There is always a second chapter to nonsense

A new study was making the rounds last week which I ended up ignoring. From Women are happier without children or a spouse, says happiness expert by Sian Cain.

I am deeply skeptical of the happiness research field. I do not think I have ever read research in the field which was not filled with glaring empirical errors and methodological weakness. I saw no evidence from a brief scan of the Guardian article to indicate that this was any different. There was one claim that stood out and which I can no longer document because the Guardian appears to have excised much or most of the original article.

The claim was to the effect that the happiest people are never-married and never-had-children women. I think it might have indicated older women. It was an arresting claim because it does not comport easily with what I see in the real world. However, personal anecdote is never a refutation of measured reality, as long as reality is measured well.

The second reason that it was arresting was my unbidden thought "So, the happiest people are Shakers." They are a millenarian sect noted for their "celibate and communal lifestyle, pacifism, uniform charismatic worship, and their model of equality of the sexes." They are a fascinating case study in millenarian movements because, at a societal level, they are, through their commitment to celibacy, committed to self-destruction. As indeed has happened.

During the mid-19th century, an Era of Manifestations resulted in a period of dances, gift drawings, and gift songs inspired by spiritual revelations. At its peak in the mid-19th century, there were 4,000-6,000 Shaker believers living in 18 major communities and numerous smaller, often short-lived, communities. External and internal societal changes in the mid- and late-19th century resulted in the thinning of the Shaker community as members left or died with few converts to the faith to replace them. By 1920, there were only 12 Shaker communities remaining in the United States. At the present time, there is only one active Shaker village, Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village, which is located in Maine. Consequently, many of the other Shaker settlements are now museums.

Shakers can only exist on the foundation of a society/culture which is itself robust and productive. To describe them as parasitical is inappropriately derogatory but that is the underlying dynamic. They can only exist in association with a healthy host because they themselves are not self-sustaining.

Which was my thought when I scanned the Guardian article. "Here is an academic championing a superior life-style which is parasitic on the actions and efforts of others. That's odd." Additionally, the tenor of the article seemed, as is so common today, an effort to demonstrate that men are beasts and women are victims. As would seem to align with the fact that the author of the article is one of Ben Rhodes's 27 year old journalists who "literally know nothing."

But I spend too much time criticizing academics and other postmodernist social justice anarchists and so, demonstrating inexcusably rare self-discipline, I passed over the article.

But there is always a second chapter to nonsense. This, inexplicably, is from the DNC young adult news site, Vox. A source more noted for its infantile ideology than its commitment to straight news reporting. But credit where credit is due.

From A new book says married women are miserable. Don’t believe it. by Kelsey Piper.

Last week, a shocking claim about happiness made the rounds in the press, from the Guardian to Cosmopolitan to Elle to Fox.

The claim?

Women should be wary of marriage — because while married women say they’re happy, they’re lying. According to behavioral scientist Paul Dolan, promoting his recently released book Happy Every After, they’ll be much happier if they steer clear of marriage and children entirely.

“Married people are happier than other population subgroups, but only when their spouse is in the room when they’re asked how happy they are. When the spouse is not present: f***ing miserable,” Dolan said, citing the American Time Use Survey, a national survey available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and used for academic research on how Americans live their lives.

The problem? That finding is the result of a grievous misunderstanding on Dolan’s part of how the American Time Use Survey works. The people conducting the survey didn’t ask married people how happy they were, shoo their spouses out of the room, and then ask again. Dolan had misinterpreted one of the categories in the survey, “spouse absent,” which refers to married people whose partner is no longer living in their household, as meaning the spouse stepped out of the room.

And as usual, it was someone from outside the field who caught the fundamental error.

The error was caught by Gray Kimbrough, an economist at American University’s School of Public Affairs, who uses the survey data — and realized that Dolan must have gotten it wrong. “I’ve done a lot with time-use data,” Kimbrough told me. “It’s a phone survey.” The survey didn’t even ask if a respondent’s spouse was in the room.

The tweet in which Kimbrough outlines that error and other's in Dolan's book follows.

Last weekend, @profpauldolan spoke at the Hay festival in the UK, and some of his remarks were picked up by the BBC, the Guardian, and the Independent, and then repeated dozens of times in outlets across the world, including US reporting from FOX News to local TV stations. 1/ pic.twitter.com/7Aonf2PT5Q

— Gray 'serial millennial myth debunker' Kimbrough (@graykimbrough) June 1, 2019

Click to follow the thread.

Piper goes on:

This is only the most recent example of a visible trend — books by prestigious and well-regarded researchers go to print with glaring errors, which are only discovered when an expert in the field, or someone on Twitter, gets a glance at them.

In May, author Naomi Wolf learned of a serious mistake in a live, on-air interview about her forthcoming book Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalization of Love. In the book, she argues that men were routinely executed for sodomy in Britain during the 1800s. But as the interviewer pointed out, it appears she had misunderstood the phrase “death recorded” in English legal documents — she thought it meant a person had been executed, when it actually meant the death penalty had been deferred for their whole natural life. That meant that the executions she said occurred never actually happened.

Earlier this year, former New York Times editor Jill Abramson’s book Merchants of Truth was discovered to contain passages copied from other authors, and alleged to be full of simple factual errors as well. And around the same time, I noticed that a statistic in the New York Times Magazine and in Clive Thompson’s upcoming book Coders was drawn from a study that doesn’t seem to really exist.

I am not sure it is so much a trend as a longstanding condition. Perhaps the trend is the discovery rather than the error making. In other words, I suspect the tendency to write motivated books which cherry pick data rather than making good faith arguments is reasonably longstanding but what is increasing is our inclination and capacity to catch the bad arguments. If that is the case, it is a good thing.

What is notable to me is that all Piper's examples are members of the Mandarin class who usually push a postmodernist social justice agenda. They are trying to convince us that the world functions in a fashion markedly at variance with how we normally interpret it. Dolan wants us to believe that the happiest people are unmarried childless women whereas social norms suggest that it is people in a good marriage who are happiest. I am agnostic. I suspect the latter but perfectly willing to consider an alternative claim based on good data and solid research protocols. But in our current state, the counter claims exist but the data and solid research do not. As the Dolan incident (and the Wolfe incident) demonstrate.

Piper has a tweet summarizing the whole issue:

So 1) don't trust books 2) don't trust summaries or analyses without checking the source 3) don't trust anything published without the data and code. That's actually a lot of skepticism to apply to everything you read. It's kinda rough. But you want to believe true things, right?

— Kelsey Piper (@KelseyTuoc) June 4, 2019

Click for thread.

For a variety of reasons, over the past couple of decades the veracity and reliability of the press (newspapers, magazines, mainstream publishers) has declined with a corresponding decline on the part of readers of such news.

We are at a difficult inflection point. I would not go as far as Piper but I am in the same boat as she is. We should only passively trust when there is a track record of earned trust. Pick your writers, authors and journalists you trust and follow them in whichever platform they appear. There is no longer, in my opinion, much brand trust anymore. The NYT, the Washington Post, The Economist - I have spent a lot of money subscribing to them and enormous number of hours reading them over the decades but they are pale empirical shadows of what they once were.

The biggest barrier to my emerging approach (follow the writer, not the platform in which they appear) is that it can foster insularity. You have to work to counter that. But that seems to be our contemporary impasse. Choose mainstream media platforms and prepare for a cascade of erroneous and motivated fake news or choose the individual writers and prepare to work hard to maintain a necessary variety which precludes insularity.