George Rebane
A recent ’60 Minutes’ surprised me with a segment in which it was reported that placebos worked just as well as drugs like Prozac for fighting depression – well, almost as well. Prozac did have a tiny edge in really severe cases of depression. The research was done by Dr Irving Kirsch of Harvard, and it has reignited a firestorm of debate as to what real effect do many expensive big pharma concoctions have over sugar pills.
The power of the human brainbone to gin up alternative realities has been known for decades. In the Greece of pre-Dorian invasions the gods regularly conversed with individuals and even attended public events such as weddings and other celebrations. Everybody saw them and corroborated each other’s experiences. In the middle ages and later, people actually saw witches fly on broomsticks, and believed such sightings to be as reliable as seeing clouds in the sky. In the modern age anthropologists have discovered and studied a tribe in Papua-New Guinea whose known world has a boundary at a narrow river, the other side of which has always been invisible to the aboriginals.
Some psychologists have identified the responsible region of the brain for such hallucinations in the right hemisphere opposite Wernicke’s area (used in language processing). In any event, most of us have heard some astounding stories and are aware of the power of placebos. It all seems to revolve around the level of credibility (faith) we attribute to the sugar pills presented as medicine and administered by sincere and serious healthcare professionals. And this effect seems to work in spades with anti-depressant medications.
But that wasn’t really what caught my attention in the TV segment. The question that popped up was why did the FDA still allow Prozac et al to tout themselves as the clinically effective standard of care for depression. The answer was that FDA’s approval procedures rate a drug effective, if it bests the performance of placebos in at least two properly conducted drug trials or studies. It could fail to be better in, say, ten previous studies, but as soon as it racks up two victories over the placebo, it gets to go to market.
My instant reaction was ‘Wow! I didn’t know that.’ So if in a (double?) blind trial Prozac and a placebo are each given to two samples of 500 subjects suffering from depression, and Prozac is judged to effectively reduce symptoms in, say, 100 subjects, while the placebo equally reduces symptoms in only 98 subjects, then Prozac wins. There was no requirement of statistical significance or any such technical niceties. Two such victories, and the billions start rolling in.
The question then becomes, what kind of risk do big pharma companies take when bringing to market already developed, marginally performing medicines?
Continue reading "Placebos vs Big Pharma" »
George Rebane
Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona’s Maricopa County is being sued by the Dept of Justice for discrimination through the use of profiling. When ol’ Sheriff Joe stops a car for some traffic, licensing, or other safety violation, it seems that he puts the occupants through an immigration check nine times more frequently when they are Hispanics, than when they are not. This to the feds and other soft heads is clear discrimination through profiling; is it not? Let’s return to the sheriff after a couple of preliminaries.
Most people who put their feelings on the back burner for a bit and revert to reason will agree that discrimination occurs when some benefit or sanction is directed toward a segment of population that is out of kilter with the proportion of the population having an attribute that legally deserves the benefit or sanction.
Let’s say that 15% of county residences have a specific building code violation, and county winds up writing citations and fining 25% of residences for that violation. It is clear that 10% of residences have been discriminated against since they can show that no violation existed on their properties.
Also if a population of equally developmentally handicapped people were supposed to get a certain subsidy, and upon examination it was later found that payments went excessively to a subset of the handicapped that had another attribute (say, they were all tall) not contemplated in the law, then the subset without the secondary attribute (the short ones) suffered discrimination.
It gets a little dicier when we start dealing with realworld uncertainties, and when we have to allocate scarce resources to achieve a certain objective. And this brings us to some of Sheriff Joe’s problems. So let’s get a few numbers under our belt (they may be off a bit, depending on your source, but I tried to get them all from the Census Bureau, so they should work for this discussion.)
Continue reading "Discrimination by the numbers" »
George Rebane
It’s usually tough to divide up a set of assets when a partnership breaks up, spouses get divorced, or any set of in/divisible assets or resources must be allocated between multiple parties. The study of fair division algorithms has seen a considerable amount of research and it isn’t over yet. A good fair division algo that is adopted by negotiating parties will go a long way toward achieving a mutually acceptable outcome. I have found Fair Division: from cake-cutting to dispute resolution (1996) by Brams and Taylor to be an excellent survey of such algos.
We all know how two people should divide a cake into equal pieces so that neither would have a reasonable complaint – the algo prescribes that one cuts the cake, the other chooses his piece. But what happens when there are three or more people who want to divide the cake equally, or even to divide the cake into agreed upon portions? You can see how things can get complicated very quickly.
In this edition we will consider a simple yet powerful algo – let’s call it FD01 (developed by Bronislaw Knaster) – that allows two parties to divide up a disparate set of indivisible assets, one of which consists of cash. The entire schema for FD01 is shown in the spreadsheet figure below.

The left column lists the six assets (the cash asset is not required). Parties A and B agree that their split is 40-60 respectively as shown. Each party has the assets appraised. This step is not required, and may be completed mutually if desired, or the two appraisals may even be shared.
Both parties, using all the information available to each that may include tax considerations, future plans, and knowledge of the other’s propensities, will now place a ‘bid value’ by each asset that represents his own assessment of what he considers to be the dollar value of the asset to be used in the subsequent calculations. Each party submits a sealed bid list for all assets to be divided. The bid values for each are listed in their respective columns.
Continue reading "Fair Division 101" »
George Rebane
The curious and inexplicable course of our polarized public discourse has been examined for some time in these pages, even to the extent that ‘The Liberal Mind’ is an RR category of collected posts on this issue. To a reasonable person on the so-called Right, the reasoning processes of the so-called Left are an enduring puzzle, even though the outcomes of such processes are relatively easy to predict. I don’t know whether people of the Left have similar problems understanding our reasoning processes, but I presume that they do.
These questions are neither idle nor unimportant as indicated by the increasing level of academic research devoted to the area. A landmark study done at University College London, reported here, discovered measurable differences in the active brain areas of conservatives and liberals when they considered socio-political issues informed by their separate ideologies. This research indicated that with appropriate brain imaging equipment in place, it is possible to tell from the resulting images whether the subject studied is a self-professed liberal or conservative.
Now Dr Jonathan Haidt, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, has documented his examination of how liberals and conservatives differ in The Righteous Mind (two reports on it here and here). The results from Haidt and his research team are both revealing and illuminating. Even the noted progressive NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof reports that these results “help demystify the right”.
Dr Haidt’s research indicates that Americans speak of social values in “six languages” (aka six dimensions). Kristof states that “Conservatives speak all six, but liberals are fluent in only three. And some (me included) mostly use just one, care for victims.” The liberals’ three languages of social discourse are in a manifold whose three dimensions are – caring for the weak, fairness, and liberty. The conservatives share these three, with a somewhat different view of fairness and liberty, and add to their manifold of thinking/expression three more – loyalty, respect for authority, and sanctity. These three are also tagged as “binding values” that bind people together into larger groups.
Continue reading " The Liberal Mind – Yes Virginia, we really are different (updated 10apr12)" »
‘Why the technical stuff?’
George Rebane
I was asked that question recently by a regular RR reader. He went on to opine that not many of my readers would make the effort to understand all that high falootin’ stuff and just skip over it. In short, I’m wasting time and effort in offering up such posts. And, of course, he may be right. When you’re selling, you never want to discount what a customer tells you. And make no mistake about it, I am selling my little heart out here on RR.
As I later reflected on the reader’s question, it occurred to me that it’s been some years now since I posted anything on the larger purpose and objective(s) for flogging the keyboard and debating various esoteria with RR commenters. Being a rewarded lifelong teacher has provided some intrinsic impetus to this enterprise – first in the Army, then with my kids and grandkids (no claims of success there), as a professional engineer/scientist/academic, and now again working with high schoolers.
RR is structured to continuously build on what has been written and discussed before in its pages. I attempt to back-link all of its pieces to their appropriate ancestors, in addition to the usual outside references. To the extent that this is successful, RR is an accumulating body of thought offered by me, and subsequently expanded and critiqued by the blog’s commenters. Relatively few pieces here start out of whole cloth. I make a considerable and not always successful effort to circle the barn as few times as possible; previous orbits on any given topic are always available by searching RR through its built in function or with an engine like Google (just add ‘rebane’ to the keyword list, and voila!).
Ideologically I am a conservetarian, promoting a careful and hopefully coherent amalgam of conservative and libertarian thought as seen through the Austrian lens. For good or ill, I am an elitist. I know I cannot reach everyone with all possible ideas/notions through my heartfelt diatribes, so I just try to target and contend with a small number of interested readers, all of whom should evince that they have at least three solid digits in their IQ. In that and other things, I am terribly incorrect according to the dominant political perspective of the day as spouted by both Republicans and Democrats.
Continue reading "‘Why the technical stuff?’" »
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