Data Talks

Happy Sunday. pic.twitter.com/E4yQQl9F57

— Crémieux (@cremieuxrecueil) November 19, 2023

 

Eleanor of Toledo and her son Giovanni de' Medici, 1544 by Agnolo Bronzino

Eleanor of Toledo and her son Giovanni de' Medici, 1544 by Agnolo Bronzino

Click to enlarge.

Winter Day in the Forest, with a Woman Carrying Firewood, 1936 by Peder Mørk Mønsted (Danish, 1859-1941)

Winter Day in the Forest, with a Woman Carrying Firewood, 1936 by Peder Mørk Mønsted (Danish, 1859-1941) 

Click to enlarge.

Scarce societal resources have been wasted due to mistaken beliefs about the power and prevalence of unconscious bias

From Stretching the Limits of Science: Was the Implicit-Racism Debate a “Bridge Too Far” for Social Psychology? by Gregory Mitchell and Philip E. Tetlock.

Ask an employee of any public company if the topic of unconscious bias came up in the company’s most recent diversity training session, and chances are good that she will respond “yes” (see, e.g., Zelevansky, 2019). Review the contents of the student orientation program at any liberal arts college, and you will probably find a session devoted to the pernicious effects of unconscious bias (see, e.g., Rao, 2020). Search the New York Times website for the phrase “unconscious bias” and more than 250 articles will appear. Interview anyone who regularly watches MSNBC about the causes of racial inequalities in the United States, and we would wager a week’s pay that unconscious bias will be mentioned as an important cause (cf. Kam & Engelhardt, Chapter 29 this volume; Baskakova et al., Chapter 28, this volume). Review articles from the last ten years of any randomly selected social science journal outside psychology (yes, even an economics journal), and we would wager an even larger sum that multiple articles discuss the significance of unconscious bias. If you dig deep enough, you will find a common source for all these references to unconscious bias: research using an Implicit Association Test (“IAT”) (Greenwald et al., 1998).

After doing one of these tasks to verify that “unconscious bias” figures prominently in public understandings of racism, interview a reasonably well-informed social psychologist and ask whether the racial attitudes IAT (or “the race IAT”) measures unconscious bias, whether an individual’s score on the race IAT reliably predicts that person’s behavior during interracial interactions, whether the race IAT measures the strength of category associations within one’s mind or something about the ambient social environment, and whether training sessions on implicit bias prevent implicit bias. For reasons discussed in this book (e.g., Arkes, Chapter 11 this volume; Fazio et al., Chapter 2 this volume; Jussim et al., Chapter 13 this volume; Meissner & Rothermund, Chapter 18 this volume; Wolsiefer & Blair, Chapter 8 this volume) and elsewhere (e.g., Blanton & Jaccard, 2008; Corneille & Hütter, 2020; Forscher et al., 2019; Hahn et al., 2014; Lai et al., 2014; Schimmack, 2021; Tetlock & Mitchell, 2009), the informed psychologist should answer “no” or “I don’t know” to all these questions. 
 
How did we reach this place where public understanding of what the race IAT reveals about racism and how to combat it diverges so greatly from that of the scientifically well-informed? And where do we go from here? We reflect on the highly successful, and highly misleading, public education campaign associated with the race IAT and why the psychological research community was so slow to react to unsubstantiated claims about the potency and pervasiveness of unconscious racism. Scarce societal resources, including opportunities to develop effective interventions to address ongoing inequities, have been wasted due to mistaken beliefs about the power and prevalence of unconscious bias – beliefs attributable to social psychology’s valorization of the race IAT and failure to correct unwarranted speculation about what the race IAT reveals.

History

Golden bust of Emperor Marcus Aurelius from Avenches, western Switzerland, is going on display at the Getty. It is the largest known bust of an emperor made of a precious metal and one of only a handful of gold busts to escape being melted down.

Bust was found in a sewer… pic.twitter.com/hLJGTJYy7G

— Archaeo - Histories (@archeohistories) December 4, 2023

 

Choosing to ignore attention seeking surveys which offer misleading results

Many good points.  Easier to read the short essay than to summarize.  From Don't Put too Much Stock in Survey Finding that 67% of 18-24-Year-Olds Say Jews are "Oppressors".  by Ilya Somin.  The subheading is The much-cited Harvard-Harris poll question has flawed wording,and is at odds with other, better surveys.

Among the important points is this:

A second problem is that the question uses terminology ("oppressors," "ideology") that may not be familiar to respondents who don't follow politics closely (which many studies show a large percentage of the public does not). If you're reading this post, you probably do follow politics closely, and may find it hard to believe that anyone is unfamiliar with terms like "ideology." Perhaps that's also true of all or most of your friends and relatives. Maybe none of them would be confused about such things, either.

But, if so, you and your social circle are highly unrepresentative. Most of the general public is not like that. A majority of Americans can't name the three branches of government, don't know when the Civil War happened, and support mandatory labeling of food containing DNA (the latter probably because they don't understand what DNA is). Political scientists also find that most of the public has little understanding of such basic political concepts as "liberal" and "conservative." It would not be surprising if the same was true of many survey respondents' understanding of "oppressor" and "ideology," though admittedly I haven't seen research specifically focused on these terms.

Political enthusiasts overlap closely with those who are either politicians or whose livelihoods are largely dependent on politics.  They are noisy about politics and also a small minority and unrepresentative of the average American and their concerns.  This isolation from the norm is routinely overlooked.

The point of small numbers of individuals driving impressions is universal and not limited to the question of antisemitism.

If anti-Semitic sentiment is actually much lower than the result on the "oppressor" question suggests, why the dramatic increase in anti-Semitic incidents since the war started? The answer is that a small minority of the public does have anti-Semitic views, and those become more salient at a time when Israel and Jews are highly prominent in the news cycle. Much research shows that, when a set of attitudes become more salient due to current events, people are more likely to act on them. Moreover, the far-left variant of anti-Semitism is disproportionately represented on college campuses (which have a higher proportion of far-leftists than the general population), thus accounting for the relatively high number of incidents there.

The actions of a small but virulent and galvanized minority of bigots can still cause pain and—in extreme cases—lead to horrific hate crimes. That's a genuine problem. But it should not lead us to give undue credence to dubious survey results that make anti-Semitism seem much more widespread than is actually likely to be the case.

An Insight

We have an entire class of journalists that believes that nothing is real, and that everything is about words, and that the public’s obvious concern about the tangible problems that are in front of their eyes is invariably about something else. https://t.co/z1csFjTb1Z

— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) November 18, 2023

 

War induced technology of management

An interesting argument.  From Creating the “American Way” of Business: Evidence from WWII in the U.S. by Michela Giorcelli.  From the Abstract:

The Second World War II (WWII) was arguably one of the largest shocks to the U.S. economic and production system in history. Historians, business historians, and economists have largely discussed the stimulus that WWII had on U.S. technological advancements. However, its effect on U.S. ‘‘managerial technology’’ innovations has been largely ignored, except for very few qualitative works. In this paper, I argue that ‘‘managerial technology’’ played a key role in shaping U.S. WWII production and its capacity to defeat some of the most advanced economies in the world. The large-scale diffusion of innovative management practices to US firms involved in war production acted as a technology that put them on a higher growth path for decades. Moreover, it made U.S. managerial practices internationally distinctive and helped create the so-called “American Way” of business, which was exported to war-torn European and Japanese economies in the war aftermath.

I see wonderful things

#DYK? A flock of flamingos is called a flamboyance! With their bright pink feathers, long legs, and graceful necks, these colorful birds command attention wherever they go. The world's largest flamingo colony can be found in Tanzania, where 2 million+ birds have been observed. pic.twitter.com/rFnT2TFD2X

— American Museum of Natural History (@AMNH) November 18, 2023

 

With an additional twelve months, what do we now know?

As we approach the end of the year it is natural to do some cognitive housekeeping.  What mysteries or issues did we consider at the beginning of the year which might have been answered?  Which mysteries of issues do we exit the year with unresolved?

I missed this summary from the beginning of the year, neatly wrapping up many of the issues attached to our disastrous public health and governmental response to Covid-19.  From America's COVID Response Was Based on Lies by Scott W. Atlas.

Here are the 10 biggest falsehoods—known for years to be false, not recently learned or proven to be so—promoted by America's public health leaders, elected and unelected officials, and now-discredited academics:

1. SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus has a far higher fatality rate than the flu by several orders of magnitude.

2. Everyone is at significant risk to die from this virus.

3. No one has any immunological protection, because this virus is completely new.

4. Asymptomatic people are major drivers of the spread.

5. Locking down—closing schools and businesses, confining people to their homes, stopping non-COVID medical care, and eliminating travel—will stop or eliminate the virus.

6. Masks will protect everyone and stop the spread.

7. The virus is known to be naturally occurring, and claiming it originated in a lab is a conspiracy theory.

8. Teachers are at especially high risk.

9. COVID vaccines stop the spread of the infection.

10. Immune protection only comes from a vaccine.

Let's switch to the positive perspective.  We now know with some certainty:

1. SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus has a low to moderate fatality rate.

2. The very elderly and those with multiple comoborbidities are the population with any material risk exposure.  The young and healthy had effectively zero risk.  

3. Natural immunity exists and is effective.  

4. Those without symptoms are not a significant driver of the spread.

5. Locking down schools and businesses, confining people to their homes, stopping non-COVID medical care, and eliminating travel does not stop or eliminate the virus.

6. Masks are ineffective at stopping the spread.

7. The virus is now believed to be manmade and likely an inadvertent leak from a research lab.

8. Teachers are at no greater risk than the general population.

9. COVID vaccines did not stop the spread of the virus and it is unclear the extent to which it might have reduced mortality rates or mitigated illnesses.  

10. Natural immunity can be safely cultivated without vaccines.

Those ten principles tend to be true across most communicable diseases and were truths known in advance of Covid-19.  Many known facts and general principles of public health were discarded or ignored for unknown reasons.  And with no material benefit.  

Additional things which 2023 has revealed about the Covid-19 response with greater certainty or probability include:

The importance of a public health response which addresses palliative treatment as well as a possible vaccine prevention. 

Increased certainty that the virus was man made.

The increased probability that it was an accidental release from the Wuhan Virus Institute.

The increased clarity on the education loss owing to school closures (and its concentration among the poorest households).

Increased awareness of the magnitude of the negative health consequences owing to lockdowns including obesity rates, inflated death rates, suicide rates, overdose rates, anxiety medication prescriptions, etc.  

Improved clarity about the economic cost and the logistical and supply chain disruptions arising from the lockdowns.

Emerging awareness of unintended side effects such as myocardial infarctions among young men.

Emerging awareness of unintended deaths from ventilator treatments.

Emerging awareness of the elevated death rates arising from interrupted or postponed medical treatments during the pandemic.   

Increased danger arising from coercive governmental actions abridging or transgressing constitutional rights.

Much of the government generated panic and misinformation is crumbling in the face of sustained truth-seeking.  What remains unknown is some sort of explanation for why so many government agencies and "experts" so persistently ignored well-established public health knowledge and protocols.  

What also remains unfinished is holding individuals (corporate and governmental) accountable for crimes and dereliction of duties.  We don't need a witch hunt but accountability has to be seen as real by the voting public in order for any degree of trust to be regained.