Counterintuitive Fall 2024

I try to keep my politics in check in the classroom and just be upset about everything no matter which side of the House it comes from, so I apologize that this article has Republicans in the title and wants to pick a fight with a political party. I promise I’m equally offended by both parties and would post it if it blamed Democrats for being insane too.

In their purported effort to slash the national budget and restore us to fiscal sanity, the Republican budget plan would cut $1.6 billion from the Environmental Protection Agency which, it claims, is smothering our fragile economy with job-killing legislation. In part, the cuts are deliberately designed to curtail EPA programs to encourage renewable energy.

At the same time, the budget defends and leaves intact $4 billion in subsidies to the oil and gas producing companies. Why? Ending the subsidies would amount to tax increases which would cost American jobs.

Pro Publica has the story, but you can find it elsewhere too and, of course, it’s not really news. We’ve been subsidizing the enormously profitable oil companies for decades in our hurry to burn everything on earth.

I hope you’re finding me helpful, not only an irritant. If you hate your topic already and need something counterintuitive—and quickly!—and no other suggestion I’ve offered appeals to you, here’s another I’m working on that might turn out to be true. Either way, it’s splendidly C/I, if you know what I mean.

Here are some general interest links. I hope you’ll be able to find objective scientific reports in the databases.

Mixed Results From Dispersants

Dispersants Long Term Effects

Dispersants “Sticking Around”

Dispersants Lingering in Gulf Long After Oil Spill

Corexit Suspected in Widespread Crop Damage

Dispersant May Make Deepwater Spill More Toxic

Chemicals Present New Environmental Concerns

Radio Times Program with “The Father of Green Chemistry” Paul Anastas

Paul Anastas is a deadly bore, but the discussion about dispersants is brief, beginning about the -17:00 minute mark. Read all the popular press reports about dispersants, listen to the broadcast, then make up your mind about what’s crazier, using dispersants or not using dispersants.

Equally terrifying (and discussed in the broadcast) are the hundreds of toxic chemicals energy companies eject directly into the underground stores of natural gas to “fracK’ or fracture the rock that traps the gas so they can pipe it to the surface. I’ve mentioned the politics of fracking elsewhere, in a Reading List entry called “Fracking Money.”

Is it possible long exposure to “procedural TV shows” like CSI has tainted jurors’ expectations? Do citizens sitting on juries expect investigators to have DNA results in 20 minutes, or to employ extremely high-tech methods to catching and convicting every criminal who comes to trial?

An investigation by NPR, PBS Frontline and ProPublica titled “Post Mortem” has exposed how death investigation in America is nothing like what you see on TV. That shouldn’t be too surprising; still, prosecutors complain that shows like CSI make it more likely that jurors will expect ultra-high-tech tests before they’re willing to convict suspects.

What prosecutors call The CSI Effect makes it increasingly difficult to get convictions in the courtroom, they say.

The producers of the CSI series think jurors are too sophisticated to expect computer programs to deliver the detailed and instantaneous results their programs sometimes portray. Still, many legal experts insist jurors often confuse fact with fiction. They feel pressure to convince juries they’ve employed every available high-tech forensic test before they can convince jurors the defendant is guilty.

What do you think? Can this question be researched with credible results?

If you don’t know already, the team of journalists responsible for the book Freakonomics and the New York Times column of the same name, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, have greatly influenced my thinking about thinking. They have devoted their careers so far to researching common topics in search of unexpected reasons for common causes. And the reverse, if that makes sense.

Take fossil fuels, for example. Why do we continue to burn them after all we know about how they strangle the planet? Because they’re still so cheap. Yes, even when it costs $500 a month to heat our houses, burning what we find below the earth’s crust is still cheaper than anything else we’ve discovered to heat space. Or is it? If we factor the actual cost of all the consequences of burning fossil fuels, the health costs and the environmental costs, nobody could possibly afford to shoulder his share of the burden. We don’t pay for those costs in our utilities bills. And until we do, oil and gas and coal will seem cheap.

The same is true for cars versus public transportation. Is it cheaper to drive to New York City than to take the train? It sure seems so, no matter what gas costs this week. But that highway wasn’t free; clearing it of snow isn’t free; patrolling it with state troopers isn’t free; the real cost of gasoline would break anybody’s budget if we really paid its true cost at the pump, and so on. Until we pay the true costs of commodities, we have no clear concept of what’s really “cheap.”

So, what if cigarettes cost $222 a pack? Maybe they actually do cost $222 a pack, but the cost isn’t collected by the Wawa cashier. Maybe if somebody offered to pay a smoker $222 for every pack she didn’t smoke, she’d find the motivation to quit? Freakonomics sheds some light on these questions.

From there, if you wish, you can quickly link to a more general discussion of the Economy of Desire. Any way you enter the counterintuitive world of freakonomics, you’ll find plenty of unexpected causes and effects.

Consider: the darkening ease, the brightening trouble; the pleasure pleasure because it was, the pain pain because it shall be; the glad acts grown proud, the proud acts growing stubborn; the panting and trembling towards a being gone, a being to come; and the true true no longer, and the false true not yet. And to decide not to smile after all, sitting in the shade, hearing the cicadas, wishing it were night, wishing it were morning, saying, No, it is not the heart, no, it is not the liver, no, it is not the prostate, no, it is not the ovaries, no, it is muscular, it is nervous.

Samuel Beckett
Watt (1943)

A master of the counterintuitive in fiction.

It’s 5:30 Sunday morning, so of course I’m up, thinking counterintuitively. This time I’m not alone. The broadcaster on WIP is interviewing Tobias (Toby) Moskowitz about common misconceptions in sports.

Home field advantage isn’t about staying home while the visitors have to travel to a distant city. It’s not about playing on the frozen tundra to which you’re accustomed while your opponent has to tough out the unfamiliar conditions. It isn’t about the support you feel from thousands of cheering fans clad in your team colors.

It’s the referees. They’re more likely to make calls in favor of the home team. Or so Moskowitz and his team of researchers have concluded, after years of study. These and other common sense but not often cited observations debunk sports myths you may have used to win arguments all your life. They could be a great prompt to your own research into any number of misconceptions about your favorite game, sport, or team.

Scorecasting by Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim.

“Scorecasting is both scholarly and entertaining, a rare double. It gets beyond the clichéd narratives and tried-but-not-necessarily-true assumptions to reveal significant and fascinating truths about sports.” —Bob Costas

Two Mississippi men spent a combined 30 years in prison for crimes they didn’t commit. They were separately charged with sexually assaulting and murdering two 3-year-old girls — in two separate crimes — two years apart. The pathologist who conducted both autopsies said he suspected the girls had been bitten. In both cases only top teeth marks were found. Link to the video here.

Life and death consequences result from believing what isn’t true. For two convicted murderers in Mississippi, only the efforts of The Innocence Project rescued them from death row.

I hope someone will research the topic of capital convictions overturned by DNA evidence.

Into all this counterintuitivity about cancer detection and training doctors to be better predictors of nascent tumors, I would be remiss if I did not introduce an update on the amazing and truly bizarre ability of dogs to sniff out cancers in humans with perfect accuracy. So here’s the link.

There’s a growing body of research showing that children exposed to lots of germs early in life are less likely to develop allergies, asthma or autoimmune disorders as they grow up. But now there’s a new twist on the theory, known as the hygiene hypothesis in scientific circles, and it’s about little girls in cute little dresses.

In an article in the peer-reviewed journal Social Science and Medicine, Sharyn Clough, a philosopher of science at Oregon State University who studies research bias, says young girls are held to a higher standard of cleanliness than young boys, a discrepancy that could help explain later health differences. Girls are expected to stay squeaky clean while boys are encouraged to play outside, Clough argues. And that might explain why women have higher rates of certain illnesses.

Read the story here.

As I did in Counterintuitive Research Ideas 01, I will continue to offer suggestions for topics that offer opportunities for original research with counterintuitive results. I will very shortly be scrutinizing your research proposals for evidence that you’ve taken these suggestions seriously and are not content to do the same old research paper filled with citations of the opinions of others. They’ll have to show original thinking and, with luck, surprising results. Consider these examples.

KILLER PRODUCTS.
When is it a good time to tell customers your product can kill them?

Stock prices for the big four US cigarette makers soared the day after the government settled its case against them and levied billions of dollars of fines. The terms of the settlement forced the companies to stop advertising their products in magazines. The companies cannot show people smoking on billboards. They must of course post ever more frightening messages directly on their packages, warning customers exactly what sorts of painful cancers they are buying. The companies are even required to fund an independently-produced big-budget ad campaign, “The Truth Campaign,” promoting anti-smoking messages of all kinds. Yes, these are paid for by the cigarette companies. And yes, stock prices soared when the details of the settlement were released. Did the ban against cigarette ads work? The links might get you started.

KILLING GOOD IDEAS. How is it possible that business leaders who specialize in killing good ideas succeed, sometimes phenomenally?

They do so by recognizing that even the best ideas are sometimes doomed by development costs or market reluctance. Which would be more interesting as a research topic: following the history of the splendid failures of products that should have worked but never caught on? or the example of an idea that was turned down repeatedly before it finally found its way to market? (I once heard a story of an inventor who wanted to vend hot cheese snacks directly from machines. He got to market eventually, but the product he ended up selling is more like a pretzel bite stuffed with cheese, and a cold one.) On the other hand, Steve Jobs‘s willingness to shoot down brilliant ideas is legendary, and perhaps the key to his success (unless you consider the iPad a pretzel bite).

CHEAP PLAYERS MAKE A BETTER TEAM. Billy Beane was a very highly-paid prospect his first year in baseball but never performed as expected. Then he figured out why. He’d been paid on the basis of irrelevant statistics.

When he became the GM of the Oakland As, he applied ground-breaking statistical analysis tools to his job of building a team through trades and acquisitions. Among his counterintuitive insights: players who make more errors are often better fielders than players who don’t. They’re catching balls that would have been scored hits. When they miss one and are charged an error, it’s often a ball inferior fielders wouldn’t have tried to field (and wouldn’t have been penalized for missing). For pitchers, wins are irrelevant; strikeouts are not. For batters, what matters is OBP, not BA. Beane built his team by bargain-shopping players other teams undervalued. A classic of counterintuitive thinking from the sports world.