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.  

History

A 6th Century BC, detail of a relief on the eastern stairs of Apadana at Persepolis (Takht-e Jamshid), Iran; depicting Delegations including Lydians (pictured here) and Armenians bringing their famous wine to king.#archaeohistories pic.twitter.com/2JmoRt6EjH

— ArchaeoHistories (@histories_arch) July 13, 2023

 

Cafeteria by Robert Guinan

Cafeteria by Robert Guinan  

Click to enlarge.

History

Researchers estimate that Hasankeyf’s origins dated back 11000 years which makes it one of earliest sedentary settlements in southeast Anatolia, Türkiye.

Hasankeyf sits on left bank of Tigris river and has seen change of hands many times during course of its storied past. pic.twitter.com/4yhzyCnWk8

— ArchaeoHistories (@histories_arch) July 13, 2023

Oliver's cap, 1981 by Andrew Wyeth

Oliver's cap, 1981 by Andrew Wyeth

Click to enlarge.

On Board Ship by C. P. Cavafy

On Board Ship

by C. P. Cavafy

It’s like him, of course,

this little pencil portrait.

 

Hurriedly sketched, on the ship’s deck,

the afternoon magical,

the Ionian Sea around us.

 

It’s like him. But I remember him as better looking.

He was sensitive almost to the point of illness,

and this highlighted his expression.

He appears to me better looking

now that my soul brings him back, out of Time.

 

Out of Time. All these things are from very long ago—

the sketch, the ship, the afternoon.

I love those last two lines.  So many thing increasingly seem out of time, from very long ago . . . the sketch, the ship, the afternoon, and so much more unmentioned.  

Early profitable mass transit - taxed until it failed

This is a . . . frustrating interview.  From Anatomy of an ‘American Transit Disaster’ by David Zipper.  The subheading is In his new book, historian Nicholas Dagen Bloom chronicles the collapse of public transportation in US cities — and explains who really deserves the blame.  The journalist, Zipper, comes across as a streetcar fanboy trying to have a mass transit conversation.  He can't ever really shake off the shock that the very oldest form of mass transit just does not meet the needs of the modern customer and the interview keeps coming back to streetcars instead of mass transit.  The book might be quite good but it is hard to tell from this interview. 

Bloom has written a new book, The Great American Transit Disaster: A Century of Austerity, Auto-Centric Planning, and White Flight.  I want to know what's in it.  What is his thesis?  I would hope that the interview might reveal that.  Zipper's monomaniacal obsession with streetcars stands in the way.

American mass transit is an interesting case study.  It was once financially healthy and prevalent in most major cities.  It is currently moribund, declining, and potentially facing a financial catastrophe depending on what happens with city activity post Covid-19 shutdowns and the consequences of public policies post George Floyd riots.  Most cities have seen a collapse in center city populations and commercial activities and a corresponding collapse in mass transit ridership.  We are talking 30-40-50-60% declines.  The declines that are usually the commercial kiss of death.  

In the American public intellectual conversation however, there is an enduring love affair with mass transit.  It ought to work.  It should be wonderful.  That it has not worked for the past fifty years is laid to bad planning, the evil of cars, redlining, noxious citizens, mismatched or ineffective public policies, racism, etc.  Oh, and as always with any such public policy favorite - inadequate public funding.

My view is more prosaic.  I do not have the bounty of deep knowledge of the minutiae of mass transit history.  To me, mass transit is solving a straight forward problem for a consuming public - can it get them to where they want to be safely, cheaply, and reliably?  It is like most commercial transactions in a market where people have choices.  You simply have to perform at the minimum market expectations to stay in the game.  That may not be easy but it is conceptually straight-forward.

And that is the question unanswerable in most American cities today - Does the existing mass transit infrastructure get you to where you want to go, when you want to go, safely, cheaply and reliably?  The answer is almost always No. And, expensively no!

The biggest weakness is the "cheaply" issue.  Not so much whether the cost of a fare matches the cost of gas and insurance and parking driving your car.  Or any of the other more sophisticated calculations.  The chief culprit is that Americans have become much more productive.  There is time value to consider.  The more productive Americans become, the faster the mass transit needs to be able to deliver them to their destination in order to remain competitive.  A different way of putting it is that mass transit has to improve the speed at which it delivers people to their destinations at a rate greater than Americans increase their productivity.  That has not happened and has no prospect of happening.  Mass transit falls farther and farther behind in the economics of delivering people cheaply given what people's labor time is worth.  

In the fifty years since mass transit began disappearing into the dust bin of history, it has appeared to me that the reasons were relatively plain.  Americans became much more productive (their time has much greater value attached to it), driving has become dramatically safer both empirically and in terms of the perceived alternatives, and Americans became much more widely distributed and less dense (they moved to suburbs).  Additionally, American work became more complex and intricate.  More people work more jobs in more places doing more different things.  

If the transit system takes forty-five minutes to complete a trip that is only twenty-five minutes in a car (and doesn't cost much less than the fully amortized cost of my vehicle), then why would I take the mass transit?  If my productivity earns me $100 an hour, then taking mass transit casts me $33 in lost productivity compared to my car.

To me, the increasing productivity of the American worker and their corresponding time opportunity cost has been the biggest impediment to mass transit.  The shrinking coverage networks is the second.  Reliability is the third issue.  Poor cleanliness and safety are merely the visible faces of an economic solution that is not solving the problem it is intended to solve.

It is not funding, or racism, or suburbia, or subsidized cars, or free parking, etc.  These are all nice little Just So stories for the authoritarian and totalitarian mind.  As always, there are occasionally small nuggets of real issue buried deep in the lard of self-deception.  The reality is that no-one seems to know how to craft a mass transit system which will safely, cheaply, and reliably get people to where they want to be when they want to be there given the alternative choices they readily have.

It frustrates the living daylights out of the authoritarian and totalitarian mind.  That free citizens should make the good decisions that best suit the needs, circumstances, and constraints of those informed citizens.  

It may entirely be the case that my interpretation is completely wrong, but I suspect it is not.  I am open to evidence that I am wrong and would be eager for insight that has completely passed me by.  I was hoping that there might be something in this book or interview which might change my understanding of things.

But I am not seeing it.  The interview comes across as a long whinge about the past glory days of mass transit and how stupid American policy is when crafted by Americans seeking to optimize their own welfare.

The interviewing journalist seems like a typical leftist with all the normal mind worms who cannot believe the author is not completely buying into the journalist's nonsense.  Bloom does seem resistant to the more obvious foolishness such as the idea that the death of mass transit is due to some sort of car conspiracy.  And, no it's not white flight, either.  

But what is most striking from the piece is that there is no positive vision for how mass transit could or ought to work in the future.  If the most enthusiastic proponents of mass transit cannot envision how mass transit can solve the simple equation of how to safely, cheaply, and reliably get people to where they want to be when they want to be there, compared to the viable alternatives already in existence, then it seems like the mass transit dream is truly dead.  At least for the time being.

Because the market system is always adaptive.  Eventually citizens may not have as high a time value of money, may freely choose to live more densely, and may choose to live in a fashion which might make mass transit viable again.  We should hope we don't come to that reduced circumstance, though many public officials seem dedicated to that outcome.

There was one striking insight from Bloom that I had not known.  I knew that most city streetcars and bus services were private companies and that they were quite profitable in their time.  What I did not know is that City governments became dependent on them for tax revenue.

Was there a perception that the streetcar companies were making money off the backs of commuters? If so, I imagine that when streetcar companies started struggling, people might say, “Screw you guys. You don’t deserve our help, because you’ve profited at our expense for a long time.”

Absolutely. It was hard to shift away from the popular view of the transit company as this evil empire. In an era of skepticism of big business, it was very hard to see the public utility side of transit service. Also, city governments became very reliant on the taxes coming out of transit companies.

Yes, it’s striking today that not only did cities refuse to subsidize transit for decades, they taxed them. You included an example of Atlanta in the 1960s, when 5 cents of a 35-cent bus fare went to taxes. What was the thinking behind that?

At the beginning of the 20th century, streetcars did make money as enterprises. They were able to pay these taxes and still turn a profit. Cities had become so accustomed to transit being a contributor to municipal budgets that it was very hard to shift that approach until they essentially failed.

Sounds like cities might have been the authors of the financial death of mass transit.  

Keep researching till we get the answer we want

 Oh, my goodness, I hadn't seen this issue for what seems like a few years.  It pops its head up and gets some attention and then seems to go dormant.  But that is simply an outsider's perspective.  Perhaps among medical doctors and public health officials it is has been ever-present since I first heard the argument made some four decades.  The core claim is that African American's receive inferior health treatment owing to racial animus by white health professionals.

It is both a perfectly logical claim to make and a difficult one to prove.

On the logic side, we have the fact that there is a deep history of disparate medical access, treatment and outcomes.  We still have some areas where there are disparate outcomes.  Of course, still on the side of logic but against the argument, we have the fact that disparate racial treatment has been consequentially illegal for nearly sixty years and you rarely (or never) see doctors or medical establishments being sued for disparate treatment.  Further, it is not uncommon for medical practitioners and establishments to support charity or mission type services or trips to Haiti or Africa or similar destinations.  Accusations of racial animus are not necessarily incompatible with such behavior but are certainly inconsistent with such behavior.

While proving racial animus would be exceptionally difficult, one might think that proving inferior treatment due to animus might be easier.

One might think, but as is usual with complex systems (and health is certainly a complex system) nothing is never obvious.

If we are going to focus on Race as a subordinate attribute, then there are all sorts of other variables which we need to control.  Income, class, occupation, morbidity, age, education attainment,  diet, etc.  All need to be controlled in order to demonstrate that the differences in outcome might arise from the racial variable.  

Since I first became aware of this argument in the late seventies or early eighties, income, class, morbidity, and diet have all been the confounding variables which have made it difficult to prove that African Americans are receiving the inferior health care owing to racial animus owing to white practitioners.  

Perhaps the claim is true but it certainly feels like there is a huge victim advocacy industry sector to support for whom the claim needs to be true rather than obvious and clear empirical evidence that it is in fact a true argument.

Prescription for Failure by Stanley Goldfarb is merely the most recent update I occasionally come across.  In this case the evidence is against the argument.  The subheading is Researchers are ignoring studies on race and medicine that yield ideologically inconvenient results.

On Board Ship by C. P. Cavafy

On Board Ship

by C. P. Cavafy

It’s like him, of course,

this little pencil portrait.

 

Hurriedly sketched, on the ship’s deck,

the afternoon magical,

the Ionian Sea around us.

 

It’s like him. But I remember him as better looking.

He was sensitive almost to the point of illness,

and this highlighted his expression.

He appears to me better looking

now that my soul brings him back, out of Time.

 

Out of Time. All these things are from very long ago—

the sketch, the ship, the afternoon.

I love those last two lines.  So many thing increasingly seem out of time, from very long ago . . . the sketch, the ship, the afternoon, and so much more unmentioned.  

A logic without accuracy

From The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow.  

A few years ago a man won the Spanish national lottery with a ticket that ended in the number 48. Proud of his “accomplishment,” he revealed the theory that brought him the riches. “I dreamed of the number 7 for seven straight nights,” he said, “and 7 times 7 is 48.”1 Those of us with a better command of our multiplication tables might chuckle at the man’s error, but we all create our own view of the world and then employ it to filter and process our perceptions, extracting meaning from the ocean of data that washes over us in daily life. And we often make errors that, though less obvious, are just as significant as his.

 

Monkey pox messaging - 99.897% wrong. Virtually an inverse of Six Sigma quality

Remember back a few months ago we had a brief shining moment when public health experts thought they might have a second chance to redeem themselves after the Covid-19 fiasco with the delightfully named threat of Monkey Pox?   As it turned out, this was not highly contagious, not particularly dangerous, and was highly concentrated in the LGBT community.  It just could not be dressed up as a second Covid coming.

But not before pretty much the same cast of characters made the same mistakes again with declarative statements long on bombast and fear-mongering and short on facts.  But the great American public, having seen this show once, was not taken in a second time.  There was a heavy dose of skepticism and mockery because the quackery was so obvious.

El Gato Malo comes across a small study which reminds us of the nonsense.  From the monkey-business of "online experts" by El Gato Malo.  The subheading is watch as the credentialed class makes a fool of itself on twitter.

The original study is Analysis of tweets discussing the risk of Mpox among children and young people

in school (May-Oct 2022): Public health experts on Twitter consistently exaggerated risks and infrequently reported accurate information by Benjamin Knudsen, Tracy Beth Høeg, and Vinay Prasad.  

 

It is not a huge study with significant rigor but it does supply evidence consistent with impressions at the time.  From El Gato Malo:

remember the monkey pox “epidemic” and all the zika/dengue/ebola gonna come and get you vibes about how it was going to rampage through schools (despite never doing so before) instead of just being an idiosyncratic series of outbreaks almost entirely confined to a few groups of highly promiscuous fellows having male to male sex with large numbers of partners?

it was quite the thing there for a minute before it disappeared from view like so many other flashes in the pan when it failed to live up to billing and refused to spread in schools or really anywhere else. at all. and this is what actually makes this look like a good topic to assess expert opinion with.

so they authors searched twitter for content on monkeypox and schools, because claiming it would spread there was basically a true/false test with obvious accuracy.

From the study:

Results: 262 tweets were identified. 215/262 (82%) were inaccurate and 215/215 (100%) of these exaggerated risks. 47/262 (18%) tweets were accurate. There were 163 (87%) unique authors of inaccurate tweets and 25 (13%) of accurate tweets. Among health care professionals, 86% (95/111) of tweets were inaccurate. Only health reporters, (23/41) 56% of tweets, were more likely to provide accurate information, however this was driven by one reporter. Multiplying accuracy by followers andretweets, Twitter users were approximately 974x more likely to encounter inaccurate than accurate information.

Conclusion: Credentialed Twitter users were 4.6 times more likely to tweet inaccurate than accurate messages. We also demonstrated how incorrect tweets can be quickly amplified by retweets and popular accounts. In the case of Mpox in children and young people, incorrect information exaggerated the risks 100% of the time. 

From El Gato Malo:

Inaccurate claims were 4.6X more frequent that accurate ones and when adjusted for follower count this led to 974X more exposure for false claims.

let that one sink in. if you grabbed a tweet on schools and monkeypox from “an expert” at random on a follower weighted basis, it had a 99.897% chance of being wrong.

truly, the mind boggles. it’s all static no signal. it’s so incredibly wrong and always in the direction of “exaggerating and overblowing risk” that a simple heuristic of “do the opposite of wh

Lots more good material and commentary in his post.

It does leave us with three clear issues.

Nobody should be censoring anything.  When the "experts" are this wrong, this frequently, we need open communication to rectify the inaccurate messaging.

There is a strong tendency towards propaganda from self-interested parties and the State.

There is no negative consequence to the media/academia/state minions when they propagate inaccurate signal and seek to censor accurate data messaging.

We'll have to get around to these issues sooner or later.  

A slow city recovery

This piece is really just a dunking on San Francisco.  From A San Francisco Journalist Wanted to Debunk Horror Stories About Her City. She Got Kinda Sidetracked by the Truth by Rick Moran.

What I found interesting was this quote, I think from the original author, Elizabeth Weil.

The doom-loopy vision laid out for downtown SF was not pretty: Workers don’t return, offices remain empty, restaurants shutter, transit agencies go bankrupt, tax bases plummet, public services disappear. According to research from the University of Toronto, cell-phone activity in downtown SF is 32 percent of pre-pandemic levels. That number is 75 percent in New York.

Using cell-phone activity as a proxy for population density and commercial activity in a central city area is a clever idea.  Not a perfect substitute for direct population density information but also reliably obtainable.  

Going to the original research by University of Toronto, you get this wonderful graphic.  

Interesting points all up and down the graph.

California has a reputation for high taxes, excess regulations and poor services.  It also bought into the Covid lockdowns more rigorously than most states and also flirted more seriously with the concept of defunding the police and decarcerating criminals.  It has also seen a hemorrhaging of residents to other states over the past few years.  Not a state you would expect to find significant recovery.  

But you do, just not where one might expect.  San Francisco aren't in the recovery flock but Bakersfield, Fresno and San Diego are in the top ten and doing well with 118%, 115%, and 93% respectively.

But in the big cities, of Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Francisco, things aren't looking to good for the cities or residents with 62%, 47%, and 32% respectively.  

My city, Atlanta, is only 49% recovered.  Government has been ineffective, policing abysmal, we flirted with Defunding, and people have stayed away from downtown.  Possibly permanently.

The Covid panic ended early in the South, at least a year ago now.  It ended at the Federal level just this past month or two.  So why people not returned to downtowns?  A combination, presumably, of better and cheaper lifestyles by working at least partly from home, and concerns about physical security in a depoliced environment.  The stories coming out of New York City certainly do not allay those fears.  

We'll see how corporations and enterprises end up accommodating the employees whetted appetite for work from home.  Maybe more will return to the office but that is not especially obvious yet.

My suspicion is that the decline in policing in combination with a general decline in government services in combination will as many or more away from the downtowns.

We shall see but I am surprised how low the response has been so far in terms of resuming normal levels of downtown city activities.