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.

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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).

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“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.

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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.

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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”?

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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.

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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).

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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.

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ItIsProbablyTrueSomewhere.com

Imagine a bot that scans all local headlines looking for a story that has the highest level of in-group outrage contagiousness potential. So a right-wing website might promote a story about someone taking advantage of a government program (such as lobster-eating SNAP participants, or public union members who constantly miss work and don’t get fired) or a leftist activist who was quoted as saying something anti-patriotic. A left-wing website might promote a story about a police officer who said something racist or a republican who is against same-sex marriage, but has a secret same-sex lover. A general news website might post a story about some dangerous thing two teenagers did somewhere and warn parents that it’s a dangerous new trend, or they might post about a person from a group that the public respects who received a 20 year sentence for a crime that seems like a minor offense.

If anyone bothers to dig deeper into these stories, they often find that some of the details that made them the most outrageous were not quite accurate. The actual story is usually a lot less ridiculous than the meme suggests. But people don’t seem to care much about accuracy.

We basically just want to use the story to show our friends the kinds of things that we are passionate about. Accuracy isn’t that important (unless accuracy is what we want to show our friends that we care about, but that’s a rare quality).

Imagine instead that, rather than scanning headlines desperately trying to find an extremely contagious viral meme, a website featured a daily story that their writers made up. So a right-wing site might feature a plausible-sounding story about a democrat who claims to want to fight global warming, but drives a Hummer and has a 10,000 sq ft house that they heat to 75 degrees all winter (what a hypocrite!). The gist of that story is probably true about someone, somewhere. A left-wing site might write a plausible-sounding story about a billionaire who pays the people that clean their mansions less than minimum wage (the greedy bastards!). Something like that is probably true somewhere.

The cherry-picked stories about specific people described earlier might not be more accurate, on average, than the made up stories about hypothetical people. Sure, we don’t know the names of the hypothetical people, but the stories probably fairly accurately capture somebody’s actual situation.

Of course, stories posted to ItsProbablyTrueSomewhere.com wouldn’t be very contagious, because people would know they were made up. It’s not the actual accuracy of the story that is important, but the ability for the belief-in-the-accuracy-of-the-story to be preserved from sharer to recipient. Fact checkers are smug assholes who aren’t invited to the party.

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Low social cost divorce

In Every Cradle is a Grave, Sarah Perry describes a hypothetical ‘land of free disposal,’ where barriers to suicide are removed. In this land, suicide is made easy, stigma is eliminated, and various methods for reducing the social cost are implemented. She goes on to suggest that “life, perhaps, would be more enjoyable and less miserable if it were not mandatory.”

I think there are a lot of similarities between life and marriage, suicide and divorce. A new marriage is a lot like a new life. One difference is that the people who decided to marry are the ones who formed the new ‘life,’ whereas with chidbirth the child had no say in the matter. However, this difference becomes smaller over time. People who decided to get married (e.g.) 20 years ago might hardly recognize the people (earlier versions of themselves) who made the decision to marry.

Divorce, no doubt, is painful for many people involved. However, the pain is made worse by stigma and the belief that it is a tragic thing that is harmful to all involved. Perhaps married people would find marriage more enjoyable if it were not mandatory. The idea that your spouse could leave but chooses not to sounds a lot more appealing to me than wondering whether your spouse is with you because they’re stuck. It also could make people less complacent in their marital relationship.

I think we are currently closer to a land of free marriage disposal than we are to a land of free (life) disposal, but we are not all the way there yet. If we keep moving in that direction, it will be interesting to see what the data show.

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