Respect My Authoritah

That's actually the title of David Foster's funny piece about Nancy Pelosi's demand to monetize her dignity (who knew she was so into the commercial mindset?  Next she'll be defending profit).  But it seemed also to describe this handwringer from the Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled "How Rude!  Reader Comments May Undermine Scientists’ Authority":

Scientists have a hard enough time getting people to understand what they’re talking about. 

Their thoughts can be complicated.  Their sentences can be laden with jargon.  And their conclusions can offend political or religious sensibilities. 

And now, to make things worse, readers have an immediate forum to talk back.  And when some readers post uncivil comments at the bottom of online articles, that alone can raise doubts about the underlying science, a new study has found.  Or at least reinforce those doubts.

What follows is a summary report of a study showing that readers were less swayed by an argument about the risks of nanotechnology when it was followed by rude comments than when it was followed by polite ones.  The article's author described the experiment as having taken care to ensure that the substance of the comments was the same, and all that was varied was their tone.  Hard to say, since the paper was presented at a conference and hasn't been published yet.  It's due to be published soon in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication ("CMC," for those in the know).  I found something similar, perhaps, in the current issue, "The Impact of Language Variety and Expertise on Perceptions of Online Political Discussions," which contained this delightful early subsection heading:  "Status Cues and Heuristic Processing in CMC."  So right away we get some clues about the balderdash quotient (BD).  (I'm sorry; I'm afraid that was rude.  But I'm working on a peer-reviewed paper establishing universal units for the Cognitively Heuristic BD (CHBD), and the grant money is just pouring in.)

Is this a new thing, all the concern over whether the public is getting heuristically out of hand and needs better cognitive processing so we technocrats can maintain our authoritah?  Or have I just not been paying enough attention to the hilarious stuff that gets published?  (A classic early example is "Transgressing the Boundaries:  Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.")

Rudeness is a problem, certainly.  Among its other drawbacks, it heightens emotions, not usually a helpful means of facilitating the exchange of complex ideas.  It also often wrenches the focus of discussion from the relevant to the irrelevant, especially to the personal characteristics and politics of the authors.

But if the motive for censoring rude remarks is to prevent a loss of the readers' confidence in the authority of the beleaguered scientists, then count me unconvinced.  That's just asking for moderators to censor remarks according to their ostensible ability to undercut the argument in the main post.  Even if the moderator is concerned about the unfair tactic of "rudeness," who among us wouldn't be corrupted by that standard?  It will lead to a censorship standard that's weighted by the content of the argument instead of by its style.  As commenter JD Eveland wrote:

Consider, for example, the following range of possible comments: 

(a) "Fantastic!  Amazing!  I'm putting your name into Nobel consideration right away!" 

(b) "Interesting paper.  However, I do have some concerns with how the statistical analysis was conducted." 

(c) "The results are rendered largely uninterpretable due to the investigators' choice of a repeated measures analysis of variance rather than a regression model, as is currently taught in all reasonably respectable doctoral programs." 

(d) "Obviously, the results in this article were scraped off the bottom of a birdcage after the data had been statistically processed by the bird." 

(e) "You're a poopypants, and your data analyst is a stupid f**k!  You obviously learned all you know about statistics off the back of a bag of birdseed!  I'm coming after you, and your little dog too!" 

We'd all probably agree that result (e) would be considered rude, and most of us would also apply that to (d).  On the other hand, (c) could easily be considered rude by some scientists, although it might not have been intended as such by the respondent, since that's just the way he talks to everyone including his students and his wife.  (b) would probably not be considered rude by anyone offering it, although some scientists are sensitive enough to see it as such; indeed, there are even those insecure enough as to see anything short of (a) to be rude.

What I'm describing here is rampant PC culture.  The last thing scientists need is a less hostile working environment for their tender arguments. Sound ideas can stand some rough and tumble.

Rules of thumb

We were discussing below whether it means anything to talk about the scourge of U.C.H.  I am referring, of course, to the unintentionally humorous criticism by Don Kahan of the "unreliable cognitive heuristics" of the unwashed masses.  We just cannot get them to take our word for stuff any more.  They keep relying on their guts to decide whether we're crying wolf and trying to dazzle them with B.S.  Where's the trust?

What's funny is the idea that your average smart Yalie uses something better than rules of thumb to weigh essentially unquantifiable risks for political purposes.  If you're of a rigorous turn of mind, you can get a pretty good handle on risks in repetitive situations that are susceptible to statistical analysis.  You can't get anything like a rigorous handle on risks from models of the behavior of chaotic systems that have never met the gold standard of predictions confirmed by observations (and no fair back-fitting with previously unidentified critical factors).  The best anyone could ever get out of an emerging science of prediction is a gut feel, an instinct for where to focus future research.

Richard Feynman analyzed the failure of the Challenger shuttle.  He found that people were sharpening their pencils to an absurd degree and fooling themselves into thinking they had pinpointed risk out to a number of decimal points.  In fact, they were piling probability assumption on probability assumption, when no single assumption had a solid empirical basis:

It appears that there are enormous differences of opinion as to the probability of a failure with loss of vehicle and of human life.  The estimates range from roughly 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000.  The higher figures come from the working engineers, and the very low figures from management.  What are the causes and consequences of this lack of agreement?  Since 1 part in 100,000 would imply that one could put a Shuttle up each day for 300 years expecting to lose only one, we could properly ask "What is the cause of management's fantastic faith in the machinery?" . . .  There is nothing much so wrong with this as believing the answer!  Uncertainties appear everywhere. . . . When using a mathematical model careful attention must be given to uncertainties in the model. . . . 

There was no way, without full understanding, that one could have confidence that conditions the next time might not produce erosion three times more severe than the time before.  Nevertheless, officials fooled themselves into thinking they had such understanding and confidence, in spite of the peculiar variations from case to case.  A mathematical model was made to calculate erosion.  This was a model based not on physical understanding but on empirical curve fitting."

He concluded with one of my favorite statements, a truly reliable rule of thumb:  "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."

University of Colorado Guide for Women Under Attack

The debate about whether students should carry arms on campus is going on here in Georgia as well at it is in Colorado. It's worth remembering that this is the underlying debate to the recent comments by Rep. Salazar. The question at issue is whether students -- and not just female students -- shall be permitted to carry guns on campus, or whether they shall not be.

This is the same student body who reliably gets drunk and wrecks the campus after every winning football game, so I take the issue to be a more serious question than I normally accept gun control arguments to be. This is a group of people who are technically adults, but who are permitted to behave a little less like adults than their cohorts who do not have 'college life' as an excuse. I think we should extend the full rights due to adults to those who prove they will resist that temptation and behave like adults, but the institutions have too long permitted tomfoolery for us to simply assume that everyone will be grown up from now on. Some mechanism needs to be in place to ensure that students who want to bear arms on campus are living up to their responsibilities as adults.

So I'm willing to accept that these students ought to prove themselves to be adults before given the full rights of adults. Nevertheless, the college's actual advice to female students is highly insulting.

1. Be realistic about your ability to protect yourself.
2. Your instinct may be to scream, go ahead! It may startle your attacker and give you an opportunity to run away.
3. Kick off your shoes if you have time and can’t run in them.
4. Don’t take time to look back; just get away.
5. If your life is in danger, passive resistance may be your best defense.
6. Tell your attacker that you have a disease or are menstruating.
7. Vomiting or urinating may also convince the attacker to leave you alone.
8. Yelling, hitting or biting may give you a chance to escape, do it!
9. Understand that some actions on your part might lead to more harm.
10. Remember, every emergency situation is different. Only you can decide which action is most appropriate.

Of these all, number seven is the most insulting. Imagine telling a young man of college age, "If someone should attack you, pee on yourself." This is great advice for a puppy who wants to demonstrate submission to an older dog. To a human being, it amounts to "Be prepared to degrade yourself if anyone should attack you."

Most of the rest of the advice amounts to thinking of yourself as a victim, or a prey animal.

Not everyone has it in them to kill their attacker, and that far at least point one is correct. You should look in your heart and decide if you would rather kill, or rather suffer at the mercy of a violent and wicked man. If you would in truth rather suffer, because your moral aversion to violence is so strong, this is a respectable position occupied by Quakers and other religious orders. In this case you are not a victim. You are choosing to accept the suffering that the world sends you for moral reasons of your own. That is honorable, in its way: it is courageous, in its way.

For others, there are other choices. One is to choose companions you trust, on whom you know you can rely. This is the idea, often discussed here at the Hall, of a frith bond: a bond of mutual loyalty, based on an Old English word related to our words "friend" and "free." It is a society of friendship, and it makes you freer than you would be alone. You can travel together in far greater safety, and if attacked, you can help defend each other.

You can learn to fight, and keep yourself ready to do so.

If you are right for it, you can carry arms. A firearm is not the only choice, although it makes particular sense for young women who may be physically weaker than the young men who are most likely to be violent criminals. Learn to use it safely and accurately, and keep it always handy. ("Go not one step out on the road without your weapons of war, for you never know when you may need them." Havamal.)

Under no circumstances degrade yourself. To do so is to invite, rather than to repel, the scornful treatment of the world. To be the sort of person who is prepared to degrade herself to avoid even a serious harm is to be the kind of person the world will not respect. Remember always: Death before dishonor.

The National Interest in Fertility

Hot Air looks at the "fertility panic," which is general in places falling now far below replacement levels.

We talked about this issue recently, thanks to Tex, so I just want to point out a small Obamacare consequence. Health and Human Services has made a move toward mandating free birth control as a part insurance plans. This is supposed to be Constitutional (pending 1st Amendment challenges) on the grounds that it is in the national interest to ensure that women have "access" to this technology, which can only mean that it must be provided to them for free.

So what if a future HHS should decide that it is in the national interest that we should stop using contraception as much as we do? What if they instead altered the picture with a regulation that said that "no one shall" offer any birth control coverage as part of any insurance plan?

The point is that a gate that swings one way can also swing the other. Once anything becomes a matter of public policy, it's no longer a matter that can lay a claim to the privacy of decisions made in the intimate space. But it is just that claim -- that matters of contraception are private, intimate decisions -- that underlies Griswold v. Connecticut.

Obamacare, the Adventure Continues

Finding out what's in the law:  We've been reading lately that companies are avoiding hiring a 50th employee, or cutting hours down to 29 per week, in order to escape Obamacare.  It turns out it's even easier to escape the law, no matter what your size or average hours worked per week:  just self-insure.

It seems Her Dignifiedness, Nancy Pelosi, let the PPACA slip through Congress with a carve-out for self-insured employers.  Some of you may work for self-insured employers without realizing it, because although they serve as their own risk-capital pool for medical claims, they generally use an insurance company to administer the plan, which works much like other group plans at the employee interface.  My old firm did that.  They figured out what kind of reserves they could afford to set aside for the collective medical bills in a reasonably foreseeable year, and used the usual stop-loss insurance company to limit the firm's overall risk in case every single employee came down with cancer in the same year.  As far as I was concerned, it was just Blue Cross until someone told me how it really worked.  In essence, I was relying on the firm's solvency rather than Blue Cross's.

In the past, self-insurance was popular mostly with very large employers, but stop-loss insurers have been snapping up business from smaller and smaller employers for years now.  The Obama administration is riled up, because self-insured employers can price their insurance on the basis of a small, homogeneous, often rather young labor pool.  What's worse, under Obamacare, they don't even have to worry about what will happen to their employees with pre-existing conditions if they have to give the system up, because all those employees will be guaranteed access from now on if and when they leave the self-insured pool.  Another sore point for the administration is that stop-loss insurers aren't subject to the ban on refusing coverage to people with pre-existing conditions.  They can cherry-pick all they like before agreeing to take on a new employer as a client.

So self-insured employers may become the last corner of the health insurance market that responds to price signals.  What it amounts to is traditional major-medical coverage for a group, at a time when the health czars are trying to get rid of major medical and replace it with first-dollar coverage, a/k/a prepaid healthcare.  The employer can set employee-level deductibles wherever it likes, depending on how much compensation it chooses to pay in the form of insurance.  It also sets stop-loss deductibles wherever it likes, depending on the premium it will have to pay to the re-insurer and the amount of risk it can stomach for a bad health year across its entire labor pool.  This is not what our benevolent overloads had in mind for us at all, but unfortunately they don't have the House any more.

Chalk this up as one more piece of Obamacare that's about to bite them in the behind.  Employers who are being threatened with being run out of business by the cost of healthcare are going to have an alternative.  It may not be as easy as these guys thought it would be to crash the system and replace it with single-payer.

Police state (part 44)

As has become depressingly common, another report of ignorant law enforcement "professionals" harrassing innocent citizens.

So now it's ok to pull over cars based on bumper stickers?

I'm getting dizzy

Dan Kahan of the Cultural Cognitive Project at Yale is getting very meta about the proper evidence-based approach to persuading the public that AGW-ist scientists' conclusions are evidence-based:

Scientists and science communicators have appropriately turned to the science of science communication for guidance in overcoming public conflict over climate change.  The value of the knowledge that this science can impart, however, depends on it being used scientifically.  It is a mistake to believe that either social scientists or science communicators can intuit effective communication strategies by simply consulting compendiums of psychological mechanisms.   Social scientists have used empirical methods to identify which of the myriad mechanisms that could plausibly be responsible for public conflict over climate change actually are.  Science communicators should now use valid empirical methods to identify which plausible real-world strategies for counteracting those mechanisms actually work.  Collaboration between social scientists and communicators on evidence-based field experiments is the best means of using and expanding our knowledge of how to communicate climate science.

Whew.  I can't help thinking if they put that much effort into ensuring that the climate science that is reaching the public is evidence-based, there wouldn't be so much public controversy.  In a related paper, although he makes hard work of it, Kahan admits that empirical data do not support the conclusion that conservatives are less cognitively sophisticated than liberals.  Instead, he makes the interesting finding that high cognitive scores are associated with the fervency of ideological beliefs on both sides of the political spectrum:

Seeming public apathy over climate change is often attributed to a deficit in comprehension.  The public knows too little science, it is claimed, to understand the evidence or avoid being misled.  Widespread limits on technical reasoning aggravate the problem by forcing citizens to use unreliable cognitive heuristics to assess risk.  A study conducted by the Cultural Cognition Project and published in the Journal Nature Climate Change found no support for this position.  Members of the public with the highest degrees of science literacy and technical reasoning capacity were not the most concerned about climate change.  Rather, they were the ones among whom cultural polarization was greatest.

Kahan tries hard to figure out how this could possibly mean that AGW makes the most sense, but can't get there.  He fears that ideologues on both sides of the fence are more concerned with fitting in with their tribes than with arriving at truth; he worries about "the tragedy of the risk-taking commons" and the proper "communication" strategies that must be employed by people who know the real score.  He reluctantly concludes that no amount of "clarification" of the AGW position will bring the public around "so long as the climate-change debate continues to feature cultural meanings that divide citizens of opposing worldviews."  He recommends, therefore, that

communicators should endeavor to create a deliberative climate in which accepting the best available science does not threaten any group’s values.  Effective strategies include use of culturally diverse communicators, whose affinity with different communities enhances their credibility, and information-framing techniques that invest policy solutions with resonances congenial to diverse groups.

And from there he's back to the need for a "new science of science communication."

Myself, I hypothesize that AGW science is too weak to win committed converts except among people with a strong social-justice worldview, who are drawn to the most common AGW amelioration schemes, and whose enthusiasm grows the more familiar they are with the schemes.  The suspicion that AGW is junk science in service of a social-justice political agenda, in turn, tends to turn conservatives more rabidly against the AGW hypothesis the more they investigate it.  It's not necessarily a difference in an approach to pure science at all.  The portion of the public paying the most attention, and best equipped to evaluate the evidence, knows that the science is far from definitive, especially when you consider not only the fact that it is based on predictions generated by emerging models, but also the need to assign definitive blame to human activity and to evaluate a cost-benefit analysis of proposed remediation that itself must be based on highly speculative information.  Given that murky picture, why should it be surprising that the most educated part of the public polarizes primarily around its reaction to the proposed solutions?

Sawing off the limb you're sitting on

A new acquaintance uses "The Ishmael Effect" to describe the phenomenon of self-defeating propositions, such as

‘It is (absolutely) true that truth is relative’; ‘we ought to think that there is no such thing as thought’; and ‘the one immorality is to believe in morality" . . . .

It came to mind when I read James Taranto's report today of the dilemma faced by NARAL:

"One of the nation's most prominent abortion rights groups is working to remake its image in response to concern that it may be overtaken by a growing cadre of young anti-abortion activists," Roll Call reports.  "Its message: This is not your mother's NARAL."

That's undoubtedly true.  If you're under 40, NARAL's efforts make it much likelier that your mother didn't even have children.  There's something both poignant and funny about a group devoted to abortion puzzling over its difficulty in finding young people to support it.

The new hockey stick

H/t Zombie.

Yum

This Emeril recipe is one of the best things I've tasted in a while.  It's called "Oysters, Scallops, and Crawfish Bordelaise in Puff Pastry," but an internet search suggests that it's not really a bordelaise sauce, which classically refers to a sauce based on Bordeaux wine and a meat demi-glace.  Also, it seems to me you could use any seafood, as long as you have some dry white wine and some seafood stock.  Whatever, this Emeril take on the traditional sauce is amazing, either in store-bought frozen puff pastry or (if those aren't handy), just on pasta.  We make fish stock from our fish frames or shrimp heads and/or shells, then freeze it for later use.

First you soften garlic and shallots in a pan, then briefly add the seafood, removing and reserving it in a bowl as soon as it's cooked.  Add wine and a little cognac and cook it down to half its volume.  Add fish stock, salt, and pepper and reduce again to half its volume. Stir in some chopped tomato, then butter, then the final herbs, including tarragon. Finally, add the cooked seafood back in.  The concentrated flavors from those two reductions make it unbelievably good.

Evening up the playing field

Here's one way to ensure that the Second Amendment's purpose of equalizing the power between the government and citizens is not undermined:  Olympic Arms is refusing to do any further business with New York government officials.  If you're a private citizen of New York who tried to order a gun from Olympic Arms, they'll refund your purchase price, ship the guns immediately to an out-of-state location for your pickup, or hold them for six months while you make arrangements to move to a saner state.

Fauxcahontas Makes A Good Point

She may lack personal ethics, but that doesn't mean she can't make it uncomfortable for those who lack professional ethics!

Safety first

From Jim Geraghty:  "Finally. A 14-day waiting period for all assault cabinet nominees."

The sky is falling

A meteor blew up yesterday about 25 miles in the air above a small Russian city about 1,000 miles east of Moscow.  The AP article said it was traveling at supersonic speeds.  I'll say!  About 50 times the speed of sound, from the estimates.  It may have been a few meters wide and weighed in the neighborhood of 11 tons.

I always forget how the terms work:  It's a meteoroid if it's a fairly small piece of junk in orbit, a meteor when it's in Earth's atmosphere burning up, and a meteorite if part of it makes it to the surface.  This one may have produced a few fragments on the surface, but mostly the impact took the form of a shock wave that collapsed part of a factory roof.  Five hundred people were injured, 34 of them seriously enough to go to the hospital.  That's a lot for a meteor.

The fear from within

People with damage to the amygdala are strangely unable to feel fear of external threats.  It turns out that they can feel fear generated in another part of brain, in response to internal threats like air hunger.  What's more, they are more prone to panic attacks in that context than people who routinely experience amygdala-mediated fear of external threats.  I wonder if they have less practice mastering fear?

Maybe Matt Ridley was right?

In "The Rational Optimist," Matt Ridley argued that evolutionary pressure operates not only on genes but on cultural innovations; that "ideas have sex."  This article in Nature compares the transmissibility of genes and folktales:

If folk tales simply spread by diffusion, like ink blots in paper, one would expect to see smooth gradients in these variations as a function of distance. Instead, researchers found that language differences between cultures create significant barriers to that diffusion 

These barriers are stronger than those for the exchange of genes — a message that might be crudely expressed as: “I’ll sleep with you, but I prefer my stories to yours.”

PC progress

From Moonbattery:


 

Happy Birthday, Georgia

My beloved homeland came into practical reality 240 years ago today, when Sir James Edward Oglethorpe landed on a high bluff and founded the Province of Georgia and its capital city of Savannah. The charter gave him all the land to the Pacific Ocean, but in practical terms at first it was just Yamacraw Bluff and what he could hold with his comrades. Georgia has since existed as a British province, a free and independent state, a state under the Articles of Confederation, a member of the United States of America, a member of the Confederate States of America, and was again brought back under the union. Nations come and go, but Georgia remains.

Oglethorpe founded the colony in part to defend British possessions from the Spanish in Florida, and so once he had established his city and militia, he sought out Scottish Highlanders to hold his southern frontier. These settled at the Altamaha river, under James MacIntosh Mohr (that is, "James MacIntosh the Great"). They fought the Spanish, and they fought the Indians, and they usually won -- especially at the Battle of Bloody Marsh. During one of Oglethorpe's expeditions home to recruit more Rangers, the '45 rising came up, and he had to turn to the business of fighting the Highlanders instead of recruiting them.

He had the same fate with the Americans, whom he had helped to found. After the Revolution, he was at home in Britain and went to visit John Adams, our first ambassador to the British. It's sad to think that our founder, a man of talent, insight and character, did not finally make his home here. We remember him with honor.

Reading list

Jamie Weinstein of The Daily Caller interviewed Elliott Abrams, former deputy National Security adviser to President George. W. Bush, and asked him what three books most shaped his understanding of the Middle East:

I would note four. Bernard Lewis’s “What Went Wrong,” Michael Oren’s “Power, Faith, and Fantasy,” Natan Sharansky’s “The Case for Democracy,” and a somewhat older one: the Hebrew Bible.

The whole interview is interesting.  He asserts, for instance, that Israel's unilateral strike on the Syrian nuclear plant in 2007 avoided war and spurred negotiations.  Because both the U.S. and Israel declined to crow about (or even acknowledge responsibility for) the strike, Assad was able to save face without responding to it.  Because the strike made Syria fear the U.S. and Israel, it inspired Assad to come to the bargaining table.  Yes, sometimes that happens for reasons other than that we made someone love us.

Abrams believes it's possible a strike on Iran would have the same result.  I wonder, though, if we aren't dealing with an entirely different class of crazy there.  Though when I think about it -- Syria?  Iran?  Maybe I can't make a principled distinction between them.

Be fruitful and multiply

I've always wondered why God found it necessary to tell us this.  Or, if you're not a believer, why did a culture find it necessary to exhort its own members to reproduce?  Don't we have a biological imperative?  How did we get here otherwise; why did our ancestors survive?  It's strange to observe that one of the most basic human drives is so vulnerable to collapse, especially once birth control comes into the picture.

David Goldman argues that cultural death causes and is revealed by a collapse in reproduction.  His thesis, focusing on Islamic societies, is that some religions cannot survive the transition from traditional society to modernity.  The hallmark of their failure is that their fertility rate collapses as soon as their women acquire an education. In 1979, before the Iranian revolution, the fertility rate was 7 children per female.  That rate abruptly dropped to 1.6 children per female, just above the disastrous European rate, and an unprecedented "snapping shut of the national womb."  This giant vote of no confidence in the future of the culture induces a frightening social dynamic:

[A] society that suddenly stops having children suffers from cultural despair.  The same cultural despair that curtains off the future for families afflicts policymakers.  Cultural pessimism is a great motivation for strategic adventures.  A nation that fears that it may have no future may be willing to risk everything on the roll of a dice.  Iran has one last big generation of military age men, the ones who were born in the early 1980s before the great weapons.  Nothing but the use of force would stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, with dreadful consequences.  With Iran on the verge of building a nuclear bomb, we have hit crunch-time.  Will the foreign policy establishment connect the dots in time?

This is a sore subject for me, as you can imagine.  I wonder if we've managed the transition well in our own country to a culture in which no one need be fertile unless he or she chooses.  How are the incentives for childbearing different now?  When the choice whether to reproduce or not becomes unconstrained, what makes fathers willing to support their children and their children's mothers?  What makes mothers willing to raise the children?   You'd think it would be obvious, but the demographics tell us it's anything but.  When people acquire choices for the first time, there can be a scary period in which we find out what new motives will operate, and what we have to offer each other to make it all keep working.

Gloria Steinem famously remarked that she had no children because she didn't mate in captivity.  If educating women causes a large fraction of them to adopt this view, what's wrong with the world they've become educated about?  Why should it be necessary to withhold education in order to get them to buy into continuing the race?  We've lost most of our traditional culture and religion.  What is there to replace them with, as a motive for looking to the future in a spirit of sacrifice?