"The average American woman now weighs as much as a 1960s man"
— Rob Henderson (@robkhenderson) May 29, 2020
Women
1960: 5'3", 140 lbs
2016: 5'4", 171 lbs
Men
1960: 5'8", 166 lbs
2016: 5'9", 198 lbshttps://t.co/w4Xe3ycHpxhttps://t.co/axnLi7hSnUhttps://t.co/7yNe6M0WNV
Tuesday, June 30, 2020
Data Talks
Offbeat Humor
Impressive critical reasoning!
— Lionel Page (@page_eco) May 23, 2020
P (🍞👍| 🦖☠️) < P (🍞👍) pic.twitter.com/oKSTGxm8Ph
I see wonderful things
Induction heating is the process of rapidly heating an electrically conducting object by electromagnetic induction https://t.co/qqCxsJCbR9 [source of the gif: https://t.co/BUzIeOXgV5] pic.twitter.com/EbooKscp4H
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) May 21, 2020
IQ and violent criminal behavior
Hmm. A little confusing. From Is the Association between General Cognitive Ability and Violent Crime Caused by Family-Level Confounders? by Thomas Frisell, Yudi Pawitan, Niklas Långström. From the Abstract:
However, it is methodologically difficult to measure some of the issues (socioeconomic status, parental characteristics, ethnicity, etc.) which could confound and weaken the relationship between low cognitive ability and high violence and other antisocial behavior.
This team found some other approaches to test whether the other confounding factors might be more important than cognitive ability. The confounds have little explanatory value. They seem to have confirmed the causal role of low cognitive ability on higher violence and antisocial behavior.
I believe that low cog deficits can be off-set, at least to an extent, by strong cultural norms, good behavioral choices, personality dispositions, and other such factors. But this shores up the proposition that low cog has a range of likely negative consequences. Knowing low cog, interventions need to come early and on the range of other factors which might be militating.
BackgroundMy interpretation. We have long had good theoretical grounds to believe that lower cognitive capability is causally related to higher risk for violent and other antisocial behavior.
Research has consistently found lower cognitive ability to be related to increased risk for violent and other antisocial behaviour. Since this association has remained when adjusting for childhood socioeconomic position, ethnicity, and parental characteristics, it is often assumed to be causal, potentially mediated through school adjustment problems and conduct disorder. Socioeconomic differences are notoriously difficult to quantify, however, and it is possible that the association between intelligence and delinquency suffer substantial residual confounding.
Methods
We linked longitudinal Swedish total population registers to study the association of general cognitive ability (intelligence) at age 18 (the Conscript Register, 1980–1993) with the incidence proportion of violent criminal convictions (the Crime Register, 1973–2009), among all men born in Sweden 1961–1975 (N = 700,514). Using probit regression, we controlled for measured childhood socioeconomic variables, and further employed sibling comparisons (family pedigree data from the Multi-Generation Register) to adjust for shared familial characteristics.
Results
Cognitive ability in early adulthood was inversely associated to having been convicted of a violent crime (β = −0.19, 95% CI: −0.19; −0.18), the association remained when adjusting for childhood socioeconomic factors (β = −0.18, 95% CI: −0.18; −0.17). The association was somewhat lower within half-brothers raised apart (β = −0.16, 95% CI: −0.18; −0.14), within half-brothers raised together (β = −0.13, 95% CI: (−0.15; −0.11), and lower still in full-brother pairs (β = −0.10, 95% CI: −0.11; −0.09). The attenuation among half-brothers raised together and full brothers was too strong to be attributed solely to attenuation from measurement error.
Discussion
Our results suggest that the association between general cognitive ability and violent criminality is confounded partly by factors shared by brothers. However, most of the association remains even after adjusting for such factors.
However, it is methodologically difficult to measure some of the issues (socioeconomic status, parental characteristics, ethnicity, etc.) which could confound and weaken the relationship between low cognitive ability and high violence and other antisocial behavior.
This team found some other approaches to test whether the other confounding factors might be more important than cognitive ability. The confounds have little explanatory value. They seem to have confirmed the causal role of low cognitive ability on higher violence and antisocial behavior.
I believe that low cog deficits can be off-set, at least to an extent, by strong cultural norms, good behavioral choices, personality dispositions, and other such factors. But this shores up the proposition that low cog has a range of likely negative consequences. Knowing low cog, interventions need to come early and on the range of other factors which might be militating.
That is the old style reporting worth paying for.
And as if to prove me marginally wrong. Yesterday I posted Pleading for a business sector that died a long time ago pointing out that local papers hardly provide any accurate, revealing, or useful local news anymore. I used our local paper, The Atlanta Journal and Constitution as an example of a storied paper that once did investigative journalism, once advocated for citizens, once published revealing information without fear or favor.
And now coasting along on the fumes of a near empty brand. Press release journalism, failure to report or hold politicians and commercial interests accountable. Barely able to report facts, and usually reluctantly.
And all that remains true.
The one light in the dismal miasma is a surviving journalist, Bill Torpy of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, still playing the role of the old intrepid journalist reporting the facts from the street. Today's column is Why no outrage? Atlanta shootings surge, but it’s not the cops by Bill Torpy.
But it is not what you would know from our Mayor.
As a consequence of a statewide Covid-19 lockdown, more people are remaining at home. Property crime has declined and property crime is in absolute terms the largest form of crime. Also, with fewer cars on the road, road crime is down sharply. But violent crime has shot up. On any given day in any given year there are few to no murders but there are dozens of car thefts. In absolute terms, when you average all categories of crime, all crime is down.
And violent crime, the most feared crime, is up 100%. This is how politicians lie, by telling technical truths that belie the reality people are seeing and experiencing.
And this is entirely predictable. In 2014, after the Ferguson riots, many cities instructed their police to stop doing proactive policing and reduce their presence in troubled neighborhoods. For those cities, crime increased sharply. Less policing almost always results in more crime. It is one of the most replicated findings in sociology.
After 2014 it was known as the Ferguson Effect. Many in the mainstream media and academia rejected the hypothesis but over the years more and more rigorous studies confirmed its existence. Since the suspension of proactive policing tended to occur in our largest cities, New York and Chicago being notable, the Ferguson Effect even showed up in national numbers. Violent crime which had been declining since the 1990s, popped back up. The rise only lasted a couple of years as police departments once again began practicing proactive policing and the national crime rates resumed their steady decline to historical lows.
Amidst all the polemical arguments about defunding the police, real numbers keep clocking up.
In Atlanta, the City Council members seriously discussed defunding the police. The clarity that this was a class issue rather than a race issue was made clear in the final vote. The proposal was defeated 8 to 7 with the votes for maintaining funding coming from those representing the poorest and blackest neighborhoods of the city. Those most likely to suffer from crime.
The council people more concerned with signaling their moral virtue and purity all came from the richest and whitest neighborhoods, the neighborhoods with well-armed residents, lots of gun-training, neighborhoods with private security patrols.
It sickens me to see this sort of hypocrisy where upper income council people, while playing with the symbolism of Black Lives Matter, disregard and dismiss the lives of our poorest residents who tend also to be black.
The Mayor and City Council have been praising the police department for several years as they have had to manage through underfunding and understaffing. The Mayor and City Council have praised the police department for its improved policies, and training, and results. And all that praise was clearly empty words. When the appearance of a mistake was made, the politicians threw the police department under the bus.
It is all well and good for the residents to take gifts to police stations and thank the individual officers. But if the officers know that the Mayor and Council will actively punish the police without evidence or due process, what happens? Something immensely predictable.
And the press and academia and mainline priests are prancing around declaring that Black Lives Matter and committing themselves to social justice, and declaring that this is all about the racism inherent in a city which is majority black, a Mayor who is black, a police force which is majority black, an acting police chief who is black, a City Council which is majority black.
What nonsense. And good for Bill Torpy calling them on it. That is the old style reporting worth paying for.
And now coasting along on the fumes of a near empty brand. Press release journalism, failure to report or hold politicians and commercial interests accountable. Barely able to report facts, and usually reluctantly.
And all that remains true.
The one light in the dismal miasma is a surviving journalist, Bill Torpy of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, still playing the role of the old intrepid journalist reporting the facts from the street. Today's column is Why no outrage? Atlanta shootings surge, but it’s not the cops by Bill Torpy.
The exchange was surreal, a sign that the wheels may be falling off public safety in Atlanta.And like a good traditional journalist, Torpy provides the empirical evidence, the context. This is not a matter of perceived increase in violence. It is an actual increase.
Fittingly, it happened Monday during the City Council’s Public Safety Committee hearing as council members and interim Police Chief Rodney Bryant were grappling with the unrest plaguing the city.
Councilman Antonio Brown, who represents the district just west of downtown, was getting ready to speak in the virtual meeting when he told the chief: “I was just notified there was a young man who was just shot and killed at 377 Westchester Boulevard. Can you get a unit out there? He’s been on the ground and there’s no police who have come. He’s dead already, he’s on the ground and the residents have put a sheet over him and the police still haven’t arrived.”
It sounds like Afghanistan: Can you please come and pick up the body?
But there’s more.
On June 13, as angry protesters milled around the south Atlanta Wendy’s the day after Rayshard Brooks was shot in the parking lot by a cop — and hours before the restaurant was burned down — there was a wild shootout in the Edgewood neighborhood in east Atlanta. Five people were wounded and two were killed. Residents reported hearing perhaps 40 gunshots.
Earlier this month, the owners of a bar in the popular Edgewood Avenue nightlife district posted a photo online of the business’s window smashed by a bullet. They said they felt unsafe and were closing “until the city gets its #@&! together.”
What caused this? Eight people were shot nearby in six days.
Friday in south Atlanta, police found the body of 80-year-old Clarence Knox inside his home. Residents reported at least 20 shots the night before, and cops think he was the unintended victim of a drive-by shooting.
And over the weekend there was this headline: “6 injured in 3 overnight drive-by shootings in Atlanta.” One of the victims is a 10-year-old boy.
Violence is off the chain in Atlanta.
During the first three weeks of this month — May 31 to June 20 — 75 people have been shot in Atlanta. Last year during that period, 35 people were shot in the city.So violent crime is up 100%. Sounds right based on reports from friends around the city and from reports on NextDoor.
At this rate it’ll be 100 shot by July.
Eleven people have been killed during that three-week period. Last year? Five.
But it is not what you would know from our Mayor.
In a statement, the mayor’s office said overall crime is down 17% in Atlanta. “But like some major cities, we have seen an increase among certain crimes as more people resumed activity outside their homes since the end of May. Now that bandwidth is less strained following weeks of demonstrations, APD resources are freed up to increase patrols on the streets and curb illicit activity,” the mayor’s office said.Talk about blowing smoke. That's simply Simpson's Paradox. It is a typical politician's untruth. Property crime has been rising for the past 3-4 years in most neighborhoods. But violent crime has been declining.
As a consequence of a statewide Covid-19 lockdown, more people are remaining at home. Property crime has declined and property crime is in absolute terms the largest form of crime. Also, with fewer cars on the road, road crime is down sharply. But violent crime has shot up. On any given day in any given year there are few to no murders but there are dozens of car thefts. In absolute terms, when you average all categories of crime, all crime is down.
And violent crime, the most feared crime, is up 100%. This is how politicians lie, by telling technical truths that belie the reality people are seeing and experiencing.
And this is entirely predictable. In 2014, after the Ferguson riots, many cities instructed their police to stop doing proactive policing and reduce their presence in troubled neighborhoods. For those cities, crime increased sharply. Less policing almost always results in more crime. It is one of the most replicated findings in sociology.
After 2014 it was known as the Ferguson Effect. Many in the mainstream media and academia rejected the hypothesis but over the years more and more rigorous studies confirmed its existence. Since the suspension of proactive policing tended to occur in our largest cities, New York and Chicago being notable, the Ferguson Effect even showed up in national numbers. Violent crime which had been declining since the 1990s, popped back up. The rise only lasted a couple of years as police departments once again began practicing proactive policing and the national crime rates resumed their steady decline to historical lows.
Amidst all the polemical arguments about defunding the police, real numbers keep clocking up.
In Atlanta, the City Council members seriously discussed defunding the police. The clarity that this was a class issue rather than a race issue was made clear in the final vote. The proposal was defeated 8 to 7 with the votes for maintaining funding coming from those representing the poorest and blackest neighborhoods of the city. Those most likely to suffer from crime.
The council people more concerned with signaling their moral virtue and purity all came from the richest and whitest neighborhoods, the neighborhoods with well-armed residents, lots of gun-training, neighborhoods with private security patrols.
It sickens me to see this sort of hypocrisy where upper income council people, while playing with the symbolism of Black Lives Matter, disregard and dismiss the lives of our poorest residents who tend also to be black.
“Crime doesn’t take a holiday,” said Councilman Michael Bond. “Crime doesn’t care about activists or protests. Crime doesn’t care about black men getting shot down in the streets. The criminals know the police are diverted. They are taking advantage of the situation.”And regardless of the outcome of that vote, the members of the police force are paying attention. They are doing a dangerous job. And what they are observing is that if they make a mistake, and more pertinently, if they simply appear to make a mistake, they will be suspended and/or fire without any due process. The Mayor has defenestrated them along with the representatives of the wealthiest neighborhoods.
Bond was part of a council majority (8-7) that voted against withholding funding from the Atlanta Police Department budget as a way to force reforms.“
The irony about defunding to reform police is that residents in those areas are begging for more police,” he said. Many residents, especially those who are older, are frightened about crime and “don’t want the police to go away,” he said.
The Mayor and City Council have been praising the police department for several years as they have had to manage through underfunding and understaffing. The Mayor and City Council have praised the police department for its improved policies, and training, and results. And all that praise was clearly empty words. When the appearance of a mistake was made, the politicians threw the police department under the bus.
It is all well and good for the residents to take gifts to police stations and thank the individual officers. But if the officers know that the Mayor and Council will actively punish the police without evidence or due process, what happens? Something immensely predictable.
Then there’s this: Many cops have taken a more hands-off approach to policing following the arrests of six officers for using Tasers on two college students this month, and the arrests of two officers in the killing of Brooks. Cops are reticent to get out and deal with angry people in the streets.Rich or poor, black or white, citizens are sitting on the sidelines watching politicians throw honest hardworking public servants to the mob. They are watching the Mayor cede the streets to the mob. They are watching appalled at the establishment hypocrisy when eleven African-Americans are murdered by criminals while the political leadership cower in fear.
A video shot after a shooting near the burned-out Wendy’s shows cops being forced back into their cars by a threatening crowd. In the third week of June, Atlanta cops made 50 traffic stops. In the corresponding period a year ago, they made 3,000. (Yes, those numbers are right.)
Scores of cops have called in sick, and the so-called “proactive” policing — which is investigating situations to try to stop crime before it occurs — is now largely nonexistent.“
Officers will respond to high-level calls and protecting each other,” said Jason Segura, a cop who heads the department’s union. He said the recent firings and quick arrests of officers without detailed investigations has police thinking the city does not have their backs.
He took issue with Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, who until now has had a good relationship with cops, having pushed through a long-awaited pay raise.
“She’s going to listen to the mob” in calling for arrests of and sanctions against police, Segura said. “This is politics and the citizens are suffering. Being proactive will probably get you indicted under the current state of affairs.”
And the press and academia and mainline priests are prancing around declaring that Black Lives Matter and committing themselves to social justice, and declaring that this is all about the racism inherent in a city which is majority black, a Mayor who is black, a police force which is majority black, an acting police chief who is black, a City Council which is majority black.
What nonsense. And good for Bill Torpy calling them on it. That is the old style reporting worth paying for.
Monday, June 29, 2020
Data Talks
How many years do we spend in school? Top 15 most educated nations, 1870-2017 https://t.co/983vb5AtbI pic.twitter.com/Wwy1hrw54t
— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) May 28, 2020
I see wonderful things
Known as Asperitas, these clouds are stunning, unusual and relatively unstudied https://t.co/xpoxBnerED [source of the photo, by Witta Priester: https://t.co/A79lcGfdWw] pic.twitter.com/mWNY2gYfjH
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) May 20, 2020
Toulon Washerwomen, 1925 by Clare Leighton
Toulon Washerwomen, 1925 by Clare Leighton
Click to enlarge.
Pleading for a business sector that died a long time ago
Great insight into the mind of the establishment mainstream media. As an industry, they are in their death throes. Debilitated by tech companies seizing the ad revenue which used to go to newspapers and TV stations, overtaken by loss of talent and replacement by Woke junior journalists who know nothing.
In my household, based on the loss of factual reporting and epistemic integrity, we are down to two papers from six. And the remaining two are knife-edge.
From Don’t Cancel That Newspaper Subscription by Margaret Renkl. She starts out with an inspiring tale from 66 years ago about a journalist. Kind of telling, and distressing, that she has to go back that far for an heroic journalist tale.
She acknowledges the bad ship of the industry.
And that is the first tell. Renkl is not pointing out rule-breaking or anything of the sort. She is a Social Justice warrior, not a Classical Liberal. She objects to the free speech that allows a message she doesn't like. It is one of the great ironies of the age that those most in opposition to free speech are in the industry whose very existence depends on free speech.
Renkl is not making any principled argument about the nature of advertising. She is trying to stem the financial body blow from the Woke subscribers.
But that she pitches her argument in the context of the value to the community is kind of astonishing. Again:
The upshot is that it provide almost nothing of value to local readers. The AJC will never champion citizens/residents over the commercial establishment and political power structure. It hardly reports on news as it is happening.
A couple of days ago, there was a massive pipe collapse near Georgia Tech with consequent flooding. Most the City is without water and much the rest is on a boil-water-alert.
I find out about the problem via Twitter (dramatic video footage) and on NextDoor (useful links to the Department of Watershed Management).
Seems like we continue to have these kind of problems every four to eight months.
By 2004, it became obvious that Atlanta water infrastructure was being outpaced by development. Politicians and Commercial Interests circled the wagons and lobbied intensely to get the public to take on some additional bonds to fix the water infrastructure. Sixteen years and $2 billion dollars later, we still have frequent boil-water-alerts.
The infrastructure is still a mess. The Department of Watershed Management is still notoriously corrupt and incompetent. But you learn that by being a good neighbor fixing local problems and interacting with the City government. And through social media platforms. You won't read about the problems in the AJC.
Instead you will read the apocalyptic forecasts from the paper as to what will happen if citizens don't cough up more taxes for a further $2 billion in investments.
The ship Renkl is pleading for, a local paper reporting factual useful news to local citizens to help them make informed decisions? Gone. A few pages of opinion and Social Justice/Critical theory reporting with no knowledge or context is about all that is left. When social media platforms are providing more timely, better trusted, and more fact-based reporting than the newspaper, you know the sector is in a death spiral.
In my household, based on the loss of factual reporting and epistemic integrity, we are down to two papers from six. And the remaining two are knife-edge.
From Don’t Cancel That Newspaper Subscription by Margaret Renkl. She starts out with an inspiring tale from 66 years ago about a journalist. Kind of telling, and distressing, that she has to go back that far for an heroic journalist tale.
She acknowledges the bad ship of the industry.
A staggering 7,800 journalists lost their jobs in 2019, according to Business Insider. Once the pandemic hit, another 36,000 media-company employees got the pink slip. And all these disasters came on top of continuing losses that collectively cost American newsrooms half their journalists between 2008 and 2019.This in context of a perceived mis-step by the Tennessean.
I remind you of all this — the decades-old history of a newspaper known for advancing progressive causes and the recent history of a media company in thrall to corporate investors — to provide some context for an appalling advertisement that ran in The Tennessean on June 21.Sounds in poor taste, but most advertising is in poor taste. Within the pages, whether advertising or in the reporting or editorializing, it is easy to find similar levels of ignorance, bad taste, and presumed bias. I don't know whether the advertising breached any of the terms or guidelines of the paper, but I am presuming not. It sounds like the objection is to the message rather than to any breach of contract.
The full-page, full-color ad featured images of Donald Trump, Pope Francis and burning American flags, as well as a long, incoherent, biblically illiterate warning that “Islam is going to detonate a nuclear device in Nashville, Tennessee” and thereby launch a “Third World War.”
And that is the first tell. Renkl is not pointing out rule-breaking or anything of the sort. She is a Social Justice warrior, not a Classical Liberal. She objects to the free speech that allows a message she doesn't like. It is one of the great ironies of the age that those most in opposition to free speech are in the industry whose very existence depends on free speech.
Renkl is not making any principled argument about the nature of advertising. She is trying to stem the financial body blow from the Woke subscribers.
Public outcry began early and spread swiftly. Especially given the recent history of vandalism and violent threats against Muslims in Middle Tennessee, “A huge target was placed on our community,” said Sabina Mohyuddin, executive director of the American Muslim Advisory Council, a Nashville-based advocacy group. Public calls to unsubscribe from the paper flew around Twitter.Renkl takes pains to demonstrate that the Tennessean is as worthily woke as ever.
Tennessean editor Michael A. Anastasi called the ad “inconsistent with everything The Tennessean as an institution stands and has stood for and with the journalism we have produced.”The journalists and editors made a mistake by straying from the woke straight-and-narrow. Please don't punish them by cancelling your subscriptions. They can't afford to lose more revenue. That's her message.
Mr. Anastasi wasn’t referencing merely his newspaper’s storied history. In the same print edition of the paper that carried the unforgivable ad, The Tennessean published articles on the “violence interrupters” of Gideon’s Army, a grass-roots organization that works as a successful alternative to police intervention; Nashville’s Juneteenth protest; an interview with the mother of Ashanti Posey, an African-American teenager shot to death in April; and two op-ed columns on racism and policing. The issue also included a number of wire reports about hate crimes legislation in Georgia, the removal of Confederate statues in North Carolina, NASCAR’s decision to prohibit the display of Confederate flags, and worries by civil rights leaders that the 2020 census is undercounting minority populations.
You can argue that The Tennessean is now so short of journalists it can’t possibly cover the full range of challenges facing this city, and you would be right. You can argue that the statewide focus of Gannett’s “USA Today Network — Tennessee” is just a fancy way of ignoring smaller-city news, and you would be right about that, too. But you can’t argue that the journalists who actually cover this town are indifferent to the plights of the communities they cover. Tennessean reporters were as appalled by that ad as everyone else.
As the “first rough draft of history,” journalism will always be prone to mistakes, no matter how assiduously reporters and editors try to prevent them. But canceling your newspaper subscription because of one ad, no matter how hideous — or because of one deeply offensive headline, or one flagrantly dangerous op-ed — will not cure journalism of what ails it.It comes down this. The opinion in the NYT is written by a fully paid up member of the Mandarin Class, comfortable acknowledging that her preferred media is sharply at odds with the public and surviving only by subscriptions from the most left-leaning of readers. She is not making an argument, she is making a plea. Don't hurt us more. We will be more woke.
The only thing canceling your subscription to a newspaper will do is hasten the death of journalism itself. It will leave your community with even fewer full-time reporters to tell you what local leaders were up to while you weren’t paying attention. It will leave you with a far poorer understanding of the place where you live.
But that she pitches her argument in the context of the value to the community is kind of astonishing. Again:
It will leave your community with even fewer full-time reporters to tell you what local leaders were up to while you weren’t paying attention.We are already there. Most local papers have thin staff, dramatically fewer pages, almost no original content reporting. My local paper, the Atlanta Journal and Constitution with a storied history, hardly reports on the city at all. Very little about crime because it offends some readers. Very little about endemic corruption because it offends some financial interests. Very little about city incompetence because it offends the establishment. Almost nothing about local politician scandals because it would offend the politician and the paper would lose what little access it has.
The upshot is that it provide almost nothing of value to local readers. The AJC will never champion citizens/residents over the commercial establishment and political power structure. It hardly reports on news as it is happening.
A couple of days ago, there was a massive pipe collapse near Georgia Tech with consequent flooding. Most the City is without water and much the rest is on a boil-water-alert.
I find out about the problem via Twitter (dramatic video footage) and on NextDoor (useful links to the Department of Watershed Management).
Seems like we continue to have these kind of problems every four to eight months.
By 2004, it became obvious that Atlanta water infrastructure was being outpaced by development. Politicians and Commercial Interests circled the wagons and lobbied intensely to get the public to take on some additional bonds to fix the water infrastructure. Sixteen years and $2 billion dollars later, we still have frequent boil-water-alerts.
The infrastructure is still a mess. The Department of Watershed Management is still notoriously corrupt and incompetent. But you learn that by being a good neighbor fixing local problems and interacting with the City government. And through social media platforms. You won't read about the problems in the AJC.
Instead you will read the apocalyptic forecasts from the paper as to what will happen if citizens don't cough up more taxes for a further $2 billion in investments.
The ship Renkl is pleading for, a local paper reporting factual useful news to local citizens to help them make informed decisions? Gone. A few pages of opinion and Social Justice/Critical theory reporting with no knowledge or context is about all that is left. When social media platforms are providing more timely, better trusted, and more fact-based reporting than the newspaper, you know the sector is in a death spiral.
DiAngelo isn’t the first person to make a buck pushing tricked-up pseudo-intellectual horseshit as corporate wisdom, but she might be the first to do it selling Hitlerian race theory.
The Fever of Wokedom is seemingly, more prevalent and with a higher cognitive mortality rate than Covid-19.
I have suggested that we are in a period of the Great Revealing - the Social Justice/Critical Theory movement has reached a tipping point, and their religious fanatics are now trying to purify society and destroy people and careers. It is unpleasant and dangerous.
But it is revealing. Who supports the sheer idiocy of getting rid of the police? Who is it that wants to reintroduce segregation by creating racially separate spaces on campuses? Who wants to declare their racism by publicly subscribing to Social Justice/Critical Theory? All is being revealed.
And on the positive side, particularly in the academy and in mainstream media, closet Classical Liberals are finally having to step forward and raise their voices for progress and development and the against violence, racism, totalitarianism, violence, anger, and repression of the Social Justice/Critical Theory movement. It is reassuring to hear those voices, silent for so long.
Matt Taibbi is among the braver and the more articulate, defending the principles of Classical Liberalism though hating the party nominally most committed to them. The flow of his articles denouncing the danger of overturning Classical Liberalism in return for Social Justice/Critical Theory" steadily rises.
His most recent is a book review of one the more absurd events of an absurd year. From On “White Fragility”: A few thoughts on America’s smash-hit #1 guide to egghead racialism by Matt Taibbi.
Read the whole thing for the more complete argument. However, it is full of zingers. He begins sedately.
I have suggested that we are in a period of the Great Revealing - the Social Justice/Critical Theory movement has reached a tipping point, and their religious fanatics are now trying to purify society and destroy people and careers. It is unpleasant and dangerous.
But it is revealing. Who supports the sheer idiocy of getting rid of the police? Who is it that wants to reintroduce segregation by creating racially separate spaces on campuses? Who wants to declare their racism by publicly subscribing to Social Justice/Critical Theory? All is being revealed.
And on the positive side, particularly in the academy and in mainstream media, closet Classical Liberals are finally having to step forward and raise their voices for progress and development and the against violence, racism, totalitarianism, violence, anger, and repression of the Social Justice/Critical Theory movement. It is reassuring to hear those voices, silent for so long.
Matt Taibbi is among the braver and the more articulate, defending the principles of Classical Liberalism though hating the party nominally most committed to them. The flow of his articles denouncing the danger of overturning Classical Liberalism in return for Social Justice/Critical Theory" steadily rises.
His most recent is a book review of one the more absurd events of an absurd year. From On “White Fragility”: A few thoughts on America’s smash-hit #1 guide to egghead racialism by Matt Taibbi.
Read the whole thing for the more complete argument. However, it is full of zingers. He begins sedately.
A core principle of the academic movement that shot through elite schools in America since the early nineties was the view that individual rights, humanism, and the democratic process are all just stalking-horses for white supremacy. The concept, as articulated in books like former corporate consultant Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility (Amazon’s #1 seller!) reduces everything, even the smallest and most innocent human interactions, to racial power contests.But then the flame-thrower comes out.
It’s been mind-boggling to watch White Fragility celebrated in recent weeks. When it surged past a Hunger Games book on bestseller lists, USA Today cheered, “American readers are more interested in combatting racism than in literary escapism.” When DiAngelo appeared on The Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon gushed, “I know… everyone wants to talk to you right now!” White Fragility has been pitched as an uncontroversial road-map for fighting racism, at a time when after the murder of George Floyd Americans are suddenly (and appropriately) interested in doing just that. Except this isn’t a straightforward book about examining one’s own prejudices. Have the people hyping this impressively crazy book actually read it?Social Justice/Critical Theory depends on a religious faith with a tautological belief at its core and which makes argument fruitless.
DiAngelo isn’t the first person to make a buck pushing tricked-up pseudo-intellectual horseshit as corporate wisdom, but she might be the first to do it selling Hitlerian race theory. White Fragility has a simple message: there is no such thing as a universal human experience, and we are defined not by our individual personalities or moral choices, but only by our racial category.
DiAngelo instructs us there is nothing to be done here, except “strive to be less white.” To deny this theory, or to have the effrontery to sneak away from the tedium of DiAngelo’s lecturing – what she describes as “leaving the stress-inducing situation” – is to affirm her conception of white supremacy. This intellectual equivalent of the “ordeal by water” (if you float, you’re a witch) is orthodoxy across much of academia.More
DiAngelo writes like a person who was put in timeout as a child for speaking clearly. “When there is disequilibrium in the habitus — when social cues are unfamiliar and/or when they challenge our capital — we use strategies to regain our balance,” she says (“People taken out of their comfort zones find ways to deal,” according to Google Translate). Ideas that go through the English-DiAngelo translator usually end up significantly altered, as in this key part of the book when she addresses Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream,” speech.The jibes keep coming.
It takes a special kind of ignorant for an author to choose an example that illustrates the mathematical opposite of one’s intended point, but this isn’t uncommon in White Fragility, which may be the dumbest book ever written. It makes The Art of the Deal read like Anna Karenina.Classical Liberals of the center and right have been invoking the increasing similarity between the Social Justice/Critical Theory movement and the Struggle Sessions of the Mao era. Certainly an effective rhetorical turn but initially it struck me as a tad over-stretching. I see though, that Taibbi also thinks we are already there in terms of Maoist repressive behaviors.
The downside, which we’re already seeing, is that organizations everywhere will embrace powerful new tools for solving professional disputes, through a never-ending purge. One of the central tenets of DiAngelo’s book (and others like it) is that racism cannot be eradicated and can only be managed through constant, “lifelong” vigilance, much like the battle with addiction. A useful theory, if your business is selling teams of high-priced toxicity-hunters to corporations as next-generation versions of efficiency experts — in the fight against this disease, companies will need the help forever and ever.You have an odd situation when the center and right side of the Classical Liberal spectrum are more upset about the injustices being done against left-leaning academics than is the Social Justice/Critical Theory crowd are perfectly happy indulging in a digital day of defenestrating everyone they can get their hands on.
Cancelations already are happening too fast to track. In a phenomenon that will be familiar to students of Russian history, accusers are beginning to appear alongside the accused. Three years ago a popular Canadian writer named Hal Niedzviecki was denounced for expressing the opinion that “anyone, anywhere, should be encouraged to imagine other peoples, other cultures, other identities." He reportedly was forced out of the Writer’s Union of Canada for the crime of “cultural appropriation,” and denounced as a racist by many, including a poet named Gwen Benaway. The latter said Niedzviecki “doesn’t see the humanity of indigenous peoples.” Last week, Benaway herself was denounced on Twitter for failing to provide proof that she was Indigenous.
Michael Korenberg, the chair of the board at the University of British Columbia, was forced to resign for liking tweets by Dinesh D’Souza and Donald Trump, which you might think is fine – but what about Latino electrical worker Emmanuel Cafferty, fired after a white activist took a photo of him making an OK symbol (it was described online as a “white power” sign)? How about Sue Schafer, the heretofore unknown graphic designer the Washington Post decided to out in a 3000-word article for attending a Halloween party two years ago in blackface (a failed parody of a different blackface incident involving Megyn Kelly)? She was fired, of course. How was this news? Why was ruining this person’s life necessary?
People everywhere today are being encouraged to snitch out schoolmates, parents, and colleagues for thoughtcrime. The New York Times wrote a salutary piece about high schoolers scanning social media accounts of peers for evidence of “anti-black racism” to make public, because what can go wrong with encouraging teenagers to start submarining each other’s careers before they’ve even finished growing?
it’s extremely suspicious that the books politicians, the press, university administrators, and corporate consultants alike are asking us to read are urging us to put race even more at the center of our identities, and fetishize the unbridgeable nature of our differences. Meanwhile books like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird, which are both beautiful and actually anti-racist, have been banned, for containing the “N-word.” (White Fragility contains it too, by the way). It’s almost like someone thinks there’s a benefit to keeping people divided.A lot of people are reaching that same conclusion. The unseating of the Mandarin Class by the silent majority seems to be gathering steam.
Anyone can get angry, but . . .
In this period when all our institutions are under assault by the barbarism, racism, intolerance, and violence of the wildly inappropriately named Social Justice/Critical Theory, it is pleasant to take solace in ancient wisdom of the Classical Liberal and Age of Enlightenment inspiration.
From Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle, Book 7, 1152b 15, edited by Roger Crisp. Link is to an older translation. Emphasis added.
We can see the uncontrolled fury and anger. It is easy to be angry. But what is the problem to be solved?
The absence of any clear or coherent answer is telling. It appears that the riots are simply a rejection of the prosperous, progressive, safe status quo. It is a rejection of progress and the embracement of retrogression. The desire seems to be to return to the pagan and uncivilized belief sets against natural rights, personal freedom, rejection of group identity, rejection of collective guilt, rejection of heritable guilt. All those consequential assumptions which have stood everyone in such good stead.
All to be discarded because of the fanatic religious beliefs of the tiny minority of Social Justice/Critical Theory acolytes. Those who want to return to primitive tribalism, group identities, banishment of individualism, enthusiastic embracing of racism, collective guilt, and heritable guilt.
Problem solving and progress is a trait of Age of Enlightenment thinking and Classical Liberalism. And the roots go all the way back to Ancient Greece when we first understood that it is easy to be angry but that undirected anger, that destructive anger is merely the revving up of an engine that accelerates us towards bad outcomes.
From Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle, Book 7, 1152b 15, edited by Roger Crisp. Link is to an older translation. Emphasis added.
Enough has been said, then, to show that virtue of character is a mean, and in what sense it is so; that it is a mean between two vices, one of excess and one of deficiency; and that it is such because it is the sort of thing able to hit the mean in feelings and actions. This is why it is hard to be good, because in each case it is hard to find the middle point; for instance, not everyone can find the centre of a circle, but only the person with knowledge. So too anyone can get angry, or give and spend money - these are easy; but doing them in relation to the right person, in the right amount, at the right time, with the right aim in view, and in the right way - that is not something anyone can do, nor is it easy. This is why excellence in these things is rare, praiseworthy and noble.Hence the call from Classical Liberals to the riotous mobs of Social Justice/Critical Theory adherents - What is the problem you want to solve?
We can see the uncontrolled fury and anger. It is easy to be angry. But what is the problem to be solved?
The absence of any clear or coherent answer is telling. It appears that the riots are simply a rejection of the prosperous, progressive, safe status quo. It is a rejection of progress and the embracement of retrogression. The desire seems to be to return to the pagan and uncivilized belief sets against natural rights, personal freedom, rejection of group identity, rejection of collective guilt, rejection of heritable guilt. All those consequential assumptions which have stood everyone in such good stead.
All to be discarded because of the fanatic religious beliefs of the tiny minority of Social Justice/Critical Theory acolytes. Those who want to return to primitive tribalism, group identities, banishment of individualism, enthusiastic embracing of racism, collective guilt, and heritable guilt.
Problem solving and progress is a trait of Age of Enlightenment thinking and Classical Liberalism. And the roots go all the way back to Ancient Greece when we first understood that it is easy to be angry but that undirected anger, that destructive anger is merely the revving up of an engine that accelerates us towards bad outcomes.
Too real to ignore.
I have always enjoyed Malcolm Gladwell as a writer who can popularize leading ideas. But you always have to watch closely. His authorial and rhetorical skills can sometimes outweigh the strength of the evidence he is advancing. (Some of my past posts on the issues attached to 10,000 hours are here.)
Came across this brief article today. From Ten-thousand hours of practice isn’t enough to make you a star by Sara Kiley Watson.
Practice is predictive of some outcome degree of outcome but you have to take into account G, motivation, talent, behavior (perseverance), etc. are in the mix with G being the most influential.
It is a conclusion widely rejected by the blank slaters in Social Justice?critical Theory but it is also an empirical reality that cannot be simply dismissed.
But we can give these factors their proper context. Genetics plays a not inconsiderable role in individual outcomes (G is highly heritable for example). There are group differences.
But outcomes cannot by individually forecast with great precision and confidence. What is true at the group level, for a variety of reasons, may not be true for an individual.
At a group level, outcome is affected primarily by G but also by natural talent, personal interest/motivation, intensity of practice, personality dispositions, cultural values, and personal choices. Too complex to accurately model but also too real to ignore.
Came across this brief article today. From Ten-thousand hours of practice isn’t enough to make you a star by Sara Kiley Watson.
In 1993, Swedish psychologist K. Anders Ericsson set out to find the secret to turning a typical teen into a violin virtuoso. His answer? Practice: 10,000 hours of it. The figure, a simple average of a few prodigies’ regimens, stuck; journalist and author Malcolm Gladwell even dubbed it “the magic number of greatness” in his 2008 book Outliers.Hambrick has been doing some interesting work over three decades which substantially validate the overall observation G is one our most effective and stable predictors of performance.
The concept of ”practice makes perfect” has been drilled into the heads of ambitious youths since the Roman Empire. Anyone can be the next LeBron James, Yo-Yo Ma, or Celine Dion as long as they can devote enough time to honing their craft. But can it be that simple? Not every expert agrees. While training is essential to learning, spending a chunk of your life trying something over and over doesn’t mean you’ll go pro, says Zach Hambrick, a psychologist at Michigan State University.
Being great isn’t just about the quantity of work, he asserts, but also about the workers themselves. In reviewing different studies about the role of practice in music, games, sports, education, and professional success, Hambrick found that rehearsal time accounted for only about one-quarter of any disparity in skill level. Other factors—like age, intelligence, and natural gifts—all played big roles in setting apart the better from the best.
Genes in particular shape physical and intellectual acumen. Height might be handy for a basketball star, and a limber vocal range could help you nab the lead in Grease. And no amount of practice will make you taller or able to hit notes across every octave. Obnoxious amounts of piano playing will not make your fingers grow longer.
Practice is predictive of some outcome degree of outcome but you have to take into account G, motivation, talent, behavior (perseverance), etc. are in the mix with G being the most influential.
It is a conclusion widely rejected by the blank slaters in Social Justice?critical Theory but it is also an empirical reality that cannot be simply dismissed.
But we can give these factors their proper context. Genetics plays a not inconsiderable role in individual outcomes (G is highly heritable for example). There are group differences.
But outcomes cannot by individually forecast with great precision and confidence. What is true at the group level, for a variety of reasons, may not be true for an individual.
At a group level, outcome is affected primarily by G but also by natural talent, personal interest/motivation, intensity of practice, personality dispositions, cultural values, and personal choices. Too complex to accurately model but also too real to ignore.
Sunday, June 28, 2020
Data Talks
Remember that only 1.8% of U.S. residents live in nursing homes or assisted living facilities, and yet these facilities have tallied 42% of all #COVID19 deaths.
— Avik Roy (@Avik) May 26, 2020
Offbeat Humor
Do dogs have a theory of mind?
— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) May 21, 2020
A lot of psychologists doubt it. But when you see this... pic.twitter.com/DrBMO5Hf04
I see wonderful things
This is what 35,000 walrus look like along a shore [source: https://t.co/G2rGTJ2BF9] pic.twitter.com/uUgva6lUa5
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) May 20, 2020
An insight
"Women are more religious than men to the extent that being irreligious constitutes risk-taking behavior" https://t.co/RQfT1Cqkqt pic.twitter.com/kqqgCx5ttC
— David Schmitt (@PsychoSchmitt) May 16, 2020
How not to get your ass kicked by the police!
Years ago, Chris Rock did a PSA which seems to need more attention in the present climate. From How not to get your ass kicked by the police!.
Double click to enlarge.
Obey the Law
Use Common Sense
Stop Immediately
Don’t Run Away
Turn Down Your Music
Be Polite
Don’t Bring a Crazy Friend with You
Bring a White Friend
Shut Up
Don’t Take Your Angry Girlfriend in the Car
Double click to enlarge.
First Freedom, and then Glory -- when that fails, Wealth, vice, corruption, -- barbarism at last.
From Childe Harold's Pilgrimage by George Gordon, Lord Byron. Canto the Fourth.
As if on schedule. We are founded in the idea of freedom, gloried in wealth, and now the barbarism of Critical Theory/Social Justice is upon us. Let us hold the wall, renew our commitment to freedom and celebrate those dare to build rather than those who destroy.
As if on schedule. We are founded in the idea of freedom, gloried in wealth, and now the barbarism of Critical Theory/Social Justice is upon us. Let us hold the wall, renew our commitment to freedom and celebrate those dare to build rather than those who destroy.
CVIII
There is the moral of all human tales;
'Tis but the same rehearsal of the past,
First Freedom, and then Glory -- when that fails,
Wealth, vice, corruption, -- barbarism at last.
And History, with all her volumes vast,
Hath but one page, -- 'tis better written here,
Where gorgeous tyranny hath thus amass'd
All treasures, all delights, that eye or ear,
Heart, soul could seek, tongue ask -- Away with words! draw near,
CIX
Admire, exult -- despise -- laugh, weep, -- for here
There is such matter for all feeling: -- Man!
Thou pendulum betwixt a smile and tear,
Ages and realms are crowded in this span,
This mountain, whose obliterated plan
The pyramid of empires pinnacled,
Of Glory's gewgaws shining in the van
Till the sun's rays with added flame were fill'd!
Where are its golden roofs! where those who dared to build?
Saturday, June 27, 2020
Data Talks
Meta-Analysis: Men are more likely to interrupt, but the effect size is small. Curiously, male-led studies report less male interrupting than female-led studies... [1998] https://t.co/WalsSy2P6E
— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) May 26, 2020
Effect Size Visualizations: https://t.co/6lsV4DSiqe pic.twitter.com/dp8Rc0aGVd
Offbeat Humor
I made a 2020 commemorative candle pic.twitter.com/I3jo1HfC6X
— summertime steph (@Stephamaybe) May 19, 2020
I see wonderful things
Suction is a fundamental function for the diet of a whale shark, but this one is even able to suck fish out of hole in a fishing net https://t.co/NN7zmLxPJr pic.twitter.com/vluBvemQRq
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) May 20, 2020
January afternoon, 1968 by Virginia Cuthbert
January afternoon, 1968 by Virginia Cuthbert
Click to enlarge.
The press takes him literally, but not seriously - edition n+1
We are four years out and the mainstream media has still not absorbed the lesson pointed out by Salena Zeno in Taking Trump Seriously, Not Literally.
A classic instance of taking him literally, but not seriously. And also a classic case of the Streisand Effect.
What are the facts? Washington Post provides the data.
Click to enlarge.
If you use the number of instances/cases of violent crime, then the top ten most violent cities are all governed by a Democratic Mayor.
If you use the number of instances/cases of violent crime per 100,000 residents, then only the top four most violent cities are governed by Democrats.
Only one city in the entire data set is governed by a Republican Mayor, and that is the 17th most dangerous in number of violent crimes and doesn't even show up on the violent crime rate. There are three cities governed by Independents.
Looking at the forty data points (20 cities, two measures of violence each), then only 3% are governed by a Republican and 7% are governed by Independents. Democrats govern 90% of the most dangerous cities.
And this is how the Washington Post thinks they are refuting Trump's claim that the most dangerous cities are all governed by Democrats - by showing that there is only one city governed by a Republican, his city being among the most safe on their list. And by showing that three cities are governed by Independents.
Not only is this a classic instance of taking him literally, but not seriously. It is also a classic case of the Streisand Effect. And it is also an example of a frequent Trump tactic that the mainstream media cannot help themselves get suckered by. Even after four years.
By picking at definitional nits to muster at least some narrow definitional point that could make Trump's statement untrue, they in effect trigger the Streisand Effect. By laboring so hard and transparently absurdly to refute his claim, they simply bring more attention to the claim and effectively validate it.
But proving him not literally accurate (only 90% of the most dangerous cities are governed by Democrats), they make a spectacle of demonstrating for most people that he is seriously pretty accurate.
And once again they allow Trump, the media puppet master, to use the mainstream media to make his point for him.
It works almost every time. Trump makes a slightly or seriously exaggerated claim. The mainstream media fall all over themselves to prove that on some occasions, in some circumstances, seen from just the right angle, Trump's claim is not universally true. And end up demonstrating that his basic argument is true and now unintentionally validated by his opponents.
This is Charlie Brown and Lucy with the football. We know how it ends. The mainstream media knows how it ends. But they simply cannot stop themselves from scoring minor points while making their opponent's primary point for him.
He baits them, they respond, their brand goes down (jesuitical nit picking) while they advance his argument for him. As a corollary, they also end up feeding the impression of Fake News. It is a modern political wonder.
The best way, he says, is to provide good education and good jobs in these areas. “Fifty-eight percent of black youth cannot get a job, cannot work,” he says. “Fifty-eight percent. If you are not going to bring jobs back, it is just going to continue to get worse and worse.”The Washington Post ran an article a couple of days ago. Trump keeps claiming the most dangerous cities in America are all run by Democrats. They aren't.
It’s a claim that drives fact-checkers to distraction. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the unemployment rate for blacks between the ages of 16 and 24 at 20.6 percent. Trump prefers to use its employment-population ratio, a figure that shows only 41.5 percent of blacks in that age bracket are working. But that means he includes full time high-school and college students among the jobless.
It’s a familiar split. When he makes claims like this, the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.
A classic instance of taking him literally, but not seriously. And also a classic case of the Streisand Effect.
What are the facts? Washington Post provides the data.
If you use the number of instances/cases of violent crime, then the top ten most violent cities are all governed by a Democratic Mayor.
If you use the number of instances/cases of violent crime per 100,000 residents, then only the top four most violent cities are governed by Democrats.
Only one city in the entire data set is governed by a Republican Mayor, and that is the 17th most dangerous in number of violent crimes and doesn't even show up on the violent crime rate. There are three cities governed by Independents.
Looking at the forty data points (20 cities, two measures of violence each), then only 3% are governed by a Republican and 7% are governed by Independents. Democrats govern 90% of the most dangerous cities.
And this is how the Washington Post thinks they are refuting Trump's claim that the most dangerous cities are all governed by Democrats - by showing that there is only one city governed by a Republican, his city being among the most safe on their list. And by showing that three cities are governed by Independents.
The Washington Post actually thought they were owning Trump by posting this? pic.twitter.com/m6PnV7Y4JC
— Ryan James Girdusky (@RyanGirdusky) June 27, 2020
Not only is this a classic instance of taking him literally, but not seriously. It is also a classic case of the Streisand Effect. And it is also an example of a frequent Trump tactic that the mainstream media cannot help themselves get suckered by. Even after four years.
By picking at definitional nits to muster at least some narrow definitional point that could make Trump's statement untrue, they in effect trigger the Streisand Effect. By laboring so hard and transparently absurdly to refute his claim, they simply bring more attention to the claim and effectively validate it.
But proving him not literally accurate (only 90% of the most dangerous cities are governed by Democrats), they make a spectacle of demonstrating for most people that he is seriously pretty accurate.
And once again they allow Trump, the media puppet master, to use the mainstream media to make his point for him.
It works almost every time. Trump makes a slightly or seriously exaggerated claim. The mainstream media fall all over themselves to prove that on some occasions, in some circumstances, seen from just the right angle, Trump's claim is not universally true. And end up demonstrating that his basic argument is true and now unintentionally validated by his opponents.
This is Charlie Brown and Lucy with the football. We know how it ends. The mainstream media knows how it ends. But they simply cannot stop themselves from scoring minor points while making their opponent's primary point for him.
He baits them, they respond, their brand goes down (jesuitical nit picking) while they advance his argument for him. As a corollary, they also end up feeding the impression of Fake News. It is a modern political wonder.
Friday, June 26, 2020
Data Talks or Off Beat Humor? You decide.
This should be taught in undergraduate classes.https://t.co/yUMVc3SkE0 pic.twitter.com/sjRCLohHTE
— Ion Râmaru (@Ion_Ramaru) June 26, 2020
I see wonderful things
Suction is a fundamental function for the diet of a whale shark, but this one is even able to suck fish out of hole in a fishing net https://t.co/NN7zmLxPJr pic.twitter.com/vluBvemQRq
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) May 20, 2020
Misattribution of root causes
From Amy Cooper: The Paradox of the Shameless White Liberal, How pious white anti-racism can contribute to racist behavior by Musa al-Gharbi.
Very interesting. On the substance, I believe al-Gharbi is likely directionally correct, however, he is making a strong claim but his argument structure is in places structurally somewhat weak.
More intriguing to me is that this is one of the rare instances where someone is making the case that the issue is class and not race. That is kind of ancillary to his argument but a truth almost never discussed in the US.
In the US, 70%, 80%, 90%, maybe more of what we argue about in terms of race is really about class or class-adjacent issues such as family-structure or poverty. Some small number of people are philosophical racists (on both ends of the political spectrum). Many more people have patterns of learned practical knowledge which occasionally have a racial bias at their core. Very few systems are systemically racist. Virtually all systems have disparate impact. Disparate impact by itself is no evidence for racism.
So why do we talk about everything racial as if it were a product of malicious racism if, in fact, it is primarily class tension?
Probably path dependency. We clearly have had in parts of the country legal and institutional racism. That was systematically demolished with abolition and the outcome of the Civil War. We then had a hundred years of residual legal racism. It is an historical oddity worth noting (see Thomas Sowell) that between 1865 and 1965, the African-American-White gaps in socio-economic measures of performance (income, education attainment, family formation, health, etc.) showed the greatest rate of convergence.
In 1965 we in large part abolished the residual legacy of legal racism.
It has been a mopping up operation since then. Structural racism (slavery) gone. Residual Legal racism (red-lining, separate but equal, etc.) gone. Most obvious forms of remaining social racism are pretty much gone in most communities. It is not just impolite or even impolitic to criticize based on race, it is virtual career suicide.
If structural, legal, and social racism are substantially gone, why do we still focus on race? I would argue because they used to be real and we are locked into that language and that logic. We are locked into a path dependency.
But at some point, sometime perhaps in the seventies, the evidence was emerging that there are still material disparate outcomes that cannot be attributed to race but are sourced in class.
Take, as an example, school disciplinary actions. It is indisputable that there are black-white differences in the nature and extent of school disciplinary actions. African-American children are expelled, suspended or otherwise disciplined at a greater rate than white students. Why?
With our history, the obvious conclusion would be that this is some holdover of the old issues. But finding overt racism is extremely difficult.
My argument is that that is because we are falling into patterns of thought and misdiagnosing the root cause. It is not race, it is class.
One of the main pieces of evidence for this is by looking at who is doing the discriminatory disparate disciplining.
Some of the schools and school districts with the highest disparate impact are democratically controlled urban school districts. Some even where the District Education Board is majority African-American, where the majority of teachers are African-American, where the majority of the students and parents are African-American, and where the Mayor and City Council are African-American.
Racism? Theoretically possible. Probable? I would argue not.
Because once you control for obvious class attributes, the disparate impact shrinks to vanishing. Controlling for income is perhaps the biggest influence. Control for family structure. Control for parental education attainment. Control for religiosity. When these attributes, more closely associated with class, are brought to bear, the disparate impact shrinks everywhere, whether urban or suburban school districts.
Just an example of why I think we mistakenly misclassify many outcomes as the product of racism when in fact they are a product of class issues.
Al-Gharbi captures some of that thinking in his essay.
And a very rare one at that. Most settle on the habitual race thinking and al-Gharbi clearly accords class a role which it rarely receives.
Very interesting. On the substance, I believe al-Gharbi is likely directionally correct, however, he is making a strong claim but his argument structure is in places structurally somewhat weak.
More intriguing to me is that this is one of the rare instances where someone is making the case that the issue is class and not race. That is kind of ancillary to his argument but a truth almost never discussed in the US.
In the US, 70%, 80%, 90%, maybe more of what we argue about in terms of race is really about class or class-adjacent issues such as family-structure or poverty. Some small number of people are philosophical racists (on both ends of the political spectrum). Many more people have patterns of learned practical knowledge which occasionally have a racial bias at their core. Very few systems are systemically racist. Virtually all systems have disparate impact. Disparate impact by itself is no evidence for racism.
So why do we talk about everything racial as if it were a product of malicious racism if, in fact, it is primarily class tension?
Probably path dependency. We clearly have had in parts of the country legal and institutional racism. That was systematically demolished with abolition and the outcome of the Civil War. We then had a hundred years of residual legal racism. It is an historical oddity worth noting (see Thomas Sowell) that between 1865 and 1965, the African-American-White gaps in socio-economic measures of performance (income, education attainment, family formation, health, etc.) showed the greatest rate of convergence.
In 1965 we in large part abolished the residual legacy of legal racism.
It has been a mopping up operation since then. Structural racism (slavery) gone. Residual Legal racism (red-lining, separate but equal, etc.) gone. Most obvious forms of remaining social racism are pretty much gone in most communities. It is not just impolite or even impolitic to criticize based on race, it is virtual career suicide.
If structural, legal, and social racism are substantially gone, why do we still focus on race? I would argue because they used to be real and we are locked into that language and that logic. We are locked into a path dependency.
But at some point, sometime perhaps in the seventies, the evidence was emerging that there are still material disparate outcomes that cannot be attributed to race but are sourced in class.
Take, as an example, school disciplinary actions. It is indisputable that there are black-white differences in the nature and extent of school disciplinary actions. African-American children are expelled, suspended or otherwise disciplined at a greater rate than white students. Why?
With our history, the obvious conclusion would be that this is some holdover of the old issues. But finding overt racism is extremely difficult.
My argument is that that is because we are falling into patterns of thought and misdiagnosing the root cause. It is not race, it is class.
One of the main pieces of evidence for this is by looking at who is doing the discriminatory disparate disciplining.
Some of the schools and school districts with the highest disparate impact are democratically controlled urban school districts. Some even where the District Education Board is majority African-American, where the majority of teachers are African-American, where the majority of the students and parents are African-American, and where the Mayor and City Council are African-American.
Racism? Theoretically possible. Probable? I would argue not.
Because once you control for obvious class attributes, the disparate impact shrinks to vanishing. Controlling for income is perhaps the biggest influence. Control for family structure. Control for parental education attainment. Control for religiosity. When these attributes, more closely associated with class, are brought to bear, the disparate impact shrinks everywhere, whether urban or suburban school districts.
Just an example of why I think we mistakenly misclassify many outcomes as the product of racism when in fact they are a product of class issues.
Al-Gharbi captures some of that thinking in his essay.
Amy Cooper was asked to put her pet on a leash, in accordance with city ordinance. Rather than simply complying with the rules, Ms. Cooper tried to sic the police on the person who pointed out her violation — feigning to be in imminent danger from an “African American man.” Fortunately, the man accused of threatening Ms. Cooper recorded the incident. His sister later uploaded the video to social media, where it went viral; it has already been viewed tens of millions of times.It feels like al-Gharbi is more focused on establishing that liberals can be manifestly racist rather than emphasizing that the causal mechanism for that racism is class privilege and class assumptions which is where I focus. But its his essay and argument.
It is unclear what the appropriate consequences for something like this should be, given how dire the consequences of her actions could have been (as recent events in Minneapolis sadly confirm). However, Ms. Cooper has already paid a high price for her transgression: She has been publicly shamed and terminated from her position as a VP and Head of Investment Solutions at Franklin Templeton Investments. She has surrendered custody of her dog (whom she dragged around by the neck for most of the confrontation). Some lawmakers have called for her to be charged with making a false report to police.
A lot of ink has been spilled over this incident and others like it. One thing that has been largely missing from these stories is the political orientation of the white people who behave in this manner. It may be tempting to view this question as a distraction from the “core” issue at hand — however, I will argue, this component may actually be essential for understanding how many of these stories play out.
Consider Ms. Cooper’s threat against the person who told her to leash her dog: She was going to call the cops and “tell them there’s an African American man threatening” her life. It seems taken as a given that the police are racially biased — that they will act with overwhelming force, and without regard to the actual facts of the case, to defend a white person who appears to be in danger from a black man. Even though she was the one breaking rules, she assumed the police would target him, precisely on the grounds that he was an “African American man.”
This is not a set of assumptions that most conservatives would likely hold. They are generally skeptical of claims of racial bias in policing. While some acknowledge a few “bad apples,” they assert that law enforcement officers typically discharge their duties in a restrained and fair manner, with their responses to situations dictated by the pertinent facts of the case.
In other words, Ms. Cooper’s assumption that the cops would respond in a forceful manner against a black man without asking too many questions, strictly in virtue of his race as compared to hers — this is the kind of belief that liberals tend to hold about cops.
Indeed, based on her demographic characteristics — urban, white, female, highly-educated, of an upper-socio-economic status — it is statistically highly probable that Ms. Cooper voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 general election.
The peculiar intersection of race, class, and ideology that Ms. Cooper embodies is hardly unusual for cases like these. Consider: in areas of concentrated poverty that are being gentrified or that lie adjacent to wealthier areas (as is often the case in urban settings), policing tends to be much more frequent and aggressive — even for small crimes. Those calling the cops on people of color for things like taking shelter from the rain, failing to wave at a white passerby while leaving their AirBnB, sitting in their car waiting for yoga class to start, accidentally brushing up against a white person in a store, etcetera — the people regularly seeking out law enforcement for things like loud music, loitering, “suspected” criminal activity, or domestic disturbances — these are often relatively well-off, highly-educated, liberal, white denizens eager to “clean up” or “protect” the neighborhoods they choose to live in.
Moreover, it is liberals who go out of their way to embed themselves in communities of color — especially young and highly-educated professionals or artists. Granted, rents tend to be cheaper in these areas. However, many are also drawn to such neighborhoods, quite explicitly, because they are “historic,” “cultured” and “diverse.” In so doing, they put themselves in situations where they more frequently come into contact with minorities. If misunderstandings or conflicts arise (as they inevitably will in multi-cultural and gentrifying urban neighborhoods), many reflexively look to local authorities to resolve these disputes on their behalf. Like Ms. Cooper, this is often done in confidence that the police will align themselves with the white person making the call. In practice, then, they are attempting to use police to punish people of color who are insufficiently deferent to their own demands or preferences. However, it is extremely difficult for most white liberals to understand their actions in this way due to a phenomenon social scientists call “moral credentialing.”
And a very rare one at that. Most settle on the habitual race thinking and al-Gharbi clearly accords class a role which it rarely receives.
He ponders on the share of youth which still belongs to him
From The Collected Poems: with parallel Greek text by C. P. Cavafy. Page 67.
Very Seldom
by C. P. Cavafy
He is an old man. Worn out and stooped,
crippled by the years and by abuses,
walking slowly he crosses the narrow street.
But once he goes inside his home to hide
his wretchedness and his old age, he ponders
on the share of youth which still belongs to him.
Now, young men recite his own verses.
His visions pass before their lively eyes.
Their healthy, sensuous minds,
their elegant, firm bodies,
are stirred by his manifestation of Beauty.
The entire "above the fold" space is devoted to Covid19
From Did mainstream media just make a decision to downplay the protests? Was there some poll? Did the ratings come in? by Ann Althouse.
Ms. Althouse is one of the legion of academics, Classical Liberals to the core, who have been caught back-footed by reemergence of fanaticism, intolerance, authoritarianism, anarchism, etc. on the left. She is enjoyable to read, from my perspective, primarily because of her focus on language. She is very attuned to linguistic nuance.
In this post she is commenting on a phenomenon which those in the center and on the right have been discussing for some time.
When the BLM riots began, it was as if there were a spigot and all news of Covid-19 seemingly disappeared from the mainstream media. You could find some reporting but you had to look hard. First everything was civilizational collapse due to Covid-19. Until it wasn't. Then, everything was race, all the time, everywhere.
Everyone acknowledged that new news of course warrants focus. But exclusive focus?
The speculation was that with the sharp contrast at that time of successful Covid-19 outcomes in Texas, Florida, Georgia, against all media expectations and compared to disasters like New York, drove the media away from Covid-19 to civil unrest as a narrative more beneficial to DNC candidates.
A plausible argument. It fits the facts. But like most things, there were probably other factors beyond mere blind partisanship. Blanket coverage of Cassandra Covid-19 forecasts and lamentations was almost certainly causing a drop in click-throughs, the life-blood of media companies.
What was striking to me at that time, about a month ago, was more that the transition was so swift. One day 100% Covid-19 and the next 100% race riots.
And that lasted about a month. And either the clicks are drying up or the news is not polling well for the DNC. Depends on your filter. This has been brewing for at least a week, but I had not quite noticed the tipping point Althouse points out. What I had noticed was the reemergence of articles focused entirely on reported infections.
This was predicted by the center and right leaning pundits more than a month ago as testing finally kicked in to an industrial phase. Not dozens a day but thousands and tens of thousands of tests a day.
From a purely epistemic perspective, there were all sorts of discussions about just what exactly the increased testing might tell us and how it might change policy decisions. But virtually everyone agreed that there would be a period where accelerating testing would cause an accelerated increase in reported cases. Not because the disease was spreading faster but because we were looking harder and more comprehensively.
Everyone knew that the mainstream media would run with reported infections as the story most likely deleterious to their boogeyman, Trump.
And that is what I noticed about a week or ten days ago. More such stories focusing on rising reported infections and very few addressing the more substantive issue of hospital admissions, ICU bed usage for Covid-19 and most critically, deaths.
It has been a week of cognitive dissonance because the tidal wave of reporting indicates rapidly rising infection rates and yet all the data sources seem to be indicating a continued steady decline in deaths. Which is it? Are we entering a new phase of disaster or are we seeing the same pattern we see in other countries, peak deaths a couple of months ago and a slow decline since then?
The mainstream media makes you work very hard to get to something that might at least smell like the truth.
Althouse focuses less on the issue of measurement misreporting and focuses more on the phenomenal phase transition from 100% riots to 100% Covid-19 disaster in the space, again, of a day.
I have an instinctive dislike for pat and conspiratorial answers. Conspiracies can work, but very, very rarely. Accidental coincidence of shared interests between Social Justice infatuated journalists and street radicals? Sure. Humans keeping consequential secrets? That rarely seems to me to be a strong attribute of the species.
I fall back on my clicks explanation. They switched because the riot misreporting was driving fewer clicks. As to why it happens in the space of 24 hours across a large industry with many players? I don't know. Concerted coordination is plausible, I just don't think likely. But a lot of things I would have thought plausible but unlikely have turned out to be true in the past couple of years.
Ms. Althouse is one of the legion of academics, Classical Liberals to the core, who have been caught back-footed by reemergence of fanaticism, intolerance, authoritarianism, anarchism, etc. on the left. She is enjoyable to read, from my perspective, primarily because of her focus on language. She is very attuned to linguistic nuance.
In this post she is commenting on a phenomenon which those in the center and on the right have been discussing for some time.
When the BLM riots began, it was as if there were a spigot and all news of Covid-19 seemingly disappeared from the mainstream media. You could find some reporting but you had to look hard. First everything was civilizational collapse due to Covid-19. Until it wasn't. Then, everything was race, all the time, everywhere.
Everyone acknowledged that new news of course warrants focus. But exclusive focus?
The speculation was that with the sharp contrast at that time of successful Covid-19 outcomes in Texas, Florida, Georgia, against all media expectations and compared to disasters like New York, drove the media away from Covid-19 to civil unrest as a narrative more beneficial to DNC candidates.
A plausible argument. It fits the facts. But like most things, there were probably other factors beyond mere blind partisanship. Blanket coverage of Cassandra Covid-19 forecasts and lamentations was almost certainly causing a drop in click-throughs, the life-blood of media companies.
What was striking to me at that time, about a month ago, was more that the transition was so swift. One day 100% Covid-19 and the next 100% race riots.
And that lasted about a month. And either the clicks are drying up or the news is not polling well for the DNC. Depends on your filter. This has been brewing for at least a week, but I had not quite noticed the tipping point Althouse points out. What I had noticed was the reemergence of articles focused entirely on reported infections.
This was predicted by the center and right leaning pundits more than a month ago as testing finally kicked in to an industrial phase. Not dozens a day but thousands and tens of thousands of tests a day.
From a purely epistemic perspective, there were all sorts of discussions about just what exactly the increased testing might tell us and how it might change policy decisions. But virtually everyone agreed that there would be a period where accelerating testing would cause an accelerated increase in reported cases. Not because the disease was spreading faster but because we were looking harder and more comprehensively.
Everyone knew that the mainstream media would run with reported infections as the story most likely deleterious to their boogeyman, Trump.
And that is what I noticed about a week or ten days ago. More such stories focusing on rising reported infections and very few addressing the more substantive issue of hospital admissions, ICU bed usage for Covid-19 and most critically, deaths.
It has been a week of cognitive dissonance because the tidal wave of reporting indicates rapidly rising infection rates and yet all the data sources seem to be indicating a continued steady decline in deaths. Which is it? Are we entering a new phase of disaster or are we seeing the same pattern we see in other countries, peak deaths a couple of months ago and a slow decline since then?
The mainstream media makes you work very hard to get to something that might at least smell like the truth.
Althouse focuses less on the issue of measurement misreporting and focuses more on the phenomenal phase transition from 100% riots to 100% Covid-19 disaster in the space, again, of a day.
Did the events in Madison, Wisconsin — with the toppling of a statue to the abstraction of progress and a statute of an antislavery hero — suddenly wake everyone up to the downside of encouraging chaos?Well, maybe.
I'm looking at The NYT and The Washington Post, and all the top stories are about Covid19 — the big story that the protests had overcome and submerged. Covid is back with a vengeance.
On the WaPo home page, the "above the fold" area is full of Covid19 headlines. Then there are a few things about the 2020 elections, something about Michael Flynn, something about the Palestinians, and — this is the closest we get to the protests — the defeat of Tim Scott's police reform bill. Scrolling past the top screen, there's "Trump lashes out at Black Lives Matter in two tweets/The president accused one of the movement’s members of treason and lamented alleged plans for a new mural in front of Trump Tower in Manhattan that honors the cause" and "Blackface has long been an issue in comedy/Look no further than SNL" — both racial but still not about whatever protests/riots might be happening. Scrolling further, I'm reading many many headlines, but nothing about the protests. Finally, near the bottom, in tiny print, I see "Perspective/Toppling more statues isn’t working when there’s other work to be done." That's all there is right now, I believe.
On the NYT home page, the entire "above the fold" space is devoted to Covid19. After that, there is one protest-related story — "How the Philadelphia Police Tear-Gassed Trapped Protesters" — but it's focused on police tactics and grouped with a couple other stories about police tactics that happened outside of the protests. There's also a set of 3 headlines about "The Debate on Statues." That's the sober issue of whether they should they be removed, not the exciting drama of a mob tearing them down in the night. There are 11 headlines for opinion columns, and only one is at all related to the protests (and not even directly — "We Know How George Flynn Died"). Again, it's about the police. Further down, there's stuff about Louisa May Alcott and Leo Tolstoy and Biden's VP. There's nothing about what's going on in any "autonomous zones" or where anybody marched or rioted.
I really think a big decision was made to stop talking about it! I'm just going to guess: Word got around that the ongoing protests were hurting Democratic Party candidates.
I have an instinctive dislike for pat and conspiratorial answers. Conspiracies can work, but very, very rarely. Accidental coincidence of shared interests between Social Justice infatuated journalists and street radicals? Sure. Humans keeping consequential secrets? That rarely seems to me to be a strong attribute of the species.
I fall back on my clicks explanation. They switched because the riot misreporting was driving fewer clicks. As to why it happens in the space of 24 hours across a large industry with many players? I don't know. Concerted coordination is plausible, I just don't think likely. But a lot of things I would have thought plausible but unlikely have turned out to be true in the past couple of years.
Hipster Limerick #4
Hipster Limerick #4
by Chris Pryor
There once lived a hipster named Riddick.
His homebrew was flat and acidic.
His framboise was funky;
His cider was skunky;
Yet, hapless, remained quite the critic.
Thursday, June 25, 2020
Data Talks
Social determinants of health and survival in humans and other animals https://t.co/gon30AW35w
— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) May 23, 2020
“[S]ocial integration, social support, and, to a lesser extent, social status independently predict life span in at least four different mammalian orders.” pic.twitter.com/Y3T7RJTFh9
Data Talks
See Conway’s post below. Also, a reminder (Sackett et al.): The predictive power of the SAT (for college GPA) is NOT an artifact of SES: Statistically controlling for SES reduces the SAT-GPA correlation from .47 to .44.https://t.co/5pyH5yVtm0 https://t.co/xmvROqRPan
— Thomas Coyle (@ThomasRCoyle) May 21, 2020
I see wonderful things
One of my all-time favorite science facts: Venus flytraps can count. They need to register two taps in quick succession before they snap shut. This is to help ensure they catch bugs rather than stray leaves or other debris. https://t.co/vs0qTNUh62 Video: https://t.co/aMWpR44OJm pic.twitter.com/pn6wVcXJyt
— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) May 18, 2020
New York, By the River, 1946 by Mstislav Dobuzhinsky
New York, By the River, 1946 by Mstislav Dobuzhinsky
Click to enlarge.
Maps
This is one of the coolest maps I’ve ever seen: how many days it took to get anywhere in the world from London in 1914. pic.twitter.com/MsdaKMrD00
— Brian Klaas (@brianklaas) May 16, 2020
Reform yourself. That way there will be one less rascal in the world.
Heh. From Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
But no social change can come about until the consciousness of individuals is changed first. When a young man asked Carlyle how he should go about reforming the world, Carlyle answered, “Reform yourself. That way there will be one less rascal in the world.” The advice is still valid. Those who try to make life better for everyone without having learned to control their own lives first usually end up making things worse all around.
An insight
Thread: Ahhh. I always wandered why the Egyptian "Dog days" were located on the solar year at the hottest part of the year, the end of July, beginning of August...So I looked at the Ancient Egyptian dog breeds... pic.twitter.com/SC5kSCX0mI
— oldeuropeanculture (@serbiaireland) May 11, 2020
Archives don't stop reporters from misreporting
It is so easy to become numb to the campaigning that the mainstream media do on a partisan basis.
Came across this.
Crowley is the New York Times's White House Correspondent on foreign affairs.
You would think he would be aware of his company's own reporting just five years ago.
From Former Obama Campaign Aide Now Works to Oust Netanyahu by Julie Hirschfeld Davis.
Interesting take.
Came across this.
People are so numb to broken norms that Trump’s de facto endorsement of a foreign leader days before an election — once considered diplomatic taboo — barely caused a stir. https://t.co/NXo250mAr2
— Michael Crowley (@michaelcrowley) June 25, 2020
Crowley is the New York Times's White House Correspondent on foreign affairs.
You would think he would be aware of his company's own reporting just five years ago.
From Former Obama Campaign Aide Now Works to Oust Netanyahu by Julie Hirschfeld Davis.
Jeremy Bird, the architect of the grass-roots and online organizing efforts that powered President Obama’s presidential campaigns from Chicago, is advising a similar operation in Tel Aviv. But this time it is focused on ousting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.Hmmm. Actively campaigning against foreign leaders passes but meeting with them does not.
His consulting work for the group V15 — an independent Israeli organization that does not support specific candidates but is campaigning to replace Israel’s current government — has added yet another political layer to the diplomatic mess surrounding Mr. Netanyahu’s decision to address a joint meeting of Congress next week on Iran.
[snip]
Mr. Bird is the latest in a long line of Americans who have worked on foreign political campaigns, particularly in Israel. In December, Mr. Netanyahu hired John McLaughlin, a Republican pollster; Likud has brought on Vincent Harris, a campaign aide to Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky. Former aides to Mr. Obama have also worked for the prime minister, including Bill Knapp and Josh Isay.
Former campaign strategists to Bill Clinton, including his pollster Stanley B. Greenberg and strategist James Carville, went to Israel in 1999 to help Ehud Barak defeat Mr. Netanyahu.
Interesting take.
Unintended Anthem of Social Justice and Critical Theory
I always enjoyed this light jingle.
I never realized at the time that it was a forecast in 1959 of the ethos of education in 2020. Of Social Justice Critical Theory, and Twitter arguments. The denial of science, denial of history, denial of biology, denial of maths, all for the thrill of emotionalism. The decline was all there had I but looked.
I never realized at the time that it was a forecast in 1959 of the ethos of education in 2020. Of Social Justice Critical Theory, and Twitter arguments. The denial of science, denial of history, denial of biology, denial of maths, all for the thrill of emotionalism. The decline was all there had I but looked.
What a Wonderful World
by Sam Cooke
Don't know much about history
Don't know much biology
Don't know much about a science book,
Don't know much about the french I took
But I do know that I love you,
And I know that if you love me, too,
What a wonderful world this would be
Don't know much about geography,
Don't know much trigonometry
Don't know much about algebra,
Don't know what a slide rule is for
But I do know that one and one is two,
And if this one could be with you,
What a wonderful world this would be
Now, I don't claim to be an "A" student,
But I'm tryin' to be
For maybe by being an "A" student, baby,
I can win your love for me
Don't know much about history,
Don't know much biology
Don't know much about a science book,
Don't know much about the french I took
But I do know that I love you,
And I know that if you love me, too,
What a wonderful world this would be
History
Biology
Science book
French I took
But I do know that I love you,
And I know that if you love me, too,
What a wonderful world this would be
Don't know much about history
Twitchy is often unpleasantly and one-sidedly snarky but occasionally they strike a seam of gold. From Reign of Terror, you say? New York Times editor gets schooled after ridiculing Sen. Lindsey Graham’s French Revolution analogy by Brett T. They need help on headlines as well.
The original tweet from Lindsey Graham is:
To which Dan Salzstein responds.
Salzstein being senior editor for special projects at The New York Times. Prior to that, he was an editor at the Travel section. His entire career has been at the NYT. And his educational background which would allow the embarrassment of his comment? Amherst '95, BA in English. Just at the beginning of the Social Justice/Critical Theory era in education where actually learning went out the window. Perhaps a refund might be in order.
Twitchy has some of the more humorously educational responses. A couple of the better ones:
The nightmare of the devolution of the old classical liberal order continues.
The original tweet from Lindsey Graham is:
It appears the French Revolution has now come to the Democratic Party based on initial primary results from New York and Kentucky.
— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) June 24, 2020
If you had any doubts about who is in charge of the Democratic Party ALL doubts should have been removed.
To which Dan Salzstein responds.
The French Revolution, you say? In which rising social and economic inequality led to a democratic overthrow of a monarchy and the establishment of a republic? That French Revolution? https://t.co/A4dSz6FAhh
— Dan Saltzstein (@dansaltzstein) June 24, 2020
Salzstein being senior editor for special projects at The New York Times. Prior to that, he was an editor at the Travel section. His entire career has been at the NYT. And his educational background which would allow the embarrassment of his comment? Amherst '95, BA in English. Just at the beginning of the Social Justice/Critical Theory era in education where actually learning went out the window. Perhaps a refund might be in order.
Twitchy has some of the more humorously educational responses. A couple of the better ones:
Someone only got a third of the way into the book https://t.co/8J8KT5FfFK
— Chris Baker (@Zacnaloen) June 24, 2020
From the same paper that brought you the 1619 Project brings you... the French Revolution: a musical comedy https://t.co/eI37L6w0AE
— Ryan James Girdusky (@RyanGirdusky) June 24, 2020
The nightmare of the devolution of the old classical liberal order continues.
Wednesday, June 24, 2020
Data Talks
This interesting chart shows how the tracks of all known hurricanes have never crossed the equator due to the Coriolis force https://t.co/D5r5vAC21c pic.twitter.com/b13HOIh1IM
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) May 21, 2020
Afternoon tea on the terrace (or Artist's wife, New York State near Geneseo), 1889 by Irving Ramsey Wiles
Afternoon tea on the terrace (or Artist's wife, New York State near Geneseo), 1889 by Irving Ramsey Wiles
Click to enlarge.
An insight
We’ve confused actors with heroes, currency with wealth, diplomas with intelligence, propaganda with news, indoctrination with education, demands with rights, tyrants with leaders, conformity with diversity, and slander with debate.
— Alice Smith (@TheAliceSmith) May 10, 2020
It’s a fake world.
Pushing back the boundaries of Icelandic history
From Oldest Viking settlement possibly unearthed in Iceland by Tom Metcalfe.
Archaeologists have unearthed what may be the oldest Viking settlement in Iceland.
The ancient longhouse is thought to be a summer settlement built in the 800s, decades before seafaring refugees are supposed to have settled the island, and was hidden beneath a younger longhouse brimming with treasures, said archaeologist Bjarni Einarsson, who led the excavations.
"The younger hall is the richest in Iceland so far," Einarsson told Live Science. "It is hard not to conclude that it is a chieftain's house."
Longhouses were large wooden halls, up to 250 feet (75 meters) long and 20 feet (6 meters) wide, covered with turf and thatch and used as communal habitations throughout the Norse lands during the Viking Age.
They were divided into rooms and could be shared by several families. Fires were built in stone hearths along the center, and farm animals could be stabled there to protect them from cold.
Both longhouses were found at Stöð, near the village and fjord of Stöðvarfjörður in the east of Iceland. The younger structure dates to around A.D. 874 — the commonly accepted date for Iceland's settlement by people, who, according to Icelandic lore, were escaping the Norwegian king Harald Fairhair. It contains one of the most valuable hoards of ornamental beads, silver and ancient coins ever found in Scandinavia, Einarsson said.
Among the finds: Roman and Middle Eastern silver coins, and "hacksilver," which are cut and bent pieces of silver used as bullion or currency by the Vikings and other ancient peoples.
[snip]
Hidden beneath the treasure-filled longhouse was an even older structure. Chemical and other analysis suggest this buried longhouse was built in the 800s, long before the permanent settlement of Iceland, Einarsson said.
He thinks it was a seasonal settlement or camp, occupied only during the summer and maybe into the fall, by workers in the area.
When news reporting avoids reporting the news.
From Why the World's Most Advanced Solar Plants Are Failing by Caroline Delbert.
In high school and then later at university forty years ago, I was pulled between a deep love of Egyptology (non-financially remunerative and at the height of the Cold War and with Egypt an ally of the Soviet Union, unlikely to even be feasible in any meaningful sense); an intense interest in the possibility of creating an alternative non-hydro-carbon energy model for national economic development; and a desire to be in a position to pursue a career in international business.
Egyptology went by the board first - simply not feasible.
The real sticking point was whether alternate energy was a real deal where there were real possibilities of creating material improvement. From high school, I elected to do International Economics over Electrical Engineering but even in university, I continued a heavy involvement in the alternate energy arena, doing internships, applying for grants in the field, etc.
By the end of university, I had settled on the opinion that while there was much interesting happening on the engineering front, there was no near term prospect of commercial viability. I wanted it to be true but could not amass enough credible evidence to support the belief.
I mention all this because one of the technologies that had been developed in the late sixties and seventies was concentrated solar power plants. Basically, an array of parabolic mirrors are used to superheat a dense medium to then power a generating plant producing electricity.
The downsides are obvious - they require a lot of land, it is a large scale precision engineering problem, it is intermittent (subject to weather), it is capital intense, and it has negative environment impacts (particularly bird deaths.)
By 1982 when I graduated, though, there were multiple test plants built at industrial scale. It had been shown to be engineering viable. By 2005 there was an installed capacity across the globe of 354 MW. By 2018, 5,500 MW. Nearly 100 commercial plants in operation.
BUT . . .
After forty years of development and experimentation and more than 100 plants built, they are still not commercially viable. They all still depend on pretty hefty subsidies and guaranties.
AND . . .
After forty years, there is still significant problems with both plant construction and plant operation.
From the article.
To be fair; even among the best engineering and project management firms, only 20% of projects are on-time, on-budget and deliver the performance results forecast. About half of projects get killed off in the early stages. But even when over budget and late, some of the balance of 30% still make money, just not as much as anticipated.
So just how bad is the problem? What are the numbers? How late are the projects? How much more do they cost than anticipated? How much higher are operating expenses than anticipated? How much lower is the generating capacity than originally planned? These are normal project questions.
The answers to which are not in the Popular Mechanics article. OK. It is a general interest magazine. Maybe I need to go to the original report. I click on the report link only to discover that the Popular Mechanic article is a retelling of a Scientific American article. Press release journalism by proxy. Not common, but I have seen it before. Someone releases a "study" in a press release. A media company writes a popular version which restates the key findings in 5th Grade English level. And then a second media company rewrites the fifth-grade version into a fourth grade version.
The Scientific American also does not have the fundamental information I am seeking. I find the research link in the Scientific American article and click through to Concentrating Solar Power Best Practices Study by Mark Mehos, et al from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, part of the Department of Energy. OK, we should find some real empirical answers here.
Or not.
The first rule of science and commerce is "If you can't measure a problem, you can't fix it." Which really means you can't deliberately fix it. You might get lucky and fix the problem without knowing how or why.
I have done my share of structured cross-company and cross-industry benchmarking studies in my time. I am not mocking or even denigrating their efforts. Much useful information can arise from less structured, less empirical discussions in terms of qualitative learnings.
But it is kind of frustrating on two fronts - Two articles which purport to report on a known problem but have nothing to report because there are no empirical measures. A second because we are forty of fifty years in and we are still treating this as an emerging sector. The reality is that it is an unviable sector and we keep nursing it along owing to lack of accountability or oversight. This looks simply like governmental inertia compounded by irresponsibility. Anything which attracts tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies really needs some sort of forecast of viability and value.
And the media in this case simply took a press release report, regurgitated a summary and never even looked at the content or implications. It was mindless. No wonder they so fear AI.
In high school and then later at university forty years ago, I was pulled between a deep love of Egyptology (non-financially remunerative and at the height of the Cold War and with Egypt an ally of the Soviet Union, unlikely to even be feasible in any meaningful sense); an intense interest in the possibility of creating an alternative non-hydro-carbon energy model for national economic development; and a desire to be in a position to pursue a career in international business.
Egyptology went by the board first - simply not feasible.
The real sticking point was whether alternate energy was a real deal where there were real possibilities of creating material improvement. From high school, I elected to do International Economics over Electrical Engineering but even in university, I continued a heavy involvement in the alternate energy arena, doing internships, applying for grants in the field, etc.
By the end of university, I had settled on the opinion that while there was much interesting happening on the engineering front, there was no near term prospect of commercial viability. I wanted it to be true but could not amass enough credible evidence to support the belief.
I mention all this because one of the technologies that had been developed in the late sixties and seventies was concentrated solar power plants. Basically, an array of parabolic mirrors are used to superheat a dense medium to then power a generating plant producing electricity.
The downsides are obvious - they require a lot of land, it is a large scale precision engineering problem, it is intermittent (subject to weather), it is capital intense, and it has negative environment impacts (particularly bird deaths.)
By 1982 when I graduated, though, there were multiple test plants built at industrial scale. It had been shown to be engineering viable. By 2005 there was an installed capacity across the globe of 354 MW. By 2018, 5,500 MW. Nearly 100 commercial plants in operation.
BUT . . .
After forty years of development and experimentation and more than 100 plants built, they are still not commercially viable. They all still depend on pretty hefty subsidies and guaranties.
AND . . .
After forty years, there is still significant problems with both plant construction and plant operation.
From the article.
The government’s leading laboratory for renewable energy has released a new report detailing the strengths and flaws of concentrated solar energy. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) published the report with the stated goal of using very mixed feedback on existing concentrated solar projects to create a list of suggested best practices going forward.Bottom line seems like after forty years, the plants are still not commercially viable, they still cannot design them well, and they still have persistent operational challenges.
The NREL report “is titled CSP Best Practices, but it can be more appropriately viewed as a mix of problematic issues that have been identified, along with potential solutions or approaches to address those issues,” it begins. What’s inside includes problems shared across concentrating solar power (CSP) projects as well as general issues of large-scale construction. There are also issues with specific kinds of CSP plants based on their designs.
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Parabolic trough CSP plants use solar collectors to heat water and generate steam heat, the same as a traditional coal or even nuclear power plant. But in between is a stage called heat transfer (HTF), where a fluid medium like oil or liquid metals carries the heat from the collection area to the turbine.
The CSP report says some of the issues with these systems are the extreme and dangerous heat of the HTF and the waste hydrogen produced by these processes. Designers have also positioned elements vertically at a higher cost, when most CSPs are built in rural places with plenty of space.
The other kind of CSP plant is a tower design, where mirrors concentrate the solar power directly into a central reservoir usually made of molten salt. These plants take a very long time to come to temperature and are subject to leaks and underperformance. All of these factors mean that molten salt plants have not yet reached their performance goals or the numbers their builders have often promised locals served by these grids.
The report says these plants have often exceeded their planned operating budgets because of surprise maintenance costs as well as poor understanding of what the true operating costs will even be. NLER writes:
“There tend to be issues that are not fully considered, and it generally falls to the owner to pick up the additional costs. Some of these issues are related to obtaining and keeping quality O&M staff; lack of understanding of regional cultures; and availability and timeliness of spare parts and services.”
Even with just a few dozen CSP plants in the U.S., the report notes that many of these are placed on poor sites. At the Crescent Dunes solar facility in Tonopah, Nevada, hundreds of birds were killed in just the first 18 months. “That's just the number of dead birds biologists have seen,” E&E News reported in 2016. But site selection also includes making compromises about how far a construction crew must travel to make onsite repairs, or even how to find a qualified workforce to work on the project in the first place.
The bottom line? CSP contractors and operators are doing their best, but the technology isn’t uniform or understood enough for the approach these builders have been taking. “The very nature of fixed-price, fixed-schedule, full-wraparound performance-guarantee EPC contracts has likely been a main reason for issues experienced at existing CSP plants,” the report concludes.
To be fair; even among the best engineering and project management firms, only 20% of projects are on-time, on-budget and deliver the performance results forecast. About half of projects get killed off in the early stages. But even when over budget and late, some of the balance of 30% still make money, just not as much as anticipated.
So just how bad is the problem? What are the numbers? How late are the projects? How much more do they cost than anticipated? How much higher are operating expenses than anticipated? How much lower is the generating capacity than originally planned? These are normal project questions.
The answers to which are not in the Popular Mechanics article. OK. It is a general interest magazine. Maybe I need to go to the original report. I click on the report link only to discover that the Popular Mechanic article is a retelling of a Scientific American article. Press release journalism by proxy. Not common, but I have seen it before. Someone releases a "study" in a press release. A media company writes a popular version which restates the key findings in 5th Grade English level. And then a second media company rewrites the fifth-grade version into a fourth grade version.
The Scientific American also does not have the fundamental information I am seeking. I find the research link in the Scientific American article and click through to Concentrating Solar Power Best Practices Study by Mark Mehos, et al from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, part of the Department of Energy. OK, we should find some real empirical answers here.
Or not.
The SolarPACES concentrating solar power (CSP) project database1 was used to identify the current CSP projects that are in commercial operation around the world. As of the end of 2018, 94 commercial CSP trough and tower projects had achieved commercial online operation, with all but 4 still in operation active (76 operating parabolic trough plants and 14 operating tower projects). For this study, we received input from participants representing more than 80% of these projects.So a study of an industrial sector which has been in place for forty years but focusing on qualitative issues rather than quantitative measures.
It is important to note that the survey process was more qualitative than quantitative, largely due to concerns of confidentiality of information. Participants were invited to respond to a series of general questions and allowed to focus on the topics of most interest. We acknowledge that the results are biased by the topics of interest of the participants and the project team. However, we did receive quantitative results from several participants indicating where the shortfalls in performance occurred in plants. The results were very consistent with the findings in this report.
The first rule of science and commerce is "If you can't measure a problem, you can't fix it." Which really means you can't deliberately fix it. You might get lucky and fix the problem without knowing how or why.
I have done my share of structured cross-company and cross-industry benchmarking studies in my time. I am not mocking or even denigrating their efforts. Much useful information can arise from less structured, less empirical discussions in terms of qualitative learnings.
But it is kind of frustrating on two fronts - Two articles which purport to report on a known problem but have nothing to report because there are no empirical measures. A second because we are forty of fifty years in and we are still treating this as an emerging sector. The reality is that it is an unviable sector and we keep nursing it along owing to lack of accountability or oversight. This looks simply like governmental inertia compounded by irresponsibility. Anything which attracts tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies really needs some sort of forecast of viability and value.
And the media in this case simply took a press release report, regurgitated a summary and never even looked at the content or implications. It was mindless. No wonder they so fear AI.
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