When emotional conviction out-paces reason and evidence

Humility is a necessary human attribute given the complexity of the world and our own fallibility. Necessary but always in short supply.

No matter how convinced we are that X is true, there is always the possibility that it is not, because we have been ignorant of, overlooked, misinterpreted, or misunderstood something. From The Correction Heard 'Round The World: When The New York Times Apologized to Robert Goddard by Kiona N. Smith.

Fifty years before Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins climbed into their small capsule to fly to the Moon, many people weren't even convinced that rockets would work in space. When a rocket engine ignites, it burns fuel and pushes exhaust out the back end of the rocket with tremendous force. According to Isaac Newton's Third Law of Motion, every action produces an equal and opposite reaction -- which means the backward thrust of the rocket's exhaust also acts on the rocket, pushing it forward. Many people, including the author of a January 13, 1920 editorial in the New York Times, misunderstood Newton's law and assumed that rockets worked because their exhaust pushed against the air itself. With no air to push against, how could a rocket actually push itself through space?

Today, we know that Newton's Third Law means that rocket engines don't need air to "push against," but in the early days of January 1920, Goddard faced instant skepticism when he published an article in Popular Science describing how rockets could launch ships into space. It was an ambituous piece of work, and Goddard even outlined an uncrewed Moon mission, in which a rocket carrying an explosive payload would crash into the Moon, producing an explosion so large that scientists could see it from Earth. Goddard was ahead of his time in some ways: NASA and other space agencies have crashed quite a few objects into various Solar System bodies, because slamming a heavy, fast-moving object into a planet turns out to be a great way to learn something about what it's made of.

Although the article caught the public imagination, it also drew harsh criticism. Various outlets argued that the velocity required to escape Earth's gravity would produce so much friction that the rocket wouldn't survive the heat (rockets accelerate gradually, so by the time they reach escape velocity, they're in the thin upper layers of the atmosphere), that payloads would never survive re-entry into Earth's atmosphere (engineers worked that problem, and Goddard himself proposed an ablative heat shield to protect returning spacecraft from the heat of re-entry), or that there was no scientific or social reason to shoot things into space (shortsightedness is not a new phenomenon). Others argued that it would be impossible to make all the calculations required to account for high-altitude winds and the complex relative motion of Earth and the Moon. Fortunately, the Apollo program had Katherine Jonson, Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson and other "computers" to make that happen, but it's easy to see how daunting the prospect would have been in 1920.

And on January 13, 1920, the New York Times published an editorial insisting that a rocket couldn't possibly work in space:

"That professor Goddard, with his 'chair' in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution [from which Goddard held a grant to research rocket flight], does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react -- to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools."

[snip]

Eventually, of course, Goddard would be vindicated by the 1944 launch of a German V-2 guided ballistic missile. But it took until July 17, 1969, the day after the launch of a crewed mission to the Moon, for the New York Times to take back its harsh words. The 1969 correction is almost comically dry and conspicuously doesn't mention the Apollo mission.

"Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th century, and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere," the Times editors wrote. They added, "The Times regrets the error."

The New York Times, however, never regrets its errors enough to actually display humility when dealing with complex science, especially if they have an ideological dog in the fight. Witness their multi-decade commitment to anthropogenic global climate warming. An ideological fig leaf for authoritarian action based on skimpy data and an incomplete understanding of multiple loosely coupled complex dynamic systems, none of which are fully understood.

AGCW has virtually disappeared from the lexicon, first replaced by climate warming, and then, as that failed to appear in the data, replaced yet again by the virtually meaningless climate change. Given that climate is always changing and that virtually no one claims otherwise, the hunger for imposing ideological solutions remains, even as the evidence for the problem disappears.

Goddard had to wait 49 years for an apology. Perhaps all the "deniers" (as mischaracterization if ever there was one) will get an apology circa 2039.

Back Pages, 2005 by Greg Drasler

Back Pages, 2005 by Greg Drasler

Click to enlarge.

Ja sei Namorar by Matthieu Forichon

Ja sei Namorar by Matthieu Forichon

Click to enlarge.

The most passionate are the most obdurate.

A few years ago, a slew of states passed large, fairly comprehensive pre-K head-start type programs in a bid to improve education outcomes as well as to close the education gaps that exist from first grade, and which widen every grade following, between children of the poor and their better-off peers. Both desirable goals. However, pre-kindergarten programs, while popular for more than half a century as a solution, have rarely performed as anticipated. Multiple reviews of the grandaddy of pre-k programs, Head Start, have shown at best mixed results. The more rigorous the study, the smaller the measured results. A common finding of Head Start and similar pre-k programs, is that they yield a boost in assessed academic performance at First grade but all vestiges of that boost have disappeared by third-grade. There is no persistent effect.

It cannot be overlooked that these programs with vestigial outcomes are expensive.

Despite the lack of rigorous evidence, we keep trying to find how to rejigger the design or administration so that we get better results. Oklahoma and Tennessee have been a couple of second generation pioneers trying to rectify design failures in earlier programs and launching/re-launching new programs which it was hoped would yield positive results.

I am seeing a first large, rigorous review of the Tennessee effort for the first time.

From Effects of the Tennessee Prekindergarten Program on children’s achievement and behavior through third grade by Mark W.Lipsey, Dale C.Farran, Kelley Durkin. From the Abstract:

This report presents results of a randomized trial of a state prekindergarten program. Low-income children (N = 2990) applying to oversubscribed programs were randomly assigned to receive offers of admission or remain on a waiting list. Data from pre-k through 3rd grade were obtained from state education records; additional data were collected for a subset of children with parental consent (N = 1076). At the end of pre-k, pre-k participants in the consented subsample performed better than control children on a battery of achievement tests, with non-native English speakers and children scoring lowest at baseline showing the greatest gains. During the kindergarten year and thereafter, the control children caught up with the pre-k participants on those tests and generally surpassed them. Similar results appeared on the 3rd grade state achievement tests for the full randomized sample – pre-k participants did not perform as well as the control children. Teacher ratings of classroom behavior did not favor either group overall, though some negative treatment effects were seen in 1st and 2nd grade. There were differential positive pre-k effects for male and Black children on a few ratings and on attendance. Pre-k participants had lower retention rates in kindergarten that did not persist, and higher rates of school rule violations in later grades. Many pre-k participants received special education designations that remained through later years, creating higher rates than for control children. Issues raised by these findings and implications for pre-k policy are discussed.

Ouch. Their summary:

• This study of the Tennessee Voluntary Pre-K Program (VPK) is the first randomized control trial of a state pre-k program.


• Positive achievement effects at the end of pre-k reversed and began favoring the control children by 2nd and 3rd grade.

• VPK participants had more disciplinary infractions and special education placements by 3rd grade than control children.

• No effects of VPK were found on attendance or retention in the later grades.

Straight Talk on Evidence has a report here. They note:

In this report we discuss newly-published findings from a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of Tennessee’s voluntary prekindergarten (pre-k) program for low-income children (Lipsey, Farran, and Durkin 2018). We are highlighting this study for two reasons. First, the effectiveness of state and local pre-k programs is a topic of high policy importance. Approximately 28 percent of the nation’s four-year-olds are enrolled in pre-k programs funded by states, municipalities, or school districts—a number that has grown rapidly over time (Chaudry and Datta 2017)—and policy officials often tout pre-k as a powerful tool for closing school achievement gaps between minorities and whites and increasing earnings later in life (e.g., Executive Office of the President 2015).

Second, this study provides uniquely credible evidence on the topic. It is the first large RCT of a state-funded pre-k program, and one of only two such studies ever conducted of public preschool programs—the other being the national RCT of the federal Head Start program. Other studies of public or private preschool programs have had weaknesses that limit the reliability of their findings, such as lack of random assignment (e.g., Oklahoma universal pre-k, Chicago Child-Parent Centers) or small samples and imperfect randomization (e.g., Perry Preschool Project, Abecedarian Project).

Straight Talk's report has this disturbing addendum from the researchers:

In 2008 we worked closely with the Tennessee Department of Education to craft a strong experimental design that would assess the effectiveness of the TN Voluntary Pre-K program (TNVPK). Other than the Head Start Impact study, this would become the only randomized control study of a scaled-up public pre-k program.

Our initial results supported the immediate effectiveness of pre-k; children in the program performed better at the end of pre-k than control children, most of whom had stayed home. The press, the public, and our colleagues relished these findings. But ours was a longitudinal study and the third grade results told a different story. Not only was there fade out, but the pre-k children scored below the controls on the state achievement tests. Moreover, they had more disciplinary offenses and none of the positive effects on retention and special education that were anticipated.

Those findings were not welcome. So much so that it has been difficult to get the results published. Our first attempt was reviewed by pre-k advocates who had disparaged our findings when they first came out in a working paper – we know that because their reviews repeated word-for-word criticisms made in their prior blogs and commentary. We are grateful for an open-minded editor who allowed our recent paper summarizing the results of this study to be published (after, we should note, a very thorough peer review and 17 single-spaced pages of responses to questions raised by reviewers). We are also appreciative of the objective assessment and attention to detail represented in the Straight Talk review.

It is, of course, understandable that people are skeptical of results that do not confirm the prevailing wisdom, but the vitriol with which our work has been greeted is beyond mere scientific concern. Social science research can only be helpful to policy makers if it presents findings openly and objectively, even when unwelcome.

We share with our colleagues a commitment to the goal of providing a better life for poor children. Blind commitment to one avenue for attaining that goal, however, is unnecessarily limiting. If pre-k is not working as hoped and intended, we need to roll up our sleeves and figure out what will work, with solid research to guide that effort.

Rhetoric, emotion and advocacy play too dominant a role in our public discourse. No one is bettered by suppressing evidence we might dislike because it contradicts our priors. We only improve by tackling the world as it is rather than as we might wish it to be.

They had large resources of compulsion at their disposal

From Churchill: The Power of Words edited by Martin Gilbert. Subtitled His remarkable life recounted through his writings and speeches.

A wonderful collection. I have read several of his books and what a master of the word.

From My Early Life by Winston Churchill.

The greatest pleasure I had in those days was reading. When I was nine and a half my father gave me Treasure Island, and I remember the delight with which I devoured it. My teachers saw me at once backward and precocious, reading books beyond my years and yet at the bottom of the Form. They were offended. They had large resources of compulsion at their disposal, but I was stubborn. Where my reason, imagination or interest were not engaged, I would not or I could not learn. In all the twelve years I was at school no one ever succeeded in making me write a Latin verse or learn any Greek except the alphabet. I do not at all excuse myself for this foolish neglect of opportunities procured at so much expense by my parents and brought so forcibly to my attention by my Preceptors. Perhaps if I had been introduced to the ancients through their history and customs, instead of through their grammar and syntax, I might have had a better record.

Of the 143 cases of abbreviation or shortened words

I am (re)reading Aunt's Aren't Gentlemen by P.G. Wodehouse. It was published in October 1974, shortly before Wodehouse's death on 14 February, 1975.

I noted a particular verbal tick Wodehouse ascribed to the protagonist, Bertram Wooster, of abbreviating words to a representative initial letter. I am familiar with it from the many other Wooster/Jeeves books but it had not ever registered with me just how frequent this tick occurred. Reflecting on the observation, I came to the conclusion that perhaps I had not especially noticed the affectation because I was relatively young when I first read Wodehouse's oeuvre. Probably 13-18 years old or so.

I imagined that I was a young enough reader that I was probably unconsciously skipping over the instances where this occurred as one does as a young reader, often skipping over unknown words. Perhaps.

But then I had reason to look up Aunts Aren't Gentlemen in Wikipedia to get the publication date. In doing so, I discover that indeed, the abbreviations are more prevalent in Aunts Aren't Gentlemen than in the earlier books.

Bertie regularly abbreviates his words, with abbreviation becoming more common as the series progresses. Of the 143 cases of abbreviation or shortened words (such as "the old metrop"), only 11 occur in the short stories, and more than half occur in the novels that follow Ring for Jeeves (with that novel having none, as Bertie is not present in the book). In order to make the abbreviations comprehensible, Bertie either introduces a word first and then abbreviates it, or abbreviates a familiar, clichéd phrase. Wodehouse uses these abbreviations to repeat information in varied and humorous ways. For example, Bertie uses three abbreviations in a passage in chapter 3:

So far, I said to myself, as I put back the receiver, so g. I would have preferred, of course, to be going to the aged relative's home, where Anatole her superb chef dished up his mouth-waterers, but we Woosters can rough it, and life in a country cottage with the aged r just around the corner would be a very different thing from a country c without her coming through with conversation calculated to instruct, elevate, and amuse.

Amazing. I had an impression and then, courtesy of the internet, I discover someone has actually done the counting.

Now I can know. I wasn't skipping over the frequency of abbreviations. They were rare at the beginning of the series and built in frequency over the course. I was not skipping, I was inured.

Hey, media/academy/establishment parties - The public just aren't that into you.

From Touring Trumpland - And Finding it Largely Trumpless by Tim Blair.

I have viewed Trumps 2016 victory not so much as an indicator of the shifting balance between Left and Right but much more in keeping with the global rejection of established political parties by the great middle of voters. Established parties who claimed expertise and superior morality but who consistently failed to demonstrate either.

The wailing and gnashing of teeth of the media/academy/establishment parties complex is the wailing and gnashing of teeth of free riders who see their sinecures at risk.

Blair's reporting is consistent with this:

Exhausted by media obsession over Donald Trump’s divisive presidency, Russian collusion, threat to liberty and destruction of democracy, I recently went to the one place on earth where I could easily avoid hearing anything at all about Donald Trump.

I went to the United States.

Anyone who has not visited the US since Trump’s hilarious 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton might be surprised by the utter absence there of Trump in daily life. Everyday Americans are mostly just getting on with things, as normal, non-obsessive people tend to do. The apparent civil war we keep hearing about just isn’t happening.

Of course, certain precautions must be taken to avoid being drawn into a vortex of anti-Trump mania. During my visit I carefully avoided tiny outposts of Trump fixation, including Hollywood celebrity households, the offices of any former Clinton staffers and newsrooms at the New York Times, CNN, the Washington Post and MSNBC.

I also dodged most college campuses, although a day or two at the excellent University of Iowa proved happily Trump-free.

It helps, too, if your point of arrival in the US isn’t California, where a ragtag pro-Hillary resistance movement remains active. Instead, I flew direct to Dallas before commencing a forensic multistate listening tour through Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Iowa, Indiana, Missouri, and Oklahoma.

As it happens, all of those states voted for Trump. But their larger cities tended to side with Clinton, so a certain balance was available. If people from either side of the alleged Trump divide wished to speak out, I was there to hear them.

Except that nobody wanted to talk about Trump, Clinton or politics in general. This wasn’t due to apathy or lack of engagement. It was because there are more interesting topics of conversation, such as, well, just about everything. Work. Family. Sport. Music. Weather. Cars. Food. The semi-trailer carrying a few tons of bourbon that crashed and caught fire on the interstate. You know, topics people care about outside of election years.

I live in a red state but in a deep blue city and in a navy blue neighborhood in that blue city. I work with clients and people across the US. Aside from the Bay Area of California and a handful of still grieving Democrats, people rarely talk politics. The near hysteria of the media/academy/establishment parties is little apparent elsewhere.

In the mainstream media, much of the writing is either from the perspective of the hard left or the statist establishment Republicans. That is, perhaps at most, five percent of the population.

Very roughly, a third of the population are independent, roughly a third are Democrats, roughly a third are Republicans. I am guessing that for the independents, politics is a minuscule and episodic interest/concern. Even for those who are registered or self-identify as either Republican or Democrat, I would wager no more than a third of each follows politics deeply. So say, roughly 20-25% of the population finds politics very important. The other 75-80% of Americans go about their wonderful lives focusing on the real and important things while the 20-25% of their brethren fret the small stuff.

The fact that most of those 20-25%, and virtually all the most vocal and emotionally incontinent, are concentrated in the high-profile megaphonic industries of media/academy/establishment parties, further exacerbates the impression that everyone is dyed in the wool political fanatics. They aren't. The public just aren't into the self-anointed, preening, self-admiring media/academy/establishment parties.

San cave art in Ukhahlamba, Drakensberg Park, South Africa

San cave art in Ukhahlamba, Drakensberg Park, South Africa

Click to enlarge.

As to that I have no information, sir.

From Aunts Aren't Gentlemen by P. G. Wodehouse.

When I had doffed the sweater and flannels in which I had breakfasted, Jeeves informed me that E. Jimpson could see me at eleven, and I thanked him and asked him to tell the garage to send the car round at ten-forty-five.

'Somewhat earlier than that, sir,' he said, 'if I might make the suggestion. The traffic. Would it not be better to take a cab?'

'No, and I'll tell you why. After I've seen the doc, I thought I might drive down to Brighton and get a spot of sea air. I don't suppose the traffic will be any worse than usual, will it?'

'I fear so, sir. A protest march is taking place this morning.

What, again? They seem to have them every hour on the hour these days, don't they?'

'They are certainly not infrequent, sir.'

'Any idea what they're protesting about?'

'I could not say, sir. It might be one thing or it might be another. Men are suspicious, prone to discontent. Subjects still loathe the present Government.'

'The poet Nash?'

'No, sir. The poet Herrick.'

'Pretty bitter.'

'Yes, sir.'

'I wonder what they had done to him to stir him up like that. Probably fined him five quid for failing to abate a smoky chimney.'

'As to that I have no information, sir.'

Writing some four hundred years ago, Robert Herrick captures a constant across the centuries; free people's exasperation with their government.

From The Hesperides.

Present Government Grievous.
by Robert Herrick

Men are suspicious, prone to discontent:
Subjects still loathe the present government.

There's just the couplet but it has stood the test of time.

We drove out, past the couple of local cops, having no idea what the hell we’d done, and wondering if we were in trouble.

An entertaining story from Dave Freer, illustrating the fragile veracity of "news". From Unreliable witnesses.

“It’s all a question of point of view.”

Back in the dark ages – 1980’s in South Africa the BBC Radio News reported on a labor dispute/picket protest led by the ANC aligned organizers in a fishing town up the West Coast of the Cape. The picket line had been savagely broken up by the police with dogs (the BBC reporter of the time was a passionate promoter of the anti-apartheid cause, and as his media was not within the country could report whatever he liked without any form of censorship.) The local Afrikaans press reported on the incident too. There wasn’t a lot to report on from one horse towns on the West Coast, and the Cape Town Riot squad dispersing a protest with dogs was news, if not big news. The one set of media carried it from their point of view as a bad thing, and the other as a good thing.

Now, as it happens I was – quite inadvertently – there, along with my pregnant wife. I wasn’t protesting, or with the police. I was just at the tail end of a long sampling trip, collecting shark vertebrae and gut contents –as well as measurements of said sharks – at various fish processing plants up the west coast. I was a very broke research scientist, and paying dog-sitters or putting our two hounds (a sloppy bull-terrier x keeshond cross and a dim-witted but loveable Old English Sheepdog) in kennels was just an expense that couldn’t be met. So they traveled with us, sleeping in the back of the truck. They loved the trips. My wife used to record for me – as it was a bloody, slimy, smelly dirty job, making writing difficult while you were doing it. Now, typically – as we were taking nothing of value, fish processors were quite obliging about us sampling the catch – as long as we didn’t get in the way. In this particular fishing town, that meant starting really early on the previous night’s landings, before work started. The track to the shark plant was a narrow alley next to and around the corner from the main only large employer in the town – they dealt with pilchards and anchovies.

We got there in the dark and had worked hard for several hours, and, tired, smelly, bloody and laden with sample buckets of vertebrae sections, (for age and grown studies) were glad to be heading for a coffee and giving the dogs a run before heading home. The dogs of course knew the pattern and were hyper with ‘walk-delight’, as always.

So: Barbara driving we headed around the corner and into the midst of a whole bunch of people. My dogs – confined to the back canopy — were barking. They were already excited for their walk and liked to tell the world… My wife, being herself, hooted and drove slowly towards the protestors –all we wanted was out of there… And, to be honest, we couldn’t actually turn around – and the sea was behind us.

Now, whether the protestors got freaked the idea that cops were somehow behind them, or just the noise of the two dogs was enough – people scattered in all directions running and screaming. We drove out, past the couple of local cops, having no idea what the hell we’d done, and wondering if we were in trouble.

A friend later told me the Cape Town Riot squad (we were about 2 hours away from the city) showed up about an hour and half after this, and were somewhat peeved at being called out for nothing.

The news media reported the event from their point of view. The essential facts were in a way true. A protest had been broken up by dogs. The riot squad had come up from Cape Town. The rest was the story that they wanted to tell their audience. They, or their sources, may have actually believed their version of events. Who knows? But I gave up on believing their reportage was overly accurate after that.