Better than tree jumpers

In Louis Theroux’s LA Stories, Among the Sex Offenders, Louis interviews several sex offenders. One person he interviewed was twice convicted of rape. He admits he did it, but explains:

I’m not what we call a tree jumper. I don’t jump out of trees and attack women physically and hold them down and all that. no no no. This was a thing that happened with my girlfriend, got out of hand.

Another person Louis interviewed had been repeatedly convicted of indecent exposure (exhibitionism). He explained:

I think the standard impression of exhibitionists is someone that jumps out from behind a bush or a tree with a trench coat and tries to surprise someone. “Aha!” and shock them. When i do it, i want to retain their attention for as long as possible. I don’t want them to run away in fear. I want to be noticed. Maybe talked to. And in some cases they talk to me.

It is interesting to me that they each came up with basically the same comparison. To them, what is worse than their sex crimes are surprise attacks – surprise being a key distinction. Their offenses either involved someone they already knew (in the first case) or someone that they tried to connect with in some way (be noticed, spoken to). The shock attacks I guess are more impersonal and in their minds show a higher level of sociopathy (because of the impersonal nature). I wonder, though, why they see that as worse. Is it strictly because it’s distinct from what they did, or is there reason to think that most people would see it as worse? Is it worse to rape a stranger than a girlfriend? Why do they think that? They could have compared themselves to murders, but chose to compare themselves to something closer to what they did.

I also wonder if the “at least I’m not a tree jumper” argument is more for themselves (to not feel like as bad of a person, internally) or more as a way to try to shape how others view them. Of course, how they perceive that they are viewed by others might affect how they view themselves.

Lack of Li’l Sebastians

Horses were very valuable to people as transportation. They are large, strong, fast, and just the right shape to be ridden. However, they could not fill this niche for very long. People eventually created superior mechanical horses (cars, trains).

Horses are cute and make people feel loved. So they had potential to fill the pet niche. However, dogs outcompete them for that role. Horses are too big for most people’s homes and land, and are expensive to feed. Their size was an advantage when they were giving people rides, but is a big disadvantage as a pet. Also, horses are not as good as dogs at showering people with over-the-top displays of affection. So, purposeless horses got turned into food for animals that are better suited for this niche.

The love of Li’l Sebastian reflects our dream for a world where a species can rapidly evolve from one human-useful niche (ride-givers) to another (pet).

“All in favor of kids for cash?” Everyone: “Aye!”

This post is about what kids for cash, the treatment of Brendan Dassey as shown in Making a Murderer, and the war on drugs have in common.

Kids for cash

Briefly, the kids for cash scandal involved Wilkes-Barre, PA Judge Mark Ciavarella, who gave kids long sentences at youth detention centers for very minor crimes. He had a financial relationship with two of these centers, which he did not disclose. So it appeared that he was profiting from giving kids harsh sentences. Pretty scandalous.

There is a documentary about this titled Kids for Cash. The documentary was not what I expected. What it shows is that Ciavarella wanted his identity to be about how tough on kids he was. He was campaigning on the idea that he wouldn’t give kids a second chance. If they got in trouble at school he would give them the toughest punishment allowable by law. He was elected. He then followed through on his campaign promises. He ended up getting re-elected. These are 10 year terms. So he was Judge for 10 years and citizens chose to re-elect him. For much of his time as Judge, he was not receiving kickbacks from youth detention centers. He campaigned as a tough-on-crime judge. He was elected as a tough-on-crime judge. He was giving out harsh sentences to kids who got in trouble at school, just like he said he would.

So it seems to me that he basically gave the people what they wanted, in terms of how he dealt with teens who got into trouble. Had he also not been getting kickbacks for it, would the public have really cared about these harsh sentences? They didn’t seem to when they voted for him and re-elected him.

Lawns

I love watching people take care of their lawns. Today I saw people with leaf blowers. Grass basically says “I don’t want these leaves on me” and the humans race over and groom it. When grass turns brownish it’s saying “I’m thirsty” and the humans water it. When it gets long people cut it.

In Sapiens, Harari asked “how did wheat convince homo sapiens to exchange a rather good life for a more miserable existence?” In that case, the explanation, while also awesome to think about, is pretty easy to understand. In the case of grass it seems more complicated.

I enjoyed the 99pi episode on lawns. Lawns were really great for signaling wealth because it showed that you were rich enough to own land that you didn’t put to food producing use. It would be like if today rich people bought or built big factories but didn’t have them make anything.

Once lawns became extremely popular (and industrialized, to an extent), it was no longer just for the elites. So their social status purpose morphed. Currently, lawns seem to signal how good of a neighbor you are. If lawns were easy to take care of, by having one we wouldn’t be signaling to our neighbors that we are the kind of people who care for things.

However, it’s not quite as simple as: if I care for my lawn it shows I care about things and I’m a good neighbor; if I don’t care for my lawn then I don’t have pride in myself or my neighborhood. Some people pay lawn care companies to take care of their lawn. By having others do the work, you aren’t quite as strongly showing that you will work hard and get your hands dirty to do your part to make the neighborhood beautiful. You do, however, show that you have enough money to hire people to care for your lawn. Thus, one could argue that you are signaling that you are so important that you don’t have the time to do the yard work yourself, but you still care enough about how the neighborhood looks that you’ll pay to have it done. On the other hand, a person who is rich enough to pay someone to take care of their yard, but instead does the work themself, shows their neighbors that they’re ‘down to earth’ (not above physical labor).

Getting back to how grass gets us to care for it. If it was extremely easy to keep green, it probably wouldn’t have had so much evolutionary success. Being a bit of a diva can be an advantage. Dogs used a totally different strategy to get humans to care for them. Dogs just flood people with flattery. They basically say “oh my god, you are so great! I can hardly contain myself. I can’t believe someone as great as you exists.” Every inch of their body is used to make the dog’s caretaker feel important (waging tail, happy dog sounds, rolling / running around, jumping up the owner’s legs, etc). I love that there can be such different strategies to make humans do reproductive work for other organisms.

Incentivizing bias

Every profession has incentive to increase the perceived value of what it does. As a result, we receive large doses of propaganda from every profession.

As a kid, every profession can seem pretty impressive. If you picture every profession as a tower, these towers are much taller in our minds than they are in reality.

But what happens when you get to the top of one of these towers (i.e., when you become a certified plumber, MD, teacher, yoga instructor, attorney)?

1. Some people become very self-important and have no interest in correcting people’s overestimation of the tower height.I don’t know if they notice the inaccuracy or not, but they become in their eyes as important as their prior-perception.

2. Other people notice that it’s not as impressive as they once thought, and adjust their perspective accordingly.

3. Finally, some people think the tower is still really tall, and they must just be an imposter. (i.e. “the other people must be as smart as I thought they were before I got into this profession, but somehow I managed to sneak in”). I think that is where career imposter syndrome comes from.

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Here’s the thing, though. In order for a profession to very effectively over-inflate perceived value relative to actual value, it kind of needs its members to buy into it. i.e., it needs a lot of people like I describe in 1. I guess this happens naturally, because most people enjoy being admired. However, I wonder what things can be done to deceive people about their own intelligence & skills. How do professional organizations accomplish this? What are effective methods?

Is putting up more hurdles and making the profession more exclusive enough? Can people tell the difference between “there were a lot of hurdles but most people could jump them if they wanted to” and “this is extremely difficult and you need unusual skills”?

How good stories ruin our brains: Emily Rosa case study

Until today I hadn’t heard of the story of Emily Rosa. Quoting wikipedia: “At age nine Rosa conceived and executed a scientific study of therapeutic touch which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1998.” She won the James Randi “Skeptic of the Year” award in 1998. She received a great deal of media attention after publication of the article.

My first thoughts were: “That’s really cool. I love it that she did an experiment and got it published!” Then I read the article.

I have never read an article more littered with errors. Almost every statement in it related to statistics is wrong.

The basic experiment was described in the abstract:

therapists were “tested under blinded conditions to determine whether they could correctly identify which of their hands was closest to the investigator’s hand. Placement of the investigator’s hand was determined by flipping a coin. […] In 1996, 15 practitioners were tested at their homes or offices on different days for a period of several months. In 1997, 13 practitioners, including 7 from the first series [my emphasis], were tested in a single day.”

Despite the repeated measures design (some practitioners were tested 10 times, others were tested 20 times), the data appear to have been analyzed as if they were independent trials (although it’s hard to tell what they actually did, because the description of the methods is so terrible).

They did a one-sided test and failed to reject the null. However, the therapists did worse than would be expected with random guessing (44% success rate with p-value of about 0.04 (I can’t give a precise p-value because it’s impossible to reconstruct their data)). It could be just chance that they performed worse than you’d expect if they were just guessing, but it does suggest that something might be going on (was the experimenter tipping them off in the wrong direction in some way? were they really sensing a difference in what they feel but attributed it to the wrong thing?). None of that was discussed.

It would take me too long to list all of the errors and potential sources of bias. But trust me, it’s that bad.

I get that a child is one of the authors and it’s cute and we could provide them some slack. But the JAMA editors could have helped make the paper better.

Most importantly, I am extremely disappointed in my fellow skeptics. They let a sensational story blind them. It’s a story that has all of the elements needed to go viral. A 9 year old took on those pseudoscientists and won! Yay us! So then the skeptic community turned off their skeptical brains and just endorsed the whole story. Shame.

Of mice and parking tickets

Think of your house as a cell, with membranes (walls, roof, windows) and channels (doors, pipes, windows). You’re the immune system of this cell. In general this cell is quite appealing to other living things, due to temperature regulation and sources of food. Most of what makes it through your house’s membranes (via channels) will go undetected. However, sometimes you will detect unwanted invaders. For example, mice might go undetected for a while, but eventually you might notice mice feces or that they’ve eaten food you’ve left out.

You could ignore the mice, but to some degree that is only inviting more mice. In addition, most people don’t want mice in their houses (or bugs, but we’ll stick to the mice example). Another option is to try to kill the mice. However, mice are cute! You will probably feel mean if you kill them. Instead, you could catch them and let them go outside. How sweet.

Consider the letting them go scenario. The mice will likely either die or find another home. If they find another home, someone else is stuck with deciding between killing them or catching them and letting them go. You have basically passed the problem on to someone else. The mice will likely still die (either from cold, starvation or a mouse trap). However,  you get to feel like a good person.

Every system has membranes, channels and immune systems to patrol for intruders. This appears to be a universe universal (or, literally universal). Attaching morality to it is a difficult, questionable business.

I see this pattern a lot, where people make something someone else’s problem and look down on them while feeling good about themselves.

Think about many of the jobs that seem very unpleasant. As an example, consider the people whose job it is to write parking tickets in large cities. Parking meters are intended to prevent people from parking in one spot for a long time. Because of this, when you drive to a city, you are far more likely to find an available parking spot. Someone needs to enforce the parking meter rules, or people would just park there for long periods of time. If you like this system, then you should be thankful for the people who write parking tickets. However, I see a lot of anger directed at them. Of course it doesn’t feel good to get a parking ticket, but getting angry at them only makes their job worse. I think most people want parking meter enforcement, except when they get a ticket. The people who have better job options don’t have to write parking tickets to pay their bills. They can reap the benefits of parking meter enforcement, while acting morally superior to the people who do take on these jobs. It’s like making mice someone else’s problem, and then judging them if they kill them.

 

 

Authoritative communication: linking claims with status

I ‘ve noticed that people tend to be more likely to believe someone when they make a claim using an authoritative communication style. I’ve also noticed that I am less likely to correct their objectively false claims.

What I mean by authoritative is that someone makes a claim with extreme confidence, as displayed by their body language, tone of voice, and the statement itself. This is in contrast to someone who makes a statement where they make it clear that they aren’t certain it’s correct, and that they are open to discussion.

The authoritative person links the claim with their status — you cannot challenge one without the other. I find it stressful to challenge someone’s status, and am therefore less likely to respond. I would really like to discuss the claim without challenging the status, but that doesn’t seem possible.

By not challenging them, however, I have done nothing to reduce the amount of unjustified authority in the world. I wonder the degree to which this is why confident people who are less competent often get further ahead in the corporate world (assuming that’s true).

Argument by analogy in debates is an epistemic sin

In Beverly Hills 90210, Donna Martin responded to critics of a plan to have condom machines in the high school:

It’s like if you have a swimming pool in your backyard, you can tell your children not to go in it, you can even build a fence around it, but if you know that they’re going to find a way in to that water, don’t you think you ought to teach those kids how to swim?

And Donna Martin drops the mic.

How can one respond to that? You don’t want to take a chance that kids will drown, do you?

The analogy is powerful because everyone has heard about kids who drowned in pools. It is really disturbing to think about, especially given our desire to protect children. It hits the right emotions that prevent most people from being able to look critically at it. For this reason it’s both an effective strategy, if well-executed, and harmful to those who hoped the debate would lead to better policy. I feel like this strategy is so effective and so awful that Schopenhauer should have featured it in his list of ways to win an argument.

However, there are effective ways to respond to these cheap emotional analogies.

Send an analogy back in return

One strategy is to use the same analogy to make a different argument — one that is unpopular. That will show flaws in the argument.

For example, when I was in high school there was an official school-sanctioned ‘smoking area’ on school grounds. The Principal argued that kids will smoke anyway, but if they’re not allowed to smoke outside they will smoke in the bathroom and damage school property. You don’t want school property damaged, do you? Sure, you can tell kids not to smoke, but we know that they will anyway. If you know they’re going to swim, shouldn’t you give them a safe place to do it?

Another strategy is to come up with an absurd example that follows the same line of logic. In this case you could argue:

We can tell kids to not use pot. But we know many of them will anyway. And if they are buying it from their friends, who knows what it will be laced with. Therefore, there should be marijuana dispensers at school.

Finally, you could use exactly the same argument, but change one thing to make it seem absurd. You could in this example argue for condom machines in restrooms at businesses.

It’s against company policy for people to have sex in their offices. However, we know office sex takes place anyway, and STIs are a real problem. Shouldn’t we at least make it easier for people to be safe? It’s like if you have a swimming pool in your backyard, you can tell your children not to go in it, you can even build a fence around it, but if you know that they’re going to find a way in to that water, don’t you think you ought to teach those kids how to swim?

Pick it apart

Another, but probably less effective, strategy is to point out specific (hidden-ish) assumptions. It’s helpful if you can relate it to the analogy.

For example, you could argue that a condom machine doesn’t teach kids how to have safe sex, so it’s not like teaching kids to swim. It’s more like making a life preserver available at a location far away from the pool (since most kids don’t have sex at school).

You could also point out that the analogy is based on the assumption that making condoms available will decrease the number of instances of unprotected sex. However, condoms available in schools could feel like an endorsement. That could affect the total number of sexual encounters in a given year (either positively or negatively). Even if condom availability increased the rate of condom use, if it also increased the number of sexual encounters then it’s possible there could be more instances of unprotected sex. In other words, if it lead to an increase in the number of sexual encounters, that’s like building more pools.

Conversations

Communication is sometimes primarily tribal, sometimes primarily social (in other ways — e.g. friendly small talk, conversations about family), and sometimes primarily about knowledge (academic, logistical, etc). If you respond to a primarily tribal sentence with a primarily knowledge point, your sentence will be interpreted tribally (because it has already been established that this is a tribal conversation). If you start a knowledge conversation and somebody responds tribally, their tribal language will likely be judged based on its accuracy.

For example, if terrorists are described as cowards, that’s a tribal conversation. If you respond by saying “terrorists are terrible people, but I don’t necessarily think they’re cowards,” it will be interpreted as you defending terrorists (because it was a tribal conversation, so everything you say will be interpreted as either with or against).

If your liberal friends excitedly tell you about the ‘bold’ speech at the academy awards, that’s a tribal conversation. If you respond by questioning whether it is really bold to express liberal ideas to a liberal audience, in tribal language that means “I don’t support the cause.”

Now imagine that you were having a very non-tribal discussion about the pros and cons of raising the minimum wage, with the goal of really coming to a better understanding about the topic. If someone responds with a joke about how democrats just want to make sure that no one is rich, it would be interpreted as “I’m not smart enough to contribute anything meaningful to this conversation.”

Most people, whether consciously or not, know what type of conversation is taking place and interpret everything in that context. In general, however, I think it’s always easier to shift the conversation from knowledge->social->tribal than in the other direction. Jumping from tribal to knowledge is the worst offense.