History

Southern Pacific passenger train, 1940's. pic.twitter.com/eMI5BP1YVR

— World Of History (@UmarBzv) May 11, 2023

 

I see wonderful things

Goniurellia tridens is a species of fruit flies.

Each wing is transparent and bears a precisely detailed image of an ant-like insect. While flying, the ants appear to walk and deter predators.

[source: https://t.co/7wxLPEsHs3]
[📷 P. Roosenschoon] pic.twitter.com/wkYoNJariw

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) May 11, 2023

 

All the pretty little lies

The Great Revealing continues to unveil deceits.  From Say Farewell To The "Diversity Benefits" Rationale For Affirmative Action by Josh Blackman.  The subheading is The majority and dissent state the quiet part out loud: affirmative action was never about the educational benefits from diversity.

For nearly five decades, affirmative action was sustained on the opinion of Justice Louis Powell. The key vote in Bakke thought that a diverse student body could improve learning on campus. Ultimately, Grutter adopted Justice Powell's rationale, and held that universities have a compelling interest to pursue the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body. That simple premise spawned an entire institution around "diversity." Universities were forced to frame every decision they took in terms of using "diversity" as a way to help students learn. Of course, the real justification for affirmation action could be found in Justice Marshall's Bakke opinion. He grounded racial preferences for black students (and not other races) in the centuries of oppression, slavery, segregation, and discrimination. Indeed, the "educational benefits" approach tokenized minority students as curiosities for white students to learn from. Advocates for affirmative action had to grit their teeth to stay in the good graces of old white folk like Justices Powell and O'Connor.

[snip]

It was to be expected that the majority would discard the "educational benefits" rationale. But I was surprised at how little that rationale opinion featured in the dissents. Justices Sotomayor and Jackson wrote at length about white supremacy, institutional racism, and other reasons to justify affirmative action. But the purported benefits that can be obtained in the classroom were not on center stage. The phrase "educational benefits" appears only four times in Justice Sotomayor's dissent, and zero times in Justice Jackson's dissent.  Indeed, as Chief Justice Roberts pointed out, Justice Sotomayor cited Justice Powell "barely once," while Justice Jackson "ignores Justice Powell altogether." Rather, the dissenters rely almost exclusively on Justice Marshall's dissent. Under well-settled law, the universities have not invoked any sort of "remedial" interest. To the contrary, the dissenters adopted the en vogue theory that our society is plagued by structural racism and the Fourteenth Amendment must be interpreted to remedy that oppression. Chief Justice Roberts observed that "there is a reason" the dissenters have to rely on Justice Marshall's dissent, because they "surely cannot claim the mantle of stare decisis."

[snip]

Going forward, can we drop the "educational benefits" charade? No one ever actually believed that racial preferences were justified by those purported benefits. But if not "educational benefits," then what compelling interest would suffice? The more I read the Chief's opinion, the more I conclude that no interest would suffice. 

It was all a lie.  Racial diversity does not create educational benefits.  But for decades it was an accepted fig leaf.  

Offbeat Humor

Click to enlarge.

Data Talks

An astonishing release of discovery documents revealed a vast federal censorship army, with more than 80 officials across at least 11 agencies having secretly been given privileged status and special channels to censor speech on social media platforms.https://t.co/tWc3N4IlFb

— Michael P Senger (@michaelpsenger) May 11, 2023

 

Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells And sights, before the dark of reason grows

From Captured by Bells by John Betjeman, Chapter IV, page 33.

Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells 

And sights, before the dark of reason grows. 

Ears! Hear again the wild sou'westers whine! 

Three days on end would the September gale 

Slam at our bungalows; three days on end 

Rattling cheap doors and making tempers short. 

It mattered not, for then enormous waves 

House-high rolled thunderous on Greenaway, 

Flinging up spume and shingle to the cliffs. 

Unmoved amid the foam, the cormorant 

Watched from its peak. In all the roar and swirl 

The still and small things gained significance. 

Somehow the freckled cowrie would survive 

And prawns hang waiting in their watery woods; 

Deep in the noise there was a core of peace; 

Deep in my heart a warm security. 

Nose! Smell again the early morning smells: 

Congealing bacon and my father's pipe; 

The after-breakfast freshness out of doors 

Where sun had dried the heavy dew and freed 

Acres of thyme to scent the links and lawns; 

The rotten apples on our shady path 

Where blowflies settled upon squashy heaps, 

Intent and gorging; at the garden gate 

Reek of Solignum on the wooden fence; 

Mint round the spring, and fennel in the lane, 

And honeysuckle wafted from the hedge; 

The Lynams' cess-pool like a body-blow; 

Then, clean, medicinal and cold the sea. 

"Breathe in the ozone, John. It's iodine." 

But which is iodine and which is drains? 

Salt and hot sun on rubber water-wings . 

Home to the luncheon smell of Irish stew 

And washing-up stench from the kitchen sink 

Because the sump is blocked. The afternoons 

Brought coconut smell of gorse; at Mably's farm 

Sweet scent of drying cowdung; then the moist 

Exhaling of the earth in Shilla woods —

First earth encountered after days of sand. 

Evening brought back the gummy smell of toys 

And fishy stink of glue and Stickphast paste, 

And sleep inside the laundriness of sheets. 

Eyes! See again the rock-face in the lane, 

Years before tarmac and the motor-car. 

Across the estuary Stepper Point 

Stands, still unquarried, black against the sun; 

On its Atlantic face the cliffs fall sheer. 

Look down into the weed world of the lawn —

The devil's-coach-horse beetle hurries through 

Lifting its tail up as I bar the way 

To further flowery jungles. See once more 

The Padstow ferry, worked by oar and sail, 

Her outboard engine always going wrong, 

Ascend the slippery quay's up-ended slate, 

The sea-weed hanging from the harbour wall. 

Hot was the pavement under, as I gazed 

At lanterns, brass, rope and ships' compasses 

In the marine-store window on the quay. 

The shoe-shop in the square was cool and dark. 

The Misses Quintrell, fancy stationers, 

Had most to show me — dialect tales in verse 

Published in Truro (Netherton and Worth) 

And model lighthouses of serpentine. 

Climb the steep hill to where that belt of elm 

Circles the town and church tower, reached by lanes 

'Whose ferny ramparts shelter toadflax flowers 

And periwinkles. See hydrangeas bloom 

In warm back-gardens full of fuchsia bells. 

To the returning ferry soon draws near 

Our own low bank of sand-dunes; then the walk 

Over a mile of quicksand evening-cold. 

It all is there, excitement for the eyes, 

Imagined ghosts on unfrequented roads 

Gated and winding up through broom and gorse 

Out of the parish, on to who knows where? 

What pleasure, as the oil-lamp sparkled gold 

On cut-glass tumblers and the flip of cards, 

To feel protected from the night outside: 

Safe Cornish holidays before the storm! 

Heuristics are cognitive short-cutting strategies especially adaptive under the time and resource limitations but which occasionally fail

From Achieving quality in clinical decision making: cognitive strategies and detection of bias by Pat Croskerry.  From the Abstract: 

Clinical decision making is a cornerstone of high-quality care in emergency medicine. The density of decision making is unusually high in this unique milieu, and a combination of strategies has necessarily evolved to manage the load. In addition to the traditional hypothetico-deductive method, emergency physicians use several other approaches, principal among which are heuristics. These cognitive short-cutting strategies are especially adaptive under the time and resource limitations that prevail in many emergency departments (EDs), but occasionally they fail. When they do, we refer to them as cognitive errors. They are costly but highly preventable. It is important that emergency physicians be aware of the nature and extent of these heuristics and biases, or cognitive dispositions to respond (CDRs). Thirty are catalogued in this article, together with descriptions of their properties as well as the impact they have on clinical decision making in the ED. Strategies are delineated in each case, to minimize their occurrence. Detection and recognition of these cognitive phenomena are a first step in achieving cognitive de-biasing to improve clinical decision making in the ED.

An alternate source with access to the report is here.  

The thirty cognitive errors are:

Aggregate bias

Anchoring

Ascertainment bias

Availability and nonavailability

Base-rate neglect

Commission bias

Confirmation bias

Diagnosis momentum

Fundamental attribution error

Gambler’s fallacy

Gender bias

Hindsight bias

Multiple alternatives bias

Omission bias

Order effects

Outcome bias

Overconfidence bias

Playing the odds

Posterior probability error

Premature closure

Psych-out error

Representativeness

restraint

Search satisfying

Sutton’s slip

Triage-cueing

Unpacking principle

Vertical line failure

Visceral bias

Yin–yang out

Zebra retreat

Each bias is defined, and described with consequences identified and mitigations recommended.

Aggregate bias is defined and noted as synonymous with Ecological Fallacy.  The definition/discussion is:

The aggregate fallacy is when associations between variables representing group averages are mistakenly taken to reflect what is true for a particular individual, usually when individual measures are not available. Physicians may use the aggregate bias to rationalize treat- ing an individual patient differently from what has been agreed upon through clinical practice guidelines for a group of patients (i.e., there is a tendency for some physicians to treat their own patients as atypical). However, the aggregate fallacy argument does not apply because clinical practice guidelines have been established on individual data. Further, the clinician’s behavior may be augmented by a patient’s demanding behavior. Thus, a particular patient judged to have a viral upper respiratory tract infection may be treated with an antibiotic for perverse (irrational) reasons, or a patient with an ankle sprain who doesn’t satisfy the Ottawa Ankle Rules may be x-rayed. The aggregate bias may be compounded by those with a commission bias, who have a tendency to want to be seen as ‘‘doing something’’ for the patient.

Well worth reading in whole for a discussion of real world consequences to misapplied heuristics, biases, and cognitive dispositions to respond.

Unknown title, 2023 by Lee Madgwick (British)

Unknown title, 2023 by Lee Madgwick (British)

Click to enlarge.

Upper Volta with rockets

The phrase Upper Volta with Rockets has circulated over the years but with uncertain attribution.  The phrase conveys the idea of weak and retrograde governance in charge of lethal technology.  Upper Volta was the earlier name of what is now Burkina Faso in West Africa.

I came across the origin of the phrase:

Date: Thu, 18 Feb 1999 

From: "Xan Smiley" <XanSmiley@economist.com> 

Subject: Upper Volta with Rockets

I notice that the phrase "Upper Volta with rockets" has popped up a few

times recently in DJL, with occasional passing discussion as to its

origins. Henry Kissinger, Helmut Schmidt and even Mikhail Gorbachev have

been cited as the phrase's inventor.

Sorry, but it was I who first put it into public print. It was in the

summer of 1987, I think, when I was the correspondent in Moscow (1986-89)

for The Daily Telegraph (London) and The Sunday Telegraph. The phrase

caused some enjoyable offence at the time, and I was castigated for my

"rabid anti-Sovietism" etc in the Soviet press.

In fact, I had previously heard a thought expressed rather similarly by a

non-journalist woman who happened to be a Zimbabwean, and I thought I'd

play with it. Bad luck that the Upper Voltans had actually been calling

their country Burkina Faso for quite some time. But poor Upper Volta had a

more hopeless and comic ring to it.

Anyway, I don't see why the aforementioned bigwigs should get the credit

for it, if credit it is!

yours sincerely

Xan Smiley

Europe Editor

The Economist

Xan Smiley of the Economist!

Economic path dependence and persistence

From Income and inequality in the Aztec Empire on the eve of the Spanish conquest by Guido Alfani and  Alfonso Carballo.  From the Abstract:

Today, Latin American countries are characterized by relatively high levels of economic inequality. This circumstance has often been considered a long-run consequence of the Spanish conquest and of the highly extractive institutions imposed by the colonizers. Here we show that, in the case of the Aztec Empire, high inequality predates the Spanish conquest, also known as the Spanish–Aztec War. We reach this conclusion by estimating levels of income inequality and of imperial extraction across the empire. We find that the richest 1% earned 41.8% of the total income, while the income share of the poorest 50% was just 23.3%. We also argue that those provinces that had resisted the Aztec expansion suffered from relatively harsh conditions, including higher taxes, in the context of the imperial system—and were the first to rebel, allying themselves with the Spaniards. Existing literature suggests that after the Spanish conquest, the colonial elites inherited pre-existing extractive institutions and added additional layers of social and economic inequality.

There is a field of research which argues, with some decent data, that date of adoption of technology is a predictor of later national income levels.  If a region adopted Iron in 1500 BC, you can use that information to forecast its world rank in income in 2000.

Similarly, there is the work of Gregory Clark which demonstrates the persistence of advantageous behavioral traits across many generations either due to assortative mating and gene selection or due to family culture persistence.  

This research would seem to support the idea of economic system trade-off persistence.