Is corn syrup actually bad for you?

I've been hearing this line for a long time - high-fructose corn syrup supposedly causes a more damage to your body over other sweeteners, and the solution is to ban it or pay more for cane sugar-sweetened foods.

It's supposedly an ingredient in most foods because American corn subsidies makes the syrup cheap - that's why we don't see it in Canadian and Mexican versions of Pepsi, for example.

That ignores the longstanding impact of sugar quotas, which allows the American sugar oligarchy to charge high prices for cane sugar. Imported sugar comes with higher tariffs the more that's imported, a blatant form of protectionism. Canadian and Mexican soda makers don't have the quotas as well as the subsidies.

People are right to oppose corn subsidies, as well as the related ethanol subsidies that caused the 2008 global food crisis. Agricultural subsidies need to go away. But so do sugar quotas.

What I'm not sure about is the validity of the anti-corn syrup mob chants. For a long time I thought it was activists making a big deal about a minor difference. Perhaps high-fructose corn syrup was ever-so-slightly worse for you than sugar. Big deal, that problem can be tolerated if the price is low enough. Thanks to market forces, the food police have the option of buying sugar cane versions of products if they want to pay.

My position was challenged after reading this piece from the Center for Consumer Freedom about it being a myth pushed by the sugar oligarchy, as well as a few other pieces. I am not an expert in nutrition science, and a lot of the anti-corn people swallow the organic, locally-grown all-natural food worldview that I know has major flaws. So what is the best science, from a neutral perspective, on high-fructose corn syrup?

I did a search on ScienceBasedMedicine.com and found a piece that said the issue is nonsense. The fructose levels, the chemical the activists claim is so bad, is also found in equal amounts in the alternative sweetners, including all-natural honey.

So yes, high-fructose corn syrup is bad for you, as is cane sugar, honey and agave syrup.

As an aside, there are claims that cane sugar makes sodas taste better and more refreshing. I bought this argument for a while until I tried a few cane sugar root beers, and later held a blind taste test of regular Pepsi and Pepsi Throwback. I didn't notice any difference, and the fifteenish people in my experiment couldn't tell which was which.
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Voter ID doesn't matter.

Over at Congress Shall Make No Law, Nate recently wrote about requiring voters to show a photo ID. I can't think of another recent issue so marked with ridiculous notions of what the impact of the legislation would be.

Neither of the following two scenarios seems likely:

1) Not requiring a photo ID to vote will result in phony votes being cast, changing the results of an election.

2) Requiring a photo ID will block poor people from voting, changing the results of an election.

I think both are so unlikely as to be ridiculous. Each individual vote counts for so little, that if you have a conspiracy of fake voters casting votes in person, you are involving so many operatives in order to have any impact that you can expect the whole scheme to be blabbed to investigators.

Likewise, the idea of a registered and likely voter who possess no photo ID is absurd. You can not function in modern America without such ID. How do you cash a paycheck, unemployment check or welfare check without one? How likely would someone be to vote in the first place who doesn't possess a Driver's license or a state ID?

The scenario's both sides draw up are absurd. It's not asking much to require voters show an ID, and it's not a big risk to the voting process to have no such requirement.

The real motivation here is both sides think they will see votes slightly tip in their favor. The Democrats in opposition are worried that their voters will be left out, and the Republicans are worried a small group of leftist activists will cheat a few more votes in on their side. This was never about principles.
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Kinect and federal spending

The Freakonomics blog posted a link to Budget Climb, a way of letting people comprehend the size of the the abstract dollar amounts in the federal budget.

Instead of just visualizing the amounts, Budget Climb lets people in front of a display pantomime climbing the size of different budget items over the years. In the video, I noticed a long little box with a light on it under the screen and I checked the website. Sure enough, this is a Kinect application.

I wrote a post back in April outlining how non-game applications of Kinect are a positive externality. At one point it was tempting to update the list with more applications as they became public, but they're so numerous now it's impossible to keep up.

This is a novel educational (and political) application, and we can expect to see more like.
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In praise of Matthew Yglesias

There are a handful of leftie economists I'm eager to quote or draw inspiration from. They include Paul Krugman, Brad Delong, Ezra Klein, Matthew Yglesias and of course, Lord Keynes himself.

I think Yglesias deserves more praise for being so consistent with his economics while being very serious about his progressive views. He makes a serious attempt to understand his intellectual opponents, and he's not afraid to criticize people on his side. Look at yesterday's post on barber licensing for a perfect example.

I see breaking up the barber cartel and increasing competition for barbering services as a progressive measure, because if you reduce the cost of things that poor people buy, you increase their real living standards. A contrary view espoused in comments is that since barbering is a working class occupation, we ought to favor cartelization as a means of increasing working class income.

But he wasn't done.

But to perhaps gesture at a “theory of politics” issue, I think part of what bugs people about the barber issue is that they’ve developed the implicit view that for progressive politics to succeed we need to raise the social status of “big government,” and that it’s counterproductive to this mission to highlight any misguided “big government” initiatives. It’s acceptable to criticize excessive spending on the military and on prisons, because the conservative critique of “big government” often exempts those institutions. But if conservatives attack “regulation,” then “regulation” must be defended or, when indefensible, ignored.

Well played, good sir, well played. Being automatically against all "deregulation" means tolerating - if not embracing - a lot of bogus regulations that didn't work the way they were supposed to.
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TAM talk and links

This morning I gave my talk at the TAM 9 science conference in Las Vegas. It came out great, and if the organizers decide to put it on YouTube I will include a link. After the break, I've included a version of my paper, along with some expanded answers from the Q&A, but first here are some skeptic-friendly links:

My niche is economic skepticism, with a focus on the economic claims of the "Buy Local" movement. This is my intro post to the general public, and this is my intro post for skeptics.

I covered TAM 7 as a news story when I first started this blog two years ago.

I often write about the economics of video games. This is a social science perspective, such as why console fanboyism is rational, the upcoming moral hazard in Gears of War 3 and my defense of charging to use content already on the disc. It is not the fixed exchange rate of 100 coins for an extra life.

Here are two news stories I've written. There's a ghost hunt that got mentioned on the SGU podcast and piece on a chelation clinic.

I have some classic posts that involve politics that skeptics will find interesting, such as Idiot Hunting and why it's crass to say political opponents often are stupid, evil or insincere. I also have some not-very-nice things to say about modern Marxists.

The media isn't calling your skeptics group, and it's your fault

There's an old expression that says, "Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door."

As both a skeptic and a reporter in the mainstream media reporter, I say, forget that. That's terrible advice, and I think it explains why the media is awash with woo stories and the skeptical angle is rarely included.

The good news here is that your local skeptics group has a role to play in getting skepticism in the media. While the national media may prefer to interview someone from the JREF or New England Skeptical Society, your state and local media will want to talk to a local group like yours.

So then why aren't skeptics in the media more?

The popular view of skeptics is that members of the media are too lazy to get all of the facts right and journalists care more about presenting an attention-getting story than a factual one. While these explanations can be true, they are painfully incomplete. Skeptics do not understand how news stories are generated, overestimate the resources news teams work with and misunderstand what motivates reporters.

Being a reporter isn't much different from being a blogger. I have a computer with the Internet, a telephone, a phone book and my car keys. That's it. The only database or files news teams typically have is the archive of past news stories.

We miss important stories all the time because we don't have a perfect way to find out what's going on in the world. There's a lot of luck involved, and we write a lot of stories because someone in the community approached us and told us what's going on.

A lot of media criticism comes from treating reporters as experts who should know better. But most reporters aren't experts. Instead of relying on their own knowledge of a topic, a reporter gathers information and presents it.

In a sense, you can think of a news story as a collection of arguments from authority. Facts are facts because the speaker is an expert. We don't write, "Mr. Trudeau is a fraud." We write, "investigators say Mr. Trudeau is a fraud.

A news report is more like Wikipedia than Encyclopedia Britannica. Britannica articles are planned and written by an expert, while Wikipedia articles emerge through the knowledge of a large group of people. Original research is discouraged. The reporter acts more like a moderator than an author.

Now imagine a Wikipedia article on alternative medicine with no input from skeptical editors. What would that look like? Would you blame Wikipedia, or the skeptical community for not getting involved?

One criticism I often hear is that reporters care more about making a story exciting than they do about having the facts right. We're accused of "sensationalizing" to get more readers at the expense of our accountability.

But that's not how we see it. We want to keep our readers interested in the story by focusing on the most interesting details, and no reporter I've talked to has said they'd be willing to get a few details wrong in order to make the story more exciting. We really do care about accuracy.

As for the charge that we just want to sell more papers, that doesn't add up. There's something called a "principal-agent problem," where the publisher (the prinicipal) has an incentive to make more profits, but the reporter he hires to perform the work for him (the agent) has different motivations and incentives. The average reporter won't see a single extra dime as a result of a popular story.

People don't become reporters just to make money. The job pays too poorly. They care a lot more about presenting information to the world. It doesn't make any sense for someone to choose a career for fulfillment, and then compromise their integrity for zero profit.

Skeptics sometimes say reporters are too lazy to dig into stories, read scientific reports or find a skeptic. I say, we're busy. As a reporter at daily newspaper I'm expected to turn in 11 stories each 40-hour week. With all the downsizing and decreased revenue the media has endured, you can't expect us to spend too much time on every story. It's awful and I wish it could be different, but that is reality.

There are a also a couple of biases working against skeptics that keeps us out of new stories.

One is that skepticism is reactive. Someone has to present woo before we have a chance to knock it down. It's very easy for a reporter to stumble upon a magic healer or a snake oil salesman. These people advertise and generate a lot of attention. They're visible.

But skeptics are invisible. You have a thriving Internet community and blog culture, but the average reporter doesn't know to seek you out when they come across woo.

Try thinking of a reporter as someones grandparent. If the subject of a story appears able to break the laws of nature, why would you expect the reporter to seek out a magician, a neurologist or a funk drummer to comment?

Another bias skeptics face is that reporters are more likely to include sources they can get ahold of on short notice. From my own experience, it's hard to find a skeptic. Local sources are preferred for local news stories, and it's difficult to find local skeptics even when looking for them. And keep in mind most reporters don't know you exist, so they aren't looking for you.

Scientists are also difficult to contact. We mostly talk to academic scientists, and they're always busy with classes, or on break and impossible to track down.

As skeptics, we haven't made a real effort to get the media's attention. We assume the media knows we exist, what subjects we cover and how to get a hold of us. We write blog entries hoping reports will stumble across them by chance. When we do try to contact the media, it's in the form of a letter to the editor.

But we don't want skepticism on the letters page. We want to be in the news stories themselves. Since reporters do not automatically think of skeptic groups when a woo story comes up, it's up to us to get their attention.

With all these factors working against skeptics, why would you ever expect the outcome to be any different?

Think of Public Relations as the art of getting the media to spread your message to the public for you, and the other side has a lot more experience with it. You need to let the media know that we exist, what subjects we cover and how they can reach us quickly. We can do this before a relevant story breaks, as it happens, and quickly after it happens.

Before

Before a story breaks, you can contact the media through in-person visits, phone calls and brief faxes telling them what we do, and suggesting stories like chelation therapy and tax money going to woo businesses. Tell them you live in the area and your group exists to help protect the public from misinformation. Skeptics who are experts should fax news organizations a concise blog article monthly and include a phone number to position themselves as a future source.

During

The moment a skepticism story breaks, you can contact the media as a potential source to offer a contrasting view, or to explain it in a way viewers will understand. You have to get in fast, so phone calls or faxes work best. It's difficult to nail the timing, so don't expect this to come up very often.

After

If a story is already out there, contact the media and offer a "new angle" on the story, one that everyone missed and the public will find interesting. News organizations will keep writing about a subject as long as the public is interested, and skepticism offers a perfect "second day lede." You can also expand and localize the story. When the Iraq government bought dowsing rods as bomb detectors, the media would have been very interested in learning about local schools that bought dowsing rods as drug detectors.

Some young technophiles may think that traditional media is dead, and skeptics should focus on web-based news and forget TV, radio and print.

Perhaps that will be the case one day, but a Pew Research poll from last September suggests for now traditional media is still important. When asked what technologies they observed news from the previous day, 58 percent said television. Results for online, radio and newspapers were each a third. Emergent media like podcasts and social media only added 10 percent. Traditional media is still important, and those same media companies are the ones that produce most online news.

Skeptics spend too much time sitting on the couch, wearing their prom outfit hoping someone will call and invite them. You have the knowledge, You know how to convey it to the public and You need to be the one to make that phone call.

If your skeptics group puts some real work into contacting the media, pitching stories, letting reporters know how to reach you and what sort of issues you can comment on, your message will eventually get in the media. If instead you only write the occasional letter to the editor, don't expect your message to get any further than the letters page.

We've got a better mousetrap, so let's get out there and tell the world.

THE END

Now for the questions.

Someone made the claim that journalists are incompetent, because he's talked to the media and the stories didn't come out the way he wanted them to most of the time. He wanted to know what he should do.

I don't know enough about the situation, but here are some thoughts. Were his expectations too high? Did he expect the other side to only get a token paragraph and have the rest focus on him? Maybe the reporter was confused, did he do a good job of explaining his side, and did he check to make sure the reporter understood? Had he ever made contact with this reporter in the past, or was this a one-phone call relationship?

There are a lot of potential variables here, and I don't know enough about the situation to make that call.

The second was the claim that news agencies exist only to make a profit. The implication is that they will do whatever it takes to draw readers or viewers.

This is ironic because the questioner was asking at a conference that serves as the biggest annual fundraiser for the James Randi Foundation. The same thing could be said about the conference, but the way the conference attracts people is by putting out a great product. That's how the newspaper I work for looks at it. Tabloids do exist, but there's a big range in news companies out there and plenty of them care about.

You could say all companies exist to make money, but that doesn't say anything about the quality of their products.

One final note here. After listening to DJ Grothe speak on the diversity panel, I support the direction he's taking the movement, which includes stopping it from getting involved with political issues that involve value judgments, or that deviate too far from the core criteria of skepticism. He also opposes the push to make skepticism an atheist movement. I am confident the JREF is in good hands.
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That totally counts

I'm endorsed some statements against modern feminism that's likely to get me labeled a misogynist, because nothing says woman-hating like consistently opposing public funding for private matters.

But something came out this weekend on Xbox Live that has revealed my true colors, and with one statement I can show I understand what it's like to be a woman in a man's world. So here goes:

Ms. 'Splosion Man is superior to 'Splosion Man in every single way, and I loved 'Splosion Man.

Because seriously, Ms. 'Splosion Man is awesome.

See you at the next rally, sisters.
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Colorblind-friendly games and the free market

There's an unfortunate color choice in a lot of video games, where halos around friendly characters will be green and the halos around enemies will be red.

That's unfortunate for people like me who are red-green deficient, the most common type of colorblindness. Ever since Baldur's Gate, I've had trouble picking out my enemies in a particularly busy game. I've had to stop playing some flash games because they introduced additional colors that I can't tell apart and sometimes when I try to point things out to other players, I call orange objects yellow and purple objects blue.

Colorblindness can really hold a player back in video games, which is why I was happy to hear Modern Warfare 3 will have a colorblind assist mode.

Video games have a mixed record with providing options to help the colorblind. Peggle chose a blue and orange palette for each major components, the easiest colors to tell apart. The game will also put shapes into blocks to help people like me tell them apart. This is what companies should do.

Meanwhile, the hacking minigame in Bioshock 2 depended on quickly telling red and green apart, a real problem for people like me. It seems abstract puzzle games seem to be better prepared for colorblind problems, while actions games have a spotty history.

So what does this tell us about the free market?

The most obvious thing is the solution is not perfect. Some games are accessible to the colorblind, while some have easily-fixable problems that persist. It's not just video games, the five-to-six player expansion for Settlers of Catan introduced green and brown factions into the game in shades I can't tell apart. That's the visible.

But what's invisible is the roadblocks in game creation that would be required if a top-down model attempted to make all games handicap-friendly. If the door is open for colorblindness, what about disabilities? Would a deaf mode be needed to put comic book sound effects in to let players know when someone is shooting behind them? How far would these demands reach, and what fun games we enjoy now would have been blocked from entering the marketplace?

And what about subtitles in video games? Those help the handicapped as well, and are universally available for games with dialogue or voice-overs, but they weren't put there by a regulation. The demand of customers encouraged companies to include those options

What I expect to see in the future of video games is universal colorblind options for games. It's going to take time, and it won't always be perfect, but it will be motivated by the self-interest of video game companies who just want to satisfy their customers.

NOTE: I forgot to include two examples of government failures to fix colorblind problems. Graphs in public school textbooks and traffic lights. Yes, we do remember what order the yellow and red lights are, but its hard to spot their relative position at night, and single-lamp blinking lights are hard to tell apart.
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Richard Dawkins isn't the real issue here

There's a civil war of sorts going on in the skepticism community. Rebecca Watson, founder of Skepchick.org and feminist crusader, wrote about being creeped out when a guy at a conference invited her to his hotel room for "coffee," and biologist Richard Dawkins allegedly posted a slightly-coarse response on her blog saying she's making too big a deal of it and the actions of one socially-inept nerd is not enough to conclude the secular community is misogynistic.

Being feminists, the Skepchick community went DEFCON 2 and called for a boycott of Dawkins books and asked readers to write him letters. Here's mine:

Dear Richard Dawkins,

There's a lot of talk these days about the value of diversity in skepticism. On September 30, 2007 when you recorded the "Four Horsemen" video with Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett, you said:

It’s like it’s a good idea to have somebody from the political right who is an atheist, because otherwise there’s a confusion of values which doesn’t help us. And it’s much better to have this diversity in other areas. But I think I sort of do agree with you. But even if I didn’t, I think it was valuable to have that.

I was dragged into the secular community kicking and screaming when I was 14 when my mind rejected the comforting religious ideas I had been brought up with. When I was 18 I learned my set of political views made me one of those vile "conservatives" I'd heard so much about. It was not my intention to join either group, but I never really had a choice.

There's a lot of negative "locker room talk" about people from my political background in secular and skeptical circles, to borrow a phrase from moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt. I just wanted to thank you for saying not just that people like me should be tolerated, but that we provide an additional value as well. Thank you for making me feel welcome.

Sincerely,
Michael, YoungHipAndConservative.com

My letter touches on an issue I find much more important than this Internet squabble, and that's the push from Skepchick to have skeptics push liberal politics. I've already written about their affirmative action crusade, but they also want to push issues like abortion rights as something skeptical and secular groups should defend.

I am completely opposed to this for a number of reasons. The most obvious is that opposing abortion is not a scientific claim; it is a value judgment. Christopher Hitchens' pro-life stance should be a dead give-away here. Steven Novella wrote in his great essay "How to Argue" that science makes factual claims, not value judgments. His example to illustrate this point is:

Ultimately, all arguments over abortion come down to a personal moral choice: which should have greater value, the mother’s right to make choices regarding her own body, or the unborn fetus’s right not to be killed. All attempts to resolve this objectively have resulted in further arguments that are dependent upon value judgments, for example: at what point at or after conception does an embryo or fetus become a person? Also, how does the fetus’s total biological dependence upon its mother affect their respective rights?

I've heard Novella make this point over and over again on the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe Podcast. Since Watson is a panelist on that podcast, I know she's heard the argument as well. Yet, she has trouble distinguishing scientific concepts from her own personal politics.

People, you see me writing about pseudoeconomics all the time, but I know better than to dismiss Keynesian economics with that label. While I don't find the Keynesian world view compelling, I'm the first to admit that is deserves to be taken seriously as a legitimate viewpoint with a lot of good scholarship. I know how to separate facts from opinions.

The pro-choice movement deserves some scrutiny. Watson repeats the talking point that the right is on the cusp of making abortion illegal. Michael Moore, of all people, wrote an editorial on this "urban myth" in 2000, calling it "fearmongering" that has been used against the right over and over again to win votes for the Democratic party.

One of the central ideas to Adam Smith's book "The Theory of Moral Sentiments" is that people take pleasure in having others share their world view. I think what Watson is doing is trying to convince other secular people to adopt her political views using the language of science. This is what Friedrich Hayek called "scientism," where the trappings of science are used to make a point that is not scientific.

The irony of it all is that Watson is simultaneously leading a crusade for more diversity in skepticism and secularism. She said we need to have more viewpoints present while she attempts to push people out who disagree with her politics. You can't have it both ways.

Skepticism is about combating misinformation, especially supernatural claims. There is already way too much woo for skeptics to fight, and she wants to spread the movement even thinner by going after non-scientific issues. I have absolutely no doubt that this push will fall flat. There's already plenty of liberal politics in the secular world, but it simply too far removed from science to make it in the skeptical community.
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Two years and counting

Two years ago I started this blog following a newspaper lay-off. I had the idea for the title and had been putting off starting it, but I wanted to make sure I got it going before I turned 30 and was unquestionably considered young.

I also wanted to get the blog started before I go to The Amazing Meeting in Las Vegas, where I wrote about the event as a news story to keep my skills sharp.

Now, two years later, I'm going to the same event as a minor speaker. I have my own URL and a custom layout. I've found other bloggers to make cross-comments with occasionally, and I'm working in the media again. Things are going very well.

It's been a great two years. I love writing here and I plan to keep it up. I turned 30 recently and am keeping the title for now. I'm still young, hipper than ever and not really a conservative as much as a "classic liberal, but a good title is a good title.
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Stop being such a good loser

It's been a decade since I stopped playing Magic: The Gathering, and about five years since since I painted my last Warhammer 40K figure. I don't watch anime, Dr. Who or Firefly and I put more effort into my appearance than on my forum tag lines.

But I still get nerd cred because of one integral personality quirk, one little reflex that sticks out like a pocket protector and redeems my mainstream camouflage: I get unreasonably annoyed when someone makes an intuitive conclusion that violates some esoteric concept that average people have no reason to understand.

In this case, it's the idea of easy come, easy go. Say a friend at a thrift store looking through a $5 item bin finds the Cosmos DVD set staring Carl Sagan, which they would be willing to buy for its retail price of $130. They buy it, but somehow lose it before they go home.

Most people I know in that situation will be disappointed, but say something cheery like "Oh well, I'm only out $5."

And that's when my teeth gnash.

That person is not out a mere $5, they are out $130 dollars. Let me explain.

Prices and values are not the same thing. The price is what you give up to have something. The value is what something is actually worth to you. If the price is lower than what you value something, then the difference is called your consumer surplus. In the example, the friend just left that thrift store with a DVD set and a $125 consumer surplus, and should be very glad to have both.

After you've paid something and you can't do anything to reverse the purchase, what you paid is called a sunk cost. You don't need to factor sunk costs into future actions - doing so is a common fallacy - so just remove them from consideration. Once a cost is sunk, it's irrelevant. Your friend paid $5, and left with $130 in value. It doesn't matter if the store took $5, $10 or $50 for those DVD - that cost is now sunk. The DVD set is still worth $130 to your friend.

So when your friend says "easy come, easy go. I'm only out $5," they are looking at a sunk cost, and forgetting about that amazing consumer surplus they were so happy to have earlier.

Remember those consumer surpluses - they're yours, and if something takes them from you, get very upset.
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Destroy, don't confiscate, the money

In the past I've used the burning of bales of money as a ridiculous way to illustrate opportunity cost, but this time I'm making the claim that government agencies should be forced to hold actual bonfires with dollar bills.

There's a serious issue called civil asset forfeiture, where the police and prosecutors can seize and keep property they believe is linked to a crime, even if that person hasn't been convicted of anything.

Phil Williams from CBS News Channel 5 in Tennessee recently did an amazing piece of investigative reporting on local agencies who are letting drugs slip by in order to focus on finding money to seize. This is a classic case of rent seeking, where legislation causes people to spend precious resources to make artificial profits while the overall society is harmed.

Maine has a good rule that the police or municipality do not profit directly from civil asset forfeitures, but the money instead goes into the state general fund. This cuts down on the incentive for police to seize valuables from the public.

But what would happen if the money was destroyed instead?

It's not such a far-fetched idea. Police destroy firearms seized from criminals. Although firearms are valuable goods that could be resold, police instead have a public works employee take a band saw to the guns. After all, those guns could be involved with past crimes.

Well so has all that money. If the government simply had to destroy the money the way it does when it take guns from people, it would have less of an incentive to violate peoples' civil rights and steal from unconvicted suspects. Money made from selling seized goods would need to burn as well.

This would also have a slight deflationary effect on the currency, as less money in circulation means less of a supply for the bills that represent goods and services. Every time money is destroyed, the money people have at home gains a little bit in value.

I realize deflation is no walk in the park - it's the base to inflation's acid - but we haven't had the exposure to deflation like we have with inflation.
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