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Random addendum (-da)
Reflections on randomness, water, science, and sex
Posted July 28, 2010
Relaxed bonobo
One should always be a little improbable.
~ Oscar Wilde
Practice improbable acts of kindness (thereby making them less so).
These notes are random, or are they? Lately, I have been bemused by the loose usage of the term ‘random.' People love calling events random that are more properly called ‘improbable,' ‘surprising,' or ‘weird.' If you run into Uncle Harry while trekking in Tibet, this is not random, though it may register as improbable, surprising, or weird, depending how you feel about Uncle Harry. Conversely, throwing snake eyes is random. It occurs with a probability of 1/36. It is also improbable, but only absolutely and not relatively so as each specific combination of numbers resulting from the toss of two dice has that same probability. It may be surprising, but should not be, and it is certainly not weird. Randomness refers to unpredictability, not to the mere fact that the event was not predicted. You did not predict running into Uncle Harry because you did not bother to inquire about his vacation plans when you had the chance. Conversely, no prior inquiry would have told you about the snake eyes.
Germanic water, again
So here is random (or should I say ‘unpredicted') note number one. In an earlier post, I delved into the Germans' obsession with their water. Yes, I got a little emotional, and I beg your forgiveness. I simply enjoy my glass of tap water on ice just like the next American "mit Migrationshintergrund" (with a background of (im)migration). And in Germany you can't get that. You must buy a bottle of overpriced, carbon-enhanced (or flat) spring water or die of dehydration. My analysis is that Germans have created the myth that the water must be overpriced; if it weren't, eateries would go bankrupt and everyone would suffer. Of course, this myth begs the question of why not add a euro or two to the meal ticket? Would the public be so offended that they stopped eating out, again driving the food provision industry into bankruptcy? Why should the myth be more tolerable than fair pricing of individual goods?
I don't have much to add to the matter since I last wrote, except this: (1) The mythical economic food-water-price equilibrium does indeed seem unique to Germany. This summer, I travelled in Austria, which is so very similar (though with a distinctive national consciousness, particularly when it comes to World Cup soccer) to Germany. The food seemed similarly priced, but lo-and-behold, Leitungswasser (tap water) was copious, free of charge, and served with a smile. (2) I have it on good authority that a similar situation prevails in the Danish provinces just across the German border (different language and better soccer than in Austria). (3) The German system shows no signs of slackening since my foundational experiences in 2008. Earlier this month, I went for brunch at one of my old haunts in Berlin. A delightful all-you-can-eat buffet was offered for a mere EUR 7.90 (c. $10). It was a hot day all right, so I asked for water. As my red-blooded American family was not with me (unlike in '08), I did not bother to challenge the taboo on ordering Leitungswasser. As expected, I received a diminutive bottle with brand name carbonated spring water (aka, Rülpswasser or burp water). This little feature ran EUR 6.30 (c. $8). Now being older and more jaded, I did not pick a fight; yet asked the waitress (mit Migrationshintergrund) what she thought of the pricing. She agreed that it was ridiculous and we parted as friends.
Failure to preplicate
Here comes the non-sequitur segue: My 2010 experience with Germans and their water replicated my 2008 experience. This sounds scientific. A successful replication strengthens or solidifies belief. In experimental science, a successful replication boosts confidence but yields few brownie points as no new discovery has been made. Conversely, a failure to replicate yields despair (glee) if the same (a rival) researcher did the original study. Be that as it may, the timing entails an asymmetry. Only the first study stands as a discovery; subsequent studies can only be successful or failed replications.
That's fair you say. After all, the designers of the original study had, well, an original idea. The designers of later studies get by as copy-cats. Meta-analysts don't care about matters of sequence. When a good number of studies on problem X are on record, they compute weighted average effect sizes, and they look for moderator variables and such. The original study no longer has any privileges. Strict determinists also dismiss time. Bertrand Russell once wrote an essay "On the notion of cause," in which he argued that you cannot be a determinist and a champion of causation at the same time. Determinism (if true-and casual theories assume that it is) means that so-called effects entail so-called causes just as much as vice versa.
From Russell, I deduce that a failure (or the lack thereof) to replicate ought to have an equally valid, time-reversed, analogue: The failure to preplicate. If you find nothing in the original study (and manage to get published anyway), then this null result becomes a failure to preplicate when a later study finds something. This happened to me once. My student David Stanke and I (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2001) found strong evidence for social projection. Participants assumed that others shared their personality attributes and social attitudes. Compared with participants in a control condition, the tendency to project one's own properties onto others was not stronger among participants who were cognitively busy, that is, participants who were rehearsing a string of digits at the time of projection. We did not expect this null result. A few years later, Epley and colleagues (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2004) found stronger projection among participants who were working under time pressure than among participants without pressure. From their point of view, this was a failure to replicate our null result. From our point of view, our result was a failure to preplicate theirs.
Choice copying
When there is a failure to p-re-plicate, uncertainty is on the rise and so are the mildly unpleasant emotions that come with that. In another earlier post, I delved into the most murky of questions, namely "What do women want?" Research on choice copying had come to my attention and it said that human females, like guppies and grouse, gravitate toward males that other females are already gravitating to. This makes sense in a heuristic sort of way. If the early gravitators have valid information about the male's fitness as a mate, then later gravitators can save themselves the trouble of collecting this information themselves. The potential trouble, as I see it, is that with excessive choice copying some sufficiently fit males will go empty and so will some females.
There are two problems. One is that I did not mean to make a veiled endorsement of monogamy. The other is "What about males? Do they engage in choice copying too?" The evidence on this is either absent or mixed, so I will argue from a prioris. If it were true that females have a stronger tendency to engage in choice copying than males do, the standard narrative of evolutionary psychology would be supported. According to that narrative, which harkens back to Darwin, both males and females are comfortable with polygyny. The difference is that it is easy for most females to get in on a polygynous arrangment, whereas it is difficult for most men.
The trouble is that the generous size of our testicles casts some pretty big doubt on the standard narrative. In their recent book, Sex at dawn, Ryan and Jethá present a lot of new evidence consistent with the not-so-new theory of sperm competition. According to this theory, much of males' genetic competition plays out at the level of sperm, not at the level of individuals (as it does, for example, in gorilla land). When more males get to mate with a variety of females than the standard view of sexual selection wants you to believe, it is unlikely that females engage in much stronger choice copying than males do. More likely, both sexes engage in some, as suggested in a forthcoming paper in Evolution and Human Behavior (Place, Todd, and colleagues, 2010). Make love, not war. Poppe, net kloppe!
Mr. Bo Nobo (see photo) seems rather relaxed-and don't we know his secret.
Addendum (7/30/10): Human mate choice copying suggests that, colloquially speaking, chicks are the best chick magnets. Informal observation and talking to people who claim to know, suggests further testable hypotheses. Perhaps men become more attractive to women if they, the men, are in the company of children. The standard evolutionary narrative has no trouble with this one. Men with children are presumably fathers and thus have passed several fitness tests. They have already been chosen and thus validated by another woman, and their sperm has done its job, possibly by beating out competing sperm. Moreover, men in the company of children have evidently not run away, thus signaling an ability and willingness to invest in offspring. A weaker, but colloquially endorsed hypothesis says that it is enough for a man to be in the company of pets, especially a dog. The standard narrative seems to fail here because having a dog does not imply validation by a female.
