BBC’s “Transgender Kids, Who Knows Best?” p1: You got Autism in my Gender Dysphoria!

This series on BBC’s “Transgender Kids: Who Knows Best?” is co-authored by HJ Hornbeck and Siobhan O’Leary. It attempts to fact-check and explore the many claims of the documentary concerning gender variant youth. You can follow the rest of the series here:

  1. Part One: You got Autism in my Gender Dysphoria!
  2. Part Two: Say it with me now…
  3. Part Three: My old friend, eighty percent
  4. Part Four: Dirty Sexy Brains

 

Petitions seem as common as pennies, but this one stood out to me (emphasis in original).

The BBC is set to broadcast a documentary on BBC Two on the 12th January 2017 at 9pm called ‘Transgender Kids: Who Knows Best?‘. The documentary is based on the controversial views of Dr. Kenneth Zucker, who believes that Gender Dysphoria in children should be treated as a mental health issue.

In simpler terms, Dr. Zucker thinks that being/querying being Transgender as a child is not valid, and should be classed as a mental health issue. […]

To clarify, this petition is not to stop this program for being broadcast entirely; however no transgender experts in the UK have watched over this program, which potentially may have a transphobic undertone. We simply don’t know what to expect from the program, however from his history and the synopsis available online, we can make an educated guess that it won’t be in support of Transgender Rights for Children.

That last paragraph is striking; who makes a documentary about a group of people without consulting experts, let alone gets it aired on national TV? It helps explain why a petition over something that hadn’t happened yet earned 11,000+ signatures.

Now if you’ve checked your watch, you’ve probably noticed the documentary came and went. I’ve been keeping an eye out for reviews, and they fall into two camps: enthusiastic support…

So it’s a good thing BBC didn’t listen to those claiming this documentary shouldn’t have run. As it turns out, it’s an informative, sophisticated, and generally fair treatment of an incredibly complex and fraught subject.

… and enthusiastic opposition …

The show seems to have been designed to cause maximum harm to #trans children and their families. I can hardly begin to tackle here the number of areas in which the show was inaccurate, misleading, demonising, damaging and plain false.

… but I have yet to see someone do an in-depth analysis of the claims made in this specific documentary. So Siobhan is doing precisely that, in a series of blog posts.
[Read more…]

Trump is in Control of the USA

[this is a slight elaboration on a comment I made elsewhere]

I don’t think I’ve said “constitutional crisis” enough. Emphasis mine:

After a weekend spent trying to get the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) to comply with the New York and Massachusetts Orders staying the Presidential Executive Order banning immigration from seven countries, a group of attorneys Darius Amiri, Laura Riley, Madiha Zuberi, Nina Bonyak, in coordination with other volunteer attorneys working out of LAX, have been at the U.S. Marshal’s office at the Central District of California since 8:00 a.m. this morning.

These attorneys are demanding that the U.S. Marshal’s office comply with its statutory obligation under 28 U.S.C. 566(c) to serve civil federal orders on the CBP Port Director at Los Angeles International Airport. The Marshal’s office has so far failed to serve process and instead represents that it has been instructed by its Office of the General Counsel to await instruction from the U.S. Attorney’s office. Over the weekend, California Central District Court (CACD) Judge Dolly Gee granted a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) (which was amended and corrected this morning) and this is another of the documents that has yet to be served on the CBP.

Two hundred years of precedent have established that the courts are the final arbitrator of what’s constitutional and what is not. But as I’ve said, the Judicial branch relies on the Executive to enforce its judgments; those court injunctions against Trump’s EO don’t go into effect until they get into the hands of the people enforcing that EO, and by telling the U.S. Marshals to stand down the Executive has effectively blocked those court orders from taking effect.

The Judicial branch is no longer checking or balancing Executive power. You just lost one of your three branches, Americans.

I have been saying that #TheRegime’s big overarching play right now is de-fanging the judiciary, sidelining it, making it subservient.

Now, if objecting to this gets any traction, #TheRegime’s talking point will be that the Marshals have always been part of DOJ, under exec.

Which is *true enough* but beside the point. They are the enforcement arm of the judiciary, grouped under executive because enforcement.

The impartiality of the law enforcement bodies under DOJ (FBI, Marshal Service) is supposed to be–must be–sacrosanct. Sacred. Untouchable.

Making the judiciary’s enforcement wing under the direct command of a handpicked crony AG accomplishes makes the entire judicial branch moot

With the Marshals marching to the president’s orders, court decisions only matter when #TheRegime agrees with them.

To make matters worse, the Executive branch is starting to override the Legislative. Remember how the border patrol refused to meet with Congressional representatives? Emphasis again mine:

“Since my background is a Ph.D. in public administration, I have a good working knowledge of U.S. institutions and policymaking processes,” [Donald] Moynihan told Salon. “Members of Congress are fond of reminding executive branch officials that [the latter] are beholden to them, not just to the president.” It is Congress that supplies every federal agency with its budget, and along with that “specific directives as to [its] role.”

“It’s remarkable to me that when an actual member of Congress would turn up at your doorstep, a manager in that agency would not try to be responsive to their concerns,” Moynihan continued. “It suggests they view obeying the guidance of the president as superior to any other direction. This is troubling precisely because the founders designed a separation of powers so that no single actor (in this case the president) had sole control of administration.”

Trump is also going behind the backs of Congress, borrowing their staffers while swearing them to secrecy. This is a big deal.

This is quite simply unheard of.

To be clear, the executive works with Congress all the time to craft legislation. That’s the President working with members of Congress, though much of the actual work is delegated to staff. All normal. It’s congressional staff working for the executive without telling the members of Congress they work for which is the big deal. […]

I’m not sure this rises to the level of a formal separation of powers issue. But the idea of the White House coopting congressional staff behind the backs of members of Congress certainly runs roughshod over the overarching concept of two coequal and separate branches of government.

Until Congress steps up, or Trump backtracks and agrees to respect judicial rulings, he has [no] checks on his power. He’s become a dictator without firing a single shot.

[HJH 2017-01-31] I just spotted a relevant update from Popehat.

OKAY. Awaiting an official statement, but about that story about the USMS not serving the LA federal court order: /1

/2 Counsel has now appeared for the federal defendants: US Department of Justice, Office of Immigration Litigation – Civil Division

/3 In fact, a stipulation by the parties to move the briefing schedule now appears on the docket (but is sealed)

/4 The significance is this: by appearing, the federal defendants can’t claim lack of service of the order. This should moot service issues.

/5 In fact it should bind the federal defendants to any order the court issues or has issued now that its counsel has appeared, as I read it

/6 That doesn’t answer issue of whether CPD has refused to comply so far or will continue to refuse.

/7 Also doesn’t exclude possibility that USMS dorked around for some period of time until their counsel made an appearance.

/8 But the fact that the ACLU filed a stipulation reached with the feds suggests some level of acknowledgement and cooperation.

In some ways, this is good news. The courts will not be stopped by a technicality like a lack of service, and as of now federal attorneys are respecting the Judicial branch. But if service has been granted, that means that the delays by US Marshals had the effect of deporting potential plaintiffs before they could plead their case before the courts. Any border guard that deported or refused entry to someone as per the immigration Executive Order, as of eight hours ago, is ignoring a court order. And some digging brings up this case.

Mohammad Abu Khadra, who lives in Katy[, Texas] with his brother Rami, traveled to Jordan last week to renew his visa. When he flew into Bush IAH airport Saturday, officials with U.S. Customs and Border Protection detained him at the airport for about 48 hours. He was transferred to an Office of Refugee Resettlement shelter in Chicago Monday, where he remained as of Tuesday afternoon. The teen has no access to his cell phone or to a computer, his brother said.

 Mohammad is among dozens of visa holders and immigrants to be detained at U.S. airports since Trump signed an executive order Friday indefinitely barring all Syrian refugees from entering the United States and suspending all refugee admissions for 120 days. It also prohibits citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States for 90 days, whether they are refugees or not. Those countries include Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

Mohammad’s native Jordan is not on the list, and Mohammad is not a refugee.

The Judicial branch is still out of commission.

The Three Stages of a Dictator

[this is similar to a comment I made elsewhere, but it deserves a wider audience.]

Lately, I’ve been reading some depressing things. To start, I’m seeing rumblings that Trump admin is deliberately being provocative.

With the #MuslimBan, Bannon et al chose to do something overtly unConstitutional that they knew would be a flash-point for the left.

They *rushed* this through on purpose, overriding objections and failing to coordinate with intelligence or immigration officials.

From their actions, we can infer the #MuslimBan has a purpose that suits their strategic goals and has nothing to do with national security.

A #MuslimBan is a perfect vehicle for them: it’s a flashpoint for opposition from the left and a dog whistle for support from the right.

The #MuslimBan furthers domestic division: it makes many within the U.S. see protesters as aligned with who they perceive to be “the enemy.” […]

Like other ascendant authoritarian regimes, the Trump Admin WANTS an excuse to put down dissent. And to do so violently.

But why would Trump be interested in flexing the military against the American people? It didn’t make much sense at first, until I remembered the basic arc of any dictator: 1) grab power, then 2) use that power to fill your pockets with as much cash as you dare, then 3) escape. Trump is currently testing what sort of power he has.

the administration is testing the extent to which the DHS (and other executive agencies) can act and ignore orders from the other branches of government. This is as serious as it can possibly get: all of the arguments about whether order X or Y is unconstitutional mean nothing if elements of the government are executing them and the courts are being ignored.

To ensure he keeps his power long enough to successfully smash-and-grab, he needs to remove as many check-and-balances as possible. Narrowing down the number of people he deals with is also a wise move, because it decreases the number of people able to check or balance.

There appears to be a very tight “inner circle,” containing at least Trump, Bannon, Miller, Priebus, Kushner, and possibly Flynn, which is making all of the decisions. Other departments and appointees have been deliberately hobbled, with key orders announced to them only after the fact, staff gutted, and so on. Yesterday’s reorganization of the National Security Council mirrors this: Bannon and Priebus now have permanent seats on the Principals’ Committee; the Director of National Intelligence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have both been demoted to only attending meetings where they are told that their expertise is relevant; the Secretary of Energy and the US representative to the UN were kicked off the committee altogether (in defiance of the authorizing statute, incidentally).

I am reminded of Trump’s continued operation of a private personal security force, and his deep rift with the intelligence community. Last Sunday, Kellyanne Conway (likely another member of the inner circle) said that “It’s really time for [Trump] to put in his own security and intelligence community,” and this seems likely to be the case.

If this really is the arc of a dictator, though, we need to see step 2 in action. Surprisingly, I thought that piece was missing. Oh sure, a major expansion of your hotel chain paired with a rate hike is a nice start, as is filing to run in the 2020 election so you can fundraise and whip your loyal base into a frenzy, or maybe taking advantage of cheap land that’s just been released. Most of those struck me as too small, or too noisy, or too limiting the escape plan. But then Yonatan Zunger, quoted in the last two paragraphs, led me to this story.

More than a month after Russia announced one of its biggest privatizations since the 1990s, selling a 19.5 percent stake in its giant oil company Rosneft, it still isn’t possible to determine from public records the full identities of those who bought it. […]

“It is the largest privatization deal, the largest sale and acquisition in the global oil and gas sector in 2016,” Putin said. It was also one of the biggest transfers of state property into private hands since the early post-Soviet years, when allies of President Boris Yeltsin took control of state firms and became billionaires overnight.

But important facts about the deal either have not been disclosed, cannot be determined solely from public records, or appear to contradict the straightforward official account of the stake being split 50/50 by Glencore and the Qataris. For one: Glencore contributed only 300 million euros of equity to the deal, less than 3 percent of the purchase price, which it said in a statement on Dec. 10 had bought it an “indirect equity interest” limited to just 0.54 percent of Rosneft. In addition, public records show the ownership structure of the stake ultimately includes a Cayman Islands company whose beneficial owners cannot be traced.

And while Italian bank Intesa SanPaolo leant the Singapore vehicle 5.2 billion euros to fund the deal, and Qatar put in 2.5 billion, the sources of funding for nearly a quarter of the purchase price have not been disclosed by any of the parties.

 

The Kremlin spent two years looking for someone to sell part of a company that was worth $79.8 billion back in 2006, yet is keeping silent on the details. Very strange.

But there might be an answer, and it involves golden showers.

Shortly after CNN published its report, BuzzFeed News published the full 35-page dossier reportedly presented in summary form to the incoming and outgoing presidents. BuzzFeed notes that the dossier “includes specific, unverified and potentially unverifiable allegations of contact between Trump aides and Russian operatives, and graphic claims of sexual acts documented by the Russians.” It states that Russian intelligence was “cultivating, supporting and assisting” Trump for years, and that they have information that could be used to blackmail the president-elect, who will take the oath of office in less than two weeks.

Yes yes, like everyone else I read the first two pages and got a chuckle out of what Trump did to the bed the Obamas slept in. But, also like everyone else, I failed to read to page 30.

2. In terms of the substance of their discussion, SECHIN’s associate said that the Rosneft President was so keen to lift personal and corporate western sactions imposed on the company, that he offered PAGE/TRUMP’s associates the brokerage of up to a 19 per cent (privatized) stake in Rosneft in return. PAGE had expressed interest and confirmed that were TRUMP elected US president, then sanctions on Russia would be lifted.

The timeline fits. Trump has been threatening to run for President since the 1980’s. In 2008, Trump’s son says “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.” According to the dossier, the Kremlin has been trying to influence him since 2011. In 2013, Trump explored the idea of becoming President. The US imposed sanctions on Russia begin in March 2014, and are a heavy hit to their economy. In August 2014, Rosneft begins the process of selling a 19.5% stake. In June 2015, Trump rides an escalator, and with the help of some Russian trolls goes on to win the Presidency November 8th, 2016. In the meantime, he’s seen hanging out with Russian mobsters. On December 7th, a buyer for Rosneft is finalized with the deal set to close “mid-December.” On December 19th, Trump wins the Electoral College vote. Transferring that much money takes time, probably months. Trump was sworn in as President on January 20th.

If that 19.5% was worth $11 billion, the typical brokerage fee is 2%, and the dossier is on the money, Trump could earn a $220 million payday. No wonder the CIA and five other agencies are looking into monetary ties between Trump and the Kremlin. This also sets the stage for step 3, the escape.

My money is on impeachment, after a string of increasingly draconian and unpopular measures that eventually turns the Republicans against him, followed by a swift exit from the country. Time will tell, of course.

The Odds of Elvis Being an Identical Twin?

This one demanded to be shared ASAP. Here’s what you need to know:

  1. Identical or monozygotic twins occur in roughly four births per 1,000.
  2. Fraternal or dizygotic twins occur in roughly eight births per 1,000.
  3. Elvis Prestley had a twin brother, Jesse Garon Presley, that was stillborn.

For simplicity’s sake, we’ll assume sex is binary and split 50/50, despite the existence of intersex fraternal twins. What are the odds of Elvis being an identical twin? The answer will pop up on my blog in two days.

Sex, Donald Trump, and Videotape

Goddammit, I don’t have the time to write this. But if I don’t stop and put the analysis floating in my head to photons, I’ll itch about it for days.

First off, I need to lay down a trigger warning for sex, Donald Trump, and videotape. Because this happened:

The dossier, which is a collection of memos written over a period of months, includes specific, unverified, and potentially unverifiable allegations of contact between Trump aides and Russian operatives, and graphic claims of sexual acts documented by the Russians. BuzzFeed News reporters in the US and Europe have been investigating various alleged facts in the dossier but have not verified or falsified them. CNN reported Tuesday that a two-page synopsis of the report was given to President Obama and Trump.

Now BuzzFeed News is publishing the full document so that Americans can make up their own minds about allegations about the president-elect that have circulated at the highest levels of the US government.

Oy.
Second, there’s a chance these claims are false. I wouldn’t rate this scenario as likely, though…
The raw memos on which the synopsis is based were prepared by the former MI6 agent, who was posted in Russia in the 1990s and now runs a private intelligence gathering firm. His investigations related to Mr. Trump were initially funded by groups and donors supporting Republican opponents of Mr. Trump during the GOP primaries, multiple sources confirmed to CNN. Those sources also said that once Mr. Trump became the nominee, further investigation was funded by groups and donors supporting Hillary Clinton.

The documents have circulated for months and acquired a kind of legendary status among journalists, lawmakers, and intelligence officials who have seen them. Mother Jones writer David Corn referred to the documents in a late October column. BuzzFeed News reporters in the US and Europe have been investigating various alleged facts in the dossier but have not stood them up or knocked them down.

Reddit’s r/The_Donald users pointed to an anonymous 4chan post from Nov. 1, exactly one week before the election, that Redditors say proves “/pol/ really invented this rumor” involving Trump’s alleged business and personal ties to Russia. […]

[Rick] Wilson dismissed all of r/The_Donald and 4chan’s claims in a tweet on Tuesday night. “You’re wrong if you believe 1. What we had came from /pol 2. That I was Buzzfeed’s source. Try again, boys,” he wrote. “The information was out there looooong before the 4chan posts,” he replied to another user.

Reached by phone earlier in the evening, Wilson told The Daily Beast that the Russian allegations were “making the rounds before anyone talked about it publicly.” He said that they were being discussed as early as a year and a half ago.

… but stranger things have happened.
Third, what’s left out is as important as what’s left in. Trump’s called a sexual pervert, but there’s no mention of what acts he personally engaged in. Did he join in the fun? Or just sit back and watch? It’s not terribly relevant, though; fake news cuts both ways, and even the most charitable interpretation says Trump done wrong.
Fourth, there’s the question of how Trump’s followers will react. This one’s pretty easy: he’ll lose maybe five to ten approval points, but most of his fans will just brush this off as fake news. His transition may have the lowest approval rating of any in recent memory, but that’s when you average across the whole country. When you break down by party affiliation, though, Republicans rate him within a hair of George Bush Jr. A few may even like Trump more. Defiling a bed the Obamas slept on? Damn, that’s hardcore hate.
Fifth, we have Trump himself. He’s thought to be unshameable, but I don’t think that’s quite true. His vengeful nature is frequently treated as a show of dominance, but I think it’s really papering over weakness. He can’t stand to be criticized or ridiculed. So if the entirety of Twitter is mocking him, this has to be one of the worst moments of his life.

@realDonaldTrump (Donald J. Trump)
‏
FAKE NEWS – A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!
Retweets: 18,191; Likes: 50,597
7:19 PM – 10 Jan 2017

The Trump brand will take another hit, hurting him in what may be his weakest spot.

Sixth, there’s the media. The mainstream is actually in a bit of a bind; they have to maintain a PG rating to reach the masses, which means they can’t go into detail about the report, but without those details the full impact will be blunted. It’ll come across as just another contested fact, the “unverified” angle will dominate the coverage, and people will entrench instead of change their minds. Social media, however, can get as nasty as it wants. The allegations are nearly perfect for going viral, so this could ring across the internet for a very, very long time.

Seventh, and the main reason why I’m writing this, is that the President of the US is also the Commander-in-Chief of the military. They’re a rather proud and patriotic group of people, sworn to defend the US against a foreign enemy. So if any of them read this…

Speaking separately in June 2016, Source B (the former top level Russian intelligence officer) asserted that TRUMP’s unorthodox behavior in Russia over the years had provided the authorities there with enough embarrassing material on the now Republican presidential candidate to be able to blackmail him if they so wished.

… their definition of “foreign enemy” might expand a bit.

https://i2.imgflip.com/1hg3yo.jpg

Eighth, Trump isn’t President yet. He can’t be impeached. He’s already been elected by the Electoral College. I’m not an expert here, I’ll admit, but the only way I know of to prevent Trump from becoming President is if he agrees to step down first. That would be an admission of guilt on his part, and ain’t likely. This leaves the US in an odd legal limbo, where nothing can happen… until Trump takes the oath of office, after which anything can happen.

Ninth, there’s the Kremlin. There was quite a bit of debate about whether or not they were trying to get Trump into office, hurt Clinton, or just throw a monkey wrench into US politics. Eichenwald claims that they stopped promoting Trump when it looked like that “grab’em” video would sink his campaign; if that’s true, and it’s also true they have kompromat on him, it might signal they’d intentionally leak said video to throw the US into further chaos. Currently, though, the sources most likely to be pushing Russian propaganda are taking the “fake news” and “4chan did it” angles.

Tenth, we have the Republican party. Their loyalties are currently tugged a million ways to Sunday. Most of them are at least tolerant of Trump, given how quickly many of them backtracked after denouncing Trump over the aforementioned video. But most of them are also suspicious of Russia. Most have similar views as the military. Some of them have read this report. At best, they’ll have to endure this humiliation and a wave of angry voters demanding an investigation. At worst, they have the choice of tossing Trump under the bus, alienating a large group of voters, or let this scandal spread like a cancer through their party.

So, what does all this add up to? Here’s what I figure: the next ten days are going to be some of the messiest politics we’ve seen in the US. There are going to be a lot of heated meetings behind closed doors, trying to figure out what do on or before Inauguration Day. Trump is going to stick with denials, and wait until he is sworn in; after which, a swift purge of the Republican party is his probable first move given his current actions. The Kremlin will probably continue saying there is no kompromat. The Democrats aren’t going to change course.

The real wild cards here are the military and the Republican party. The military seems to think Trump is unfit for command, overall, but also supported him over Clinton. It’s not clear how they’ll take this leak. Will the Republicans, afraid the military would take matters into their own hands or this scandal will drag them down, invoke Amendment 25 and put Pence in charge? Will they blow the report off, and join Trump in dismissing the findings of the USIC, risking even more leaks from disgruntled spooks? These two players are the ones who’ll determine how this scandal plays out.

Watch them carefully.

Steven Pinker, Crank

At least he doesn’t start out that way.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that in an isolated system (one that is not taking in energy), entropy never decreases. … Closed systems inexorably become less structured, less organized, less able to accomplish interesting and useful outcomes, until they slide into an equilibrium of gray, tepid, homogeneous monotony and stay there.

For a non-physicist, it’s a decent formulation. It needs more of a description of entropy, though. In computer science, we think of it as how much information is or could be packed into an space. If I have a typical six-sided die, I can send you a message by giving it to you in a specific configuration. If I just ask you to look at a specific side, there are only six unique states to send a message with; if I also ask you to look at the orientation of the other sides, I can bump that up to twenty-four. I can’t send any more information unless I increase the number of states, or get to send multiple die or the same die multiple times. Compression is just transforming a low-entropy encoding into a high-entropy one, saving some time or space.

The physics version is closely related: how many ways can I shuffle the microscopic details of a system while preserving the macroscopic ones? If you’re looking at something small like a computer circuit, the answer is “not many.” The finely-ordered detail can’t be tweaked very much, and still result in a functional circuit. In contrast, the air above the circuit can be mixed up quite a bit and yet still look and act the same. Should a microscopic fluctuation happen, it’ll be far more harmful to the circuit than the air, so when they do inevitably happen the result is a gradual breaking up of the circuit. Its molecules will be slowly stripped off and brought into equilibrium with the air surrounding it, which also changes but less so.

Still with me? Good, because Pinker starts to drift off..

The Second Law of Thermodynamics is acknowledged in everyday life, in sayings such as “Ashes to ashes,” “Things fall apart,” “Rust never sleeps,” “Shit happens,” You can’t unscramble an egg,” “What can go wrong will go wrong,” and (from the Texas lawmaker Sam Rayburn), “Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a carpenter to build one.”

That’s not really the Second Law, though. Pinker himself acknowledges that it only applies to closed systems, but anyone who’s looked up can attest that it isn’t. This comes up all the time in Creationist circles:

There is a mathematical correlation between entropy increase and an increase in disorder. The overall entropy of an isolated system can never decrease. However, the entropy of some parts of the system can spontaneously decrease at the expense of an even greater increase of other parts of the system. When heat flows spontaneously from a hot part of a system to a colder part of the system, the entropy of the hot area spontaneously decreases!

It’s bad enough that Pinker invokes a creationist-level understanding of physics, but he actually manages to make them look intelligent with:

To start with, the Second Law implies that misfortune may be no one’s fault. … Not only does the universe not care about our desires, but in the natural course of events it will appear to thwart them, because there are so many more ways for things to go wrong than to go right. Houses burn down, ships sink, battles are lost for the want of a horseshoe nail.

There is no “wrong” ordering of molecules in the air or a computer chip, only orderings that aren’t what human beings want. “Misfortune” is a human construct superimposed on the universe, to model the goal we strive for. It has no place in a physics classroom, and is completely unrelated to thermodynamics.

Poverty, too, needs no explanation. In a world governed by entropy and evolution, it is the default state of humankind. Matter does not just arrange itself into shelter or clothing, and living things do everything they can not to become our food. What needs to be explained is wealth. Yet most discussions of poverty consist of arguments about whom to blame for it.

Poverty is the inability to fulfill our basic needs. Is Pinker saying that, by default, human beings are incapable of meeting their basic needs, like food and shelter? Then he is effectively arguing we should have gone extinct and been replaced by a species which has no problems meeting its basic needs, like spiders or bacteria or ants. This of course ignores that economies are not closed systems, as the Sun helpfully dumps energy on us. Innovation increases efficiency and therefore entropy, which means that people who can’t gather their needs efficiently given what they have are living in a low entropic state.

But I thought entropy only increased over time, according to the Second Law? By Pinker’s own logic, poverty should not be the default but the past, a state that we evolved out of!

More generally, an underappreciation of the Second Law lures people into seeing every unsolved social problem as a sign that their country is being driven off a cliff.

Ooooh, I get it. This essay is just an excuse for Pinker to whine about progressives who want to improve other people’s lives. He thought he could hide his complaints behind science, to make them look more digestible to himself and others, but in reality just demonstrated he understands physics worse than most creationists.

What a crank. And sadly, that seems to be the norm in Evolutionary Psychology.

No, that is not a Sokal hoax; that is a legitimate paper published by two leading Evolutionary Psychologists! There must be something about the field that breeds smug ignorance…

Replication Isn’t Enough

I bang on about statistical power because it indirectly raises the odds of a false positive. In brief, it forces you to do more tests to reach a statistical conclusion, stuffing the file drawer and thus making published results appear more certain than they are. In detail, see John Borghi or Ioannidis (2005). In comic, see Maki Naro.

The concept of statistical power has been known since 1928, the wasteful consequences of low power since 1962, and yet there’s no sign that scientists are upping their power levels. This is a representative result:

Our results indicate that the average statistical power of studies in the field of neuroscience is probably no more than between ~8% and ~31%, on the basis of evidence from diverse subfields within neuro-science. If the low average power we observed across these studies is typical of the neuroscience literature as a whole, this has profound implications for the field. A major implication is that the likelihood that any nominally significant finding actually reflects a true effect is small.

Button, Katherine S., et al. “Power failure: why small sample size undermines the reliability of neuroscience.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 14.5 (2013): 365-376.

The most obvious consequence of low power is a failure to replicate. If you rarely try to replicate studies, you’ll be blissfully unaware of the problem; once you take replications seriously, though, you’ll suddenly find yourself in a “replication crisis.”

You’d think this would result in calls for increased statistical power, with the occasional call for a switch in methodology to a system that automatically incorporates power. But it’s also led to calls for more replications.

As a condition of receiving their PhD from any accredited institution, graduate students in psychology should be required to conduct, write up, and submit for publication a high-quality replication attempt of at least one key finding from the literature, focusing on the area of their doctoral research.
Everett, Jim AC, and Brian D. Earp. “A tragedy of the (academic) commons: interpreting the replication crisis in psychology as a social dilemma for early-career researchers.” Frontiers in psychology 6 (2015).

Much has been made of preregistration, publication of null results, and Bayesian statistics as important changes to how we do business. But my view is that there is relatively little value in appending these modifications to a scientific practice that is still about one-off findings; and applying them mechanistically to a more careful, cumulative practice is likely to be more of a hindrance than a help. So what do we do? …

Cumulative study sets with internal replication.

If I had to advocate for a single change to practice, this would be it.

There’s an intuitive logic to this: currently less than one in a hundred papers are replications of prior work, so there’s plenty of room for expansion; many key figures like Ronald Fisher and Jerzy Neyman have emphasized the necessity of replications; and it doesn’t require any modification of technique; and the “replication crisis” is primarily about replications. It sounds like an easy, feel-good solution to the problem.

But then I read this paper:

Smaldino, Paul E., and Richard McElreath. “The Natural Selection of Bad Science.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1605.09511 (2016).

It starts off with a meta-analysis of meta-analyses of power, and comes to the same conclusion as above.

We collected all papers that contained reviews of statistical power from published papers in the social, behavioural and biological sciences, and found 19 studies from 16 papers published between 1992 and 2014. … We focus on the statistical power to detect small effects of the order d=0.2, the kind most commonly found in social science research. …. Statistical power is quite low, with a mean of only 0.24, meaning that tests will fail to detect small effects when present three times out of four. More importantly, statistical power shows no sign of increase over six decades …. The data are far from a complete picture of any given field or of the social and behavioural sciences more generally, but they help explain why false discoveries appear to be common. Indeed, our methods may overestimate statistical power because we draw only on published results, which were by necessity sufficiently powered to pass through peer review, usually by detecting a non-null effect.

Rather than leave it at that, though, the researchers decided to simulate the pursuit of science. They set up various “labs” that exerted different levels of effort to maintain methodological rigor, killed off labs that didn’t publish much and replaced them with mutations of labs that published more, and set the simulation spinning.

We ran simulations in which power was held constant but in which effort could evolve (μw=0, μe=0.01). Here selection favoured labs who put in less effort towards ensuring quality work, which increased publication rates at the cost of more false discoveries … . When the focus is on the production of novel results and negative findings are difficult to publish, institutional incentives for publication quantity select for the continued degradation of scientific practices.

That’s not surprising. But then they started tinkering with replication rates. To begin with, replications were done 1% of the time, were guaranteed to be published, and having one of your results fail to replicate would exact a terrible toll.

We found that the mean rate of replication evolved slowly but steadily to around 0.08. Replication was weakly selected for, because although publication of a replication was worth only half as much as publication of a novel result, it was also guaranteed to be published. On the other hand, allowing replication to evolve could not stave off the evolution of low effort, because low effort increased the false-positive rate to such high levels that novel hypotheses became more likely than not to yield positive results … . As such, increasing one’s replication rate became less lucrative than reducing effort and pursuing novel hypotheses.

So it was time for extreme measures: force the replication rate to high levels, to the point that 50% of all studies were replications. All that happened was that it took longer for the overall methodological effort to drop and false positives to bloom.

Replication is not sufficient to curb the natural selection of bad science because the top performing labs will always be those who are able to cut corners. Replication allows those labs with poor methods to be penalized, but unless all published studies are replicated several times (an ideal but implausible scenario), some labs will avoid being caught. In a system such as modern science, with finite career opportunities and high network connectivity, the marginal return for being in the top tier of publications may be orders of magnitude higher than an otherwise respectable publication record.

Replication isn’t enough. The field of science needs to incorporate more radical reforms that encourage high methodological rigor and greater power.

Steven Pinker and his Portable Goalposts

PZ Myers seems to have pissed off quite a few people, this time for taking Steven Pinker to task. His take is worth reading in full, but I’d like to add another angle. In the original interview, there’s a very telling passage:

Belluz: But as you mentioned, there’s been an uptick in war deaths driven by the staggeringly violent ongoing conflict in Syria. Does that not affect your thesis?

Pinker: No, it doesn’t affect the thesis because the rate of death in war is about 1.4 per 100,000 per year. That’s higher than it was at the low point in 2010. But it’s still a fraction of what it was in earlier years.

See the problem here? Pinker’s hypothesis is that over the span of centuries, violence will decrease. The recent spike in deaths may be the start of a reversal that proves Pinker wrong. But because his hypothesis covers such a wide timespan, we’re going to need fifty or more years worth of data to challenge it. [Read more…]

Veritasium on the Reproducibility Crisis

It’s a great summary, going into much more depth than most. I really like how Muller brought out a concrete example of publication bias, and found an example of p-hacking in a branch of science that’s usually resistant to it, physics.

But I’m not completely happy with it. Some of this comes from being a Bayesian fanboi that didn’t hear the topic mentioned, but Muller also makes a weird turn of phrase at the end. Muller argues that, as bad as the flaws in science may be, think of how much worse they are in all our other systems of learning about the world.

Slight problem: there are no other systems. Even “I feel it’s true” is based on an evidential claim, evaluated for plausibility against other competing hypotheses. The weighting procedure may be hopelessly skewed, but so too are p-values and the publication process.

Muller could have strengthened his point by bringing up an example, yet did not. We’re left taking his word that science isn’t the sole methodology we have for exploring the world, and that those alternate methodologies aren’t as rigorous. Meanwhile, he explicitly points out that a small fraction of “landmark cancer trials” could be replicated; this implies that cancer treatments, and by extension the well-being of millions of cancer patients, are being harmed by poor methodology in science. Even if you disagree with my assertion that all epistemologies are scientific in some fashion, it’s tough to find a counter-example that effects 40% of us and will kill a quarter.

My hope doesn’t come from a blind assurance that other methodologies are worse than science, it comes from the news that scientists have recognized the flaws in their trade, and are working to correct them. To be fair to Muller, he’d probably agree.

Ignorance and Social Justice

“Why are you a feminist?”

Because it lets me sleep at night. Think about it: let’s say it’s true that over half the human population is burdened with a systematic disadvantage compared to the rest. Having learned of that, can you honestly shrug your shoulders and ignore the problem? I certainly can’t, so I’ll do what little I can to correct this injustice.

You may not agree, which is fine. But the corrolary of this view is that you cannot be opposed to feminism without also misunderstanding it. This sets up a prediction we can test: people who oppose feminism and other forms of social justice must be ignorant of it, must invoke straw-people, and must be resistant to learning or understanding it, if my stance has some truth to it.

The evidence suggests it has more than a little.

For instance, after offering to debate Martin Hughes, TJ Kirk cowardly backed out. Stephanie Zvan has an excellent blog post up pointing out that this is a common theme: people opposed to social justice aren’t keen on actually debating the subject.

That’s the real function of “You don’t want to debate” in this context. It isn’t to get you to debate. It’s there to say there’s something wrong with you. That’s why the offer disappears once you drag the argument into the reality of terms and conditions and making sure no one profits from the debate. It wasn’t real to begin with.

To do well in a debate, you really have to know the other side in depth. If you do that homework, though, you might learn the other side’s arguments are correct. So if you are hoping to sleep well at night, you don’t debates. I popped into the comment section to point out an exception to this:

Some of the hardcore haters would disagree, and say they’re perfectly fine with a debate. They have a very peculiar definition of “debate” in mind, though, where both sides shout slogans into the night without critically appraising their merits. It’s an extension of what I’ve called the “treadmill of lies:” By endlessly cycling from myth to lie, they avoid having to consider any one in detail and thus can convince themselves they’re just a bunch of skeptical satirists.

When this actually happens during a debate, we call it a “Gish Gallop.” This technique is a big problem with traditional, in-person debates, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that TJ Kirk was pushing for this format instead of a more leisurely exchange of blog posts. He knew he had nothing but slogans against Hughes’ arguments, and he knew those wouldn’t convince anyone but those already convinced. Unless there was some sort of reward involved, like cash or a raised profile, there was no point in “debating” Hughes.

I go into a little more detail on the treadmill here. But as luck would have it, this data point was followed by yet another. Possibly in response to the controversy kicked off by Kirk, a number of atheist YouTubers joined with him to fire back a challenge: “QUESTIONS WHITE MEN HAVE FOR SJWs!”

Others in the atheo/skeptic community have been responding back, in between bouts of muffled laughter and obvious eyerolls. I’ll add my two cents at some point, but for now I’d like to point out a common theme in the questions.

3. Do you want women to be equal or do you want women to be a protected class? You can’t have both.

Protected class: “A group of people with a common characteristic who are legally protected from employment discrimination on the basis of that characteristic. Protected classes are created by both federal and state law. … Federal protected classes include: Race. Color. Religion or creed. National origin or ancestry. Sex.”

4. What are you afraid will happen when you leave your “safe space”?

“A Safe Space is a place where anyone can relax and be able to fully express, without fear of being made to feel uncomfortable, unwelcome, or unsafe on account of biological sex, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, cultural background, religious affiliation, age, or physical or mental ability.”

5. How can you possibly justify the idea that it’s somehow racist to disagree with black lives matter?

“When we say Black Lives Matter, we are broadening the conversation around state violence to include all of the ways in which Black people are intentionally left powerless at the hands of the state.  We are talking about the ways in which Black lives are deprived of our basic human rights and dignity.”

6. Are you aware the present is not the past? Are you familiar with the concept of linear time? Because you seem incredibly comfortable traveling back through time by talking about how bad things were for women, or black people, or whomever. And then by using some form of SJW magic, you then claim or imply that those problems in the past exist today. Are you aware that this trick that you’re doing is not working? Why do you think that would work?

“Results: In the United States, an estimated 19.3% of women and 1.7% of men have been raped during their lifetimes; an estimated 1.6% of women reported that they were raped in the 12 months preceding the survey. The case count for men reporting rape in the preceding 12 months was too small to produce a statistically reliable prevalence estimate. An estimated 43.9% of women and 23.4% of men experienced other forms of sexual violence during their lifetimes, including being made to penetrate, sexual coercion, unwanted sexual contact, and noncontact unwanted sexual experiences. The percentages of women and men who experienced these other forms of sexual violence victimization in the 12 months preceding the survey were an estimated 5.5% and 5.1%, respectively.”

8. Did you know there are 13% more women in college right now than men? So if the whole goal of feminism is “equality,” shouldn’t we have some men-only scholarships in order to equal everything out?

“The strength of this unconscious bias is quite astonishing – even for a relatively objective measure such as promptness, students rated a “female” professor 3.55 out of 5 and a “male” professor 4.35, despite the fact that they handed work back at the same time.

The implications are serious. In the competitive world of academia, student evaluations are often used as a tool in the process of hiring and promotion. That the evaluations may be biased against female professors is particularly problematic in light of existing gender imbalance, particularly at the highest echelons of academia. According to the American Association of University Professors, in 2012, 62% of men in academia in the US were tenured compared to only 44% of women, while women were far more likely to be in non-tenure track positions than men (32% of women in academia compared to just 19% of men).”

When there are answers to the questions those YouTubers fired off, it only takes a few minutes of Googling to get an answer. Want scientific studies? They’ve been done by the hundreds, on nearly all the topics pushed by “social justice warriors.” Decades of research have been done, untold thousands of words have been spilled, and yet these people opposed to social justice are completely ignorant of it all. Had they put in the time to educate themselves, like some others have, they’d become social justice warriors too.

But as Zvan would have predicted, some of those questions aren’t actually questions.

7. Why do you think that you can spend your entire life in a state of perpetual emotional immaturity? Do you actually imagine that you’ll be able to stretch out your adolescence for your entire existence?

10. What do you hope to gain by bringing back racial segregation?

12. Why do you think every cis white male is born racist?

14. Would you rather be right, or popular? It seems like your primary objective is to score social points and get public validation.

These questions were never meant to be answered, they’re just empty talking points that form the treadmill’s belt. They’re meant to protect you from educating yourself, from breaking the wall of ignorance.

Because you might not sleep well, once you find out what’s on the other side.