Thursday, June 30, 2022

History

 

An Insight

 

I see wonderful things

 

Offbeat Humor

Data Talks

 

Weak opinions and damp squib reporting

The same phenomenon, twice in one week.  I have mentioned that with the overturn of Roe this past Friday, the mainstream media was amplifying pro-choice advocates' lamentations and threats.  The airwaves and the screens were full of predictions of protests and riots for the weekend.  Which never transpired.  

The lamenters continued to lament but in terms of a mass protests of people demonstrating their ire?  Not so much.

On Tuesday something similar happened with the House January 6th Committee.  I have, after the first few days of the Committee, resolutely not followed their activities.  It quickly became more than apparent that it was merely a partisan political campaign rather than either a judicial or investigating committee.  My time is limited and valuable.  Why spend it on antics?

Nevertheless, the headlines were filled on Tuesday with revelations of "bombshell" testimony from some low level aid to Trump about his activities on January 6th.  The slavish inclusion of "bombshell" in every mainstream media report echoed peak Russia Collusion hysteria when every "news reporter" felt compelled to note that the "walls were closing in on Trump."


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Walls which kept closing in until they disappeared because it was all a manufactured issue.  There was, and had never been, any collusion.  


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Similar with Tuesday's bombshell.  From one transcript of the testimony, there seemed to be a pretty high probability that the testimony was . . . inaccurate?  Unbelievable?  Improbable?

None-the-less, it was an exercise in self-discipline not to go over and read the articles and find out what all the furor was about.  The conviction that it is all a manufactured partisan performance with little epistemic value is one thing.  Ignoring all the titillating headlines and promises of momentous revelation was another.

The value of self-discipline won out and the pay out seems material.  I was expecting some major headlines Wednesday morning as in-depth reporting explored the new revelations.  There were indeed more hysterical opinion pieces in the mainstream media and some debunking pieces in the right-leaning media, but no in depth reporting.

I am not seeing anything this morning either, Thursday morning.  Headlines screaming of revelations but no actual reporting.  

Seems like one more bombshell that was actually just another damp squib.

From Helen, lines 1617-1618, in The Complete Greek Tragedies: Euripides II: Helen. Hecuba. Andromache. The Trojan women. Ion. Rhesus. The suppliant women by David Grene, Richmond Alexander Lattimore (eds.), Modern Library, 1963, p. 73

Man's most valuable trait
is a judicious sense of what not to believe.

Blue Afternoon by John Felsing (American, b.1954)

Blue Afternoon by John Felsing (American, b.1954) 
























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A cloistered virtue is no virtue at all.

From Areopagitica by John Milton

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. 

Wednesday, June 29, 2022

Nothing like smart commenters to straighten things up

Scott Alexander recently did a review, Book Review: San Fransicko.  The book is San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities by Michael Shellenberger.  I have not read the book and therefore have no basis to criticize the book on that front.  

However, both the book and the review address various urban ills, in particular homelessness about which I am marginally informed having been peripherally involved in helping homeless get their lives back on track and having done a lot of research on the issue as it pertains to my downtown neighborhood as we deal with rising crime, rising homelessness, depolicing, etc.

I have much respect for Alexander.  He is forthright about everything he does, is diligent in trying to seek the truth and absolutely open when he has made errors.  He is everything you might want in this respect.  Oh, and he has among the brightest, most articulate, and variously experienced of followers, making the comment section always almost as good as whatever the original piece might have been about.

In this review though, I felt Alexander had some definitional category errors, was far too trusting of very noisy data, and was perhaps overly harsh in his judgments.  In fact, he acknowledged the validity of many of Shellenberger's arguments but still seemed to have a negative reaction to the book greater than his criticisms would warrant.  

Homelessness is a chaotic issue (non-linear effects, evolving over time, contextually dependent, loosely coupled systems, noisy data, etc.) and it is easier sometimes to discern what does not work than to reliably identify what might reliably work.  There is plenty of room for respectful disagreement.

Still, I was uncomfortable how variant our interpretations were. What was I missing?

As is his wont, Alexander followed up with Highlights From The Comments On San Fransicko. This is part of what makes him so invalauble.  He puts out a hypothesis or judgment.  His exceptionally bright readers come back with corrections, alternate interpretations, new data, etc.  

Many of the commenters make many of the concerns I had explicit.  Core homelessness is too serious an issue to be left to advocates or utopians.  It is a dreadful problem in select areas and for those who are its victims and it requires uncomfortable decisions to be made that do not accord well with the rosier hopes of some.  There are solutions which can work and which ought to be pursued but they are expensive, are not 100% successful and do not align well with the self-motivated ideologies of many of homelessness's advocates.

History

 

21 symptoms of bad public health thinking

From A checklist for COVID policy by Vinay Prasad.  The subheading is How to know someone's brain is working.

A rundown of what most people in the empirical and evidentiary community have been saying since April 2020.  At every step of the way through Covid-19, our public health leaders have almost uniformly always made the wrong decision by ignoring past experience, then existing policies, the emerging data and the experience in other developed countries.  From January to March, there is plenty of lattitude for forgiveness owing to an uncertain assessment of the threat and a sparsity of contemporary data.  From April to June, the evidence was becoming available and matched past experiences.  After June 2020, there was not much excuse for the bad choices made.

He lists 21 items:

These were issues that were not just obvious in retrospect but at the time. A simple test for who knows what they're talking about.

It is astonishing how many government institutions are continuing to double down on bad policies which are now known without doubt to be unwise and ineffective.

Anyone espousing any of the 21 items should be suspect as not having an empirical or evidentiary focus.

Eventually real data supersedes wishful thinking

From What Caused The 2020 Homicide Spike? by Scott Alexander.  Since May 2020, it has been reasonably clear that the spike in violent crime, particularly murder, was a) largely centered in major cities and b) followed from BLM riots and the effect those riots had on depolicing.  

The implication is that policy has impact and that bad policy creates bad impacts.  Consequently, there are many who are avid that the BLM protests and city governments who defunded police, threw them under the bus, or simply backed away from providing support to them are not to blame for the excess deaths in the hundreds and thousands and are not their fault.  Certainly not.

Some have even gone so far as to blame the advent of Covid lockdowns as the genesis of the rise in criminal violence.  

Alexander looks at all the US data and affirms that which was known since 2014 - There is indeed a Ferguson Effect and that when city leaders choose to depolice, it always leads to an increase in violent crime.  Which, incidentally, is always concentrated among the most economically and socially vulnerable groups.  

Alexander goes further and identifies that if the critics of the Ferguson Effect who argue that this was a Covid effect are right, then we should see spikes in violent crime abroad in countries experiencing the travails of Covid.  This implied forecast is shown to be false as well.  No one experienced a spike in violent crime.

The Ferguson Effect is real, depolicing leads to violent crime, and the data is all there to validate those hypotheses.

The public policy choices of city leaders are the cause of the excess in violent deaths plaguing many large American cities.  Political leaders made their choices and are responsible for the outcomes.

An Insight

 

25% of the Washington workforce are nonprofit employees

From Democrats Are Having a Purity Test Problem at Exactly the Wrong Time by Thomas B. Edsall.  As someone eager to see some return to sanity and reason, the article is largely good news.  I was struck by this truly appalling statistic.  

The impact of the racial reckoning in the nonprofit sector is being keenly felt in the nation’s capital, which has the third-largest concentration of locally focused nonprofits in the United States. When national organizations are taken into account, the Washington region is home to about 50,000 nonprofits employing 600,000 people, or, to put it another way, about one in four workers in Washington is a nonprofit employee, according to a 2018 report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

I have frequently spoken of the bubble effect of New York, LA, and DC on journalists.  The great majority of national journalists are clustered on those three cities (and a handful of similar cities) where there is essentially a mono-political system with only Democrats being elected, with outsized immigrant groups, great wealth and income inequality, crime, homelessness, etc.  MSM journalists write about what they see and what they see in their sheltered enclaves of high education, high income, high self-regard people living in high dysfunction cities is radically different than the national condition.

But woof! 25% of the Washington workforce are nonprofit employees?  How warping an influence is that?  10% lobbyists, 25% nonprofit ideologues, and 65% federal employees?  No wonder they neither understand America nor can solve real problems in the real world.  They are in a petrie dish of luxury beliefs.  

I see wonderful things

 

Offbeat humor

 

Offbeat Humor

 









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Data Talks

 

May in South Devon, 1971 by S.R. Badmin

May in South Devon, 1971 by S.R. Badmin






















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Tuesday, June 28, 2022

The missing caring in healthcare

The American healthcare system is ever-evolving which makes comparisons with the past difficult and with other countries even more challenging.  From Boiled Alive by Robert W Malone MD, MS.  The subheading is Living with American healthcare.  

I have lived under multiple healthcare regimes, principally American (in its many evolving forms), British, Swedish, and Australian.  When I have been asked in the past, my characterization has been that if you are suffering from any among the top 80% of ills to which the flesh is heir, you want to be in Australia or Sweden.  The care is accessible, good, friendly and cheap.  

But if you are suffering from one of the more rare and exotic conditions, the rarest 20%, you want to be in the US.  The system is enormously accommodating of variance and exoticism.  

In recent years, post Obamacare, the American system has split into three levels.  If you work for a corporation, in general, you are sitting pretty.  Quality is high, costs are (in the scheme of things) low but you have to spend an unreasonable amount of time on the bureaucracy of payments.

If you are in an Obamacare program, intended to make things affordable, you have reasonable access to good quality of care but it costs a lot and the bureaucracy is interminable.  

If you are poor, you can get surprisingly good care for free for the big things but little health maintenance.

I currently have corporate coverage which is dramatically better than Obamacare that I previously had as owner of a small business.  What I have noticed are big changes from care in the 1990s.  More big practices, more integrated data (which is great), more specialization.  On the other hand, continuity of care is miserable compared to thirty years ago.  You get handed off from one specialist to another with no one keeping an overall eye on things.  You have to be very proactive in managing your own health outcomes in a way that you really did not have to be.  

Which is an issue because of the specialization and access to obscure but precise data.  Lack of follow-up or follow-through is pervasive.  You have to determine yourself when this is warranted or an oversight which needs to be addressed.  You have to be your own ruthless advocate.

It is in this context that I read Malone's Boiled Alive in which he is comparing his experience of emergency medical care in Athens, Greece versus his home city of Los Angeles.  Interesting throughout.

A health policy for 330 million based on a massive data error committed among 11 authors and further reviewed by top-tier scientists for presentation to the most knowledgeable experts in the field. Who accepted it without noting the obvious errors.

From Essential Terms of the Authority Crisis by Matt Shapiro.  The subheading is Through no small amount of dishonesty and incompetence, institutions of authority are crumbling and the nature of expertise is changing.

Reading this account all I can think of is Institutional Ineptitude.  Sure, malevolence and ideological mayhem are probably in there somewhere, but the main ingredient seems to have to be ineptitude.

This last week, the CDC held their ACIP meeting to discuss whether or not they should recommend the COVID vaccines for children 6 months to 5 years old. While presenting on the danger of the virus for children, a slide was shown claiming that COVID presented as one of the leading causes of death for children.
















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This should be rather astonishing as child death from Covid has been near zero in virtually all countries ever since the beginning of the pandemic.  Granted that children have very low death rates anyway but for Covid to be the fifth cause of death seems deeply improbable given quite detailed and reliable data from such countries as Israel, Denmark, Sweden, Britain, etc..

Kelley, who runs covid-georgia.com, saw this slide and immediately knew it was false. She has been tracking COVID data in excruciating detail in Georgia since the beginning of the pandemic and has recently become an expert on the CDC’s pediatric death data simply because it was such a disaster and she wanted to get down to the truth of the matter.

This slide above is no small error. Not only did it count the wrong number for pediatric COVID deaths, it compared all pediatric COVID deaths in a 26-month period to annualized deaths from other causes. This is a massive data error, and yet it persisted through a supposedly rigorous data check from 11 authors and was selected by top-tier scientists for their landmark presentation to the most knowledgeable experts in the field.

No one in any of these meetings recognized this error. This slide was presented uncritically to the nation’s top doctors and epidemiologists who are in charge of setting the national policy on COVID vaccines for children and no one even noticed it. It was spread uncritically by dozens more experts, including a former Surgeon General of the United States.

And this error was caught by a woman who tweets using just her first name only and runs fact-checker on the world’s most eminent scientists in her free time.

On the one hand, I’m delighted that what Kelley does makes an impact. It looks like her persistence will result in a re-evaluation of the paper from which this chart was taken. In that way, the system works. But the system utterly failed before it worked and it’s only working now because an internet rando is more knowledgeable and paying closer attention than our top scientists and doctors.

On the one hand this is a shocking indictment of the ineptitude and untrustworthiness of our top epistemic, epidemiological, and public health institutions.  They simply cannot be trusted to get anything right.

On the other hand, I love this country where your average citizen pseudonymously tweeting and blogging in Georgia can point out that the Epistemic Emperors have not a stitch of clothing on.  To give Kelley of Georgia her Twitter due, here is her account.  

In the last two years, we’ve watched this story play out with alarming frequency. High-profile experts who are running policy for the nation (or even the world) show themselves to be woefully uninformed in their field of expertise. Over the last two years, a huge portion of this very newsletter has been about looking at nationwide narratives concerning COVID data and asking if they are actually true.

I’ve started asking myself: Why are we continuously playing whack-a-mole with bad policy drawn from poor science? It is impossible to do this forever, and for many people, it’s impossible to do this at all. Most people don’t know where to go to get the data and they wouldn’t know what to do with it if they got it.

This is the core of the authority crisis. After so many devastating and public failures at the highest levels of expertise, it seems untenable to give them credence simply based on their credentials and institutional positions.

Indeed.  And it is hard not to notice that those most prone to grave epistemic errors are also those most confident in their own wisdom, accuracy and goodness.  And also the most inclined towards authoritarianism.  The two years of the pandemic when public health experts have gotten almost everything wrong from the beginning has been bad enough.  Far worse has the official turn towards mandating and censorship.  

Voting out mandating censoring authoritarians is not really an epistemic solution but it likely will clean up the communal pond of knowledge quite significantly.  

UPDATE:  Another piece on institutional proclivities towards affirmative error making:  Never Trust A Number by Steve.  The subheading is They're shortcuts to understanding, and there are no shortcuts.

History

 

An Insight

 

I see wonderful things

 

Offbeat Humor

 

Data Talks

 

Coastal Defences, 1940 by Eric Ravilious

Coastal Defences, 1940 by Eric Ravilious 









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Monday, June 27, 2022

What does the silence mean?

From an information flow perspective, weekends are always a disruption.  Monday to Friday, everyone is pumping out their opinions, reporting and data but that slows come the weekend.  There are still many opinions and some reporting and a little data, but it is a different and lesser magnitude.

Friday, we get the Dobbs decision kicking abortion laws back to the states.  Dobbs itself arose from a new abortion law in Mississippi which, strikingly, are still more expansive than those in most nations in Europe.  Listening to NPR you would think we are trembling at the brink of constitutional collapse and the systemic brutalizing of women.  Abortion is a serious matter.  It warrants serious thought.  It warrants widespread consent when translated into law.  Conditions missing for the past fifty years.  

We will arrive at answers across the US and my suspicion is that they will look much like those in Europe.  A personal decision in the first trimester, a constrained decision in the second, and very constrained in the third.

Regardless of how that decisioning rounds out over the next five years, I was interested in the advocacy responses.  The mainstream media, substantially disjointed from popular opinion, were amplifying dramatic calls for protest and direct action.  Almost calls of civil disobedience and insurrection.

All through Friday afternoon and through the weekend I kept hearing about plans for major demonstrations all across the nation.  I heard the calls but saw no demonstrations.  

Perhaps it the weekend news rationing issue?  I wait till Monday for the first coverage of major demonstrations all across the nation protesting the decision.

And I am still not seeing anything.  Nothing in the New York Times, nothing in the major aggregators.  

I don't think there was nothing.  From local reports here and there, I have the impression of multiple demonstrations and protests but with participation in the dozens or low hundreds.  

I don't know quite how to interpret this yawning silence.  Were there no major protests?  Maybe they will be occurring this week?  Are people simply exhausted about the topic?  Is it too difficult to gin people up over a legal/legislative issue when they are confronting generational inflation rates, shortages, plunging savings accounts, etc.?

I don't know.  But it is striking.

It reminds me of some incident back in the mid-1980s.  Memories of the late 1960s summer riots were still reasonably vivid.  There was some issue which Jesse Jackson (before all his scandals) was trying to work up some political position for.  He was on the networks, more in sorrow than in anger, warning of "a long hot summer" unless the establishment yielded to his demands.  A hardly veiled threat that unless his demands were met, the streets would once again erupt.

As it turned out, there was no long hot summer.  No race riots as Jackson was sotto voce implying.  His threat, made to gain negotiating traction, ended up undermining him.  He was not a leader who could command legions.  He was not a social forecaster who could accurately forecast the heat of the street.  He became an ever less relevant footnote.

The chattering class is certainly chattering, but where are the feet of people on the ground demonstrating a groundswell of opposition.  Hard to believe that it doesn't exist but even harder to believe that it is not being reported.  

Everything reminds Milton of the money supply. Everything reminds me of sex, but at least I keep it out of my papers.


I do not want to compare Friedman’s views to what Noah Smith or someone else would say now. I want to compare them to what economists believed then, meaning 1967, prior to Friedman’s address to the American Economic Association.

Back then, monetarism had about the same status as astrology. Robert Solow could quip, “Everything reminds Milton of the money supply. Everything reminds me of sex, but at least I keep it out of my papers.”
 

History

 

An Insight

 

I see wonderful things

 

Offbeat Humor

 

Data Talks

 

A Watercolor Drawing, 1913 by Paul Nash

A Watercolor Drawing, 1913 by Paul Nash 
























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Sunday, June 26, 2022

The Walk to Paradise Garden

From An Aperture Monograph by W. Eugene Smith.

Circa 1973-75 I took a picture.  It was long before I became familiar with Smith's work.  I was in Sweden and the setting was a dark forest path looking out onto a summer-sun filled glade, at the far end of which was a small bridge over a brook leading the path onwards, elsewhere.  

I was pleased with it.  It spoke of a hopeful future, an ambition to discover.  I printed it, mounted it, I think I even won a high school photography prize for it.  I am sure I still have it somewhere among boxes that were packed for moves and then never unpacked.  I look forward to finding it again at some point.  

Some years later, I became aware of Smith's work and eventually came across this photograph, The Walk to Paradise Garden,  not dissimilar to mine.  His was obviously taken much earlier than mine and included the two children which added an immense richness and promise to it.  


















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Smith was a photographer for LIFE magazine and stationed in the Pacific covering World War II there.  In 1945 he was severely wounded from a mortar round on Okinawa.  He returned home to New York state for surgeries and recuperation.  For a full year he was unable to hold a camera at all.  This picture was his first photo after his injury and recuperation.  The subjects were his two children, Patrick and Juanita, walking the wooded paths behind his home.  It became his most popular photo and Edward Steichen included it as the final photo in The Family of Man exhibition in 1955 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.    

From the book.

1946

The Walk to Paradise Garden . . . the children in the photograph are my children, and on the day I made this photographic effort, I was not sure I would be capable of ever photographing again.

There had been the war – now it seems like a long time ago, that war called World, volume II – and during my 13th Pacific invasion shell fragments ended my photographic coverage of it. Too painful, helpless years followed my multiple wounding, during which time I had to stifle my restless spirit into a state of impassive, non-creative suspension, while the doctors by their many operations slowly tried to repair me. . . .  But now, this day, I would endeavor to refute two years of negation. On this day, for the first time since my injuries, I would try again to make the camera work for me, would try to force my body to control the mechanics of the camera; and, as well, I would try to command my creative spirit out of its exile.

Urgently, something compelled that this photograph must not be a failure – pray God that I could do so much as physically force a roll of film into the camera! I was determined that this first photograph must sing of more than being a technical accomplishment. Determined that it would speak of a gentle moment of a spirited purity in contrast to the deprave savagery I had raged against with my war photographs – my last photographs. I was almost desperate in this determination, in my insistence that for some reason his first exposure must have a special quality. I've never quite understood why it had to be thus, why it had to be the first and not the second; why, if not accomplish today, it could not be accomplished next week; yet that day I challenged myself to do it, against my nerves, against my reason. . . .

Whatever the reason – probably more complex than one – I felt, without labeling it as such, that it was to be a day of spiritual decision. . . .

Still, and regardless of the conflict that raged within me, there was no change in my determination, and of my intentions for that first photograph. These woods with these children prancing through them in happiness . . .

. . . as against war photographs I had made of a terrified mother and her child wheeling in bewilderment behind a shell-broken tree . . .

Despite pronouncements to the contrary, few intellectuals seem genuinely interested in "following the science": Too many have their careers, social status, and sense of personal identity wrapped up in perpetuating the status quo.

From The Next Phase of Regulatory Reform by James Broughel.  Provides additional information around the whole issue of regulatory burden which I posted about earlier today.  Lots of good points and useful discussion of regulatory capture.

Today, however, regulatory capture persists. The revolving door between Wall Street and financial regulatory agencies remains an ever-present problem. Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump both used executive fiats to raise or maintain import tariffs on items like solar panels and goods from China. The Jones Act, in place since 1920, continues to protect American shipping interests. Ethanol subsidies support the American corn industry but hurt the poor in developing countries. Even as the internet has started to democratize the public-comment process — which is the primary way the public can engage with proposed rules — it remains dominated by special-interest groups. As debates have grown ever more technical and arcane, the average man on the street has little chance of influencing regulatory policy.

Regulatory capture may be even worse at the state level. One 2017 study found that 85% of state occupational-licensing boards are required by law to consist of a majority of licensed professionals from the industry being regulated. Not surprisingly, these boards end up protecting incumbents and making it harder for would-be competitors — often blue-collar workers trying to get a leg up — to enter a profession. Regulatory capture has also morphed into new forms. Take "NIMBYism": When property owners lobby their local governments to establish zoning rules, historical-preservation laws, minimum lot-size requirements, parking restrictions, and similar regulations that limit building and development, they drive up property values. Just as with other forms of regulatory capture, these types of economic regulations restrict entry into the market so that a particular resource under special-interest control becomes increasingly scarce.

[snip]

Yandle's and Stigler's theories can be read as complementary to one another. Yandle's insight is, in some ways, an astute observation of something that should have been obvious: that regulations need coalitions of support behind them in order to become law. His theory offers a plausible explanation of how coalitions form to influence regulators, but it doesn't address the fact that the overall level of regulation in certain industries seems to rise unrelentingly year after year. This is where Stigler's capture theory is helpful. Firms typically resist new regulation attempts in order to avoid the corresponding compliance costs. However, once regulations are implemented, compliance costs are often sunk and cannot be recouped. Therefore, existing firms will often resist efforts to remove the very rules they initially fought against, since these regulations become barriers that stand between them and potential competitors who haven't yet paid the compliance costs. These dynamics all but ensure that there is no influential constituency to support removing regulations once they are enacted.

Yet Yandle's theory is better than Stigler's at explaining why the dominant form of regulation over the last 40 years has been social regulation. Capture theory would predict the opposite: that economic regulation would be dominant, as seemed to be the case in the 1970s. Experience since then, however, has shown that shamelessly self-interested economic regulation lacks a public-interest rationale, and therefore often fails to convince regulators and a skeptical public to favor the policy. Social regulations provide business interests with a useful public-interest cover.

[snip]

One example of such evidence-free regulation in recent years comes from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). In 2021, HHS repealed a rule enacted by the Trump administration that would have required the agency to periodically review its regulations for their impact on small businesses. The measure was known as the SUNSET rule because it would attach sunset provisions, or expiration dates, to department rules. If the agency failed to conduct a review, the regulation expired.

Ironically, in proposing to rescind the SUNSET rule, HHS argued that it would be too time consuming and burdensome for the agency to review all of its regulations. Citing almost no academic work in support of its proposed repeal — a reflection of the anti-consequentialism that animates so much contemporary regulatory policy — the agency effectively asserted that assessing the real-world consequences of its existing rules was far less pressing an issue than addressing the perceived problems of the day (by, of course, issuing more regulations).

Through its actions, HHS has rejected the very notion of having to review its own rules and assess whether they work. In fact, the suggestion that agencies review their regulations is an almost inexplicably divisive issue in Washington today. "Retrospective review" has become a dirty term, while cost-benefit analysis has morphed into a tool to judge intentions rather than predict real-world consequences. The shift highlights how far the modern administrative state has drifted from the rational, evidence-based system envisioned by the law-and-economics movement just a few decades ago.

In today's administrative state, intellectual fads appear to be in the driver's seat, while science and economics are simply along for the ride. Despite pronouncements to the contrary, few intellectuals seem genuinely interested in "following the science": Too many have their careers, social status, and sense of personal identity wrapped up in perpetuating the status quo.

Excellent piece.  

History

 

Don't use sarcasm in written communication unless you wish to be misunderstood.

From Egocentrism over e-mail: Can we communicate as well as we think? by Justin Kruger, Nicholas Epley, and Jason Parker.  From the Abstract.  The study is not random or representative and it is grossly underpowered.  Nothing conclusive therefore, but possibly indicative.  

Without the benefit of paralinguistic cues such as gesture, emphasis, and intonation, it can be difficult to convey emotion and tone over electronic mail (e-mail). Five experiments suggest that this limitation is often underappreciated, such that people tend to believe that they can communicate over e-mail more effectively than they actually can. Studies 4 and 5 further suggest that this overconfidence is born of egocentrism, the inherent difficulty of detaching oneself from one's own perspective when evaluating the perspective of someone else. Because e-mail communicators "hear" a statement differently depending on whether they intend to be, say, sarcastic or funny, it can be difficult to appreciate that their electronic audience may not.

From the body of the paper.

Social judgment is inherently egocentric. When people try to imagine the perspective, thoughts, or feelings of someone else, a growing body of evidence suggests that they use themselves as an anchor or reference point. Although precisely why this occurs—whether the result of an overlearned and generally valid heuristic, the residual byproduct of an earlier stage of childhood egocentrism, or the inevitable consequence of an effortful cognitive process such as anchoring and adjustment—is a matter of some debate, the fact remains that the assessment of another’s perspectives is influenced, at least in part, by one’s own (Camerer,Loewenstein, & Weber, 1989; Epley, Keysar, Van Boven, &Gilovich, 2004; Fischhoff, 1975; Flavell, 1977; Fussell & Krauss,1991; Gilovich, Medvec, & Savitsky, 2000; Gilovich, Savitsky, & Medvec, 1998; Hoch, 1987; Inhelder & Piaget, 1958; Kelley &Jacoby, 1996; Keysar, Barr, & Horton, 1998; Keysar & Bly, 1995;Nickerson, 1999, 2001; Ross & Ward, 1996).

Nowhere is this tendency more apparent than in the music tapping study conducted by Elizabeth Newton (1990). Participants in her study were asked to tap the rhythm of a well-known song toa listener and then assess the likelihood that the listener would correctly identify the song. The results were striking: Tappers estimated that approximately 50% of listeners would correctly identify the song, compared with an actual accuracy rate of 3%.What accounts for this dramatic overestimation? The answer becomes immediately apparent when one contrasts the perspectives of tappers and listeners, as Ross and Ward (1996) invited their readers to do when describing Newton’s results. Whereas tappers could inevitably “hear” the tune and even the words to the song (perhaps even a “full orchestration, complete with rich har-monies between string, winds, brass, and human voice”), the listeners were limited to “an aperiodic series of taps” (Ross &Ward (1996, p. 114). Indeed, it was difficult from the listener’s perspective to even tell “whether the brief, irregular moments of silence between taps should be construed as sustained notes, as musical “rests” between notes, or as mere interruptions as the tapper contemplates the “music” to come next” (p. 114). So rich was the phenomenology of the tappers, however, that it was difficult for them to set it aside when assessing the objective stimuli available to listeners. As a result, tappers assumed that what was obvious to them (the identity of the song) would be obvious to their audience.

When participants in the study listened to a message with sarcasm, they were able to identify the intonation of sarcasm 73% of the time.  The speakers had, on average, expected that 78% of listeners would discern the sarcasm.  In this scenario, the accuracy demonstrated (73%) was pretty close to the accuracy anticipated (78%).

In contrast, when reading an email with sarcasm, the email writers similarly thought that the sarcasm would have been detectable 78% of the time.  In fact, the sarcasm was detected only 56% of the time by the readers.  


















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An Insight

 

Price's Law

From Wikipedia

Price's square root law or Price's law pertains to the relationship between the literature on a subject and the number of authors in the subject area, stating that half of the publications come from the square root of all contributors. Thus, if 100 papers are written by 25 authors, five authors will have contributed 50 papers. Price's law is related to Lotka's law and has been likened to the Matthew Principle. It can be modeled using an approximately L-shaped graph, with number of people on the Y-axis, and productivity or resources on the X-axis.
 

Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

An interesting argument.  From The Political Gender Gap is Exploding by Daniel Cox.  The subheading is Changing Patterns of Religious Identity, Education, and Marital Status May Be Responsible for the Growing Divide.

Worth a read for the many links and deep data.  One of his initial points is that among 18-29 year olds, 44% of women identify as liberal in comparison with only 25% of men.  In addition, only 15% of women today between 18 and 29 are married compared to 55% in 1972.  

Research has shown that unmarried women feel more connected than their married counterparts to other women—a phenomenon known as “linked fate”— and it can lead them to support more liberal policies. In their fascinating 2017 study, Christopher T. Stout, Kelsy Kretschmer, and Leah Ruppanner argue that “women consistently earn less money and hold less power, which fosters women’s economic dependency on men. Thus, it is within married women’s interests to support policies and politicians who protect their husbands and improve their status.” This phenomenon of “linked fate” was not found to be evident among men, so even though young men are also less likely to be married compared to older generations, their marital status may have less of an impact on their politics than for women.

[snip]

Overall, young people today are far more likely to identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or queer than at any previous time—according to Gallup, approximately one in six members of Gen Z identify as LGBT. But it’s young women who are most responsible for the rapid growth of LGBTQ identity. And while it would not be surprising that the politics of LGBT Americans are more liberal when it comes to LGBTQ issues, recent work has shown that “LGBT Americans are distinctively liberal … in their general political predispositions, electoral choices, and attitudes on a wide range of policy matters.”

Lots of interesting points.  There has been conversation in some quarters that the leftward drift of the Democratic party is due to the feminist movement and there are aspects of that argument which would seem to have some merit.

Cox's data seems to suggest something parallel and somewhat different going on.  We have a whole cohort of young women over-invested in low value college degrees, unmoored in religious belief, unmarried and without children, exploring variant sexual identities, and with sharply declining levels of happiness or life satisfaction.  

Cox concludes

For now, it appears young women are poised to become a powerful political force, one that will shape the fortunes of both political parties for years to come.

I am not so sure that that is the case.  Were they all high status or upper two quartiles, perhaps.  And while there are some such, the large majority are in the bottom three quintiles and far more exposed to the negative consequences of their bad choices.  I can't see there being the class cohesion across the levels for this to be a movement.  

Instead, it feels like we are seeing an opening chasm between those of old values and Classical Liberal world view who continue to rise while those following the dictums and fads of the Woke ilk drift into misery and irrelevance.  I am not sure I see a disparate, low productivity group of unhappy people avaricious for the success of others but unwilling to adhere to the cultural norms that allow that success to be either a power or threat.

It is a tragedy.  A double tragedy because it is a product of their own choices.  

I see wonderful things

 

Offbeat Humor

 

Government created mechanisms for destroying the commercial viability of low-end housing

From "How Dodd-Frank Locks Out the Least Affluent Homebuyers" by Virginia Postrel.  The subheading is Careless people wreaking havoc among the most vulnerable

The radical progressive wing of the Democratic party in most large cities has in the past 2-5 years taken up the project of densification, disassembling established middle class single family residential neighborhoods, rent subsidies and subsidizing construction of multi-unit buildings.  

These are destructive ideas on many levels even if we agrees that government has created this situation by making it too difficult to build cheaply in big cities, usually from over-restrictive zoning in the wrong areas, policies against gentrification, an overburden of ineffective construction code regulations, etc.  

Postrel is pointing out another set of federal policies which have substantially destroyed the market for low end home mortgages.  It is a deliberate policy to achieve other, somewhat reasonable, objectives but without taking into account the unplanned and unintended negative consequences on the poor and the low end home market.  

“Over the last decade, origination for mortgage loans between $10,000 and $70,000 and between $70,000 and $150,000 has dropped by 38 percent and 26 percent, respectively, while origination for loans exceeding $150,000 rose by a staggering 65 percent,” reports a new study on small-dollar mortgages from the Center for the Study of Economic Mobility at Winston-Salem State University and the Future of Land and Housing program at the New America think tank. The study is scheduled for release on Tuesday

The culprits behind the disappearance of small-dollar mortgages are lending restrictions enacted with good intentions and warped by economic blind spots. Designed to protect borrowers and the financial system, the Dodd-Frank Act regulations passed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis “increased the fixed costs and the per-loan costs of extending a mortgage,” says the study. The regulation-imposed costs made small-dollar mortgages a lousy proposition for lenders.

Compounding the problem, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau then limited the fees that lenders could charge as closing costs. For profit-oriented lenders, small-dollar mortgages are no longer worth the trouble. At best, they squeeze out the tiniest of margins. At worst, they don’t even cover the fixed cost of processing the loan.

Recalling that the CFPB was championed but corporate lawyer, Harvard professor, abuser of affirmative action, and supposed champion of the poor, Elizabeth Warren.

Killing off the small-dollar mortgage market has been an economic catastrophe in East Winston and other lower-income, often historically Black and Latino, neighborhoods. Would-be homeowners can’t buy and longtime homeowners can’t sell. Despite population growth, the inflation-adjusted value of a house in East Winston has fallen from about $150,000 in 2007 to just under $64,000 today, using the Zillow Home Value index. (The nadir was $39,825 in 2014.)

Massive amounts of hard-won local wealth have been wiped out. “We calculated that in real terms, every $1,000 invested in property in East Winston in 1996 is now worth $430; by comparison, every $1,000 invested elsewhere in the county is now worth $1,290,” says the study. The low-dollar houses that do sell mostly go to bargain-hunting investors paying cash rather than to would-be owner-occupants.

Eager to rein in mortgage lenders, legislators behind Dodd-Frank didn’t grasp what the law might mean for borrowers who would otherwise qualify for modest loans. Neither did the regulators at the CFPB. Rare is the policy maker who can even imagine a single-family home today selling for five digits.

It can be enraging how all these nominally altruistic chattering class people end up making everything worse for everyone else and then pat themselves on the back for a job nobly done.

Postrel cites The Great Gatsby.

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

Data Talks

 

February, 1958 by Ronald Lampitt

February, 1958 by Ronald Lampitt 




















Click to enlarge.

Saturday, June 25, 2022

Free choices and category representations

I had not thought about this in a long time but someone mentioned it today.  From Black People Less Likely by Scott Alexander.  It is from the old Slate Star Codex before the New York Times tried to deplatform him for being an independent thinker.

Alexander is a polyamorist and is responding to an accusation that the polyamorist community must be racist because African-Americans are underrepresented in that community.  A fairly specious and pedestrian accusation but Alexander does it the courtesy of treating as a real issue.  And, as he always does, he goes to the data.

The article constantly equivocates between “the problem is that polyamory is too white” and “the problem is that the media portrays polyamory as too white”, which is kind of a weird combination of problems to be discussing in a media portrayal. But it seems to eventually settle on a thesis that black people really are strongly underrepresented.

For the record, here is a small sample of other communities where black people are strongly underrepresented:

Runners (3%). Bikers (6%). Furries (2%). Wall Street senior management (2%). Occupy Wall Street protesters (unknown but low, one source says 1.6% but likely an underestimate). BDSM (unknown but low) Tea Party members (1%). American Buddhists (~2%). Bird watchers (4%). Environmentalists (various but universally low). Wikipedia contributors (unknown but low). Atheists (2%). Vegetarian activists (maybe 1-5%). Yoga enthusiasts (unknown but low). College baseball players (5%). Swimmers (2%). Fanfiction readers (2%). Unitarian Universalists (1%).

Can you see what all of these groups have in common?

No. No you can’t. If there’s some hidden factor uniting Wall Street senior management and furries, it is way beyond any of our pay grades.

And to be clear, which I suppose I have not been, this is a population, statistics, history and culture issue.  Taking one set of identities (such as race, religion, class, ethnicity, etc.) and trying to pair them with some statistically small and eclectic set of affiliative communities (bird watchers) is always going to throw up under and over-representations.  Its not a law, but it might as well be one.

Alexander is merely focusing on race because that it is the accusation being made.

He has a list of eight reasons why disparate representation might arise and why these usually have little or no clear relationship to demonstrable bigotry.  

His is an important argument but I was more interested in his examples of significant underrepresentation.  There is always also the mirror issue of overrepresentation in elective activities, not addressed here.

In all these instances, we mostly have people making free choices for their own reasons and it is not inherently obvious why any of this should be considered concerning much less warrant intrusive governmental intervention.

Werewolves of London


Double click to enlarge.


Werewolves of London
Song by Warren Zevon

I saw werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand
Walking through the streets of SoHo in the rain
He was looking for the place called Lee Ho Fooks
For to get a big dish of beef chow mein

Ah-hoo, werewolves of London
Ah-hoo
Ah-hoo, werewolves of London
Ah-hoo

You hear him howling around your kitchen door
You better not let him in
Little old lady got mutilated late last night
Werewolves of London again

Ah-hoo, werewolves of London
Ah-hoo
Ah-hoo, werewolves of London
Ah-hoo, huh

He's the hairy handed gent who ran amok in Kent
Lately he's been overheard in Mayfair
You better stay away from him, he'll rip your lungs out Jim
Huh, I'd like to meet his tailor

Ah-hoo, werewolves of London
Ah-hoo
Ah-hoo, werewolves of London
Ah-hoo

Well, I saw Lon Chaney walking with the Queen
Doin' the werewolves of London
I saw Lon Chaney Jr. walking with the Queen, uh
Doin' the werewolves of London
I saw a werewolf drinkin' a piña colada at Trader Vic's
His hair was perfect

Ah-hoo, werewolves of London
Hey draw blood
Ah-hoo, werewolves of London

Although raising one child may provide experience, it does not guarantee success with the next child.

From The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande

Complex problems are ones like raising a child. Once you learn how to send a rocket to the moon, you can repeat the process with other rockets and perfect it. One rocket is like another rocket. But not so with raising a child, the professors point out. Every child is unique. Although raising one child may provide experience, it does not guarantee success with the next child. Expertise is valuable but most certainly not sufficient. Indeed, the next child may require an entirely different approach from the previous one. And this brings up another feature of complex problems: their outcomes remain highly uncertain. Yet we all know that it is possible to raise a child well. It’s complex, that’s all.

Gawande is illustrating the difference between simple, complicated and complex problems or tasks.  Raising children is an example of a complex task.  Past experience helps but is not determinative because every child is different and all circumstances are necessarily different.

But I think there is a much larger point here.  In the US, we have fallen prey to the intellectually indefensible approach of treating all differences between groups (race, religion, sex, ethnicity, class, etc.) as inherent evidence of obvious discrimination.

This is of course nonsense.  There are many reasons for variance in performance between groups having nothing to do with discrimination.  Indeed, in many fields, there is solid data supporting that differences in outcomes are definitely because of differences in choices rather than because of differences in discriminatory activity.

Nonsense though it may be, differential impact remains relevant until it is eventually and finally discarded.

But Gawande is pointing out another major factor.  We know that genetics is certainly a strong contributor both in terms of capability (height, weight, IQ, muscle strength, etc.) as well as in terms of behaviors.  This is no declaration for biological determinism but merely the acknowledgement that the overwhelming majority of evidence is against the blank slatism and that humans inherit some capabilities and many behavioral dispositions.  All of these dispositions are later bounded and constrained by cultural attributes.

Different cultures have different degrees to which they promote and reward marriage, family formation, children, marriage sustenance, and generational involvement in child rearing.

One can expand Gawande's point and observe that cultural values and reward mechanisms have a large impact on outcomes.  Within reason, the more adults emotionally engaged in the rearing of a child, the better.  The worst case scenario is the single parent with a young child.

In contrast is the child with two parents and perhaps involvement from four grandparents.  There are six sources of knowledge and experience (as many as fourteen if one were to include great-grandparents).  The one child is unique but among the six adults possibly involved in his or her upbringing there is a far greater probability of matching adult experience and knowledge to the actual needs of the individual child.  The chances of an optimized upbringing are dramatically higher than in the case of the solitary single-parent household.

You play this out across a whole population and the probabilities of child success are huge in the second scenario and small in the first.

There would be substantial differential impact owing to cultural attributes towards life success without any bigotry or discrimination.  A fact unacknowledged currently.

An Insight

From We can't have nice things by Allison Schrager.  The subheading is Unless we are willing to pay for it.

Just buy what you want, work for who pays you the most, and buy sin-filled stocks. Then, give all that extra money to charity.

The Preparedness Paradox

From Wikipedia.

The preparedness paradox is the proposition that if a society or individual acts effectively to mitigate a potential disaster such as a pandemic, natural disaster or other catastrophe so that it causes less harm, the avoided danger will be perceived as having been much less serious because of the limited damage actually caused. The paradox is the incorrect perception that there had been no need for careful preparation as there was little harm, although in reality the limitation of the harm was due to preparation. Several cognitive biases can consequently hamper proper preparation for future risks.

A different variation is that we usually under or overweight factors different from their actual impact.  Provision of clean water has had an order of magnitude or more impact on mortality and morbidity improvement than, for example, penicillin.  Both are very valuable but we underweight the former and overweight the latter.  

An even better example is that we tend to overweight perceived expertise and underweight demonstrated experience.

History

 

My love for you was greater than my wisdom.

From Medea by Euripides.  

Showing much love and little wisdom. 

Also translated as:

My love for you was greater than my wisdom. 

Rejecting traditional lifestyles like getting married and having kids is probably contributing to overall unhappiness.

From Substackers Pseudonymous by Infovores, Parrhesia, and Resident Contrarian.  The subheading is Hacking the Blogosphere with Resident Contrarian and Parrhesia.

Infovores, Parrhesia and Resdient Contrarian are three essayists and Tweeters who probably lean towards a Classical Liberal worldview and who write pseudonymously for a variety of reasons.  Certainly the Postmodernist, Woke, CRT, Social Justice wing of academia and the mainstream media are very hostile to the Classical Liberal worldview.  

I am familiar with Infovores and Resident Contrarian and enjoy their writing.  I don't recognize Parrhesia.  

In this piece, Infovores is interviewing Parrhesia and Resident Contrarian.  Parrhesia:

I think that people undervalue things that are meaningful and overvalue convenience, comfort, and passive stimulation. I think that excessive internet use is probably making many people unhappy. Websites like Reddit and Twitter expose people to an unhealthy amount of upsetting content. Rejecting traditional lifestyles like getting married and having kids is probably contributing to overall unhappiness. Media is so entertaining that people choose to be less social, often to their own detriment. Financial and career opportunities entice people enough to move away from friends and family, something unusual until recently. We would probably be happier if we spent less time online and more time together with friends and loved ones.