits are affected! - and that tests for mouse mtDNA are not good enough to detect the problem.

• Hue et al say that "Taqman PCR primers previously described as XMRV-specific can amplify common murine ERV sequences from mouse suggesting that mouse DNA can contaminate patient samples and confound specific XMRV detection." They go on to show that some human samples previously reported as infected with XMRV, are actually infected with a hybrid of XMRV and a mouse ERV which we know can't infect humans.
• Sato et al report that PCR testing kits from Invitrogen, a leading biotech company, are contaminated with mouse genes including an ERV almost identical to XMRV, and that this shows up as a false positive using commonly used PCR primers "specific to XMRV".
• Oakes et al say that in 112 CFS patients and 36 healthy control, they detected "XMRV" in some samples but all of these samples were likely contaminated with mouse DNA because "all samples that tested positive for XMRV and/or MLV DNA were also positive for the highly abundant IAP long terminal repeat [found only in mice] and most were positive for murine mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase sequences [found only in mice]"
• Robinson et al agree with Oakes et al: they found "XMRV" in some human samples, in this case prostate cancer cells, but they then found that all of the "infected" samples were contaminated with mouse DNA. They recommend that in future, samples should be tested for mouse genes such as the IAP long terminal repeat or cytochrome oxidase, and that researchers should not rely on tests for mouse mtDNA.

They're all open-access so everyone can take a peek. For another overview see this summary published alongside them in Retrovirology.

I lack the technical knowledge to evaluate these claims, no doubt plenty of people will be rushing to do that before long. (Update: The excellent virologyblog has a more technical discussion of these studies.) But there are a couple of things to bear in mind.

Firstly, these papers cast doubt on tests using PCR to detect XMRV DNA. However, they don't have anything to say about studies which have looked for antibodies against XMRV in human blood, at least not directly. There haven't been many of these, but the paper which started the whole story, Lombardi et al (2009), did look for, and found, anti-XMRV immunity, and also used various other methods to support the idea that XMRV is present in humans. So this isn't an "instant knock-out" of the XMRV theory, although it's certainly a serious blow.

Secondly, if the 'mouse theory' is true, it has serious implications for the idea that XMRV causes chronic fatigue syndrome and also for the older idea that it's linked to prostate cancer. But it still leaves a mystery: why were the samples from CFS or prostate cancer patients more likely to be contaminated with mouse DNA than the samples from healthy controls?

Robert A Smith (2010). Contamination of clinical specimens with MLV-encoding nucleic acids: implications for XMRV and other candidate human retroviruses Retrovirology : 10.1186/1742-4690-7-112

XMRV - Innocent on All Counts?

A bombshell has just gone off in the continuing debate over XMRV, the virus that may or may not cause chronic fatigue syndrome. Actually, 4 bombshells.

A set of papers out today in Retrovirology (1,2,3,4) claim that many previous studies claiming to have found the virus haven't actually been detecting XMRV at all.

Here's the rub. XMRV is a retrovirus, a class of bugs that includes HIV. Retroviruses are composed of RNA, but they can insert themselves into the genetic material of host cells as DNA. This is how they reproduce: once their DNA is part of the host cell's chromosomes, that cell is ends up making more copies of the virus.

But there are lots of retroviruses out there, and there used to be yet others that are now extinct. So bits of retroviral DNA are scattered throughout the genome of animals. These are called endogenonous retro-viruses (ERVs).

XMRV is extremely similar to certain ERVs found in the DNA of mice. And mice are the most popular laboratory mammals in the world. So you can see the potential problem: laboratories all over the world are full of mice, but mouse DNA might show up as "XMRV" DNA on PCR tests.

Wary virologists take precautions against this by checking specifically for mouse DNA. But most mouse-contamination tests are targeted at mouse mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). In theory, a test for mouse mtDNA is all you need, because mtDNA is found in all mouse cells. In theory.

Now the four papers (or are they the Four Horsemen?) argue, in a nutshell, that mouse DNA shows up as "XMRV" on most of the popular tests that have been used in the past, that mouse contamination is very common - even some of the test kits are affected! - and that tests for mouse mtDNA are not good enough to detect the problem.

• Hue et al say that "Taqman PCR primers previously described as XMRV-specific can amplify common murine ERV sequences from mouse suggesting that mouse DNA can contaminate patient samples and confound specific XMRV detection." They go on to show that some human samples previously reported as infected with XMRV, are actually infected with a hybrid of XMRV and a mouse ERV which we know can't infect humans.
• Sato et al report that PCR testing kits from Invitrogen, a leading biotech company, are contaminated with mouse genes including an ERV almost identical to XMRV, and that this shows up as a false positive using commonly used PCR primers "specific to XMRV".
• Oakes et al say that in 112 CFS patients and 36 healthy control, they detected "XMRV" in some samples but all of these samples were likely contaminated with mouse DNA because "all samples that tested positive for XMRV and/or MLV DNA were also positive for the highly abundant IAP long terminal repeat [found only in mice] and most were positive for murine mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase sequences [found only in mice]"
• Robinson et al agree with Oakes et al: they found "XMRV" in some human samples, in this case prostate cancer cells, but they then found that all of the "infected" samples were contaminated with mouse DNA. They recommend that in future, samples should be tested for mouse genes such as the IAP long terminal repeat or cytochrome oxidase, and that researchers should not rely on tests for mouse mtDNA.

They're all open-access so everyone can take a peek. For another overview see this summary published alongside them in Retrovirology.

I lack the technical knowledge to evaluate these claims, no doubt plenty of people will be rushing to do that before long. (Update: The excellent virologyblog has a more technical discussion of these studies.) But there are a couple of things to bear in mind.

Firstly, these papers cast doubt on tests using PCR to detect XMRV DNA. However, they don't have anything to say about studies which have looked for antibodies against XMRV in human blood, at least not directly. There haven't been many of these, but the paper which started the whole story, Lombardi et al (2009), did look for, and found, anti-XMRV immunity, and also used various other methods to support the idea that XMRV is present in humans. So this isn't an "instant knock-out" of the XMRV theory, although it's certainly a serious blow.

Secondly, if the 'mouse theory' is true, it has serious implications for the idea that XMRV causes chronic fatigue syndrome and also for the older idea that it's linked to prostate cancer. But it still leaves a mystery: why were the samples from CFS or prostate cancer patients more likely to be contaminated with mouse DNA than the samples from healthy controls?

Robert A Smith (2010). Contamination of clinical specimens with MLV-encoding nucleic acids: implications for XMRV and other candidate human retroviruses Retrovirology : 10.1186/1742-4690-7-112

Wikileaks: A Conversation

"Wikileaks is great. It lets people leak stuff."

"Hang on, so you're saying that no-one could leak stuff before? They invented it?"

"Well, no, but they brought leaking to the masses. Sure, people could post documents to the press before, but now anyone in the world can access the leaks!"

"Great, but isn't that just the internet that did that? If it weren't for Wikileaks, people could just upload their leaks to a blog. Or email them to 50 newspapers. Or put them on the torrents. Or start their own site. If it's good, it would go viral, and be impossible to take down. Just like Wikileaks, with all their mirrors, except even more secure, because there'd be literally no-one to arrest or cut off funding to."

"OK, but Wikileaks is a brand. It's not about the technical stuff - it's the message. Like one of their wallpapers says, they're synonymous with free speech."

"So you think it's a good thing that one organization has become synonymous with the whole process of leaking? With the whole concept of openness? What will happen to the idea of free speech, then, if that brand image suddenly gets tarnished - like, say, if their founder and figurehead gets convicted of a serious crime, or..."

"He's innocent! Justice for Julian!"

"Quite possibly, but why do you care? Is he a personal friend?"

"It's an attack on free speech!"

"So you agree that one man has become synonymous with free speech? Doesn't that bother you?"

"Erm... well. Look, fundamentally, we need Wikileaks. Before, there was no centralized system for leaking. Anyone could do it. It was a mess! Wikileaks put everything in one place, and put a committee of experts in a position to decide what was worth leaking and what wasn't. It brought much-needed efficiency and respectability to the idea of leaking. Before Wikileaks, it was anarchy. They're like... the government."

"..."

Edit: See also The Last Psychiatrist's take.

Wikileaks: A Conversation

"Wikileaks is great. It lets people leak stuff."

"Hang on, so you're saying that no-one could leak stuff before? They invented it?"

"Well, no, but they brought leaking to the masses. Sure, people could post documents to the press before, but now anyone in the world can access the leaks!"

"Great, but isn't that just the internet that did that? If it weren't for Wikileaks, people could just upload their leaks to a blog. Or email them to 50 newspapers. Or put them on the torrents. Or start their own site. If it's good, it would go viral, and be impossible to take down. Just like Wikileaks, with all their mirrors, except even more secure, because there'd be literally no-one to arrest or cut off funding to."

"OK, but Wikileaks is a brand. It's not about the technical stuff - it's the message. Like one of their wallpapers says, they're synonymous with free speech."

"So you think it's a good thing that one organization has become synonymous with the whole process of leaking? With the whole concept of openness? What will happen to the idea of free speech, then, if that brand image suddenly gets tarnished - like, say, if their founder and figurehead gets convicted of a serious crime, or..."

"He's innocent! Justice for Julian!"

"Quite possibly, but why do you care? Is he a personal friend?"

"It's an attack on free speech!"

"So you agree that one man has become synonymous with free speech? Doesn't that bother you?"

"Erm... well. Look, fundamentally, we need Wikileaks. Before, there was no centralized system for leaking. Anyone could do it. It was a mess! Wikileaks put everything in one place, and put a committee of experts in a position to decide what was worth leaking and what wasn't. It brought much-needed efficiency and respectability to the idea of leaking. Before Wikileaks, it was anarchy. They're like... the government."

"..."

Edit: See also The Last Psychiatrist's take.

Online Comments: It's Not You, It's Them

Last week I was at a discussion about New Media, and someone mentioned that they'd been put off from writing content online because of a comment on one of their articles accusing them of being "stupid".

I found this surprising - not the comment, but that anyone would take it so personally. It's the internet. You will get called names. Everyone does. It doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you.

I suspect this is a generational issue. People who 'grew up online' know, as Penny Arcade explained, that

The sad fact is that there are millions of people whose idea of fun is to find people they disagree with, and mock them. And they're right, it can be fun - why else do you think people like Jon Stewart are so popular? - but that's all it is, entertainment. If you're on the receiving end, don't take it seriously.

If you write something online, and a lot of people read it, you will get slammed. Someone, somewhere, will disagree with you and they'll tell you so, in no uncertain terms. This is true whatever you write about, but some topics are like a big red rag to the herds of bulls out there.

Just to name a few, if you say anything vaguely related to climate change, religion, health, the economy, feminism or race, you might as well be holding a placard with a big arrow pointing down at you and "Sling Mud Here" on it.

The point is - it's them, not you. They are not interested in you, they don't know you, it's not you. True, they might tailor their insults a bit; if you're a young woman you might be, say, a "stupid girl" where a man would merely get called an "idiot". But this doesn't mean that the attacks are a reflection on you in any way. You just happen to be the one in the line of fire.

What do you do about this? Nothing.

Trying to enter into a serious debate is pointless. Insulting them back can be fun, just remember that if you find it fun, you've become one of them: "he who stares too long into the abyss...", etc. Complaining to the moderators might help, but unless the site has a rock solid zero-tolerance-for-fuckwads policy, probably not. Where the blight has taken root, like Comment is Free, I'd not waste your time complaining. Just ignore it and carry on.

The most important thing is not to take it personally. Do not get offended. Do not care. Because no-one else cares. Especially the people who wrote the comments. They presumably care about whatever "issue" prompted their attack, but they don't care about you. If anything, you should be pleased, because on the internet, the only stuff that doesn't attract stupid comments is the stuff that no-one reads.

I've heard these attacks referred to as "policing" existing hierarchies or "silencing" certain types of people. This seems to me to be granting them far more respect than they deserve. With the actual police, if you break the rules, they will physically arrest you. They have power. Internet trolls don't: if they succeed in policing or silencing anybody, it's because their targets let them boss them around. They're nobody; they're not your problem.

If you can't help being offended by such comments, don't read them, but ideally you shouldn't need to resort to that. For one thing, it means you miss the sensible comments (and there's always a few). But fundamentally, you shouldn't need to do this, because you really shouldn't care what some anonymous joker from the depths of the internet thinks about you.

Online Comments: It's Not You, It's Them

Last week I was at a discussion about New Media, and someone mentioned that they'd been put off from writing content online because of a comment on one of their articles accusing them of being "stupid".

I found this surprising - not the comment, but that anyone would take it so personally. It's the internet. You will get called names. Everyone does. It doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you.

I suspect this is a generational issue. People who 'grew up online' know, as Penny Arcade explained, that

The sad fact is that there are millions of people whose idea of fun is to find people they disagree with, and mock them. And they're right, it can be fun - why else do you think people like Jon Stewart are so popular? - but that's all it is, entertainment. If you're on the receiving end, don't take it seriously.

If you write something online, and a lot of people read it, you will get slammed. Someone, somewhere, will disagree with you and they'll tell you so, in no uncertain terms. This is true whatever you write about, but some topics are like a big red rag to the herds of bulls out there.

Just to name a few, if you say anything vaguely related to climate change, religion, health, the economy, feminism or race, you might as well be holding a placard with a big arrow pointing down at you and "Sling Mud Here" on it.

The point is - it's them, not you. They are not interested in you, they don't know you, it's not you. True, they might tailor their insults a bit; if you're a young woman you might be, say, a "stupid girl" where a man would merely get called an "idiot". But this doesn't mean that the attacks are a reflection on you in any way. You just happen to be the one in the line of fire.

What do you do about this? Nothing.

Trying to enter into a serious debate is pointless. Insulting them back can be fun, just remember that if you find it fun, you've become one of them: "he who stares too long into the abyss...", etc. Complaining to the moderators might help, but unless the site has a rock solid zero-tolerance-for-fuckwads policy, probably not. Where the blight has taken root, like Comment is Free, I'd not waste your time complaining. Just ignore it and carry on.

The most important thing is not to take it personally. Do not get offended. Do not care. Because no-one else cares. Especially the people who wrote the comments. They presumably care about whatever "issue" prompted their attack, but they don't care about you. If anything, you should be pleased, because on the internet, the only stuff that doesn't attract stupid comments is the stuff that no-one reads.

I've heard these attacks referred to as "policing" existing hierarchies or "silencing" certain types of people. This seems to me to be granting them far more respect than they deserve. With the actual police, if you break the rules, they will physically arrest you. They have power. Internet trolls don't: if they succeed in policing or silencing anybody, it's because their targets let them boss them around. They're nobody; they're not your problem.

If you can't help being offended by such comments, don't read them, but ideally you shouldn't need to resort to that. For one thing, it means you miss the sensible comments (and there's always a few). But fundamentally, you shouldn't need to do this, because you really shouldn't care what some anonymous joker from the depths of the internet thinks about you.

The Tree of Science

How do you know whether a scientific idea is a good one or not?


The only sure way is to study it in detail and know all the technical ins and outs. But good ideas and bad ideas behave differently over time, and this can provide clues as to which ones are solid; useful if you're a non-expert trying to evaluate a field, or a junior researcher looking for a career.

Today's ideas are the basis for tomorrow's experiments. A good idea will lead to experiments which provide interesting results, generating new ideas, which will lead to more experiments, and so on.

Before long, it will be taken as granted that it's true, because so many successful studies assumed it was. The mark of a really good idea is not that it's always being tested and found to be true; it's that it's an unstated assumption of studies which could only work if it were true. Good ideas grow onwards and upwards, in an expanding tree, with each exciting new discovery becoming the boring background of the next generation.

Astronomers don't go around testing whether light travels at a finite speed as opposed to an infinite one; rather, if it were infinite, their whole set-up would fail.

Bad ideas generate experiments too, but they don't work out. The assumptions are wrong. You try to explain why something happens, and you find that it doesn't happen at all. Or you come up with an "explanation", but next time, someone comes along and finds evidence suggesting the "true" explanation is the exact opposite.

Unfortunately, some bad ideas stick around, for political or historical reasons or just because people are lazy. What tends to happen is that these ideas are, ironically, more "productive" than good ideas: they are always giving rise to new hypotheses. It's just that these lines of research peter out eventually, meaning that new ones have to take their place.

As an example of a bad idea, take the theory that "vaccines cause autism". This hypothesis is, in itself, impossible to test: it's too vague. Which vaccines? How do they cause autism? What kind of autism? In which people? How often?

The basic idea that some vaccines, somewhere, somehow, cause some autism, has been very productive. It's given rise to a great many, testable, ideas. But every one which has been tested has proven false.

First there was the idea that the MMR vaccine causes autism, linked to a "leaky gut" or "autistic enterocolitis". It doesn't, and it's not linked to that. Then along came the idea that actually it's mercury preservatives in vaccines that cause autism. It doesn't. No problem - maybe it's aluminium? Or maybe it's just the Hep B vaccine? And so on.

At every turn, it's back to square one after a few years, and a new idea is proposed. "We know this is true; now we just need to work out why and how...". Except that turns out to be tricky. Hmm. Maybe, if you keep ending up back at square one, you ought to find a new square to start from.

The Tree of Science

How do you know whether a scientific idea is a good one or not?


The only sure way is to study it in detail and know all the technical ins and outs. But good ideas and bad ideas behave differently over time, and this can provide clues as to which ones are solid; useful if you're a non-expert trying to evaluate a field, or a junior researcher looking for a career.

Today's ideas are the basis for tomorrow's experiments. A good idea will lead to experiments which provide interesting results, generating new ideas, which will lead to more experiments, and so on.

Before long, it will be taken as granted that it's true, because so many successful studies assumed it was. The mark of a really good idea is not that it's always being tested and found to be true; it's that it's an unstated assumption of studies which could only work if it were true. Good ideas grow onwards and upwards, in an expanding tree, with each exciting new discovery becoming the boring background of the next generation.

Astronomers don't go around testing whether light travels at a finite speed as opposed to an infinite one; rather, if it were infinite, their whole set-up would fail.

Bad ideas generate experiments too, but they don't work out. The assumptions are wrong. You try to explain why something happens, and you find that it doesn't happen at all. Or you come up with an "explanation", but next time, someone comes along and finds evidence suggesting the "true" explanation is the exact opposite.

Unfortunately, some bad ideas stick around, for political or historical reasons or just because people are lazy. What tends to happen is that these ideas are, ironically, more "productive" than good ideas: they are always giving rise to new hypotheses. It's just that these lines of research peter out eventually, meaning that new ones have to take their place.

As an example of a bad idea, take the theory that "vaccines cause autism". This hypothesis is, in itself, impossible to test: it's too vague. Which vaccines? How do they cause autism? What kind of autism? In which people? How often?

The basic idea that some vaccines, somewhere, somehow, cause some autism, has been very productive. It's given rise to a great many, testable, ideas. But every one which has been tested has proven false.

First there was the idea that the MMR vaccine causes autism, linked to a "leaky gut" or "autistic enterocolitis". It doesn't, and it's not linked to that. Then along came the idea that actually it's mercury preservatives in vaccines that cause autism. It doesn't. No problem - maybe it's aluminium? Or maybe it's just the Hep B vaccine? And so on.

At every turn, it's back to square one after a few years, and a new idea is proposed. "We know this is true; now we just need to work out why and how...". Except that turns out to be tricky. Hmm. Maybe, if you keep ending up back at square one, you ought to find a new square to start from.

Israel and Palestine are Both Fighting Back...?

There are three basic schools of thought on the Israel / Palestine thing.

• Those evil Israelis are out to destroy Palestine, and the Palestinians are just fighting back.
• Those evil Palestinians are out to destroy Israel, and the Israelis are just fighting back.
• It's a cycle of violence, where both sides are fighting back against the other.
  

Which one you subscribe to depends mostly on where you were born. I'm not aware of many people who've changed their minds on this issue, perhaps because doing so would require a study of the last 2,500 years of history, religion and politics.

Wouldn't it be handy if science could provide an answer? According to the authors of a new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the "cycle" school is right: both sides are fighting back against the other: Both sides retaliate in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The authors (from Switzerland, Israel and the USA) took data on daily fatalities on both sides, and also of daily launches of Palestinian "Qassam" rockets at Israel. The data run from 2001, the start of the current round of unpleasantness, to late 2008, the Gaza War.

They looked to see whether the number of events that happened on a certain day predicted the number of events caused by the other side on the following days, i.e. whether a Palestinian death caused the Palestinians to retaliate by firing more rockets and killing more Israelis, and vice versa.

What happened? They found that both sides were more likely to launch attacks on the days following a death on their own side. The exception to this rule was that Israel did not noticeably retaliate against Qassam launches. This is perhaps because Qassams are so ineffective: out of 3,645 recorded launches, they killed 15 people.

These graphs show the number of "extra" actions on the days following a event, averaged over the whole 8 years, according to a statistical method called the Impulse Response Function. Note that the absolute size of the effects is larger for the Israeli retaliations (the Y axis is bigger); there were a total of 4,874 Palestinian fatalities and 1,062 Israeli fatalities

The authors then used another method called Vector Autoregression to discover more about the relationship. In theory, this method controls for the past history of actions by a given side, so that it reveals the number of actions independently caused by the opposing side.

the number of Qassams fired increases by 6% on the first day after a single killing of a Palestinian by Israel; the probability of any Qassams being fired increases by 11%; and the probability of any Israelis being killed by Palestinians increases by 10%. Conversely, 1 day after the killing of a single Israeli by Palestinians, the number of Palestinians killed by Israel increases by 9%, and the probability of any Palestinians being killed increases by 20%

....retaliation accounts for a larger fraction of Palestinian compared with Israeli aggression: in the levels specification, 10% of all Qassam rockets can be attributed to prior Israeli attacks on Palestinians, but only 4% of killings of Palestinians by Israel can be attributed to prior Palestinian attacks on Israel.... 6% of all days on which Palestinians attack Israel with rockets, and 5% of all days on which they attack by killing Israelis, can be attributed to retaliation; in contrast, this is true for only 2% of all days on which Israel kills Palestinians.

What are we to make of this? This is a good paper as far as it goes, and it casts doubt on earlier analyses finding that Israel is retaliating against Palestinians but not vice versa. However, the inherent problem with all of this research (beyond the fact that it's all based on correlations and can only indirectly imply causation), is that it focuses on individual acts of violence. The authors say, citing surveys, that

Over one half of Israelis and three quarters of Palestinians think the other side seeks to take over their land. When accounting for their own acts of aggression, Israelis often claim to be merely responding to Palestinian violence, and Palestinians often see themselves as simply reacting to Israeli violence.

But I don't think many Israelis would argue that the IDF only kills individual Palestinians as a reflex reaction to a particular attack. They're claiming that the whole conflict is a defensive one, that the Palestinians are the aggressors, but that doesn't rule out their taking the initiative on a tactical level e.g. in destroying Palestinian military capabilities before they have a chance to attack. And vice versa on the other side.

WW2 was a war of aggression by the Axis powers, but that doesn't mean that the Allies only killed Axis soldiers after they'd attacked a certain place. The Allies were on the offensive for the second half of the war, and eventually invaded the Axis's own homelands, but it was still a defensive war, because the Axis were responsible for it.

For Israel and for Palestine, the other guys are to blame for the whole thing. Who's right, if anyone, is fundamentally a historical, political and ethical question, that can't be answered by looking at day-to-day variations in who's shooting when.

Comment Policy: Please only comment if you've got something to say about this paper, or related research. Comments that are just making the case for or against Israel will get deleted.

Haushofer J, Biletzki A, & Kanwisher N (2010). Both sides retaliate in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America PMID: 20921415

Israel and Palestine are Both Fighting Back...?

There are three basic schools of thought on the Israel / Palestine thing.

• Those evil Israelis are out to destroy Palestine, and the Palestinians are just fighting back.
• Those evil Palestinians are out to destroy Israel, and the Israelis are just fighting back.
• It's a cycle of violence, where both sides are fighting back against the other.
  

Which one you subscribe to depends mostly on where you were born. I'm not aware of many people who've changed their minds on this issue, perhaps because doing so would require a study of the last 2,500 years of history, religion and politics.

Wouldn't it be handy if science could provide an answer? According to the authors of a new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the "cycle" school is right: both sides are fighting back against the other: Both sides retaliate in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The authors (from Switzerland, Israel and the USA) took data on daily fatalities on both sides, and also of daily launches of Palestinian "Qassam" rockets at Israel. The data run from 2001, the start of the current round of unpleasantness, to late 2008, the Gaza War.

They looked to see whether the number of events that happened on a certain day predicted the number of events caused by the other side on the following days, i.e. whether a Palestinian death caused the Palestinians to retaliate by firing more rockets and killing more Israelis, and vice versa.

What happened? They found that both sides were more likely to launch attacks on the days following a death on their own side. The exception to this rule was that Israel did not noticeably retaliate against Qassam launches. This is perhaps because Qassams are so ineffective: out of 3,645 recorded launches, they killed 15 people.

These graphs show the number of "extra" actions on the days following a event, averaged over the whole 8 years, according to a statistical method called the Impulse Response Function. Note that the absolute size of the effects is larger for the Israeli retaliations (the Y axis is bigger); there were a total of 4,874 Palestinian fatalities and 1,062 Israeli fatalities

The authors then used another method called Vector Autoregression to discover more about the relationship. In theory, this method controls for the past history of actions by a given side, so that it reveals the number of actions independently caused by the opposing side.

the number of Qassams fired increases by 6% on the first day after a single killing of a Palestinian by Israel; the probability of any Qassams being fired increases by 11%; and the probability of any Israelis being killed by Palestinians increases by 10%. Conversely, 1 day after the killing of a single Israeli by Palestinians, the number of Palestinians killed by Israel increases by 9%, and the probability of any Palestinians being killed increases by 20%

....retaliation accounts for a larger fraction of Palestinian compared with Israeli aggression: in the levels specification, 10% of all Qassam rockets can be attributed to prior Israeli attacks on Palestinians, but only 4% of killings of Palestinians by Israel can be attributed to prior Palestinian attacks on Israel.... 6% of all days on which Palestinians attack Israel with rockets, and 5% of all days on which they attack by killing Israelis, can be attributed to retaliation; in contrast, this is true for only 2% of all days on which Israel kills Palestinians.

What are we to make of this? This is a good paper as far as it goes, and it casts doubt on earlier analyses finding that Israel is retaliating against Palestinians but not vice versa. However, the inherent problem with all of this research (beyond the fact that it's all based on correlations and can only indirectly imply causation), is that it focuses on individual acts of violence. The authors say, citing surveys, that

Over one half of Israelis and three quarters of Palestinians think the other side seeks to take over their land. When accounting for their own acts of aggression, Israelis often claim to be merely responding to Palestinian violence, and Palestinians often see themselves as simply reacting to Israeli violence.

But I don't think many Israelis would argue that the IDF only kills individual Palestinians as a reflex reaction to a particular attack. They're claiming that the whole conflict is a defensive one, that the Palestinians are the aggressors, but that doesn't rule out their taking the initiative on a tactical level e.g. in destroying Palestinian military capabilities before they have a chance to attack. And vice versa on the other side.

WW2 was a war of aggression by the Axis powers, but that doesn't mean that the Allies only killed Axis soldiers after they'd attacked a certain place. The Allies were on the offensive for the second half of the war, and eventually invaded the Axis's own homelands, but it was still a defensive war, because the Axis were responsible for it.

For Israel and for Palestine, the other guys are to blame for the whole thing. Who's right, if anyone, is fundamentally a historical, political and ethical question, that can't be answered by looking at day-to-day variations in who's shooting when.

Comment Policy: Please only comment if you've got something to say about this paper, or related research. Comments that are just making the case for or against Israel will get deleted.

Haushofer J, Biletzki A, & Kanwisher N (2010). Both sides retaliate in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America PMID: 20921415