Are Generalizations Useful?

William Blake noted that "To generalize is to be an idiot. To particularize alone is a distinction of merit." Journalism is primarily about anecdotes, witness the Malcom Gladwell phenomenon.

Robin Hanson recently posted an interesting blog post on women using sex as a bargaining chip in marriages. Midge Decter (wife of Norman Podhoretz) noted this in her autobiography, that a woman's main power over men was that they needed sex less than men did, and this actually countered their disadvantage in earnings and strength quite effectively.

Yet, there seemed many feminists unhappy with Hanson's cynical evaluation of male-female relationships. One commenter (a 'sex activist') noted that

it would be nice to see some recognition that women sometimes don’t get as much sex as (or the kind of sex that) they want out of long-term relationships. And that there are men who have considerably more complex experiences of sexuality than you seem to acknowledge here.

So, Robin noted a generalization (women have a propensity to do X more than men), and some women got hysterical (heh) about the insight. Let's be clear. A stereotype is that all A are A. These are generally untrue, because there are exceptions to most assertions (eg, 'men are taller than women'). But generalizations are true and useful. It is useful to know that walking in a dark alley containing a bunch of young men is dangerous for a young woman. Not that all such situations mean bad things will happen, but the odds imply it is not a good idea.

Most things come down to probabilities, and learning to slant them in your favor is part of an intelligent life. For those who think only deterministic relations are interesting, or known facts about individuals, I just can't empathize. I find it a childish view of life. Not that anecdotes and biographies aren't interesting, but they are primarily interesting as how they are relevant to everyone's story, or a metaphor for something larger.

Mainstream Media Mission Statement Highlights Bad Faith

An editorial was published Dec. 7 by 56 newspapers around the world in 20 languages. The text was drafted by a London Guardian team during more than a month of consultations with editors from more than 20 of the papers involved.

Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: Eleven of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice cap is melting and last year’s inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc.

So, higher oil prices, and the havoc caused by that, is what we want to avoid?

Consider that a Pigovian Tax is a tax applied directly to fossil fuels, intended to cover the 'externalities' in the costs of producing carbon not born by, say, a mining company that extracts the coal. It would introduced by Keynes' mentor Pigou as a way to efficiently deal with externalities like pollution, and Greg Mankiw explains its motivation here). It is liked by economists because it puts the cost of the carbon right on the carbon, making its costs focused on the source, and not spread around. It is the least distortionary method of getting people to burn less carbon: raise its price, people will substitute alternatives (wind, nuclear, sweaters). Cap and Trade is less efficient than a Pigovian tax, and all sorts of targeted taxes and subsidies less so than that (even Paul 'I'm Mad as Hell' Krugman agrees). Raising oil prices is the least distortionary solution to any effort to lower carbon burning.

So, what they highlight as an undesirable effect of Global Warming is a lower bound cost as to what would go into any solution being considered. I have a feeling the Global Warming crowd knows what they want, and are just trying to present anything motivation to get us to agree to their proposals, regardless of how inconsistent their reasoning.

Government Spending to the Rescue

Congress passed a $700B bill to save our financial system last year. Alas, they can't seem to spend it, as banks would rather not have the funds than have the government as a partner. Of course, that just means the government will spend it elsewhere, because as economist Brad DeLong states, "At this point, anything that boosts the government's deficit over the next two years passes the benefit-cost test--anything at all." So Obama now Says TARP Funds Can Go Toward Cutting Deficit, Creating Jobs.

It's a shame so many think that government creates jobs. Sure, there is a level of overhead necessary in an economy, providing us with courts, roads, etc., but to think at our current levels of government, that deficit spending is a net positive is simply naive, and if it worked, Japan wouldn't have stagnated in the 1990's, and the ballooning government deficits of Western countries in the 1970's wouldn't have brought the great productivity slowdown that started around 1973.

Consider this boondoggle, spun charitably by my local public radio station:

A weatherization lab and entire energy efficient house at the school are used to teach a variety of weatherization techniques.

West said more than 130 people have been through Summit's new weatherization program. But just a couple dozen have landed jobs.

Abe Hassan, who runs a stimulus-funded weatherization training program targeting minorities in East St. Paul tells a similar story.

Hassan said 19 people graduated from his training program recently at Merrick Community Services but none of his students have found jobs using those skills.

$130 million over 2 years is geared towards green jobs, conflated with an extra minority objective. Very few real jobs--jobs that are from customers paying for services or products-- are created, but everyone can feel good about trying to help the environment, and persons of color. The boom field appears to be in green jobs minority training.

Peer Review All About Politics

With the Global Warming debate, 'peer review' is mentioned as the essence of objective science. Yet the Shannon Love makes an interesting point. Peer review is basically a mechanism to avoid a certain kind of politics, not to evaluate a paper's value.

It is not a journal’s responsibility to confirm or refute experimental conclusions, but it is their responsibility to check for basic errors in math or methodology, just as they would check for errors in grammar or spelling. Peer review offloads any responsibility for publishing bad papers onto anonymous members of the scientific community. It’s a perfect form of blame passing that everyone else wishes they could use.

This blame passing also keeps journals and editors from being accused of taking sides in personal and professional quarrels. It is also the reason that reviewers themselves prefer to remain anonymous. No scientist wants to suffer the professional and personal consequences from either refusing or accepting a paper they should not have refused or accepted. It is also why peer review is a superficial review. The reviewers do not wish to be dragged into the minutia of scientific debates and quarrels. Instead, they concentrate on the basics that everyone can agree on.

So, to avoid the politics in choosing which papers are worthy, the anonymous peer review allows an editor to reject papers without having everyone hate him. Peer reviewers correct obvious errors, and make recommendations about the usefulness of a paper. The former point is objective and straightforward, but note this does not involve checking the raw data for fraud, or replicating an algorithm. I've refereed many papers, and I never independently tried to replicate their results with their algorithm and data. If they faked their data subtly, only posterity would punish them, not a referee.

But a referee also crucially opines on a paper's usefulness, and this involves guessing what other people would like to reference. Most models do not have straightforward empirical implications, so this is often an assessment of which toolkit is considered cutting edge. Economics often builds huge Rube Goldberg machines that potentially are useful, which are never refuted, but rather, fade away as the professors who made their reputations on these models retire, and the new generation sees that they are quite useless.

Input-output models, large scale macroeconomic models, second order difference equations modeling the GDP. These were all considered the apex of 'good form', and so any results in these frameworks, if sufficiently rigorous, were published. If you submitted a paper today using these frameworks, you would get rejected out of hand because they are no longer considered useful. But that came through long experience, and not any definitive rejection. Even today, some results based on dynamic programming, and using vector autoregressions, are published merely for getting a result, not an interesting one, because the technique is difficult, rigorous, and takes economics a leap equivalent to the leap from astrology to astronomy. Who says economists don't work on faith?

This is an example how something can be peer reviewed, and not even wrong.

Two Cheers for Lower Mortality

n Arnold Kling and Nick Schultz's From Poverty to Prosperity, they highlight the many ways life has become much wealthier, easier, better, than 100 years ago. A signature fact is that life expectancy has increased 25 years in the US over the past 250 years, and these stats are significant in Robert Fogel's nifty book The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100. Mortality stats are often given as prima facia evidence of a better life.

But, there is a downside. As mortality has gone down the preoccupation with death has gone up. Personally, I have experienced a small number of deaths, none of them of young people, as is typical. This leads to an unfamiliarity, and so it becomes scarier. The bestseller, Tuesday's with Morrie was supposedly all about how a learned man's dying was really about teaching a young Mich Albom how to live. I read it as a pathetic screed against dying, thinly masked against this hysterical objective. We have come a long way since Roman times, when defeated generals would regularly kill themselves in defeat, and a fallen gladiator would always present his throat to his adversary, accepting death (he was usually spared, however).

Death is so rare we think it unnatural, but it is necessarily as natural as being born. Given it is so uncommon and we generally don't believe in an afterlife, our fear of death is probably greater than it has ever been. Fear of death causes us to increase suffering to avoid death at all costs creating a further fear, the fear of the pre-death slide.

There's a neat scene in Marley and Me, where the old dog leaves the family because he knows he is going to die. The old dog knows how to die. One does one's best, and when the body gives, resign and accept this fact of life. Recently, an acquaintance noted his father was getting frail, and he and his siblings decided to force the widower into into a nursing home for his own good. After they informed him of their decision, and how it was in his best interest, he said, 'let me say goodbye to Billy', his pet goat. He then shot himself in his barn. This was seen by his pastor as a shameful end, but I think it rather stoic.

In our secular age, we think living is everything, and so doing everything to stop it is a good thing, but it's not. Regardless of motivation, facing death with equanimity is a sign of courage and wisdom, because it's hard to enjoy the present knowing you are going to be scared shitless with certainty in the future.

I don't want to die, but I also don't want to fear death, because via backward induction, it would imply I feel fear all the time. It's like competition: hating losing, but don't fear it; in this case, hate death but don't fear it. It is not the worst of all things.

Parasite or Predator, still Selfish

There's an interesting exchange over at Bloggingheads.tv, about group selection. You see, evolution happens at many levels, such as the gene level as when the sickle cell gene grows in malarial environments. The mere gene view is the 'selfish gene' process introduced in contrast to naive group selectionism, which in the 1960s was based on the idea that 'what is good for the group is good for the individual'. However, Richard Dawkins was far too dismissive of non gene-centered selection, as it is now recognized that organizations higher than the gene—the organism, the tribe, the species—sometimes compete evolutionarily, as when grey squirrels drive red squirrel populations to zero when they have overlapping boundaries.

Anyway, Razib Kahn asks David Sloan Wilson about scientific allegations that certain groups (notably, the Jews) are parasites, and Wilson notes that ecologically you can group people into two groups: predators and parasites. A predator takes advantage of the smaller population, a parasite takes advantage of a larger population, but, they do the same thing. Thus, it isn't any different to assert some group is acting parasitic any more than it is to assert some group is acting predatory. If all groups are selfish acting in their own interest just has a different name depending on its numbers.

I'm if anything a Semitophile, so if you're a visitor, don't infer I'm trying to justify anti-Semitism. However, I think it's reasonable to look at human groups historically and call various strategies as parasitic or predatory. Indeed, given the zeitgeist strongly discourages allegations of parasitism because this is considered piling on minority groups, discouraging diversity, etc., it is probable that parasitic behavior is more common, because it doesn't have to withstand criticisms of parasitism the way majority groups have to withstand the negative PR of predation. For example, note that Noam Chomsky basically defines evil as bad behavior combined with total power, thus making the US the monster of the twentieth century as a consequence of the size of its economy (and, in his mind, the relative virtue of the weak Palestinians vs. the stronger Israelis). It's reasonable to assume majority groups will have more problems exploiting minority groups (predation) than minority groups will have exploiting majority groups (parasitism).

Important, but Uninteresting

Over on Bloggingheads, they are talking about Elizabeth Whalen's 8000 word article on he rather ordinary, happy marriage, in the upcoming New York Times Magazine. Ann Althouse makes this interesting point:

Is writing about an ordinary marriage, an interesting writing project? It may be a wonderful experience to have, but so is sleeping all night, and there's nothing to write.

So true. Reading the news it's good to remember that item frequencies are not proportional to the importance in our everyday lives. As someone once said: 'Literature is mostly about sex and a little about having children. Life is the other way around.'

Science in Practice

A sad note that in every field, protocol is a prerequisite to substance. A paper not only needs to have a new point, but it must do so in a way that patronizes the methodology they all have uniquely mastered. A scientist is generally not someone who simply knows a lot about 'x', but also knows how his status tribe discuss such ideas. Whether its post modern philosophy or economic dynamics, the key is the methodology, because that is what defines who is relevant, because someone with good ideas, but who does not use your method, potentially trashes your human capital (eg, you mean my understanding of the difference between Brouwers' and Kakutani's fixed point theorems was wasted?).

Of course, scientists will deny this, say that while they know some others who act this way, they themselves just care about truth, the scientific method, prediction, etc. It's true to some degree these attributes define what persists, and in that sense, is operative. But to get published, you need to play the game.

From the Chronicle of Higher Education, David Hakes, an economics professor at Northern Iowa, shares this anecdote:

When we submitted the paper to risk, uncertainty, and insurance journals, the referees responded that the results were self-evident. After some degree of frustration, my coauthor suggested that the problem with the paper might be that we had made the argument too easy to follow, and thus referees and editors were not sufficiently impressed. He said that he could make the paper more impressive by generalizing the model. While making the same point as the original paper, the new paper would be more mathematically elegant, and it would become absolutely impenetrable to most readers. The resulting paper had fifteen equations, two propositions and proofs, dozens of additional mathematical expressions, and a mathematical appendix containing nineteen equations and even more mathematical expressions. I personally could no longer understand the paper and I could not possibly present the paper alone.

The paper was published in the first journal to which we submitted.

The Univ of Minnesota Loves Diversity

The University of Minnesota has a new booklet out articulating how much they love diversity. How much? They say "diversity" 230 times in 18 pages. As a local journalist noted about a different program at the U:

aspiring teachers there must repudiate the notion of "the American Dream" in order to obtain the recommendation for licensure required by the Minnesota Board of Teaching. Instead, teacher candidates must embrace -- and be prepared to teach our state's kids -- the task force's own vision of America as an oppressive hellhole: racist, sexist and homophobic.

It seems like the essence of a higher education is diversity, not of thought, but of human subgroups based on ethnicity, religion, race, and sex.

Tolerance of diversity is has morphed into celebration, and in the process took something salutary and turned into something destructive. Some think diversity encourages the active and complex kind of thinking because it puts students in uncomfortable situations, but diversity is usually the most scripted and routine parts of their education, because for decades now, the diversity agenda has taught them all the safe answers to their smarmy questions.

Equating group disparities with racism on the part of the more successful group guarantees mutual resentment. As overt discrimination fades, still large racial disparities in success leads African Americans to conclude that racism is not only pervasive but also insidious because it is so unobservable and unconscious. Whites resent that nonfalsifiable accusation and the demands to feel guilty, if not directly compensate, African Americans for harm they do not believe they caused.

Once we encountered the world’s diversity with prejudice, disgust, erotic excitement, pity-—but also curiosity. Now we look at it incoherently, as both vastly important (in explaining inequality) and utterly irrelevant (in explaining fundamental differences between races). Such nonsense quickly instills in one an incurious attitude towards diversity in order to avoid offense and nonsense. Ask a professor why black sprinters dominate the 100 meters, and you'll often here something silly and a quick change of the topic. Ask that same professor why blacks have lower socioeconomic status in the West, and you'll hear a confident exposition on institutional racism. Smart people learn to just avoid the subject.

The diversity mantra implies class membership trumps individual character in determining moral standing. It should be no surprise that this belief has failed to improve the lot of those regarded as oppressed. It inverts Martin Luther King's call to judge people by the content of their character, and in the process creates a greater divide.