Categories of decision making

Sounds roughly right but I wonder what an empirical analysis would show.

Not sure about anybody else, but my decisions at work are: 65% common sense 20% logic 10% experience 5% evidence #tipsfornewdocs #meded

— David Warriner (@doctordiscodave) November 21, 2015

Selling to the periphery as the golden path to success

Yesterday I posted The rate of engagement among a brand’s Facebook fans is seven in 10,000.

This section was to me the most provocative, but yet also consistent with my own thinking.

First, you will never increase your brand’s market share by targeting existing users — the task that digital media performs so efficiently. The effort and expense marketers put into targeting their own customers with emails and web banners is largely wasted; loyalty programmes, says Sharp, “do practically nothing to drive growth”. What seems like a prudent use of funds — focusing on people who have already proved they like the brand — is actually just spinning wheels.

Second, and paradoxically, a successful brand needs to find a way of reaching people who are not in its target market, in the sense of people who are predisposed to buy it. The brand’s advertising must somehow gain the attention of people who are not interested in it, have never bought it, or who bought it so long ago they can’t remember — so that when they are ready to buy, it automatically springs to mind. In the wastage is the value.

This is consistent with a lot of findings in network theory and affiliative sociology. It is becoming well established that when job searching or doing sales, your likeliest source of success is not with those with whom you have the deepest relationships, your nearest circle of friends.

The best leads come from the second and third circles out from your core friends. The reason has to do with statistical overlaps. When you think of friend circles as access nodes to information, it becomes a little clearer. Think of the perfect job opportunity.

If you start looking for that perfect job opportunity, how likely is it that your closest friends know about it but you don't? That's the heart of the issue. Your closest friends have a knowledge and experience set that tends to be highly correlated with your own. Yes, they might know something you don't but the odds are significantly lower than someone who is two or more circles out. A friend-of-a-friend likely has a dramatically lower overlap of knowledge than your immediate circle. And an acquaintance of a friend, yet even lower odds of overlap.

The further out on your friend network you go, the more likely it is that they are aware of things you are not. Hence the demonstrable value of networking.

I take all this and look at the book industry. People are always trying to break into the authorship gig but the hurdles are horrendous. Not in terms of being published. Those hurdles are lower than they have ever been and almost non-existent. No, the barriers to entry are not getting published, they are getting noticed. It's all about marketing.

"You will never increase your brand’s market share by targeting existing users" is especially relevant. 50% of the population read no book electively during a year. 10% of the population do 80% of the reading. 40% of the population do 20% of the reading, averaging about a book every two months or 6 books a year.

The 10% who do 80% of the reading are knowledgeable and discerning readers. They usually stick with their reading interests which often flow along genre lines. The reader of westerns is unlikely to take up a romance. A reader of romances unlikely to try out nonfiction science. A reader of mysteries is unlikely to switch to contemporary literary fiction. Etc. People read what they are interested in and have relatively fixed ideas of what that might be.

What Sharp's research suggests s that publishers should be focusing their marketing efforts, not on already enthusiastic readers but on occasional readers and the non-readers.

The most effective ads don’t sell, but they do make people buy. By keeping the brand alive in your mind, Coke ads change the probability of you buying it in the next year by a minuscule proportion, a nudge so small that you almost certainly won’t notice it, which is why people often say that advertising doesn’t affect them. But that tiny effect adds up to millions of cans.

Enthusiastic readers are a small body count in the market (10%) even though they buy most the books. But they are very set in their ways and very canny book buyers. It is the ninety percent of the market where publishers have the best chance of getting occasional readers (40% of the market at 6 books a year) and the intermittent readers (50% of the market and fewer than a book a year). If they change their reading habits by even a small amount, it has a huge impact.

I think this is what the WE NEED DIVERSE BOOKS people miss. It is not a supply side issue. There are near infinite books published each year (from the perspective of a single reader) and there are many, many publishers and there are exceptionally low barriers to entry. Publishers are not the problem.

It is readers who are the problem. They are not reading the books the WE NEED DIVERSE BOOKS people want them to read. So this isn't about publishers or racism. This is about getting readers to want to read the types of books that the WNDB people want them to read.

That's a big ask and involves quite a different set of activities than trying to shame publishers into publishing a few more books that people aren't likely to read. This is, in large part, why I think the WE NEED DIVERSE BOOKS campaign will end up failing. They have misdiagnosed the problem and do not have any solutions for the real issue.

It was impossible to avoid joining in (campus mindlessness)

We have a 5%, probably just a 1%, of campus students who are dissatisfied with a range of ill-articulated grievances. They are unable to provide evidence to support even the existence of the problem with which they identify, are unable to argue their case, and are unable to support the half-baked solutions which they recommend. It is frustrating to taxpayers to see such strong evidence of gross educational misconduct. It is frustrating because the claims originate out of a small ideological cult who are immune to argument. They are Eric Hoffer's True Believer made flesh.

Everyday for the past couple of weeks, and every week for the past couple of years, there are more and more instances reported. Mizzou, Yale, Columbia, Amherst, Dartmouth, UCLA, etc. The reality, though, is that there is no patriarchy, there is little or no institutional racism, there is no such thing as a microagression, people are generally not prejudicially bigoted. Except, regrettably, among the advocate hustlers themselves who are more than happy to trade in negative stereotypes and prejudicial bigotry.

This most recent week's collection of bigotry and hatred from the 1% social justice warrior class is appalling. It brings to mind George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. From Chapter One. I hadn't read it in years but it seems strangely prescient. I wonder what it would be like to read Nineteen Eighty-Four and True Believer back-to-back? It sounds depressing but I suspect it might be seering.

From the first few pages of Chapter One of Nineteen Eighty-Four we already have Oceania, the three-year plan, Hate Week, Big Brother. In the first few pages, Orwell has already introduced key cultural concepts that have recurring cultural relevance sixty-six years later. And of course there are the Party's three slogans:

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

The wilful assertion of opposites is still running strong:

ISIS IS NOT ISLAMIC
CLIMATE CHANGE IS MORE DANGEROUS THAN TERRORISM
FREE SPEECH CANNOT INCLUDE HATEFUL SPEECH

And that foolishness is just from this week alone.

Here's the scene that this week's viral video's brought to mind. The daily Two Minute Hate.

The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one’s teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one’s neck. The Hate had started.

As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. The little sandy-haired woman gave a squeak of mingled fear and disgust. Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared. The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party’s purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even — so it was occasionally rumoured — in some hiding-place in Oceania itself.

[snip]

Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room. The self-satisfied sheep-like face on the screen, and the terrifying power of the Eurasian army behind it, were too much to be borne: besides, the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically. He was an object of hatred more constant than either Eurasia or Eastasia, since when Oceania was at war with one of these Powers it was generally at peace with the other. But what was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were — in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes waiting to be seduced by him. A day never passed when spies and saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police. He was the commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State. The Brotherhood, its name was supposed to be. There were also whispered stories of a terrible book, a compendium of all the heresies, of which Goldstein was the author and which circulated clandestinely here and there. It was a book without a title. People referred to it, if at all, simply as THE BOOK. But one knew of such things only through vague rumours. Neither the Brotherhood nor THE BOOK was a subject that any ordinary Party member would mention if there was a way of avoiding it.

In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen. The little sandy-haired woman had turned bright pink, and her mouth was opening and shutting like that of a landed fish. Even O’Brien’s heavy face was flushed. He was sitting very straight in his chair, his powerful chest swelling and quivering as though he were standing up to the assault of a wave. The dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out ‘Swine! Swine! Swine!’ and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the screen. It struck Goldstein’s nose and bounced off; the voice continued inexorably. In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violently against the rung of his chair. The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp. Thus, at one moment Winston’s hatred was not turned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary, against Big Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police; and at such moments his heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic on the screen, sole guardian of truth and sanity in a world of lies. And yet the very next instant he was at one with the people about him, and all that was said of Goldstein seemed to him to be true. At those moments his secret loathing of Big Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed to tower up, an invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock against the hordes of Asia, and Goldstein, in spite of his isolation, his helplessness, and the doubt that hung about his very existence, seemed like some sinister enchanter, capable by the mere power of his voice of wrecking the structure of civilization.

From the movie version of the book.

The rate of engagement among a brand’s Facebook fans is seven in 10,000

A very thought provoking review of a book, How Brands Grow by Professor Byron Sharp. The review is How the Mad Men lost the plot by Ian Leslie.

In 2010, Pepsi embarked on an audacious new marketing strategy. Foregoing its slot in the Super Bowl, America’s annual showcase for lavish TV ads, it diverted its TV budget into a social media campaign: the “Pepsi Refresh Project”. Consumers were invited to propose ideas that would have a positive impact on society, and Pepsi promised to fund the ones that gained the most votes, via Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. “We wanted to explore how a brand could be integrated into the digital space,” Frank Cooper, then Pepsi’s “chief consumer engagement officer” explained.

The Refresh Project accomplished everything a social media campaign is supposed to accomplish: millions of Facebook likes and thousands of new Twitter followers. But it didn’t sell Pepsi. Pepsi Cola and Diet Pepsi both lost about 5 per cent of their market shares over the course of the year — a calamitous decline. The brand returned to TV. Bob Hoffman, a veteran American adman who blogs as the Ad Contrarian, has gained a large following for his savage critiques of digital hype. After Pepsi Refresh, he concluded, “only zealots and fools will continue to bow down to the gods of social media.”

The Pepsi debacle emboldened the ad industry’s other contrarians to point out that, despite the dazzling promises of digital, nearly all brands in mature categories still rely on conventional media. At the risk of being labelled Luddite, they suggested that although the internet has changed how the game is played, it has not changed its fundamental rules: mass marketing works; fame works; emotion works — and “legacy media”, especially TV, still do all of this better than the new

Sharp's incendiary observations are:

Sharp’s first law is that brands can’t get bigger on the back of loyal customers. Applying a statistical analysis to sales data, he demonstrates that the majority of any successful brand’s sales comes from “light buyers”: people who buy it relatively infrequently. Coca-Cola’s business is not built on a hardcore of Coke lovers who drink it daily, but on the millions of people who buy it once or twice a year. You, for instance, may not think of yourself as a Coke buyer, but if you’ve bought it once in the last 12 months, you’re actually a typical Coke consumer. This pattern recurs across brands, categories, countries and time. Whether it’s toothpaste or computers, French cars or Australian banks, brands depend on large numbers of people — that’s to say, the masses — who buy them only occasionally, leave long gaps between purchases and buy competing brands in between.

If you work for a brand owner, the implications are profound. First, you will never increase your brand’s market share by targeting existing users — the task that digital media performs so efficiently. The effort and expense marketers put into targeting their own customers with emails and web banners is largely wasted; loyalty programmes, says Sharp, “do practically nothing to drive growth”. What seems like a prudent use of funds — focusing on people who have already proved they like the brand — is actually just spinning wheels.

Second, and paradoxically, a successful brand needs to find a way of reaching people who are not in its target market, in the sense of people who are predisposed to buy it. The brand’s advertising must somehow gain the attention of people who are not interested in it, have never bought it, or who bought it so long ago they can’t remember — so that when they are ready to buy, it automatically springs to mind. In the wastage is the value.

Fascinating. That bears out some of my operating, but unproven, assumptions. I have steered well clear of investing in digital brand management owing to an absence of evident effectiveness. This despite frequent and numerous entreaties by marketing firms.

All of this makes “engagement” largely pointless. Light buyers aren’t fans of your brand. They don’t think of it as special or even unique. They aren’t much interested in whether your vodka is from Russia or Sweden, or how many times it has been distilled. No surprise, then, that they almost certainly don’t follow your brand on Twitter or visit its Facebook page, or that they can think of a thousand things they’d rather do than share a “digital experience”, let alone sign up to a “project”.

Even the people who do join brand pages on Facebook hardly ever click on them. The US company Forrester Research has found that the rate of engagement among a brand’s Facebook fans is seven in 10,000; for Twitter it is three in 10,000. People might watch ads on Facebook or YouTube, but that’s about all the interaction they want (Facebook itself recently conceded this point). A senior marketer at the drinks company Diageo, where Sharp’s book has been influential, put it to me bluntly. “After 10 or 15 years of f***ing around with digital we’ve realised that people don’t want to ‘engage’ with brands, because they don’t care about them.’

Interesting lessons learned.

Marketers consistently undervalue consistency. Diageo recently carried out an audit of all the endlines that it had attached to one of its biggest brands, Guinness, and were embarrassed to discover it had used more than 20 different slogans in 15 years. What’s more, when it asked people to recall an endline, the only one they remembered was “Good things come to those who wait”, which hadn’t run since 1999. Vast sums of money had been spent on campaigns which probably had short-term effects but barely left a trace in consumer memories.

When evidence takes you places you don't necessarily want to go.

I commented on several reading related studies in a post Reading and Spoken Volumes.

Particularly intriguing that there is such a sharp association with completed college education. James Heckman found that there was no material earnings difference between high school dropouts and those who later earned a GED. His conclusion was that the earnings barrier was not the knowledge acquisition represented by the dropout versus the GED earner. Rather, the association ran between income and behavior; not between income and knowledge. If you had the self-control to complete high school on time, that behavior of self-control would later also serve you well in work.

There is a similar such break in this data. If your parents are high school graduates or attended college and did not complete it, then you are likely to have the same level of book reading (22 and 21 minutes respectively). The big jump, a jump of 50% from 21 minutes to 31 minutes of reading is between those home environments in which parents completed college versus anything less. I am guessing that the causative flow is one of values and behaviors. Parents that had the self-discipline to complete college also likely value reading and have the self-discipline to create an environment in which reading is encouraged and rewarded.

Also interesting is the disparity between reading volumes between the races. 28 minutes a day spent reading books by whites, 18 minutes by African-Americans, and 20 minutes by Hispanics. So whites are reading about 50% more than blacks. Now certainly that is a function of history, economics, and culture. This parallels, though somewhat less dramatically, the findings of Hart & Ridley where the cumulative volume of direct verbal communication before kindergarten was about 15 million words for the lowest income participants (primarily African American), 30 million words for middle class, and 40 million for wealthy families.

Combining these two studies together suggests that perhaps a significant causation of variance in communication capability and scores is probably solely related to practice. If whites are reading 50% more books and hearing 100-200% more words, you have to expect that they would have higher reading and verbal scores (and the attendant correlations that go with communication fluency) simply as a matter of exposure and practice. The factual and experiential content that go with that volume can't be ignored either.

There is a new study out that ties in to this phenomena, The Parenting Gap Is Widening by Anna Sutherland.

The first observation is that all parents are raising their game in terms of how they invest time with children.

The popular stereotype here is of middle-class moms enrolling their toddlers in foreign language classes in hopes of sending them to Harvard someday. College-educated parents do spend more time on educational activities than less educated ones, but Americans of all socioeconomic backgrounds have come to allocate more time to such activities over the past few decades. In fact, in 2008–2013, mothers with no more than a high school diploma devoted more time, on average, to developmental child care than mothers with bachelor’s degrees did in the early 1990s (57 minutes a day versus 44).

Of course, one of the problems is that there are fewer traditional families, the source of these measures.

Even though everyone is investing more time in their children, the gap between classes is growing as well.

Yet the “parenting gap” between social classes isn’t apt to close anytime soon, a new Journal of Marriage and Family article implies. Evrim Altintas of Oxford’s Centre for Time Use Research looked at data from the American Heritage Time Use Study spanning five decades, and discovered that despite positive trends in all groups, the disparity in educational child care between parents from different educational backgrounds has grown over that period.

The gap between mothers with only high school degrees and those with bachelor’s degrees, which was negligible in the 1970s, reached more than 30 minutes in the early 2000s, then narrowed somewhat to 21 minutes in the late 2000s. In 2008–2013, college-graduate mothers spent 78 minutes on developmental activities with their kids, while the figure was 62 minutes for women with some college education and 57 for those with a high school diploma or less. For fathers, the gap between the highest and lowest education groups is now around 15 minutes (55 minutes versus 39). In the most recent time period, at every education level, mothers devoted roughly 20 more minutes per day to developmental child care activities than fathers, on average.

This is the spanner in the equality of opportunity works:

Accounting for the fact that children with less educated parents are more likely to live apart from their fathers makes these gaps more dramatic. According to Altintas’s estimation, which she notes is if anything biased downward, once fathers’ residential status is taken into account, children of parents with bachelor’s degrees may receive more than 1,000 extra hours of cognitively stimulating care over the first four years of life, on average, relative to children with high school–­educated parents.

The very substantial differences between the top and bottom classes in the amount of time spent reading, talking, coaching, etc. in a child's first four years highlights the unattainable nature of helping children have "equal" opportunities. That is by no means an argument that we should abandon efforts to level the playing field. By no means. But it does suggest changes in the tactics.

If pre-K programs end up being validated as ineffective as the most recent large studies indicate, and if the four-fold increase in spending in K-12 makes no difference in outcomes by class as experience has shown, then what can make a difference?

I think, as challenging as it philosophically might be, the answer is in figuring whether, how, and to what degree, it is appropriate for government to foster and encourage the adoption of upper class values and behaviors by those in the lower classes. Yuck - writing the words chills me, but I think that is what the accumulating evidence is indicating. Sure, we still need to try and make schools more effective, but we shouldn't count too much on those investments actually equalizing the opportunity field. Too much happens in the first four years to catch-up on by the time the children hit K-12. Indeed, many studies indicate that the gaps only worsen during school.

Cavalier grasshoppers

Hat tip to Ann Althouse, "The world owes me a living.". The Grasshopper and the Ants from 1934.



A retelling of the old Aesop fable highlighting the ne'er-do-well, cavalier grasshopper and the industrious, forward planning ants with a dash of Christian charity.

Evergreen.

Chimerae of illusory hatreds

Interesting to see the silent majority of students begin to push back at the themes of racism, oppression, suppression, patriarchy, etc. being advocated by a small, ideologically and factually bereft minority of students.

First, from University of Missouri, Univ. of Missouri student: ‘Several of us are afraid to disagree with other students’ by Ian Paris.

An innocent man lost his job. Racial tensions are at an all time high. Faculty members refuse to acknowledge students’ First Amendment rights. Campus authorities are policing speech.

This is my reality as a student at the University of Missouri.

I believe in liberty for all people, but the current climate on campus runs counter to that. Some friends tell me they are afraid to voice their opinions lest they come under fire from the administration or peers – or the police.

The University of Missouri police department sent an email urging students to report offensive or hurtful speech – not because it is illegal – but so the Office of Student Conduct could take disciplinary action against these students.

Several of us are afraid to disagree with other students, who in turn may report us to the authorities so we can be “dealt with.” Many students have told me they are also afraid to speak out against the protest narrative, afraid they will be called “racist” and become campus pariahs.

What’s lost is honest dialogue.

Those of us who want to support on some level the protesters’ pain bristle at their disregard for the First Amendment and freedom of the press and willingness to listen to others.

The “safe space” built at Mizzou means dissenting voices are decried as “racist,” “offensive” or “hurtful.” Students face diversity reeducation, pending expulsion.

Speech on my campus has become limited, not just on the quad. Grad students refuse to dissent from the opinions of liberal professors lest they lose their position, for example.

This is not an Orwellian dystopian novel – this is the climate of the University of Missouri, and it’s the reality that I, and my fellow students, face every day.

Even better is the piece, We Dissent by the Editorial Board of the Claremont Independent.

First they dress down the administration for their cowardice, failure to lead and hypocrisy including:

Second, President Chodosh. We were disappointed to see you idly stand by and watch students berate, curse at, and attack Dean Spellman for being a “racist.” For someone who preaches about “leadership” and “personal and social responsibility,” your actions are particularly disappointing. You let your colleague, someone who has been helping your administration for the past three years and the college for six years, be publicly mocked and humiliated. Why? Because you were afraid. You were afraid that students would also mock and humiliate you if you defended Dean Spellman, so you let her be thrown under the bus. You were so afraid that it only took you five minutes to flip-flop on their demand for a temporary “safe space” on campus. Your fear-driven action (or lack thereof) only further reinforced the fear among the student body to speak out against this movement. We needed your leadership more than ever this week, and you failed us miserably.

Too often in academia, empty talk and platitudes is all that is served up. People are distanced from reality and from the concomitant need to act with courage, agency and responsibility.

They finish by addressing the students of Claremont, both the unreasoning rabble as well as the silent majority of bystanders.

To our fellow Claremont students, we are disappointed in you as well. We are ashamed of you for trying to end someone’s career over a poorly worded email. This is not a political statement––this is a person’s livelihood that you so carelessly sought to destroy. We are disappointed that you chose to scream and swear at your administrators. That is not how adults solve problems, and your behavior reflects poorly on all of us here in Claremont. This is not who we are and this is not how we conduct ourselves, but this is the image of us that has now reached the national stage.

We are disappointed in your demands. If you want to take a class in “ethnic, racial, and sexuality theory,” feel free to take one, but don’t force such an ideologically driven course on all CMC students. If the dearth of such courses at CMC bothers you, maybe you should have chosen a different school. If students chose to attend Caltech and then complained about the lack of literature classes, that’s on them. And though it wouldn’t hurt to have a more diverse faculty, the demand that CMC increase the number of minority faculty members either rests on the assumption that CMC has a history of discriminating against qualified professors of color, or, more realistically, it advocates for the hiring of less qualified faculty based simply on the fact that they belong to marginalized groups. A hiring practice of this sort would not benefit any CMC students, yourselves included.

We are disappointed in the fact that your movement has successfully managed to convince its members that anyone who dissents does so not for intelligent reasons, but due to moral failure or maliciousness. We are disappointed that you’ve used phrases like “silence is violence” to not only demonize those who oppose you, but all who are not actively supporting you. We are most disappointed, however, in the rhetoric surrounding “safe spaces.” College is the last place that should be a safe space. We come here to learn about views that differ from our own, and if we aren’t made to feel uncomfortable by these ideas, then perhaps we aren’t venturing far enough outside of our comfort zone. We would be doing ourselves a disservice to ignore viewpoints solely on the grounds that they may make us uncomfortable, and we would not be preparing ourselves to cope well with adversity in the future. Dealing with ideas that make us uncomfortable is an important part of growing as students and as people, and your ideas will inhibit opportunities for that growth.

We are adults, and we need to be mature enough to take ownership of and responsibility for our feelings, rather than demanding that those around us cater to our individual needs. The hypocrisy of advocating for “safe spaces” while creating an incredibly unsafe space for President Chodosh, former Dean Spellman, the student who was “derailing,” and the news media representatives who were verbally abused unfortunately seemed to soar over many of your heads.

Lastly, we are disappointed in students like ourselves, who were scared into silence. We are not racist for having different opinions. We are not immoral because we don’t buy the flawed rhetoric of a spiteful movement. We are not evil because we don’t want this movement to tear across our campuses completely unchecked.

We are no longer afraid to be voices of dissent.

Wretched as these sad protests against the chimerae of illusory hatreds might be, perhaps the silver lining is the spur it might serve to remind people of the everlasting need to defend liberty against the hand of tyrants who would suppress others.

Then you grow up

From Can We Start Taking Political Correctness Seriously Now? by Jonathan Chait. Nice to see a mainstream liberal stand up so clearly for freedom of speech and against the Heckler's Veto that so many university students of the postmodernist ilk seem to wish to exercise.

The upsurge of political correctness is not just greasy-kid stuff, and it’s not just a bunch of weird, unfortunate events that somehow keep happening over and over. It’s the expression of a political culture with consistent norms, and philosophical premises that happen to be incompatible with liberalism. The reason every Marxist government in the history of the world turned massively repressive is not because they all had the misfortune of being hijacked by murderous thugs. It’s that the ideology itself prioritizes class justice over individual rights and makes no allowance for legitimate disagreement. (For those inclined to defend p.c. on the grounds that racism and sexism are important, bear in mind that the forms of repression Marxist government set out to eradicate were hardly imaginary.)

American political correctness has obviously never perpetrated the brutality of a communist government, but it has also never acquired the powers that come with full control of the machinery of the state. The continuous stream of small-scale outrages it generates is a testament to an illiberalism that runs deep down to its core (a character I tried to explain in my January essay).

The scene in Columbia and the recent scene in New Haven share a similar structure: jeering student mobs expressing incredulity at the idea of political democracy. As far as the students are concerned, they represent the cause of anti-racism, a fact that renders the need for debate irrelevant. Defenses of p.c. tactics simply sweep aside objections to the tactics as self-interested whining.

Just about across the spectrum we are seeing solid condemnation of the authoritarian tactics in evidence at Yale and Missouri State University. Consequently there is more accord in the comments sections than is normally the case. While there are plenty Mr. Wilson commentators (of Dennis the Menace fame; "get off my lawn") there is actually some useful observations as well, including

mohammed.noori
William Perry used to write about this stuff in the 1970s (he was a student counselor at Harvard). What's happening at Yale is a natural part of the learning process in higher education. This relates to students' conceptions of knowledge and how these conceptions develop and deepen as people successfully move through various stages of human development.

Perry suggests that students move through three stages:

1) a dualistic view of knowledge as right and wrong which is the responsibility of an authority to arbitrate.
2) as open view of knowledge as a multiplicity of positions of equal value;
3) a relativisitic view of knowledge as contextualized, requiring a personal commitment to align it with ones personal values.

Following Perry's framework, the altercation between the student and the resident "house parents" looks like the students are still at the dualistic phase while the residents, as one would expect, have a relativistic view. These views are incommensurate, hence the conflict.

William Perry passed away in 1998. Here is his obituary. Sounds like an estimable man. The book from which Mohammed summarizes is Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years by William G. Perry.
The True Believer loves dualism and sees everything through that lens. Life is so much simpler when you can cram everyone into two simplistic boxes, Good and Bad. Then you grow up.

You don't want bring a "political gesture" to a gunfight

I find the blogger Ace of Spades a little much. Not necessarily wrong per se but that his arguments are often needlessly provocative, incendiary and/or belittling of his opponents. He uses a bludgeon where mockery might do. His recent rant is against, well against a lot targets, but starting with John Oliver, John Oliver, Last Month: Boy, Those Fox Chuckleheads Sure Are Paranoid Ninnies to Think That Terrorists Might Smuggle Themselves Into Europe With the Rufugees! And Ace of Spades is right. Within just the past few weeks, left leaning media and bloggers have been mocking the concerns from the right that terrorists would take advantage of the refugee invasion in Europe to slip in some terrorists to wreak havoc. This despite the occasional terrorist being caught up in the security nets.

So now the right leaning critics are vindicated in their concerns. For all his crowing and bluster, Ace of Spades does have some interesting commentary about the epistemic closure which prevented left leaning utopianists from seeing the risk in the first place and which now is blinding them to acknowledging that the risk was indeed real. To the point that they do appear to be simply falling back into a mental safe room where synthetic reality accords more with their expectations. Ace of Spades:

He mocked the idea that terrorists would, or could, infiltrate Europe with Syrian migrants, and invited his flock to laugh at the heathens who thought maybe they could.

Well, despite having a 48 hour lead time, John Oliver wasn't quite ready to address the Paris attacks in last night's show. So he just did a two minute segment in which he called the terrorists "f***ing assholes" and praised the French for their pastries.

He then said, "If you're picking a Lifestyle and Culture war with the French, good luck!"

[snip]

They don't seem to notice that IS did not mount a "Lifestyle and Culture war" against the French; rather, they have, in a series of attacks over the past year (remember Charlie Hebdo?), launched an actual war, a bullet and bomb war, against France.

Yes, John Oliver, the French culture is immensely superior to the joyless death-cult of the Islamists. Well-spotted, as they might say in England (and bien vu as they'd say in France.

But unfortunately, a war is not won when two sides get together on the field of battle and show off to each other who produces the best pastries, the best fashion, the best Progressive Televangelist Rants which "DESTROY" the opponent, nor the best #HashtagMemes.

Wars are not won or lost the way gang wars are won or lost in 80s movies, that is to say, with a dance-off.

They are won with guns and with men capable of and willing to use those guns.

[snip]

It's not that the left is so stupid as to be incapable of understanding reality; though that does, of course, play into it. The problem is that they are a Manichean religious cult which has certain extreme religious views, and anyone questioning those views will be deemed heretic and thrown out of the cult and ostracized.

So it's more a failure of moral and intellectual courage than of intellectual capacity. They could see the truth, and they could possibly speak the truth, but they are, as C.S. Lewis observed, Men Without Chests.

The faux intellectual class is in fact studiously anti-intellectual; they are simply the most degenerate sort of priestly class, the priests who do not actually read or study, but just pass what seems like wisdom from one stupid mouth to one imbecile ear.

It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.

They're not stupid, so much as they are cowards; and the ultimate retreat for the ultimate coward is the full flight from reality, the retreat to the #SafeSpace of fuzzy dreams of the way they wish the world were.

[snip]

But as I keep saying, a coward will flee a fight, but the ultimate in cowardice is a full-speed flight from reality. The ordinary coward flees the fight; the new breed of coward claims there was never a fight in the first place to flee, it was just a #FalseRacistNarrative.

And having appalled us all not just with their physical cowardice (which is understandable enough) but their ontological cowardice as well, these simpering assholes then have to pollute the world further with their six billionth treacly, truckling rendition of Imagine.

Well, yeah.

By happenstance, the very next article I happened to read was an opinion piece in the New York Times which, rather inadvertently, supported Ace of Spades' point. France's War Within by Sylvie Kauffmann.

Except this was not any November Sunday. In hospitals, doctors were still fighting to save the lives of those seriously wounded in the worst terrorist attacks ever carried out in the city, which left at least 129 people dead and 352 injured. “Let Us Resist” proclaimed the headline of a local paper, Le Parisien. In shock, Parisians had mostly stayed indoors on Saturday night, but Sunday was different: They chose to resist by living normally and going out, defying fear. Ordering a glass of wine at café terraces, the very type of place the gunmen targeted Friday, quietly became a political gesture.

Under the newly declared state of emergency, rallies in Paris were banned for five days. Yet people also defied this order: By late afternoon on Sunday, several thousand had gathered at the Place de la République, near where most of the attacks occurred, lighting candles and singing “La Marseillaise.” Trying to live normally, yet on the edge: Shortly before 7 p.m., a rumor spread that a gunman was attacking a café nearby. People fled in panic, desperately seeking shelter. Half an hour later, they were back.

Don't bring a "political gesture" to a gunfight.

I get that in the face of tragedy, you don't want to simply ignore it but that your choice of actions that are not clichéd or maudlin are limited.

However, the hard question is whether any of these actions will prevent a recurrence of the tragedy or mitigate the consequences. They won't.

We are stuck with the tragic position encapsulated in the old English adage:

Meek Michael thought it wrong to fight.
Bully Bill, who killed him, thought it right.

Gestures won't resolve this conundrum, only hard choices. By all means, take the time, consider deeply, proceed cautiously. But take action, don't just make gestures.

Good intentions leading to bad outcomes - school discipline edition

We have a lot of people, including political leaders, who are desperately eager to incite racial division among Americans by touting racism as somehow inherent in the entire culture of the US and bred in the bone of all institutions. Of course the argument is substantially nonsense and in many cases easily refuted, but it is a siren song to those Gramscian devotees of the Frankfurt School and it's unfortunate ideological offspring (third wave feminism, critical theory, critical race theory, postmodernism, etc.).

In the past year the Department of Justice has attempted to rectify, across all schools in the nation, racial disparities of punishment. The argument is that A) there is a racial disparity whereby more black students are punished than white (true) and B) that this disparity occurs because of the inherent racism of the public school system and its administrators (asserted but not proven, with much refuting evidence).

The argument is tenuous on its face. Thats a lot of systemic racism operating across the 13,500 locally operated school districts in the US. It's believable if that is what you ideologically want to believe, but what about some actual evidence? There is very little of that. The reason it is important to establish an evidentiary base is that you can end up doing a lot of harm if you have the wrong root cause. We have a lot of well-intended romantic utopianists who want to take the authority to make things better for third-party victims but who don't actually know what they are doing and end up harming the intended beneficiaries of their actions more often than not.

A statistician writing under the nom de plume, Random Critical Analysis, has evidence that suggests that there is an alternative and stronger root cause than racism. He outlines his argument in On the relationship between school suspensions, race, single-motherhood, and more.

Blacks get suspended at vastly disproportionate rates whereas “asians” (census/OMB definition), on the other hand, are about half as likely as whites are to get suspended. Contrary to conventional wisdom, though, this pattern tends to be pretty consistent nation wide and the south is not notably “worse” with respect to disparities here.

[snip]

If you actually look at the department of education’s own map you will see very little sign of regional bias in places with significant concentrations of blacks. If anything the disparities (without adjusting for anything), tend to be larger in the northeast and the midwest (see table above).

[snip]

Schools with higher proportions of black students (chosen at random) are more likely to have appreciably more discipline citations. This tends to suggest that this is a broad national pattern and that racial demographics accounts for much of the variance.

[snip]

This despite the fact that these mostly black districts are much more likely to be populated with black teachers, principals, etc (unfortunately I don’t have national data at this level of detail!). If these suspensions are mostly grounded in real behavioral problems, as I suspect they are, they are likely to have negative consequences for other students in the classrooms (especially other blacks since they are far more likely to be in class with the misbehaving students).

RCA then gets to the rub of his/her argument:

If we plot the black suspension rate directly by percentage of single-mothers in the school district (all races/ethnicities)…

[snip]

Annoyingly I’ve yet to find a decent way to get non-hispanic white suspension rates for all districts from them yet, but it is nonetheless quite obvious that the single-motherhood rate is a strong predictor across the country.

It predicts overall suspension rates better than percent black, better than (child) poverty rates, better than parent education rates (% w/ bachelors+), and so and so forth.

[snip]

I am deeply skeptical of the notion that racial discrimination explains much of the differences in outcomes here, particularly when we observe such vast differences in strong predictors like single-motherhood and see similar patterns with other racial-ethnic groups (even when it works against whites, as in the case of “asians”). Now it may be that single-motherhood is operating mostly as a proxy for other differences, but there is some evidence that it is more than that (or see here for more info). Regardless, it seems unreasonable to leap to the assumption that differences in outcomes are the fault of racism on the part of teachers, administrators, and the like when we have good evidence that the outcomes can be mostly explained with readily available observables like this (even more so when it’s quite widely known that there are substantial statistical differences in behaviors between groups today).

This analysis makes clear why it is so important to have an evidence based case for the proposed root causes. Racial discrimination has been explicitly illegal in schools for fifty years and more. Where teachers and administrators discriminate based on race, they can, and are, brought to justice. But there aren't that many cases anymore. Some, but not many. If there is little evidence of actual racial discrimination, then trying to force schools to reduce their discipline rules because it disproportionately affects black students, particularly if there is evidence that the root causes for unruly behavior lie elsewhere, becomes a government sanctioned mechanism to degrade the learning environment of all the other students who are not misbehaving. Another instance of good intentions leading to bad outcomes.