The thesis of Dan Ariely's new book, Predictably Irrational, is that "people often make decisions that seem to defy logic--but they do so in very predictable, consistent ways." It sounds like a good book, and I'm looking forward to reading it. But one of his experiments, described in this MIT Tech Talk article, doesn't really make sense.

Ariely and his students went around and left six-packs of Coke in randomly selected dorm refrigerators all over campus. When he checked back in a few days, all of the Cokes were gone. But when he later placed plates of six loose dollar bills in those same refrigerators, not a single bill was missing when he checked back. Even though the value was comparable--and thus the situations were supposed to be equivalent--people responded in opposite ways.

The problem is with the idea that "the value was comparable -- and thus the situations were supposed to be equivalent." The value is comparable in the sense that the price of a can of soda is around a dollar. But to a person standing thirstily in front of a refrigerator, the value of a can of soda is greater than a dollar. Try leaving a six-pack of Coke and six dollar bills on a municipal garbage can and see which one disappears first.

Update: Good lord! Ariely himself (the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at MIT's Sloan School of Management) responds, both courteously and informatively, in the comments. The internet is amazing.

The Alternative-Science Respectability Checklist:

Believe me, I sympathize. You are in possession of a truly incredible breakthrough that offers the prospect of changing the very face of science as we know it, if not more. The only problem is, you’re coming at things from an unorthodox perspective. Maybe your findings don’t fit comfortably with people’s preconceived notions, or maybe you don’t have the elaborate academic credentials that established scientists take for granted....

Happily, we are here to help. It would be a shame if the correct theory to explain away dark matter or account for the origin of life were developed by someone without a conventional academic position, who didn’t really take a lot of science classes in college and didn’t have a great math background but was always interested in the big questions, only for that theory to be neglected because of some churlish prejudice. So we would like to present a simple checklist of things that alternative scientists should do in order to get taken seriously by the Man. And the good news is, it’s only three items!

P. Z. Myers on this week's stem-cell breakthrough:

Americans did not make this discovery; Japanese researchers did. It required understanding of gene expression in embryonic stem cells, an understanding that was hampered in our country. It's going to require much more confirmation and comparison between the induced pluripotent stem cells and embryonic stem cells as part of the process of making this technique useful....

We are not going to be able to grow new organs and tissues for human beings from a few skin cells using this particular technique. It's going to take more work on embryonic stem cells to figure out how to take any cell from your body, and cleanly and elegantly switch it to a stem cell state that can be molded into any organ you need. What this work says is that yes, we'll be able to do that, it isn't going to be that difficult, and that we ought to be supporting more stem cell research right now so we can work out the details.

Or we can just sit back and let the Japanese and Europeans and Koreans do it for us, which is OK, I suppose. Just keep in mind that ceding the research to others means giving them a head start on the development of all the subsequent breakthroughs, too, and that what we're doing is willingly consigning U.S. research in one of the most promising biomedical research fields ever to an also-ran, secondary status.

Headlines that might at first seem to come from the Onion, but in fact come from the Daily Telegraph: "Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything."

From The Economist:

Once upon a time, the only ideologically acceptable explanations of mental differences between men and women were cultural. Any biologist who dared to suggest in public that perhaps evolution might work differently on the sexes, and that this might perhaps result in some underlying neurological inequalities, was likely to get tarred and feathered.

Today, by contrast, biology tends to be an explanation of first resort in matters sexual. So it is salutary to come across an experiment which shows that a newly discovered difference which fits easily, at first sight, into the biological-determinism camp, actually does not belong there at all.

It's particularly funny watching David Brooks flail around trying to make sense of Darwinism while Robert Wright, who wrote the book on it, is a guest columnist. Today he nails the kind of piece Brooks was trying to write on Thursday. (Wright is kind of my hero, and his The Moral Animal and, especially, Nonzero are crucial pieces of my mental furniture.)

Next in what seems to be turning into a series on popular misperceptions about evolutionary theory: John Seabrook, in his otherwise terrific profile of Sims creator Will Wright, says this about Wright's forthcoming Spore:

In order to create the best content for your style of play—“the right kind of ecosystem for your creature,” as Wright puts it—Spore builds a model of how you play the game, and searches for other players’ content that fits that model. If you create a hyper-aggressive Darwinian monster, for example, the game might download equally cutthroat opponents to test you.

Seabrook is using the word Darwinian as a virtual synonym for "hyper-aggressive," to suggest "nature red in tooth and claw." Of course, strategies of hyper-aggressiveness are Darwinian in the sense that they evolved through natural selection. But as has been argued many times, the same could be said about strategies of cooperativeness or reciprocal altruism. The achievements of human cooperation -- cities, science, language, political structures, the World Series -- are as much a product of our evolutionary heritage as are bloodsports and rape, and to imagine otherwise is to suffer from lazy humanist metaphysics.

Other than that it's a good piece, and Spore looks amazing:

Wright hurtled through the levels, evolution moving at hyperspeed as his creature acquired houses, tools, weapons, vehicles, and cities. While he was narrating his creature’s adventures, Wright was also explaining how, in passing through the different levels of the game, the player would be progressing through the history of video games: from the arcade games, like Pac-Man, to Miyamoto’s Super Mario, to the first-person shooters. At the tribal level you are playing a Peter Molyneux-style God game, and at the global level you are playing Sid Meier’s Civilization.

I have long thought that, pace Dworkin/MacKinnon/Canadian law, it's just as plausible that pornography prevents rape as it is that pornography causes rape. (Seriously, ask Kate Lewis Wright: I remember making this argument to her c. 1989.) Now it turns out that there is empirical data to support this view. Once again, I am right.

New research: Does watching television in early childhood cause autism? Update: Stephen "Freakonomics" Levitt explains why he thinks the research doesn't hold up.

And speaking of that David Brooks column: Brooks describes Louann Brizendine’s The Female Brain as "a breezy — maybe too breezy — summary of hundreds of studies on the neurological differences between men and women." That interjected criticism, "maybe too breezy": Did David fucking Brooks, of all people, really read The Female Brain and say, "Too breezy! Insufficiently technical!"? Or -- speculative alternate theory -- did he read Robin Marantz Henig's review of The Female Brain in last week's Times Book Review, in which Henig, who actually knows something about science, criticized Brizendine for offering "breezy generalizations" instead of factual detail?

David Brooks's column yesterday provided more evidence that he's a total fathead. (You can read it here, if you get TimesSelect.) Summarizing Louann Brizendine’s new book The Female Brain, Brooks takes his readers on a whistle-stop tour of the current wisdom on the physiological basis of gender differences, which segues into a summary of evolutionary psychology:

The prevailing view is that brain patterns were established during the millenniums when humans were hunters and gatherers, and we live with the consequences.... Happiness seems to consist of living in harmony with the patterns that nature and evolution laid down long, long ago.

Where on earth did Brooks get the idea that evolution wants us to be happy? Evolution wants our genes to survive. To that end it has equipped us to be dissatisfied almost all the time, but to imagine that satisfaction is just around the corner if we can just find an attractive mate, eat some food, or improve our social status. (A creature that can easily make itself happy in a lasting way is an evolutionary dead end.) If we want to be happy, our best shot is to fight "the patterns that nature and evolution laid down long ago" as best we can.

This is a classic fallacy of pseudoscientific thinking -- the idea that what is natural is by definition desirable. Why does this guy get to write about stuff he doesn't understand?

You know that "six degrees of separation" thing? Apparently it's bullshit.

"Irrationality is a very infectious disease, as we see from the United States."

Someone has finally come up with a scientific explanation for why Jews are smarter than everyone else.