Is war a necessary predicate to participative democracy?

Hat tip to Tyler Cowen regarding a new book that has an intriguing hypothesis. The book is Forged Through Fire: War, Peace, and the Democratic Bargain by John Ferejohn and Frances McCall Rosenbluth.

If the modern democratic republic is a product of wars that required both manpower and money for success, it is time to take stock of what happens to democracy once the forces that brought it into being are no longer present. Understanding war’s role in the creation of the modern democratic republic can help us recognize democracy’s exposed flanks. If the role of the masses in protecting the nation-state diminishes, will the cross-class coalition between political inclusiveness and property hold?

…a second question is what is to become of the swaths of the world that were off the warpath in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries when the European state was formed? Continued and intense warfare forged democracies with full enfranchisement and protected property rights in the Goldilocks zone: in countries that had already developed administrative capacity as monarchies, and where wars were horrendous but manageable with full mobilization…

The bad news is that in today’s world, war has stopped functioning as a democratizing force.

Adding it to the the always lengthening list of books to read.

"With work, maybe results" vs. "With work, always results."

Oh, dear. Another faddish psychology finding called into question. From A Mindset “Revolution” Sweeping Britain’s Classrooms May Be Based On Shaky Science by Tom Chivers.

Michael Jordan didn’t make his high school basketball team in 1978. He went on to become the greatest player in the game’s history. This is what he says about failure: “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

According to a theory that has swept education in the last few years, Jordan has what psychologists call a “growth mindset”. He believes that even if you can’t do something initially, you can improve your abilities, whether they involve basketball or maths or playing the oboe, through hard work. “I can accept failure,” he said. “Everyone fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying.”

Psychologists say the growth mindset is contrasted to a “fixed mindset” – the belief that your skills are innate, genetically endowed and fixed. Someone with a fixed mindset, according to the theory, would look at a maths problem they couldn’t do, and think, I can’t do that, I’m not gifted at maths. They might give up. But someone with a growth mindset might apparently think, I just haven’t learnt enough maths to do that; I’ll learn some more and try again. They will keep trying in the face of difficulty – believing they can improve to meet challenges.

On the other hand . . .

But some statisticians and psychologists are increasingly worried that mindset theory is not all it claims to be. The findings of Dweck’s key study have never been replicated in a published paper, which is noteworthy in so high-profile a work. One scientist told BuzzFeed News that his attempt to reproduce the findings has so far failed. An investigation found several small but revealing errors in the study that may require a correction.

[snip]

Bates told BuzzFeed News that he has been trying to replicate Dweck’s findings in that key mindset study for several years. “We’re running a third study in China now,” he said. “With 200 12-year-olds. And the results are just null.

“People with a growth mindset don’t cope any better with failure. If we give them the mindset intervention, it doesn’t make them behave better. Kids with the growth mindset aren’t getting better grades, either before or after our intervention study.”

[snip]

Nick Brown, a PhD student in psychology at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, is sceptical of this: “The question I have is: If your effect is so fragile that it can only be reproduced [under strictly controlled conditions], then why do you think it can be reproduced by schoolteachers?”

Using a statistical method he developed called Granularity-Related Inconsistency of Means or GRIM, Brown has tested whether means (averages) given for data in the 1998 study were mathematically possible.

It works like this: Imagine you have three children, and want to find how many siblings they have, on average. Finding an average, or mean, will always involve adding up the total number of siblings and dividing by the number of children – three. So the answer will always either be a whole number, or will end in .33 (a third) or .67 (two thirds). If there was a study that looked at three children and found they had, on average, 1.25 siblings, it would be wrong – because you can’t get that answer from the mean of three whole numbers.

Brown, who has previously debunked an influential study into “positive psychology”, looked at the 1998 study with the GRIM method. He found that of 50 means quoted in the data, 17 of them were impossible.

And on. The article overall is quite good at giving the pros and cons from both sides. Admirably so. Chivers doesn't provide sufficient evidence to completely debunk the Growth Mindset movement but he does introduce enough counterfactuals to call it sharply into question.

I like one of the summaries of the status quo:

Bates doesn’t think that the mindset hypothesis should be thrown out. He said that there is an uncontroversial reading of the idea – “a very conservative, old-fashioned one: ‘If you don’t work at it you won’t get the results’” – but that, in her TED talks and books, Dweck pushes a more dramatic version, that instilling a growth mindset in children “really works, and you can expect big things from it. She thinks it’s really big, that it’s massive.”

"If you don't work, you won't get the results" versus "If you work hard you will always get the results."

Neither is completely true but the former is more true than the latter, but it is the latter which has caught on. It feels so good, utopian optimists want it to be true. Even if it quite possibly/likely isn't.

Regulatory review for all

I had not thought about this for a while until this recent article brought it to mind, Harvard, Too? Obama’s Final Push to Catch Predatory Colleges Is Revealing by Kevin Carey.

The Obama administration has for some years been pursuing the private education sector for exploitive practices - basically promising too much to prospective students and delivering too little in terms of an education valued in the marketplace. I don't disagree with the policy given that students are often taking out loans for near worthless certificates. My only disagreement has been with the fact that the scope is restricted to private sector schools.

If it is a problem there, why might it not be a problem in traditional four-year schools as well? There is certainly plenty of anecdotal data to support that the problem is real there as well. The past administration's stance of only going after for-profit school has appeared ideological at best (profit = bad) or collusive at worst. Academia (four year schools) have provided much funding and certainly a lot of intellectual covering fire for the administration. They are clearly an ally. And while most are not for profit institutions, all of them are commercial institutions. Any commercial enterprise is always concerned about competition. Going after for-profit schools appeared to me as if the Administration were doing a commercial favor to their academic allies by reducing the number of competitors in the field. Corrupt, in other words.

It has also concerned me that the result of the Administration's structuring of the regulatory review process has effectively meant that the programs most used by the poorest are the ones most targeted while the universities most attended by the upper middle class get a free pass. This has seemed discriminatory to me. By all means, protect students from unscrupulous programs which promise more than they can deliver. But protect all students, not just the ones who it is easy to ignore if you get it wrong.

Carey reports an interesting datum to support my skepticism about the differential effectiveness. Most for-profit schools do not offer a four year degree. They confer certificates and it is certificate-granting schools which have been the target for scrutiny. But by a quirk, one Harvard program got caught up in the methodological review and indeed, they were found to be equally bad at serving the interests of their students.

For the past eight years, the Obama administration has waged a battle against predatory for-profit colleges. On Monday, the Department of Education released a final salvo — a list of hundreds of college programs that load students with more debt than they can afford to repay.

The failing-program list included ITT Tech, which filed for bankruptcy under federal pressure late last year, as well as industry leaders like Kaplan University and the University of Phoenix. And there — among a host of local graphic design, fashion, cosmetology and barber schools — is Harvard University.

The fact that such a world-famous institution of higher learning was caught in a regulatory net devised to protect students from exploitative trade schools suggests that even the most prestigious colleges may not be paying enough attention to whether their degrees are worth the price of admission.

The Obama administration’s rules on for-profit colleges are based on two statistical measures of individual programs: how much money typical program graduates are required to spend on student loan payments every year, and how much they earn in the job market two years after graduation. If this “debt-to-earnings ratio” is too high for multiple years — if graduates need to spend too much of their income paying down loans — then the program is ruled ineligible to receive federal financial aid.

Republican members of Congress and people working with the incoming Trump administration have called for rolling back the for-profit college regulations. Harvard’s inclusion suggests it might make sense to expand the rules to include nonprofit programs with similar problems.

The Harvard program is run by the A.R.T. Institute at Harvard University (A.R.T. stands for American Repertory Theater). It’s a small program, admitting about two dozen students each year into “a full-time, two-year program of graduate study in acting, dramaturgy or voice pedagogy.” On average, graduates earn about $36,000 per year.

The problem, from a regulatory standpoint, is that they borrow a lot of money to obtain the degree — over $78,000 on average, according to the university. The total tuition is $62,593. And because it’s a graduate program, students can also borrow the full cost of their living expenses from the federal government, regardless of their credit history.

After accounting for basic living expenses, the average Harvard A.R.T. Institute graduate has to pay 44 percent of discretionary income just to make the minimum loan payment.

Were the new administration to apply the same regulatory scrutiny to all institutions of higher learning, it would be much fairer and likely would dramatically improve life outcomes for all incoming students.

Pervasive groupthink among media elites

Nate Silver has an important analysis of media coverage of the 2016 election in The Real Story of 2016.

In its broadest outline, I am in agreement with his points. A few nits here and there but I think he is on the right track. Regarding answers to the question about why the mainstream media got the election so wrong:

They also suggest there are real shortcomings in how American politics are covered, including pervasive groupthink among media elites, an unhealthy obsession with the insider’s view of politics, a lack of analytical rigor, a failure to appreciate uncertainty, a sluggishness to self-correct when new evidence contradicts pre-existing beliefs, and a narrow viewpoint that lacks perspective from the longer arc of American history.

Well, yes. I have been harping on the issue of analytical rigor (both narrative and empirical) and lack of perspective for some time but all the other points are pertinent as well.

We want to know the truth in order to make better, and more useful, forecasts about a whole range of things be it climate change, conservation, the criminal justice system, economic development, productivity growth, etc. We none of us benefit if our mainstream media are not interested in truth but only focus on ideological or partisan winning. The Truth is out there.

Shady research on priming

Poor old psychology has had a rough patch. A week or so ago I posted about the obliteration of the relevance of Implicit Attitude Tests. Now priming is being thrown out.

Everything you always wanted to know about the shady research on "social priming", by the great Anthony Pratkanis. https://t.co/YPaeQEN6VB pic.twitter.com/V6aXpUXFjt

— Rolf Degen (@DegenRolf) January 12, 2017

Then falter not O book, fulfil your destiny

Recently I came across a lightly aged 1937 copy of a Heritage edition of Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, illustrated by Rockwell Kent.

To date, I have not taken to Leaves of Grass as a whole, though over time I more frequently have found snippets here and there that intrigue me. But I do enjoy Rockwell Kent's works. So perhaps this will be the combination to carry me through the rollicking and sometimes seemingly incomprehensibly expansive, almost giddy song to America.

From the third Inscription

In Cabin’d Ships at Sea

In cabin’d ships, at sea,
The boundless blue on every side expanding,
With whistling winds and music of the waves—the large imperious waves—In such,
Or some lone bark, buoy’d on the dense marine,
Where, joyous, full of faith, spreading white sails,
She cleaves the ether, mid the sparkle and the foam of day, or under many a star at night,
By sailors young and old, haply will I, a reminiscence of the land, be read,
In full rapport at last.

Here are our thoughts—voyagers’ thoughts,
Here not the land, firm land, alone appears, may then by them be said;
The sky o’erarches here—we feel the undulating deck beneath our feet,
We feel the long pulsation—ebb and flow of endless motion;
The tones of unseen mystery—the vague and vast suggestions of the briny world—the liquid-flowing syllables,
The perfume, the faint creaking of the cordage, the melancholy rhythm,
The boundless vista, and the horizon far and dim, are all here,
And this is Ocean’s poem.

Then falter not, O book! fulfil your destiny!
You, not a reminiscence of the land alone,
You too, as a lone bark, cleaving the ether—purpos’d I know
not whither—yet ever full of faith,
Consort to every ship that sails—sail you!
Bear forth to them, folded, my love—(Dear mariners! for you I fold it here, in every leaf;)
Speed on, my Book! spread your white sails, my little bark, athwart the imperious waves!
Chant on—sail on—bear o’er the boundless blue, from me, to every shore,
This song for mariners and all their ships.

Stubbing my toe of perception on the rock of measured reality

From Pew Research Center, Trump, Clinton Voters Divided in Their Main Source for Election News: Fox News was the main source for 40% of Trump voters by Jeffrey Gottfried, Michael Barthel and Amy Mitchell.

A pretty good body of research with some interesting insights in terms of how people create their customized epistemic ecosystems. There are two observations not highlighted which seem important.

Click to enlarge

The headline leads with Fox News as a dominant source of news for those voting for Trump whereas Clinton voters had more diverse sources. The headline is "Fox News dominated as main campaign news source for Trump voters; no single sources pronounced among Clinton voters." True. But that seems to spin the information a particular direction (diversity good, monoculture bad) and it defines diversity as number of sources rather than orientation of sources.

An alternative way to look at this is that Republicans were more balanced in the ideological orientation of their news sources by balancing 40% from "conservative" news (from Fox) with 32% (omitting local radio) from "liberal" sources. In contrast, Democrats were much more in an echo-chamber with 74% of their news from "liberal" sources and only 3% from "conservative sources. In other words, Republicans favored their ideologically congruent sources by 25% (40/32 = 1.25) whereas Democrats favored their ideologically congruent sources by nearly a factor of 25 (74/3 = 24.7)

The alternative headline could be "Republicans dramatically more diverse in their news sources than Democrats."

Both statements, Pew's headline and the alternative I have suggested, are factually true. The only difference is how you measure diversity. Is it ideological diversity or is it source diversity? Both are interesting perspectives.

The second thing that leapt out at me was the paucity of three of my sources of information. The Washington Post does not show up at all. The New York Times and NPR only show up as relevant to Democratic voters and even then as relatively minor (5% and 7% respectively.)

I knew that all three, WaPo, NYT and NPR, were notably skewed in their political reporting and are consumed primarily by left of center college educated professionals. I knew they weren't directly significant to the public at large. I have shocked friends by pointing out that the audience of Rush Limbaugh (a conservative radio talk host with a two or three hour show) is nearly the same size as that of NPR's flagship news show, Morning Edition.

But knowing all that doesn't reduce the impact of seeing that for all voters, only 4% listed NPR as a main source of news and only 3% read the NYT as a main source of news.

Serves as an example that knowledge alone does not counter an anchoring bias. I consume all three sources (along with many others). I knew that their audiences were a fraction of the nation. And despite that knowledge, I imputed much more relevance to them than the measured reality supports.

I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by any means possible, except getting off his back.

This character still abounds. From Writings on Civil Disobedience and Nonviolence by Leo Tolstoy.

I sit on a man's back, choking him, and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by any means possible, except getting off his back.

Forget fake news, we've got fake realities

What is it in the air or the water? Popular SJW academic themes have been getting knocked hard lately. In the past couple of months I recall noting some new research undermining the idea of Implicit Attitude Tests. What else? There was another major article of faith undermined recently. Triggering? Safe Spaces? Maybe.

Anyway, here comes another research paper, this time revealing that microaggressions as a concept has little or no evidentiary basis in reality. From Microaggressions: Strong Claims, Inadequate Evidence by Scott O. Lilienfeld. From the abstract:

The microaggression concept has recently galvanized public discussion and spread to numerous college campuses and businesses. I argue that the microaggression research program (MRP) rests on five core premises, namely, that microaggressions (1) are operationalized with sufficient clarity and consensus to afford rigorous scientific investigation; (2) are interpreted negatively by most or all minority group members; (3) reflect implicitly prejudicial and implicitly aggressive motives; (4) can be validly assessed using only respondents’ subjective reports; and (5) exert an adverse impact on recipients’ mental health. A review of the literature reveals negligible support for all five suppositions. More broadly, the MRP has been marked by an absence of connectivity to key domains of psychological science, including psychometrics, social cognition, cognitive-behavioral therapy, behavior genetics, and personality, health, and industrial-organizational psychology. Although the MRP has been fruitful in drawing the field’s attention to subtle forms of prejudice, it is far too underdeveloped on the conceptual and methodological fronts to warrant real-world application. I conclude with 18 suggestions for advancing the scientific status of the MRP, recommend abandonment of the term “microaggression,” and call for a moratorium on microaggression training programs and publicly distributed microaggression lists pending research to address the MRP’s scientific limitations.

Triggering, microaggressions, Implicit Attitude Tests, priming, safe spaces, etc. have all been ideological constructs intended to close the Overton Window and they have been markedly successful at doing so. People don't wish to appear to be unsympathetic and end up getting railroaded into positions they don't actually support.

But the harsh truth is that there is little or no empirical support for the reality of triggering, microaggressions, IAT, safe spaces, or priming. These are fake rhetorical devices.

We will be well rid of them as they pass out of circulation. Not a moment too soon.

Hero takes a journey and stranger comes to town

I did not have the self-control to not click through on When Narrative Matters More Than Fact by Ashley Lamb-Sinclair. This is exactly the soft-minded pablum that galls me. It is of course absolutely true in some cases. But it is a motte and bailey strategy for advancement of the postmodern relativists. Narrative matters (in some cases) more than fact for entertainment purposes but facts matter more than narrative for life in the real world.

Lamb-Sinclair provides background and then her claim.

When I was in high school, one of my history teachers was also the football coach. “Coach Mac,” we called him. For a right-brained creative like me, history was often a toss up. There were certain parts of the curriculum that I loved, but I loathed (and was generally inept at) memorizing dates and obscure facts. But Coach Mac taught us history through football plays and storytelling. Through a series of Xs, Os, and arrows detailing their paths, Coach Mac told stories of Roman invasions, the Crusades, Genghis Khan, and the rise of Stalin. I sat in the front row, took copious notes, and was a star student every day in that class.

Because of Coach Mac, I became a history minor in college. And yet, if you asked me dates and details of these events Coach Mac and my college professors taught me, I could not tell you any of them without the aid of Google. The truth is, history stole my heart not because of the facts, but because of the stories.

Joseph Campbell famously said that there are only two stories in the whole world: Hero takes a journey and stranger comes to town. As an English teacher, I enjoy telling my students this nugget of wisdom and challenging them to defy it. They never can because, although stories are powerful, they are also simple. There are certain constructs, rhythms, and traits to a well-crafted story. Stories, at their heart, are either about heroes on a journey or strangers coming into a new setting.

There are only two stories? I am susceptible to the argument and have investigated various claims of 2, 3, 5, 7, and 10 stories. An interesting argument but really it is not a factual claim but an assertion of opinion.

But Joseph Campbell? I had heard the quote "Hero takes a journey and stranger comes to town" attributed to someone else. Who really said it?

Well, not Joseph Campbell apparently. Quote Investigator has the full story. The quote has variously been attributed to Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Mary Morris, John Gardner, David Long, Ernest Hemingway, and Deepak Chopra. The prize, as best as can be documented, goes to John Gardner.

Writer and educator John Gardner died tragically at age 49 in a motorcycle accident in 1982. His influential work of tutelage “The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers” was released posthumously in 1984. Gardner included exercises “for the development of technique”, and the following was listed fifth. Boldface has been added to excerpts: 1

Write the opening of a novel using the authorial-omniscient voice, making the authorial omniscience clear by going into the thoughts of one or more characters after establishing the voice. As subject, use either a trip or the arrival of a stranger (some disruption of order—the usual novel beginning).

The exercise above did not assert that the two possibilities referenced exhausted all plot choices. Also, the statement was only about the beginning of a novel. Nevertheless, these words were the earliest pertinent published evidence known to QI.

The rest of the QI article is interesting in tracing the gradual evolution of a specific, culturally accepted quote from an original more general quote from an identifiable author.

All of which is interesting and sad. Lamb-Sinclair makes this quote the crux of her essay but it is a falsely attributed quote. It is like a building on a foundation of sand.

After this inauspicious start, Lamb-Sinclair then veers into a social justice warrior diatribe about Donald Trump and fake news and the inadequacy of fact checking. Just more of the unsettled noise which is so prevalent at the moment. She is not making an argument, she is venting. Fair enough, but not on my reading time. Her piece is worth nothing except as an example of irony. The saddest part is this:

Like many educators, I am appalled at the wealth of fake news that floats around social media and the power it has over young people who do not necessarily have the skills to interpret it.

It doesn't help your argument that facts matter and that fake news is a problem when you get your first asserted fact wrong.