Thursday, December 31, 2020

It is frankly absurd to think that by March or April all reasonable people had converged to the consensus view that the world economy should be locked down, but major press outlets and information platforms proceeded as if this was established fact.

Excellent.  From The "Democratic Centralism" of COVID by Bryan Caplan.  Well, not by Caplan, published by Caplan.

The anonymous author of the satirical “Homeless Camping in Austin: A Modest Proposal” has also sent me this more serious guest post.  The title is mine.  “Democratic centralism,” you may recall, is the Leninist practice of demanding strict loyalty to a party line after a (usually perfunctory) debate.  Printed with the author’s permission.

From the actual essay:

Since very early in the pandemic, there has been a somewhat novel approach to information flow in the media and particularly on social media sites, at least compared to the baseline in the western world.  Very quickly, there seems to have been a consensus that information gatekeepers should determine which opinions about the nature of the coronavirus and the appropriate policy response should be allowed to be widely disseminated.  One of the notable early examples was when Medium, which is basically a website host, took down a piece written by Aaron Ginn arguing that the costs of lockdowns should be considered.  There was no basis to argue that he was providing disinformation; his post was removed because it argued for a different position than what was being promoted.
 
While biased journalism is hardly new in the US or anywhere, the movement to close down the ability to distribute alternative opinions seems to have been novel at least within the United States.  This was not like the New York Times refusing to publish opinion pieces that disagreed with its editorial stand; this was more like if the people in the olden days who sold bulk newsprint paper refused to allow anyone who dissented from the views of the newsprint providers to even obtain raw materials for printing.
 
This new attitude is puzzling given the novelty of the virus and the nearly intractable nature of the optimal policy decision, which must take into account the likely spread of the virus under various policies and the overall effect of the policies on the enormously complex and interconnected global economy.  It is frankly absurd to think that by March or April all reasonable people had converged to the consensus view that the world economy should be locked down, but major press outlets and information platforms proceeded as if this was established fact.  Given the extraordinarily poor performance of even the relatively simple virus models that were applied to the consensus view and the total inability to even begin to estimate the economic and human costs of the lockdowns, in retrospect this rapid convergence on consensus appears to be one of the single greatest acts of hubris in the history of mankind.
 
But, crucially, even at the time and without the benefit of hindsight this rapid collapse onto a single acceptable viewpoint by those who control the flow of information should have been seen as a colossal error.  Modern information economics makes it abundantly clear that in the presence of biased experts whose objectives do not perfectly align with the people receiving advice, having multiple experts, each with their own different biases and preferences, is much better than having a single biased expert.  This is true even if you could chose the least biased expert as your one expert.  Adding another, highly biased, expert, will greatly improve the quality of information available to the person being advised in the richer versions of these “persuasion” models. The idea is that a single expert, even if he cannot directly deceive, will choose to report information in such a way as to influence the people being advised to act in the interests of the expert, rather than their own.  Those being advised will know that the expert is engaged in such behavior, but even though they do their best to compensate for his manipulations the fact that he is the sole arbiter of what information does or does not flow gives the expert great power to influence the ultimate decision.  Bringing in another expert with different biases improves the situation immensely (as shown by Gentzkow and Kamacia, Bayesian Persuasion with Multiple Senders and Rich Signal Spaces), as this other expert will release information to undermine the persuasion attempts of first expert when the two experts’ objectives disagree.  Knowing this, the first expert will release even more information to undermine the persuasion attempts of the second expert, and this process can, in appropriate circumstances, leave the person being advised (us) with all the information we need to make the best judgements for ourselves. 

The concluding paragraphs are an indictment.

As distressing as this move away from allowing ideas to freely compete is, the situation gets worse.  It is essential to recognize the precise nature of the filtering that was undertaken by information platforms.  The decision was made to designate certain opinions produced by certain authorities as the only acceptable opinions.  This filter was not based on expertise; one could imagine a filter where only “qualified” individuals were allowed to opine on the coronavirus on certain platforms.  But, Dr. Scott Altas was censored, despite being a medical doctor and a health policy expert. A more defensible filter than even one based on expertise would be a filter based on historic predictive ability; perhaps the platforms could have prevented the who made the worst predictions about previous pandemics and about the current coronavirus from further pontificating.  But, Neil Ferguson, who made order of magnitude errors about virtually every recent pandemic including SARS-CoV-2, was never censored.
 
So, it appears certain platforms simply selected certain central authorities to fully back, regardless of actual expertise or a history of successful predictions.  It is thus impossible to conclude that these platforms sought to filter information in order to promote better knowledge among the general public, which as discussed above would already have been a dubious proposition.  Instead, it appears that the purpose of the information filters must have been control of information for the sake of control of information.  The implications of this objective are disturbing. 

I am truly concerned about the turning away of our Mandarin Class from any commitment to truth, freedom of speech, respect for citizens, empirical data, etc.  The authoritarian inclination towards demonstrable untruths bodes ill.  


In a world where your hypothesis isn’t true, how likely is it that pure noise would give you results like the ones you have

From Science Fictions by Stuart Ritchie.  Page 87.

Despite being one of the most commonly used statistics in science, the p-value has a notoriously tricky definition. A recent audit found that a stunning 89 per cent of a sample of introductory psychology textbooks got the definition wrong; I’ll try to avoid making the same mistake here.16 The p-value is the probability that your results would look the way they look, or would seem to show an even bigger effect, if the effect you’re interested in weren’t actually present.17 Notably, the p-value doesn’t tell you the probability that your result is true (whatever that might mean), nor how important it is. It just answers the question: ‘in a world where your hypothesis isn’t true, how likely is it that pure noise would give you results like the ones you have, or ones with an even larger effect?’

 

Gallery of Beauties

Gallery of Beauties in Bavaria.  

The Gallery of Beauties (German: Schönheitengalerie) is a collection of 36 portraits of the most beautiful women from the nobility and middle classes of Munich, Germany, painted between 1827 and 1850 (mostly by Joseph Karl Stieler, appointed court painter in 1820) and gathered by Ludwig I of Bavaria in the south pavilion of his Nymphenburg Palace in Munich.  Two additional ones were created by Friedrich Dürck. Its best-known works are the portraits of the shoemaker's daughter Helene Sedlmayr, the actress Charlotte von Hagn (revered by audiences in Munich, Berlin and Saint Petersburg) and the king's Irish mistresses Eliza Gilbert (Lola Montez) and Marianna Marquesa Florenzi. They include a Briton, a Greek, a Scot and an Israelite, along with relations of Ludwig's - the wife and daughter of Ludwig of Oettingen-Wallerstein were both painted, as was Ludwig I's daughter Princess Alexandra of Bavaria.

Scroll down for the individual portraits.   


Emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth

A letter written in 1944 by George Orwell to Noel Willmett.  It was an answer to A question by Wilmett, “whether totalitarianism, leader-worship etc. are really on the up-grade”.

There are several elements that are persistently prescient, i.e. the issues are still with us.  Emphasis added.

I must say I believe, or fear, that taking the world as a whole these things are on the increase. Hitler, no doubt, will soon disappear, but only at the expense of strengthening (a) Stalin, (b) the Anglo-American millionaires and (c) all sorts of petty fuhrers of the type of de Gaulle. All the national movements everywhere, even those that originate in resistance to German domination, seem to take non-democratic forms, to group themselves round some superhuman fuhrer (Hitler, Stalin, Salazar, Franco, Gandhi, De Valera are all varying examples) and to adopt the theory that the end justifies the means. Everywhere the world movement seems to be in the direction of centralised economies which can be made to ‘work’ in an economic sense but which are not democratically organised and which tend to establish a caste system. With this go the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer. Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark. Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving, though, of course, the process is reversible.

As to the comparative immunity of Britain and the USA. Whatever the pacifists etc. may say, we have not gone totalitarian yet and this is a very hopeful symptom. I believe very deeply, as I explained in my book The Lion and the Unicorn, in the English people and in their capacity to centralise their economy without destroying freedom in doing so. But one must remember that Britain and the USA haven’t been really tried, they haven’t known defeat or severe suffering, and there are some bad symptoms to balance the good ones. To begin with there is the general indifference to the decay of democracy. Do you realise, for instance, that no one in England under 26 now has a vote and that so far as one can see the great mass of people of that age don’t give a damn for this? Secondly there is the fact that the intellectuals are more totalitarian in outlook than the common people. On the whole the English intelligentsia have opposed Hitler, but only at the price of accepting Stalin. Most of them are perfectly ready for dictatorial methods, secret police, systematic falsification of history etc. so long as they feel that it is on ‘our’ side. Indeed the statement that we haven’t a Fascist movement in England largely means that the young, at this moment, look for their fuhrer elsewhere. One can’t be sure that that won’t change, nor can one be sure that the common people won’t think ten years hence as the intellectuals do now. I hope they won’t, I even trust they won’t, but if so it will be at the cost of a struggle. If one simply proclaims that all is for the best and doesn’t point to the sinister symptoms, one is merely helping to bring totalitarianism nearer.

You also ask, if I think the world tendency is towards Fascism, why do I support the war. It is a choice of evils—I fancy nearly every war is that. I know enough of British imperialism not to like it, but I would support it against Nazism or Japanese imperialism, as the lesser evil. Similarly I would support the USSR against Germany because I think the USSR cannot altogether escape its past and retains enough of the original ideas of the Revolution to make it a more hopeful phenomenon than Nazi Germany. I think, and have thought ever since the war began, in 1936 or thereabouts, that our cause is the better, but we have to keep on making it the better, which involves constant criticism.


Yours sincerely,

Geo. Orwell

 The comment regarding "a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible" hits very close to home at the moment when mainstream media, technology companies, and establishment politicians disavow science and simply propagate opinions about their own blinding ideology.


History

 

An Insight

 

Drifting too Far From the Shore sung by Bradley Walker

Drifting too Far From the Shore sung by Bradley Walker.

Double click to enlarge.


Drifting too Far From the Shore 
sung by Bradley Walker.

Out on the perilous deep,
Where danger silently creeps,
And storm's so violently sweeping,
You're drifting too far from shore

Drifting too far from shore,
You're drifting too far from shore,
Come to Jesus today,
Let Him show you the way
You're drifting too far from shore,

Today, the Tempest rose high,
And clouds o'er shadow the sky
Sure death is hovering nigh,
You're drifting too far from shore

Drifting too far from shore,
You're drifting too far from shore,
Come to Jesus today,
Let Him show you the way
You're drifting too far from shore,

Why meet a terrible fate?
Mercies abundantly wait
Turn back before it's too late
You're drifting too far from shore

Drifting too far from shore
You're drifting too far from shore (peaceful shore)
Come to Jesus today Let him show you the way
You're drifting too far from shore

I see wonderful things

 

Offbeat Humor

 

Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara believed that extra training would make these men suitable soldiers and productive members of society. He was mistaken.

From In the Know Paperback: Debunking 35 Myths About Human Intelligence by by Russell T Warne.  Page 329.  On the difficulty high IQ people sometimes have understanding the world as seen and experienced by others at different points on the normal IQ curve.  

On a larger scale, the differences in how highly intelligent people and average or low-IQ people think causes problems because bright people have a disproportionate say in how society is run. This was especially apparent in a US government initiative called Project 100,000. Between 1966 and 1971 (during the height of the Vietnam War), the US Department of Defense increased the number of men eligible for the draft by lowering the minimum IQ needed for military service from 92 to 71 (Gregory, 2015, pp. 100–102).3 Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara believed that extra training would make these men suitable soldiers and – after their service – productive members of society.4 Over the course of Project 100,000’s existence, 354,000 men were inducted under relaxed psychological and medical standards; 91% of these men were inducted due to the lowered minimum IQ (Rand Corporation, n.d., p. 5).
 
Project 100,000 was a spectacular failure. Men in Project 100,000 were harder to train and were less competent soldiers, which placed lives at risk. Over half of the men were dishonorably discharged (Gregory, 2015, p. 196). They experienced psychiatric problems at a rate that was 10 times higher than other soldiers (Crowe & Colbach, 1971), and their death rate was three times higher than average (Gregory, 2015, p. xiv). While some men from Project 100,000 were good soldiers, the extra training and supervision in the military did little for most soldiers to compensate for their low IQ. The cause of Project 100,000’s failure was not the American military’s lack of motivation or resources to bring low-IQ men up to standard levels of performance. Instead, the failure originated in McNamara’s and other decision makers’ lack of understanding that IQ differences lead to fundamental differences in people’s ability to function in their environment. Contrary to McNamara’s – and Collins’s (1979) – beliefs, people are not interchangeable cogs that can be trained to fill nearly any job (Gottfredson, 1986).

I posted a small snippet about Project 100,000 in Behavioral Sink a couple of years ago. 

This insight undergirds the concerns (though these aren't his terms) of Charles Murray in The Bell Curve and in Coming Apart as well many other classical liberal thinkers who are tremendous proponents of meritocracy but highly concerned when efficient meritocracy becomes combined with assortative mating.  And certainly the discussions about social/mental bubbles are traceable to this epistemic mismatch.  


Data Talks

 

Madonna and Child with Two Musician Angels, 1507 by Piero di Cosimo

Madonna and Child with Two Musician Angels, 1507 by Piero di Cosimo

Click to enlarge.


Wednesday, December 30, 2020

Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed.

From Science Fictions by Stuart Ritchie.  Page 80.

Science … commits suicide when it adopts a creed.
          T. H. Huxley, ‘The Darwin Memorial’ (1885)

Finally, an answer

At last, some data.  Atlanta Police Department has long had a challenge of meeting its authorized force goals due to low pay, little consistent political support, mayoral and City Council opposition to police actions which deliver security at the expense of perceived social justice, etc.  We should have around 2,200 officers and are always well below that.

This year has been especially difficult.  Early in the Antifa/BLM protests, Mayor Kiesha Lance Bottoms threw some police officers under the bus after some over-forceful treatment of protesters during a BLM protest and then abandoned all support after a couple of police officers were attacked by a detained suspect who then attacked them and stole one of the officers' Tazer.  The suspect fled, firing the Tazer at the closest officer giving chase who then returned fire to fatal effect.

Bottoms fired him, the DA indicted him, all well before any investigation had occurred. 

The police chief threw herself on her sword. 

The streets were ceded to BLM.  A child was shot and killed by a BLM person manning a street control point when the child's mother tried to turnaround and avoid their illegal intentions.  

The City Council entertained a motion to defund the police which was defeated by a single vote margin.

Police officers, reading the tea leaves, began resigning, retiring, avoiding confrontations with violent citizens, etc.  

Over several months residents of the City watched all this.  Just how many police officers actually remained on the force?  The newspapers and TV news stations were not reporting on it.  City Council members pretended they did not know and would not answer.  

At last, we got an answer in early December.  From Atlanta Police down 220 officers since start of January, department says by Adrianne M Haney.  Its worse than the headline indicates.  The subhead is 

According to the department, it is about 400 short of its 'authorized strength' of 2,046 total officers.

So, in six months, we are now 25% below our staffing goal.  

The Atlanta Police Department says it is operating with fewer police officers now than it was at the start of the year.

According to the department, there are 1,603 officers currently on the force, about 400 short of its "authorized strength" of 2,046 total officers.

"We have been operating at less than full staffing for a while," according to Atlanta Police spokesman Steve Avery. "The numbers fluctuate as people come and go."

According to the department, the force had 1,666 sworn officers at the start of January 2019. That number increased significantly over a year, and by January 2020, the department said it was up to 1,822 officers. 

However, that number dropped to 1,733 in September 2020. By the end of 2020, Atlanta Police said that number had fallen to below 2019 levels to the current 1,603 officers. 

The implication is even worse than a surface examination indicates.  The news doesn't provide the data but the practical implication of such wildly fluctuating headcounts is that the average APD officer is now relatively new.  Assuming headcount losses are among the more experienced, not only are operating at 75% of targeted headcount but that remaining 75% are relatively junior and inexperienced.  

It would seem likely that some (63 + 156) 222 officers out of the current 1,603 were hired within the year.  So we are at ~75% of authorized headcount and ~15% of that 75% are inexperienced.   That it is not a safe situation.  

And it is entirely the product of budget and policy decisions on the part of the Mayor and City Council.

The spokesperson does what spokespeople do - lie for their their superiors.

While Atlanta Police couldn't point to one issue for the drop in the number of officers, Avery said the turnover is "not out of line with what we are seeing with numerous departments across the nation today, due to the current climate surrounding policing in United States." 

"The reasons for the attrition are varied, we have some officers opting for retirement, some deciding to pursue other careers outside of policing entirely, as well as officers taking advantage of opportunities with other departments outside of Atlanta," he added.

[snip]

 While Avery conceded that some lower-priority calls to police - like larcenies where the suspect has already left, private property accidents with no injuries, or minor damage to property - are "triaged," he said the department makes every effort to respond to all calls and believes it has enough resources to "effectively and efficiently protect and serve the City of Atlanta." 

Things aren't well in the City.  News reports today indicate that the murder rate is up 58% from a year ago with 155 murdered in 2020 YTD versus 95 in all of 2019.  60 lives lost owing to the ignorance and incompetence of the Mayor and City Council who are still shielded and protected from the press.  


 

History

 

Data Talks

Click for the thread. 

The source of data is ANES 2018 Pilot Study

What the data is indicating is that in general all ethnic groups have a greater expressed affinity for those ethnically/racially like themselves.  There is not a large variance but Blacks have the greatest disposition to prefer their own racial group and non-liberal whites the least.  

The one exception to this rule are white liberals who prefer other races over their own.

Further tweets in the thread indicate that 50% of white liberals report having no close black friends versus 26% for white moderates and 30% of white conservatives.  White Liberals, compared to other whites, like blacks in the abstract, less so in reality.  In other words, they express more affinity for blacks but do not translate that into real friendships.

In a concluding tweet, there is the observation:

The US certainly is a strange country — the groups which have the most black friends are called “racists” but the one which has the fewest calls itself “anti-racist.”

And the only overt bigotry that the “anti-racists” seem to exhibit is toward their own group.

And yet those strange outliers of misanthropy are driving the debate and policies. 

 

Offbeat Humor

 

Bright people tend to believe that everyone thinks and solves problems as well as they do, and this can have important consequences

From In the Know Paperback: Debunking 35 Myths About Human Intelligence by by Russell T Warne.  Page 328.  

. . . the great majority of all jobs can be learned through practice by almost any literate person.

(Collins, 1979, p. 54)

. . . research proved that young people, whatever their background, could mini- mize any chance of long-term poverty by taking three simple steps: graduating from high school, getting a job – any job – right after graduation from high school or college, and bearing children only after marriage, not before. The success sequence shows that good choices can help all people avoid bad outcomes, even if they’re disadvantaged, while bad choices are likely to produce bad outcomes, even for the more privileged.

(Medved, 2017, paragraphs 2–3; typo corrected and paragraph break eliminated)

This final chapter opens with two quotes that, on the surface, do not seem to have much to do with intelligence. The quote from Collins (1979) is a claim that almost every job is within the grasp of most adults, while Medved supports the “success sequence” (first labeled as such by Haskins & Sawhill, 2009) of life choices that some have suggested is a key to staying out of poverty. But the two quotes share an underlying assumption that almost everybody in society has the intelligence to learn, plan, and reason sufficiently well to achieve economic success. For Collins (1979), individual differences in intelligence – if he believes they exist at all – are irrelevant because on-the-job training can help nearly anyone overcome any deficits and become a successful employee.1 In Medved’s (2017) opinion, poverty could be greatly reduced if only everyone would make good choices. But he never contemplates whether these choices are easy for people with low intelligence.

As I have shown in many previous chapters, individual differences in intelligence matter in work, school, and everyday life, and these differences have important consequences. One consequence is that people have difficulty imagining what the thought process is like for someone whose IQ is more than about 10 or 15 points away from their own (Detterman, 2014). This causes problems when people at one IQ level make judgments of or recommendations to people whose IQ is very different from their own because people project their level of competence onto others. 
 
This is a special form of what is called the psychologist’s fallacy (a term first coined by James, 1890, p. 196), which is the tendency of a person to assume that others think and act more-or-less the way that they do. Ironically, highly intelligent people are one of the groups most susceptible to this blind spot in their thinking.2 Bright people tend to believe that everyone thinks and solves problems as well as they do, and this can have important consequences when high-IQ people deal with other segments of the population.

I posted about something similar to this three weeks ago in Epistemic s-curve mismatch


Karlsens House by Søren Martinsen

 Karlsens House by Søren Martinsen 

Click to enlarge.


Tuesday, December 29, 2020

The most important incentive to scientific fraud is a passionate belief in the truth and significance of a theory or hypothesis which is disregarded or frankly not believed by the majority of scientists

From Science Fictions by Stuart Ritchie.  Page 71.

Another motive may be the fraudster’s pathologically mistaken views on what science is about. The immunologist and Nobelist Sir Peter Medawar has argued, perhaps counter-intuitively, that scientists who commit fraud care too much about the truth, but that their idea of what’s true has become disconnected from reality. ‘I believe,’ he wrote, ‘that the most important incentive to scientific fraud is a passionate belief in the truth and significance of a theory or hypothesis which is disregarded or frankly not believed by the majority of scientists – colleagues who must accordingly be shocked into recognition of what the offending scientist believes to be a self-evident truth.’ The physicist David Goodstein agrees: ‘Injecting falsehoods into the body of science is rarely, if ever, the purpose of those who perpetrate fraud,’ he suggests. ‘They almost always believe that they are injecting a truth into the scientific record … but without going through all the trouble that the real scientific method demands.’

See Eirc Hoffer's The True Believer for greater explication  of this dangerous condition which is far more prevalent than it used to be.  People who determine truth based on their emotional convictions rather than the evidence.


Contumacious

 Contumacious

con·tu·ma·cious

/ˌkänt(y)o͝oˈmāSHəs/

adjective ARCHAIC•LAW

adjective: contumacious

(especially of a defendant's behavior) stubbornly or willfully disobedient to authority.

"his refusal to make child support payments was contumacious"

 

History

 

An Insight

 

I see wonderful things

 

Downtown by Petula Clark

Downtown by Petula Clark 

 
Double Click to enlarge.


Downtown
by Petula Clark
 
When you're alone and life is making you lonely
You can always go
Downtown
When you've got worries, all the noise and the hurry
Seems to help, I know
Downtown

Just listen to the music of the traffic in the city
Linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty
How can you lose?
The lights are much brighter there
You can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares

So go
Downtown
Things will be great when you're
Downtown
No finer place for sure
Downtown
Everything's waiting for you

Don't hang around and let your problems surround you
There are movie shows
Downtown
Maybe you know some little places to go to
Where they never close
Downtown

Just listen to the rhythm of a gentle bossa nova
You'll be dancing with 'em too before the night is over
Happy again
The lights are much brighter there
You can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares

So go
Downtown
Where all the lights are bright
Downtown
Waiting for you tonight
Downtown
You're gonna be alright now
Downtown

Downtown
Downtown

And you may find somebody kind to help and understand you
Someone who is just like you and needs a gentle hand to
Guide them along
So maybe I'll see you there
We can forget all our troubles, forget all our cares

So go
Downtown
Things will be great when you're
Downtown
Don't wait a minute more
Downtown
Everything is waiting for you
Downtown

Downtown (downtown)
Downtown (downtown)
Downtown (downtown)
Downtown (downtown)

Offbeat Humor

 

Data Talks

 

Sands on the edge of the Loire, 1923 by Félix Vallotton

Sands on the edge of the Loire, 1923 by Félix Vallotton

Click to enlarge.


Monday, December 28, 2020

Flawed decision-making or moral bankruptcy based on ideological foolishness?

From Public health bodies may be talking at us, but they’re actually talking to each other by Megan McArdle.  Since she moved to the Washington Post, McArdle's strong voice for factualness and curiosity about reality has been muted.  This piece is more like her old work; hard-hitting and acknowledging that which everyone who has been paying attention knows and which all the institutional players, including the media, choose to ignore.

If you watch the YouTube video of the now-infamous November meeting of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, you’ll hear Chairman José Romero thank everyone for a “robust discussion.” Shortly thereafter, the committee unanimously agreed that essential workers should get vaccinated ahead of the elderly, even though they’d been told this would mean up to 6 percent more deaths. This decision was supported in part by noting that America’s essential workers are more racially diverse than its senior citizens.

On Dec. 20, after the public belatedly noticed this attempted geronticide, the advisory panel walked it back, so I need not point out the many flaws of this reasoning. Instead, let’s dwell on the equally flawed process by which the committee reached its decision, because that itself is a symptom of much deeper problems that have plagued us since the beginning of the pandemic. 

[snip]

Either way, despite Romero’s accolade, the discussion of whether to prioritize essential workers was anything but robust. The committee left only 10 minutes for it, during which not one of those 14 intelligent and dedicated health professionals suggested adopting the plan that kills the fewest people. Nor did anyone run out of time to make that point. Ten minutes was actually a little too much for what turned out to be a pro forma opportunity to get on the record endorsing the plan, and particularly its emphasis on racial and economic equity in health care. A condensed but highly representative sample:

“This is where we can really elevate the issue of health equity”

“If we’re serious about valuing equity . . . we need to have that baked in early on in the vaccination program”

“Strongly agree . . . for equity reasons . . . ” 

 “I think equity is a priority”

“I want to applaud the entire conversation today around the emphasis on equity and identifying that the racial, ethnic and low-income disparities in the impact of covid warrants prioritization of essential workers”

It’s striking how many people commented on this question, and with such otherwise-content-free affirmations. It’s also striking that the same group reversed itself 13 to 1 only a month later, after it turned out there were also reputational consequences for endorsing this particular quest for equity.

[snip]

Moreover, advancing equity and saving lives both require gaining, and keeping, the public trust, including among groups who were bound to be upset if seniors were deprioritized because of their relative Whiteness. The committee had just seen data indicating that most people thought seniors were the second-highest priority group, right after health-care workers, and yet no one suggested the easy, popular route that also saved the most lives. In almost every other context for the past nine months, public health experts have insisted that minimizing deaths should override other concerns, even quite important ones. So how, in this case, did equity conquer death?

Unfortunately, the vaccine committee’s turnaround is just one of a string of related errors. Looking back over the past nine months, it’s as if the public health community deliberately decided to alienate large groups of Americans, usually in the name of saving someone else.

The World Health Organization told us travel bans don’t work, apparently because they harm tourist economies; then we were told masks don’t work, apparently because experts worried that hoarding them would leave health-care workers without personal protective equipment; the public health community fell suddenly silent about the dangers of large gatherings during the George Floyd protests; a presentation to a government advisory committee actually described thousands of potential additional deaths as “minimal” compared with pursuing racial and economic equity; Anthony S. Fauci admitted he’d been lowballing his estimates of the point at which we’ll reach herd immunity. 

 Each one was another disaster of public communications, a body blow to the credibility health authorities need to persuade people to stay home, wear masks, get vaccinated. Collectively, they suggest a community of experts with a lot of public health models but no good mental model of the public. They may be talking at us, but they’re really talking only to each other.

A federal public institution chose to kill people based on their age and race without any of the thirteen decision-makers raising a peep.  They all thought that this was a good idea.

They may be talking at us, but they’re really talking only to each other.

True as far as it goes.  The more critical issue is that these public servants are no longer serving the needs of the public but are prioritizing their own preferences above the public - not because of facts but because of ideological conviction.  

Trust can be lost due to incompetence or ignorance and that is bad enough.  When trust is lost because the public believe you are actively working against their own best interests, factually demonstrable best interests, then that is pretty catastrophic.  CDC, FDA, Research Universities, Mainstream Media, and many Federal agencies such as the intelligence services are getting deeper and deeper into this troublesome territory.

The solution is not a propaganda campaign; it is to demonstrate competence and alignment with the public's interests.  


Its a grift - Virtuous victim signal can facilitate nonreciprocal resource transfer from others to the signaler

I am dubious of much sociological and psychological research, particularly at the methodological level.  Regardless, these findings are not too surprising.  

From Signaling Virtuous Victimhood as Indicators of Dark Triad Personalities by Ekin Ok, Yi Qian, Brendan Strejcek, and Karl Aquino.  From the Abstract.  

We investigate the consequences and predictors of emitting signals of victimhood and virtue. In our first three studies, we show that the virtuous victim signal can facilitate nonreciprocal resource transfer from others to the signaler. Next, we develop and validate a victim signaling scale that we combine with an established measure of virtue signaling to operationalize the virtuous victim construct. We show that individuals with Dark Triad traits—Machiavellianism, Narcissism, Psychopathy—more frequently signal virtuous victimhood, controlling for demographic and socioeconomic variables that are commonly associated with victimization in Western societies. In Study 5, we show that a specific dimension of Machiavellianism—amoral manipulation—and a form of narcissism that reflects a person’s belief in their superior prosociality predict more frequent virtuous victim signaling. Studies 3, 4, and 6 test our hypothesis that the frequency of emitting virtuous victim signal predicts a person’s willingness to engage in and endorse ethically questionable behaviors, such as lying to earn a bonus, intention to purchase counterfeit products and moral judgments of counterfeiters, and making exaggerated claims about being harmed in an organizational context.

 

One thing that stood out was that image duplication was more likely to take place in some countries rather than others: India and China were overrepresented in the number of papers with duplicated images, while the US, the UK, Germany, Japan and Australia were underrepresented.

From Science Fictions by Stuart Ritchie.  Page 69.

Who are these fraudsters? Can we put together an FBI-like ‘profile’ of the quintessential fraudster, to aid us in preventing further acts of data fabrication? In a review of fraud cases, the neuroscientist Charles Gross lamented the lack of solid evidence on who commits fraud. He did, however, have a go at describing the type of character who regularly appears in well-publicised fraud reports in the media. That person, he wrote, tends to be ‘a bright and ambitious young man working in an elite institution in a rapidly moving and highly competitive branch of modern biology or medicine, where results have important theoretical, clinical, or financial implications.’  By this point in the chapter, it’s a familiar picture: for instance, it fits Paolo Macchiarini almost perfectly.
 
Notably, Gross described the fraudster as a man. This is a clear pattern among the worst fraudsters: of the thirty-two scientists currently on the Retraction Watch Leaderboard, only one is a woman.95 To know whether this tells us something important, we’d need to know what the base rate of men versus women was in each relevant field, and thus whether men were overrepresented. A study in 2013, focusing on “the life sciences, took those baseline differences into account and found that men were indeed overrepresented as the subject of fraud reports from the US Office for Research Integrity.  A 2015 paper examining retractions and corrections across all scientific fields, meanwhile, found no gender differences, although it’s not clear whether it considered the all-important baseline.
 
After collecting their database of papers with duplicated western-blot images, Elisabeth Bik and her colleagues also checked to see if there were any characteristics that differentiated the problematic papers from others. One thing that stood out was that image duplication was more likely to take place in some countries rather than others: India and China were overrepresented in the number of papers with duplicated images, while the US, the UK, Germany, Japan and Australia were underrepresented. The authors proposed that these differences were cultural: the looser rules and softer punishments for scientific misconduct in countries like India and China might be responsible for their producing a higher quantity of potentially fraudulent research.  This once again emphasises that the social milieu in which science is conducted can have serious effects on its quality.
 
Others have made related speculations. After citing research showing that a rather suspicious one hundred per cent of trials of acupuncture from scientists in China had positive results (even if acupuncture worked perfectly, we’d expect to see a few failures just by chance), the doctor and writer Steven Novella argued that the political circumstances in China might not be conducive to good science:

There is also legitimate concern that totalitarian governments do not create an environment in which science can flourish. Science requires transparency, it requires valuing method over results, and it should be ideologically neutral. These are not concepts that flourish under a totalitarian regime. Also, the scientists who get promoted to positions of respect and power are likely to be those who please the regime, by proving, for example, that their cultural propaganda is real. So the selective pressures for advancement do not prioritize research integrity.

 Whatever its cause, Chinese scientists would seem to agree that there’s a major problem. In one survey of Chinese biomedical researchers in the early 2010s, participants estimated that around 40 per cent of all biomedical articles published by their compatriots were affected by some kind of scientific misconduct; 71 per cent said that the authorities in China paid ‘no or little attention’ to misconduct cases.

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I see wonderful things

 

Hrdza - Žehnaj dieťa / Bless the Child

Hrdza - Žehnaj dieťa / Bless the Child


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Winter Landscape with Deer, 1912 by Peder Mørk Mønsted

Winter Landscape with Deer, 1912 by Peder Mørk Mønsted

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Sunday, December 27, 2020

1.97 per cent of scientists admit to faking their data at least once.

From Science Fictions by Stuart Ritchie.  Page 68.

So, if you combine the Leaderboard’s heavy hitters with all the other scientists who retract articles for dishonest reasons, how many scientists actually commit fraud? The overall proportion of papers retracted – around 4 in 10,000 published studies, or 0.04 per cent – is reassuringly low. It also isn’t very helpful, as we know on the one hand that some retractions aren’t due to fraud, but on the other that some journals either don’t catch false findings or don’t bother retracting them. What happens if instead you simply ask scientists, anonymously, whether they’ve ever committed fraud?
 
The biggest study on this question to date pooled research from seven surveys, finding that 1.97 per cent of scientists admit to faking their data at least once.  As if one in fifty scientists admitting to being fraudsters wasn’t alarming enough, consider that people are naturally loath to confess to fraud, even in an anonymous survey, so the real number is surely much higher. Indeed, when surveys asked scientists how many other researchers they know who have falsified data, the figure jumped up to 14.1 per cent (although of course, some of those polled might have been mistaken, paranoid, or exaggerating problems in their rivals’ research).

 

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Dusk in Winter, 1943 by Raphael Gleitsmann

 Dusk in Winter, 1943 by Raphael Gleitsmann

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My Mother, 1969 by Yuri Mikhailovich Raksha

My Mother, 1969 by Yuri Mikhailovich Raksha

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Saturday, December 26, 2020

We have seen this movie before

Interesting.  From Der Spiegel 2010: Reconstruction of the Swine Flu Mass Hysteria of 2009 The great hysteria pandemic attempt by the WHO and the governing classes that failed.  It appears that this was originally reported in Der Spiegel in 2010 and was then republished on August 2, 2020.  

Clearly it is an indictment of the WHO bureaucracy and how they responded to a new swine flu virus in 2009.  

It wasn’t until several weeks later that a laboratory in Canada tested a mucosal smear taken from the boy. The results made him famous. Edgar didn’t have an ordinary flu, but had been infected with a new kind of pathogen, the swine flu virus. Edgar went down in history as niño cero, “boy zero,” the first person to fall ill with the new plague.

The Mexican boy’s infection was mild, like an overwhelming majority of the millions of cases that would occur worldwide in the coming months. The new virus would probably have attracted far less attention if it hadn’t been for modern molecular medicine, with its genetic analyses, antibody tests and reference laboratories. The swine flu would have conquered the world, and no doctor would have noticed.

But the world did notice, largely because of high-tech medicine and the vaccine industry. From Ebola to SARS to the avian flu, epidemiologists, the media, doctors and the pharmaceutical lobby have systematically attuned the world to grim catastrophic scenarios and the dangers of new, menacing infectious diseases.

None of these diseases receives more attention than influenza. Researchers in more than 130 laboratories in 102 countries are constantly on the lookout for new flu pathogens. Entire careers and institutions, and a lot of money, depend on the outcomes of their work. “Sometimes you get the feeling that there is a whole industry almost waiting for a pandemic to occur,” says flu expert Tom Jefferson, from an international health nonprofit called the Cochrane Collaboration. “And all it took was one of these influenza viruses to mutate to start the machine grinding.”

Now turned up, the machinery was set into motion. Researchers got to work examining the molecular structure of the virus. The pharmaceutical industry started to develop vaccines. Government agencies laid out disaster plans. There was only one thing that everyone was ignoring: The new pathogen was, in fact, relatively harmless.

How did all this happen?

Der Spiegel's answer is primarily - Incentives.  Der Spiegel provides a month by month timeline of actions taken the summer of 2009 which led to the declaration of a global H1N1 pandemic, the mass slaughter of pigs in many countries and numerous other economic disasters.  In the event, H1N1 proved pretty mild with relatively few global deaths from the influenza.  The recommended WHO interventions were massively damaging to many country's economies with little indication of effectiveness or even need.

Der Spiegel hypothesizes that WHO needed the pandemic to justify its existence, exacerbated by some personnel issues where key decision-makers, based on past experience, were predisposed to find a pandemic.  

The weekly magazine even more strongly makes the case that the whole process was inappropriately and self-servingly driven by the financial interests of pharma companies.  

An interesting context to our issues today where "experts" have beclowned themselves with bad advice, departures from evidentiary norms, contradictory positions, policies which are seen to be ineffective, and edicts from which they exempt themselves, etc.  

People make mistakes.  It is the exempting of individuals in positions of authority and benefitting institutions from the consequences of their failures, failure which typically exact costs and tragedies on those least able to absorb them, which badly damages societal trust.  

Among retractions in general, honest mistakes only make up around 40 per cent or less of the total.

From Science Fictions by Stuart Ritchie.  Page 67.

The Retraction Watch Database isn’t a perfect list: some retractions might have been missed, since journals vary widely in the extent to which they acknowledge or highlight retracted articles. It’s also important to note that a retraction doesn’t necessarily mean fraud – many papers are retracted because the authors noticed a mistake and withdrew the paper themselves. Other retractions are more ambiguous: for instance, in early 2020 the Nobel Prize-winning chemical engineer Frances Arnold announced that her team were retracting a paper on enzymes from Science because the results wouldn’t replicate and because ‘careful examination of the first author’s lab notebook … revealed missing contemporaneous entries and raw data for key experiments.’82 Whether this implied mere error or something worse on behalf of that lead author, a student in Arnold’s lab, is unclear. Arnold’s admission was painfully candid: ‘I apologise to all,’ she tweeted. ‘I was a bit busy when this was submitted, and did not do my job well.’

Among retractions in general, honest mistakes only make up around 40 per cent or less of the total. The majority are due to some form of immoral behaviour, including fraud (around 20 per cent), duplicate publication and plagiarism. The number of retractions is also increasing over time, though this might not imply an increase in fraud: rather, it might mean that journal editors are getting wiser to it, or that authors are more willing, like Arnold, to admit that they screwed up.

In the same way that a small number of lawbreakers commit a disproportionate number of crimes in society, the Retraction Watch Database shows that just 2 per cent of individual scientists are responsible for 25 per cent of all retractions.

 

History

 

Connecticuters

Reading Accidental therapists: For insect detectives, the trickiest cases involve the bugs that aren’t really there by Eric Boodman which I'll blog about separately.  For the time being, I was distracted by:

It might sound like some dusty holdover from another, more agricultural time, when the fates of Connecticutters and critters were more closely intertwined.

Connecticutters?  That is the collective noun for those who live in Connecticut?  With all the history and travel I read, how did I not know this?  Is it even true?

Apparently, yes, it is the collective noun, though properly spelled Connecticuters.

Kevin Vellturo has the story in ‘Connecticuter?’ Government style manual raises the question: What do you call someone from Connecticut?  Apparently, while Connecticuter is both proper and official, it is not particularly widely known and there are those with strong feelings against the name.  


Most of these make sense to me.  But there are a handful deviant from what I am accustomed to hearing or have never seen.

Alabamian - I live next door to Alabama and am not sue I have heard them called anything but Alabamans.

Hawaii resident - Why not Hawaiian?  I think that is all I have ever seen.

Hoosier - I am familiar with the nickname but it is the only state on the list where the official name is a nickname.

Massachusettsan - I don't have a ready alternative, but I wouldn't have guessed Massachusettsan.

Wyomingite - Also sounds improbable.

But that's the beauty of the English language.  It is a living and evolving example of living and evolving linguistic democracy.  The rules are descriptive not normative.


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House in Tuscany, 1903 by Hans Emmenegger

House in Tuscany, 1903 by Hans Emmenegger

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Friday, December 25, 2020

The range of the data (the difference between the highest and lowest scores) was nearly identical, although the groups were otherwise quite different.

From Science Fictions by Stuart Ritchie.  Page 63.

This kind of reasoning is what caught out social psychologists Lawrence Sanna and Dirk Smeesters in 2011. Sanna published a study in which he claimed to find that people are more prosocial when standing at higher elevations; Smeesters claimed to show that seeing the colours red and blue affects how people think about celebrities.  The results in both papers looked impressive at first glance, easily confirming their proposed theories about human behaviour. But a closer look revealed something distinctly odd. The psychologist Uri Simonsohn showed that in the various groups in Sanna’s experiment, the range of the data (the difference between the highest and lowest scores) was nearly identical, although the groups were otherwise quite different. Simonsohn calculated that the chances of this happening in real data were minuscule. It was the same for Smeesters, except it was the averages of his groups that were too similar; again, these similarities just weren’t consistent with what would happen in real data, where error would have nudged the numbers further apart.  Once these problems, among others, were exposed, the offending papers were retracted, and both researchers resigned in disgrace. 

These kinds of statistical red flags are analogous to  what makes your bank freeze your credit card after it’s suddenly used to spend large sums on a tropical cruise: unusual activity that’s out of line with normal expectations, and which might be due to fraud.  And there are a host of other features of fraudulent data that might cause readers to become suspicious when they dig into the details. The dataset might look a little too immaculate, for example, with too few missing datapoints, which come about for all sorts of reasons in real datasets: participants dropping out of the study or instruments failing, for example. Perhaps the distribution of numbers might not follow certain expected mathematical rules.  Or the effects might be vastly larger than seems plausible in the real world, and thus too good to be true.

 

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Christmas Holidays by Trevor Mitchell

 Christmas Holidays by Trevor Mitchell 

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Thursday, December 24, 2020

They’re predictably unpredictable

From Science Fictions by Stuart Ritchie.  Page 62.

“Fortunately, just as it’s a monumentally difficult task to forge a compelling Rembrandt or Vermeer (or a compelling western blot), it’s not at all easy to fake a dataset convincingly. Data pulled out of thin air don’t have the properties we’d expect of data collected in the real world.65 Fundamentally, this is because no science is really an exact science: numbers are noisy. Every time you try to measure anything, you’ll be slightly off from the true value, be it the economic performance of a country, the number of rare orangutans left in the world, the speed of a subatomic particle, or even something as simple as how tall someone is. With height, for instance, the person might be a bit slouched, your tape measure might slip by a fraction of an inch, or you might accidentally write down the wrong number. This is called measurement error, and it’s hard to get around completely, even if there are ways to reduce it. 
 
Measurement error’s equally annoying cousin is sampling error. As scientists we can rarely, if ever, examine every single instance of a phenomenon – no matter whether we’re trying to study a set of cells, or exoplanets, or surgical operations, or financial transactions. Instead, we take samples, and try to generalise from them to the set as a whole (statisticians call the whole set the ‘population’, even if it’s not a set of people). The trouble is, the characteristics of any given sample you take (say, the average height of all the people in your study) are never a precise match to what you really want to know (say, the average height of all the people in the country). Just through the random chance of who was included, every sample will have a marginally different average. And some samples, again just by chance, might be wildly different from the true average in the overall set.
 
Both measurement error and sampling error are unpredictable, but they’re predictably unpredictable. You can always expect data from different samples, measures or groups to have somewhat different characteristics – in terms of the averages, the highest and lowest scores, and practically everything else. So even though they’re normally a nuisance, measurement error and sampling error can be useful as a means of spotting fraudulent data. If a dataset looks too neat, too tidily similar across different groups, something strange might be afoot. As the geneticist J. B. S. Haldane put it, ‘man is an orderly animal’ who ‘finds it very hard to imitate the disorder of nature’, and that goes for fraudsters as much as for the rest of us.