Posts Tagged ‘superstition’
“I made no resolutions for the New Year. The habit of making plans, of criticizing, sanctioning and molding my life, is too much of a daily event for me.”*…
For many, the turn of a new year is a time of introspection– and a time of commitment to improvement. The Pew Research Center weighs in on how we’re doing with that…
It’s the time of year when New Year’s resolutions are made – and sometimes broken.
Three-in-ten Americans report making at least one resolution this year, with half of this group making more than one, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.
Nearly a month into the new year, the survey also finds that most people who made resolutions have stuck with them, although 13% say they have not kept any of them.
…
Across all age groups, sizable majorities of those who made resolutions this year say their goals focus on health, exercise or diet.
Overall, 79% say their resolutions concern health. Smaller but still sizable shares made resolutions about money or finances (61%), personal relationships (57%), hobbies or personal interests (55%), or work and career (49%).
…
Less than a month into the new year, a large majority of those who made resolutions (87%) say they have kept at least some of them.
About six-in-ten adults who made at least one resolution (59%) say they have kept all of them so far, while 28% say they have kept some of them. Another 13% say they have kept none of them.
There are only modest demographic differences when it comes to who has broken resolutions and who has stuck with them so far.
Of the 70% of Americans who did not make any New Year’s resolutions this year, a majority (56%) say their main reason for not doing so is they simply do not like to make resolutions.
About one-in-ten (12%) of those who didn’t make a resolution say they break them too easily. Nearly as many (9%) say they couldn’t think of a resolution to make, while 6% say they forgot to make one this year…
“New Year’s resolutions: Who makes them and why,” from @pewresearch.
* Anais Nin
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As we revisit resolve, we might recall that today is Groundhog Day, rooted in Pennsylvania Dutch lore that if a groundhog emerging from its burrow on this day sees its shadow due to clear weather, it will retreat to its den and winter will persist for six more weeks; if it does not see its shadow because of cloudiness, spring will arrive early.
The “official” groundhog is named Punxsutawney Phil, who appears from his hole at Gobbler’s Knole in Pennslyvania every year since 1887. (That said, the first recorded celebration of Groundhog Day, then still known as Candlemas Day, was in the year 1841 in Morgantown, PA.)
While the tradition remains popular in the 21st century, studies have found no consistent correlation between a groundhog seeing its shadow and the subsequent arrival time of spring-like weather.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”*…
It seems that money can trump sin, at least in the professional services arena in Italy…
We investigate if organized crime groups (OCG) are able to hire good accountants. We use data about criminal records to identify Italian accountants with connections to OCG. While the work accountants do for the OCG ecosystem is not observable, we can determine if OCG hire “good” accountants by assessing the overall quality of their work as external monitors of legal businesses. We find that firms serviced by accountants with OCG connections have higher quality audited financial statements compared to a control group of firms serviced by accountants with no OCG connections. The findings provide evidence OCG are able to hire good accountants, despite the downside risk of OCG associations. Results are robust to controls for self-selection, for other determinants of auditor expertise, direct connections of directors and shareholders to OCG, and corporate governance mechanisms that might influence auditor choice and audit quality.
“Does the Mafia Hire Good Accountants?“
Commenting on the report, Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) notes…
The authors suggest that when the mafia chooses an accountant, they have to choose between two mutually exclusive strategies:
I. Hire a stupid accountant that you can trick into signing off on dirty books; or
II. Hire a smart accountant who can turn your dishonest business into one that is honest on paper, even if that erodes your profits.
The authors make a compelling case that the mafia choose the second strategy. What’s more, they show that even accountants with known mob connections have no trouble finding non-criminal clients (“it is disheartening the Mafia can hire seemingly good accountants who appear to suffer no adverse reputation effects from their Mafia ties”).
Perhaps that’s because the mafia is so crucial to both the Italian and global business world: the authors quote a 2017 ISTAT study that says that 12% of Italian GDP is mafia activity and a 2011 UNODC study that attributes 3.6% of global GDP to Italian mafia groups.
But it would be a mistake to think that just because the mafia has clean books that it runs good businesses. Businesses that are run or colonized by mobsters aren’t good firms – they pay poorly, produce low-quality goods and services, and engage in a variety of crimes and regulatory violations.
This is a fascinating and clever analysis, though it’s short on recommendations. The most concrete policy proposal the authors advance is for police to maintain a public registry of accountants under investigation for mafia ties, and to bar those accountants from practicing until they are cleared…
* Upton Sinclair
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As we deconstruct the devil’s due, we might note that today is Groundhog Day, rooted in Pennsylvania Dutch lore that if a groundhog emerging from its burrow on this day sees its shadow due to clear weather, it will retreat to its den and winter will persist for six more weeks; if it does not see its shadow because of cloudiness, spring will arrive early.
While the tradition remains popular in the 21st century, studies have found no consistent correlation between a groundhog seeing its shadow and the subsequent arrival time of spring-like weather.
“It is unwise to be too sure of one’s own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.”*…
An 1874 engraving showing a probably apocryphal account of Newton’s lab fire. In the story, Newton’s dog started the fire, burning 20 years of research. Newton is thought to have said: “O Diamond, Diamond, thou little knowest the mischief thou hast done.”
Imagine a black box which, when you pressed a button, would generate a scientific hypothesis. 50% of its hypotheses are false; 50% are true hypotheses as game-changing and elegant as relativity. Even despite the error rate, it’s easy to see this box would quickly surpass space capsules, da Vinci paintings, and printer ink cartridges to become the most valuable object in the world. Scientific progress on demand, and all you have to do is test some stuff to see if it’s true? I don’t want to devalue experimentalists. They do great work. But it’s appropriate that Einstein is more famous than Eddington. If you took away Eddington, someone else would have tested relativity; the bottleneck is in Einsteins. Einstein-in-a-box at the cost of requiring two Eddingtons per insight is a heck of a deal.
What if the box had only a 10% success rate? A 1% success rate? My guess is: still most valuable object in the world. Even an 0.1% success rate seems pretty good, considering (what if we ask the box for cancer cures, then test them all on lab rats and volunteers?) You have to go pretty low before the box stops being great.
I thought about this after reading this list of geniuses with terrible ideas. Linus Pauling thought Vitamin C cured everything. Isaac Newton spent half his time working on weird Bible codes. Nikola Tesla pursued mad energy beams that couldn’t work. Lynn Margulis revolutionized cell biology by discovering mitochondrial endosymbiosis, but was also a 9-11 truther and doubted HIV caused AIDS. Et cetera. Obviously this should happen. Genius often involves coming up with an outrageous idea contrary to conventional wisdom and pursuing it obsessively despite naysayers. But nobody can have a 100% success rate. People who do this successfully sometimes should also fail at it sometimes, just because they’re the kind of person who attempts it at all. Not everyone fails. Einstein seems to have batted a perfect 1000 (unless you count his support for socialism). But failure shouldn’t surprise us…
Some of the people who have most contributed to our understanding of the world have been inexcusably wrong on basic issues. But, as Scott Alexander argues, you only need one world-changing revelation to be worth reading: “Rule Thinkers In, Not Out.”
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As we honor insight where we find it, we might send carefully-addressed birthday greetings to Infante Henrique of Portugal, Duke of Viseu, better known as Prince Henry the Navigator; he was born on this date in 1394. A central figure in 15th-century Portuguese politics and in the earliest days of the Portuguese Empire, Henry encouraged Portugal’s expeditions (and colonial conquests) in Africa– and thus is regarded as the main initiator (as a product both of Portugal’s expeditions and of those that they encouraged by example) of what became known as the Age of Discoveries.
“What the mind doesn’t understand, it worships or fears”*…
Vaccination rates are plummeting at top Hollywood schools, from Malibu to Beverly Hills, from John Thomas Dye to Turning Point, where affluent, educated parents are opting out in shocking numbers (leaving some schools’ immunization rates on par with South Sudan) as an outbreak of potentially fatal whooping cough threatens L.A. like “wildfire”…
Read @GarymBaum’s fascinating– and chilling– story (and find the interactive version of the map above) at “Hollywood’s Vaccine Wars: L.A.’s “Entitled” Westsiders Behind City’s Epidemic.” See also: “The Calculus of Contagion.”
[TotH to Quartz for the pointer]
* Alice Walker
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As we steel ourselves for the prick, we might spare a thought for Abraham Flexner; he died on this date in 1959. The founding director of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies, Flexner is best remembered for his pioneering work as a reformer of American higher education, especially medical education. On the heels of his 1908 study, The American College, in which he effectively critiqued the university lecture as a method of instruction, he published the Flexner Report, which examined the state of American medical education and led to far-reaching reform in the training of doctors. The report called on American medical schools to enact higher admission and graduation standards, and to adhere strictly to the protocols of mainstream science in their teaching and research. While one unintended consequence of Flexner’s impactful advocacy was the reversion of American universities to male-only admittance programs to accommodate a smaller admission pool (female admissions picked up again only later the century), most historians agree with his biographer, Thomas Bonner, that Flexner was “the severest critic and the best friend American medicine ever had.”
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