Tuesday, May 31, 2022

When articles of faith are presented as claims of fact

I saw this headline in Bloomberg, Why Did U.S. Cities Resegregate? by Jake Blumgart.  Naively thinking that this could be interesting, I click through.  

It is an interesting issue.  We are fifty and sixty years out from segregation as it used to occur and, despite innumerable city, county, state, and federal public policy initiatives we still have a lot of segregation.  Now, as then, it is primarily class, income, and cultural segregation even though ideologues are convinced it is straight-up racism.  

It is a matter of theological faith even though all the empirical data points to class, income, and cultural drivers.  

It remains an interesting issue though.  In a nation guaranteed freedom of association and a reasonably free market, it is of course inevitable that people will sort themselves based on the affiliations with which they most associate.  Usually including income, education attainment, class, cultural association, age, familial structure, etc.  

So to what extent should the government intervene to force citizens to arrange their living conditions based on what the government wishes to impose?  It is an interesting question.  Historically, the philosophy behind desegregation has been dramatically inconsistent once it moves past the sensible observation that everyone should be subject to the same laws.  

As it turns out, this article is an interview of an author with a new book out on segregation.  Both the reporter and the author are completely indoctrinated.  I only post about it because it is such a striking example of dissociation from reality.  Probably three quarters of the assertions or claims of fact are simply and obviously wrong.  And this isn't even my field.

And with so many of the claims being factually unfounded, it is hard to take the rest of their arguments seriously.

The only thing the article is worthwhile for is to remind you just how isolated so many people can be.  Ideological religion is a powerful force.

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I see wonderful things

 

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And then it died.

From The Murder of the Century by Paul Collins.  Page 269.

It seemed as if that final word on the Guldensuppe case might remain with Hearst himself. But when the media baron died in 1951, there was still another man who hadn’t forgotten about the case—one man still standing. That man was Ned Brown.

The cub reporter who first found Mrs. Nack’s apartment rose in time to write the World’s “Pardon My Glove” boxing column. He outlasted the newspaper itself; Ned worked in its newsroom until its final hours in 1931, then graduated to a long career handling publicity for Jack Dempsey and editing Boxing magazine. But he never stopped filing ringside newspaper reports, and when his fellow boxing writer A. J. Liebling profiled him in 1955, it was as much in admiration of an era as of a man: Ned was the last Victorian holdout in the New York sports pens.

“Being a newspaperman gave you stature then,” the old man fondly recalled. “Everywhere except in society. It didn’t cut any ice there.”

Ned then went on to outlive Liebling, too. In fact, he also outlived nearly every New York newspaper. After the World went under, it combined with the Evening Telegram to become the New York World-Telegram. Then it swallowed the Sun to become the New York World-Telegram and Sun. Then it was mashed together with the remnants of the Journal, the Herald, and the Tribune to become the New York World Journal Tribune. And then it died.

But Ned Brown lived on.

Nothing could knock Ned to the mat; the same inquisitive blue eyes that searched Mrs. Nack’s mantelpiece for a picture of Guldensuppe would go on to witness the Manson trial and Watergate. In an age of Kojak and Dirty Harry, he still recalled the days when journalists carried badges. Yet although news evolved from carrier-pigeon dispatches to satellite broadcasts, the business remained curiously familiar; when Rupert Murdoch started his chains, and Ted Turner bought his first TV stations, it was already old news to Ned Brown. He’d seen it all before. Hearst’s saturation coverage of sensational local crime—creating a suspenseful narrative out of endless news updates from every angle, whether there was anything substantive to cover or not—had already anticipated the round-the-clock cycle of broadcast news.

When Ned Brown died in 1976, he was well into his nineties—nobody was quite sure how old he was anymore. It wasn’t long since he’d made a final bow to the public; evicted from his apartment by the Hudson River, the one possession the old man had bothered to retrieve was his tuxedo.

“I need that suit for my social life,” he explained to a reporter.

With him ended the living memory of Augusta Nack and Martin Thorn. Even the case files had been destroyed years earlier by the Queens County Courthouse in a fit of housekeeping. As they were on their way to the incinerator, though, one curious reporter picked out a yellowed evidence envelope and opened it up.

It held little inside—just six duck feathers and a mystery.

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History

 

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An Insight

 

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Complaining about the law is no substitute for making credible arguments

An interesting guest editorial in the New York Times.  From We Clerked for Justices Scalia and Stevens. America Is Getting Heller Wrong. by Kate Shaw and John Bash.  Shaw clerked for Stevens who dissented from the majority decision in Heller and Bash clerked for Scalia who wrote the majority opinion.  

It has been striking to me that our policy debates seem to be so little based in the law or informed of the judicial decision-making process.  The leaked majority decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has been repeatedly represented as banning abortion; which it does not.  It would merely, and properly, return the debate back to where it belongs - in the people's legislatures.

Similarly with gun control as represented in the Heller decision.  Gun control activists constantly represent Heller as the impediment to sensible gun control.  It is not.  

Bash and Shaw point out:

Nothing in Heller casts doubt on the permissibility of background check laws or requires the so-called Charleston loophole, which allows individuals to purchase firearms even without completed background checks. Nor does Heller prohibit giving law enforcement officers more effective tools and greater resources to disarm people who have proved themselves to be violent or mentally ill, as long as due process is observed. Heller also gives the government at least some leeway to restrict the kinds of firearms that can be purchased — few would claim a constitutional right to own a grenade launcher, for example — although where that line could be constitutionally drawn is a matter of disagreement, including between us. Indeed, President Donald Trump banned bump stocks in the wake of the mass shooting in Las Vegas.

Most of the obstacles to gun regulations are political and policy based, not legal; it’s laws that never get enacted, rather than ones that are struck down, because of an unduly expansive reading of Heller. We are aware of no evidence that any mass shooter was able to obtain a firearm because of a law struck down under Heller. But Heller looms over most debates about gun regulation, and it often serves as a useful foil for those who would like to deflect responsibility — either for their policy choice to oppose a particular gun regulation proposal or for their failure to convince their fellow legislators and citizens that the proposal should be enacted.

The closest we’ve come to major new federal gun regulation in recent years came in the post-Sandy Hook effort to create expanded background checks. The most common reason offered by opponents of that legislation? That it would violate the Second Amendment. But that’s just not supported by the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the amendment in Heller. If opponents of background checks for firearm sales believe that such requirements are unlikely to reduce violence while imposing unwarranted burdens on lawful gun owners, they should make that case openly, not rest on a mistaken view of Heller.

Their plea is that debates at least acknowledge the actual legal decisions instead of making up arguments that are vaporous misrepresentations.  

As the nation enters yet another agonizing conversation about gun regulation in the wake of the Uvalde tragedy, all sides should focus on the value judgments and empirical assumptions at the heart of the policy debate, and they should take moral ownership of their positions. The genius of our Constitution is that it leaves many of the hardest questions to the democratic process.

Not an unreasonable request it would seem.

Regulation of abortion is fraught.  Regulation of guns is fraught.  But such regulation is entirely constitutional and feasible.  

The challenge for activists, both expansive pro-abortionists, as well as statist gun controllers, is that their positions are not compatible with the will of the people and, as pertinently, are generally incompatible with empirical evidence.  

Their complaint does not really reside with whether court decisions are bad or good.  Their effective complaint is that they are unable to make compelling arguments for their positions to either the public or to the citizen's legislators.  

Especially in the case of gun control, it would help if the policies they propose could be shown to work.  Absent that barest minimum, nobody need listen to them and all the howling and gnashing of teeth about the Supreme Court is mere drama to conceal that they have no credible policy proposition supported by reason or empirical evidence.

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I see wonderful things

 

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Offbeat Humor




















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Data Talks

 

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One whole according to the intentions of reason.

Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant

It is unfortunate that not until we have unsystematically collected observations for a long time to serve as building materials, following the guidance of an idea which lies concealed in our minds, and indeed only after we have spent much time in the technical disposition of these materials, do we first become capable of viewing the idea in a clearer light and of outlining it architectonically as one whole according to the intentions of reason.

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For the poor, rushes and hearth fire served for light; for the yeoman and squire, smoky tallow candles; for the rich, candelabra of beeswax backed by mirrors.

From Energy by Richard Rhodes.

Eight hundred hours of light, but no more than a candle flame’s worth at a time. Oil lamps, like miniature gravy boats, burned even more feebly with their wicks of twisted rag. The oil might be flax, rape, walnut, or fish liver, and, around the Mediterranean, the industrious olive. On St. Kilda, in the Hebrides west of Scotland, the stomach oil of the fulmar, an oily, all-purpose seabird, made lamplight. “The Shetland Islanders,” writes a folklore historian, “as recently as the end of the nineteenth century, threaded wicks through stormy petrels [killed and dried for the purpose], birds so fat and oily that they eject oil through the digestive tract when caught.”  For the poor, rushes and hearth fire served for light; for the yeoman and squire, smoky tallow candles; for the rich, candelabra of beeswax backed by mirrors.

Without adequate lighting, the country night was dark, though lustered by starlight or full moon. Eighteenth-century Birmingham’s Lunar Society—country neighbors Erasmus Darwin, Matthew Boulton, James Watt, Josiah Wedgwood, and chemist Joseph Priestley—convened when the moon was full, bright enough to cast shadows, so they could walk to their meetings.  But night in the city was dark and threatening. In ancient Rome, a historian warns, “night fell over the city like the shadow of a great danger. . . . Everyone fled to his home, shut himself in, and barricaded the entrance.” John Stow, the Elizabethan chronicler, says that in the eleventh century, King William I—William the Conqueror—“commanded that in every town and village, a bell should be nightly rung at eight o’clock, and that all people should then put out their fire and candle, and take their rest.” We call such a prohibition a curfew, a word derived from Norman French covre le feu: “cover the fire!” Henry I lifted his father’s curfew, Stow adds, but “by reason of wars within the realm, many men . . . also gave themselves to robbery and murder in the night.”

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The Green Man by Brian Froud

The Green Man by Brian Froud

























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Monday, May 30, 2022

Housing First is three times more deadly than Shelter First

There is a tragic struggle going on amongst homeless advocates.  In one camp, there are the Housing First aficionados.  Their solution for the homeless is to provide housing to all homeless as the very first step.  Get them into housing, then figure out what they need.  

In the other camp are those who insist on providing shelter first.  Just get them in off the streets.  A final shelter solution can then be crafted.  

Aside from it never having been shown to be effective, a major drawback to the Housing First strategy is that it is massively expensive and dreadfully slow.  The homes or housing units cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to build and the population of the homeless always grows faster than the supply of housing.  Oh, and the moral hazard issue of course.

But the pathologically altruistic are enormously invested in the Housing First strategy.  After all, it is somebody else's money that is being wasted.  

There are many good evidentiary and reason based arguments to be made, but there has been a dearth of good hard empirical data.  


Data that tracks both the number of people experiencing homeless and those who die is difficult to verify. Many U.S. cities don’t make such data public, and the ones that do note the counts are probably severely lower than reality, especially in cities such as L.A. where much of the homeless population lives outdoors and not in shelters.

But publicly available data shows New York’s homeless population is the highest in the country, at about 70,000 people. Los Angeles follows with more than 66,000. Despite that, the number of deaths in both cities at the start of the pandemic were vastly different.

Los Angeles saw 1,988 homeless people die from April 2020 to the end of March 2021. In a similar period – July 2020 to the end of June 2021 – 640 people died in New York, about a third of what L.A. saw.

But in both cities, drug overdoses increased by about 80% and were listed as the leading cause of death.

Experts note the differences in mortality probably is the result of two key issues: Los Angeles has a much older homeless population and many live outdoors, which makes it harder to access services and health care.

In fact, at least 252 homeless people in L.A. County were found dead on sidewalks and another 56 in tents, 101 on streets and alleyways, 95 in county parks and 25 on railroad tracks or train platforms in that time period, according to an analysis of data obtained by USA TODAY from the Los Angeles County Coroner.

“It’s an apples-to-oranges comparison,” said Gary Blasi, a professor emeritus at UCLA law school who specializes in homelessness and evictions. “You are 12 times more likely to be housed in a shelter in New York. And simply being inside allows so much, from a clean shower and good night’s sleep to a small sense of stability and relief from that hopelessness.”

New York is a Shelter First city and Los Angeles is, notoriously, a Housing First city.  Yes, there will always be definitional and data capture issues, but the more three-fold differential in deaths between LA and NYC is striking even though they have roughly the same size of homeless population.  
















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The Georgia legislature to ban the “brutal” sport of football

From The Murder of the Century by Paul Collins.  Page 169.

As the courthouse emptied out, Journal pigeon posts fluttered past the windows—the first four pages of tonight’s issue would be devoted to the case, shoving aside every other national and international story, including a Spanish overture to President McKinley, a nearly unanimous vote by the Georgia legislature to ban the “brutal” sport of football, and word that infamous outlaw “Dynamite Dick” had been gunned down by lawmen in the wilds of the Indian Territory. With tomorrow’s witnesses slated to be a parade of doctors and professors, the capital circumstantial case was turning historic.

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He shied away from those who had adopted any ideology that blinded them to either mathematical fact or real events.

From John von Neumann: The Scientific Genius Who Pioneered the Modern Computer, Game Theory, Nuclear Deterrence, and Much More by Norman Macrae.

These colloquia often ranged also over political debates, and Johnny’s technique in these proved the same as later in America. He never argued with people who said anything emotional or politically convinced. He did not believe that public argument changed such people’s views, and he thought preaching back at them simply brought boredom and bad blood. But he asked probing questions of anybody who said anything interesting, and “interest” was a word to which he gave a wide range. Johnny preferred people who laughed at the world rather than whined at it. He shied away from those who had adopted any ideology that blinded them to either mathematical fact or real events.

Well that takes away 75% of the national discourse conducted on Twitter, in the mainstream media and in academia.  

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History

 

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An Insight

 

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Happy Memorial Day

To Make Men Free, 1943 by Norman Rockwell






























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I see wonderful things

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Offbeat Humor




















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Data Talks

 

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Good reporting imparts good information

From US Schools Facing Mass Exodus of Teachers Who Won’t Return This Fall by Autumn Spredemann.  I don't read the Epoch Times all that much but people periodically recommend it so I have been dipping in with greater frequency.  

Based on a meaninglessly small sample size, they do a somewhat better job around numerical issues than NPR, Washington Post or New York Times, my historical sources.  When I saw the above headline at Epoch, my immediate response was "How do they know?"  Is there really an exodus? 

Compared to the other mainstream media, Sprederman does a reasonable job of making her case.  Whereas NPR, Washington Post or New York Times will usually just quote people asserting that there is an exodus (and usually people from just one side of the issue), you actually want to show that there is an increased teacher turnover rate or that there is a survey metric that is a reliable leading indicator.  For example, if increasingly teachers say on surveys that they intend to leave the profession and that survey measure strongly correlates to an actual future increase in turnover, that is useful information.

Further, you want to give context.  It is not enough to say that there is a 15% turnover rate among teachers on an annual basis.  If you are arguing that there is a mass exodus, you have to show that 15% is meaningfully greater than in the recent past or long term averages.

These are numeracy hurdles which NPR, Washington Post, and the New York Times rarely clear.  They assert.  They use surveys of intent as actual outcomes.  When they do use data, it is out of context.  etc.

In this instance, The Epoch Times does reasonably well.

The average national turnover rate was only 16 percent before COVID-19. However, in 2021, that number jumped to 25 percent.

[snip]

Yet the struggle to keep existing educators and hire new ones is only half the battle. A new report from the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education indicates that university students pursuing teaching degrees are declining.

In 2019, U.S. colleges awarded fewer than 90,000 undergraduate degrees in education. That’s down from nearly 200,000 a year in the 1970s. Over the past 10 years alone, the number of people completing traditional teacher preparation programs has dropped by 35 percent. 
 
[snip] 
 
“This is a five-alarm crisis,” said NEA president Becky Pringle.

One of the hurdles administrators face amid the staff scarcity is a lengthy certification and training process even after qualified university graduates apply to teach.

“I want to continue teaching—however, I’m being forced out,” Lisa Carley Hotaling told The Epoch Times.

Having taught in Michigan and New York, Hotaling found herself between a rock and a hard place after she took a teaching job in California as an emergency hire in the Alameda Unified school district.

Despite already having a master’s degree and more than a decade of education and classroom experience, she still has to take the California Basic Skills Test (CBEST) and go back to school specifically for her master’s in education to continue teaching.

“That only gives me a one year credential,” Hotaling explained. “[Then] I’ll be required to return to school to do what I’m already doing in the classroom. It makes no sense. And I have to pay for further education on top of it?”

All-in-all, some good old-fashioned reporting with a solid mix of pertinent data, context, source quotation, and illustrative anecdote.  

Even so there is still a clanger, though possibly due to the reporter's sources and her not catching the issue.

Findings from a joint study on the role of school counselors from the Connecticut State Department of Education, the Connecticut School Counselor Association, and the Center for School Counseling Outcome Research and Evaluation at the University of Massachusetts Amherst revealed schools with fewer students and more counselors had lower rates of student suspensions and disciplinary actions.

Good to quote studies but there is such an obvious confounder that it needed to be addressed but is not.  Schools which can afford to be smaller and which can afford many counselors are presumably also wealthier schools with a student body from more affluent and competent families.  The implication being that wealth and class and marital status are potential confounders when considering suspensions and disciplinary actions.  Especially when it is already known that poorer schools have a higher prevalence of single-parent families and also higher disciplinary issues.

Still, she did good journalistic work compared to her brethren at NPR, Washington Post, and the New York Times.  

Sprederman does have one item which is not explored but I suspect is relevant.

He also thinks a general lack of respect for educators underscores why more are leaving their jobs early, and others are reluctant to apply.

“The respect situation is just a huge issue,” he said.

Marks was candid when asked about the difficulties of hiring new talent in schools. “I don’t know right now, given the way the world is, if I’d be interested in being a classroom teacher.”

Marks is making the argument that low respect for the profession leads to lower applications and higher turnover.  That is plausible.  But it is worth thinking about whether the profession does have a low reputation and, if so, why.  

Curious, I checked Gallup.  Indeed, in 2021, people had a high regard for grade-school teachers with 64% assessing grea-school teachers as having high or very high honesty and ethics.  Context: reporters (17%), car salesmen (7%), lobbyists (5%), police officers (53%), military officers (61%), nurses (83%). 

However, nurses have basically been at 80-85% every year for the past twenty years.  Teachers, on the other hand are down from 73% in 2002.  And I suspect this understates the decline.  I wonder what the numbers will be in 2025 once people have fully digested what happened.

We are coming off a two-year period when parents have been enormously impacted by misguided and dangerous policy from public health organizations, politicians, and teachers unions.  Schools never needed to close.  Vaccine mandates are and never were appropriate for children.  School closures have been very damaging to children's physical and mental health in addition to the lost learning.

And teacher's unions led the charge for all these policies.  I am not surprised that there might be a decline in public respect for the profession.  It seems like their behaviors as professionals (via their unions) has warranted a decline in respect.

Especially given that there were all along, loud and persistent voices drawing attention to the poor evidentiary base for the union-supported policies.  It is one thing to suddenly have to spend two years effectively home-schooling your own children (and probably foregoing meaningful employment to do so).  It is quite another when you do that because others forced you into that role for no good reason.

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Spring Garden by Jo Grundy

Spring Garden by Jo Grundy


























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Sunday, May 29, 2022

As dead as Kelsey’s nuts

From The Murder of the Century by Paul Collins.  Page 110.

“To reassure the gentlemen in charge of the Herald,” a night reporter replied tartly, “The World has not the head of Guldensuppe and would not keep it if it had.”

Yet there was no denying the head’s importance. Old-timers in the newsroom still recalled “the Kelsey Outrage” of more than twenty years back, when Long Island poet Charles G. Kelsey unwisely wooed a very engaged woman named Julia. She’d set a candle in the window as their sign to meet, but he was seized in her yard by locals armed with tar and feathers, most likely led by Julia’s fiancé, Royal Sammis. After turning the lovelorn poet into a scalding mass of tar, they sent him screaming out into the night, never to be seen again. Julia and Royal married three months later, freed of the bothersome suitor, and everyone lived happily ever after—at least until ten months later, when fishermen pulled Kelsey’s tarred body from Huntington Bay. Or rather, they pulled out the bottom half of it; the top was gone, and his genitals had been hacked off.

As with Guldensuppe, the facts of the Kelsey case seemed clear: The identity of the victim, the perpetrators, and the motive all appeared obvious. There was even the same shock of betrayal: The candle that lured Charles Kelsey was lit deliberately by Julia, who then allegedly watched his tarring. But without a complete body, and with stories floated by the defense of live Kelsey “sightings,” no jury had been able to convict a single person involved. The whole grisly affair was crudely preserved for decades in a popular turn of phrase—“as dead as Kelsey’s nuts”—but Royal and Julia Sammis still walked free.”

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History

 

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The statistics are wrong, but always wrong in the same way; the conceptions are fanciful, but it is always the same fantasy.

From The Anti-Politics Machine by James Ferguson.  Page 55.

The peculiar representation of Lesotho which emerges from the World Bank report must not be understood as simply the product of mistakes or errors. There are, indeed mistakes and errors in the Report just reviewed, and there are nearly as many in most other such reports. But these mistakes and errors are always of a particular kind, and they almost invariably tend in predictable directions. The statistics are wrong, but always wrong in the same way; the conceptions are fanciful, but it is always the same fantasy.
 
Lightly related to the adage from statistician George Box.

All models are wrong, but some are useful.

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An Insight

 

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I see wonderful things

 

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Offbeat Humor




















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Data Talks

 

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London: Seen Through an Arch of Westminster Bridge, 1746/1747 by Canaletto

London: Seen Through an Arch of Westminster Bridge, 1746/1747 by Canaletto


















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Saturday, May 28, 2022

An undesirable class of readers

From The Murder of the Century by Paul Collins.  Page 56.

An enlightening history as to how sordid and messy information creation and conveyance can be.  Yellow journalism is almost universally reviled by the establishment but it serves a market.  Just not a class of readers respected by the establishment.  And despite the illegal and immoral tactics on display though-out this book, journalists were not infrequently ahead of the police in chasing down leads and validating claims or overturning alibis.  

Reading this history in the midst of the Administration's efforts to police truth with a Disinformation Governance Board was striking.  

Other newspapers were looking endangered as well. The Times had briefly gone bust the previous year, and over at the stately Sun—the paper whose respectability the Times still only aspired to—an even more dire drama was now unfolding. It was being whispered that editor Charles A. Dana, after having helmed the Sun for more than fifty years, had stopped coming to his office in the previous week. Only imminent death could be keeping the old man from his desk in the middle of the year’s biggest crime story. New York newspapers without Dana were nearly unthinkable—indeed, Pulitzer himself had trained under the Sun’s publisher before turning on him.

The irony was not lost on the denizens of Newspaper Row. Pulitzer had made his fortune by attacking his old colleagues at the Sun as dinosaurs, and he then went after James Gordon Bennett’s equally celebrated New York Herald by undercutting its newsstand price. Now Hearst, trained in his college years at the World, was doing the exact same thing.

“When I came to New York,” one editor heard Pulitzer say with a sigh, “Mr. Bennett reduced the price of his paper and raised his advertising rates—all to my advantage. When Mr. Hearst came to New York I did the same. I wonder why, in view of my experience?”

The World’s unmatched circulation of more than 350,000—an audited figure it proudly advertised atop its front pages by proclaiming CIRCULATION BOOKS OPEN TO ALL—was now in danger of being overtaken by the Journal. And as the two pulled perilously close in record-setting circulations, the city’s other papers were getting shoved further aside. A future owned by yellow journalism was not one most reporters wished to contemplate. Some libraries had already barred the World and the Journal from their precincts, with one Brooklyn librarian sniffing that they attracted “an undesirable class of readers.” Rival papers were quick to agree, and laid into the salivating coverage of what the World had dubbed the Missing Head Mystery.

“The sensational journals of the city have now become scientific and publish anatomical charts and figures, solely in the interests of science, and to supply a want which the closing of the “dime museums in the Bowery creates,” mocked the New York Commercial Advertiser. A Times reporter bemoaned the sight of the yellow journals co-opting the case from a bumbling police force: “The freak journals, those startling and irrepressible caterers to the gross and savage side of human nature, are having a particularly fine time with their new murder mystery … and putting all the celebrated detectives of fact and fiction to shame.” Worse still, he admitted, they were good at it: “Yet it seems that in an enlightened age criminals might be brought to justice in a manner less demoralizing to the whole community.”

But it was another observation by the Times, one being quietly made all down Newspaper Row that day, that contained the real sting for Pulitzer’s men.

“The Journal, by the way,” they wrote, “is generally doing better nowadays. The pupil is taking the master’s place now.”

It was all too true. Ned and Gus and the rest of Pulitzer’s newsmen were barred from the very crime scene that they’d been the first to uncover. Locked out of Nack’s building while a joyous Hearst scampered about inside, infuriated World reporters marched off to the neighborhood pay phones to call the newsroom and complain. But when they picked up the earpieces, nothing happened.

Hearst’s men had cut the cords.

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History

 

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An Insight



















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I see wonderful things

 

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Instead of spouting policy platitudes, we can choose to solve well-defined problems

Of course everyone is now talking about mass shootings and ninety percent and more of what is being said is generated by emotional convictions around ideologies and belief systems.  Not much comes from a perspective of defining the problem, collecting and testing data and then designing solutions which might have some prospect of reducing either the frequency of mass shootings or deaths from guns (or both.)  

We all want to reduce or eliminate mass shootings, individual shootings, accidental deaths from guns and suicides.  How we do so is the critical issue and the one least moored in logic, reason, or objective empiricism.  

It drives me crazy when, after a shooting, the first inclination from the anti-gun groups is to propose bog standard policy solutions which would not have had any impact on the actual instigating tragedy.  We need to implement realistic solutions, not parrot rote talking points.

As always happens though, some new data, interpretation or perspective turns up in the conversation after these tragic events.  They turn up and are almost always instantly buried because it does not conform to the preferred talking points.

In this case, I saw a study of which I was unaware.  It is introduced through Gun policy needs a “Decision Support System” by BJ Campbell.  A decision support system is characterized by making as good decisions as possible with empirical data and clear reasoning around issues which are inherently undefined, unmeasured or constantly evolving.  Static problems tend to be easier to understand and fix.  Undefined, unmeasured and evolving problems are difficult (similar to wicked problems.)
  1. DSS tends to be aimed at the less well structured, underspecified problem that upper level managers typically face;
  2. DSS attempts to combine the use of models or analytic techniques with traditional data access and retrieval functions;
  3. DSS specifically focuses on features which make them easy to use by non-computer-proficient people in an interactive mode; and
  4. DSS emphasizes flexibility and adaptability to accommodate changes in the environment and the decision making approach of the user.
Violent death and guns fall into the category of a problem characterized as inadequately defined, inadequately measured, and dynamic.  Campbell writes:

Michael Siegel and his research team at Boston University gave us the closest reasonable approximation to a Gun DSS backbone in the spring of 2019. He and his group have done a lot of research about gun violence in the United States, but this was the first time I’ve heard of a study that looked specifically at the efficacy of policy changes on firearm suicide and homicide rates. It was a longitudinal study, looking at changes over time based on when certain laws were passed or repealed. It was multivariate, and controlled for the other major factors that impact these rates, such as black population rate, poverty rate, unemployment rate, per capita alcohol consumption, and such. The study seems, by my read, to be solid. Let’s look at the study’s findings:
    • “Assault weapon” bans have no effect.
    • Magazine capacity bans have no effect.
    • None of the gun laws they modeled affected the suicide numbers at all.
    • Limiting handgun purchase to age 21 and over has no effect.
    • Trafficking prohibitions (restrictions on buying with the intent to sell) have no effect.
    • Junk gun laws (prohibiting handguns that fail to meet certain requirements) have no effect.
    • Stand-your-ground laws have no effect, positive or negative.
    • Permitless carry laws have no effect, positive or negative.
There were only three laws that had any effect whatsoever. 
    • Universal background checks, either through required background checks for all sales or through a firearm purchase permit, reduced gun homicides by 14.9% and had no effect on suicide.
    • Prohibiting those convicted of a violent misdemeanor from buying a handgun reduced gun homicides by 18.1%, and had no effect on suicide.
    • Shall-issue laws, which ensure that law enforcement officers can’t discriminate when issuing concealed carry permits, increased gun homicides by 9.0% and had no effect on suicide.
It is important to read the original study.  Crisp bullet points belie the assumptions that need to be made and the intricacies of measurement, definition and data collection, much less interpretation.

While there is plenty to be concerned about in terms of just how confident we can be with precision, these findings are broadly consistent with much of what I have read over the past thirty years.  

The sociology of gun research started out from a very weak base and has improved substantially but it is still nowhere near as precise and reliable as we would want.  But the research is far better than it was and better than research in other critical policy areas (ex. Covid-19) where decisions are made on the barest of data.

Before we could have any meaningful policy discussion, we would need a lot of people to get on board with this DSS (or provide a better and more reliable DSS).  But this DSS requires a lot of people to give up near-theological beliefs and so the policy discussion whirls and whirls without any desirable outcome.

While the findings were not too terribly surprising, it felt like it was incomplete but I could not put my finger on what was missing.  Then, today, I see a much more granular and specific piece.  It is not really data-based but it does flag the missing elements.  From How to Cut Crime in the Murder Capital of America by Douglas Carswell.  That murder capital being Jackson, Mississippi based on the murder rate.  

Carswell is not focused on gun control but on the murder rate in Jackson, Mississippi.  Related, but not identical issues.  He has five recommendations, four of which are relevant anywhere, not just in Jackson.
  1. More police: Despite the often heroic efforts of individual law enforcement officers, there are simply not enough of them. 
  2. Prosecute: No matter how effective the police are at chasing suspects through the streets, there are serious failings when it comes to pursuing them through the courts. Who in Jackson has not heard stories of suspects being allowed to walk free?
  3. Detention: The failure to have enough detention capacity in Hinds County is outrageous. Build it. 
  4. Clear the courts: The bureaucratic backlog in the courts is perhaps the single biggest impediment to effective justice. Clear the backlog of cases. If those that administer the court system can’t cope, bring in administrators that can.
He does not provide the data but all these are relatively well researched and data supported policies.  Proactive policing reduces crime in general and violent crime in particular.  Prosecution with targeted and well-calibrated detentions also reduce crime.  Basically he is recommending that the police department be staffed for the magnitude of the problem, that prosecutions are reliably brought, sentences imposed, and punishments exacted.  

No need to be brutal, reckless or punitive in any of this.  A well-trained police force with an adequately staffed public prosecutors office, functioning and reliable court systems and good prisons with both effective diversions and alternative punishments are all predicates.  

But between these two pieces, one research and one opinion based on research, we actually have a reasonably complete policy recommendation to reduce all violent crimes including gun crime, reduce crime, and also reduce suicides from guns (the biggest issue).  It would look something like:

Adequately staffed, trained and funded police departments based on the magnitude and nature of the crime problem.

Adequately staffed, trained and funded public prosecutors who reliably bring winnable cases based on good evidence provided by the police. 

Adequately staffed, trained and funded courts which keep up with the rate of crime commission and which impose targeted sentences based on the nature of the crime, the impact on the community, and the capacity for mercy and redemption through reliably effective diversionary programs as well as incarceration.

Adequately staffed, trained and funded diversionary programs as well as jails and prisons with services (such as health treatment, psychological counseling, and job training) geared to the successful reintegration of the perpetrator back into society at the completion of their punishment.

Universal background checks, either through required background checks for all sales or through a firearm purchase permit program

Prohibition of those convicted of a violent misdemeanors or crimes from buying a handgun

Modified shall-issue laws according to the above two criteria

Of course careful and sequenced implementation is required.  Data has to be collected and monitored to ensure that policies are yielding the outcomes desired.  Services and facilities might need to be expanded.  In the near term, taxes might need to rise before falling significantly over a 3-5 year span.  

But the outcome, likely, would be in five years a much lower crime rate, a much lower murder rate, fewer deaths from guns, and fewer suicides.  That's the prize.  But to achieve it, all sides have to come to the table of data and evidence and check their ideological convictions and policy obsessions and focus on the defined problem.  If the policy shows no prospect of delivering the desired outcome, then it shouldn't be part of the conversation.

One other first order effect likely to occur might be a much improved visibility into the cause, consequences, and treatments of public mental health.  

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Offbeat Humor




















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They are missing some instinct that allows them to use common sense to see through ideas that are fashionable and high status, but clearly false.

From Why Do I Hate Pronouns More Than Genocide? by Richard Hanania.  Subtitled Self-reflection on what drives moral outrage and why I am not an effective altruist.

Having come out of academia, I’ve known many liberals, and I’m also an observer of our political culture. Following Kahneman and Tversky, we can say that there is a “System 1” (instinctive) and “System 2” (analytic) morality. I’m sure if you asked most liberals “which is worse, genocide or racial slurs?”, they would invoke System 2 and say genocide is worse. If forced to articulate their morality, they will admit murderers and rapists should go to jail longer than racists. Yet I’ve been in the room with liberals where the topic of conversation has been genocide, and they are always less emotional than when the topic is homophobia, sexual harassment, or cops pulling over a disproportionate number of black men.

[snip]

Among academics, I’ve seen many who do serious work and others who write the kind of nonsense that gets featured on the New Real Peer Review account. It has always frustrated me that the real scholars don’t seem to have much dislike or animus towards the “studies” types. I imagine that if shamans were given medical degrees and allowed to work in hospitals, real doctors would see that as an insult to their profession. Those in construction I’d like to think would hate it if people in their industry were building houses that always collapsed and giving everyone else a bad name. A System 1 morality that leads a profession to maintain some quality control among its own can be a very good thing, even when it is driven by ego gratification, as all System 1 morality is.

[snip]

It’s possible not to understand that markets are better than central planning because you are lazy or dumb. Lazy and dumb, I can live with. But that’s not why people believe in gender blank slatism. Rather, they are missing some instinct that allows them to use common sense to see through ideas that are fashionable and high status, but clearly false. 

[snip]

An individual concerned with truth – and whose self-esteem is based on thinking of himself as the kind of person concerned with truth – naturally finds wokeness uniquely offensive regardless of how damaging he thinks it is. This should be even more true when the individual belongs to the same profession as the wokes, for the same reason you’d expect pilots who take themselves seriously to be the group most angry at a new generation of aviators that is always crashing planes. Pilots, one assumes, take seriously the ostensible purpose of their profession, which is getting aircraft safely from one location to another. Most academics, unfortunately, do not, and are therefore comfortable with the absurdity in their midst.

A long and meandering piece but with lots of interesting ideas.  

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Stick to the market, which enforces consequentialism

Arnold Kling in his 5/28 substack.

Matt Yglesias writes,

I don’t know whether all or most of the current EA conventional wisdom will stand the test of time, but I think the ethic of trying to make sure your actions have the desired consequences rather than being merely expressive is incredibly important.

EA refers to Effective Altruism. He praises Sam Bankman-Fried, who made megabillions in the crypto market in order to give it away.

While I give credit to EA for at least trying to go beyond mere virtuous intentions and to think in terms of consequences, it is still only an intention to think about consequences. If you really care about consequences, stick to the market, which enforces consequentialism. Use the heuristic that if your firm makes profits, it made people better off. If it doesn’t, it didn’t.

Now in a complex world there are bound to be exceptions in which this heuristic fails. I think that there is a high probability that it fails in the case of crypto profits. My personal opinion is that the crypto ecosystem is a negative-sum game, like poker in a casino, or like a chain letter. So I find it plausible that SBF’s megabillions are much greater than any social value he created winning them.

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Data Talks

 

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The Perrines by Linda Lee Nelson (born 1963)

The Perines by Linda Lee Nelson (born 1963)





















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Friday, May 27, 2022

The Murder of the Century

A unique pleasure is that of chancing on a book that you enjoy a great deal but which you had not heard of and whose author you did not know of.  Every book, even from familiar authors, is a chance.  You invest 4-10 hours or more reading.  Will you enjoy it, will you learn from it, will you remember it, will it change your mind or cause you to think of things differently?

It is a great satisfaction when you encounter such a book, but especially when you had no grounds to anticipate it.  

Such was The Murder of the Century by Paul Collins.  I knew neither the author nor the title.  The subtitle is A Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars.  The blurb is:

On Long Island, a farmer finds a duck pond turned red with blood. On the Lower East Side, two boys playing at a pier discover a floating human torso wrapped tightly in oilcloth. Blueberry pickers near Harlem stumble upon neatly severed limbs in an overgrown ditch. Clues to a horrifying crime are turning up all over New York, but the police are baffled: There are no witnesses, no motives, no suspects.
 
The grisly finds that began on the afternoon of June 26, 1897, plunged detectives
headlong into the era's most baffling murder mystery. Seized upon by battling media moguls Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, the case became a publicity circus. Reenactments of the murder were staged in Times Square, armed reporters lurked in the streets of Hell's Kitchen in pursuit of suspects, and an unlikely trio--a hard-luck cop, a cub reporter, and an eccentric professor--all raced to solve the crime.
 
What emerged was a sensational love triangle and an even more sensational trial: an unprecedented capital case hinging on circumstantial evidence around a victim whom the police couldn't identify with certainty, and who the defense claimed wasn't even dead. The Murder of the Century is a rollicking tale--a rich evocation of America during the Gilded Age and a colorful re-creation of the tabloid wars that have dominated media to this day.

Indeed.  And more.  I highly recommend it.  

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History

 

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An Insight

 

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I see wonderful things

 

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Onerous loans from overpriced schools stuffed with bureaucrats have crippled young people.

From Bari Weiss's Common Sense.

College enrollment keeps falling: Even without Covid restrictions on campus, young Americans are still opting out of college at a dramatic rate. Enrollment as of Spring 2022 is down 4.7% from a year ago, according to new data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Since the start of the pandemic, the shift is even more dramatic: Total undergraduate enrollment has fallen by 9.4%. One thing that’s real about the #cancelstudentdebt movement is the pain: Onerous loans from overpriced schools stuffed with bureaucrats have crippled young people. A lot of teenagers today are looking at the deal and thinking, maybe there’s something better? And with a very strong job market right now, there often is. The drop in enrollment actually makes me hopeful: Colleges and universities can easily get better—start with scrapping a lot of unnecessary administrators—and now they’re finally being incentivized to do so. 

Talk about the asabiyyah cycle which I mentioned in the prior post.  The modified version might look like.

Hard times create smart students. Smart students create good times. Good times create foolish students. And, foolish students create hard times.

Which sure sounds like the end state of our K-12 and universities at the moment.  Institutionalized foolishness to the detriment of society and individual students.  
 
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Offbeat Humor

 

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Dynasties have a natural life span like individuals and no dynasty generally lasts beyond three generations of about 40 years each

There is a quote that periodically makes the rounds.  It is from the author G. Michael Hopf in his book, Those Who Remain.  

Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.

It certainly describes a distressing proportion of history but is counterbalanced by Adam Smith's observation that 

Be assured, my young friend, that there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.

Sometimes you can have repeated spells of bad rulers or terrible administrations and yet still pull through to some revived glory or prosperity.  And other times. . . other times, it is the last straw.  

I had not realized that Hopf's description of cyclicality was first described by Ibn Khaldun in Muqaddimah in 1377.  Ed West makes the connection.  

Ibn Khaldun's description of the cycle of history is the asabiyyah cycle.  From Wikipedia in Asabiyyah.

'Asabiyyah or 'asabiyya (Arabic: عصبيّة, 'group feeling' or 'social cohesion') is a concept of social solidarity with an emphasis on unity, group consciousness, and a sense of shared purpose and social cohesion, originally used in the context of tribalism and clanism.

Asabiyya is neither necessarily nomadic nor based on blood relations; rather, it resembles a philosophy of classical republicanism. In the modern period, it is generally analogous to solidarity. However, it is often negatively associated because it can sometimes suggest nationalism or partisanship, i.e., loyalty to one's group regardless of circumstances.

The concept was familiar in the pre-Islamic era, but became popularized in Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah, in which it is described as the fundamental bond of human society and the basic motive force of history, pure only in its nomadic form. Ibn Khaldun argued that asabiyya is cyclical and directly relevant to the rise and fall of civilizations: it is strongest at the start of a civilization, declines as the civilization advances, and then another more compelling asabiyyah eventually takes its place to help establish a different civilization.
 
More particularly:

Ibn Khaldun describes asabiyya as the bond of cohesion among humans in a group-forming community. The bond exists at any level of civilization, from nomadic society to states and empires. Asabiyyah is strongest in the nomadic phase, and decreases as civilization advances. As this declines, another more compelling asabiyyah may take its place; thus, civilizations rise and fall, and history describes these cycles as they play out.

Ibn Khaldun argued that some dynasty (or civilization) has within itself the plants of its own downfall. He explains that ruling houses tend to emerge on the peripheries of existing empires and use the much stronger asabiyya present in their areas to their advantage, in order to bring about a change in leadership. This implies that the new rulers are at first considered 'barbarians' in comparison to the previous ones. As they establish themselves at the center of their empire, they become increasingly lax, less coordinated, disciplined and watchful, and more concerned with maintaining their new power and lifestyle. Their asabiyya dissolves into factionalism and individualism, diminishing their capacity as a political unit. Conditions are thus created wherein a new dynasty can emerge at the periphery of their control, grow strong, and effect a change in leadership, continuing the cycle. Ibn Khaldun also further states in the Muqaddimah that "dynasties have a natural life span like individuals", and that no dynasty generally lasts beyond three generations of about 40 years each.

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