February 4, 2014

The Atlantic: Beards are racist

From The Atlantic:
The Racially Fraught History of the American Beard 
“Washes and razors for foofoos," scoffed Walt Whitman. But the story of 19th-century facial hair is more tangled than modern nostalgists may realize.  
SEAN TRAINOR

Let me declare what many already know: 2013 was a landmark year for men’s facial hair. From flamboyant beards to the proliferation of “old-fashioned” shops, evidence of the trend abounds, embracing groups as diverse as the Boston Red Sox, the men of Movember, and the Robertsons of Duck Dynasty. In dens of hipsterdom, one can hardly throw a PBR without hitting a waxed moustache. ... 
But one characteristic distinguishes this revival from previous ones: Today’s facial-hair enthusiasts share an affection for the ornate practices of the 1800s—the exuberant beards and ostentatious moustaches, as well as the elegance and “manliness” of the shops where those styles were cultivated.
What follows is the lost story of American facial hair. Like countless other histories, it is rife with contradictions. It begins with white Americans at the time of the Revolution who derided barbering as the work of “inferiors.” It continues with black entrepreneurs who turned it into a source of wealth and prestige. And it concludes with the advent of the beard—a fashion born out of desperation but transformed into a symbol of masculine authority and white supremacy.

Then there's a whole bunch of stuff about black barbershops (it doesn't seem to occur to the author that lots of white people lived in areas without many black barbers) and how Indians can't grow beards (according to stereotype, of course). I can't quite follow the theory, but then there's:
"(Incidentally, Victorian Englishmen were going through a beard revival of their own at that time, though for different reasons.)"

Rather than promoting two complicated theories of how Americans and Brits came up with the same look at about the same time for separate reasons involving African-Americans and American Indians in America but presumably not in England, isn't it more plausible that provincial Americans like Abraham Lincoln were mostly following fashions being set in Dickens' London, the richest, most progressive, most dominant city in the world around 1860?

In general today, youngish white people are getting more into their ancestors' material culture: "The Dream of the 1890s Is Alive in Portland" and all that. 

Of course, much of what's attractive about styles from before the Great War, the Depression, and WWII is the self-confident sense of superiority (after 1945, you can sense the feeling that Western man just didn't deserve nice things). Which will be justification for countless more Atlantic articles worrying over: Are handlebar mustaches racist or not? (Answer: Yes.)
  

World War 3

From my new column "World War 3" in Taki's Magazine:
With the 100th anniversary of World War I upcoming and old enmities between America and Russia resurging in contemporary form—for example, Glenn Beck recently said, “I will stand with GLAAD against…hetero-fascism” in Russia—due to the approach of that gayest of sporting events, the Winter Olympics, I thought it worth taking a look back at the war that didn’t happen: the one between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. 
So I dug out my battered copy of Sir John Hackett’s 1978 sci-fi novel, The Third World War: August 1985, which scared the hell out of me when I received it as a Christmas present on December 25, 1979, the day the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. ... 
This bestseller is little remembered today, although its dry, logistics-oriented tale pleading for more defense spending has enjoyed an odd afterlife by inspiring Max Brooks’s zombie apocalypse novel World War Z that became last summer’s Brad Pitt blockbuster (which has provided me with no end of punning titles such as “World War G” and “World War T”).

Read the whole thing there.

I hadn't consciously been aware that Max Brooks was so influenced by Sir John's book, but it all made sense on a Plate of Shrimp level, hence all my World War G / World War T riffing.

A lot things turn out to be less random than you'd think. For example, Hackett has the Soviets finally stopped by West German reservists at a river in the Netherlands, just as Hackett's brigade was stopped by Germans at a river in the Netherlands when they parachuted in during Operation Market Garden in September 1944.

By the way, one of the great works of British boys' literature, Richard Adams' talking rabbit novel Watership Down, is an allegory of the paratroopers' terrified retreat from the bridge too far.
 

Did lead poisoning cause crime boom?

EPA graph of blood lead levels near Smelterville, ID
An economist named Rick Nevin has been promoting for a number of years the theory that rises and falls in the crime rate are closely tied to lead pollution. In a 2007 post entitled "Lead Poisoning and the Great 1960s Freakout," I looked at the evidence and found it mixed (why, for example, didn't Japan have any substantial loosening of social order?) but intriguing. Blogger Kevin Drum has taken up pushing the theory. (I responded here.)

My suggestion, both from the perspective of disinterested research and as a PR strategy, has been for Drum to focus upon specific locations that were severely polluted by lead due to mining, industry, or dumping. The EPA maintains a handy list of some of the worst lead pollution Superfund sites. What has happened to crime rates in these locales over time? For instance, correlate the EPA graph above with crime rates in Smelterville and see what you get.

To give a literary example, the single most insanely violent novel I've ever read is Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, which is based upon his experiences as a Pinkerton man in Butte, Montana, a center of violent strikes and repression. Butte was the biggest, most polluted mining town in the United States, with substantial lead and gigantic copper mining activities right in the middle of town. Did metal poisoning contribute to the craziness of action described in Hammett's book? 

On the other hand, my Uncle Al, an accountant, was born in Butte 90 years ago, and has been just about the sanest guy I've known. 

I've tried reading up on lawsuits by residents of lead towns against the big polluters, and crime doesn't seem to come up much in the testimony. Typically, the plaintiffs argue that the energy levels of themselves and their children are depressed.
  
So, I remain uncertain. But, my point is that there is much data available that nobody seems to have studied carefully.

P.S., An Economist notes:
Butte was primarily a copper mine. Lead was produced. However, copper and zinc were the primary products. The dominant ore in Butte as copper porphyry. By contrast, the ore processed at Bunker Hill was quite different. From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Valley,_Idaho)

What were Neanderthal genes good for?

Many years ago, Gregory Cochran began pushing the idea that modern humans have some small percentage of Neanderthal inheritance, and that humanity as it exists today acquired by interbreeding with Neanderthals certain useful gene variants that had been evolving separately in cold Europe. Both predictions appear to be true, and now studies are looking at which fitness-enhancing gene versions were picked up wholesale from Neanderthals.

At West Hunter, Cochran reviews some new data:
Exactly which kinds of Neanderthal alleles would give advantage was less obvious.  I suspected that Neanderthals would be resistant to local pathogens, and that such genetic defenses could easily pay off in modern humans moving into Eurasia.  It looks as if some of that happened – there is a good chance that some common HLA alleles in Eurasians originated in Neanderthals, and some Neanderthal variants involved with defense against viruses have become common. 
I thought that anatomically modern humans might have picked up alleles that dealt better with the big swings in day length characteristic of northern latitudes.  In an earlier talk, Sakararaman  mentioned a common Neanderthal version of the CLOCK gene in Europeans, but that doesn’t show up in the paper, so maybe that turned out to be a mistake. 
It looks as if both Europeans and East Asians have picked up Neanderthal versions of  several keratin filament genes, involved in hair and skin formation. Not fixed, but pretty common.  This might have something to do with the non-kinky hair found in most Eurasians. 
Some of these common Neanderthal alleles may have some effect on the central nervous system, but as usual, we have such a poor understanding of gene function that it’s hard to tell. A Neanderthal variant of TANC1 is common in Europeans, and that gene is thought to regulate dendritic spines and excitatory synapses.  Looking at the broader question, an unusual number of selected Neanderthal alleles were found that are associated with major depression. So maybe those alleles affected mood regulation. Perhaps depression is part of a strategy for dealing with long winters. 
There are gene deserts in which you find very few Neanderthal alleles, presumably because those alleles didn’t work well in modern humans. There is a dearth of testes-associated gene,  not too surprising because they evolve particularly rapidly and are therefore more likely than average to be incompatible with a sister group that diverged some time ago.  The area around FOXP2 is such a desert:  Neanderthals were perhaps worse at speech, or any rate different in some way that didn’t mesh. 
There are some signs of reproductive incompatibility with modern humans, but obviously not enough to prevent adaptive introgression. David Reich suggests that Neanderthals were “at the very edge of being biologically incompatible”.  I doubt that, for two reasons.  First, the known cases of species intersterility in primates all took longer to develop. Bonobos and chimps manage, and they’ve been separated something like 800,000 years. In addition, there is evidence that African hunter-gatherers (Bushmen and Pygmies)  picked up some genetic material from an unknown archaic group, one that split off considerably earlier than Neanderthals, something like 900,000 years. ...
In our book, we suggested that the big bang of the Upper Paleolithic,  the dramatic increase in cultural complexity seen in Europe some 40,000 years ago, might have been triggered, at least in part, by an influx of adaptive Neanderthal alleles. Right now, from the evidence in these papers, I’m not seeing a strong case for that. Of course we only understand what half these genes are doing,  so the fat lady hasn’t finished singing, but  we may well be wrong.  Of course that dramatic increase in cultural complexity did happen, and for that matter, it is still true that average IQ scores are quite low in sub-Saharan Africa and its diaspora.  But IQ scores are also low in populations such as Australian Aborigines that have about the same amount of Neanderthal admixture as other people outside of Africa – so at minimum the story is  more complicated.
     

WSJ: Tom Perkins was on to something

A commenter writes:
- Steve Sailer: Some people don't criticize billionaires out of fear of anti-Semitism. 
- Critics of Steve: Only a crazy, conspiracy theorist Jew-hater racist sexist like you would say that. 
- WSJ: animosity towards top 1% is driven by anti-Semitism. 

From the Wall Street Journal:
Ruth Wisse: The Dark Side of the War on 'the One Percent' 
Stoking class envy is a step in a familiar, dangerous and highly incendiary process.

By RUTH R. WISSE 
Feb. 3, 2014 7:37 p.m. ET 
Two phenomena: anti-Semitism and American class conflict. Is there any connection between them? In a letter to this newspaper, the noted venture capitalist Tom Perkins called attention to certain parallels, as he saw them, between Nazi Germany's war against the Jews and American progressives' war on the "one percent." For comparing two such historically disparate societies, Mr. Perkins was promptly and heatedly denounced.

Would Kleiner Perkins' Perkins' attempt to play the Kristallnacht Kard have gone over better if he weren't a Norwegian-American? He seems to think so, and quickly argued that his late Jewish partner Eugene Kleiner would have agreed with him and he was motivated by white knight feelings toward his ex-wife Danielle Steele in her battle with San Francisco's bureaucracy.
But is there something to be said for his comparison—not of Germany and the United States, of course, but of the politics at work in the two situations? The place to begin is at the starting point: with the rise of anti-Semitism, modernity's most successful and least understood political movement. ...
The parallel that Tom Perkins drew in his letter was especially irksome to his respondents on the left, many of whom are supporters of President Obama's sallies against Wall Street and the "one percent." These critics might profitably consult Robert Wistrich, today's leading historian of anti-Semitism. His "From Ambivalence to Betrayal: The Left, the Jews, and Israel" (2012) documents the often profound anti-Semitism that has affected socialists and leftists from Karl Marx to today's anti-Israel movement of boycott, divestment and sanctions.  
... My point is broader: Stoking class envy is a step in a familiar, dangerous and highly incendiary process. Any ideology or movement, right or left, that is organized negatively—against rather than for—enjoys an inherent advantage in politics, mobilizing unappeasable energies that never have to default on their announced goal of cleansing the body politic of its alleged poisons. 
In this respect, one might think of anti-Semitism as the purest and most murderous example of an enduring political archetype: the negative campaign. That campaign has its international as well as its domestic front. Modern anti-Zionism, itself a patented invention of Soviet Communism and now the lingua franca of the international left, uses Israel just as anti-Semitism uses Jews, directing grievance and blame and eliminationist zeal against an entire collectivity that has flourished on the world scene thanks to the blessings of freedom and opportunity. 
Herein lies a deeper structural connection. On the global front today, the much larger and more obvious beneficiary of those same blessings is the democratic capitalist system of the United States, and the ultimate target of the ultimate negative campaign is the American people. Anyone seeking to understand the inner workings of such a campaign will find much food for thought in Mr. Perkins's parallel. 
Ms. Wisse, a [actually, The Martin Peretz] professor of Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard, is the author of "Jews and Power" (Schocken, 2007) and "No Joke: Making Jewish Humor" (Princeton, 2013).

Dr. Wisse was one of Larry Summers' few outspoken defenders at Harvard after his 2005 "gaffe" about women mathematicians.
 

February 3, 2014

Andrew Sullivan as role model: Gay boys 'roiding up

From WNEW:
Steroid Use Much Higher Among Gay and Bi Teen Boys

CHICAGO — Gay and bisexual teen boys use illicit steroids at a rate almost six times higher than do straight kids, a “dramatic disparity” that points up a need to reach out to this group, researchers say. 
Reasons for the differences are unclear. The study authors said it’s possible gay and bi boys feel more pressure to achieve a bulked-up “ideal” male physique, or that they think muscle-building steroids will help them fend off bullies. 
Overall, 21 percent of gay or bisexual boys said they had ever used steroids, versus 4 percent of straight boys. The difference was similar among those who reported moderate use — taking steroid pills or injections up to 40 times: 8 percent of gay or bi teens reported that amount, versus less than 2 percent of straight boys. The heaviest use — 40 or more times — was reported by 4 percent of gays or bi boys, compared with less than 1 percent of straight teens. 
The study is billed as the first to examine the problem; previous research has found similar disparities for other substance abuse. ...

The nationally representative study is an analysis of government surveys from 2005 and 2007. It involved 17,250 teen boys aged 16 on average; almost 4 percent — 635 boys — were gay or bisexual. Blashill said it’s likely more recent data would show the disparities persist. 
Dr. Rob Garofalo, adolescent medicine chief at Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago, said the differences aren’t surprising, since it is known that gay youth often have “body image issues.” But he said, “It is still shocking. These are dramatically high rates.” 

Here, from 2000, is Andrew Sullivan's loving depiction of the effect of prescription testosterone on himself.

By the way, there's a sense that in our culture gay men are less waspishly witty than they used to be and are now more earnest and dull. It's hard to measure, but I'd guess you'd find more people who would agree with that statement than with the opposite. Might this cultural trend (assuming it exists) have something to do with the dumbing down side effects of butching up to be more attractive to other gay men?
      

Here we go again ...

From the New York Times:
Race Gap on Conventional Loans

African-American and Hispanic borrowers have been largely shut out of the conventional mortgage market, according to a new report from Zillow and the National Urban League. Citing 2012 loan data reported under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, along with results from a Zillow poll of 700 mortgage applicants in December, the analysis found that whites accounted for about 69 percent of all conventional mortgage applications. The share of applications filed by blacks was under 3 percent; Hispanics represented only 5 percent.

100 - 69 - 3 - 5 = 23% of new conventional mortgages going to whom?
Black and Hispanic borrowers are far more likely to apply for low-down-payment loans insured by the Federal Housing Administration. About 57 percent of black applicants and 60 percent of Hispanic applicants applied for F.H.A. loans, compared with 30 percent of white applicants. 
Access to financing that requires as little as 3.5 percent down is key for minority applicants, who on average have lower incomes and credit scores than whites, said Stan Humphries, Zillow’s chief economist. They also have far lower rates of homeownership, which makes it harder to accumulate wealth over time and across generations. “Higher down-payment requirements have had the biggest impact on minority applicants for conventional mortgages,” Mr. Humphries said. “They just don’t have the savings nonminority groups have.” 
And their conventional mortgage applications are more likely to be denied. One in four black applicants were turned down, compared with one in 10 white applicants, the report said. 
As conventional lending standards have tightened, F.H.A.-backed loans have become crucial to maintaining credit access in minority communities. But at the same time, Mr. Humphries said, F.H.A.’s dominance among such borrowers hints at a problematic trend: “a different path to financing based on your race and ethnic group.” 
And the F.H.A. path can be costly. Although F.H.A.-backed loans offer the initial advantage of less money down, their mortgage insurance premiums are considerably higher than premiums on conventional loans. 
Julia Gordon, the director of housing finance and policy at the Center for American Progress, a liberal research group, has concerns about what she calls “the dual housing market,” and says she believes the conventional market ought to be making lower-down-payment loans more widely available. “Like all the other separate-but-equal arrangements,” she said, “this is not good for consumers or the market or for taxpayers. We are seeing creditworthy people who should be able to get loans in the conventional market but can’t.” 
Ongoing discussions in Washington about how to wind down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should include a commitment to ensure that lenders make credit available equitably, she added. 

With apologies to Wordsworth and Milton:

                     Las Vegas, 2014
MOZILO! thou shouldst be lending at this hour:
    Exurbs have need of thee: they are a fen
    Of prudent finance: kitchen, bath, and den,
Fireplace, the heroic wealth of marble shower,
Have forfeited their late-lost subprime dower
    Of higher leverage. We are low-debt men;
    O raise us up, return to us again,
And give us zero down liar loan power!
Thy face was like an Orange, and golfed a lot;
    Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like TV:
    Pure flapdoodle, correct politically,
    So didst thou at Sherwood Country Club play,
In devout PCness; and yet thy stock
    The lowest return on investment did pay.
 
Here's the original:

                     London, 1802
MILTON! thou shouldst be living at this hour:
    England hath need of thee: she is a fen
    Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
    Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
    O raise us up, return to us again,
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power!
Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart;
    Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:
    Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
    So didst thou travel on life's common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
    The lowliest duties on herself did lay.
         

February 2, 2014

Philip Seymour Hoffman, RIP

I'm still looking for online video of Philip Seymour Hoffman's Tex Avery-sized reaction shots to taking snorts of moonshine in The Master. These outtakes of another line aren't bad, though.

Hoffman was the greatest actor in English-language movies about a decade ago. He would have made the ideal Ignatius J. Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces.

Back in 2005 I called him "the American Alec Guinness," but that was imperceptive. He was almost always conspicuous in character roles. I can remember watching Scent of a Woman in 1992 and wondering who is playing the other high school kid. Hoffman tended to cause elbow-nudging among audiences: Hey, look, it's what his name. This is going to be good! (Guinness was conspicuous too, of course, as is his heir Gary Oldman -- nobody goes into acting to be inconspicuous -- but Guinness wasn't conspicuously conspicuous.)

Lately, you could see a few problems. Before starting an article, I make up a page of random notes where I just jot down observations without attempting to fit them together. From my notes for my review of the recent Hunger Games sequel:
Philip Seymour Hoffman looked like he was needing the Big H to get through his dialogue.

Fat actor life expectancy:

P.S. Hoffman 46
James Gandolfini 51
Chris Farley 33
John Candy 43
John Belushi 33

Now my wife is worried about John Goodman. Oliver Platt, too. But, there's also:

Jackie Gleason 71
W.C. Fields 66
Sydney Greenstreet 74
      

Anti-Human Nature

Another from the Edge forum on obsolete scientific ideas:
Peter Richerson 
Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of California-Davis; Visiting Professor, Institute of Archaeology, University College London 
[Anti-]Human Nature 
The concept of human nature has considerable currency among evolutionists who are interested in humans. Yet when examined closely it is vacuous. Worse, it confuses the thought processes of those who attempt to use it. Useful concepts are those that cut nature at its joints. Human nature smashes bones. 
Human nature implies that our species is characterized by common core of features that define us. Evolutionary biology teaches us that this sort of essentialist concept of species is wrong. A species is an assemblage of variable individuals, albeit individuals who are sufficiently genetically similar that they can successful interbreed. Most species share most of their genes with ancestral and related species, as we do with other apes. In most species, ample genetic variation ensures that no two individuals are genetically identical. Many species contain geographically structured genetic variation, as the modern humans do. A few tens of thousands of years ago, our genus seemed to have comprised of at a couple of African "species" and three Eurasian ones, all of which interbred enough to leave traces in living genomes. Most species, and the populations of which they are composed, are relentlessly evolving. The human populations that have adopted agriculture in the Holocene have undergone a wave of genetic changes to adapt to a diet rich in starchy staples other agricultural products, and to an environment rich in epidemic pathogens taking advantage of dense, settled human populations. Some contemporary human populations today are subject to new selective pressures owing to "diseases of abundance." The evolution of resistance to such diseases is detectable. Some geneticists argue that genes affecting our behavior have come under recent selection to adapt to life in complex societies. 
The concept of human nature causes people to look for explanations under the wrong rock. Take the most famous human nature argument: are people by nature good or evil? In recent years, experimentalists have conducted tragedy of the commons games and observed how people solve the tragedy (if they do). A common finding is that roughly a third of participants act as selfless leaders, using whatever tools the experimenters make available to solve the dilemma of cooperation, roughly a tenth are selfish exploiters of any cooperation that arises, and the balance are guarded cooperators with flexible morals. This result comports with everyone's personal experience, some people are routinely honest and generous, a few are downright psychopathic, and many people fall somewhere in between. Human society would be entirely different if this were not so. The human nature debate on the topic was sterile because it did not attend to something we all know if we stop to think about it. 
Darwin's great contribution to biology was to abandon essentialism and focus on variation and its transmission. He made remarkable progress even though organic inheritance was a black box in his day. He also got the main problem of human variability right. In the Descent of Man, he argued that humans were biologically a rather ordinary species with a rather ordinary amount of geographical variation. Yet, in many ways, the amount human behavioral variation is far outside the range of other species. The Fuegans adapted to a hunting and gathering life on the Straits of Magellan were sharply different from a leisured gentleman naturalist from Shrewsbury. But these differences mainly owe to different customs and traditions, not mainly to organic differences. He also realized that the evolution of traditions responded to selective processes other than natural selection. Traditions are shaped by human choices a little like the artificial selection of domesticates, with natural selection playing a subordinate role. 
In his Sketch on an infant Darwin described how readily children learn from their caregivers. The inheritance of traditions, customs, and language is relatively easy to observe with the tools of a 19th Century naturalist compared to intricacies of genetic inheritance, which is still yielding fundamental secrets to the high tech tools of molecular biology. Recent work on the mechanisms underlying imitation and teaching has begun to reveal the more deeply hidden cognitive components of these processes and the results underpin Darwin's phenomenological account of tradition acquisition and evolution. 
In no field is the deficiency of the human nature concept better illustrated than in its use to try to understand learning, culture and cultural evolution. Human nature thinking leads to the conclusion that causes of behavior can be divided into nature and nurture. Nature is conceived of as causally prior to nurture both in evolutionary and developmental time. What evolves is nature and cultural variation, whatever it is, has to the causal handmaiden of nature. This is simply counterfactual. If the dim window stone tools give us does not lie, culture and cultural variation have been fundamental adaptations of our lineage perhaps going back to late australopiths. The elaboration of technology over the last two million years has roughly paralleled the evolution of larger brains and other anatomical changes. We have clear examples of cultural changes driving genetic evolution, such as the evolution of dairying driving the evolution of adult lactase persistence. Socially learned technology could have been doing similar things all throughout the last 2 million years. The human capacity for social learning develops so early in the first year of life that developmentalists have had to design very clever experiments to probe what infants are learning months before language and precise imitative behavior exist. At least from 12 months onward social learning begins to transmit the discoveries of cultures to children with every opportunity for these discoveries to interact with gene expression. In autistic children, this social learning mechanism is more or less severely compromised, leading to more or less severely "developmentally disabled" adults. 
Human culture is best conceived of as a part of human biology, like our bipedallocomotion. It is a source of variation that we have used to adapt to most of the world's terrestrial and amphibious habitats. Using the human nature concept, like essentialism more generally, makes it impossible think straight about human evolution. 

As F. Scott Fitzgerald might have said if he had been a little more sober: the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to notice that this bathtub gin bottle is both part empty and part full at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
      

Anti-Anti-Anecdotalism

Another Edge egghead contribution on Which idea should be retired from Science:
Nicholas G. Carr 
Author, The Shallows and The Big Switch 
[Anti-]Anti-anecdotalism 
We live anecdotally, proceeding from birth to death through a series of incidents, but scientists can be quick to dismiss the value of anecdotes. "Anecdotal" has become something of a curse word, at least when applied to research and other explorations of the real. A personal story, in this view, is a distraction or a distortion, something that gets in the way of a broader, statistically rigorous analysis of a large set of observations or a big pile of data. But as this year's Edge question makes clear, the line between the objective and the subjective falls short of the Euclidean ideal. It's negotiable. The empirical, if it's to provide anything like a full picture, needs to make room for both the statistical and the anecdotal. 
The danger in scorning the anecdotal is that science gets too far removed from the actual experience of life, that it loses sight of the fact that mathematical averages and other such measures are always abstractions. Some prominent physicists have recently questioned the need for philosophy, implying that it has been rendered obsolete by scientific inquiry. I wonder if that opinion isn't a symptom of anti-anecdotalism. Philosophers, poets, artists: their raw material includes the anecdote, and they remain, even more so than scientists, our best guides to what it means to exist.

I employ lots of anecdotes, data, academic studies, stereotypes, appeal to authorities, consensus, lone geniuses, fiction, the whole gamut of potential evidence.

In general, I think people aren't terribly good at distinguishing between the two main reasons why a bit of anecdotal evidence would be memorable to more than one person: either it's illustrative of a dog-bites-man pattern or it's a man-bites-dog story that is interesting for its rarity, an exception that proves the rule (i.e., supports the general pattern by being famously exceptional).

It's not terribly hard to notice which one it is, but you've got to look. But I don't see much in our culture that tells people to try to distinguish along this dimension. Does it even have a name?
  

An old fashioned Super Bowl

The first few decades of Super Bowls were almost uniformly awful games, depressing blowouts, with the few close ones mostly featuring lots of turnovers. Recently, they were pretty good, but welcome back to what my younger days were like. Oddly enough, the terribleness of most of the first 30 or so Super Bowls didn't stop them from getting ever more popular. Almost every year was the triumph of hope over experience.
   

Malta less of a pushover than America

From the New York Times:
Give Malta Your Tired and Huddled, and Rich 
By DAN BILEFSKY   JAN. 31, 2014 
PARIS — Having been besieged by the Ottomans, and ruled over the centuries by foreign invaders from the Greeks to the Romans to Napoleon, the tiny Mediterranean island nation of Malta has seen plenty of unwelcome interlopers. 
But now, it seems, these foreigners are quite welcome — if they are willing to hand over 1.15 million euros, or $1.55 million, to buy a Maltese passport. 
Motivated in part by economic stress, and in part by what some call crass opportunism, the idyllic island 50 miles south of Sicily is selling citizenship for $880,000 in cash and $677,000 in property and investments to applicants 18 or older willing to pay the price. ...
Being a citizen of Malta, which is part of the European Union’s passport-free zone, will confer the right to travel among the union’s 27 other member states without border formalities. A newly minted Maltese citizen will also be able to live and work in another European Union country, and will gain the right to visa-free travel to 69 non-European Union countries, including the United States. 
Critics accuse the government of pawning the national birthright. So far, those said to be interested in the passports include a former Formula 1 champion, a Chinese billionaire, an international pop star, a member of a prominent Persian Gulf royal family, an American press magnate and a South American soccer player, according to The Times of Malta, a daily newspaper. 
While all European Union countries have the right to peddle citizenship to whomever they want, the practice is relatively rare and the union’s justice commissioner, Viviane Reding, expressed dismay last month, telling the Maltese that European citizenship “must not be up for sale.” 
Others fear that the proud and picturesque island — with 411,277 citizens, one of the world’s most densely populated countries — risks following in the footsteps of fellow European Union member Cyprus, which has come under criticism for attracting tycoons looking for a convenient place, preferably one with sun and sand, to protect their assets from tax collectors. 
Under pressure from European Union officials in Brussels, Malta this week agreed to require foreigners seeking to buy Maltese passports to be residents for at least one year. It has also vowed to carefully vet applicants. Yet initial plans to limit to 1,800 the number of passports granted have been scrapped. 
For all the fuss and red-faced reprimands of Brussels bureaucrats, Malta is just one of several countries seeking to woo rich foreigners by offering residency or citizenship. 
Cyprus recently slashed the amount of investment required to be eligible for citizenship, to $4.06 million from $13.5 million. ...

In contrast, the United States hands out EB-5 visas to investors who pay zilch to the government, and just invest $500,000 (in "targeted" areas) or $1,000,000 anywhere in businesses, typically construction projects. While Maltese taxpayers get $880,000, American taxpayers get nothing.
 

So far ...

So far, I'm not far off for once in a sports prediction:
My Super Bowl prediction: Manning to regress toward mean

Fanatical NFL bettors lack diversity

Here's a long NYT Magazine article by James Vlahos, "The Super Bowl of Sports Gambling," profiling a dozen or so competitors in a giant Las Vegas contest to see who can beat the point spread the most over the 2013 NFL season, picking at least five games per week. The winner was a Chicago yuppie who beat the point spread more than two-thirds of the time. 

The article cites some opinion polls showing a surprisingly high degree of sports gambling among American women, but I have to imagine that's mostly office pools and other social betting. None of the intense football bettors in the article are women. If you go to a casino, you see plenty of older women hitting the slot machines hard, but having a serious sports gambling habit, whether betting against the point spread or playing fantasy football seriously for money, strikes me as about as all male of a phenomenon as anything in American life. But perhaps I'm wrong.
   

The Republicans' war on self-esteem

More from that wonderful Charles Blow column in the NYT, "The Masculine Mistake," about how having sisters and daughters makes men more Republican:
The Republican Party is in danger of becoming a man cave of cavemen and the women who can abide them. 
The House speaker, John Boehner, has gone so far as to have sensitivity training for Republican members because, as he put it, “some of our members just aren’t as sensitive as they ought to be.” 
And the masculinity shaming has not been confined to Republican men. Some Republican women have been equal-opportunity offenders. 
At the height of the anthrax scare in 2001, Ann Coulter wrote a piece for the conservative site Townhall titled “The Eunuchs Are Whining,” in which she referenced liberals as “mincing pantywaists” and proclaimed that “women — and I don’t mean to limit that to the biological sense — always become hysterical at the first sign of trouble.” 
This last-bastion-of-bare-chestedness is a politically ill-fated one in a country quickly evolving to value all of its citizens equally.

We can tell how fast America is evolving by the fact that nobody will bother watching that tackle football game scheduled for today. Whoever heard of Richard Sherman? And notice how athletes and movie stars are much slimmer and less brawny today than they were back in the primitive macho 1950s when muscleheads like Jimmy Stewart ruled the screen.

Anyway, here's the most Recommended comment to this column, the one that gets to the heart of what's motivating Charles Blow's readers:
Rima Regas  
Democrats need to drive home the fact, and it is a fact, that Republicans have been waging a war on the self-esteem of a growing number of segments of the US population

Here's my graph of who voted for Obama and who voted for Romney based on Reuters-Ipsos' panel of over 40,000 voters:


February 1, 2014

NYT lauds GOP for giving amnesty, blasts GOP for not giving vote

The GOP House leadership can congratulate itself for getting on the good side of the New York Times editorial board for the first time in years:
Fixing Immigration, in Principle
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD,  JAN. 30, 2014

What you need to know now that House Republican leaders have unveiled a list of “principles” that have raised hopes for a breakthrough on immigration reform this year: 
Principles are no substitute for actual legislation, and we’re still a great distance from a deal. Repairing a system so huge and so broken is a big undertaking for any Congress, much less this dismally dysfunctional one. The Republicans’ grab bag of ideas still leaves Democrats nothing to negotiate with. 
That said, the list’s release Thursday, after years of stalemate, leaves us with a palmful of blessings to count.
LEGALIZATION! The question about the nation’s 11 million unauthorized immigrants has always been this: Are they out or in? Criminals or potential Americans? The new principles say that these immigrants must “get right with the law.” This is a big change from “get out,” the central immigration position of the Republicans’ 2012 presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, who embraced the “self-deportation” mantra of his adviser Kris Kobach, author of Arizona’s brutal immigration law. 

So, the GOP's new principles of amnesty without citizenship are making the GOP more popular with the New York Times! Whoo-hoo!

Except, on the same page, the New York Times doesn't even wait one day to spring the other side of the trap: amnesty without citizenship will just be a perpetual sore spot for the NYT-led media to use to stir up anti-GOP racialized resentments:
RELATED IN OPINION 
Op-Ed Contributor: Second-Class Noncitizens  
By MAE M. NGAI, JAN. 30, 2014
Those who take this ultraconservative position (including many aligned with the Tea Party) are blind to the lessons of history. The United States has a long track record not only of legalizing illegal immigrants, by legislative or administrative action, but also of pairing legalization with a grant of permanent residency, the prerequisite for naturalization.
... The alternative now envisioned by some House members — legal status without access to citizenship — would effectively create a new stratum of society, a permanent second class of Americans. 
We have been down that road before, with grim results. The Asiatic exclusion laws, in force from the 1880s to the World War II era, were openly racist attempts to protect America from the “yellow peril” and “unassimilables.” These laws not only prohibited most prospective immigrants from China and other Asian countries from entering; they also excluded all Asians from naturalized citizenship, including merchants and professionals who were otherwise legal residents. In most Western states exclusion from citizenship also meant exclusion from owning agricultural property and from a range of occupations, from teaching to commercial fishing. 
... In 2012 Congress expressed “regret” over the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. 
Today’s political opposition to a path to citizenship is out of sync with democratic principles, historical practice and the vast majority of public opinion. 
It is punitive in spirit. It also suggests an unease with the prospect of more Latino voters. Republicans seem divided between those who recognize the need to appeal to the growing Latino electorate and those who would rather shut out prospective Latino voters than try to win their support. 
Citizenship is precious. That is precisely why it shouldn’t be held hostage to narrow, defeatist and racially discriminatory partisan interests.

Gee, GOP, it sort of sounds like this whole "immigration reform" thingie is a Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't trap carefully constructed by your political enemies.
   

January 31, 2014

NYT: Having female loved ones makes men into sexist Republicans

New York Times columnist Charles Blow discovers a new engine fueling the War on Women: having female loved ones makes men more sexist. Apparently, being around women they love causes males to notice average differences between men and women, and Noticing, as we've all been warned, leads to conservatism.
The problem with having your message powered by machismo is that it reveals what undergirds such a stance: misogyny and chauvinism. The masculinity for which they yearn draws its meaning and its value from juxtaposition with a lesser, vulnerable, narrowly drawn femininity. 
We have seen recent research suggesting that men with daughters are more likely to be Republican and a study finding that men with sisters are more likely to be Republican. *
The study of men with sisters was conducted by researchers at Stanford Graduate School of Business and Loyola Marymount University. A report from Stanford about the study concluded, “Watching their sisters do the chores ‘teaches’ boys that housework is simply women’s work, and that leads to a traditional view of gender roles — a position linked to a predilection for Republican politics.”

Also, in 2012 65.0% of white men with wives voted Republican compared to only 50.6% of white men without wives.

It's almost as if the wives, daughters, and sisters of men are poisoning men's minds against the truths of feminism, which are so much more obvious to males sitting alone in their parents' basements.

Seriously, as Henry Kissinger has noted, there will never be a final victor in the Battle of the Sexes because there is too much fraternizing with the enemy.
--------
Here is statistician Andrew Gelman trying to work through the puzzles of how to test for these effects without measuring something else, such as propensity to have larger families.
   

Brad DeLong, Rod Dreher, and "Be Like Me"

A few days ago, Rod Dreher published a long thoughtful post, "Evolution & the Culture Wars," that began with with a quote from an old article I wrote for the Toronto National Post back in the previous century called "Darwin's Enemies on the Left."

If I had to write it over again, I'd tone down the ending's late 1990s expectation that genetic selection techniques were going to become a big deal fairly soon. In truth, nothing involving medicine moves quickly. But, my 1999 views have certainly held up better to the last decade and a half of subsequent scientific discoveries than those of the conventional wisdom of 1999, as exemplified, at its high end, by the late Stephen Jay Gould.

Rod writes:
That link takes you to a 1999 Steve Sailer piece in which he observed that many on the left embrace Darwinian evolution not so much because Science as because it gives them a point of view with which to bash the troglodytes of Jesusland. ... 

Rod goes on to say:
I don’t see how evolution could be right and Sailer be wrong. I like reading Sailer because he forces me to see things I would often prefer not to see. 

But he also says:
As Sailer points out, it is perfectly possible to reconcile the spiritual and moral equality of humanity with what science tells us is true about human biological variability. The problem, I think, is that we humans are bad at this. Given the history of the 20th century, I flat-out don’t trust our species to handle the knowledge of human biodiversity without turning it into an ideology of dehumanization, racism, and at worst, genocide. Put another way, I am hostile to this kind of thing not because I believe it’s probably false, but because I believe a lot of it is probably true — and we have shown that we, by our natures, can’t handle this kind of truth.

Perhaps.

But allow me to point out where much of the mindless fury of the 21st Century resides by quoting from today's blog by prominent economics professor and former Clinton Administration official Brad DeLong
ROD DREHER: "WE'LL USE... RACIST SOCIAL DARWINISM!": THURSDAY IDIOCY 
Yet More Thursday Idiocy: Outsourced to bspencer [at Lawyers, Guns, and Money]: Rod D: 
[Lawyers, Guns, and Money] "I’m not quite sure how to talk about this Rod Dreher post because it’s so bizarre.  
It reads as a whiny appeal for liberals to quit being so mean to creationists and fundies. But if you scratch the surface, you’ll find it’s really a threat. And the threat is basically: “Be careful shoving your beloved SCIENCE down our throats, libs, because SCIENCE also says Black people are stupid.” To make his case, he links approvingly to racist XXXXXXXX Steve Sailer. 
[Rod Dreher] One of the things that keeps drawing me to Steve Sailer’s writing is that his beliefs on human biodiversity sometimes lead him to point out inconvenient truths about ideologies informing our common life.
If I’ve given you the impression that Dreher is bullying, racist sxxxhead, I apologize. He’s not. He’s heavy-hearted about what he’s telling us. He’s SAD that black people are stupid and inferior. But don’t you see that he’s left no choice but to be a racist sxxxbag when we insist on forcing our reality down his throat? 
“Darwin wouldn’t be surprised to learn which race had invented rap music”–Steve Sailer 
I’ve got a few issues.... One... there is no consensus in the scientific community that there are significant differences among the races. 
Two... there’s a long way to go from acknowledging differences to enacting eugenicist-influenced policies in response to said differences. 
Three: People are different, period... living full and happy lives. 
So, yes, I’m going to call it: Rod Dreher’s post is at threat, and a disgusting one at that.

The 250+ comments at the blog approvingly quoted by DeLong are highly indicative of the hate-filled state of mind of the people who are true believers in today's conventional wisdom. You really need to read them to believe them.

As for Rod's point about "the importance of maintaining the concept of forbidden knowledge," allow me to make a self-serving suggestion.

Since a 1996 article I wrote for National Review, "Great Black Hopes," I've been poking fun at the intellectual's panacea for all social problems: "Be like me!" For example, in my review of Steven Pinker's 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature, I wrote:
The subject of violence is so gigantic that even Pinker is eventually reduced to advocating that all-purpose solution of intellectuals: Be Like Me! Fortunately, I’m all in favor of humanity becoming more like Pinker: witty, learned, reasonable, and very, very smart. I’m even half-persuaded by Pinker’s ultimate argument that people are becoming more rational, as demonstrated by the rising raw scores on IQ tests—the celebrated “Flynn Effect.” Thus they are less likely to, say, invade Russia.

Most people aren't intellectuals, of course, so it isn't reasonable to offer policies based on the assumption that All We Have to Do is pester everybody into becoming intellectuals.

So, I've been disinclined to offer Be Like Me advice to anybody.

On the other hand, it is not unreasonable to pester public intellectuals to be better public intellectuals by pointing out the flaws, intellectual and moral in the dominant, and noting the admirable aspects of the demonized.

After all, public intellectuals' views influence policy directly and eventually seep down to the masses. And, they've "entered the arena" so it's not at all unsporting to recommend improvements to make them better public intellectuals.

Hence, here's a bit of egomaniacal advice to public intellectuals: Be Like Me.

Try to be extremely reasonable. Put yourself in other people's shoes so you can understand the incentives they face. Learn a few important subject areas in depth, especially major topics where the quality of thought is typically shallow. Don't assume you are an expert on complicated subjects such as macroeconomics or race if you are not. Check yourself to make sure your theories are level-headed. Read widely and carefully. Rethink your old policy favorites, especially when they've become popular because diminishing returns are probably setting in. Question conventional wisdom. Use wit to deflate the powerful, prestigious, and the smug when they go wrong. Don't pile on the unfashionable. Undermine Malcolm Gladwell when he's riding high in 2005-2012, but ease off in 2013 when everybody else finally gets what you've been pointing out. In summary, be less like Brad DeLong writing about race and more like Steve Sailer.

Obviously, that's extremely bad career advice.

And I'm sure that Rod would argue that, just as I laugh at public intellectuals telling average people to Be Like Me, most public intellectuals just couldn't hack it.

But how will they know unless they are encouraged to try? Who knows, maybe a few will be able to surprise themselves?