Best Science Headline Ever

How Many Times to They Pass the Ball?

Cosmic Gorilla Effect Could Blind Detection of Aliens

It's also a good discussion of inattentional blindness, with a focus on how this might be interfering with the search for extraterrestrial life. (SETI).

Good read.

Tweet of the Day

It's true. pic.twitter.com/D0oocPcR4i

— PORP (@TheOfficialPORP) April 9, 2017

I know that the original tweet is about a year old, but it is brilliant.

This is as true ... as taxes is. And nothing's truer than them.

Being Born on 3rd Base and Thinking That You Hit a Triple

It turns out that the single most statististically segnificant characteristic of successful entrepreneurs is that they come from rich families:

We’re in an era of the cult of the entrepreneur. We analyze the Tory Burches and Evan Spiegels of the world looking for a magic formula or set of personality traits that lead to success. Entrepreneurship is on the rise, and more students coming out of business schools are choosing startup life over Wall Street.

But what often gets lost in these conversations is that the most common shared trait among entrepreneurs is access to financial capital—family money, an inheritance, or a pedigree and connections that allow for access to financial stability. While it seems that entrepreneurs tend to have an admirable penchant for risk, it’s usually that access to money which allows them to take risks.

And this is a key advantage: When basic needs are met, it’s easier to be creative; when you know you have a safety net, you are more willing to take risks. “Many other researchers have replicated the finding that entrepreneurship is more about cash than dash,” University of Warwick professor Andrew Oswald tells Quartz. “Genes probably matter, as in most things in life, but not much.”

………

For creative professions, starting a new venture is the ultimate privilege. Many startup founders do not take a salary for some time. The average cost to launch a startup is around $30,000, according to the Kauffman Foundation. Data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor show that more than 80% of funding for new businesses comes from personal savings and friends and family.

“Following your dreams is dangerous,” a 31-year-old woman who runs in social entrepreneurship circles in New York, and asked not to be named, told Quartz. “This whole bulk of the population is being seduced into thinking that they can just go out and pursue their dream anytime, but it’s not true.”

I'm not surprised, but I am a bit disgusted.

We need to understand that much of the sociology of success in the US, as it is everywhere, boils down to nepotism and tribalism.

Amazon is a Petri Dish for Sociopaths

In 1996, an evolutionary biologist attempted to create an improved chicken by separating out the hens that outperformed their fellow hens.

It was an unmitigated disaster, and it bears notice in companies which use a similar process, "Stack Ranking", to manage their employees.

Amazon is the most notable, and most aggressive adherent of this philosophy:

Jeff Bezos, CEO and founder of Amazon, recently took some heat when the New York Times exposed working conditions and the corporate culture at his firm. ‘Ruthless’ and ‘demanding’ are two descriptors of the working environment, sink or swim. Amazon is not alone. Some of the leading recent startups have competitive employment requirements, a survival of the fittest approach. They want the best and push out the rest. It’s a simple notion to strengthening your company and the most efficient way to assemble optimally performing groups, organizations, and sports teams. Or at least that has been the dominant rhetoric behind models of group productivity within both the business and sporting industries. Stack-ranking and other business practices of individual selection have been widespread, from General Electric to Microsoft, and is a standard modus operandi in sports teams including the focus of this piece, the European soccer team, Real Madrid. However, the wisdom behind the application of these models, both in business and sport, is under scrutiny. To begin to see why, we turn to evolutionary biology.


In 1996, evolutionary biologist William Muir conducted a series of unusual experiments at Purdue University. Muir was looking to explore the various methods of group productivity with regards to egg production. He wanted to create a group of ‘Super-Chickens’ who would produce more eggs than any other coop. He followed the logic that many employers today tout: take the best individuals, put them in a group together, and then let the magic happen. Muir selected the most productive hens from each cage and bred the next generation from them. Muir also identified the cages that collectively were more productive at laying eggs in comparison to other cages. He then continued to selectively breed using these two separate groups and observed the levels of production.

The outcome of this study was striking; selecting the best group cages produced hens that thoroughly outperformed the line of individually more productive ‘Super-Chickens’. For the cage-selected line, after just five generations, the number of eggs per hen catapulted from 91 to 237, the mortality rate of the group crashed from 68% to 9%, and the hens also displayed improved wellbeing as a function of the reductions of pecking and negative social interactions.

The Super-Chicken group did not fare so well. In fact, this line of hens had some other, rather less desirable qualities. They presented signs of aggression, violence, dysfunction and waste. There was an extremely high prevalence of fatal cannibalistic pecking within the group and general agonistic behaviors. Those in the cage who did not die from these cannibalistic attacks (there was an 89% mortality rate) were left with severe feather loss, life-threatening abrasions and other serious physical injuries. The hens were more intent on fighting amongst each other than doing anything productive! Hopefully that doesn’t sound like any workplaces you know…

So what happened? Why did the best egg-layers from the first generation yield something akin to the Gremlins of the eponymously named 80s movie? What Muir realized was that instead of identifying the most efficient hens, he had identified the hens that successfully conveyed the appearance of being the most productive. Those hens that individually produced the most did so by being adept at aggressively suppressing the other hens from laying eggs
. Taking the more productive individuals meant taking the more aggressive hens. Breeding repeatedly from those which were most productive actually favored those which were most aggressive. Placing these hens together in cages led to extreme violence (only three of these psychotic hens actually survived!). Muir ended up running out of the Super-Chickens and had no choice but to end monitoring them and only continue with the other group. Ultimately, the process of selecting at the individual level took to an extreme the challenge of cooperation arising from individuals selected for selfishness.

The behaviour of the psychotic hens fits rather well with the normative assumptions of classical economic and game theory, which suggest that individuals will act selfishly in situations that afford them the opportunity. In group situations, individuals are consistently expected to identify, and act on, the dominant Nash strategy—the strategy that cannot be beaten. Just think of the classic ‘tragedy of the commons’, where people are predicted to free-ride on and exploit the contributions of others to a shared resource. Furthermore, the selfish actions of the Super-Chickens also support the theme of much evolutionary psychology from the 1960’s, which was based on the principle that individual interests will always outweigh the interests of the group.Given an opportunity to benefit from the efforts of others, selection will favor those which seize the day.

 ………

Some companies have begun to pay heed. Recently, Microsoft abandoned its longstanding stack-ranking approach. It recognized that stack-ranking was undermining team cooperation, employees withheld information to avoid damaging their own rank, sought teams where they could rank better, and ensured new team members failed. As an outcome to stack-ranking, it seems obvious. Yet many companies pursued it, just as breeders choose super-chickens. For Jeff Bezos, he may not agree. Amazon is a hugely successful company, at least in sales and turnover. It is not a particularly profitable company. When Microsoft was the behemoth of its domain, its aggressive policies eventually led it into trouble, barely avoiding being broken apart. Enron thought it had the smartest guys in the room. It’s endemic corruption ultimately crumbled the company. A company led by super-chickens may not be the best long-term strategy.

Much of the American management class, and Jeff Bezos in particular, seem to see Lord of the Flies as a model for how to manage employees.

They are selecting for narcissistic sociopaths in their organization, and in the long run that is not a good thing.

Boeing Cannot Design Planes Anymore

As a result of years of layoffs and retirements of staff, Boeing lacked the technical resources to make a credible bid for the new Air Force Trainer:

It seemed so all-American: a U.S. aviation giant unveiling its newest military jet to flashing lights and thumping heavy-metal music. But the sleek twin-tailed T-X — Boeing’s candidate to become the U.S. Air Force’s next pilot trainer — couldn’t have made it to the dolled-up St. Louis hangar without a good deal of international help.

For all its deep aviation heritage, the Chicago company needed a partner on the T-X bid. A decade of engineering layoffs had left the venerable American firm without the workers needed to add the trainer competition to its existing workload, particularly with the Air Force requiring demonstration aircraft with a relatively quick turnaround. It also needed a way to do it more cheaply than past endeavors.

So the maker of the F-15 Eagle and F/A-18 Super Hornet teamed up with Saab — builder of the Gripen 4.5-generation fighter jet — to develop a T-X candidate. And less than three years after the two firms announced their partnership, they have now unveiled their first two aircraft, which are expected to fly by year’s end. That’s pretty fast for an American defense firm.

While officials from neither company would say just what parts of the plane were developed in Europe, Saab is believed to be manufacturing large portions of it. In June, a large Russian cargo plane believed to be carrying sections of the new aircraft flew from Sweden to the U.S.

………

“I’m not saying this thing is doomed. It’s just that I’m uncomfortable with a big disconnect between engineering and design and manufacturing,” said Richard Aboulafia, vice president for analysis at the Virginia-based Teal Group consulting firm. “It adds risk, it gets rid of a core company advantage, and frankly, there are just huge advantages of having designers and manufacturers co-located.”

Aboulafia cited Boeing’s need to lean on its partner for engineering.

“Outsourcing design — that appears to have a lot more complications than benefits,” he said. “It adds risk and it gets rid of a core capability, a core differentiator.”

I would note here that Boeing has outsourced technical expertise on the civil side as well, with many of the stumbles in 787 development coming from the fact that critical engineering expertise was outsourced to, "risk sharing partners."

It is a clear indictment of the McDonnell Douglas MBA style management that Boeing has had for the past few decades.

Boeing can no longer design and build new aircraft.

Factoid of the Day

I always knew the people who you know are the ones most likely to kill you.

I did not know this: (BTW, kickass discussion of statistics of incomplete data here)

Americans are afraid of many threats to their lives – serial killers, crazed gunmen, gang bangers, and above all terrorists – but these threats are surprisingly unlikely. Approximately three-quarters of all homicide victims in America are killed by someone they know. And the real threat from strangers is quite different from what most fear: one-third of all Americans killed by strangers are killed by police.

Our law enforcement system is broken.

OK, that bit I knew.

This Says Something Interesting About American Management

Though I haven't quite figured out what.

The CIA has released a WWII manual on sabotage, and it appears to describe life in modern American businesses frighteningly accurately:

In 1944, the CIA's precursor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), distributed a secret pamphlet that was intended as a guidebook to citizens living in Axis nations who were sympathetic to the Allies.

The "Simple Sabotage Field Manual," declassified in 2008 and available on the CIA's website, provided instructions for how everyday people could help the Allies weaken their country by reducing production in factories, offices, and transportation lines. 

………

See if any of those listed below — quoted but abridged — remind you of your boss, colleagues, or even yourself.

Organizations and Conferences 

• Insist on doing everything through "channels." Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
• Make "speeches." Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your "points" by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences.
• When possible, refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration." Attempt to make the committee as large as possible — never less than five.
• Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
• Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
• Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
• Advocate "caution." Be "reasonable" and urge your fellow-conferees to be "reasonable"and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.

Managers 

• In making work assignments, always sign out the unimportant jobs first. See that important jobs are assigned to inefficient workers.
• Insist on perfect work in relatively unimportant products; send back for refinishing those which have the least flaw.
• To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions.
• Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.
• Multiply the procedures and clearances involved in issuing instructions, pay checks, and so on. See that three people have to approve everything where one would do.

Employees 

• Work slowly.
• Contrive as many interruptions to your work as you can.
• Do your work poorly and blame it on bad tools, machinery, or equipment. Complain that these things are preventing you from doing your job right.
• Never pass on your skill and experience to a new or less skillful worker.

I'm sure that my dad, who spent much of his professional life as a consultant in management and organization, is familiar with these hallmarks of a dysfunctional organization.

I'm also wondering just how surprised he is that these behaviors are indistinguishable from deliberate sabotage.

The Politics are So Brutal Because the Stakes are So Small

Often said about academe, but also true of community theater, apparently.

The Poor Do Have Self Control

One of the myths about the poor is that they cannot defer gratification for greater future benefits.

Well, scientists have found a way to objectively test for the ability to handle stress, it involves "Vagal Tone", activity of the Vagus nerve, which is an indicator of how well people handle stress.

What they discovered is that poor children who are best able to think things through the take the immediate reward, while rich kids will delay gratification.

It turns out that poor children use a different calculus:  Having never experienced the stability of their more fortunate cohorts, they go for the the immediate payoff, because experience has shown them that the any plans for the future will make their plans moot:

In the late 1960s, Walter Mischel, a researcher at Stanford University, invited several hundred children to participate in a game in which they were given a choice: They could eat one sweet right away, or wait and have two a little later. Initially, the goal was simple: to see how and why people (kids in this case) delayed gratification. But after the end of the experiment, Mischel began to check in with as many of the participants' families as he could, and over the following decade he learned that his little experiment probably had much larger implications than he had anticipated.

Many of the children had trouble resisting the single, immediate treat (a marshmallow), which was to be expected. The magnetic force that exists between kids and candies is no secret. What was surprising, however, was that that tendency — the inability to forego something good right now in exchange for something better in a bit — was associated with all sorts of negative life outcomes, including lower levels of academic achievement and higher rates of obesity.

………

The realization has sparked concerns that poverty begets a certain level of impulsiveness, and that that tendency to act in the moment, on a whim, without fully considering the consequences, makes it all the more difficult for poor children to succeed. But there's an important thing this discussion seems to miss. Poor kids may simply not want to delay gratification. Put another way, their decisions may not reflect the sort of impulsive nature we tend to attribute them to.

"When resources are low and scarce, the rational decision is to take the immediate benefit and to discount the future gain," said Melissa Sturge-Apple, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester who studies child development. "When children are faced with economic uncertainty, impoverished conditions, not knowing when the next meal is, etc. — they may be better off if they take what is in front of them."

A recent two-part study conducted by Sturge-Apple shows how the tendency of poorer children to pounce on immediate rewards might not be the result of impulsiveness but rather of careful consideration.

In the first experiment, she monitored the heart rate of 200 low-income 2-year-olds. The monitoring allowed her to approximate each child's vagal tone — a measure of the activity of the vagus nerve, which has been shown to indicate how well a given individual performs under stress (i.e., reads social cues, reacts to environmental contexts, and adjusts behaviors). High vagal tone is good: it suggests a heightened ability to act relatively calmly under stress. Low vagal tone is bad: it suggests just the opposite.

Two years later, at the age of 4, the same children were presented with a choice. Each was sat a table where two plates and a bell were placed. One plate held two M&Ms, while the other held five. The children were told that they could either ring the bell and have the two M&Ms immediately or enjoy the plate of five as soon as the experimenter returned.

Interestingly, each child's vagal tone appeared to have a significant effect on their decision. But — and this is an important but — it didn't have the sort of effect many would have imagined. The higher the child's vagal tone — the greater, in other words, a child's ability to act calmly under pressure — the more likely the child was to ring the bell. The calmer the children were to think it through, the more likely they were to choose the immediate reward.

………

The children born to college-educated mothers of high socioeconomic status acted exactly as one would expect. The higher their vagal tone, or calmness under stress, the more likely they were to hold out for the five extra M&Ms. For children born to non-college-educated mothers of low socioeconomic status, on the other hand, the outcome was exactly the opposite. The higher their vagal tone, the less likely they were to wait.

The chart below, plucked from the study, shows just how stark the divergence is.

This is rational behavior, not evidence of lack of moral fiber.

If you don't know where your next meal is coming from, you eat whenever you can.

QED.

Quote of the Day

There is one aspect, however, in which Game of Thrones has a claim to being the most realistic show on television. Despite the wizards, the wights and the way every character manages to maintain perfect hair even when they’re being pointlessly tortured to death, there is something horribly relatable about Martin’s world of Westeros, whose characters have now become part of public myth. What sets it apart is not the monsters, the nudity or the festering gallons of gratuitous gore, but the overwhelming sense that the plot got run off the rails three books ago and is being steered towards a terrible precipice by a bunch of bickering, power-mad maniacs. This, coincidentally, happens to be the plot of the entire 21st century so far.

—Laurie Penny

As an aside, I probably should to watch a few episodes this show eventually, if just to understand the Obama/Anger Translator Luther "Khaleesi is coming to Westeros" reference.

I Care Not Much for a Man's Religion Whose Dog and Cat Are Not the Better for It

Abraham Lincoln said that, and a recent research implies that generosity and religiously are antithetical:

An argument often advanced for the encouragement of religion is that, to paraphrase St Matthew’s report of Jesus’s words, it leads people to love their neighbours as themselves. That would be a powerful point were it true. But is it? This was the question Jean Decety, a developmental neuroscientist at the University of Chicago, asked in a study just published in Current Biology.

Dr Decety is not the first to wonder, in a scientific way, about the connection between religion and altruism. He is, though, one of the first to do it without recourse to that standard but peculiar laboratory animal beloved of psychologists, the undergraduate student. Instead, he collaborated with researchers in Canada, China, Jordan, South Africa and Turkey, as well as with fellow Americans, to look at children aged between five and 12 and their families.

Altogether, Dr Decety and his colleagues recruited 1,170 families for their project, and focused on one child per family. Five hundred and ten of their volunteer families described themselves as Muslim, 280 as Christian, 29 as Jewish, 18 as Buddhist and 5 as Hindu. A further 323 said they were non-religious, 3 were agnostic and 2 ticked the box marked “other”.

………

The upshot was that the children of non-believers were significantly more generous than those of believers. They gave away an average of 4.1 stickers. Children from a religious background gave away 3.3. And a further analysis of the two largest religious groups (Jews, Buddhists and Hindus were excluded because of their small numbers in the sample), showed no statistical difference between them. Muslim children gave away 3.2 stickers on average, while Christian children gave away 3.3. Moreover, a regression analysis on these groups of children showed that their generosity was inversely correlated with their households’ religiosity. This effect remained regardless of a family’s wealth and status (rich children were more generous than poor ones), a child’s age (older children were more generous than younger ones) or the nationality of the participant. These findings are, however, in marked contrast to parents’ assessments of their own children’s sensitivity to injustice. When asked, religious parents reported their children to be more sensitive than non-believing parents did. 

 It appears that no one's dog cat is better for their owner's religion.

This Really is True

The folks at Cracked make the point that the Star Trek universe is actually a dystopian nightmare where affluence has snuffed out all creativity, and thus they send civilians on warships out into the far reaches of the galaxy to prevent boredom to turn into revolution:

Funniest Lad Mad Cover in Pakistan of the Day

Pakistani actress Veena Malik just appeared nude on the cover of FHM India sporting ink on her left arm saying "ISI".

This is a reference to the Pakistani intelligence service which has been accused of supporting terrorists in South Asia, and they are not amused:

In this month’s issue of FHM India, an international men’s magazine, Pakistani actress Veena Malik made worldwide headlines with a risqué nude photo shoot. While much of the attention has been on what Malik wasn’t wearing, one of the most powerful elements of her photo shoot was what she was sporting: a big, bold tattoo on her left arm, stating very simply, "ISI," for Pakistani’s secretive Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate.

The cover headline: "Pakistani W.M.D. Veena Malik Shows You How to Throw a Grenade!"

Indeed, the cover has been explosive; PakAlertPress.com, for instance splashed a headline on its blog: "India and Pakistan Are Going Nuclear Over Provocative Political Tattoo." And the photo has elicited a furious reaction in Pakistan’s media and in its living rooms.

In one fell swoop, the enormous tattoo on a bare woman’s body managed to demystify, emasculate and parody the ISI — something most people have been afraid to do in public since the inception of the agency a year after the birth of the nation in 1947. Founded with a mission of coordinating intelligence in the country after Pakistan’s loss to India in the 1947 war in Kashmir, the agency has become a feared, though privately mocked, enterprise, its hands allegedly in every back-room Pakistani deal; rigging elections, training militants for battle in India and Afghanistan, and monitoring its own citizens. The tattoo’s location on Malik’s body takes on special meaning in light of retired Adm. Mike Mullen’s statement in September that the militant Haqqani Network, considered by most Western analysts and experts to be based in the tribal areas of Pakistan, is a "veritable arm" of the ISI.

………

Kabeer Sharma, editor of FHM India, says the ISI tattoo was meant to be a sardonic reflection of India’s own conspiracy theories about the intelligence agency. "In India, you say, ‘The milk has gone bad. The ISI did it,’ They blame all of their problems on ISI," says Sharma.

Sharma, the son of an Indian satirist and New Delhi bookstore owner, says that a dilemma on the subcontinent is that folks don’t laugh enough over the absurdities of politics. "The problem," he says, "is that we all blame our problems on this imaginary force. Who is this ISI?" Meanwhile, on the Pakistan side, everything is blamed on RAW. "We collectively have no sense of humor. We have no sense of irony," he says.

………

But this isn’t just a conspiracy hatched in India (though the magazine was produced there), feeding the siege mentality behind so much of the rhetoric in Pakistan. In a country where the "ghairat brigade," or honor squad, of talking heads takes regularly to the airwaves to defend Pakistan’s honor against enemies — perceived and imagined — the photo shoot was a victory for a new movement that is emerging in Pakistan: the beghairat brigade, or the squad "without honor," or more aptly the "shameless brigade."

To many, the beghairat brigade offers a counter to the conspiracy theories that so permeate debates in Pakistan. Josh White, a scholar on Pakistan at the U.S. Institute of Peace, says, "I think the significance of the small but interesting beghairat movement is that it is trying to forge a way of being genuinely nationalistic without accepting the narrative that all of Pakistan’s problems are the result of someone else’s meddling."

I am sure that there are some deeper sociological points here, but this tempest in a teapot also amusing as hell.

One of the Facts of Running a Local Government Is That Making Your Government "Business Friendly" Never Pays

Of course, what I mean by "Business Friendly" is using tax abatements, creating dedicated infrastructure, or building stadiums.

When you pay companies to locate in your town, you always lose, and the latest case is the oil boom towns in North Dakota, which have discovered that by not making drillers pay their way, they raise costs for everyone else:

While the massive Bakken oil boom drew hordes of job seekers and international attention to the remote prairies of North Dakota and Montana in recent years, it’s turned into a money loser for most cities and counties in the region.

Crime in Dunn County, N.D., in the heart of the nation’s oil boom, skyrocketed 60 percent in just three years, and the road maintenance budget soared from $1.5 million to $25 million.

The local government couldn’t keep up, with demand for services outpacing the growth in tax revenue by as much as 40 percent. The problem continues as the drop in oil prices in the past year means increasingly less money for the county to spend on projects – while drilling, the truck traffic that eats up the roads, and demand for community services haven’t stopped.

“The gap between revenues and needs is still fairly large,” Daryl Dukart, a Dunn County commissioner, said in an interview. “It will take many years to balance out.”

Dunn County is far from alone. Analysis from researchers at Duke University found that “most local governments in North Dakota and Montana’s Bakken region have experienced net negative fiscal effects” from the shale drilling boom.

The answer here is fairly simple: Make the newcomers pay their own way.

When thousands of very trucks tear up your local roads, charge tolls on them.

When their water demands require the construction of new sewer and water infrastructure, charge them for that too.

The oil is where the oil is. If drilling drops by 10% because the energy companies have to pay their own way, it's a net plus.

The idea that in the long term it will sort itself out, a sentiment expressed by a Dickinson, North Dakota City Manager Shawn Kessel, is a pipe dream.

In the long term, the oil boom goes bust, and you still have to pay for the infrastructure that is now sitting unused, as well as the mountains of toxic waste that will start showing up.

I learned a little bit by being raised by a city planner, and one of the lessons that stuck is that if you subsidize industries to locate in your town, it will be a net tax loser.

The 2^nd lesson is that most of the money in real estate is made through explicit and implicit subsidies that come from the local government in the form of tax abatements, zoning changes, and unpaid for infrastructure upgrades.

What Ta-Nehisi Coates Said

He notes that there is no Ferguson effect, and that this is a matter of fact, not of opinion:

The Times has a story today on the rise in homicide in some American cities. It’s an important story—one which is hurt by the utterly baseless suggestion that those who protested against Ferguson may well have blood on their hands:

The New York Times quoted two academics, one of whom suggested that police are too concerned to act with impunity, and the other who notes that the rise in murder rates in the St. Louis area predated the shooting of Michael Brown.

For police to be in fear of prosecutions of their misconduct^* to be driving an increase in crime, it would have to occur after the trigger.

As my colleague Brentin Mock points out, to observe that homicides began increasing in St. Louis before the protests is not to make a subjective interpretation, but to offer a knowable and verifiable fact. If the “Ferguson Effect” is real, how can it be that it started before the Ferguson protests?

Neglecting this question is neither dispassionate nor high-minded. It is the sort of insidious “false equivalence” that so rightly irks my colleague James Fallows.  “False equivalence” runs contrary to the mission to journalism—it obscures where journalists are charged with clarifying. A reasonable person could read the Times’ story and conclude that there is as much proof for the idea that protests against police brutality caused crime to rise, as there is against it. That is the path away from journalism and toward noncommittal stenography: Some people think climate change is real, some do not. Some people believe in UFOs, others doubt their existence. Some think brain cancer can be cured with roots and berries, but others say proof has yet to emerge.

I'm sick of this, "Opinions on the shape of the world differ" crap.

^*Or maybe it isn't fear. Maybe it's a bunch of cops throwing a tantrum. Certainly, it appears that some of their behavior, particularly with regard to the NYPD and Mayor De Blasio to be the acts of a petulant child.

A Very Thought Provoking Essay………

Over at the Archdruid's crib, there is a must read post on the requirements for overturning an existing order. You want to read the whole thing, but here is a sample:

The first and most essential step in the transformation of any society is the delegitimization of the existing order. That doesn’t involve violence, and in fact violence at this first stage of the process is catastrophically counterproductive—a lesson, by the way, that the US military has never been able to learn, which is why its attempts to delegitimize its enemies (usually phrased in such language as “winning minds and hearts”) have always been so embarrassingly inept and ineffective. The struggle to delegitimize the existing order has to be fought on cultural, intellectual, and ideological battlefields, not physical ones, and its targets are not people or institutions but the aura of legitimacy and inevitability that surrounds any established political and economic order.

He also quotes what may be Isaac Asimov's most enduring bit of prose, "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."

It is an very interesting essay why's and wherefores of violence and non-violence for any revolutionary movement.

This Is a New Social Networking Service That I Approve Wholeheartedly

It requires no computer, though it does require a functioning elbow. It is called pub:

A middle-aged visionary has launched an offline service called ‘pub’, which allows friends to interact in a building.

Overweight, balding 46-year-old Martin Bishop sees ‘pub’, known locally as The Woodcutter’s Arms, as a place where people can verbally communicate while drinking beer.

He said: “There’s Steak Night on Tuesdays and a ska band every third Friday. Hopefully we’re getting the toilets done next month because they’re a bit grim at the moment.”

24-year old blogger Nikki Hollis commented: “I love going to the pub because it’s so interactive and exciting. For example, my friend will say something about her life, and then I comment, and then she comments back, and then I comment, and so on.

………

However police have warned about the potential dangers of ‘pub’: “People in the pub aren’t always who they seem to be. A middle-aged man could claim to be a small girl. Stay alert, use your eyes.”

I'm wondering if they could come up with a sports themed version of this.

I think that "Sports Pub" could be a real winner.

Internet Firm Going Public, but Not in a Good Way

It appears that, Ashley Madison the dating site for people who want to cheat on their spouses, has gone public ……… prematurely, and much like their clients, prematurely is not a word that you want to hear:

Large caches of data stolen from online cheating site AshleyMadison.com have been posted online by an individual or group that claims to have completely compromised the company’s user databases, financial records and other proprietary information. The still-unfolding leak could be quite damaging to some 37 million users of the hookup service, whose slogan is “Life is short. Have an affair.”

The data released by the hacker or hackers — which self-identify as The Impact Team — includes sensitive internal data stolen from Avid Life Media (ALM), the Toronto-based firm that owns AshleyMadison as well as related hookup sites Cougar Life and Established Men.

Reached by KrebsOnSecurity late Sunday evening, ALM Chief Executive Noel Biderman confirmed the hack, and said the company was “working diligently and feverishly” to take down ALM’s intellectual property. Indeed, in the short span of 30 minutes between that brief interview and the publication of this story, several of the Impact Team’s Web links were no longer responding.

………

In a long manifesto posted alongside the stolen ALM data, The Impact Team said it decided to publish the information in response to alleged lies ALM told its customers about a service that allows members to completely erase their profile information for a $19 fee.

According to the hackers, although the “full delete” feature that Ashley Madison advertises promises “removal of site usage history and personally identifiable information from the site,” users’ purchase details — including real name and address — aren’t actually scrubbed.

“Full Delete netted ALM $1.7mm in revenue in 2014. It’s also a complete lie,” the hacking group wrote. “Users almost always pay with credit card; their purchase details are not removed as promised, and include real name and address, which is of course the most important information the users want removed.”

On NPR, a representative of ALM said that they were using DMCA take-down notices to keep the information off the web, but that makes no sense at all, because a data is not copyrightable, though there may be some trade secret protections that apply.

In either case, there was a bit of schadenfreude for me when I heard about this.

I can understand how some people might look for someone to cheat with, you see this in the personal ads of the alternative press regularly, but making a whole site for this is just really creepy.

H/T Yves Smith.

This Is an Interesting Analysis of the Social Dynamics among the EU Leadership

I just came across an interesting analysis of attitudes in the EU, which the author suggests that that something akin to tribalism is poisoning EU-Greece negotiations:

Against all odds, Tsipras obtained a decisive victory in yesterday’s referendum. I agree that the referendum’s question was confusing (but have you ever seen the ones asked in Italian referenda?). I agree that the No was strategically positioned before the Yes (but why should have been the other way around?). I agree that Tsipras continued insisting that a No vote would not mean an exit from the euro, when it might mean exactly that. Yet, the Greek people in spite of the extreme situation – banks closed, massive campaign of the EU leaders in favor of the yes, not-too-vailed threats of what would have happened had the No won – overwhelmingly supported Tsipras.

Does it mean that now the EU needs to accept all Tsipras’s requests? Of course, not. In an agreement, like in a marriage, it takes two. Unlike in a marriage, however, in an international agreement there is a question of legitimacy of the negotiating delegates. From day one, the EU challenged the legitimacy of Tsipras’s mandate. The kind interpretation is that the EU rejected it because of the ambiguity underlying Tsipras’s mandate: no to the Troika’s conditions, but yes to the euro. The unkind one is that the EU rejected it because Tsipras was not part of the Brussels’ elite (he did not even wear a tie). Even worse, he was challenging the legitimacy of the Brussels’ elite. You can be a crook, you can be an unelected leader and – if you are one of them – your legitimacy will never be questioned in Brussels or Frankfurt. But if you are not, not only your credentials will be challenged, you will be openly undermined even if you had democratically won a clear mandate.

As a result, from day one – everybody from Junker to the Eurogroup – was trying to make this government fall, flirting with a new coalition between the “moderate” part of Syriza and the more centrist To Potami party and making clear that the conditions offered by the Institutions (ex Troika) would be much better, if Tsipras’s government fell. This was extremely antidemocratic and underhanded. Now it cannot continue any more. Tsipras has a clear mandate. Furthermore, Tsipras’s bargaining position had been boosted by a recently released IMF paper, which confirms that Greece’s debt is not sustainable.

Now the Institutions do not need to accept Tsipras’s conditions, but they have to negotiate with him in good faith. The no vote does not necessarily mean Grexit, unless the Institutions want so. What it is different now is that the European leaders will have to take responsibility for kicking a country out (something against all the treaties). They cannot hope anymore that Tsipras will do the dirty job for them.

(emphasis original)

I'm not sure if his analysis over ties and the like make sense except as a metaphor, for what is an excess of group thing that permeates the EU leadership, but in that context, it does appear to explain a lot.

Much of what passes for "common knowledge" in the EU, is in fact a mishmash of economic theories that were discredited well before the 2^nd World War, and much like the gold standard economics that exacerbated the depression and led to the rise of fascism, it appears that a similar path is being taken.

H/T Brad DeLong

It Appears That Sociological Ethnography Is Not, and Can Never Be, Science………

Alice Goffman released what many consider to be a seminal work of sociological ethnography.

It has now been revealed that many of the details of this study are false.

This is actually not an issue of a violation of professional ethics. In fact ethics in this field requires the obfuscation of data:

Late last month, a Northwestern University law professor published an article calling into question the veracity of a widely lauded book by Alice Goffman, one of sociology’s brightest young stars. The book, On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City, is an ethnographic study of a black neighborhood in Philadelphia where, according to Goffman’s research, residents live in a mini–police state, constantly in fear of being arrested and sent to jail or prison, often for minor offenses. Goffman conducted her fieldwork, first as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania and later as a graduate student at Princeton University, by embedding herself with a group of men from the neighborhood—they are all given pseudonyms in the book—and carefully tracking their lives over the course of about six years. The result is an extraordinarily detailed portrait of a community—nicknamed “6th Street” by Goffman and never identified by its actual location—in which the criminal justice system dominates people’s lives and systematically cuts them off from opportunity.

On the Run received nearly universal acclaim upon its publication. But according to Steven Lubet, the Northwestern law professor, the book is seriously flawed. Lubet points to two anecdotes that he believes could not have happened as described and a third that seems to implicate Goffman in a felony. The article in which Lubet laid out his concerns touched off a debate both within the academic community and outside of it, one that spilled from sociology message boards onto the pages of the New York Times and caused some observers to wonder whether they were witnessing the opening scenes of an all-too-familiar story of intellectual deception, exposure, and professional disgrace.

Lubet’s article, originally published in the New Rambler Review and adapted by the New Republic, may have touched off the public backlash against Goffman, but he was not the first critic to attack her credibility. A few weeks earlier, many in the world of sociology had become transfixed by a strange unsigned document that had been sent to scores of influential scholars in the field, along with Goffman’s department chairwoman at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In the document, which quickly made its way online, an unnamed critic made the case against On the Run over the course of more than 30,000 words and 45 numbered “problems,” highlighting what appeared to be inconsistencies in the book’s chronology and casting doubt on the integrity of the research behind it. The document appeared to be the work of an obsessive with an agenda—its tone was at times angry and bitter, and its reasoning could be muddled and hard to follow—but some of the author’s observations seemed damning, or at least in need of explanation. Goffman felt compelled to write a line-by-line rebuttal and submit it to her department.

I spoke to Goffman on the phone on June 5, not long after the University of Wisconsin–Madison released a brief statement saying that it had found the accusations of academic misconduct that had been leveled against Goffman in the anonymous letter to be “without merit.” With that statement in mind, I asked Goffman about what I considered the most problematic points in the letter and asked her to respond to them. From there we talked more generally about her book and how it compares to other works of nonfiction aimed at exposing the strife and degradation suffered by underprivileged populations.

Ethnography can look like an uncomfortable hybrid of impressionistic data gathering, soft-focus journalism, and even a dash of creative writing.

I came away from the conversation with a sense that there are indeed factual inaccuracies throughout On the Run. However, they are not the product of the kind of fraud we’re used to seeing in publishing scandals, and it would be unfair to say they place Goffman in the company of fabulists like Stephen Glass or data-cookers like Michael LaCour. That’s because the majority of what I’m calling “inaccuracies” were introduced into On the Run because the conventions of sociological ethnography required them. In keeping with the methodological protocols of her chosen discipline, which typically demands that researchers grant their subjects total anonymity, Goffman changed details and scrambled facts in order to prevent readers from deducing the identities of the people she was writing about. In the process, she made her book all but impossible to fact-check.

The imperative to anonymize subjects is, in most cases, specifically mandated by the institutional review boards that approve social science research in American academia. And while it does seem possible to me that Goffman embellished some aspects of her narrative in order to tell a more compelling story, it was the steps she took to protect her sources—many of whom commit serious crimes in the book—that have made On the Run all but defenseless against skeptics like Lubet and the author of the anonymous letter. In other words, there is a good bit more than just the credibility of On the Run at stake here. At the heart of this controversy are the fundamental limitations of ethnography as a mode of inquiry. As practiced by many scholars, what is supposed to be a scientific undertaking aimed at systematically revealing truths about the world looks more like an uncomfortable hybrid of impressionistic data gathering, soft-focus journalism, and even a dash of creative writing.

Though it may be Goffman in the hot seat right now, any number of her colleagues could find themselves in a similar position, for the simple reason that producing research that is detached from reality to the point of being unverifiable is a central tenet of their discipline. As a result, some of the most vital and nationally relevant findings that come out of their field, including research on topics of urgent importance, like the conditions of inner city life, are vulnerable to questions about how much truth—and what kind of truth—they actually contain.

………

Elijah Anderson, Goffman’s undergraduate adviser

To that question, Goffman doesn’t have a good answer. As Lubet points out, she so disguised the people and locations that appear in On the Run as to make her accounts effectively unverifiable: She changed the name of every person in her book and altered what she refers to in the preface as people’s “identifying characteristics.” According to Goffman, that meant changing the names of the places her characters inhabit and visit, changing people’s ages and jobs, adjusting the number of people who were present at certain events, moving some of those events around in time. What’s more, Goffman revealed in an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer that she shredded all of her notebooks and disposed of the hard drive that contained all of her files out of fear that she could be subpoenaed and thereby forced to incriminate her subjects.

………

The third discrepancy was of a different type, however. Goffman said that Chuck was indeed alive at the time of the court hearing. But the field note in which he is described giving his brother a ride was not written down in 2009—Goffman just labeled it that way in the book as part of the anonymization process. When it came to court hearings, she explained, she felt it was especially important to scramble dates because public records can be used with relative ease to identify cases and thus people. In this instance, Goffman said, her failure was in neglecting to make sure that the timeline as presented in the book was internally consistent.

It’s this last example that is most illuminating: unlike the other two, which seem to be innocent, if careless, mistakes, it illustrates the lengths to which Goffman went to change facts in order to protect her subjects. More to the point, that’s exactly what she was supposed to do, according to the rules of ethnography.

………

To find out, I called several sociologists and anthropologists who had either done ethnographic research of their own or had thought about the methodology from an outside perspective. Ethnography, they explained, is a way of doing research on groups of people that typically involves an extended immersion in their world. If you’re an ethnographer, they said, standard operating procedure requires you to take whatever steps you need to in order to conceal the identities of everyone in your sample population. Unless you formally agree to fulfill this obligation, I was told, your research proposal will likely be blocked by the institutional review board at your university.

“Your honor —your word—is the only thing you have to make your stuff believable.”

If all there is to verify your studies is your word, it's not science.  Period, full stop.

If sociological ethnography requires its adherents to produce studies that are by definition irreproducible results, then it is not a science. It is an exercise in historical fiction.

Science requires reproducibility, no saving throw.