brendan_oconnor_ai brendan_oconnor_ai-2004 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
1 brendan oconnor ai-2004-12-02-go science
Introduction: Is social science even worth doing when things like this get funded with hundreds of millions of federal dollars? Many American youngsters participating in federally funded abstinence-only programs have been taught over the past three years that abortion can lead to sterility and suicide, that half the gay male teenagers in the United States have tested positive for the AIDS virus, and that touching a person’s genitals “can result in pregnancy,” a congressional staff analysis has found. … Among the misconceptions cited by Waxman’s investigators: • A 43-day-old fetus is a “thinking person.” • HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, can be spread via sweat and tears. • Condoms fail to prevent HIV transmission as often as 31 percent of the time in heterosexual intercourse. … When used properly and consistently, condoms fail to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) less than 3 percent of the time, federal researchers say, and it is not known how many gay teena
2 brendan oconnor ai-2004-11-24-addiction & 2 problems of economics
Introduction: This is my idea based off of Bernheim and Rangel’s model of addict decision-making . It’s a really neat model; it manages to relax rationality to allow someone to do something they don’t want to do because they’re addicted to it. [Rationality assumes a nice well-ordered set of preferences; this model hypothesizes as distinction between emotional "liking" and cognitive, forward "wanting" that can conflict.] The model is mathematically tractable, it can be used for public welfare analysis, and to top it off — it’s got neuroscientific grounding! It appears to me there are two big criticisms of the economics discipline’s assumptions. One of course is rationality. The second has to do with the perfect structure of the market and environment that shapes both preferences and the ability to exercise them. One critique is about social structure: consumers are not atomistic individual units, but rather exchange information and ideas along networks of patterned social relations. (Socia
3 brendan oconnor ai-2004-11-20-gintis: theoretical unity in the social sciences
Introduction: Herbert Gintis thinks it’s time to unify the behavioral sciences. Sociology, economics, political science, human biology, anthropology and others all study the same thing, but each is based on different incompatible models of individual human behavior. There seems to be evidence that new developments have the potential to offer a more unifying theory. Evolutionary biology should be the basis of understanding much of human behavior. Rational choice and game theoretic frameworks are finding greater acceptance beyond economics; in the meantime, other fields need to absorb sociology’s emphasis on socialization — that people do things or understand the world in a way taught by society. The human behavioral sciences are still rife with many smaller inconsistencies; for example, according to Gintis, only anthropolgists look at the influence of culture across groups, but only sociologists look at culture within groups. Gintis’ ultimate goal is to have a common baseline from which each disci