Elucidations

• Episode 151: Witold Więcek discusses statistics and academic research

  Note: this episode was recorded in August of 2022.In the latest Elucidation, Matt talks to Witold Więcek about the difficulties that come up for researchers who would like to draw upon statistics. Lots of academic fields need to draw heavily on statistics, whether it’s economics, psychology, sociologym, linguistics, computer science, or data science. This means that a lot of people coming from different backgrounds often need to learn basic statistics in order to investigate whatever question they’re investigating. But as we’ve discussed on this podcast, statistical reasoning is easy for beginners to mess up, and it’s also easy for bad faith parties to tamper with in undetectable ways. They can straight up fabricate data, they can cherry pick it, they can keep changing the hypothesis they are testing until they find one that is supported by a trend in the data they have. So what should we do? We can’t give up on statistics; it is simply too useful a tool.Witold Więcek argues that researchers have to be mindful of “p-hacking”. Statistical significance, the golden standard of academic publishing, can easily be guaranteed by unscrupulous research or motivated reasoning: statistically speaking, even noise can look like signal if we keep asking more and more questions of our data. Modern statistical workflows require us to either adjust the results for number of hypotheses tested or to follow principles of Bayesian inference. As a broader strategy, Więcek recommends that every research project making significant use of statistical arguments bring in in an external consultant, who can productively stress test those arguments in an adversarial way, given that they aren’t part of the main team.It was a great conversation! I hope you enjoy it.Matt Teichman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• Episode 150: Shruti Rajagopalan discusses talent in India

  In this episode, Matt sits down with Shruti Rajagopalan (Mercatus Center) to talk about what the future holds for India.We often have a tendency to think of the current economic and geopolitical situation as simply the way things are. Especially for people who grew up in the United States over the past 50 years, the fact that it is an economic and military superpower sorta feels set in stone. But in this episode, Shruti Rajagopalan encourages us to take the long view, regarding the current state of the US as just one phase in a decades or possibly centuries-long economic development life cycle. First, the country logs a certain number of decades as a manufacturing hub, under conditions of minimal top-down interference from regulatory bodies. This enables it to build wealth, which eventually pushes it away from being a manufacturing economy, but it’s a race against the clock. With economic growth comes a rise in average life expectancy, plus a lower birth rate, which together can lead to large aging population. Once the aging population increases, the country’s economy needs to be strong in order to accommodate all the caregiving that an aging population makes necessary.Interestingly, it’s starting to look like some other countries—particularly India—are currently poised to undergo a similar trajectory of economic development that the US did. What makes India stand out is that among the countries in the world with a large young population, they have an unusually high GDP per capita. They also have a pretty sizeable early-career, STEM-savvy middle class that is ready to move anywhere in the world, build a life wherever they end up, and culturally assimilate.Our esteemed guest argues a) that the relaxation of economic restrictions which took place in India in 1991 made this siutation possible, and that b) a few conditions still need to be met for the future to unfold in the optimal way. One is that India needs to build up its manufacturing sector that the country can get richer before the population gets too old. Another is that other countries need to take advantage of the fact that India’s young workforce is ready to emigrate. She even suggests that wealthier countries with a rising elderly population, low birthrate, or declining heritage language could perhaps address those issues by welcoming an incoming population of young workers from India.Join us as our guest outlines the (hopefully) upcoming rise of India on the world stage! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• Episode 149: Lainie Ross and Christos Lazaridis talk about defining death

  In this episode, we are joined by Lainie Ross (University of Rochester Medical Center) and (once again!) Christos Lazaridis (UChicago Medicine), this time to talk about the different ways of defining death.In our previous episode with Christos, we talked about death and the vexed history of attempts to define it. Prior to the advent of modern life support technology in the 1950s, it was usually enough to check whether a person had a heartbeat and could breathe to determine whether they were dead. But once machines were invented that could breathe and circulate blood in patients whose lungs or hearts were failing, a new moral conundrum was born: how do you decide whether a medical patient is dead when it is now possible to keep their lungs breathing and their heart beating indefinitely?In this episode, our distinguished guests talk about the actual criteria that physicians use to determine whether a patient is dead, as well as some possible criteria that no one has tried applying but which some doctors think would be more appropriate. Furthermore, Lainie Ross argues that every person has the right to choose which criteria will be used to determine whether they are dead. These two topics interact in interesting ways.For example, I might have a strong preference for my doctor to pronounce me dead only if I have permanently lost all consciousness, even if I can still spontaneously breathe. Although we currently have no good method of objectively measuring whether a patient has permanently lost consciousness, Dr. Ross argues that I have the moral right to sign an agreement stating my preferences. Specifically: the agreement could state that if, in the future, the technology for determining whether someone has permanently lost consciousness gets invented, and, at that time, I have permanently lost consciousness, then I should be declared dead. On the flipside, some patients prefer a stricter criterion, often for religious reasons. Perhaps it is my religious belief that if I am breathing, then I should be considered to be alive. Lainie Ross argues that in that case, I have the moral right to sign an agreement stating that that is the criterion that doctors will use on me, in the event that I lose consciousness but am still able to spontaneously breathe.As of right now, people only have the legal right to sign these types of agrreements in a handful of states in the US. Join us for this episode as Christos Lazaridis and Lainie Ross argue for making this legal right more widespread! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• Episode 148: Christos Lazaridis discusses brain death

  In this episode, Matt sits down with Christos Lazaridis (University of Chicago Medicine) to chat about what brain death is and whether brain death should count as, like, death death.Modern life support technology really hits its stride in the 1960s, allowing doctors to buy themselves more time to save their patients by connecting them to machines that can assist with breathing, blood oxygenation and/or heart pumping. But the flipside to that incredible technological breakthrough was that the medical community now needed to get more precise about the moment at which a person goes from being alive to being dead. After all, what had previously been a quick window between the two was now, due to life support technology, happening in extreme slow motion. In addition, organ transplanation was becoming more and more commonplace, meaning that it was no longer as simple as saying e.g. ‘I count someone as dead just in case their heart has stopped.’By the early 80s, the United States had settled on a standard definition for when someone counts as dead, which states that a person is dead if they have either permanently lost consciousness or permanently lost the ability to breathe and pump blood with their heart. That criterion makes certain life-saving practices possible; for example, it legally feasible for organ transplantation to begin once a patient has fallen into an irreversible coma, provided they agreed to donate their organs in advance.But should a person really count as dead just because they fell into an irreversible coma? We call that condition ‘brain death’, or sometimes the wordier ‘death by neurological criteria’, and we legally count it as a full death. Critics of the notion of brain death say that it should not count as death, because a person in this condition is still biologically alive. Their argument is that saying a person in this condition is dead is just a story we’re telling ourselves.In this episode, Christos Lazaridis—who is a practicing neurointensivist—argues that even if that is a story we’re telling ourselves, that’s fine, because this is a corner case in which it makes sense for the social/legal status of being dead to come apart from the biological status of being dead. Tune in to hear why he thinks this is the case! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• Episode 147: Gabriella Gonzalez discusses the intersection of algebra and programming

  In this episode, Matt talks to Gabriella Gonzalez about how basic concepts from the branch of math known as abstract algebra can help us simplify our computer programs and organize our thoughts.Algebra. That thing they make us do in school. What was that again? Oh yeah, that’s right; it’s where you get to manipulate equations containing variables. Like, if I have an equation that looks like this:2⋅x = 16Then I can divide both sides by two and get a new version where x stands alone, i.e. solve for x:(2⋅x) / 2 = 16 / 2x = 8If you took algebra in school, you might remember learning a bunch of tricks for pushing parts of equations around to get one of the variables to appear only on one side and thus solve for it. Being able to solve for variables in equations proves useful for lots of things: like, if you can translate a word problem into one of those equations, finding the answer is often as simple as tinkering with the equation in some obvious way.Abstract algebra is somewhat similar in that it also involves manipulating equations containing variables, except the twist is that now you aren’t necessarily manipulating numbers anymore. The variables can stand for something else, and there are more general versions of plus-like, times-like, etc. operations that you can do on these other things. You might be wondering: what on earth could a variable in an equation stand for other than a number? Well, in this episode, Gabriella Gonzalez gives a bunch of examples. You can have equations for cooking recipes, for computer programs, for transactions performed on databases, and for regular expressions. (A regular expression is a special type of computer program for identifying strings that fit a particular pattern and pulling information out of them.)Gonzalez then goes on to argue that the point of all this is to avoid re-inventing the wheel. Often, when you write a computer program to add some numbers, though this isn’t necessariy obvious at the time of writing, you aren’t actually drawing meaningfully on the fact that they’re numbers. If that’s the case, then what you can often do is make your code that adds things abstract so you only have to write your program once, but then you can re-use it on all these different other kinds of entities other than numbers.The overall payoff of all that, according to this month’s distinguished guest, is that by following algebra-driven design, you can keep your code simple and easy to understand, while still having it do fancy things. This is particularly important today, when our software just seems to keep getting fancier and fancier, but the usual ways of accomplishing that goal make it unreliable and well nigh impossible to keep up to date.Join us as Gabriella Gonzalez gives us the tour through various algebraic systems that occur all over the place in computer science, philosophy, and linguistics!Matt Teichman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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