You’re Probably Not Mostly Microbes

We are, supposedly, outnumbered in our own bodies. We play host to an extraordinary menagerie of bacteria and other microbes—the microbiome—and it’s frequently said that these teeming cells outnumber our own by ten to one. This 10:1 ratio crops up everywhere. It appears in scientific papers, blog posts, magazine stories, TED talks, and popular science books—sometimes, even in the very title. It is undoubtedly one of the most famous statistics about the micro biome.

And it’s probably wrong.

It’s the result of a back-of-the-envelope calculation that became enshrined as hard fact based on little more than its catchy nature and its sounds-about-right-ness.

According to a new review by Ron Milo at the Weizmann Institute of Science, the correct ratio is more like 1:1. That is, in terms of cell counts, we and our microbes are equal shareholders. We’re not outnumbered after all. Indeed, as Milo so wonderfully writes, “the numbers are similar enough that each defecation event may flip the ratio to favor human cells over bacteria.” You gain temporary dominance over your own body with every flush.

- More Here

Quote of the Day

Erudition without bullshit, intellect without cowardice, courage without imprudence, mathematics without nerdiness, scholarship without academia, intelligence without shrewdness, religiosity without intolerance, elegance without softness, sociality without dependence, enjoyment without addiction, religion without tolerance, and, above all, nothing without skin in the game.

Nassim Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

January Is a Cloudy Crystal Ball

Given the vast number of variables that might be used to predict stock prices, it’s possible that even a high degree of accuracy of the January barometer is a purely random outcome.

“If you have a truly random variable, and there are, say, 60 million possibilities, it’s impossible not to find some pattern somewhere,” said Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a professor of risk engineering at New York University, author of “The Black Swan” and a former derivatives trader on Wall Street. “You might well find a correlation between changes in your grandmother’s blood pressure and stock prices. But that’s a spurious correlation.”

He added, “It’s surprising we don’t have more weird correlations, given the vast number of possible variables and the large number of markets we have.”

Professor Goldin said that if you flipped enough coins every year, you would most likely find one that predicted stock prices with 100 percent accuracy. “You could call that a magic coin,” she said. “It has an impressive correlation looking backward. The problem is, it wouldn’t give you any sense of how well it’s going to do going forward.”

That seems to have been an issue lately with the January barometer, whose accuracy in recent years has been slipping. Over the last 10 years, it gave false negative indications in 2014, 2010, 2009 and 2005, and a false positive in 2011.

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Professor Taleb said that despite this week’s decline in share prices, he would not be buying United States stocks now because of high valuations, rising interest rates and the continuing plunge in commodity prices. And while that decision has nothing to do with a bearish forecast from the January barometer, he doesn’t entirely dismiss such market maxims.

“One thing you learn as a trader is, don’t bet against the folk wisdom,” he said. “The odds are this is a purely random outcome, but sometimes there’s a kernel of truth in these sayings.”

- More Here

Steve Jobs

Expecting it to be bad, I had postponed watching this movie forever; but I was wrong. It's worth a watch just for splendid screenplay.

Andy Hertzfeld: We're not a pit crew at Daytona. This can't be fixed in seconds.

Steve Jobs: You didn't have seconds, you had three weeks. The universe was created in a third of that time.

Andy Hertzfeld: Well, someday you'll have to tell us how you did it.

Quote of the Day

Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.

- Marcel Proust

Wisdom Of The Week

 I'm all for shutting down the crooked ways to get rich. But that won't eliminate great variations in wealth, because as long as you leave open the option of getting rich by creating wealth, people who want to get rich will do that instead.

Most people who get rich tend to be fairly driven. Whatever their other flaws, laziness is usually not one of them. Suppose new policies make it hard to make a fortune in finance. Does it seem plausible that the people who currently go into finance to make their fortunes will continue to do so but be content to work for ordinary salaries? The reason they go into finance is not because they love finance but because they want to get rich. If the only way left to get rich is to start startups, they'll start startups. They'll do well at it too, because determination is the main factor in the success of a startup. [3] And while it would probably be a good thing for the world if people who wanted to get rich switched from playing zero-sum games to creating wealth, that would not only not eliminate great variations in wealth, but might even exacerbate them. In a zero-sum game there is at least a limit to the upside. Plus a lot of the new startups would create new technology that further accelerated variation in productivity.

Variation in productivity is far from the only source of economic inequality, but it is the irreducible core of it, in the sense that you'll have that left when you eliminate all other sources. And if you do, that core will be big, because it will have expanded to include the efforts of all the refugees. Plus it will have a large Baumol penumbra around it: anyone who could get rich by creating wealth on their own account will have to be paid enough to prevent them from doing it.

You can't prevent great variations in wealth without preventing people from getting rich, and you can't do that without preventing them from starting startups.

- Economic Inequality by Paul Graham

Quote of the Day

It’s a safe guess, though, that most of the people targeted by gratitude exhortations actually have something to be grateful for, such as Janice Kaplan, the author of the memoir “The Gratitude Diaries,” who spent a year appreciating her high-earning husband and successful grown children. And it is here that the pro-social promise of gratitude begins to dim. True, saying “thank you” is widely encouraged, but much of the gratitude advice involves no communication or interaction of any kind.

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The real challenge of gratitude lies in figuring out how to express our debt to them, whether through generous tips or, say, by supporting their demands for decent pay and better working conditions. But now we’re not talking about gratitude, we’re talking about a far more muscular impulse — and this is, to use the old-fashioned term, “solidarity” — which may involve getting up off the yoga mat.

-The Selfish Side of Gratitude

Profile of Robert Trivers

Trivers’ first paper, on the evolution of reciprocal altruism, described a theoretical model showing how altruism among strangers could naturally develop—people cooperate with the expectation of similar treatment from others. This model explained a wide variety of feelings and behaviors, from friendship to moralistic aggression. The emotion of gratitude, for instance, evolved to motivate us to return favors, encouraging cooperation. Guilt motivates us to repair relationships we’ve harmed. Anger makes us avoid or punish those who have harmed us. And gossip makes us mindful of our reputations. Trivers suggested that complex strategies of cheating, detecting cheating, and the false accusation of cheating (itself a form of cheating) pushed the development of intelligence and helped increase the size of the human brain.

Next, in Trivers’ second paper, he hypothesized that a single factor drives sex differences across all species. He argued that differences in parental investment—the energy and resources invested in an offspring—lead the sex that invests more (females, in most species) to focus on mate quality and the sex that invests less (males) to seek quantity. So in humans we expect choosiness in females and aggression between males as they vie for females. The theory has tremendous explanatory power, from justifying the brightly colored feathers of male birds to illuminating why sexual jealousy is a leading (and, until recently, legally defensible) cause of homicide—men prize their mate’s fidelity above all.

In another paper, Trivers conceptualized offspring not as passive recipients of parental investment, but as independent actors, generating the theory of parent-offspring conflict. A child wants disproportionate attention and resources for him- or herself, but a parent wants to spread the goods equally between all offspring. And so we have kids who bawl until they get what they want, siblings who maintain lifelong rivalries, and parents who try to instill equality no matter how selfish the kids’ tendencies. It was for these three papers, plus another two, on insect colonies and on parents’ ability to vary the sex ratio of their offspring, that he won the Crafoord.

In each paper, he found a simple, clear idea, and took it as far as it would go, wrapping diverse and widespread phenomena together in one neat package. You might not have made the connections before, but once you see them, they’re quite clear. “Trivers has answered some of the most profound questions about the human condition,” Pinker  told me. “Namely, why are our relationships with other people such complicated mixtures of cooperation and conflict? He did so with a simple, though nonobvious, analysis of the patterns of overlap and nonoverlap of our long-term genetic interests.” According to David Haig, a geneticist at Harvard and a longtime friend and collaborator of Trivers, “Bob has a great ability to see questions as simple and not be distracted by details.” Richard Dawkins praises him for applying economic ideas to biology “with greater clarity of mind than any biologist since R. A. Fisher,” the knighted geneticist.

- More Here and his second memoir Wild Life: Adventures of an Evolutionary Biologist is out.

Quote of the Day

Wisdom is one of the few things that looks bigger the further away it is.

- Terry Pratchett

Quote of the Day

There's a sort of Gresham's Law of conversations. If a conversation reaches a certain level of incivility, the more thoughtful people start to leave.

- Paul Graham