10 years ago at the blog – – it is now officially too late to be early.

Nothing like going back and reading the original transcript. (Plus original comments)

The wonderful thing about long-range predictions is that, by the time you can actually check them for accuracy, everyone has lost interest and is busy listening to your new round of long-range predictions. In this case we can't say that the claim was wrong (the Ted Talker gave himself a generous upper bound), but we can say that a general cure for cancer will not come faster than he predicted. That's an important point because many people consider it axiomatic that technological progress almost always happens faster than the experts predicted.

It's an idea so deeply held that people, particularly journalists (who, let's be frank, have an ulterior motive for going along with the story) often treat these conceptual IOUs as actual money in the bank, despite a long history of unpaid debts.

To be clear, we have and continue make enormous progress in the fight against cancer it is one of those fields where pretty much every year sees substantial advances, but it is also perhaps the canonical example of a problem that has shown again and again the dangers of hubris.

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Assuming I didn't lose you at "TED Talk"

I need to do more research before I wade into this (or convince Joseph to do it for me), but even with the 10 to 50 year wiggle room, talk of having absolutely total confidence makes me nervous.

[GUY] RAZ: Which they did, an amazing scientific feat. They mapped the code that makes up all human DNA. Now they're still trying to figure out what it means, but they already know what it could mean for the future.

(SOUNDBITE OF TED TALK)

RESNICK: The world has completely changed and none of you know about it.

RAZ: So how is it going to change the world?

RESNICK: In a bunch of ways. The good news is it's going to help us immensely in treating cancer 'cause cancer is nothing more than a disease of the genome. It's a disease where one cell has certain changes, which cause it to get a little bit worse and then it reproduces. And by the time you've got a solid tumor, you've got this really heterogeneous population of cancerous cells. And if you sequence their genomes, they're a mess. And so right now, prior to genome sequencing, we're taking wild guesses at what the molecular basis of one's cancer is. And now going forward, what we're going to do is say, forget all of that, what is happening at the molecular level because this drug can target only those cancers that have the BRAF mutation, as an example.

RAZ: So where is it headed? What can you imagine in 10 or 20 years or beyond?

RESNICK: I think we will cure cancer. Genomics and sequencing at large will ultimately cure cancer. Whether that happens in 10 years or 50 years or more is difficult to say.

RAZ: That's incredible. I mean, you can say that with total confidence?

RESNICK: Absolutely. At some point, we'll snuff it out. I mean, people will still develop cancer, certainly, unless we get into genetic engineering of humans, which is something we ought to talk about, but it will be curable.

 

“I feel like I’m the wellness Lorax,”

I obviously have no special insight into what goes on in the minds of the rich, but I have to assume that in a society that bends over backwards to meet your every need, being told that you have to grow old and die just like everyone else must be particularly exasperating.

Mark Ellwood writing for Businessweek:

Not everyone feels so feel-good about all this pricey prescription. “I feel like I’m the wellness Lorax,” says Rina Raphael, a journalist who writes the Well to Do newsletter. “I’m always saying, ‘This is not going to work.’ So much of this is just an exercise in psychology, making people feel better about what they’re doing.”

If these services work, she argues, it’s because they reaffirm established habits. Wealthy acolytes are already able and willing to take care of their health. It’s the willpower placebo effect; even putting a supplement into your basket at the supermarket, Raphael notes, has been shown to give a boost to the system. “Here’s a news flash: You don’t need any of this. Everyone knows exactly what they need to do for their health. Eat a balanced diet, get some movement in, try to decrease your stress. It’s not rocket science.” 

...

The two-story Continuum space was formerly a DavidBartonGym and, later, a Peloton studio; now, Halevy proudly shows off the flotation tank in a sensory-deprivation cupboard, artfully surrounded by plants, and a pair of ice baths. “We would never call this a gym,” he says. “We’re not something else you’re trying to cram into your day. It is a destination.” His membership is currently capped at 250 at the New York location. Outposts in Miami and Los Angeles are nearing confirmation. Each member pays a $10,000 induction fee, then $10,000 per month for unlimited access to physiotherapists, massages and those plunge baths, as well as “performance coaches,” known elsewhere as personal trainers.  

I always find my time in the sensory deprivation tank is more fulfilling knowing I'm surrounded by plants I can't see or smell.

And now for a different take on the end of aging from Mitchell and Webb.

Four years ago at the blog I meant to write a "ten years ago at the blog"

Ten years ago at the blog we had a post on a trick for cooking banking metrics based on combining different data sources that mature at different rates.

Four years ago I pointed out this example to Kaiser Fung who incorporated it in one of his posts, and I decided that would be a good time to re-up the original post. Then I forgot about it.

Until today.

Friday, November 7, 2014

Speed boating

Back when I was in banking, there was a term that got batted around quite a bit called speed-boating. The expression was derived from the way a fast-traveling boat can, for a while, outrun its own wake . As long as a certain speed is maintained, the boat will travel smoothly. However, if the boat suddenly slows down it can be swamped when its wake catches up with it.

Here's how the analogy worked in banking. When you are in the business of lending money, both regulators and investors like to keep track of how well you are doing at getting people to pay their loans back. To do this, they would look at the charge-off rate. At the risk of oversimplifying, this rate was basically the number of loans that went bad divided by the total number of accounts that were open during the period in question.

Obviously, if you booked an account and it went bad, this would add one to both the numerator and the denominator which would push your rate closer to 100%. So you would think that it would always be in the banker's best interest to avoid loans that are going to go bad.

The flaw, or at least the loophole, in this assumption is the fact that the ones are not added at the same time. Even in the extreme cases where the customers never make a payment, the loan is not considered bad for a certain interval, generally 90 days or more. If the customers make a few small payments, this could stretch out for six months or year.

Let's say I book an account that goes delinquent after one year. That was a bad deal for the bank – – it lost money due to that decision – – but for one year, having that account actually lowered the bank's charge-off rate. Eventually, of course, this will catch up with the bank, but the reckoning can be delayed if the bank continues to book these bad accounts at an increasing rate.

As with many of our posts, the moral of the story is that numbers don't always mean what you think they mean. You will often see someone pull out a statistic to settle an argument -- "How can you say the business model is unstable? See how long their charge-off rate is?" -- but without understanding the number and knowing its context, you can't really say anything meaningful with it.

The World's Greatest 404 Page

From the Financial Times:

November 5th, 2024

Looks like it's time to wrap things up on the election. We have a few threads with some posts still sitting in the scheduled or draft folders. There's definitely more to say about what's going on at the New York Times and about Elon's misadventures as a political operative, though that's really more a part of our ongoing Musk megathread.

Most of our election blogging over the past year or so has been anecdotes and snapshots, Gathering data in case we want to do a bigger picture retrospective once the dust has settled. I had something like that in mind for 2016 but the outcome of that election was so shocking that I never had the heart to get around to it. This time, regardless of what happens, I am not going to be surprised.

As for the models, N = 0

This is an unprecedented election along numerous dimensions. We have never had one of the two major parties openly embraced fascism. We've never had an issue like Dobbs, though Brown v. Board of Education does come close. We've never had a race with this many upheavals or a press this dysfunctional. We've never had a gap this large between perception and reality in terms of public policy. This is only a partial list.

Add to that the growing concerns over the state of political polling and the number of anomalies we have already witnessed. We don't know where we stand and if we did, we still wouldn't know how things might change at the last minute. (And, yes, experts will tell you that voters don't change their minds at the last minute. They know this because voters haven't done so in previous elections. See the previous paragraph.)

The blog will also be on revisionism watch. No matter how events unfold over the next few days, there will be a great number of famous and highly paid people who will do their best to make us forget how wrong they got things. We are going to do our best to make that difficult for them.

So, if you haven't already, vote then turn off the news (it will only raise your blood pressure) and watch a good movie. Here's a suggestion.

Sherlock Jr - 1924

Josh Marshall on the difference between close and uncertain

This has been a recurring theme of the discussions Joseph and I have been having about the election. When the question of how things were going came up in conversations with friends and co-workers, my standard response has been that there were plausible scenarios where either candidate not only wins, but wins by bigger margins than any of the experts have been predicting. 

From Talking Points Memo:

I’ve made this point a few times in recent weeks, here and on the podcast. I’m going to make the point again because I think it’s critical for understanding this election nine days out. We keep hearing that this is the closest election in decades. Polls say that’s right. At least 5 of the 7 swing states are within a single percentage point — fairly meaningless margins statistically. National poll averages are between one and two points — right on the cusp of where most believe a Democratic Electoral College victory becomes possible. But I don’t think that’s the right way to look at it. What we have is a high uncertainty election. That’s not the same thing. There’s every chance that most or every race that looks close will veer more or less uniformly in one direction. And that wouldn’t necessarily be because of one late-breaking story, some great decision by one of the candidates or even undecideds all “breaking” in one way. It could simply be because the dominant understanding of the race and the electorate was just a bit off and had been all along.

Even more than usual this year our understanding of this race, from polls, from dominant media narratives, understandings of what happened in the past two elections, is based on assumptions that may simply be wrong. In my way of looking at it, there are a small number of interlocking assumptions about the electorate that make up our understanding of this race. There are plausible arguments that each is wrong. That makes the outcome very uncertain. It also creates a lot of avenues for wishful or motivated thinking.

...

Finally, isn’t this how it always is? Electoral fog of war, the inherent uncertainty of knowing how a vast national community of hundreds of millions of people is going to make decisions at the ballot box? Sort of. But not entirely. I think there’s more uncertainty than usual because of 1) rapid changes in the polling industry in response to evolving technology, 2) methodological changes in response to polls twice underestimating Donald Trump’s electoral strength, and 3) the steep and inherent difficulties of separating what about the 2020 election was embedded electoral trends and what was the COVID pandemic. So yes, I really do think there are more question marks, more debatable assumptions packaged into the analyses than usual.

Twelve years ago on the blog -- the war on data still seems pretty relevant

Dharna Noor writing for the Guardian:

Climate experts fear Donald Trump will follow a blueprint created by his allies to gut the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), disbanding its work on climate science and tailoring its operations to business interests.

Joe Biden’s presidency has increased the profile of the science-based federal agency but its future has been put in doubt if Trump wins a second term and at a time when climate impacts continue to worsen.

The plan to “break up Noaa is laid out in the Project 2025 document written by more than 350 rightwingers and helmed by the Heritage Foundation. Called the Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, it is meant to guide the first 180 days of presidency for an incoming Republican president.

The document bears the fingerprints of Trump allies, including Johnny McEntee, who was one of Trump’s closest aides and is a senior adviser to Project 2025. “The National Oceanographic [sic] and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories,” the proposal says.

This picks up on a longstanding push from the Trump administration and its allies.

Charles Pierce writing in 2017:

So, anyway, on Tuesday, chairman Smith organized his committee for the coming session. In his opening statement, it became clear that age doth not wither, nor custom stale, his infinite supply of pure Krazee. In his opening statement, Smith made it clear that NOAA is in his sights again, and that he still believes that scientists are conniving to impoverish Good Old Ordinary Americans with their science-y trickeration. But not ol' Lamar Smith. He's got their number. The committee's Tuesday meeting was titled, and I am not kidding about this, "Making the EPA Great Again."

"The Science Advisory Board provides critical feedback to the EPA on its proposals," said Smith in his opening statement, in a way that wouldn't make anyone suspect that he's a little paranoid on the subject. "But in recent years, SAB experts have become nothing more than rubberstamps who approve all of the EPA's regulations. The EPA routinely stacks this board with friendly scientists who receive millions of dollars in grants from the federal government. The conflict of interest here is clear."

So sayeth the man who's taken over six-hundred large in oil and gas money since he's been in Congress. Anyway, Smith hastened to move on to the latest wingnut cause celebre: another attack on NOAA and the science of climate change. An anonymous "whistleblower" told that noted scientific journal, The Daily Mail, that NOAA fudged that report debunking the notion of a climate change "pause" that so exercised Smith in the last Congress. (I told you we'd get back to this.) All of what Smith called "recent news stories" flow from this report in the Daily Mail. Ars Technica has a good rundown on the "controversy," which seems to consist of little more than nasty office feuds that set Smith off on another anti-science rampage.

I've been having mixed feelings about Mr. Oliver recently (bothsidesing UFOs didn't help), but this segment on Project 2025 is a good overview..

John Oliver on Project 2025 and a second Trump term.

I was going to clip this segment out into shorter sections but decided to keep it together because it's too important and, frankly, it should terrify you. pic.twitter.com/Kaqo07lurB

— Blue Georgia (@BlueATLGeorgia) June 18, 2024

 

 I can't say we saw all this coming back in 2012, but the general direction was already obvious. 

Sunday, November 4, 2012

Strauss and the war on data

The most important aspect of Randianism as currently practiced is the lies its adherents tell themselves. "When you're successful, it's because other people are inferior to you." "When you fail, it's because inferior people persecute you (call it going Roark)." "One of these days you're going to run away and everyone who's been mean to you will be sorry."

The most important aspect of Straussianism as currently practiced is the lies its adherents tell others. Having started from the assumption that traditional democracy can't work because most people aren't smart enough to handle the role of voter, the Straussians conclude that superior minds must, for the good of society, lie to and manipulate the masses.

Joseph and I have an ongoing argument about which school is worse, a question greatly complicated by the compatibility of the two systems and the overlap of believers and their tactics and objectives. Joseph generally argues that Rand is worse (without, of course, defending Strauss) while I generally take the opposite position.

This week brought news that I think bolsters my case (though I suspect Joseph could easily turn it around to support his): one of the logical consequences of assuming typical voters can't evaluate information on their own is that data sources that are recognized as reliable are a threat to society. They can't be spun and they encourage people to make their own decisions.

To coin a phrase, if the masses can't handle the truth and need instead to be fed a version crafted by the elite to keep the people happy and doing what's best for them, the public's access to accurate, objective information has to be tightly controlled. With that in mind, consider the following from Jared Bernstein:

[D]ue to pressure from Republicans, the Congressional Research Service is withdrawing a report that showed the lack of correlation between high end tax cuts and economic growth.

The study, by economist Tom Hungerford, is of high quality, and is one I’ve cited here at OTE. Its findings are fairly common in the economics literature and the concerns raised by that noted econometrician Mitch McConnell are trumped up and bogus. He and his colleagues don’t like the findings because they strike at the supply-side arguments that they hold so dear.

And with Sandy still on everyone's mind, here's something from Menzie Chinn:

NOAA's programs are in function 300, Natural Resources and Environment, along with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and a range of conservation and natural resources programs. In the near term, function 300 would be 14.6 percent lower in 2014 in the Ryan budget according to the Washington Post. It quotes David Kendall of The Third Way as warning about the potential impact on weather forecasting: "'Our weather forecasts would be only half as accurate for four to eight years until another polar satellite is launched,' estimates Kendall. 'For many people planning a weekend outdoors, they may have to wait until Thursday for a forecast as accurate as one they now get on Monday. … Perhaps most affected would be hurricane response. Governors and mayors would have to order evacuations for areas twice as large or wait twice as long for an accurate forecast.'"

There are also attempts from prominent conservatives to delegitimize objective data:

Apparently, Jack Welch, former chairman and CEO of General Electric, is accusing the Bureau of Labor Statistics of manipulating the jobs report to help President Obama. Others seem to be adding their voices to this slanderous lie. It is simply outrageous to make such a claim and echoes the worrying general distrust of facts that seems to have swept segments of our nation. The BLS employment report draws on two surveys, one (the establishment survey) of 141,000 businesses and government agencies and the other (the household survey) of 60,000 households. The household survey is done by the Census Bureau on behalf of BLS. It’s important to note that large single-month divergences between the employment numbers in these two surveys (like the divergence in September) are just not that rare. EPI’s Elise Gould has a great paper on the differences between these two surveys.

BLS is a highly professional agency with dozens of people involved in the tabulation and analysis of these data. The idea that the data are manipulated is just completely implausible. Moreover, the data trends reported are clearly in line with previous monthly reports and other economic indicators (such as GDP). The key result was the 114,000 increase in payroll employment from the establishment survey, which was right in line with what forecasters were expecting. This was a positive growth in jobs but roughly the amount to absorb a growing labor force and maintain a stable, not falling, unemployment rate. If someone wanted to help the president, they should have doubled the job growth the report showed. The household survey was much more positive, showing unemployment falling from 8.1 percent to 7.8 percent. These numbers are more volatile month to month and it wouldn’t be surprising to see unemployment rise a bit next month. Nevertheless, there’s nothing implausible about the reported data. The household survey has shown greater job growth in the recovery than the establishment survey throughout the recovery. The labor force participation rate (the share of adults who are working or unemployed) increased to 63.6 percent, which is an improvement from the prior month but still below the 63.7 percent reported for July. All in all, there was nothing particularly strange about this month’s jobs reports—and certainly nothing to spur accusations of outright fraud.

We can also put many of the attacks against Nate Silver in this category.

Going back a few months, we had this from Businessweek:

The House Committee on Appropriations recently proposed cutting the Census budget to $878 million, $10 million below its current budget and $91 million less than the bureau’s request for the next fiscal year. Included in the committee number is a $20 million cut in funding for this year’s Economic Census, considered the foundation of U.S. economic statistics.

And Bruce Bartlett had a whole set of examples involving Newt Gingrich:

On Nov. 21, Newt Gingrich, who is leading the race for the Republican presidential nomination in some polls, attacked the Congressional Budget Office. In a speech in New Hampshire, Mr. Gingrich said the C.B.O. "is a reactionary socialist institution which does not believe in economic growth, does not believe in innovation and does not believe in data that it has not internally generated."

Mr. Gingrich's charge is complete nonsense. The former C.B.O. director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, now a Republican policy adviser, labeled the description "ludicrous." Most policy analysts from both sides of the aisle would say the C.B.O. is one of the very few analytical institutions left in government that one can trust implicitly.

It's precisely its deep reservoir of respect that makes Mr. Gingrich hate the C.B.O., because it has long stood in the way of allowing Republicans to make up numbers to justify whatever they feel like doing.

...

Mr. Gingrich has long had special ire for the C.B.O. because it has consistently thrown cold water on his pet health schemes, from which he enriched himself after being forced out as speaker of the House in 1998. In 2005, he wrote an op-ed article in The Washington Times berating the C.B.O., then under the direction of Mr. Holtz-Eakin, saying it had improperly scored some Gingrich-backed proposals. At a debate on Nov. 5, Mr. Gingrich said, "If you are serious about real health reform, you must abolish the Congressional Budget Office because it lies."
...                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

Because Mr. Gingrich does know more than most politicians, the main obstacles to his grandiose schemes have always been Congress's professional staff members, many among the leading authorities anywhere in their areas of expertise.                                                                                                                                                                                                

To remove this obstacle, Mr. Gingrich did everything in his power to dismantle Congressional institutions that employed people with the knowledge, training and experience to know a harebrained idea when they saw it. When he became speaker in 1995, Mr. Gingrich moved quickly to slash the budgets and staff of the House committees, which employed thousands of professionals with long and deep institutional memories.

Of course, when party control in Congress changes, many of those employed by the previous majority party expect to lose their jobs. But the Democratic committee staff members that Mr. Gingrich fired in 1995 weren't replaced by Republicans. In essence, the positions were simply abolished, permanently crippling the committee system and depriving members of Congress of competent and informed advice on issues that they are responsible for overseeing.

Mr. Gingrich sold his committee-neutering as a money-saving measure. How could Congress cut the budgets of federal agencies if it wasn't willing to cut its own budget, he asked. In the heady days of the first Republican House since 1954, Mr. Gingrich pretty much got whatever he asked for.

In addition to decimating committee budgets, he also abolished two really useful Congressional agencies, the Office of Technology Assessment and the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations. The former brought high-level scientific expertise to bear on legislative issues and the latter gave state and local governments an important voice in Congressional deliberations.

The amount of money involved was trivial even in terms of Congress's budget. Mr. Gingrich's real purpose was to centralize power in the speaker's office, which was staffed with young right-wing zealots who followed his orders without question. Lacking the staff resources to challenge Mr. Gingrich, the committees could offer no resistance and his agenda was simply rubber-stamped.

Unfortunately, Gingrichism lives on. Republican Congressional leaders continually criticize every Congressional agency that stands in their way. In addition to the C.B.O., one often hears attacks on the Congressional Research Service, the Joint Committee on Taxation and the Government Accountability Office.

Lately, the G.A.O. has been the prime target. Appropriators are cutting its budget by $42 million, forcing furloughs and cutbacks in investigations that identify billions of dollars in savings yearly. So misguided is this effort that Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma and one of the most conservative members of Congress, came to the agency's defense.

In a report issued by his office on Nov. 16, Senator Coburn pointed out that the G.A.O.'s budget has been cut by 13 percent in real terms since 1992 and its work force reduced by 40 percent -- more than 2,000 people. By contrast, Congress's budget has risen at twice the rate of inflation and nearly doubled to $2.3 billion from $1.2 billion over the last decade.

Mr. Coburn's report is replete with examples of budget savings recommended by G.A.O. He estimated that cutting its budget would add $3.3 billion a year to government waste, fraud, abuse and inefficiency that will go unidentified.

For good measure, Mr. Coburn included a chapter in his report on how Congressional committees have fallen down in their responsibility to exercise oversight. The number of hearings has fallen sharply in both the House and Senate. Since the beginning of the Gingrich era, they have fallen almost in half, with the biggest decline coming in the 104th Congress (1995-96), his first as speaker.

In short, Mr. Gingrich's unprovoked attack on the C.B.O. is part of a pattern. He disdains the expertise of anyone other than himself and is willing to undercut any institution that stands in his way. Unfortunately, we are still living with the consequences of his foolish actions as speaker.

We could really use the Office of Technology Assessment at a time when Congress desperately needs scientific expertise on a variety of issues in involving health, energy, climate change, homeland security and many others. And given the enormous stress suffered by state and local governments as they are forced by Washington to do more with less, an organization like the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations would be invaluable.

Martians and Metadata -- a Halloween themed repost

 [From Wednesday, October 30, 2013]

Just in case you don't know the story:

The War of the Worlds is an episode of the American radio drama anthology series The Mercury Theatre on the Air. It was performed as a Halloween episode of the series on October 30, 1938, and aired over the Columbia Broadcasting System radio network. Directed and narrated by actor and future filmmaker Orson Welles, the episode was an adaptation of H. G. Wells's novel The War of the Worlds (1898).

[Written primarily by Howard Koch who went on to do some other interesting work, but nobody talks about the writer.* ]

The first two thirds of the 60-minute broadcast were presented as a series of simulated news bulletins, which suggested to many listeners that an actual alien invasion by Martians was currently in progress. Compounding the issue was the fact that the Mercury Theatre on the Air was a sustaining show (it ran without commercial breaks), adding to the program's realism. Although there were sensationalist accounts in the press about a supposed panic in response to the broadcast, the precise extent of listener response has been debated.

In the days following the adaptation, however, there was widespread outrage and panic by certain listeners, who had believed the events described in the program were real. The program's news-bulletin format was described as cruelly deceptive by some newspapers and public figures, leading to an outcry against the perpetrators of the broadcast. Despite these complaints--or perhaps in part because of them--the episode secured Welles' fame as a dramatist.

Of course, no one who heard the whole broadcast panicked. The first line listeners heard clearly spelled out what was about to come: "The Columbia Broadcasting System and its affiliated stations present Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air in The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells."

But most of the people who were listening when the show ended hadn't heard the beginning of the show. They had been listening to one of the highest rated acts on radio, a ventriloquist named Edgar Bergen (you might want to take a minute to reflect on the concept of a radio ventriloquist before continuing). About fifteen minutes into the hour, the show cut to a musical interlude and people started channel surfing.

Though we don't normally think of it in those terms, the title of a program is data, as is the author. We feed it into the algorithm we use to interpret what we see, or in this case, hear. People who didn't hear the words  "The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells" tried to impute the genre based on the information they heard when they first tuned in to what seemed to be a reporter covering a disaster.

Check out the first few minutes and think about what you'd conclude.



PBS has a special commemorating the anniversary, but I'm staying loyal to the original medium and recommending this radio documentary produced for KPCC.


* Welles' relationship with Koch in some ways foreshadowed the controversy over Citizen Kane. Here's Pauline Kael's summary.

The Mercury group wasn’t surprised at Welles’s taking a script credit; they’d had experience with this foible of his. Very early in his life as a prodigy, Welles seems to have fallen into the trap that has caught so many lesser men—believing his own publicity, believing that he really was the whole creative works, producer-director-writer-actor. Because he could do all these things, he imagined that he did do them. (A Profile of him that appeared in The New Yorker two years before Citizen Kane was made said that “outside the theatre … Welles is exactly twenty-three years old.”) In the days before the Mercury Theatre’s weekly radio shows got a sponsor, it was considered a good publicity technique to build up public identification with Welles’s name, so he was credited with just about everything, and was named on the air as the writer of the Mercury shows. Probably no one but Welles believed it. He had written some of the shows when the program first started, and had also worked on some with Houseman, but soon he had become much too busy even to collaborate; for a while Houseman wrote them, and then they were farmed out. By the time of the War of the Worlds broadcast, on Halloween, 1938, Welles wasn’t doing any of the writing. He was so busy with his various other activities that he didn’t always direct the rehearsals himself, either—William Alland or Richard Wilson or one of the other Mercury assistants did it. Welles might not come in until the last day, but somehow, all agree, he would pull the show together “with a magic touch.” Yet when the Martian broadcast became accidentally famous, Welles seemed to forget that Howard Koch had written it. (In all the furor over the broadcast, with front-page stories everywhere, the name of the author of the radio play wasn’t mentioned.) Koch had been writing the shows for some time. He lasted for six months, writing about twenty-five shows altogether—working six and a half days a week, and frantically, on each one, he says, with no more than half a day off to see his family. The weekly broadcasts were a “studio presentation” until after the War of the Worlds (Campbell’s Soup picked them up then), and Koch, a young writer, who was to make his name with the film The Letter in 1940 and win an Academy Award for his share in the script of the 1942 Casablanca, was writing them for $75 apiece. Koch’s understanding of the agreement was that Welles would get the writing credit on the air for publicity purposes but that Koch would have any later benefit, and the copyright was in Koch’s name. (He says that it was, however, Welles’s idea that he do the Martian show in the form of radio bulletins.) Some years later, when C.B.S. did a program about the broadcast and the panic it had caused, the network re-created parts of the original broadcast and paid Koch $300 for the use of his material. Welles sued C.B.S. for $375,000, claiming that he was the author and that the material had been used without his permission. He lost, of course, but he may still think he wrote it. (He frequently indicates as much in interviews and on television.)

 

Introducing the Shafer Algorithm for Covering Journalists' Ethical Lapses

[Written 9/30/24]

Just as the Nuzzi story started to deflate, Ben Smith managed to pump it back up

I had hoped to avoid writing about last week’s big media scandal. We were scooped, to Max’s eternal regret, by Oliver Darcy’s excellent new newsletter, Status, after we ignored a Wednesday evening email from one “Anderson Jones.” Jones, an anonymous sender with an Iowa IP address who has since gone dark, had a “news tip”: New York magazine’s Olivia Nuzzi had disclosed to Vox she’d had a romantic relationship with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. ...

As best I can reconstruct the events, of the publications we know of New York magazine apparently had this story first but decided not to make a public statement. Semaphor was tipped off but decided not to pursue the story. Eventually Status eventually decided to run it but only with numerous caveats about how reluctant they supposedly were. The second case is particularly interesting. Vince Smith who founded the site was previously notable for publishing the unedited Steele Dossier, despite pretty much everyone knowing that it was filled with unverified and in some cases probably false charges. Smith's decision turned out to be a tremendous boon for Donald Trump and his supporters, allowing them to bundle all of his grossly inappropriate and very real connections with cooking into one big "Russia hoax." Smith seems to have rethought his "We have always erred on the side of publishing." credo since then (or perhaps he's just a huge hypocrite).

Reporters have all sorts of compromising relationships with sources. The most compromising of all, and the most common, is a reporter’s fealty to someone who gives them information. That’s the real coin of this realm. Sex barely rates.

You won’t hear many American journalists reckon with this. (Some British journalists, naturally, have been texting us to ask what the fuss is about. If you’re not sleeping with someone in a position of power, how are you even a journalist?) The advice writer Heather Havrilesky texted me Saturday that “the world would be much more exciting with more Nuzzis around, but alas the world is inhabited by anonymously emailing moralists instead!”

 This is an absolutely stunning position for a journalist to take, arguing that the world would be more somehow better off without sources anonymously coming forward with information about wrongdoing. This is got to be the only time I have seen someone in the news industry responding to a story being broken by a by attacking the tipster.

This is the soul of the Shafer algorithm. You make up an entirely new set of rules for friends and colleagues and still somehow manage to take a morally superior tone.

Many of Nuzzi’s critics were furious at her over a July 4 story about members of Joe Biden’s inner circle who felt he was too old to run for president. How, these critics ask now, could she have done that story fairly if she had an emotional attachment to a fringe candidate?

And this is where two values of journalism part ways. The obvious defense of that story is that it was true, something few Democrats now contest (though the few that do continue to loudly fill up our email inboxes and Twitter mentions).

 Some distortions here and at least a couple of major lies of omission. Smith misrepresents the reaction to the Biden story. It is true that there is now a strong consensus, even among Democrats, that Biden stepping down due to his age was the right choice, though that didn't really firm up until after the successful handoff to Harris avoiding the nightmare scenario of 1968 and her surprisingly successful campaign (even her supporters didn't expect her to do this well). The balance and fairness of Nuzzi's piece is a topic that is not addressed (I haven't read it so I have no opinion). It is also worth noting that Smith's suggestion that being noteworthy and true are sufficient reasons for publishing something raises serious questions about his decision to kill a story about a peer (maybe he switched back to his original credo mid-essay).

We could go back and forth from the Biden piece. It's much more difficult to justify Smith's decision to skip over all of Nuzzi's other more flagrant conflicts of interest with respect to Kennedy. We only have her very questionable word that the affair began after the profile was published. If it started during the writing of the article, we have the brightest of red flags. Even if we trust her timeline, there are still at least two occasions when she made extremely probed in the remarks in the editorial pages of the New York Times (still waiting for the paper of record to apologize for that, by the way). Still later came the puff piece "humanizing" Trump written while RFK Jr. was angling for a place in a Trump administration. This isn't a complete list – – we haven't even gotten into social media – – but it is certainly enough to make a damning case.

Fortunately, there are press critics who are having none of it.

KABAS: This has brought out a lot of different opinions from people. At first there was a general consensus that it was not a good look, that she did the wrong thing. But then other people started circling the wagons to protect her. Then Ben Smith writes this newsletter. I was wondering what you thought about his idea that a sexual relationship with a source is sort of a tertiary concern as compared to the fealty as he says, that we as journalists feel to sources? And is it true that, like he says, American journalists haven't really reckoned with this?

FOLKENFLIK: Ben's a very smart guy, a serial news entrepreneur, and an interesting and fun thinker about journalism. And I've got a lot of regard for him. But this is pretty bananas as a claim. I think that if people are having an intimate relationship, whatever form that may take, with somebody who they're writing about or whose world they're writing about, but they fail to disclose—the supposed British sensibility of, “oh, well, we're all in bed with each other”—is bonkers and bullshit. And it's not how journalism should be conducted in the States, and it's not actually how journalism should be conducted in the UK either. And I've spent a fair amount of time in my career looking at that very question as well.

So I think that it's fun and clever to say that this isn't important, but of course it's important. It affects what you think, it affects what you're doing. My feeling is you can do almost anything as a journalist that you're willing to disclose to your editors, but also to your audiences. And if you're uncomfortable disclosing it to your audiences, maybe that's a sign that it's something you shouldn't be doing.

And the reason that that information was withheld was that Nuzzi knew it would be compromising, problematic and probably disqualifying. Ben writes at the end of his thing, “before I turn in my badge, I have to say you should tell your editors” about a personal relationship with a source. He’s right. Now what he doesn't say is, “and your editors will probably take that decision out of your hands and say you've gotta change beats, or you've gotta do something else."

The Shafer Algorithm is, of course, named for press apologist Jack Shafer. Here you can see how he dealt with the question "Is It OK to Sleep With Your Sources?" back in 2018.

(Disclosure: Watkins and I enjoyed a collegial rapport during her Politico tenure, but we never worked on any story or column together.)

...It’s never OK for reporters to sleep with their sources — or with elephants. Ali Watkins deserves a good scolding and professional reprimands if she crossed that line. But based on what we know about her case, she deserves a second chance. Given all the male reporters over the years who’ve escaped punishment for their sins of the flesh, it’s only fair.

And here you can see him addressing similar lapses with similar results again and again and again.

For those who haven't had enough of our original scandal:

Olivia Nuzzi accuses ex-fiance of orchestrating blackmail campaign amid RFK relationship

and

Three Women Say RFK Jr. Cheated on Cheryl Hines With Them

Based on this latter one, being a heroin addict who drives his ex-wife to suicide qualifies as "rambunctious." 

Michael C. Bender is basically a Theodore H. White A.I.

[I wrote this before the events in Springfield, but I think this piece has aged considerably better than Bender's so I'm running it as is.]

One of the signs of dysfunctional organization is that incompetent people thrive as long as they are adept at being wrong in the right way. Case in point, Michael C. Bender, perhaps the NYT's most spinnable journalist, who was last on our radar assuring us that DeSantis was dominating Trump in the early race for the nomination, and is now the paper's point man for J.D. Vance.

There is no temptation that Bender does not succumb to in these articles: the desire of an embedded journalist to depict their subject in the best possible light; the fear of deviating from what their bosses want to hear; the pull of lazy writing;  convenient credulity; narrative writing in the worst possible sense, hackneyed and distorted, complete with dusty cliches ("folksy tales about his hardscrabble upbringing," which not only is this painfully clichéd prose, it isn't even particularly accurate.)

Here's a taste.

 [Emphasis added... frequently.]

The in-flight candidate is, in many ways, a useful metaphor for the moment: a gifted yet fledgling political talent — whose calling card is his connection to the working class — adjusting to a new life with his own chartered Boeing 737 as the newly minted member of a Republican ticket headed by a three-time presidential contender.

Bit of context. The NYT was an early investor in the Vance narrative. He was the MAGA whisperer, the sensible conservative who could talk to Trump supporters because he was one of them. It was the Paul Ryan effect squared. The establishment press so wanted to believe in a sensible Republican to lead the party out of the craziness that they turned a blind eye to all the conflicting evidence. Not coincidentally, two years go Bender was writing articles arguing that Ron DeSantis was a remarkably gifted politician.

The talented Mr. Vance story is still a thing in the NYT despite having even less supporting evidence than the DeSantis narrative.

JD Vance is making history as the least liked VP nominee (non-incumbent) since 1980 following his/her party's convention. He's the first to have a net negative favorable rating.

Not surprising given how weak he ran in Ohio in 2022. Far worse than the average Ohio Republican. pic.twitter.com/hlZziePkKe

— (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) July 24, 2024

A bit later, we get this gem reported without comment and, in the context of the rest of the article, apparently taken at face value.

“President Trump is thrilled with the choice he made with Senator Vance, and they are the perfect team to take back the White House,” said Steve Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesman.

Of course, Cheung is lying. The claim doesn't even pass the laugh test. No candidate since the introduction of approval polling has ever been happy with a running mate who got Vance-level numbers. You might expect to back off from the "this is fine" spin before they hit NYT Pitchbot territory ...

Instead they chose to double down.

JD Vance’s Combative Style Confounds Democrats but Pleases Trump

By Michael C. Bender

[And before you ask, no, this is not one of those good stories with bad headlines we've been talking about. If anything, the actual article is worse, starting with the first sentence.]

Donald J. Trump knew that JD Vance could take a punch. But during their first week together on the campaign trail, the former president wondered just how many hits his new running mate could absorb.

The volume and velocity of attacks from Democrats stunned even Mr. Trump. He was unaware of the most incendiary remarks that opponents were rapidly unearthing from Mr. Vance’s past, and the former president told allies that he was troubled by the idea that more comments would come to light as Democrats savaged his heir apparent as weird and anti-women.

A month later, polls show that the number of Americans who dislike Mr. Vance continues to grow — but Mr. Trump could not be happier.

The reason: Mr. Vance’s relentless pace of full-throttle performances as Mr. Trump’s well-trained attack dog has pleased the former president and instilled a sense of stability inside a campaign still shaken by President Biden’s sudden exit from the race.

Mr. Trump had instructed his young sidekick to fight forcefully through those initial attacks, and later said Mr. Vance’s execution exceeded his expectations, according to three allies who insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations.

In a quintessentially Trumpian display of bravado, the former president has privately praised Mr. Vance by comparing himself to Vince Lombardi, telling people that his eye for political talent was now on par with the Hall of Fame football coach’s ability to find Super Bowl-caliber players.

And it just goes on like that, a bad pastiche of the Making of the President (a book that was never that good to begin with). Take a look at Nora Ephron's brilliant satiric essay on White's books.

And here's the opening paragraphs of Bender's earlier article:

Senator JD Vance was unsure where to stand or where to put his hands.

With a fresh haircut and a closely tailored blue suit on his first day of solo campaigning as the Republican vice-presidential nominee, Mr. Vance walked to the back of his chartered airliner to chat with reporters on Monday. Briefly uncertain of how to start, he furrowed his brow and looked from side to side.

In addition to the banality, these details and the tone are often wildly at odds with the impressions of most observers.

Mr. Vance’s excitement at joining the fray was immediately visible. He arrived with a fresh haircut and neatly trimmed beard for his first solo rally, a hometown event in Middletown, Ohio. In a sign of his astonishment at every warm welcome from his pro-Trump crowds, Mr. Vance opened each event for the first several weeks with the same single exclamation: “Wow!"

Nothing in this paragraph lines up with the clips we've seen from the campaign trail featuring a stiff candidate speaking to often tiny crowds and trying to come off as normal while putting on a brave face.

I mean this is a full pan of JD’s Kenosha event. Seriously, 60 people? It like a speech to the county chess club. pic.twitter.com/MRsEwJ8TjX

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) August 21, 2024

OMG, I'm dying - this is the crowd this morning for JD Vance in New Kensington, PA - and he has his wife and 3 GOP members of Congress along with him. There's like 20 people again....look at all the empty seats in the tiny room 🤣😅😂 pic.twitter.com/wlBCNYpafI

— Amy Siskind 🏳️‍🌈 (@Amy_Siskind) August 15, 2024

J.D. Vance Blames Staff for Disastrous Doughnut-Shop Visit is not a headline a campaign likes to see.

JD Vance had a very awkward visit to a donut shop in Georgia earlier. Trust us, it’s worse than you even think. pic.twitter.com/Fnohh0bKUf

— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) August 22, 2024

Vance even managed to screw up perhaps the softest of all softball questions in all politics.

JD Vance is asked by reporter, “What makes you smile? What makes you happy?”. He responds with a fake, weird laugh. (Video: C-SPAN) pic.twitter.com/lr8woQbEkw

— Mike Sington (@MikeSington) August 7, 2024

As one tweet put it: "If this guy were a country his top domestic export would be steppable rakes."

It's possible that these moments are unrepresentative and if so, it would be perfectly appropriate for Bender to address that in the article, but this is just a campaign trying to wish away bad news and a New York Times reporter going along. 

That sense of reading a story about an entirely different race is sharpest when it gets to the reaction of the other side.

Democrats, however, have been outraged and confounded by Mr. Vance’s vice-presidential bid. This year, Mr. Trump had spoken at length about finding a running mate who was uniquely qualified to take over as president — and then picked Mr. Vance, who assumed his first elected office just last year and turned 40 less than a month ago.

While it's true, Democrats are outraged by many of Vance's positions, the general reaction from a strategic point of view has been celebratory -- they generally view Trump's choice as disastrous -- and while those celebrations may prove premature, the polling so far seems to support their assessment.

Honestly, I have not noticed any confounding among the Democrats pic.twitter.com/2qTqmKPxRm

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) September 2, 2024

The word "confounded" is an even more curious choice. No one at the Harris campaign seems confused by how to deal with him. Her digital team has produced a steady stream of spots that consist of nothing more than a choice quote and an accompanying video clip.

 Of course, Vance could yet surprise his critics -- it's always a bad idea to predict a career based on a debut -- but if you're going to make a counterintuitive argument you have to actually argue your points, not simply pretend that they are true. The data, overwhelming anecdotal evidence, and common sense  suggest that he is not a gifted politician, that he is not generating significant support even within the MAGA base, and that many in the Trump organization (quite possibly most) regret their impulsive choice. 

I don't know these things are true but if you're going to push a narrative about a remarkable young talent who's charming the masses and impressing everyone around him, you need to at least acknowledge the obvious.

10 years ago at the blog – – this one's gotten more relevant along at least a couple of dimensions

Obviously, anything having to do with the Ebola outbreak will take on an added significance given what happened a few years later, but the part that jumps out to me is that this wasn't early example of the Straussian breakdown and other trends in the GOP that would become the dominant features of the party and would go on to have a disastrous impact on the country.

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Yes, a Surgeon General would come in handy right about now

For me, one of the most interesting stories in politics these days is the way that information has come to flow in the the conservative movement. And sometimes the most interesting part of that story is the way information fails to flow.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) says Ron Klain is "off to a bad start" in his new role as the president's Ebola response coordinator, and that the U.S. Surgeon General should be the one leading the effort. But what Chaffetz doesn't seem to realize is that there hasn't been a surgeon general for more than a year.

“Why not have the surgeon general head this up?" Chaffetz asked in a Wednesday appearance on Fox News. "I think that’s a very legitimate question. At least you have somebody who has a medical background whose been confirmed by the United States Senate.”

“It begs the question, what does the surgeon general do?" he added. "Why aren’t we empowering that person?”

After this broke, Chaffetz tried to moonwalk his way back from the statement but there is simply no way to frame this so that the man comes off as both well-informed and honest. His problem is that he is trying to follow an official party line that makes consistency almost impossible (you can't block relevant nominations and gut relevant funding while plausibly complaining about the government doing too little to address an epidemic).

I suspect the root of the problem is that the leadership of the conservative movement fell in love with the appealing but doubly flawed idea that you can create optimal messaging by controlling the process. Fox News has always been a hothouse for ideas and arguments crafted to appeal to the base. Conflicting data and effective counter-arguments were largely kept out of the environment.

This approach can work for a while but at some point you lose control. The system is too complex to fine-tune. Eventually you find yourself saddled with a bunch of ideas that the base is committed to even though they can't hope to survive in the outside world.

 

More Mort

Mort Sahl Mocks The Presidential Candidates in The Upcoming 1968 Election

A traditional Republican's case against Dobbs

Highly recommended video from Tim Miller of the Bulwark. There are at least a couple of reasons you should watch this. First, the ads shown and discussed from the Harris campaign are among the most disturbing and provocative you've ever seen, and I mean that in the right way. They provoke entirely appropriate discomfort and anger.

Second, Miller's comments are worth listening to both for their content, and also for who Miller is, someone who, despite having gone all in on opposing Trump and the current state of the party, still views the world as a moderate Republican.

A Littleton, Colorado native, Miller started out in Republican politics as an intern working on the 1998 Colorado gubernatorial election.^[3][4] He later earned a bachelor's degree from the George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs.^[5]

Miller was an Iowa staffer for John McCain in the 2008 Republican Party presidential primaries, and later served as national press secretary for the Jon Huntsman 2012 presidential campaign.^[5] In his role with the Huntsman campaign, Miller was credited by Esquire for making its daily email to reporters "surprisingly hip".^[6] After the primary, Miller joined the Republican National Committee as its liaison to Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign.^[7]

In 2015, Miller was hired by former Florida governor Jeb Bush to be a senior adviser to his presidential exploratory committee, Right to Rise political action committee (PAC), and went on to serve as the communications director for Bush's presidential campaign.^[5][8][9] During the campaign, Miller drew notice as a "vocal critic" of Donald Trump.^[10] Following a 2016 South Carolina Republican primary debate, Miller followed Trump around the spin room heckling him until Miller was "hip-checked" by Trump campaign strategist Corey Lewandowski.^[11]

 Apologies for the formatting, but here are some of the comments that I found worth repeating. 

The essential take away here is that the anti-reproductive rights movement (calling it anti-abortion no longer provides an accurate picture) has gone to a place so dark and misogynistic that many people who consider themselves at least moderately pro-life are appalled by what they're seeing. The Harris campaign has made the smart (and I would say moral) decision to focus on the most indefensible consequences of Dobbs: victims of rape; girls so young we would consider them children; women bleeding out in emergency room parking lots.

The press has been pushing for Harris to take more positions on divisive issues. Personally I think it is both savvy and right to prioritize urgent points of agreement, and I can't think of many issues more urgent than this.

Abortion -- Secondary and Tertiary Effects

One of the points we have been hammering for a long time now is that much, possibly even most of the impact of the Dobbs ruling will come from its secondary and tertiary effects. For the moment, we are keeping the discussion very narrow and leaving out issues like rape and incest or the larger impact on reproductive rights, not because they are unimportant (very much the opposite), but because they are too big to work in here.

Some of this is arbitrary, but this is how we are defining our terms.

The primary effect is that women lose the right to terminate a pregnancy.

Secondary effects include treatments for pregnant women, particularly with respect to miscarriages and other complications. They generally involve healthcare providers refusing to perform necessary procedures out of the fear that these will be incorrectly classified as abortions.

Tertiary effects include the direct and indirect impact on the healthcare and rights of all women including those who are not and in some cases may not be capable of becoming pregnant. If a woman loses access to a drug because that drug can also be used as an abortifacient, that is a tertiary effect. If a woman's Dr. moves out of a state or if new doctors choose not to locate in a state due to antiabortion laws, that is a tertiary effect. If women lose their right to privacy due to things like menstrual tracking, that is a tertiary effect.

The negative impact on postnatal treatment is a tertiary effect, which brings us to Louisiana, which even more than Texas has become Ground Zero for this story.

From NPR's All Things Considered:

A new Louisiana law will re-classify misoprostol as a dangerous controlled substance

Rosemary Westwood | September 27, 2024

 Louisiana already bans nearly all abortions. But starting in October, there will be additional restrictions on mifepristone and misoprostol. These drugs are used in medication abortions but also have other uses in pregnancy care. Under a new law in Louisiana, they will be reclassified as controlled, dangerous substances. WWNO’s Rosemary Westwood in New Orleans explains why doctors there are worried.

If women start bleeding out after giving birth, one of the key drugs doctors can reach for is misoprostol. It’s effective, safe and cheap. And hospitals often keep it immediately available on special hemorrhage carts in labor and delivery rooms.

JENNIFER AVEGNO: You have it either right there in the room, in an easy-to-access cart, or you’ve got nurses who walk around with it in their pocket, going from room to room.

WESTWOOD: That’s Dr. Jennifer Avegno, the director of the New Orleans Health Department. Over the summer, she started hearing that hospitals were pulling misoprostol off the carts and out of the rooms. They’re moving the drug to locked cabinets because that’s what’s required for controlled, dangerous substances.

Most controlled drugs have the potential of being abused, like Ambien and Xanax. Misoprostol doesn’t. But in some hospitals, doctors or nurses will have to go farther to reach it and unlock the cabinet. Avegno says some are even running drills to see how much longer it will take. New Orleans OB-GYN Nicole Freehill says any delay is dangerous.

NICOLE FREEHILL: Somebody’s just bleeding profusely. And at that point, if it takes even two minutes to access that medicine versus 20 seconds that it used to take when it was on the hemorrhage cart in the room, those seconds matter.

Under the category of secondary effects, which have produced dozens of horrifying and heartbreaking stories, Louisiana was also the state where Kaitlyn Joshua suffered her traumatic experience.

WATCH: “This experience helped me see how Black women like me die needlessly… This is government and political interference in private health care decisions…”

Kaitlyn Joshua testified powerfully about how Republican abortion bans almost killed her. #ForcedBirthNation pic.twitter.com/bbD8XL8rTo

— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) September 24, 2024