Objectivity Schmobjectivity
There have been a few interesting comments about media bias lately. Matthew Yglesias suggested that newspapers, to keep up with the blogosphere, will have to become less "bland and inoffensive":
And the Seattle Times banned its reporters from showing their bias by applauding political comments, so NRO's Jonah Goldberg had this to say:
Gotta say he's missing the point here. Media outlets are as concerned, as they should be, with the appearance of bias as they are about the existence of reported bias. They're probably actually more concerned about the former. "Nothing" will be the effect on coverage because this effort is meant to affect appearance, not coverage, in the first place.
Also, there's an element here of very basic professional behavior. When you're reporting on a contest, you don't clap for one side or the other. If you can't restrain your emotions, you shouldn't be in a field that requires logical thought.
It would be ideal that reporters could applaud anti-Republican news, and yet no one would charge papers with liberal bias because they knew the reporters could set their feelings aside, but that simply isn't the case. If outlets are going to claim they're unbiased, they have to demand their reporters act that way.
There have been a few interesting comments about media bias lately. Matthew Yglesias suggested that newspapers, to keep up with the blogosphere, will have to become less "bland and inoffensive":
Ask a journalist about the objectivity convention that governs US newspapers and he'll tell you a story about the vital role a neutral press plays in sustaining a vibrant democracy. It's an intriguing story, but if you ask an economist about the optimal strategy for a media organization in a market with few competitors, he'll tell you that the important thing is to be bland and inoffensive, like television before there was cable. Not coincidentally, America's newspapers have, secure in their possession of local monopolies, gotten really good at being bland and inoffensive. I'm reasonably optimistic that in the emerging, more-competitive world, new approaches will emerge.
And the Seattle Times banned its reporters from showing their bias by applauding political comments, so NRO's Jonah Goldberg had this to say:
I do love this journalistic fixation with the idea that banning the display of bias in this or that area of life will eliminate bias in actual reporting. The best example are bans on campaign donations. It's believed that reporters who are prevented from giving money to their favorite candidates will, through the magic of transference, also stop being biased in their reporting. So the reporters at the Seattle Times are prevented from clapping in anti-Bush fashion. The net result on coverage will be, What? Nothing of course.
Gotta say he's missing the point here. Media outlets are as concerned, as they should be, with the appearance of bias as they are about the existence of reported bias. They're probably actually more concerned about the former. "Nothing" will be the effect on coverage because this effort is meant to affect appearance, not coverage, in the first place.
Also, there's an element here of very basic professional behavior. When you're reporting on a contest, you don't clap for one side or the other. If you can't restrain your emotions, you shouldn't be in a field that requires logical thought.
It would be ideal that reporters could applaud anti-Republican news, and yet no one would charge papers with liberal bias because they knew the reporters could set their feelings aside, but that simply isn't the case. If outlets are going to claim they're unbiased, they have to demand their reporters act that way.
What not to wear
August 15th 2007 22:39
***UPDATED***
Reason has an interesting piece, inspired by the controversy over Hillary Clinton's cleavage, about the stereotypes people hold about women.
The piece argues:
True enough. Experiments do show that stereotypes can make us judge competent people poorly. (This applies to race as well, and you can read my American Spectator letter to the editor about that here.)
However, Reason goes on to miss the fact that many stereotypes, while they hurt the innocent, are true in terms of demographic trends. Test after test has shown that women and men have different abilities, and even when they have the same mean ability (say, IQ) the talent is distributed differently. It's not fair to assume an individual woman will have this-or-that level of ability, but if that assumption tends to be accurate, a lot of people will persist in it.
The article glosses over that fact with this statement:
The implicit argument here is that women are as competent as men are, but unfortunately people can't see that, so women seek out careers where stereotypes can't hurt them. They go places where only their ability counts.
The problem is that no, they don't. The cited fields are only 51 and 49 percent female, respectively. This compares to graduate students, 55-58 percent of whom are women, and to undergraduate students, 56 percent of whom are women. 44-47 percent of professional students are women. The total U.S. population is 51 percent female.
Also, law isn't all that objective to begin with: There's a lot of subjectivity in grading a paper, and lawyers' performances often depend on how well they can convey a commanding presence (or "signal competence").
And a quick look at the numbers on undergraduate enrollment further sinks this theory. The American Association of University Women provides them, and here's a list of fields with more than 50 percent male enrollment. They're listed from the most to least male-dominated:
Engineering
Mathematics and physical sciences
History
Business and management
The two most male-dominated are the two most objective fields: The students, by and large, receive problems and solve them. If they get the right answer, they pass.
And here are the female majors, from most to least female-dominated:
Education
Psychology
Health professions
Public affairs/social services
Humanities
Other
Biological sciences
Social science
With the exception of biology, women are "flocking" to pretty soft sciences, where subjectivity reigns. Maybe their natural abilities work best here, or maybe discrimination really does put them here, but they most certainly are not seeking out the most direct tests of ability.
UPDATE: Kerry Howley, the piece's author, has a great response to this post in the comments. Please read it if you're interested in this debate, and thanks to her for reading and posting in such detail. (Bigtime thanks also, Kerry, for linking to that baseball study; I've been looking for something just like that for a piece I'm working on.)
She has an excellent point, one I overlooked, about the objectivity of law: The bar. People take the exam, and regardless of which gender box they check, they get a license to practice. From a quick Google search, they seem to score comparably (one analysis found but a .162 standard deviation gap in favor of men). She's also right that " Not every field where competence is easily signaled needs to be majority women to make the point."
(For the record, what I mean by "objective" is a field where instructors, employers and clients have little leeway in judging one's performance. For example, a math problem or a bar exam question is right or wrong, but a humanities paper could be a 7/10 or an 8/10 depending on the preferences and stereotypes of the grader. I presume this is pretty much what Kerry means by competence being "easily signaled," and I wish I'd made that clearer. As an aside, one interesting way to test for objectivity would be to figure out the standard deviations of individuals' grades -- math students probably get similar marks from class to class, where teachers in more subjective majors probably grade the same students differently. But I digress.)
Anyway, I'd like to reiterate two things from the original post. One, women are not "flocking" to law; they're merely about evenly represented. What's more, the fields in which they are overrepresented don't have bar exams or anything like them (that's the significance of listing majority-female college majors).
And two, not every objective/easily-competence-s ignaled field needs to be majority-female for Kerry's point to be correct -- but that should be true disproportionately. As the list of majors shows, the opposite is pretty much the case.
Math and engineering may not have single standardized tests that completely determine one's standing, but they're a heck of a lot more objective-test-based than, say, education, where professors subjectively grade papers/classroom teaching performance instead of checking right vs. wrong answers. (A close friend of mine, for example, frequently complains about her education papers' grades.) Men concentrate in fields of right and wrong answers like math and science, while women study more subjective areas like education, psychology, humanities, etc.
Finally, I certainly never said that high female enrollment in education schools suggests that stereotypes don't exist. I would never say stereotypes don't exist, because I believe lots of them! What I said is that the trend indicates women aren't gravitating toward fields where their performances are most objectively judged.
Maybe this reflects women's natural or learned abilities (men outscore women on visuospatial IQ measures, the opposite is true for verbal ones, and verbal fields are more subjective), and maybe it has to do with discrimination in certain fields. Probably both, because real differences between groups are often exaggerated when the general population notices and starts acting on them. But my point is that women are in those fields, not in hyper-objective ones where stereotypes can't hurt them.
Reason has an interesting piece, inspired by the controversy over Hillary Clinton's cleavage, about the stereotypes people hold about women.
The piece argues:
Lacking a Y chromosome almost certainly puts half the population at a disadvantage in the quest to signal competence and authority. Women are repeatedly judged as having performed better in blind assessments of their abilities, from thesis papers to orchestra tryouts, than they are judged when their gender is revealed.
True enough. Experiments do show that stereotypes can make us judge competent people poorly. (This applies to race as well, and you can read my American Spectator letter to the editor about that here.)
However, Reason goes on to miss the fact that many stereotypes, while they hurt the innocent, are true in terms of demographic trends. Test after test has shown that women and men have different abilities, and even when they have the same mean ability (say, IQ) the talent is distributed differently. It's not fair to assume an individual woman will have this-or-that level of ability, but if that assumption tends to be accurate, a lot of people will persist in it.
The article glosses over that fact with this statement:
They respond by flocking to careers where competence is most directly signaled, like those in medicine and law.
The implicit argument here is that women are as competent as men are, but unfortunately people can't see that, so women seek out careers where stereotypes can't hurt them. They go places where only their ability counts.
The problem is that no, they don't. The cited fields are only 51 and 49 percent female, respectively. This compares to graduate students, 55-58 percent of whom are women, and to undergraduate students, 56 percent of whom are women. 44-47 percent of professional students are women. The total U.S. population is 51 percent female.
Also, law isn't all that objective to begin with: There's a lot of subjectivity in grading a paper, and lawyers' performances often depend on how well they can convey a commanding presence (or "signal competence").
And a quick look at the numbers on undergraduate enrollment further sinks this theory. The American Association of University Women provides them, and here's a list of fields with more than 50 percent male enrollment. They're listed from the most to least male-dominated:
Engineering
Mathematics and physical sciences
History
Business and management
The two most male-dominated are the two most objective fields: The students, by and large, receive problems and solve them. If they get the right answer, they pass.
And here are the female majors, from most to least female-dominated:
Education
Psychology
Health professions
Public affairs/social services
Humanities
Other
Biological sciences
Social science
With the exception of biology, women are "flocking" to pretty soft sciences, where subjectivity reigns. Maybe their natural abilities work best here, or maybe discrimination really does put them here, but they most certainly are not seeking out the most direct tests of ability.
UPDATE: Kerry Howley, the piece's author, has a great response to this post in the comments. Please read it if you're interested in this debate, and thanks to her for reading and posting in such detail. (Bigtime thanks also, Kerry, for linking to that baseball study; I've been looking for something just like that for a piece I'm working on.)
She has an excellent point, one I overlooked, about the objectivity of law: The bar. People take the exam, and regardless of which gender box they check, they get a license to practice. From a quick Google search, they seem to score comparably (one analysis found but a .162 standard deviation gap in favor of men). She's also right that " Not every field where competence is easily signaled needs to be majority women to make the point."
(For the record, what I mean by "objective" is a field where instructors, employers and clients have little leeway in judging one's performance. For example, a math problem or a bar exam question is right or wrong, but a humanities paper could be a 7/10 or an 8/10 depending on the preferences and stereotypes of the grader. I presume this is pretty much what Kerry means by competence being "easily signaled," and I wish I'd made that clearer. As an aside, one interesting way to test for objectivity would be to figure out the standard deviations of individuals' grades -- math students probably get similar marks from class to class, where teachers in more subjective majors probably grade the same students differently. But I digress.)
Anyway, I'd like to reiterate two things from the original post. One, women are not "flocking" to law; they're merely about evenly represented. What's more, the fields in which they are overrepresented don't have bar exams or anything like them (that's the significance of listing majority-female college majors).
And two, not every objective/easily-competence-s ignaled field needs to be majority-female for Kerry's point to be correct -- but that should be true disproportionately. As the list of majors shows, the opposite is pretty much the case.
Math and engineering may not have single standardized tests that completely determine one's standing, but they're a heck of a lot more objective-test-based than, say, education, where professors subjectively grade papers/classroom teaching performance instead of checking right vs. wrong answers. (A close friend of mine, for example, frequently complains about her education papers' grades.) Men concentrate in fields of right and wrong answers like math and science, while women study more subjective areas like education, psychology, humanities, etc.
Finally, I certainly never said that high female enrollment in education schools suggests that stereotypes don't exist. I would never say stereotypes don't exist, because I believe lots of them! What I said is that the trend indicates women aren't gravitating toward fields where their performances are most objectively judged.
Maybe this reflects women's natural or learned abilities (men outscore women on visuospatial IQ measures, the opposite is true for verbal ones, and verbal fields are more subjective), and maybe it has to do with discrimination in certain fields. Probably both, because real differences between groups are often exaggerated when the general population notices and starts acting on them. But my point is that women are in those fields, not in hyper-objective ones where stereotypes can't hurt them.
How do I turn this thing on again?
August 15th 2007 22:28
From a Salon.com blog, about the Fretlight guitar, which lights up the places on the fretboard your hands are supposed to go to play a given chord:
Are you on crack? In the 10 years I've played guitar -- well, we just won't say how much I've spent on effects pedals, digital modeling amps, random toys, recording equipment and computer software. The guitar magazines are packed full of ads for cutting-edge gadgets.
My digital amps use computer programs to emulate various amp sounds, not to mention countless effects. My Boss Super Shifter harmonizer can tell what note I'm playing and add another depending on what key I put it in. My eBow uses a magnetic charge to make the strings vibrate like a violin's would. More and more guitarists are getting into recording as it becomes cheaper, as evidenced by products like Amplitube, which lets you plug your guitar directly into a computer and get a variety of amp-like sounds. Heck, the new Variax guitar actually simulates other kinds of guitars. so you can flip a switch to go from a Les Paul to a Strat sound.
Yeah, things sure haven't changed since the days of Jimi Hendrix! A guitar with frets that light up is a step in a whole new tech-savvy direction.
...the normally tech-averse guitar industry...
Are you on crack? In the 10 years I've played guitar -- well, we just won't say how much I've spent on effects pedals, digital modeling amps, random toys, recording equipment and computer software. The guitar magazines are packed full of ads for cutting-edge gadgets.
My digital amps use computer programs to emulate various amp sounds, not to mention countless effects. My Boss Super Shifter harmonizer can tell what note I'm playing and add another depending on what key I put it in. My eBow uses a magnetic charge to make the strings vibrate like a violin's would. More and more guitarists are getting into recording as it becomes cheaper, as evidenced by products like Amplitube, which lets you plug your guitar directly into a computer and get a variety of amp-like sounds. Heck, the new Variax guitar actually simulates other kinds of guitars. so you can flip a switch to go from a Les Paul to a Strat sound.
Yeah, things sure haven't changed since the days of Jimi Hendrix! A guitar with frets that light up is a step in a whole new tech-savvy direction.
American Psychological Association appoints itself the military's moral czar
August 15th 2007 22:26
Korn review up at antiMusic
August 15th 2007 11:11
Here it is.
Main point:
Main point:
Somehow it's been almost two years since Korn dropped guitarist Head, stopped playing nu-metal and teamed up with producers The Matrix for See You on the Other Side. Despite the turmoil – and the fact the genre they defined was hemorrhaging popularity – the band cranked out its best record ever, packed with dark guitars and soaring melodies.
They've lost another member (drummer David Silveria is on leave), stayed away from nu-metal and kept The Matrix (on some tracks) for the new Untitled. The same formula has created basically the same result, a sort of See You Again. The hit-to-miss ratio isn't quite so high as it was in 2005, but the new songs earn their place in the Korn catalog.
They've lost another member (drummer David Silveria is on leave), stayed away from nu-metal and kept The Matrix (on some tracks) for the new Untitled. The same formula has created basically the same result, a sort of See You Again. The hit-to-miss ratio isn't quite so high as it was in 2005, but the new songs earn their place in the Korn catalog.
It's not nonsense, Mrs. Obama
August 13th 2007 22:13
People on both sides of the aisle have been tripping over themselves to support Michelle Obama's proclamation that the question, "Is Barack black enough?" doesn't matter.
In a certain sense they're right. There's no blackness test for president, and if there was, every single leader up to this point in time would have failed it.
The problem is that the people making the charge aren't asking whether he's fit to be president, or whether the American public should support him; they're asking whether blacks specifically should vote for Obama in the Democratic primary. In other words, they want to know if he'll represent black interests more closely than will, say, Hillary.
On that issue, the question "Is he black enough?" is far from nonsense. A black person will have an intimate familiarity with black issues and can represent that viewpoint better than someone who's never stood in those shoes. Rational black voters will give him points for this.
But actually, in many ways Obama is no more an American black than Hillary is. He's half-white, and his black genes come from Kenya, whereas American blacks are West African in descent. Obama has no Southern slave ancestry. If he'll represent black interests better than Hillary will (and that very well may be the case), it will stem either from personal convictions or from whatever common experience he shares with blacks from growing up dark-skinned in America.
(That common experience is debatable, considering Hawaii's atypical racial makeup. He does contend he has a tough time getting cabs, though.)
In a certain sense they're right. There's no blackness test for president, and if there was, every single leader up to this point in time would have failed it.
The problem is that the people making the charge aren't asking whether he's fit to be president, or whether the American public should support him; they're asking whether blacks specifically should vote for Obama in the Democratic primary. In other words, they want to know if he'll represent black interests more closely than will, say, Hillary.
On that issue, the question "Is he black enough?" is far from nonsense. A black person will have an intimate familiarity with black issues and can represent that viewpoint better than someone who's never stood in those shoes. Rational black voters will give him points for this.
But actually, in many ways Obama is no more an American black than Hillary is. He's half-white, and his black genes come from Kenya, whereas American blacks are West African in descent. Obama has no Southern slave ancestry. If he'll represent black interests better than Hillary will (and that very well may be the case), it will stem either from personal convictions or from whatever common experience he shares with blacks from growing up dark-skinned in America.
(That common experience is debatable, considering Hawaii's atypical racial makeup. He does contend he has a tough time getting cabs, though.)
Two more points on Loury's incarceration article
August 13th 2007 22:08
(Read my earlier post here and the article here.)
One, Loury found that since the 1960s, people's opinions about blacks tend to correlate more strongly with their views on crime and welfare. I'd argue this is because the '60s saw the beginning of increases in both crime and welfare, and people could more easily see who was committing the crimes and who was receiving the welfare. It quickly became obvious that the questions "How should we handle criminals?" and "How should we treat the poor?" disproportionately meant "What should we do about the black underclass?"
Two, it's been mainly the left making this connection. One can argue that conservatives use terms like "tough on crime" and "welfare queen" as code for anti-black sentiment, but liberals lay the guilt trip on forcefully and explicitly. They point out that blacks are disproportionately poor to argue for more welfare, and they protest high incarceration rates by showing how it's hurting the black community. Loury himself is guilty of making the latter argument, and he doesn't note that the correlation cuts both ways.
One, Loury found that since the 1960s, people's opinions about blacks tend to correlate more strongly with their views on crime and welfare. I'd argue this is because the '60s saw the beginning of increases in both crime and welfare, and people could more easily see who was committing the crimes and who was receiving the welfare. It quickly became obvious that the questions "How should we handle criminals?" and "How should we treat the poor?" disproportionately meant "What should we do about the black underclass?"
Two, it's been mainly the left making this connection. One can argue that conservatives use terms like "tough on crime" and "welfare queen" as code for anti-black sentiment, but liberals lay the guilt trip on forcefully and explicitly. They point out that blacks are disproportionately poor to argue for more welfare, and they protest high incarceration rates by showing how it's hurting the black community. Loury himself is guilty of making the latter argument, and he doesn't note that the correlation cuts both ways.
Love my genes better than you
August 9th 2007 23:01
When Jeremy Lott told me about a piece he was working on for the Spectator (it's since run here), I was skeptical of his thesis. There's a new study about how charity actually has selfish roots, and The Economist made an argument based on it.
Jeremy criticizes The Economist, but typically I'm pretty sympathetic to that kind of logic. As the classic How to Win Friends and Influence People put it:
Evolutionary psychologists like Richard Dawkins contend (correctly, in my opinion) that "that feeling" evolved because of the "selfish gene." That is, say a gene makes you altruistic to people who are like you -- you'll be most altruistic toward your relatives, pretty altruistic to your community, less so to your national compatriots and even less so to all mankind. People like you will be more likely to have that gene as well, so your altruism actually furthers the gene's interests, and the gene wins out in natural selection. Thus the gene is selfish by making you altruistic.
But after reading Jeremy's article, he's 100 percent correct on this study. Some researchers took two groups of people, showing one group some pictures of attractive opposite-sex folks and asking them to write essays about dating those fine specimens. The other group saw pictures of buildings and wrote about the weather.
Then, both groups were asked what they'd do with $5,000. The dating-primed men were more likely to spend their money on flashy, impressive things. They were also more likely to spend money on charity, especially when other people could notice. Dating-primed women were more likely to say they'd volunteer a lot.
Interesting, but Jeremy is quick to pounce on the idiocy of this conclusion from the Economist article:
This is a basic logical fallacy. The study showed that the mating drive can increase charity; i.e., that charity is in part influenced by conspicuous consumption urges. It does not follow from this that charity is primarily due to these urges. If this were true, married people would give less than people in the dating market, but in fact we see the opposite .
And as Jeremy argues:
Jeremy criticizes The Economist, but typically I'm pretty sympathetic to that kind of logic. As the classic How to Win Friends and Influence People put it:
How about the time you gave a large contribution to the Red Cross?...If you hadn't wanted that feeling more than you wanted your money, you would not have made the contribution.
Evolutionary psychologists like Richard Dawkins contend (correctly, in my opinion) that "that feeling" evolved because of the "selfish gene." That is, say a gene makes you altruistic to people who are like you -- you'll be most altruistic toward your relatives, pretty altruistic to your community, less so to your national compatriots and even less so to all mankind. People like you will be more likely to have that gene as well, so your altruism actually furthers the gene's interests, and the gene wins out in natural selection. Thus the gene is selfish by making you altruistic.
But after reading Jeremy's article, he's 100 percent correct on this study. Some researchers took two groups of people, showing one group some pictures of attractive opposite-sex folks and asking them to write essays about dating those fine specimens. The other group saw pictures of buildings and wrote about the weather.
Then, both groups were asked what they'd do with $5,000. The dating-primed men were more likely to spend their money on flashy, impressive things. They were also more likely to spend money on charity, especially when other people could notice. Dating-primed women were more likely to say they'd volunteer a lot.
Interesting, but Jeremy is quick to pounce on the idiocy of this conclusion from the Economist article:
Giving money to charity is thus more akin to conspicuous consumption than it is to blatant benevolence.
This is a basic logical fallacy. The study showed that the mating drive can increase charity; i.e., that charity is in part influenced by conspicuous consumption urges. It does not follow from this that charity is primarily due to these urges. If this were true, married people would give less than people in the dating market, but in fact we see the opposite .
And as Jeremy argues:
It ignores alternative explanations for the results -- such as, maybe the control group was bored?
Why we lock 'em up and throw away the key
August 9th 2007 22:55
Glenn C. Loury has an interesting article about incarceration. He argues that the recent increase in imprisonment is not because incarceration works, or that crime has increased (it hasn't), but because as a society we've become more punitive. Tough-on-crime sentiment has certainly grown, starting probably two decades ago.
But first of all, Loury fails to take into account Bernard Harcourt's recent results indicating that incarceration does, in fact, correlate strongly with lower crime: Harcourt's breakthrough was including not only criminal sentences but also involuntary mental health commitments. When high-risk people are locked up, they don't commit crimes. No other strategy for pacifying the criminal-minded, save execution, is that effective.
Two, Loury tries to tie racial politics into the incarceration rate's fluctuations. I'm not really buying it. For starters, Americans certainly didn't get more racist all of a sudden in the late '80s and early '90s; they became more anti-crime as it became clear that coddling criminals wasn't working. Also, it's true that attitudes about race became more closely associated with attitudes about welfare and crime, but that seems to have happened starting in the late '60s, not when the incarceration rate started rising.
Even Loury eventually concedes "the racial argument about causes is inconclusive," arguing instead that "the racial consequences are clear." True enough.
Then again, it is true that it's easier to imprison someone who doesn't look like you. Awhile back I ran some basic regressions showing that more diversity in a country tends to correlate to higher incarceration -- but more diversity does not have a discernable tie to the actual murder rate.
UPDATE: A commenter has pointed out that I didn't summarize Loury's views of prison's effectiveness well. Here's the full context:
But first of all, Loury fails to take into account Bernard Harcourt's recent results indicating that incarceration does, in fact, correlate strongly with lower crime: Harcourt's breakthrough was including not only criminal sentences but also involuntary mental health commitments. When high-risk people are locked up, they don't commit crimes. No other strategy for pacifying the criminal-minded, save execution, is that effective.
Two, Loury tries to tie racial politics into the incarceration rate's fluctuations. I'm not really buying it. For starters, Americans certainly didn't get more racist all of a sudden in the late '80s and early '90s; they became more anti-crime as it became clear that coddling criminals wasn't working. Also, it's true that attitudes about race became more closely associated with attitudes about welfare and crime, but that seems to have happened starting in the late '60s, not when the incarceration rate started rising.
Even Loury eventually concedes "the racial argument about causes is inconclusive," arguing instead that "the racial consequences are clear." True enough.
Then again, it is true that it's easier to imprison someone who doesn't look like you. Awhile back I ran some basic regressions showing that more diversity in a country tends to correlate to higher incarceration -- but more diversity does not have a discernable tie to the actual murder rate.
UPDATE: A commenter has pointed out that I didn't summarize Loury's views of prison's effectiveness well. Here's the full context:
Increased incarceration does appear to have reduced crime somewhat. But by how much? Estimates of the share of the 1990s reduction in violent crime that can be attributed to the prison boom range from five percent to 25 percent. Whatever the number, analysts of all political stripes now agree that we have long ago entered the zone of diminishing returns.
T-Pain review up at antiMusic
August 9th 2007 02:21
Here it is.
Main point:
Main point:
Southern hip-hop certainly has its charms. A group like, say, Outkast can reference the gangster culture without getting bogged down in it – outside New York and Los Angeles, that expectation just isn't there. And Dixie contributes a certain soul flavor you won't find elsewhere.
This is evident, but only to a degree, on R&B crooner/rapper T-Pain's sophomore effort, Epiphany...[M]elodically, T-Pain is incredibly talented. The tracks benefit from stellar production, and they all dish out some pretty infectious yet soothing R&B attitude.
T-Pain falters lyrically, however. R&B has taken a nose dive in recent years, giving up the uplift of its classic years (T-Pain deserves credit for revisiting them in "Right Hand" and "Sounds Bad," the two closing tracks) in favor of coarse, rap-style street jive. It doesn't make much sense for nonstop profanity and locker-room sex talk to accompany a gentle beat and soulful singing, but that's exactly what permeates the radio.
As a result, T-Pain values thug rhymes over clever witticisms. The singer goes beyond gangsterism, but not very far – many of the songs deal with getting women drunk in bars and taking them home (or to Mr. Pain's car).
This is evident, but only to a degree, on R&B crooner/rapper T-Pain's sophomore effort, Epiphany...[M]elodically, T-Pain is incredibly talented. The tracks benefit from stellar production, and they all dish out some pretty infectious yet soothing R&B attitude.
T-Pain falters lyrically, however. R&B has taken a nose dive in recent years, giving up the uplift of its classic years (T-Pain deserves credit for revisiting them in "Right Hand" and "Sounds Bad," the two closing tracks) in favor of coarse, rap-style street jive. It doesn't make much sense for nonstop profanity and locker-room sex talk to accompany a gentle beat and soulful singing, but that's exactly what permeates the radio.
As a result, T-Pain values thug rhymes over clever witticisms. The singer goes beyond gangsterism, but not very far – many of the songs deal with getting women drunk in bars and taking them home (or to Mr. Pain's car).
The failure of...well, government
August 8th 2007 22:21
This American Prospect piece pretty well misses the mark on the message of the Minneapolis bridge collapse. Paul Waldman argues that the incident calls for a vigorous, involved government -- in particular, he says the Democrats should tie it in to the health care bill SCHIP.
In other words, the government proved incapable of keeping a bridge out of a river, and the Prospect takes that to mean the state should take care of kids' medical insurance, too!
This City Journal article hits it more on the head, even though it was written before the collapse:
[S]tate and local governments, spending ever more on such items as Medicaid, education, and bloated public-employee pensions and benefits, have given infrastructure the short end of the stick—even as traditional financing sources, such as proceeds from gas taxes, haven't kept pace with the growing need. Over the last 25 years, as the miles driven on U.S. roads have doubled, road spending has increased by less than 50 percent. Deterioration is the inevitable result.
The solution is focusing the government on infrastructure (even though bridge collapses are, in fact, incredibly rare), or privatizing, not expanding the government into everything else.
In other words, the government proved incapable of keeping a bridge out of a river, and the Prospect takes that to mean the state should take care of kids' medical insurance, too!
This City Journal article hits it more on the head, even though it was written before the collapse:
[S]tate and local governments, spending ever more on such items as Medicaid, education, and bloated public-employee pensions and benefits, have given infrastructure the short end of the stick—even as traditional financing sources, such as proceeds from gas taxes, haven't kept pace with the growing need. Over the last 25 years, as the miles driven on U.S. roads have doubled, road spending has increased by less than 50 percent. Deterioration is the inevitable result.
The solution is focusing the government on infrastructure (even though bridge collapses are, in fact, incredibly rare), or privatizing, not expanding the government into everything else.
Too loud, man. Too loud.
August 7th 2007 22:09
Here's a story complaining about people playing their iPods at excessive volumes. There's definitely a point there -- I've heard people play their music so loud everyone on the entire subway car could hear, and the stories about people singing along are pretty absurd.
That said, subways are loud themselves. Sometimes you have to turn it up just to hear it over the whirring of the tunnel, and when the train stops other people can probably hear it.
Also, it's pretty difficult to tell how badly your own earphones are isolating their noise. I thought mine were quite reasonably adjusted once, but when I rode the subway with my girlfriend she informed me she could hear them.
Maybe people just need to get more aggressive with confronting headphone blarers. Every incident I've observed, people have just seethed in silence.
On a side note, I got some Sony headphones with butterfly-looking things that clip to my ears. My glasses hold the clips tightly, so I think that solved the problem. Not sure using my glasses to jam the bud into my ear is a good idea, but they sound good.
That said, subways are loud themselves. Sometimes you have to turn it up just to hear it over the whirring of the tunnel, and when the train stops other people can probably hear it.
Also, it's pretty difficult to tell how badly your own earphones are isolating their noise. I thought mine were quite reasonably adjusted once, but when I rode the subway with my girlfriend she informed me she could hear them.
Maybe people just need to get more aggressive with confronting headphone blarers. Every incident I've observed, people have just seethed in silence.
On a side note, I got some Sony headphones with butterfly-looking things that clip to my ears. My glasses hold the clips tightly, so I think that solved the problem. Not sure using my glasses to jam the bud into my ear is a good idea, but they sound good.
Groundbreaking study: Advertising works
August 7th 2007 22:07
A study: Researchers gave small children the same food, wrapped plainly and then in McDonald's packaging, and the kids said the McDonald's-branded food tasted better. They concluded that the evil company's marketing really works.
Problem A: So what? The whole point of marketing is to create an association between the product/brand and positive feelings. If the researchers had found something else, that would mean McDonald's had made poor use of its advertising dollars.
Problem B: That said, it's still wrong to conclude that the results are due to marketing; some of it may be due to personal experience. For example, Gibson guitars don't advertise much, but I'd guess that if you gave me two identical guitars, one branded Gibson and one plain, I'd say the Gibson one sounded better. Why? Because I've heard a lot of Gibson guitars, and they tend to sound great -- I created that association not through marketing but through using the product. Similarly, kids may have learned they like McDonald's through eating it, and thus they associate the logo with good taste.
Problem C: According to the story, "[t]he study involved 63 low-income children ages 3 to 5 from Head Start centers in San Mateo County, Calif. Robinson believes the results would be similar for children from wealthier families." Given that low-income people tend to eat more fast food and watch more TV, why in the world would you believe that?
Problem A: So what? The whole point of marketing is to create an association between the product/brand and positive feelings. If the researchers had found something else, that would mean McDonald's had made poor use of its advertising dollars.
Problem B: That said, it's still wrong to conclude that the results are due to marketing; some of it may be due to personal experience. For example, Gibson guitars don't advertise much, but I'd guess that if you gave me two identical guitars, one branded Gibson and one plain, I'd say the Gibson one sounded better. Why? Because I've heard a lot of Gibson guitars, and they tend to sound great -- I created that association not through marketing but through using the product. Similarly, kids may have learned they like McDonald's through eating it, and thus they associate the logo with good taste.
Problem C: According to the story, "[t]he study involved 63 low-income children ages 3 to 5 from Head Start centers in San Mateo County, Calif. Robinson believes the results would be similar for children from wealthier families." Given that low-income people tend to eat more fast food and watch more TV, why in the world would you believe that?
Sex and eating habits
August 3rd 2007 21:37
Here's an interesting headline:
This kind of writing will improve your hits, but what they really meant was that scientists "pick gender and eating habits." They could also have said scientists "pick eating habits and sex."
But after reading the article, I can affirm that scientists can't pick your sex habits from your fingerprint and sweat.
Scientists pick sex and eating habits from a drop of sweat and fingerprint
This kind of writing will improve your hits, but what they really meant was that scientists "pick gender and eating habits." They could also have said scientists "pick eating habits and sex."
But after reading the article, I can affirm that scientists can't pick your sex habits from your fingerprint and sweat.
Religion vs. family
August 3rd 2007 01:22
Steven Pinker has a great piece about genealogy in The New Republic. He's just wrong about religion, though:
There's a certain logic to this, but the simple fact is that religion is primarily transmitted through family. Without family, there's no longstanding tradition to look back on.
Also, this theory predicts that countries with the strongest family ties will have the weakest presence of religion. In fact, we see the opposite -- secular states see the most family breakdown and the highest divorce rates. In fact, many religions prohibit divorce.
He has more of a point regarding love of country, as a look at the Muslim world shows. Steve Sailer often makes the point that cousin marriage is common among Muslims; as a result, their strong family ties and love for nepotism make good government difficult.
But (A) cousin marriage isn't exactly what "the American right" means by "family values." Sailer writes that the difference lies in "extended (as opposed to nuclear) families." And (B) jumping back to hammer the point home on religion, emphasis on family certainly hasn't undermined Muslim nations' commitments to Islam.
Contrary to a shibboleth of the American right, family values do not uphold religion and country; they subvert them. An extended family is a rival coalition to any other group, held together not by an ideology or social contract or common purpose but by brute genetic relatedness. And it is a coalition with an unfair advantage: relatives care for one another more than comrades do. Religions and political movements thus have to undermine family loyalties.
There's a certain logic to this, but the simple fact is that religion is primarily transmitted through family. Without family, there's no longstanding tradition to look back on.
Also, this theory predicts that countries with the strongest family ties will have the weakest presence of religion. In fact, we see the opposite -- secular states see the most family breakdown and the highest divorce rates. In fact, many religions prohibit divorce.
He has more of a point regarding love of country, as a look at the Muslim world shows. Steve Sailer often makes the point that cousin marriage is common among Muslims; as a result, their strong family ties and love for nepotism make good government difficult.
But (A) cousin marriage isn't exactly what "the American right" means by "family values." Sailer writes that the difference lies in "extended (as opposed to nuclear) families." And (B) jumping back to hammer the point home on religion, emphasis on family certainly hasn't undermined Muslim nations' commitments to Islam.
The truth about the sex decisions study
August 1st 2007 22:26
"The stereotype that men have sex for physical reasons and women have sex for love -- our data didn't really support that," [said University of Texas professor Cindy Meston]. "These young men and women were having sex for physical pleasure and also for emotional attachment, feeling connected to another person."
She also told the AP:
"It's refuted a lot of gender stereotypes...that men only want sex for the physical pleasure and women want love...That's not what I came up with in my findings."
Well, first of all, if that were true, it might be because Meston only talked to college students.* And two, it's not true.
From Meston's very own study:
An astonishing 123 items, or 52% of the items, showed significant gender differences...Men showed significantly greater endorsement of having sex due to physical reasons, such as ''The person had a desirable body''; ''The person was too ''hot'' (sexy) to resist,'' and simply because the opportunity presented itself: ''The person was available''; ''The person had too much to drink and I was able to take advantage of them.'' Men exceeded women on many items that pertained to physical pleasure such as, ''I wanted to achieve an orgasm,'' and ''It feels good.'' Men more than women reported having sex as a way to improve their social status ( e.g., ''I wanted to enhance my reputation''; ''I wanted to brag to my friends about my conquests'') and their sexual experience (e.g., ''I needed another notch on my belt''; ''I wanted to improve my sexual skills''). Finally, men exceeded women on endorsing a variety of utilitarian reasons for sex: ''I wanted to change the topic of conversation''; ''I wanted to improve my sexual skills.''
Women exceeded men on only three of the 237 reasons...''I wanted to feel feminine''; ''I wanted to express my love for the person''; ''I realized that I was in love.''
Women exceeded men on only three of the 237 reasons...''I wanted to feel feminine''; ''I wanted to express my love for the person''; ''I realized that I was in love.''
These paragraphs use "significant" in the statistical sense, so you can argue that while the differences were perceptible, they weren't all that severe, or at least not as severe as one might have expected. Still, it makes Meston's comment to the AP that " [n]one of the gender differences are all that great" sound a bit disingenuous, no? After all, they were "astonishing."
The researchers did a poor job of eliminating overlapping reasons, like "I was sexually aroused and wanted the release" and "I wanted to achieve an orgasm," so they grouped the reasons together and performed factor analyses. The results were basically the same, with statistically significant gender differences on physical, goal attainment and insecurity, but not emotional, reasons. The researchers note that 20 of the top 25 reasons for having sex overlap between the genders, but write:
When examining endorsement frequency of reasons for having sex, however, substantial gender differences emerged such that men reported substantially higher frequencies than did women for the majority of individual items and subfactors. Men, significantly more than women, endorsed reasons centering on the physical appearance and physical desirability of a partner...These findings support the evolution-based hypothesis that men tend to be more sexual aroused by visual sexual cues than are women, since physical appearance provides a wealth of cues to a woman's fertility and reproductive capacity...
Yup, that sure shows how men and women are exactly the same! I'll have to reexamine my ignorant stereotypes!
These researchers used an unrepresentative sample (exclusively college students), and when that didn't tease out the PC results they were looking for, one of them just started misleading the media about what she found.
I will say, though, that the articles I cited here did a reasonable job of including alternate views. It appears that John Tierney of the NYT actually read the study, too.
By Robert VerBruggen
*For the record, the study had two phases. The first phase simply had people list all the reasons they could think of for having sex. This phase included some non-students. But when it came to ranking those reasons -- the results discussed in this post and elsewhere in the media -- only students were involved.
