Rational hubris?

In a paper published today in Nature, my friend and colleague Dominic Johnson and his collaborator James Fowler report the results from a model that sought to understand the conditions under which humans should be overconfident.  They found that under a wide range of conditions, engaging in a strategy where actors over-evaluated their ability to compete for a resource out performed a strategy where actors had unbiased assessments of the likelihood that they would successfully obtain that resource.  In a line it works when the  benefit of the resource is typically greater than the cost of fighting which is likely to be a common finding in nature.

So, why is this an important finding?  It suggests that it's rational to be over-confident about one's abilities.  Thus, traders are behaving rationally when they bet on low performing stocks to do well or take what look like huge risks with large sums of other people's money.  Or people buy homes when they know they're in a speculative bubble betting that they'll still be able to cash out.  But such rational behavior may ultimately lead to market crashes as we've seen over the past few years.  We get into wars rationally because we over-estimate our abilities to win them (Dominic's written extensively about this).  And, we allow environmental degredation to march on because we over-estimate our ability to solve the problems at some point in the future.

Here's the rub.  With each passing year of NOT addressing our carbon addiction we're making the problem so much harder to solve.  With each additional chemical we pump into the atmosphere we make it more difficult to figure out their true costs and make it more difficult to eliminate their costs.  And all of this may be rational behavior?

Discussion question

How do we temper our over-confidence?  How do we build this into our policy making process?  Dominic suggests in his book on Overconfidence and War that we need to put more emphasis on evaluating the true costs.  I agree.

Butternut squash Risotto

I was playing around last night and made a delicious risotto.  Here's my best reconstruction...


1 butternut squash, peeled, seeded, and cut into 3/4 inch cubes tossed in olive oil and then baked at 350 F for 15 minutes and broiled for another 10 minutes or so until browned


1 red onion, 1/4 inch dice
1/4 cup olive oil
2 cups rice (I used Thai)
2 cups white wine (I used a 'too good for cooking' chardonnay)
30 oz vegetable broth
freshly ground black pepper (to taste)


After pre-cooking the squash, saute over medium high heat the onions in olive oil in a wide coverable pot.  When the onions are translucent, add the squash and rice and about half the wine.  Stir until integrated and let sit until the liquid is absorbed.  Start pouring the vegetable broth and stir and let it integrate.  Repeat until all the vegetable broth is used.  The rice should be mostly cooked. 

Depending upon how well done it is, you might need to add some water. When it's almost done, stir in the remaining wine, turn down the heat to low and let it sit covered for about 10 more minutes until you serve it.  Adding the wine at the end adds a wonderful floral finish.  Plate with freshly ground black pepper.   


While this vegan version is delicious, if I'd had some fresh Parmesan I would have considered adding that and/or butter to make it even richer.

Benefits of organic chicken

From the Union of Concerned Scientists website (http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agriculture/feed/feed-latest.html#2):

Switch to organic poultry farming reduces antibiotic resistance A blockbuster new scientific study shows that a transition to organic animal production methods that don’t use antibiotics can reduce levels of antibiotic-resistant bacteria on farms. This is the first U.S. study to provide on-farm data on the impacts of removing antibiotics from large-scale poultry CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations). Researchers from the University of Maryland and the Food and Drug Administration measured levels of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in poultry litter, water, and feed samples from 10 conventional poultry operations and 10 newly-organic operations of similar size. (Under organic certification rules, producers are not allowed to use antibiotics.) The newly antibiotic-free organic farms had much lower rates of resistant bacteria compared to the conventional farms, demonstrating that the reduction in antibiotic use can immediately lower the levels of antibiotic-resistant bacteria found on the farm. The study was released in the midst of a massive food safety recall of ground turkey contaminated with antibiotic-resistant salmonella. That incident, involving 36 million pounds of ground turkey produced by agribusiness giant Cargill, sickened some 111 consumers. Read the full study here, and learn more about the turkey recall here.

How many species are there on Earth and in the Ocean

In a new paper, these authors use a new technique to estimate how many eukaryotic species there are.  This is both controversial and important because, frankly, we have little idea of the Earth's biodiversity.  If they're right, we have a lot of exploring to do. Skeptics say they're undercounting with their estimate and we probably have even more exploring to do!  Regardless, we should care because our current human-caused extinction spasm is eliminating species faster than they can be inventoried.  And this is important for pragmatic reasons:  the set of unique adaptations that are found in nature have untapped potentials to help us develop new crops that will withstand climate change, develop new antibiotics and new sources of power and food.  Maintaining biodiversity is an important first step towards helping manage a world with 7-9 million people.  Read the full paper by following the link below; I've appended their popular summary. 

How Many Species Are There on Earth and in the Ocean?

Camilo Mora^1,2*, Derek P. Tittensor^1,3,4, Sina Adl¹, Alastair G. B. Simpson¹, Boris Worm¹

1 Department of Biology, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada,2 Department of Geography, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, Hawaii, United States of America, 3 United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre, Cambridge, United Kingdom, 4 Microsoft Research, Cambridge, United Kingdom

Knowing the number of species on Earth is one of the most basic yet elusive questions in science. Unfortunately, obtaining an accurate number is constrained by the fact that most species remain to be described and because indirect attempts to answer this question have been highly controversial. Here, we document that the taxonomic classification of species into higher taxonomic groups (from genera to phyla) follows a consistent pattern from which the total number of species in any taxonomic group can be predicted. Assessment of this pattern for all kingdoms of life on Earth predicts ~8.7 million (±1.3 million SE) species globally, of which ~2.2 million (±0.18 million SE) are marine. Our results suggest that some 86% of the species on Earth, and 91% in the ocean, still await description. Closing this knowledge gap will require a renewed interest in exploration and taxonomy, and a continuing effort to catalogue existing biodiversity data in publicly available databases.

Shale gas (from the Economist)

I'm behind writing about what I've been reading, but one striking thing from a few weeks ago (6 August Economist) was an essay and an article about the growth of the shale oil, shale gas, and indeed just natural gas.  


As the Economist writes, the distribution of shale-gas reserves is not as centralized as oil reserves (basically, where-ever there is coal, there is the opportunity of shale-gas), and now that it's possible to better extract it, there will be many players producing it.  While they see the market forces leading to production as a good thing, they argue that the environmental issues associated with shale-gas production are non-trivial and ultimately if it really is cleaner burning than coal, we're likely to have MORE warming associated with shifting from coal to shale-gas.  


Why?  Because, as they point out, the Earth is a bit cooler from all the coal that China has burned in the past few decades.  Without the particulate matter in the air, the effect of increasing CO2 levels from burning carbon will not be buffered and the World will warm.  Of course there are other bad effects of increased CO2 (including ocean acidification...).  


They note that just because we have this source of cleaner burning fuel, using it may actually delay the production of new, carbon-neutral sources of energy.  And this, from the Economist.  


Yes, we should be scared.

fish sauce balsamic vinaigrette

I've been reading The Splendid Table's How to Eat Supper: Recipes, Stories, and Opinions from Public Radio's Award-Winning Food Show.  There are a number of new tricks I've learned, but one's rather simple and I've been experimenting with it for a few weeks now.  Add fish sauce (I use Squid Brand) to vinaigrette dressings and other things that you want to bring out the umami flavor.

Since my basic is a balsamic vinaigrette (typically 1 Tbs of Dijon mustard, 1 minced garlic clove, and then about 2:1 mix of extra virgin olive oil to balsamic), I've been adding 1-2 Tbs of fish sauce to this.  It's delicious and adds another layer of complexity to the dressing.  It's particularly good in a chopped salad burrito where I wrap freshly cooked black beans and either a romaine lettuce and tomato or a spinach and tomato salad dressed with this vinaigrette in a large, pan-warmed flour tortilla. 

salt, garlic, and rosemary rub

I've been flat out recently and not had time to write anything for the blog, but that doesn't mean that I've not been cooking!  Probably the best thing that grows out of pots in our small patio garden is a rosemary plant.  Somehow we've been (fingers crossed) unable to kill it yet and it thrives with whatever water we give it.  This of course means that I've got to come up with recipes for it.  Of course, adding rosemary to potatoes and lamb are classic uses.  Trouble is that these days I'm not eating a lot of lamb (read the post about its carbon footprint!).  So, I've been exploring other options.

We had an organic chicken in the freezer and ran out of my bbq rub (recipe in book) so I figured what if I combine kosher salt, garlic, rosemary and olive oil to create a rub.  Into a hand mixer goes about 1/4 cup of salt, 6 garlic cloves, the leaves from about 14" of rosemary stem, and a couple of glugs of olive oil.  A minute later I had a rub that I massaged beneath the split chicken's (see cook book for how to prepare) skin, into the body cavity, and on top of the skin.  I have been cooking the chicken for about 1.5 hours at 250°F and letting it rest before de-boning it and serving it in burritos.  Yum.