But their pale lips did not part to say the words that would have given them security and dishonour

Eugene Volokh has a post up, ‘Let nobody belittle them by pretending they were fearless’. He is citing a passage from Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon about real courage.

And I was reminded — whether rightly or wrongly in this instance, I cannot say — of Rebecca West, writing about the English in 1940 as they anticipated the German attack on England after the fall of France:

Let nobody belittle them by pretending they were fearless. Not being as the ox and the ass, they were horribly afraid. But their pale lips did not part to say the words that would have given them security and dishonour.

Structure, Stability, Strength - defining family

From Families: It's Complicated by Joanna Venator and Richard V. Reeves.

Commenting on new research exploring the impacts of family structure (single parent never married, single parent divorced, single parent widowed/er, cohabiting, married), family stability and family strength.

Venator and Reeves are pointing out the many levels of detail which much policy discussion omits.

Instability Matters As Much as Structure…

It is clear that stability matters a lot for children. There is growing evidence, in fact, that instability has a greater negative impact than family structure on some cognitive and health outcomes. Family instability has also been linked with conflict in the household. Some of the impact of changes in family structure on child outcomes, particularly behavioral outcomes, can be attributed to the association between conflict and instability.

…But Structure and Stability Are Related

In her recent book Generation Unbound, our colleague Isabel Sawhill shows that an increasing proportion of non-martial births are to cohabiting couples rather than to a single mother. The problem is that over half the parents cohabiting when their child is born have split up before the child reaches kindergarten.

Of course some married couples split up before their child turns five too: around 20% according to latest estimates. What matters most is the stability or the lack of it; structure matters to the extent that it supports that stability. Looking at the actual experience of children within families over time is more important than a crude binary categorization.

Family Strength: Important, But Elusive

CAP’s third S – Strength – is harder to pin down. They define family strength as a combination of commitment, conflict levels, emotional support, and social networks. This is a good start. To us, this seems to be about the quality of the relationships in the family. Bluntly: are you a good parent and a good spouse? Our own research finds that parenting quality among mothers varies by family structure. It is the kind of parents you have - rather than just the number - that seems to really count.

Good life outcomes for children are desired by everyone but the path towards achieving those outcomes is murky at best and it is not obvious which policies are most likely to have the most significant positive impact.

Science is the topography of ignorance

I often discuss the knowledge frontier, that boundary which is much closer than we realize, between what we can know with confidence and what we can only predict with some probability. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., had his own phrase. From Medical Essays, 211. Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 691-92

Science is the topography of ignorance.

It isn’t really a liberal civilization any more

From The Blasphemy We Need by Ross Douthat.

If a large enough group of someones is willing to kill you for saying something, then it’s something that almost certainly needs to be said, because otherwise the violent have veto power over liberal civilization, and when that scenario obtains it isn’t really a liberal civilization any more. Again, liberalism doesn’t depend on everyone offending everyone else all the time, and it’s okay to prefer a society where offense for its own sake is limited rather than pervasive. But when offenses are policed by murder, that’s when we need more of them, not less, because the murderers cannot be allowed for a single moment to think that their strategy can succeed.

Language and "the"

I love Language Log as a place to peep in on the ebbs and flows of research and interests among professionals in the field of language and linguistics. Growing up internationally I have been exposed to many languages and acquired the rudiments of a few but I have never been particularly fluent nor learned in a very specialized field.

But there is so much that is interesting over in those meadows.

For instance, there is this post Why definiteness is decreasing, part 2 by Mark Liberman. Here is Part 1. In Part 1 Liberman is observing and commenting on the significance of the decline in the use of the definitive the. That's interesting in its own right. But in Part 2, Liberman points out something that I find fascinating.

In this post, I want to discuss two other socio-stylistic dimensions — age and sex. If the language is changing, then we expect to see "age grading", where younger people tend to exhibit the innovative pattern, while older people's usage is more old-fashioned. And because women are generally the leaders in language change, we expect to see women at every age being more linguistically innovative and men being more conservative. In other words, "young men talk like old women". And as the plot on the right illustrates, differences by age and sex in the frequency of the seem to confirm this hypothesis.

(Click on the graph for a larger version.)

These numbers come from the Fisher corpus of conversational telephone speech, comprising nearly 12,000 10-minute conversations involving a similar number of callers. Here are the numbers in tabular form — frequency of the, as a percentage of all words produced by callers in the specified age range:

AGE <28 Age 28-40 Age >40
MALE 2.53% 2.72% 2.97%
FEMALE 2.31% 2.49% 2.62%

And trust me, the numbers are large enough that these differences are statistically significant.

What is the explanation for why males use the definitive the more than females? I have no idea and it is not addressed in that particular post. But a ~10% disproportion is an intriguing fact.

The lived experience of academic presentations

With a not inconsiderable interest in academic discussions about abstract issues, this cartoon captures years of mental eye-rolling.

Just because there's no upside, doesn't mean there isn't a downside.

From Obama's College Plan Bows to Elites by Megan McArdle.

Years ago, I lived in Australia. The country is obviously much smaller than the US (fifteen times smaller in population) and this fostered a wonderful communal intimacy. However, smallness also came with some downsides. In the area of government these showed up as a tendency for government proposals or legislation to get a long way down the line of implementation with major issues still being uncovered. I recall marvelling one morning driving in to Sydney, at an Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio report on some fairly consequential government policy issue that had been presented to Parliament the day before. It wasn't but a few hours before someone pointed out that there was a large math error in calculating the cost or some similar issue which undermined the raison d'etre of the proposal in the first place. I was brand new to Australia at the time and initially quite shocked. Eventually I came to realize it was simply a function of size. Smaller organizations have less error checking and consequently more stuff gets through that should not.

This comes to mind with the recent proposal regarding making Community Colleges free. The sentiment is obviously an attractive one - make self-improvement easier to achieve for all citizens. But, as in Australia, even with the first broadcast, there are some readily identifiable problems with the proposal.

McArdle is not comprehensive in her criticism but quite devastating.

President Obama has announced a plan to make community college "as free and universal as high school." A lot could be said about this plan, and most of it already has been--see Tyler Cowen for a comprehensive roundup with a bottom line I endorse: "Overall my take is that the significant gains are to be had at the family level and at the primary education level, and that the price of community college is not a major bottleneck under the status quo."

The major barriers to completing college do not include community-college tuition, which is low for everyone, and basically free for low-income families (you automatically qualify for a Pell Grant if your family income is less than $24,000 a year, and many others qualify above that line).

Fundamentally, the proposal addresses no known material problem. If you want to help people improve their personal productivity, then it is not clear that free CC tuition will actually change the current equation. While there may be little upside potential, there is clearly a downside which seems to have been completely ignored.

There is a significant class issue which McArdle calls out.

If you graduated high school without mastering basic math and reading, and can't complete the remedial courses offered by your community college, what are the odds that you are going to earn a valuable degree? Why are we so obsessed with pushing that group further into the higher education system, rather than asking if we aren't putting too much emphasis on getting a degree?

Asking that question usually raises accusations of elitism, of dividing society into the worthy few and the many Morlocks who aren't good enough for college. I would argue instead that what's elitist is our current fixation on college. It starts from the supposition that being good at school is some sort of great personal virtue, so that any suggestion that many people aren't good at school must mean that those people are not equal and valuable members of society. And that supposition is triple-distilled balderdash.

[snip]

Higher education is becoming the ginseng of the policy world: a sort of all-purpose snake oil for solving any problem you'd care to name, as long as we consume enough of it. Education is a very good thing, but it is not the only good thing. An indiscriminate focus on pushing more people into the system is no cure for society's ills--and indeed, often functions as a substitute for helping the people who are struggling in the current system.

What if people in the policy elite stopped assuming that the ideal was to make everyone more like them, and started thinking about making society more hospitable to those who aren't? My grandfather graduated into a world where a man with a high-school diploma could reasonably hope to own his own business, or become someone else's highly valued employee, a successful pillar of a supportive community. His grandchildren graduated into a world where a college diploma was almost the bare necessity to get any kind of a decent job. Why aren't we at least asking ourselves if there's something we can do to create more opportunity for people without diplomas, instead of asking how many more years we can keep everyone in school? Why do all of our proposed solutions essentially ratify the structure that excludes so many people, instead of questioning it?

This proposal seems to fail to help people become more productive but instead focuses on helping them to look more like the privileged elite. A classic example of Reynolds' Law.

The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.

They go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one

From Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions And The Madness Of Crowds by Charles Mackay (1841). From his introduction.

Money, again, has often been a cause of the delusion of multitudes. Sober nations have all at once become desperate gamblers, and risked almost their existence upon the turn of a piece of paper. To trace the history of the most prominent of these delusions is the object of the present pages. Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

I became aware of this book in university while studying international economic development. I don't recall which professor brought it to my attention but it certainly was part of that larger education that takes place outside of the classroom. I heard it being referenced in a positive way. Some time later I came across, and purchased, my first copy at the old Second Story Bookstore at their Dupont Circle location. Oh, the days when major cities had plenty of used bookstores.

I really ought to sit down and read Extraordinary Popular Delusions And The Madness Of Crowds as a whole text at some point but I have been dipping in to it for decades.

I hadn't really considered it in a long time but Mackay's book is wholly compatible with my ongoing theme of cognitive pollution. Mackay has suitable words of caution.

Popular delusions began so early, spread so widely, and have lasted so long, that instead of two or three volumes, fifty would scarcely suffice to detail their history. The present may be considered more of a miscellany of delusions than a history—a chapter only in the great and awful book of human folly which yet remains to be written, and which Porson once jestingly said he would write in five hundred volumes! Interspersed are sketches of some lighter matters,—amusing instances of the imitativeness and wrongheadedness of the people, rather than examples of folly and delusion.

When I think of the contemporary Extraordinary Popular Delusions (anthropogenic global warming, 71 cents on the dollar, Hands Up Don't Shoot, microaggressions, trigger warnings, education decline, war on women, campus rape epidemic, etc.) it seems Mackay might be evergreen. There is something in the mind of man that wants an issue, no matter how grave or trivial, to be a crisis in order to justify it as an issue.

Social Justice Warriors seem to have such an ever renewing supply of hysterical issues that it feels sometimes as if the world has gone mad. But as Mackay says, "They go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one." Faster please.

Truths too good to be true

From One of Science’s Most Famous Quotes Is False by Michael Specter.

I recently began a Daily Comment about the growing threat of viral epidemics with one of modern medicine’s more famous quotes. “In 1967, William H. Stewart, the Surgeon General, travelled to the White House to deliver one of the most encouraging messages ever spoken by an American public-health official,’’ I wrote. Then I continued with the quote, “ ‘It’s time to close the books on infectious diseases, declare the war against pestilence won, and shift national resources to such chronic problems as cancer and heart disease,’ Stewart said.”

[snip]

I liked Stewart’s quote so much that I had used it before—once, several years ago, in a piece for this magazine about Nathan Wolfe, a scientist who travels the world hunting for deadly viruses. Stewart’s quote also appeared in a piece that I wrote more than twenty years ago, when I worked at the New York Times. It was part of a series on the resurgence of tuberculosis in the United States. I was hardly alone in pointing to the foolishness of the Surgeon General. The quote has been used dozens of times by journalists, scientists, and public-policy officials. That’s easy to understand. One rarely sees a better example of that kind of inept thinking. There was just one problem.

Stewart never said it.

Specter then documents his discovery that this iconic quotation was conjured from thin air. The yeoman's work tracing the supposed quotation was done by Brad Spellberg and Bonnie Taylor-Blake in their paper On the exoneration of Dr. William H. Stewart: debunking an urban legend.
Specter concludes with the observation

Once a fact, an assertion, a quote, or a meme has been launched into cyberspace, it will orbit there forever. Unless somebody shoots it down.

I regret the repeated error, of course. More than that, though, I hope that the next time a journalist reaches for this handy example of myopia among our public-health leaders, he or she latches onto a foolish statement that somebody actually made. Sadly, there are plenty to go around.

I encounter this situation all the time. I come across a quotation of a third party in a book or article that I want to capture in Thingfinder. I start looking for a source. Many times I have to abandon the supposed quotation entirely because I cannot trace a source for it. Other times, the quote has morphed with repetition, becoming pithier over time. Sometimes the quote is a translation from another language which raises both issues of attribution as well as accuracy of translation.

But Specter is touching on a larger and, to me very interesting set of subjects which I have alluded to as cognitive pollution and Gramscian memes.

Specter's example here is one of cognitive pollution - a fact (the quotation) that is widely disseminated and referenced and is universally accepted as true and yet is flat out wrong. William H. Stewart never said it.

Closely related are the Gramscian memes. Assertions based on ideology (belief systems) rather than logic, rationality or empirical evidence and yet so seductively packaged and smoothly presented as to not elicit any skepticism at all.

Most Gramscian memes are advanced by advocates with or without a particular agenda. For example Post-Ferguson and New York, there has been the whole #Blacklivesmatter movement which isn't really a movement at all. It is a rallying cry for many fringe interests to come together in protest. It is dispersed, there is no central leadership, there are no definitive demands for action specific action, merely an inchoate call to action.

But if you are not an ideologue, what do these protests mean? At a simplistic level there is the anger associated with any citizen's death at the hands of agents of the government. A black man killed by police.

But definitions, a context, and measurement all matter. Death is always in some fashion a tragedy to be avoided, but what is really being argued here? The skeptic can turn around the headlines from Ferguson and New York from "Black Man Dies at Hands of Police" to "Criminal Dies While Resisting Arrest" with no loss of accuracy. Why do some gravitate to the first headline while others to the second and why does one elicit more emotional conviction than the second when both are factually true?

A big part of it is obviously confirmation bias shaped by ideology and culture. But if you are a rational empiricist, you want something deeper. You want the Truth.

In that case #Blacklivesmatter is a nice rhetorical cry but what is the underlying truth?

It is irrelevant, in that case, whether there is a disparate impact on mortality by race if that disparate impact arises from reasons other than bias. What the empirical rationalist would look for is not the simple existence of disparate impact but the reasons why there might be a disparate impact.

What you want to know is whether the death rates by race match the rates of violent encounters with the police. If one group is 50% of the population but they commit 75% of the violent crimes and 85% of the violent confrontations with police, then you would expect that the mortality rate for that group from violent encounters with police would be something between 75-85% and not 50%.

In other words, are they killed in proportion to their violent acts, regardless of their representation in the population at large?

That is what this set of analyses suggests in the case of the Ferguson protests, Race and Police Killings: Additional Thoughts by Robert VerBruggen.

Between 100-200 officers are killed in the line of duty each year, with fairly significant variations year-to-year. Likewise, between 400-1,200 citizens are killed each year in confrontations with police (also varying by year but also by report as there is not a standard tracking of such data.) You want to bring both those numbers to Zero.

Structured programs and investments in police training have led to falls in police shootings in many major metropolitan areas. There is much that has been learned that can be scaled nation-wide and that should continue. However, the other side of the coin is larger and needs more effort. How do you stop citizens reacting to police with violence in the first place. That clearly varies by race and that is where much more can be done but it is basically at the frontiers of our knowledge. We know how to improve the care with which officers behave but we have a much harder time determining how to improve the behavior of the public, particularly the criminal portion of the public.

What does this have to do with William Stewart? The fact that for coming on six months we have been working with a proposition, #blacklivesmatter, which is a great rallying device (just as the Stewart quote was a great example of scientific hubris) but it does not align with known reality. If you want to be effective in bringing citizen/police shootings and deaths down to zero, it has a lot less to do with bias and race than it has to do with behaviors, both police and citizen. As long as we are answering the siren song of race as the root cause, we won't actually solve the problem.

Perspective - Duck and Rabbit edition

Click to enlarge.