It probably would have been OK to round this one off at 2%.
Dana Fradon, originally published 1/31/1977
Comments, observations and thoughts from two bloggers on applied statistics, higher education and epidemiology. Joseph is an associate professor. Mark is a professional statistician and former math teacher.
It probably would have been OK to round this one off at 2%.
Dana Fradon, originally published 1/31/1977
Picking up the ball from Andrew Gelman's recent post on the declining quality of Google searches (which itself built on this one from Cory Doctorow), I've started to see an especially weird result when I do Google searches.
I'll see a result for an article that looks like it might be what I'm looking for. It comes from a reputable publication and there's no little message telling me that it does not include one of my search terms.
[Okay, quick digression. Why does Google not only include results that leave out search terms, but includes them on the first page? As far as I can recall, every single time I am asked do I want result with the terms I typed in, I always say yes. What kind of stupid question is that?]
I get the article, I read through it, and it has no mention whatsoever of one or more of my search terms. Control F shows nothing even related to what I'm looking for. Is the term there but hidden? There once but gone now (such as in a deleted comment)? Only there in Google's imagination?
Most of Doctorow's examples of enshittification* can be traced back greed and bad actors, but this seems to be something else, perhaps just a sign of general decay. That's not particularly reassuring given how much we rely on Google.
* If you're new to the topic, here's an excellent interview with Doctorow on the subject.
There's a certain kind of "planning" that people indulge in when talking about things they know they will never do. It can be traveling to an exotic location, changing careers to a glamorous profession, or even leaving one's spouse for an attractive coworker. We've all seen people make these "plans." Chances are pretty good that we've made them ourselves at one time or another.
You don't have to delve deep into the psychology to see the appeal. It gives daydreaming the illusion of seriousness and productivity while making the daydreams themselves feel more real. Of course I'll have a house in Tuscany someday; I've already picked out the drapes.
Watching individuals do this can be sad (of Mice and Men comes to mind), but it's mostly harmless. When societies engage in this, the stakes are much higher. Though I have no objective metric to point to, it certainly feels like there has been an uptick. God knows we're not hurting for examples, with every serious news organization from the New York Times on down is pumping out bullshit analyses of how we need to prepare for the world of tomorrow.
There is almost invariably a powerful air of self-satisfaction around these articles, a sense of palpable pride in their scientific literacy and willingness to face the future. This would be bad enough if they actually had these qualities, but more often than not, the level of scientific and engineering ignorance is embarrassing and the "future" being faced consist entirely of some half century old science-fiction tropes.
Sometimes the technology is simply not viable (as with the Hyperloop), a fact that is often briefly acknowledged then completely ignored for the remainder of these pieces. Other times, the potential is real but is so far off in the future as to hardly be worth discussing (3-D printing of living organisms, AI middle managers). Then there are those cases as with the Atlantic monthly piece on policing Mars, that are simply based on a vacuum.
Productive planning always starts with knowledge and reasonable assumptions. We can't even begin to have a real discussion of issues like crime and law enforcement on Mars until we have some idea of what the economy, population density, and sponsoring institutions will look like, not to mention questions like terraforming. Are we talking about government bases, corporate outposts, billionaire vanity projects? Will the economy be based on mining, tourism, scientific research? Will there be a large, permanent population, a handful of engineers and programmers rotating in and out to keep the machines running, or perhaps no humans at all, just teams of autonomous and semiautonomous robots doing the work for us.
It's usually not difficult to tell the difference between real planning -- doing the hard work necessary to move forward with the project-- and "planning," dressing up fantasies and daydreams with serious looking details. What we've seen increasingly with discussions of Mars (perhaps hitting a plateau with the infamous Mars one scam) is a preponderance of the latter. What would the former look like?
The first priority would be to learn more. While our knowledge of the planet has exploded in recent years, it still fall short of what we need to mount a serious effort to do something with the red planet. If we're talking about permit human settlements, where should we put them? Given the radiation levels, habitats will probably need to be underground. What engineering problems should we expect with this kind of extraterrestrial excavation and tunneling? If we are interested in mining, where are the major mineral deposits of interest? How easy are they to get to?
We could keep adding to this list for a long time, but as varied as the questions are, the initial steps needed to answer them are relatively few and straightforward. We need to learn more remotely by putting survey satellites around the planet and launching a new generation of surface probes. (While we're at it, we should probably be doing something analogous with the asteroid belt as well.) We need to focus on developing relevant technologies like robotics and AI.
I will admit an ulterior motive here. The things that we should be doing if we are serious about human settlement of Mars are the same things we should be doing anyway. The data we gather looking for landing spots and mineral deposits on Mars will more than justify the effort in terms of scientific knowledge. The advances we make developing the machines to work the planet's minds and building structures will have enormous and immediate impact on life here.
[Blogger is having one of its weird days, so the formatting on this post will be a bit... quirky.]
Adam Something (a highly recommended skeptical YouTuber) recounted how, after doing a video on the Saudi Xanadu, Neom (which we discussed here), one of the paid consultants reached out to him and shared anonymously a first hand view of how these monstrosities get approved. It's better in the context of the Telosa video, but I captured the key quotes.
City building has become the fashionable hobby for the
super-rich these days so there's a lot of competition, but even in its scaled back form, Neom remains
that mad kings will aspire to for years to come.
[written before the election, but it still seems valid]
This pair of posts from almost nine years ago superficially would seem to have nothing to do with our ongoing discussion of the New York Times' catastrophic failures covering politics over the past few years. Other than a passing mention of Hillary Clinton's emails, the topic of elections doesn't come up at all and, to the extent that the NYT story showed an ideological bent, it was decidedly liberal.
But if you look deeper, the problems discussed here, particularly in the second post below, are highly relevant to the problems that have made the paper of record's coverage of the last few elections so bad. The common factor in all of these issues is the paper's culture which is arguably stronger than that of any other major news organization in the country. That, along with its sense of identity, exerts an obvious and well documented influence on everything we see coming out of the NYT.
The staff and especially the leadership of the New York Times operates under the axiomatic belief that theirs is the best paper in the country, arguably the world. It is not difficult to find statements that explicitly make this point while ones that implicitly make it pop up on literally a daily basis. The inevitable result has been a hostility to external criticism and a nearly complete inability for real self-examination. (There are people at the paper who can and do ask the right questions. They just don't tend to stay with the paper all that long.)
Goffman has declined to make public the long, point-by-point rebuttal of her anonymous attacker, but after we got to know each other well, she shared it with me. It is blunt and forceful and, in comparison with the placidity of her public deportment, almost impatient and aggrieved in tone, and it is difficult to put the document down without wondering why she has remained unwilling to publicize some of its explanations. She acknowledges a variety of errors and inconsistencies, mostly the results of a belabored anonymization process, but otherwise persuasively explains many of the lingering issues. There is, for example, a convincing defense of her presence in the supposedly closed juvenile court and a quite reasonable clarification of the mild confusion over what she witnessed firsthand and what she reconstructed from interviews — along with explanations for even the most peculiar and deranged claims of her anonymous attacker, including why Mike does his laundry at home in one scene and at a laundromat in another.
Many claims against her are also easy to rebut independently. Some critics called far-fetched, for example, her claim that an F.B.I. agent in Philadelphia drew up a new computer surveillance system after watching a TV broadcast about the East German Stasi. If you search the Internet for ‘‘Philadelphia cop Stasi documentary,’’ a substantiating item [http://articles.philly.com/2007-08-06/news/24995208_1_mapping-informants-dots] from The Philadelphia Inquirer from 2007 is the second hit. When it comes to Goffman’s assertion that officers run IDs in maternity wards to arrest wanted fathers, another short Internet search produces corroborating examples in Dallas, New Orleans and Brockton, Mass., and a Philadelphia public defender and a deputy mayor told me that the practice does not at all seem beyond plausibility. The most interesting question might not be whether Goffman was telling the truth but why she has continued to let people believe that she might not be.
This is questionable in any number of ways. Goffman is allowed to
present her rebuttal in a manner that completely shields her from any
kind of scrutiny or fact-checking. All of the information we'd need to
evaluate her claims is withheld. Instead, a highly sympathetic
journalist who is in her debt (let's be blunt. Goffman did Lewis-Kraus a
huge professional favor by allowing him this level of access) assures
us repeatedly that we should take her at her word.
The lack, or perhaps more accurately the level of detail here is
bizarre. In Goffman's apparently long and detailed document, there is no
argument or piece of evidence that can be shared with the general
readers. We aren't even given metadata. We have no idea whether these
claims are supported by data, documents, arguments, or something else.
We aren't even told the extent to which these were or weren't checked by
the reporter.
The document is not, however, so sensitive that it cannot be shared with
a journalist or that the journalist can't list specific charges that
are rebutted.
I don't want to weigh in on the veracity of Goffman's book or on any of
the related discussions. More than enough smart people are seriously
engaging in this debate. If anything, I'm concerned that the controversy
over relatively details is distracting from genuinely important points
about racism, class bigotry and mass incarceration. But journalistic
standards and culture are also important. You can make the case that
bad, grossly unethical reporting decided
the 2000 election and it is difficult to discuss the run-up to the Iraq
War without mentioning the name Judith Miller. More recent (and
relevant for the topic of this post) are the NYT fiascoes with the
Clinton emails and the San Bernadino shooters. In both those cases, the
paper allowed sources to feed inaccurate information to the public while
agreeing to withhold information that might have helped readers
evaluate the claims.
Obviously, there are valid reasons for a journalist to agree to withhold
parts of information provided by a source. but Lewis-Kraus explicitly
tells us that he knows of no reason not to share Goffman's rebuttal or
give us any information that might help us evaluate it.
The decision to give Goffman's side of the argument without actually
stating her arguments puts Lewis on shaky ground to begin with, but he
then proceeds to present her case in the most favorable possible light
while only briefly mentioning her more reputable critics from
publications such as the Chronicle of Higher Education and the New Republic (neither Paul Campos nor Steven Lubet is mentioned by name).
I can understand the temptation to let valuable sources have too much
say in the editorial process, but I'm surprised that a paper as proud of
its standards as the New York Times would be so consistently quick to
give in.
________________________________________
New York Times editor Dean Baquet told Margaret Sullivan, the paper's public editor, on Monday that he "would have walked away from the interview." The newspaper's standards editor, Philip B. Corbett, said the paper does not grant "prepublication approval to anyone."Pretty much anytime you point out an issue with the New York Times' ethics or quality control, this will be the other half of the problem: The paper really does see itself as a gold standard, not perfect perhaps, but far better than any of its peers. This attitude effectively prevents any serious self examination let alone real attempts at reform.
This is Joseph.
I found this piece by Josh Marshall to be a really good reply to the waves of doom and gloom that I have been seeing lately. It's really thoughtful.
I especially liked:
Even the history isn’t as simple as you may think. It’s actually very hard to convert a democracy into an autocracy. And the great majority of states where it’s happened are ones that only had a functioning civic democracy for a couple decades at most. Consider some of those other countries I noted above: Russia? Perhaps a decade of extremely tenuous democratic rule. Hungary? Maybe two decades, depending on how you choose to count. Weimar? At most a decade and really no more than half a dozen years of nominal stability before the onset of the Great Depression and the slide into electoral autocracy which preceded the Nazi seizure of power by about three years. The case of Turkey is more complicated but it’s features of electoral democracy were always highly, highly circumscribed. Every example is one where democracy had thin and recent roots, very different from the quarter millennium in which an evolving form of civic democracy has existed in the United States.
Really, this is the real point. It is one thing to acknowledge that some very poor policy decisions are about to be made and that there will be some real costs to American society. That is both real and true. But it is also the case that you can't assume that one side is forever in disarray while the opposing side is filled with high discipline people willing to act against their own self interest in the pursuit of one person's crusade for power. Life is always more complicated than that.
When I am doing better, I will have some comments about my views in terms of micro and macro, but this is less the time for self reflection and more a time for moving forward.
Check out Steven Levitt's Wikipedia page.
Steven David Levitt (born May 29, 1967) is an American economist and co-author of the best-selling book Freakonomics and its sequels (along with Stephen J. Dubner). Levitt was the winner of the 2003 John Bates Clark Medal for his work in the field of crime, and is currently the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago as well as the Faculty Director and Co-Founder of the Center for Radical Innovation for Social Change at the University of Chicago[2] which incubates the Data Science for Everyone coalition.[3] He was co-editor of the Journal of Political Economy published by the University of Chicago Press until December 2007. In 2009, Levitt co-founded TGG Group, a business and philanthropy consulting company.[4] He was chosen as one of Time magazine's "100 People Who Shape Our World" in 2006.[5] A 2011 survey of economics professors named Levitt their fourth favorite living economist under the age of 60, after Paul Krugman, Greg Mankiw and Daron Acemoglu.[6]
It's easy to forget just what a big deal Levitt was in the early 2000s, and just how quickly he devolved into a hack after he turned forty.
DUBNER: So Levitt, how can you in your life, when you wander around, tell the difference between a smart person and a not-so-smart person?Gelman has been riding this beat for a long time, repeatedly pointing out the flaws in this strangely persistent argument. He makes a good case (part of which I basically paraphrase in point one), but there are other problems with Levitt's claims.
LEVITT: Well, one good indicator of a person who’s not so smart is if they vote in a presidential election because they think their vote might actually decide which candidate wins. . . . there has never been and there never will be a vote cast in a presidential election that could possibly be decisive.
I would not conclude from the above discussion that Levitt is not so smart. Of course he’s very smart, he just happens to be misinformed on this issue. I applaud Levitt’s willingness to go out on a limb and say controversial things in a podcast, to get people thinking. I just wish he’d be a bit less sure of himself and not go around saying that he thinks that Aaron, Noah, Nate and I are not so smart.He's being overly diplomatic. Levitt isn't just misinformed; he's willfully misinformed. In issue after issue (drunk driving, car seats, solar energy) he has used sloppy reasoning to reach a controversial position, then has done his best to turn a deaf ear to those who pointed out his errors. We did get a partial retraction of his claims on driving*, but on others he has doubled down and occasionally resorted to cheap shots at those who disagreed with him.
[Picking up where we left off with our long neglected CSI:Mars thread.]
The way we discuss and think about the future of space has come to be dominated by a nonsensical mixture of magical heuristics, sci-fi tropes, inappropriate analogies to colonialism and the "settling" of the American West, and often libertarian ideology. This is perhaps nowhere more evident than with supposedly serious speculations about man's future presence on Mars.
Take for instance the following paragraph from the endlessly embarrassing Atlantic article:
What’s more, the power to generate and distribute something as basic as oxygen will give what Cockell called “levers of control” to specific, corruptible individuals. At one point, this inspired Cockell to create a tongue-in-cheek poster to illustrate one of his papers: alluding to classic British posters from WWII, its slogan read, “Grow Houseplants For Liberty.” “The idea,” he said, “is that the more people who grow plants on Mars in their habitats, the more oxygen that’s produced for the Martian atmosphere, and the less that needs to be produced by machines. There’s quite an interesting potential link between agriculture, plant growth, and freedom.” The more you control your own oxygen supply, in other words, the less the Martian state—or a predatory private oxygen firm—controls you.
Here, as in many discussions of the settling of Mars, oxygen takes on a role analogous to that of water in an old cowboy movie with and added element of mysticism layered on. In these narratives, plants often take on a magical quality and in this particular case, a strange political significance. Having a houseplant becomes an act of resistance, a way of declaring your independence from a tyrannical power.
Controlling the populace through oxygen supply has been a central plot point in countless science-fiction stories, but oxygen is only the beginning of your worries in this situation.
Almost none of these popular "what life will be like on Mars" articles come anywhere near addressing just how inhospitable the planet is. This is a freezing world with an incredibly thin atmosphere constantly bombarded by radiation. Given the amount of shielding necessary for surface dwellings, most of the habitats will have to be buried using heavy equipment. Once in place, everything necessary for sustaining life temperature, food, water, air pressure, will be dependent on extremely elaborate systems requiring constant maintenance. The idea that just having a fern in the corner will give you some extra measure of independence is absurd.
Of course, the entire conversation is even sillier when you take into account that despite the ubiquitous artists' renderings of space miners tapping away, even if someone comes up with a viable business model based on Martian mining, virtually all of the surface work will be done by robots who don't mind the high radiation, the intense cold or the near vacuum. Given this and the difficulty and expense of transporting humans and keeping them alive under these conditions, we'd expect a skeleton crew of absolutely essential workers. Less like the wide open mining camps of space operas, and more like a deep sea rig only with no shore leave.
Going through the draft folder, I realized we had left this thread half finished -- there's a lot to mock here -- but rather than just jumping back in, here's the start.
I've done some googling and I still can't find any evidence that the Antarctica anecdote actually happened.
When I asked Kim Stanley Robinson—whose award-winning Mars Trilogy imagines the human settlement of the Red Planet in extraordinary detail—about the future of police activity on Mars, he responded with a story. In the 1980s, he told me, a team from the National Science Foundation was sent to a research base in Antarctica with a single handgun for the entire crew. The gun was intended as a tool of last resort, for only the most dire of emergencies, but the scientists felt its potential for abuse was too serious to remain unchecked. According to Robinson, they dismantled the gun into three constituent parts and stored each piece with a different caretaker. That way, if someone got drunk and flew into a rage, or simply cracked under the loneliness and pressure, there would be no realistic scenario in which anyone could collect the separate pieces, reassemble the gun, load it, and begin holding people hostage (or worse).
For David Paige, worrying about crime on Mars is not just ahead of its time, it is unnecessary from the very beginning. Paige is a planetary scientist at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), as well as a member of a team selected by NASA to design a ground-penetrating radar system for exploring the Martian subsurface. Crime on Mars, Paige told me, will be so difficult to execute that no one will be tempted to try.
“The issue,” Paige said, “is that there is going to be so much monitoring of people in various sorts of ways.” Airlocks will likely record exactly who opens them and when, for example, mapping everyone’s location down to precise times of day, even to the exact square feet of space they were standing in at a particular moment. Inhabitants’ vital signs, such as elevated heart rates and adrenaline levels, will also likely be recorded by sensors embedded in Martian clothing. If a crime was committed somewhere, time-stamped data could be correlated with a spatial record of where everyone was at that exact moment. “It’s going to be very easy to narrow down the possible culprits,” Paige suggested.
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.
[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.