Saturday, October 31, 2020

In macroeconomics a re-analysis of sixty-seven studies could only reproduce the results from twenty-two of them using the same datasets

From Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth by Stuart Ritchie.  Page 35. 

Here’s something that’s perhaps even more alarming. You’d think that if you obtained the exact same dataset as was used in a published study, you’d be able to derive the exact same results that the study reported. Unfortunately, in many subjects, researchers have had terrible difficulty with this seemingly straightforward task. This is a problem sometimes described as a question of reproducibility, as opposed to replicability (the latter term being usually reserved to mean studies that ask the same questions of different data). How is it possible that some results can’t even be reproduced? Sometimes it’s due to errors in the original study. Other times, the original scientists weren’t clear enough with reporting their analysis: they took twists and turns with the statistics that weren’t declared in their scientific paper, and thus their exact steps can’t be retraced by independent researchers. When new scientists run the statistics in their own way, the results come out differently. Those studies are like a cookbook including mouth-watering photographs of meals but providing only the patchiest details of the ingredients and recipe needed to produce them.

In macroeconomics (research on, for example, tax policies and how they affect countries’ economic growth), a re-analysis of sixty-seven studies could only reproduce the results from twenty-two of them using the same datasets, and the level of success improved only modestly after the researchers appealed to the original authors for help.  In geoscience, researchers had at least minor problems getting the same results in thirty-seven out of thirty-nine different studies they surveyed.  And when machine-learning researchers analysed a set of papers about ‘recommendation algorithms’ – the kind of computer programs used by websites such as Amazon or Netflix to suggest what you might want to buy or watch next, based on what people like you have chosen in the past – they could reproduce only seven out of the eighteen studies on the topic that had been recently presented at prestigious computer science conferences.  

 

John Hancock had spoken “heartily” for the measure.

From 1776 by David McCulough. Page 67.

In the meantime, after much debate, the Congress at Philadelphia had passed a directive to Washington to destroy the enemy forces in Boston, “even if the town must be burnt.” John Hancock, whose stone mansion on Beacon Hill overlooking the Common was one of the prominent features on the skyline, had spoken “heartily” for the measure.

Work on fortifications continued without letup, and despite freezing winds and snow, the work improved. Washington kept moving the lines nearer and nearer the enemy. A newly completed bastion at Cobble Hill, below Prospect Hill and fully a half mile nearer to Boston, was described in the Providence Gazette as “the most perfect piece of fortification that the American army has constructed during the present campaign.”

 

Offbeat Humor

 

History

 

Let’s pass over to the really rich—how often the occasions they look just like the poor!

From The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman. 

Let’s pass over to the really rich—how often the occasions they look just like the poor! When they travel abroad they must restrict their baggage, and when haste is necessary, they dismiss their entourage. And those who are in the army, how few of their possessions they get to keep . . .

—SENECA, ON CONSOLATION TO HELVIA, 12. 1.b–2

 

I see wonderful things

 

Data Talks

 

An Insight

 

The Harvest, 1882 by Camille Pissarro

The Harvest, 1882 by Camille Pissarro

Click to enlarge.

I am always fascinated by these type of paintings.  Development and prosperity in the West has been so rapid that it is easy to forget how close we are in time to very ancient life ways.


Recency bias in combination with ignorance

A fractured howl of rage.  But his point is well taken.  Click to follow the thread.

The past four years have been one sustained experience of media recency bias  on a massive scale.  This example from the New York Times is merely one of many.  Recency Bias:

Recency bias is a cognitive bias that favors recent events over historic ones. A memory bias, recency bias gives "greater importance to the most recent event", such as the final lawyer's closing argument a jury hears before being dismissed to deliberate.

The media's is a very specific form of recency bias.  They fixate on some recent event and declare it to be worse than all precedent.  Ultimate Recency Bias, perhaps.

It is quite purposeful.  It is almost always directly or indirectly about Trump and always in the service of their idée fixe that he is the worst president to have ever served.  History will eventually pass a judgment on Trump as it does every president, deflating or recasting as necessary.  There are some historical firsts with Trump but few.  Almost everything he has done has numerous precedents.  

The New York Times' 1619 project, an alternate history project which rewrites American history in Critical Race Theory terms, is an example.  Because the New York Times repeatedly claims, "without evidence" as they like to say, that Trump is the most racist president ever, they sponsored the 1619 Project fiction writing in order to show just how outrageous that made Trump.

All nonsense of course, with scarcely a redeeming insight which even the most terrible claims or philosophies usually have.  

Anyone with the most basic knowledge of history can automatically discount the baseless claims of the media, so prone to recency bias and that is what we see with Beckett Adams' outburst. 

He is not wrong.

Think of some of the frequent claims made by the media in one form or another against Trump.

Most racist president ever - Really?  More racist than George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, James K. Polk, Zachary Taylor, Andrew Johnson, and Ulysses S. Grant?  Slaveholders all.  More racist than Lyndon Johnson?  More racist than every Southern political leader from 1870-1970 era of KKK, lynching, Jim Crow, etc?  Woodrow Wilson anyone?  James Buchanan, anyone?  Democrats all, as an aside.

Most ignorant president ever - Really?  Including Andrew Johnson who never attended school, did not learn to read till taught by his wife, one of the most resolute presidents in opposition to federally guaranteed rights for black Americans and widely considered to a leading candidate as worst president ever?  

Most xenophobic president ever - Really?  More xenophobic than every president who enforced the Chinese Exclusion Act from 1875 to 1943?  More xenophobic than Franklin Roosevelt and the Japanese Internment Camps?  

Worst president ever - See Andrew Johnson and James Buchanan.  Woodrow Wilson is also a frequent candidate, not for his venality but for his narrow minded bigotry and frequent failures.

Most corrupt president ever - James Buchanan's administration was notable for its corruption as was Ulysses S. Grant.  Lyndon Johnson is also probably in the running, though perhaps more for electoral corruption than financial corruption.  Bill Clinton's Whitewater controversy?  Bill Clinton's pardoning of Marc Rich?  

Most scandalous president ever - Andrew Jackson's bigamy?  Ulysses S. Grant's Whiskey Ring?  Grover Cleveland's illegitimate son?  Richard Nixon's Watergate?  Bill Clinton's Lincoln Bedroom scandal?  

Most divisive president ever - Richard Nixon, Barack Obama, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Andrew Jackson, Zachary Taylor, John Adams, John Tyler, Thomas Jefferson, Franklin Pierce, James Polk, Abraham Lincoln are all candidates.  For slander and dirty tricks, you'd have to go with Adams, Jefferson, Nixon or Obama.   For personal divisiveness, probably Jackson, Johnson and Lincoln.  For incapacity to knit up national divisions, probably Tyler, Pierce, Polk, Buchanan.  

Most incompetent foreign relations president ever - Well, virtually every president involved in starting or escalating foreign wars would be on this list.   Indeed, one of Trump's distinctive accomplishments has been to produce more peace treaties (4) and reduce military action (3) than he has started wars (0).  In terms of relationships with allies, among the worst have been Richard Nixon, Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter, Lindon Johnson, Harry S. Truman and John F. Kennedy.

Most sexually scandalous president ever - In the recent past we have Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky involving sexual escapades in the White House itself but not ignoring multiple affairs and allegations of rape.  Then there is John Kennedy's well documented record of affairs in the White House as well as sexual assault allegations.  In the pantheon of shame should also be considered Lyndon Johnson, Franklin Roosevelt, Warren Harding, Dwight Eisenhower, Thomas Jefferson, Grover Cleveland, 

The point is not to argue relative merits, prove one president better than another or justify Trump's actions.

Some of the presidents mentioned among worsts had extraordinary offsetting accomplishments for which they are held in high esteem.

The point is that even if all claims against Trump were actually true, they usually pale into insignificance against past presidents.  Presidents of whom pundit accusers seem completely ignorant, owing to a profound recency bias.  Most accusations against Trump (or any current president) being the worst whatever president ever are simply political attacks, ungrounded in history.   


Friday, October 30, 2020

Category error and expertise

A great example of 1) how common is the logical mistake of creating a category error (comparing different types of things without recognizing they are different, and 2) why "experts" are so often wrong and out of their death.  From Theologian John Piper’s Case Against Trump Is Intellectually And Morally Bankrupt by Kylee Zempel.  

She is an assistant editor at the Federalist and looks to be perhaps 23-4 years old.  John Piper is 74 years old, a evangelical theologian, and author of dozens of books.  What does this pipsqueak know that Piper does not?

She leads with:

John Piper, in an article last week exploring “Paths to Ruin” in the 2020 election, didn’t so much tell Christians who to vote for as much as he projected guilt and shame onto those who support Donald Trump for president. Piper is “baffled” that Christians could think one candidate’s immoral character is less deadly than another candidate’s pro-abortion policies.

The famed pastor and theologian’s purported purpose in writing the article was “to point to a perspective that seems to be neglected.” His musings, however, are far from a “neglected” perspective. They fill every column of NeverTrumper David French and litter the smooth rhetoric of Democratic Mayor Pete Buttigieg — and they merit a response, especially coming from such an influential evangelical figure.

[snip]

I’m “baffled,” Piper said, “that so many Christians consider the sins of unrepentant sexual immorality (porneia), unrepentant boastfulness (alazoneia), unrepentant vulgarity (aischrologia), unrepentant factiousness (dichostasiai), and the like, to be only toxic for our nation, while policies that endorse baby-killing, sex-switching, freedom-limiting, and socialistic overreach are viewed as deadly.”

His argument boils down to this: It’s crazy for Christians to think Trump’s sins are less serious than Biden’s policies. 

I have to assume that Piper knows far more than theology than Zempel.  But she recognizes argument structure.  And it eviscerates his position.

Piper’s framing is at best problematic and at worst intellectually dishonest, for he doesn’t make an appropriate comparison. Piper doesn’t juxtapose Trump’s character with Biden’s character or Trump’s policies with Biden’s policies. Instead, he compares Trump’s immoral character with Biden’s immoral policies.

It’s here that he finds himself “baffled” that Christians don’t take Trump’s character seriously. Many Christians, however, refuse to equate these two unequal realms. Character should be weighed against character, and policy against policy. Piper’s value judgment comes at the disposal of Trump’s policy victories, many of which are advantageous to those pursuing godliness, and at the oversight of Biden’s demonstrably depraved character.

Perhaps Piper compares Trump’s character with Biden’s policies because his analysis is based on typical media characterizations rather than the men’s actual merits. In Piper’s article, Trump’s character is a caricature, and Biden’s character isn’t covered at all — on par with the mainstream portrayal. Although Piper insists it’s OK to disagree with him and concludes he will vote for neither candidate, his entire piece maintains the same flavor: condemnation for Trump and implicit commendation for Biden.

In one section, Piper signals he is about to cover the left’s errors when he asks, “Where does the wickedness of defending child-killing come from?”

Just as fast as he pivots to Biden’s pro-death policies, he returns again to Trump’s character. This “wickedness,” Piper says, “comes from hearts that are insubordinate to God. In other words, it comes from the very character that so many Christian leaders are treating as comparatively innocuous, because they think Roe and SCOTUS and Planned Parenthood are more pivotal, more decisive, battlegrounds.”

This is interesting. It reveals that Piper does, in fact, see a connection between character and policy. Instead of exploring the depths of Biden’s character unto death here, however, Piper immediately uses this as another opportunity to dunk on Christian Trump supporters for valuing pro-life policies too highly.

“I think Roe is an evil decision. I think Planned Parenthood is a code name for baby-killing and (historically at least) ethnic cleansing. And I think it is baffling and presumptuous to assume that pro-abortion policies kill more people than a culture-saturating, pro-self pride,” Piper says. “When a leader models self-absorbed, self-exalting boastfulness, he models the most deadly behavior in the world. He points his nation to destruction. Destruction of more kinds than we can imagine.”

Notice once again that Piper isn’t using the discussion about Biden’s policy as a doorway to talking about the sinful hearts that led to those policies. Instead, he repeatedly juxtaposes the Biden, pro-abortion crowd with the evil character of the other side: Over here is Biden supporting baby-killing. And over here is Trump being self-absorbed and boastful. And Christians are nuts if they think the intentional killing of babies in the womb is more lethal than a single narcissist. It’s absurd.

The article continues, exploiting the failure of Piper to think clearly and commit a category error.

It is pretty remarkable to see a novice writer so clearly hone in on the core error of an argument so ruthlessly.  

But Piper's position is not uncommon at all.  As documented thoroughly in other research (see Philip Tetlock for example), experts are often indeed expert . . . in a very narrow domain.  As soon as they step out of that domain and prognosticate on wider matters, they depart from their certain ground and undermine their reputation by not understanding or recognizing the broader context within which their narrow expertise operates.  Not all the time but very frequently.  

Zempel almost certainly does not understand theology as comprehensively as I imagine Piper does.  But whatever his expertise might be, once he commits a category error, comparing two unlike things as if they were the same (behavior and policy), then she has him on the mat.

Cultural attributes associated with low literacy valuation have long term affects.

Interesting piece of research.  From Islam and Human Capital in Historical Spain by Francesco Cinnirella, Alireza Naghavi, and Giovanni Prarolo.  From the Abstract:

This paper studies the impact of Muslim rule on human capital development. Using a unique novel dataset containing yearly data on Muslim presence in the period 711-1492 and literacy rate in 1900 for about 7500 municipalities in Spain, we estimate the local impact of the length of Muslim rule in the medieval period on literacy rate. Our findings reveal an extremely robust negative relationship between length of Muslim rule and levels of human capital. This result is robust to the inclusion of other possible confounding factors such as the Reconquista and the Inquisition. We argue that the characteristics of Islamic law discouraged the formation of a strong merchant class and subsequently impeded the development of forms of local self-government. This translated into lower levels of human capital for regions longer under Muslim rule. Indeed, panel estimates on a sample of cities provide evidence that locations under Muslim domination missed out on the critical junctures of institutional changes which led to a stagnation in the accumulation of human capital.

Effect size?  Don't know.  Shame.

Regardless, this is interesting in that it moves the conversation of group outcome differences away from group genetics towards culture and institutions.  While Spaniards have a measurable North African (Arab and Berber) influx of genes, it is relatively small, 1.5%-7% depending on the study.   

It is not inconsiderable but low enough to shift the focus on non-genetic pathways to modern outcomes.  


The problem with cognitive pollution is that it spreads, soiling all that it touches.

From Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth by Stuart Ritchie.  Page 31. 

“Maybe it’s not quite that bad, for two reasons. First, we would expect some results that really are solid to fail to replicate sometimes, merely due to bad luck. Second, some replications might have failed due to their being run with slight changes to the methodology from the original (though if a result is fragile enough that it disappears after minor modifications to the experiment, one might wonder how useful or meaningful it really is). For these reasons, it’s sometimes tricky to decide whether a finding is ‘replicable’ or not based just on one or two replication attempts. What’s more, the replication rate seems to differ across different areas of psychology: for example, in the 2015 Science paper, cognitive psychology (studies of memory, perception, language, and so on) did better than social psychology (which includes the sorts of metaphor-priming studies we saw above).

In general, though, the effect on psychology has been devastating. This wasn’t just a case of fluffy, flashy research like priming and power posing being debunked: a great deal of far more ‘serious’ psychological research (like the Stanford Prison Experiment, and much else besides) was also thrown into doubt. And neither was was it a matter of digging up some irrelevant antiques and performatively showing that they were bad – like when Pope Stephen VI, in the year 897, exhumed the corpse of one of his predecessors, Pope Formosus, and put it on trial (it was found guilty). The studies that failed to replicate continued to be routinely cited both by scientists and other writers: entire lines of research, and bestselling popular books, were being built on their foundation. ‘Crisis’ seems to be an apt description.

Oh, I think it is quite that bad.  Possibly Ritchie's coda are relevant in the academic context.  Possibly.  But out in the broader world where weak minded wannabe thinkers fancy themselves well equipped to hold an opinion based on a widely hyped but failed-to-replicate study?  The problem with cognitive pollution is that it spreads, soiling all that it touches.   


Offbeat Humor

 

History

 

Going about Cambridge in a mannish English riding habit.

From 1776 by David McCulough. Page 66.

Earlier in the fall, Washington had written to his wife Martha to say he would welcome her company in Cambridge, if she did not think it too late in the season for such a journey. Six hundred miles on dreadful roads by coach could be punishing even in fair weather, and especially for someone unaccustomed to travel, no matter her wealth or status.

On December 11, after more than a month on the road, Martha Washington arrived, accompanied by her son John Custis, his wife Eleanor, George Lewis, who was a nephew of Washington, and Elizabeth Gates, the English wife of General Gates. Joseph Reed, who had looked after the generals’ ladies during their stop in Philadelphia, offered the thought, after seeing them on their way, that they would be “not a bad supply…in a country where wood is scarce.”

Sarah Mifflin, the wife of Colonel Thomas Mifflin, a young aide-decamp, also arrived. The handsome colonel belonged to one of Philadelphia’s most prominent families, and with his beautiful, stylish wife added a distinct touch of glamour to Washington’s circle, while Elizabeth Gates caused something of a sensation, going about Cambridge in a mannish English riding habit.

Martha Washington, who had never been so far from home or in the midst of war, wrote to a friend in Virginia that the boom of cannon seemed to surprise no one but her. “I confess I shudder every time I hear the sound of a gun…. To me that never see anything of war, the preparations are very terrible indeed. But I endeavor to keep my fears to myself as well as I can.”

 

I see wonderful things

 

For this is what makes us evil—that none of us looks back upon our own lives.

From The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman. 

I will keep constant watch over myself and—most usefully—will put each day up for review. For this is what makes us evil—that none of us looks back upon our own lives. We reflect upon only that which we are about to do. And yet our plans for the future descend from the past.

—SENECA, MORAL LETTERS, 83.2

 

An Insight

 

Machinists, 1932 by Douglass Crockwell

Machinists, 1932 by Douglass Crockwell

Click to enlarge.

Quote

 

Thursday, October 29, 2020

The results, published in Science in 2015, made bitter reading: in the end, only 39 per cent of the studies were judged to have replicated successfully.

From Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth by Stuart Ritchie.  Page 31. 

As you might expect, the confluence of failed replications (like the priming studies) and bizarre results (like Bem’s paranormal discoveries), along with revelations of misrepresentation (like Zimbardo’s experiment) and fraud (like Stapel’s fake data) spooked psychologists. Just how many of the studies in their field, they wondered, could be trusted? To get an idea of how bad things were, they started banding together to run large-scale replications of prominent studies across multiple different labs. The highest profile of these involved a large consortium of scientists who chose 100 studies from three top psychology journals and tried to replicate them. The results, published in Science in 2015, made bitter reading: in the end, only 39 per cent of the studies were judged to have replicated successfully.  Another one of these efforts, in 2018, tried to replicate twenty-one social-science papers that had been published in the world’s top two general science journals, Nature and Science.  This time, the replication rate was 62 per cent. Further collaborations that looked at a variety of different kinds of psychological phenomena found rates of 77 per cent, 54 per cent, and 38 per cent.  Almost all of the replications, even where successful, found that the original studies had exaggerated the size of their effects. Overall, the replication crisis seems, with a snap of its fingers, to have wiped about half of all psychology research off the map.

Ritchie provides some mitigation to the failure rates but I think it is pretty safe to assume that 50% of psychology and sociology findings are outright wrong.   

Offbeat Humor

And pretty clever humor at that.

 

History

 

We must bear up against the troubles, and make the best of mankind as they are, since we cannot have them as we wish.

From 1776 by David McCulough. Page 66.

There was still no news from the expedition to Quebec, and no word from Colonel Knox. When General Schuyler at Albany wrote to bemoan his tribulations, Washington responded, “Let me ask you, sir, when is the time for brave men to exert themselves in the cause of liberty and their country, if this is not?” He understood the troubles Schuyler faced, “but we must bear up against them, and make the best of mankind as they are, since we cannot have them as we wish.”

 

I see wonderful things

 

What did I fail to do in all these things?

From The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman. 

Ask yourself the following first thing in the morning:

What am I lacking in attaining freedom from passion?

What for tranquility?

What am I? A mere body, estate-holder, or reputation? None of these things.

What, then? A rational being.

What then is demanded of me? Meditate on your actions.

How did I steer away from serenity?

What did I do that was unfriendly, unsocial, or uncaring?

What did I fail to do in all these things?

—EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES, 4.6.34–35

 

Data Talks

 

An Insight

 

La Rue de Bièvre et Le Panthéon by Thierry Duval

 La Rue  de Bièvre et Le Panthéon by Thierry Duval

Click to enlarge.

Wednesday, October 28, 2020

Not race or income but dispositions towards conspicuous consumption arising from residential choices

Came across this thirteen year old research, Conspicuous Consumption and Race by Kerwin Kofi Charles, Erik Hurst, and Nikolai Roussanov.  In seeking to disconfirm/confirm their findings, I came across this article in Slate, Cos and Effect by Ray Fisman, an economist at Boston University.  From Fisman:

Economists Kerwin Charles, Erik Hurst, and Nikolai Roussanov have taken up this rather sensitive question in a recent unpublished study, “Conspicuous Consumption and Race.” Using data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey for 1986-2002, they find that blacks and Hispanics indeed spend more than whites with comparable incomes on what the authors classify as “visible goods” (clothes, cars, and jewelry). A lot more, in fact—up to an additional 30 percent. The authors provide evidence, however, that this is not because of some inherent weakness on the part of blacks and Hispanics. The disparity, they suggest, is related to the way that all people—black, Hispanic, and white—strive for social status within their respective communities.

[snip]

In general, the poorest people in any group are forced to opt out of the conspicuous consumption arms race—if you can’t afford the signal, even by stretching your finances, you can’t play the game. I, a humble economics professor, don’t try to compete in a wealth-signaling game with the Wall Street traders whom I see on the streets of Manhattan. But this still leaves us with the question of why a black person would spend so much more in trying to signal wealth than a white person. The Cosby explanation—that there is simply a culture of consumption among black Americans—doesn’t quite cut it for economists. We prefer to account for differences in behavior by looking to see if there are differing incentives.

 Kerwin Charles, Erik Hurst, and Nikolai Roussanov's original paper is somewhat opaque as to why.  You can work it out, but their explanation is circuitous.  Fisman is more clear.

Why would otherwise-similar black and white households have different incentives to signal their wealth? Charles, Hurst, and Roussanov argue that it’s because blacks and whites are seeking status in different communities. In the racially divided society we live in, whites are trying to impress other whites, and blacks are trying to impress other blacks. But because poor blacks are more likely to live among other poor blacks than poor whites are to live among other poor whites, poor black families are more susceptible to being pulled into a signaling game with their neighbors.

Consider, for example, a black family and a white family each earning $42,500 a year, the median income for a black household during the 1990s. This black family sees that other black families are buying cars, clothes, and other wealth signals that, while stretching this black family’s financial resources thin, are technically affordable for a family making $42,500. So, this family decides to buy them, too, in order to keep up with the conspicuous consumers that they compare themselves with.

Now take the white family making $42,500. The average household income among whites in the 1990s was much higher—$66,800. This white family looks around the neighborhood and is more likely to see white families spending on luxuries that are simply beyond their financial reach. The white family making $42,500 is thus too poor to participate in a signaling game with its neighbors, so they don’t. As a result, they’re spared the cost of competing, just as I am spared the expense of trying to compete with the Wall Street traders I see driving around Manhattan in their Mercedes sedans.

To test their theory, the authors look at how much a white family spends on conspicuous consumption when it is surrounded by white families making a similar amount of money. They find that this white family spends the same portion of its income on visible goods as a black family surrounded by other black families with similar incomes. They also find that the further a family of either race slips behind the average income of nearby households of the same race (becoming too poor to compete in the signaling game), the less it spends on these visible goods.

Once these effects are accounted for, racial disparities in visible consumption disappear. It’s not that black Americans are more inclined to signal wealth; rather, poor blacks are more likely than poor whites to be a part of communities where they are relatively rich enough to participate in the signaling game.

Fisman is clearer but if I am interpreting the research correctly, they are still not communicating the salient issue. 

Put differently, whites are more likely to live in white communities which are more economically diverse and therefore a higher percentage of whites in those communities are classed out of the conspicuous consumption game.  They can't afford to play.

Blacks on the other hand are more likely to live in communities which are more economically homogenous and therefore they are more subject to the standard social signaling mechanism of conspicuous consumption.

To their economic detriment, more blacks are participating in debilitating conspicuous consumption not because of some black DNA attribute, or due to some poorly articulated claim about faulty culture.

All races are similarly prone to conspicuous consumption for a given income level but whites have benefitted by living in communities which are more income heterogenous communities where conspicuous consumption is less frequently triggered whereas blacks are handicapped by living in communities which are more income homogenous communities where conspicuous consumption is more frequently triggered.

As both Fisman and the original authors note, the consequences of this are substantial.  An excess percentage of blacks living in economically homogenous communities and participating in conspicuous consumption spending are:

Spend more than 50 percent less on health care than whites of comparable incomes.

Spend 20 percent less on education than whites.

60% of the unexplained racial gap in wealth holdings after controlling for permanent income and demographics is due to the costs of conspicuous consumption.  

This is incredibly valuable but delicate research, touching on race as it does.  However, we have spent some fifty years outlawing and regulating away known causal mechanisms of social gaps between races in the US (in terms of education attainment, health morbidity, wealth accumulation, etc.)  And trillions of dollars on seemingly marginal impact social policies.

Aside from a 10% narrowing of education achievement in the seventies and eighties, presumably as a consequence of desegregation, very few social policies have had much significant or lasting impact.  

I do not rule out a healthy role for the role of religion, family structure, culture, and particularly personal behavior patterns in driving differential group outcomes but this is rare research with a plausible causal mechanism which seems to have real and large effect sizes.

The question is, if the research is ever validated, what social policies might we pursue to address the core issues identified here, reducing the income homogeneity among blacks?  More specifically, what policies might we pursue to achieve that goal (and thereby reducing harmful conspicuous consumption spending choices) while remaining consistent with our laws, spending constraints and Bill of Rights natural freedoms?  

My assumption is that somehow this is likely somehow related to cities.  However, I could not find the data I was seeking.  While big cities have huge levels of income inequality, often, cheek-by-jowel, they are also highly stratified by income.  In other words, IF you live in a major city, you probably are stratified to people of you own income and therefor induces conspicuous consumption as social signaling.

IF, on the other hand, you live in the suburbs, you are more likely, within a geographical space, to have much greater income diversity, and therefore a suppression of needless conspicuous consumption.  

Given that blacks are much more urbanized than whites, then perhaps that is the causal mechanism.  

But then you are left with the core issue - what role does or should the government have in shaping where people choose to live.  There is plenty of literature speaking to offsetting benefits of elective residential choices and natural emergent order.  

Lots of research yet to be done to even validate what the researchers think they have found.  It will be touchy research owing to its possible interpretations or misinterpretations.  On the other hand, those effect sizes are so large that the prize for threading the research and political needle to find an acceptable mechanism to increase economic heterogeneity among blacks and thereby subdue wasteful consumption signaling is so great that we can hardly ignore it either.  

And what a boost to national unity if we can get off the track of searching for vestigial racism and focus on something possibly real, tangible and beneficial.


For I find there is nothing to be depended upon but trouble and disappointments.

From 1776 by David McCulough. Page 64.

With the end of enlistments only days away, concern grew extreme. “Our people are almost bewitched about getting home,” wrote Lieutenant Hodgkins to his wife Sarah. “I hope I and all my townsmen shall have virtue enough to stay all winter as volunteers, before we will leave the line without men. For our all is at stake, and if we do not exert ourselves in this Glorious Cause, our all is gone.”

“I want you to come home and see us,” she wrote. “I look for you almost every day, but I don’t allow myself to depend on anything, for I find there is nothing to be depended upon but trouble and disappointments.”

“I want to see you very much,” she said in other letters, warning him that if he did not “alter” his mind about staying with the army, it would be “such a disappointment that I can’t put up with it.”

 

Pushing easy fantasy over hard reality.

From Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth by Stuart Ritchie.  Page 28. 

Priming isn’t the only psychological effect to have been given an audience in the millions. Harvard psychologist Amy Cuddy rocketed to fame in 2012 with a TED talk advocating ‘power posing’. She recommended that just before you enter a stressful situation, such as an interview, you should find two minutes in a private place (such as a bathroom stall) to stand in an open, expansive posture: for example, with your legs apart and your hands on your hips. This powerful posture would give you a psychological – and hormonal – boost. An experiment by Cuddy and her colleagues in 2010 had found that, compared to those who were asked to sit with arms folded or slouched forward, people who were made to power-pose not only felt more powerful, but had higher risk tolerance in a betting game and had increased levels of testosterone and decreased levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

Cuddy’s message that people who used the two-minute power pose could ‘significantly change the outcomes of their life’ struck a chord: hers became the second-most-watched TED talk ever, with over 73.5 million views in total. It was followed in 2015 by Cuddy’s New York Times-bestselling self-help book, Presence, whose publisher informed us that it presented ‘enthralling science’ that could ‘liberate [us] from fear in high-pressure moments’.  Provoking quite some degree of mockery, the UK’s Conservative Party seemed to take Cuddy’s message to heart, with a spate of photos appearing that same year of their politicians adopting the wide-legged stance at various conferences and speeches.  Alas, also in 2015, when another team of scientists tried to replicate the power-posing effects, they found that while power-posers did report feeling more powerful, the study ‘failed to confirm an effect of power posing on testosterone, cortisol, and financial risk’.

You can see why all these were so popular with the systemic discrimination crowd enamored of Critical theory.  You could make a small fortune off this cognitive pollution.  It seemed to demonstrate that even though empirical discrimination was declining there was a whole other world of subtle discriminatory signaling going on.  And, perhaps most fortuitous of all, the solution did not involve the aggrieved gaining better skills, working harder or longer, or making better decisions.  No, all you had to do was invoke to posing spell. 


History

Unprecedented?  I don't think that word means what you think it means. 


Your principles can’t be extinguished unless you snuff out the thoughts that feed them

From The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman. 

Your principles can’t be extinguished unless you snuff out the thoughts that feed them, for it’s continually in your power to reignite new ones. . . . It’s possible to start living again! See things anew as you once did—that is how to restart life!

—MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 7.2

 

I see wonderful things

 

Data Talks

 

An Insight

 

Canyon Cottonwoods by Ed Mell

Canyon Cottonwoods by Ed Mell

Click to enlarge.

Tuesday, October 27, 2020

This was simply an error

From Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth by Stuart Ritchie.  Page 28. 

Other priming studies haven’t done much better. One claimed that participants who were primed with ‘distance’ – by having them plot two points far apart on a piece of graph paper – were more likely to feel ‘distant’ from their friends and relatives; it failed to replicate in 2012.  Another study claimed that when written moral dilemmas were printed with a surrounding checkerboard pattern, participants made more polarised judgements, because the pattern made them think of the concept ‘black and white’; this failed to replicate in 2018.  On a similar topic, a line of research that claimed that you can make people more morally judgemental by priming their disgust was thrown into doubt by a review in 2015.
 
To give Kahneman his due, he later admitted that he’d made a mistake in overemphasising the scientific certainty of priming effects. ‘The experimental evidence for the ideas I presented in that chapter was significantly weaker than I believed when I wrote it,’ he commented six years after the publication of Thinking, Fast and Slow. ‘This was simply an error: I knew all I needed to know to moderate my enthusiasm … but I did not think it through.’  But the damage had already been done: millions of people had been informed by a Nobel Laureate that they had ‘no choice’ but to believe in those studies. 

Boy that was a whirlwind of absurd findings.  And all in less than ten years.


History

 

The next day, amazingly, came “glad tidings.”

From 1776 by David McCulough. Page 64.

For six long months there had been hardly a shred of good news, no single event to lift the spirits of the army, no sign to suggest better days might lie ahead.

The next day, amazingly, came “glad tidings.” A privateer, the schooner Lee, under the command of Captain John Manley, had captured an enemy supply ship, the brig Nancy, off Cape Ann, north of Boston. The ship was loaded with military treasure—a supply of war material such as Congress could not be expected to provide for months to come, including 2,500 stands of arms, cannon, mortars, flints, some forty tons of shot, and 2,000 bayonets—nearly everything needed but powder.

The Lee was one of the first of several armed schooners Washington had sent out to prey on enemy shipping. It was a first triumph for his new “navy,” and John Manley, a first hero. It was an “instance of divine favor, for nothing surely ever came more apropos,” Washington wrote immediately to Joseph Reed.

 

In either place your freedom of choice can be maintained if you so wish

From The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman. 

A podium and a prison is each a place, one high and the other low, but in either place your freedom of choice can be maintained if you so wish.

—EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES, 2.6.25

 

I see wonderful things

 

I amazed at how many people devote themselves to the task of proving humans are imperfect.

 

Data Talks

 

An Insight

 I have known of this since a small child.  I have also been aware of the analogy often drawn to individual humans who take advantage of others.  

Something in the wording though draws out the idea of one culture parasitizing the beneficial cultural attributes of another culture.  Its kind of a dreadful idea but once thought it is hard to unthink.  


Applejack by Dolly Parton

Double click to enlarge.

Applejack
Dolly Parton

He lived by the apple orchard in this little orchard shack
His real name was Jackson Taylor but I called him AppleJack
Now old AppleJack was loved by everyone he ever knew
AppleJack picked apples but he picked the banjo too

Play a song for me AppleJack, AppleJack
Play a song for me and I'll sing
Play a song for me AppleJack, AppleJack
Play a song, let your banjo ring

Now I'd go down to AppleJack's almost everyday
We'd sit and we'd drink applejack that old AppleJack had made
Then he'd take his banjo down then he'd ask me if I'd sing
And he would play the banjo and I'd play my tambourine

Play a song for me AppleJack, AppleJack
Play a song for me and I'll sing
Play a song for me AppleJack, AppleJack
Play a song, let your banjo ring

That's when I was just a kid and now that I am grown
All I have are memories, old AppleJack is gone
Oh but he left me his banjo and it always takes me back
And everytime I play it I still hear AppleJack

Play a song for me AppleJack, AppleJack
Play a song for me and I'll sing
Play a song for me AppleJack, AppleJack
Play a song, let your banjo ring

Play a song for me AppleJack, AppleJack
Play a song for me and I'll sing
Play a song for me AppleJack, AppleJack
Play a song, let your banjo ring

Play a song for me AppleJack, AppleJack
Play a song for me and I'll sing
Play a song for me AppleJack, AppleJack
Play a song, let your banjo ring

Tea, Cake and Strawberries by Levi Wells Prentice

Tea, Cake and Strawberries by Levi Wells Prentice

Click to enlarge.

Whitecaps?


Atlanta, Ga., Apr. 20--Henry Worley, a prominent Murray county farmer, was shot and killed in his field yesterday by whitecaps.  He was plowing.  No one saw the murder, but there is no doubt they are members of the Murray county whitecap gang.  Worley was formerly a member of the band, most of whose leading members are moonshiners.  They suspected him of treachery, and last week took him out at night and strung him up.  One of the gang slipped back, gave him a knife, and Worley cut himself down.  He was fired on as he ran away.  He declared that he was coming to Atlanta to give Governor Northen the names of 100 members of the gang.  Before Worley could carry out his threat, he was murdered.  There are 70 member in this league, divided in clans and sub-clans.  Their principle object is to protect their illicit stills, which abound in the mountains.  Several other outrages have been reported.  Six deputy marshals left here tonight to arrest the ring leaders of the gang.  The band will certainly be broken up.

I came across this while doing some genealogical work.  I have a couple of Henry Worleys in my family tree but they are from the early 1700s, not 1894.  No known connection to this Henry Worley.

Murray County is one of those far northern Georgia Counties historically constituted of small-holder farmers. The population was basically old American families coming down from Virginia and North Carolina after the Revolution and after the Cherokee clearances supplemented by the Scots-Irish immigrations.  There were no plantations to speak of and hardly any slaves.  Economically it was a very meager county.  Most these Appalachian counties voted against secession during the Civil War but fought for the Confederacy once secession occurred.  Even today, the African American population is only 0.6%.  

So what is going on with the news report?  It is a reminder that history is far more nuanced than we sometimes, in our modern ignorance and arrogance, grant.  

Whitecaps are the Ku Klux Klan.  Why were they operating in Murray County, a virtually entirely white county?  Because the KKK was more multidimensional than we account for today.  In this instance, it was essentially a moonshine guild, looking out for the economic interests of its members as a collective of moonshiners.  Here, they are not lynching blacks out of racial animosity but attempting to lynch a former leader out of political and economic self-interest.  

It also illustrates just how emaciated could be the structure of government.  Murray County was in some ways an interior frontier as late as the turn of the 20th century with but a slender structure of government.  A shadow county force probably working in uneasy parallel with the county government to establish a rule by illicit economic interests.  In fact a prominent local judge and a former marshal were members of the gang.

Eventually, when bad actions become too obvious, the State had to send in a force to return to the rule of law.  Ultimately, the case had to be prosecuted by the Federal government owing to local influence.

Calls to mind those lines from Louis MacNeice's Gloomy Academic:

And how one can imagine oneself among them
I do not know;
It was all so unimaginably different
And all so long ago.


Contemporary news accounts

An historical account.


Monday, October 26, 2020

Data Talks

 

Puts and takes

Fascinating.  From Covid-19 Sparks New East-West Divide in Germany - 30 Years after Reunification by Ruth Bender.

A sharp difference in the number of coronavirus cases between western Germany and the former communist East has emerged as a new divide, three decades after reunification.

The five states that once made up the bulk of East Germany are among the regions of the country least affected by the pandemic. (Berlin, located in the East but politically divided in the Cold War, has fared less well).

No scientific study has analyzed the phenomenon, but virologists, economists and politicians say part of the explanation could lie in the underlying East-West differences that still exist—the legacy of a 41-year separation that ended on Oct. 3, 1990, when the two Germanys signed the agreement that reunited them. Factors that have long handicapped the East, including an aging, less affluent population, may have shielded it from Covid-19.

 

They are bad science practice but they are not only bad science practice.

From Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth by Stuart Ritchie.  Page 26. 

Kahneman also reviewed research on ‘money priming’. In another Science paper, also from 2006, social psychologists had found that subtly reminding people about money – for instance, having them sit at a desk where there happened to be a computer showing a screensaver of floating banknotes – made them feel and behave as if they were more self-sufficient, and made them care less about others.  Being exposed to money priming, the authors said, made participants prefer ‘to play alone, work alone, and put more physical distance between themselves and a new acquaintance’.  Indeed, when asked to arrange the room’s seating for a face-to-face conversation with a stranger, the money-primed participants, compared to those who’d seen a blank screen, set their chairs almost 30 centimetres further apart. Quite an impact, you might think, for a simple screensaver. This was a pattern in the most prominent priming studies: very subtle primes appeared to cause impressive changes in the way people behaved.
 
Kahneman concluded that these kinds of priming studies ‘threaten our self-image as conscious and autonomous authors of our judgments and our choices’. He had little doubt about their soundness. ‘Disbelief is not an option,’ he wrote.  “The results are not made up, nor are they statistical flukes. You have no choice but to accept that the major conclusions of these studies are true. More important, you must accept that they are true about you.’
 
But perhaps Kahneman shouldn’t have placed such complete trust in these priming effects, despite their being published in one of the most renowned scientific journals. As it turns out, along with the discovery of Diederik Stapel’s fraud and the publication of Daryl Bem’s weird psychic results, it was a priming study – or, rather, the attempted replication of one – that was among the initial spurs of what has become known as ‘the replication crisis’. 
 
In that original priming study, the researchers asked participants to find the odd one out from a jumbled list of words, the rest of which could be rearranged to form a sentence. For half of the participants, the odd-words-out were random and neutral; for the other half, these words had to do with elderly people. These included, for example, old, grey, wise, knits, and Florida – the last of which is “known in the US for having a large population of retirees. Having completed the task, the participants were free to leave – but unbeknownst to them, the experimenters were timing how quickly they walked down the corridor to leave the building. Demonstrating again the mental connection between concepts and actions, the participants who had been primed with elderly-related words walked more slowly out of the lab than those in the control group.
 
Published in 1996, this study has now been cited over 5,000 times by other researchers and has become a staple of psychology textbooks – I remember being taught about it myself when I was a student. In 2012, though, an independent group tried running exactly the same experiment again, but with a bigger sample size and better technology. They found no differences in walking speed. They proposed that the original study might have come up with its results because the research assistants, who timed the participants with stopwatches, knew which participants were expected to behave in which way, possibly influencing their timing. Measuring the participants’ walking speed with infrared beams, as was done in the replication study, appeared to nullify the supposed priming.  Within a few “years, other labs tried to replicate both the Macbeth effect and the money-priming effect, also in much larger, more representative samples.  These efforts also conspicuously failed. There’s no reason to think, to use Kahneman’s terms, that the various priming results were ‘made up’; we have to assume they were arrived at in good faith. But ‘statistical flukes’? Perhaps exactly that.

Again, I remember these experiments and how seriously they were credited when even a mite of good sense, statistics and skepticism suggested otherwise.  And when you have the imprimatur of a Kahneman, a leader in his field, proclaiming that disbelief was not an option, well that is a pretty powerful injunction to stay in your lane and be quiet about the fact that the emperor had no clothes.  These studies were bunk from start to finish and yet they were lauded and peddled by those who should have known better.

One thing which is missing from Ritchie's book is the political/ideological context.  These priming experiments were being conducted in the years when Critical Theory, Critical Race Theory and Postmodernism were also rising.  By law and practice, overt racism has been declining in the US for decades, as has been racial hate crimes.  Most income and academic gaps are easily identifiably due to differences in personal choices and basic factors such as family structure, IQ, and the like.  

Critical Theory, Critical Race Theory and Postmodernism are pervasive in academia, particularly in the field of sociology and psychology.  With declining empirical evidence of racism, academics were desperate to find ways to demonstrate systemic racism.  Evidence which could be plausible but not obvious.  Priming studies fit the bill nicely. 

Ritchie treats them solely as products of bad science practice, and they are that.  But they are not only that.  They are bad science practice in service of propping up an otherwise demonstrably false ideological belief.  


Offbeat Humor

 

History

 

Never had he seen such a dearth of public spirit and want of virtue” as among the Yankee soldiers

From 1776 by David McCulough. Page 63.

But reenlistments were alarmingly few. Of eleven regiments, or roughly 10,000 men, fewer than 1,000 had agreed to stay. Some stimulus besides love of country must be found to make men want to serve, Washington advised Congress. Paying the troops a few months in advance might help, he wrote, but again he had no money at hand. By late November, he could report that only 2,540 of his army had reenlisted. “Our situation is truly alarming, and of this General Howe is well apprised…. No doubt when he is reinforced he will avail himself of the information.”

Washington was a man of exceptional, almost excessive self-command, rarely permitting himself any show of discouragement or despair, but in the privacy of his correspondence with Joseph Reed, he began now to reveal how very low and bitter he felt, if the truth were known. Never had he seen such a dearth of public spirit and want of virtue” as among the Yankee soldiers, he confided in a letter to Reed of November 28. “These people” were still beyond his comprehension. A “dirty, mercenary spirit pervades the whole,” he wrote. “Could I have foreseen what I have and am like to “experience, no consideration upon earth should have induced me to accept this command.”

For six long months there had been hardly a shred of good news, no single event to lift the spirits of the army, no sign to suggest better days might lie ahead.

 

Pass through this brief patch of time in harmony with nature

From The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman. 

Pass through this brief patch of time in harmony with nature, and come to your final resting place gracefully, just as a ripened olive might drop, praising the earth that nourished it and grateful to the tree that gave it growth.

—MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 4.48.2

 

I see wonderful things

 

Data Talks

 

The Great Awokening

As I lie abed, recuperating from painful surgery, I use my time differently than I normally do.  I read voluminously and rapidly.  It is my preferred mode of information ingestion.  

I am aware of podcasts and video interviews and know that there is a rich ecosystem of resources which I probably would enjoy, but none of them can match the rate achievable when simply reading.  Great for long distance driving and commuting, but really, no competition.

Immobile recovery is providing an opportunity to investigate some of what is out there.  Pain medication reduces the capacity for focused work and pain is distracting when reading.  

All as a preamble for my watching the following conversation with historian Tom Holland.  Tom Holland and the Great Awokening.

Double click to enlarge.

An hour long conversation, mostly carried by Holland but certainly shaped by the hosts.  It is not that I agreed with everything had to say, in fact there are a handful of issues where I think he has the wrong end of the stick.  However, his erudition, his clear thinking, the quality of his argument for some of his insights, and the articulateness of conversation are superior.  What a pleasure.  An hour well worth listening.

And what an accomplished polymath.  A very successful author of literary fiction.  A very successful historian with a string of books.  A translator of Herodotus.  A producer of multiple documentaries.  There are some people who are straight-forwardly talented across multiple domains.

I have a handful of his books, Rubicon and Persian Fire in particular.  They have been sitting around for a long while.  Now I know that they need to be read.  

I especially liked this conclusion of his:

He began working on a doctoral dissertation on Lord Byron from Oxford University, but soon quit after deciding that he was "fed up with universities and fed up with being poor" and instead began working.

A free man demonstrating reasoned free thinking and arriving at original and insightful conclusions.