My wife and I were speculating on how long last Friday’s Rosh Hashanah service would last. We both figured on two hours, but my wife said, “Services always last longer than you expect.”

He poses the question of rational expectations. Despite years and years of experience, Hamermesh (and myself, actually) are really bad at predicting when services will end, even though the prayers are always the same.

So what gives?

Possibly, if you think services are boring, your mindset can affect your expectations about how long services will last (in which direction would depend upon the type of person you are).  Maybe we just have poor memories for this sort of thing.

Personally, I think a large part is variability within the service. At my synagogue, the first day of Rosh Hashannah services lasted a half and hour longer than they did on the second day. The rabbi was in a rush the second day and let the first day drag out. They also started late, but since they started before I got there in both cases, all I observed was the end result.

2. Tyler Cowen talks about the saliva market in South Africa. Apparently, its very competitive.

3. Brazil plans on restricting sugar cane production to prevent deforestation of the Amazon. I guess biofuels aren’t as ecofriendly and environmentalists would like to think. However, I don’t understand why Brazil doesn’t just subsidies rather than legislating more bans. If the costs farmers had to pay where closer to their natural costs, farmers would cut back on their own.

4. Open Economics blogs asks “What is Socialism in 2009?” and is Obama really a socialist? The answer of course is ‘no.’  But, then again, modern liberals are not classical liberals and capitalism was originally a derogatory term, so we’ll see if they left comes to accept the term and try to redefine it for themselves.

5. Toro’s Running of the Bulls blog tackles the large question of market rationality.  It’s a great post, but I think he misstates Jeffery Friedman’s point though. Friedman is trying to point out in the case of the crisis, irrational exuberance came out of government incentives, not market forces. People acted stupidly, but not necessarily irrationally, under the traditional assumptions of what rationality means: they where simply reacting in a predictable way based on the available information. The information turned out to be wrong, but that’s not the fault of 99.9% of investors.

Of course, I’m personally interested in understanding how I can use rational thinking to get ahead, in personal and professional life, but I haven’t seemed to be able to inductively reason how I might go about this. Any ideas?

I don’t think its a stretch to assume that the man had no meteorological basis for making this claim, yet we hear these sorts of statements all the time. Why do people commonly assume that there are physical relationships between past and future events? Or, even worse, that past events can somehow influence the outcome of future events even when lacking a direct causal element?

I’m currently working my way through some of David Hume’s philosophy. He seems to focus on one important notion; that causal relationships, even down to apparent the physical laws of the universe, are influenced by our perceptions. In other words, we assume, despite lack of evidence, that a falling object will conform to Newtonian laws of motion everywhere in the universe. We make inferences about effects without completely understanding the causes because all previous experience has given rise to these expectations – and so we want all future experiences to conform as well. Furthermore, because these experiences must be filtered through human consciousness, events (and our expectation about future events, causes and effects) are inherently biased.

This notion can be extended one step further, by discussing the statement from the guy on the radio.

Not only do people seem to have askeptical expectations about causal relationships (by assuming a deterministic worldview and ignoring the effect of subtle variations on outcomes) and too brazenly draw inferences about the world, but there is also the expectation that the human brain can bend outcomes at will.

Radio guy wills there to be a mild winter and has some expectation that this will occur – despite the lack of data that links weather patterns in this way. Sports fans often wear their lucky jersey or sit in a specific way, in order to meta-influence the game.

Hume was only half way there.

Not only do our minds distort our expectations for cause to preceed a predicted effect, often these expectations are based nothing more than hope, desire and observation biases. Once these biases are set up, we think that our [incorrect] expectations can have an affect on actual outcomes.

to just accept the widely accepted fact that air consists of collection of different gases you need “faith” in that science can really resolve and fully explain this kind of things

I see what he’s getting at and agree to some extent.  The general public accepts 99.9% of the basic scientific principles at face value (just intuitively) without questioning them.  But is this faith akin to religious faith?

We accept scientific principles not because we have some deep religious trust in our scientist (maybe some of the big guns have become an exception) but because the public knows, on some level, the type of rigid attitude scientific method implies.

Its a shame, but we, for the most part, no longer teach children about classic science experiments in school or even much at the university level.  I believe this lack is partly to blame for the confusion between trust and faith when it comes to science.

You cannot easily verify this fact by yourself and so you must in the end trust people that have taken to their mission to find these things out.

We can and do trust scientists to do their jobs, but this trust is not akin to faith. To have faith in the bible means you can’t check the references or repeat the experiment.  Even our most basic scientific principles, however, have been published, largely in a public forum.  Want to read about Newton’s or Maxwell’s early physics experiments?  Go to the library and you’ll see all their data and how they intepreted it.  The same goes for any branch of natural or social sciences.

In fact, here is a monthly blog carnival, The Giant’s Shoulders, dedicated to reconnecting with our scientific past.  Look through some of the posts and see how some of our most basic scientific principles used to be falsifiable, hot button issues, needed to be proven with rigor.

jaskaw, in his original post, makes this general point as well, but seems to imply that this type of trust is rational (in contrast to religious faith).  That I’m not so sure about.

Is it rational to trust scientists – who we know have political or personal agendas, who have been known to lie, publish fradulent data, use their connections to stretch the limits of high standard and peer-reviewed publications for personal gain?  We have a real scientific community, and then there’s the one the media presents us with – and it’s not always friendly – that stretches already tenuous results.  The media promises us miracle cures and cancer drugs every other week, but real progress is much slower.

Maybe people are irrational for trusting scientists so much.  99.9% of us will reach for the pill bottle without even a literature review, trusting the work of corporations and government scientists to do the proper vetting.  This is despite the fact that the media plays up reports of ineffective or dangerous drugs, because bad news sells.

Despite all of this, we approach science with a trusting, almost religious-like, blind eye.  We trust in the scientific process and the painfully slow scientific method somehow gives us great results in the end.  But, if we were truly rational about it, maybe we would reject science altogether?  And I say this as a scientist with a first hand account of what the scientific process is all about.