An INsight

Anotha one.

The thing about these "conspiracies," like 'kidnap Whitmer' or 'PBs go to J6,' is that we're not talking about one G-man keeping an eye on the criminals......but instead them being driven totally by the feds. https://t.co/PKkTmzJpok

— Wilfred X. Reilly, Californian (@wil_da_beast630) April 10, 2023

 

I see wonderful things

Ankole cattle also known as Watusi cattle, are a breed of cattle indigenous to East Africa. Their long horns are useful for defensive purposes as well as thermoregulation. The blood vessels in the horns help dissipate heat

📹 IG oliverwatusipic.twitter.com/Cc7E9zFvvg

— Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) April 6, 2023

 

Offbeat Humor

 

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Empiricism, logic, and reason - vive la différence

The second note capturing some floating ideas.

I read a sequence of science reports yesterday.  I am not sure just what the sequence or particular points of inspiration were (they were only relevant after the fact) but they crystalized and reinforced something I already knew but which is worth remembering.

Specifically, I have a tendency to group a series of concepts together as very closely related to one another, to the point of being almost synonymous but which are in fact very distinct from one another, with their own strengths and weaknesses.  The concepts are:

Reason

Empiricism 

Facts and evidence

Logic

Scientific Method

I group them because so often, when you are using one concept, one technique, you are frequently using one or more of the others at the same time.  

Their distinctiveness was brought home by a couple of different papers read in close time proximity to one another.  Which papers and what their topics were was essentially irrelevant.

In one paper, they were doing a thought experiment and from that experiment came up with a new idea, a new concept worth testing.  Subsequent testing proved the utility of the new idea.  

The point was that this was essentially a couple of individuals sitting in a room processing knowledge and ideas in their heads at a conceptual level, following a train of reasoning to its logical conclusions.  No equipment.  No budgets.  No books or reports with data.  It was very clean.

But that is only one means by which epistemic frontiers are pushed back.

Manipulation of facts is another - experimentation.  What happens if we mix X with Y?  There might be a logical reason for doing so.  There might be a rational reason for doing so.  There might be an experiential reason for doing so.

Then there is logic, somewhat different from reason.  Logic can also take us to interesting ways to test the frontiers of knowledge.

The point is that logic, reason, experiment - they all have different strengths and different weaknesses.  Some of the papers were strong on logic but their reasoning was tattered.  Some vice-versa.   Some had a strong empirical base but their analytical treatment was weak.

Across the dozen or so papers, it seemed obvious that each had a particular strength in terms of logic or reason or empirical fact but none of the papers treated their topic equally strongly across all three vectors.  

I suspect that that is generally true but have never particularly focused on it before.  A paper was persuasive or not.  It had good methodology or not.  It had good analytic treatment or not.  I haven't really thought papers and their respective strengths across the three vectors of empirical data, logic, and reason.

Data Talks

"Bullying is a means for mediocre scientists to rise to the top. Some star academics reached their position because they are bullies, not in spite of it." - Excellent piece about bullying in academia (and really any other professional environment). https://t.co/JTqGBaAuuf pic.twitter.com/IMu3I2KP8j

— Claudia Gonzaga-Jauregui (@cgonzagaj) April 8, 2023

 

The fundamentals

A couple of notes in passing.

The random 50 or so books I am reading currently seem to document a theme in modern human development.  Nothing especially revelatory other than that the naming conventions are slightly different.

The fifty are a mix of history (ancient and modern), economics, military history, statistics, risk, literature, poetry, travel writing, mysteries, religion, linguistics, essays, cultural studies, humor, sociology, communications, engineering, science of medicine, etc.  Despite the seemingly unconnected variety of books, topics and issues keep arising among them which emphasize the centrality and importance of

Consent of the Governed

Property Rights and Markets

Frictionless communication/Freedom of speech, religion, movement, assembly, press, etc.

Individual responsibility for actions, outcomes and consequences

Rule of Law and Equality before the Law

All familiar and well discussed topics but seemingly increasingly relevant in an environment today where academia, government bureaucracies, journalists, and public intellectuals have turned away en masse from those concepts and reverted to or demonstrated an enthusiasm for archaic forms of authoritarianism and totalitarianism.  

The seeming connection of ideas between the seemingly unconnected books is almost certainly just a product of Path Dependence and the Frequency Illusion.  Interesting none-the-less.

Hillside Magic, 1976 by Eyvind Earle

Hillside Magic, 1976 by Eyvind Earle

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Empirical Rationalist or Libertarian Crank? Or a rose by any other name . . .

Lots of good notes in today's JEP links by Arnold Kling.  I especially liked his concluding observation:

In general, economic publications have a very strong bias in favor of papers that show what government can do to solve problems. My takes reflect the fact that I have lived long enough to see urban poverty, mental illness, childhood education deficiencies, and “problems with our health care system” manage to survive in spite of all of these well-researched solutions. Or maybe I’m just an old libertarian crank

Longstanding concerns about the supposed ubiquity of online filter bubbles are not supported

There is an obsession among the punditry and academia with the need for censorship of speech.  Part of this is justified on the basis that speech is dangerous ("hate speech") and part of this is justified on the basis of the need to minimize misinformation or disinformation.

Both justifications are facially absurd and incompatible with the natural right of free speech (and the attendant freedoms of religion, assembly, etc.).  

There are four broad platforms of speech, all intertwined - 1) Print media, 2) TV media, 3) Radio, and 4) Internet and Social Media.  The authoritarian initiatives to control speech are often focused on the fourth category of the Internet and Social Media.  

Which makes this recent research interesting.  From Quantifying partisan news diets in Web and TV audiences by Daniel Muise, Homa Hosseinmardi, Baird Howland, Markus Mobius, David Rothschild, and Duncan J. Watts.  From the Abstract:

Partisan segregation within the news audience buffers many Americans from countervailing political views, posing a risk to democracy. Empirical studies of the online media ecosystem suggest that only a small minority of Americans, driven by a mix of demand and algorithms, are siloed according to their political ideology. However, such research omits the comparatively larger television audience and often ignores temporal dynamics underlying news consumption. By analyzing billions of browsing and viewing events between 2016 and 2019, with a novel framework for measuring partisan audiences, we first estimate that 17% of Americans are partisan-segregated through television versus roughly 4% online. Second, television news consumers are several times more likely to maintain their partisan news diets month-over-month. Third, TV viewers’ news diets are far more concentrated on preferred sources. Last, partisan news channels’ audiences are growing even as the TV news audience is shrinking. Our results suggest that television is the top driver of partisan audience segregation among Americans. 

Online partisan-segregation is only 4% online.  That could be a meaningful problem but at first blush does not appear so.  

And while partisanship-segregation is 17% on television, that is the media platform that is declining.

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The researchers properly discuss the various very real limitations to their investigation (it is a tangled info-ecosystem out there).  Interestingly:

These unresolved issues notwithstanding, we close by noting that any resulting inferential errors would have to be very large to alter our main conclusions regarding the relative state of partisan-segregated news consumption online and on TV. With respect to online, partisan-segregated news consumption affects at most a few percent of Americans (Fig. 1), only a few percent of those people remain partisan-segregated for more than a few months (Fig. 2), and even those few percent consume a nonnegligible fraction of nonpartisan news. Although highly concentrated consumption of highly partisan material can be a cause for concern even if it affects only a small number of people—if, say, it facilitates extremist or violent behavior— longstanding concerns about the supposed ubiquity of online filter bubbles are not supported. With respect to TV, the picture is more complicated. On the one hand, our results make clear that partisansegregated consumption is far more prevalent on TV than it is online, affecting as much as 17% of the population (Fig. 1). It is also considerably stickier and more concentrated: After 6 months, the fraction who remain partisan-segregated is several times larger than it is online (Fig. 2), and the inhabitants of the most partisan archetypes consume partisan content almost exclusively (Fig. 3). On the other hand, whether even these much larger numbers should be considered large depends very much on what they are being compared with. If one were under the impression that the entire country was living in echo chambers, for example, 17% might sound reassuringly small. Likewise, if one had assumed that an echo chamber, once inhabited, was a permanent state of affairs, then it might be reassuring to learn that three quarters of inhabitants had left after 6 months. However, viewed from another perspective—say the percentage of voters needed to sway an election—17% may seem like a very large number indeed. Between these differing interpretations, our own is that partisan segregation in TV audiences—whether it is large enough to be considered alarming—is large enough to justify TV news receiving at least the same level of scrutiny as its online counterpart.

Nothing in these results changes my default assumption. 

I have seen no data in recent years to support that there is a general danger or even issue with American media consumption and speech.  It appears to me that claims of potential danger are speculative and almost always associated with those with predicate intentions to regulate speech.  

Further, that the proliferation of platforms, channels, and mechanisms for exercising speech has been a boon for increased connectivity for all citizens with even the most remote or specialized interests.  While at the fringe there are always criminal elements who should be detected and prosecuted for that criminal activity, the volume, nature, veracity, and variety of American speech is now, probably at greatest flower since the era of broadsheets and penny newspapers.  

Until evidence emerges, it appears to me that the wish to control speech owing to a fear of Hate Speech or a fear of Misinformation is mere authoritarianism dressed up under the guise of Emotional Caring.  

History

A cuneiform tablet with a recipe for a savoury pastry pie, with a filling including bird meat, leek, onion, garlic, dill, mint, & cinnamon - sounds rather delicious. The human taste for pie is clearly longstanding - this recipe is about 3750 years old..! (📷 Yale) #Archaeology pic.twitter.com/AtSqpBSIHn

— Dr Jo Ball (@DrJEBall) April 10, 2023