Data Talks

"Keeping Your Mouth Shut: Spiraling Self-Censorship in the United States" https://t.co/0BgDb0r8LT

— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) December 19, 2023

 

Data Talks

Correlations between parenting behaviors and personality were generally not significant at this paper's pre-registered significance threshold (p < .003) and they generally weren't conventionally significant (p < .05) either. https://t.co/gQzp0Jq9kf pic.twitter.com/fy614WxyJl

— Crémieux (@cremieuxrecueil) December 18, 2023

 

I see wonderful things

The unbelievable geometry of a puffer fish skeleton.

This structure allows them to gain water inside themselves in a moment of danger and inflate. At the same time, the spikes rise and the fish becomes thorny. pic.twitter.com/oCNJQsiDW2

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) December 19, 2023

 

Decision-making cycle times and differences in risk profile

From Social Psychology and Business by Arnold Kling, his review of The Geek Way by Andrew McAfee.  

In the middle of the last century, the American economy was dominated by heavy industry, making automobiles, steel, and other manufactured goods for the mass market. The business culture that evolved in those industries stressed planning and top-down control, as John Kenneth Galbraith argued in The New Industrial State. The leaders of such firms were allocating massive amounts of capital in irreversible ways, as in the decision to build a new plant. Needing to get these decisions right, corporate leaders relied on a cumbersome evaluation process in which each proposal was examined by a cadre of division managers and their staff analysts.

Today, much of the capital in American business consists of software systems, not physical plant and equipment. Managed correctly, this software capital can be acquired—and changed—much more quickly than physical capital. This environment rewards an entirely different management culture, what McAfee calls the Geek Way, that today’s successful business leaders have arrived at.

I have not read The Geek Way.  However, I do frequently focus on the S-curve of innovation and adoption.  In 1900, if you were to introduce some new technology such as electric refrigerators, it would take 40-50 years to reach market saturation (and commoditization).  In 2000 it was more like 10-15 years.  Now it is perhaps 5-10 years.  

Very early in my consulting career I became attuned to the articulation that as a project manager, you should never let the mean time of implementation exceed the mean time of business and technological change.

Given a set of problems for which it is a solution, if you are implementing an IT solution that will take five years to become operational but the technology, market demand, and competitive threats are on shorter cycles, then you are guaranteed to be in trouble.  The solution has to be in the market before the change.

And that is increasingly hard to do.  

The quoted section above is I think a usefully true description of what has happened but there is a slightly different way of considering it.  The mean time of implementation in the real world of big capital projects which are physical have longer lead times than capital projects which are essentially digital/conceptual.  

The conclusion is probably the same but I think there is a nuance.  In both cases, the cycle time of decision-making is shortening (with all sorts of ramifications.)  Management techniques and tools have to accommodate that.

But the nature of what is being decided upon (physical assets versus digital/conceptual assets) also invite different approaches independent of the cycle times and more related because of the difference in their respective risk profiles.

The inexplicable rise and quite explicable fall

A very articulate point.  From Claudine Gay: the great DEI grift exposed by Martin Hackworth.  The subheading is, amusingly, Will no one rid us of these meddlesome thieves?

Gay’s inexplicable rise and quite explicable fall illustrate, in a difficult-to-misinterpret fashion, the plain grift that is the DEI industry.

You can explain and attempt to justify DEI in all of the highfalutin terms that you want, but in the end, it comes down to something quite simple: it’s a way for those who eschew achievement, merit, honesty, and perseverance to get ahead on the dubious grounds of identity. It’s a con game designed to pour money into the coffers of those for whom a genuine work ethic is anathema.

It's plain and simple grift, endorsed by our own government and institutions of higher education. You know, the same people who are supposed to be watching out for such things on our behalf. 

The trick is to be prepared

From On Point: Six Strategic Challenges For 2024 by Austin Bay.

The six challenges he identifies.  Click the link to read his articulation and elaboration on each.

Challenge No. 1: Imperialist powers bent on recovering lost empires (and fulfilling the grandiose dreams of their current leaders.) 2023 comment: Russia in Ukraine, China threatening Taiwan. 2024 comment: Imperial Iran bent on recovering Mesopotamia (Iraq) and Persian Gulf.

[snip]

Challenge No. 2: Radical, militant, megalomaniacal dictatorships (North Korea) and terrorist organizations (the Islamic State group) attempting to acquire weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, chemical, biological) and the ways and means to use them to kill with history-changing, lethal surprise.

Challenge No. 3: The pervasive corruption of influential but venal individuals and venal institutions in democratic nations. The corruption is so internally corrosive to these nations that timely and effective political and military response to Challenges Nos. 1 through 3 is systemically delayed, undermined or immobilized.

Challenge No. 4: Big Debt. It was No. 5 last year but it is a byproduct of No. 4's political corruption and malfeasance. 2022's hyperinflation and government budget excess justified it last year. Now the inflation is embedded in all U.S. economic action. Fact: Big Debt has become unsustainable.

Challenge No. 5: Flailing states, failed states and totally fake states immersed in anarchic violence that spills over political borders. (Note: "Flailing" means collapsing. In fake states, local thugs control the capital, the U.N. seat and little else.) 2023 comment applicable to 2024: During the past year, Mexico has been exposed as a borderline flailing state.

Challenge No. 6: America's Southern Front. In 2023, "flailing states" (states immersed in anarchic violence that spills over political borders or states unable to control their own borders) were challenge No. 2. America's southern border crisis has created a hybrid war front --California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas are a hybrid-war front line.

Hard numbers get you closer to useful truths

A very useful central repository of well-documented information which is contested rhetorically.  From Crime in the USA by Inquisitive Bird.  The subheading is A short primer and collection of basic descriptive facts.  

The data behind this chart is well known to those that follow the subject but not among the general public.  

Click to enlarge.

The rise in murder rates in the recent era follows the Ferguson riots in 2014 and is largely driven by murders in select neighborhoods in particular cities which have either defunded police or, more commonly, simply indulged in depolicing.  They kept the police but wouldn't let them conduct ordinary policing functions.

Megan McArdle, among others, established several years ago the falsity of the canard that American prisons are stuffed with people who committed minor drug offenses.  She looked into it and found that that simply was not true.  That if you were in prison, you were there for acts of violence.  Inquisitive Bird acknowledges the fact and brings an interesting alternative perspective.

A common misconception is that American high incarceration rate is driven by mass incarceration of drug criminals or other minor offenses. In fact, only a small fraction of prisoners are there for mere drug offenses (see section Prisoners by offense type). The reality is that the high incarceration rate is largely a consequence of the high rate of violent crime in America. Excluding prisoners imprisoned for non-violent crimes, the prisoner rate remains higher than any of the 24 other countries in the above list — if the United States only imprisoned violent criminals, it would still have a higher prisoner rate than the rest of the highly developed world.

This is worth emphasizing:

If the United States only imprisoned violent criminals, it would still have a higher prisoner rate than the rest of the highly developed world.

This is strongly suggestive that the issue is less about policy and judicial practice and more about the reality of crime in America.  My point for a long time has been that as a multinational and multicultural country, we can clearly see that crime commission is very much a function of cultural norms.  Policy does have a material influence but the basic driver is cultural norms.  The same policies in different jurisdictions with different cultural norms have dramatically different outcomes.

Inquisitive Bird makes another point which I have seen discussed and about which I remain unresolved.

A natural question is how high the America’s incarceration rate is in comparison with its rate of serious crime. To analyze this, Lewis & Usmani (2022) compared First World countries in terms of their number of prisoners per homicide, instead of the usual prisoners relative to population size. They find that the American prisoner/homicide ratio is about average for the First World, whereas the number of police per homicide is very low. In this sense, when compared to the rate of serious violent crime, the American prisoner rate is unexceptional, but its number of police is exceptionally low.

I have lived in six other countries and worked extensively in another dozen.  The police force structure in countries is highly variable and counting the number of police is challenging.  Even in the US it is quite murky.  Local police?  Relatively easy.  Armed security officers in the private sector?  Usually not included but shouldn't they be?  Armed state level agents?  Armed federal agents such as the FBI?  Armed Park Services employees?  And so on.  I am very leery that anyone has a good apples-apples headcount of "police" between countries.  

So my concern is about the facts rather than the conclusions.  If you accept the facts as Inquisitive Bird has presented them, then the analytic conclusion is interesting.  The salient facts would be.

1) America has a much higher murder rate than other developed nations but it is highly concentrated geographically.

2) American police are equally effective at finding and convicting murderers as are our developed nation peers (prisoners per homicide)

3) American security is lower than peer developed nations because we have so many fewer police.

Conclusion 1 is reasonably secure.

Conclusion 2 is plausibly true but with some definitional caveats.

Conclusion 3 might be true but is very dependent on an accurate headcount in all comparison countries with highly variant civil security force structures.  

The whole piece is an excellent piece of work and should be the basis for discussion on how we efficiently and effectively provide greater security to all citizens, both tactically and strategically.  Regrettably, the numbers in the article are politically anathema and therefore won't be addressed.

Minuscule, manufactured and anemic

Rufo is correct.

Al Sharpton has organized the most low-energy, low-powered protest of @BillAckman imaginable. A small crowd, median age of about 50, summoning up nostalgia for Sharpton's previous demagoguery against New York Jews. Shameful, pathetic, ineffective.pic.twitter.com/3uH4gjMCrm

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) January 4, 2024

 But there's more.  Or, rather, I would go further.

Its a protest so small that you can almost count every participant.  You can clearly see 20 people in the front  Allowing for short people who can't be seen and perhaps some crowding in the back row, you have maybe a crowd of perhaps 40 people.  Almost all of them seemingly or retirement age, overwhelmingly older black women, holding pre-printed signs.  You can imagine the canes and zimmer frames against the wall.  They aren't marching because they can't march.  They aren't rioting because they weren't paid to riot.  

It inescapably feels like Sharpton, trying to exploit a situation, issued the order "Round me up a crowd of a couple dozen."  His aid then scurryies down to the nearby retirement center with the promise of a day out and $50 for any volunteers who are then each handed their signs as they board the bus to the event.

Minuscule, manufactured and anemic.  Rufo is focusing on the minuscule and anemic.  I am focused on the manufactured.  

I have long wondered to what degree modern protests are essentially rent-a-crowds supplemented with the Antifa militia or tarted up by NGO employees and the like.  

You see the Tea Party or Trump's crowds and you feel the energy of a mass movement.  You see the riots and mayhem of Ferguson, George Floyd, or BLM protests and you feel the atavistic urge for violence and looting.  You see these kind of affairs and it just feels like they are going through the motions.  None of it is real.  It is a bad high-school play, performed dutifully, reluctantly, and, in the end, pathetically.

Intentionally misleading reporting - a news room tradition at the Washington Post

Huh?  The past three days X has been filled with variants of this news clip.  

WAPO reporter doubles down: You didn’t say that you condemn white supremacy though.

She immediately regrets it.@VivekGRamaswamy isn’t going to play the game. pic.twitter.com/2NHshriVZa

— Chris Carapezza (@Chris_Carapezza) January 3, 2024

On the right, of course, there are various claims of Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy as having owned the Washington Post reporter Meryl Kornfield for having asked a stupid gotcha question intended to trap and embarrass Ramaswamy rather than shed any useful light.  

And indeed, viewing the video, it was a manipulative gotcha question and his muscular response was refreshing.  Once again, the Ben Rhodes journalist were out trying to create an agenda where there was no agenda and they were mocked by the supposed victim in front of the the profession and nation.  

Rhodes specified that the journalists were 27 years old and Kornfield appears to only be 25 but the point holds.  They don't know much about . . . anything.  Not about journalism and ethics, not about rhetoric, not about military tactics (where reverse ambushes are not infrequent), not about social norms.  

None of this is out of the ordinary other than what happened next.  They had their exchange.  A little bit of spice in the midst of the drudgery of a campaign.  But Ramaswamy, in upbraiding Kornfield for the unsophisticated attempted ambush, made a specific prediction that would demonstrate whether he understood what was going on and whether Kornfield was just an ideological hack.  

Ramaswamy continued, "And I know you're going to go print the headline tomorrow. I already know this, we already know how your game works. 'Vivek Ramaswamy Refuses to Condemn Racism,' because you asked a stupid question. The reality is, I condemn vicious racial discrimination in this country, but the kind of vicious and systematic racism we see today is discrimination on the basis of race in a very different direction."

One would think, having been called out as an ideologically religious obsessive and embarrassed before her peers and the nation that Kornfield would have then taken great pains not to appear to fulfill Ramaswamy's prediction.

One would think that and one would be wrong.  She went right ahead and fulfilled his prediction.

Given that there should be a high probability that she will erase her tweets, I render it as an image but the originals are here.  

Click to enlarge.

"He said he condemns “vicious racial discrimination”" is obviously a correct quote of Ramaswamy but she can't help herself.  She has to try and make this son of Hindu emigrants into a white racist.  She conditions her quote of him with "but would not “bend the knee” and condemn white supremacy."

What is the disease that afflicts these naive and unknowing credentialed Cretins?  Of course the answer is almost certainly in the leaves of Eric Hoffer's True Believers but their actions seem almost incomprehensible.  

She got caught practicing racist ideology and partisan politics under the guise of journalism and instead of being embarrassed or laying low, she doubled down.  As Kenny Rogers noted in The Gambler.  

And the night got deathly quiet

And his face lost all expression

Said, "If you're gonna play the game, boy

You gotta learn to play it right

You've got to know when to hold 'em

Know when to fold 'em

Know when to walk away

And know when to run

Ramaswamy made a prediction based on her actions and behaviors.  He predicted she would confirm his prediction and then . . . she did.  Everybody expected she would fold and walk away but she doubled down.  

Clever of Ramaswamy from a rhetorical stance.  He framed it so that she would either back away from her ridiculous question or she would hold fast.  But if she held fast and embraced his prediction, she would be also confirming the characterization upon which his forecast was made.

Am I going to play your silly game of 'Gotcha'? No, I'm not. And frankly, this is why people have lost trust [in the media]."

[snip]

And frankly, this is why people have lost trust [in the media]. 

 

Ramaswamy continued, "And I know you're going to go print the headline tomorrow. I already know this, we already know how your game works. 'Vivek Ramaswamy Refuses to Condemn Racism,' because you asked a stupid question. The reality is, I condemn vicious racial discrimination in this country, but the kind of vicious and systematic racism we see today is discrimination on the basis of race in a very different direction."

[snip]

"You people have been responsible for dividing this country to a breaking point, creating a projection of national division. . . . And you, with your catechism that you try to get politicians to -- whatever fake headline you're going to print on the basis of this conversation tomorrow -- that's what's dividing this country to a breaking point. Shame on you. Look people in the eye and tell them what you've actually failed to tell them for the last five years. Own the accountability for your own failures as the media -- that's how we rebuild trust in this country. And until then, I don't have a lot of patience to play the games."

No, Meryl Kornfield is now on record as demonstrating that she should not be trusted as a journalist.  Pity for her but her choice.

What is it with the Washington Post with young(ish) Woke reporters getting into trouble owing to an absence of professionalism and an overabundance of fealty to Wokedom - Meryl Kornfield, Taylor Lorenz, Felicia Sonmez, etc. Are there any real journalists left over there?  

Of course the Washington Post has a long history of lax editorial oversight.  I was at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. where the Washington Post is the hometown paper when the whole Janet Cooke "Jimmy's World" imbroglio broke in 1980.  43 years of untruthful reporting - seems like it is systemic for the Washington Post.