The famous Dunning-Kruger effect, in the words of Dunning and Kruger, is a bias where: People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains in part, because: [P]eople who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. There have been plenty of critiques and explanations over the years, including an article by Marian Krajc and Andreas Ortmann who argue the overestimation of ability is partly a signal extraction problem.

Cleaning up some notes recently, I was reminded of another interesting piece from Gerd Gigerenzer’s Rationality for Mortals: Is perfect memory desirable, without error? The answer seems to be no. The “sins” of our memory seem to be good errors, that is, by-products (“spandrels”) of a system adapted to the demands of our environments. In this view, forgetting prevents the sheer mass of details stored in an unlimited memory from critically slowing down and inhibiting the retrieval of the few important experiences.

Links this week: Skip your annual physical. The phrase “Statistical significance is not the same as practical significance” is leading us astray. The ineffectiveness of food and soft drink taxes (although not all calories are the same). The latest extension of the nanny state - banning junk food from playgrounds. And a new book worth looking at - Government Paternalism: Nanny State or Helpful Friend?

Under the heading “Japan’s birth rate problem is way worse than anyone imagined”, Ana Swanson at The Washington Post’s Wonkblog shows the following chart: So, the birth rate problem is worse than forecast in 1976, 1986, 1992 and 1997. However, the birth rate is higher than was forecast in 2002 and 2006 - so has surprised on the upside. It’s only “worse than anyone imagined” if you’ve had your head in the sand for the last 10 or so years.

Are two-thirds of cancer due to bad luck as many recent headlines have stated? Well, we don’t really know. The paper that triggered these headlines found that two-thirds of the variation in log of cancer risk can be explained by the number of cell divisions. More cell divisions - more opportunity for “bad luck”. But, as pointed out by Bob O’Hara and GrrlScientist, an explanation for variation in incidence is not an explanation for the absolute numbers.

Links this week: Arnold Kling’s review of Complexity and the Art of Public Policy. Are some diets mass murder? HT: Eric Crampton “Social conservatism correlates with lower cognitive ability test scores, but economic conservatism correlates with higher scores.” More on lead and crime. A risk averse culture. HT: Eric Crampton Welfare conditional on birth control. “We may regret the eclipse of a world where 6,000 different languages were spoken as opposed to just 600, but there is a silver lining in the fact that ever more people will be able to communicate in one language that they use alongside their native one.

Although RSS seems to be on the way out, I’ve found myself explaining feed readers to a few people recently. They asked for some suggestions of blogs to follow, so below are some from my reading list. I try not to live in a bubble, but you can see a libertarian bent to these recommendations. My full reading list (as at 4 January 2015) is here - unzip and upload it into your favourite feed reader - and is a bit broader than the below might suggest.

A new paper in PNAS reports on how the effect of a variant of a gene called FTO varies over time. Previous research has shown that people with two copies of a particular FTO variant are on average three kilograms heavier than those with none. But this was not always the case. I’ll let Carl Zimmer provide the background: In 1948, researchers enlisted over 5,000 people in Framingham, Mass., and began to follow their health.

Links this week: In praise of complexity economics. Books coming out in 2015. Two links from the world of intellectual property madness - what would have entered the public domain on 1 January under the old copyright regime (HT: John Bergmayer), and Uber seeks to patent the idea of pricing based on supply and demand (HT: Ben Walsh). Test social programs so we know that they work.

Continuing my tradition of giving the best books I read in the year - generally released in other years - the best books I read in 2014 are below (albeit from a smaller pool than usual). John Coates’s (2012) The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk Taking, Gut Feelings and the Biology of Boom and Bust: The best book I read this year. An innovative consideration of how human biology affects financial decision making.