The Modeler's Toy

Via Slashdot comes an absurd rant from Scott E. Page in which he rails against the very idea of meritocracy:

The multidimensional or layered character of complex problems also undermines the principle of meritocracy: The idea that the ‘best person’ should be hired. There is no best person. When putting together an oncological research team, a biotech company such as Gilead or Genentech would not construct a multiple-choice test and hire the top scorers, or hire people whose resumes score highest according to some performance criteria. Instead, they would seek diversity. They would build a team of people who bring diverse knowledge bases, tools and analytic skills. That team would more likely than not include mathematicians (though not logicians such as Griffeath). And the mathematicians would likely study dynamical systems and differential equations.

Page here actually argues that there can be no such thing as meritocracy when problem domains are so broad and complex; "no test or criteria applied to individuals will produce the best team", he claims.

But the problems with this criticism should be obvious. First, Page injects his own bias ahead of hiring managers, who he claims have a flawed understanding of what it is that needs to be done by a particular employee. Yet, if hiring managers don't know what a given position requires, how does Page, who is removed from the process entirely, get to claim he knows better than they?

The second problem is the bait-and-switch nature of his definition of "meritocracy". Page has gained notoriety and accolades for his allegedly ground-breaking work showing that there can be no such thing, and in fact that diverse teams produce better results than purported "meritocracies".

Q. The term “diversity” has become a code word for inclusion of racial, ethnic and sexual minorities. Is that what you’re talking about?
A. I mean differences in how people think. Two people can look quite different and think similarly. Having said that, there’s certainly a lot of evidence that people’s identity groups — ethnic, racial, sexual, age — matter when it comes to diversity in thinking.

Page quickly shifts gears from claims of a quantitative judgment to a qualitative one (emboldening mine):

Q. In your book, you advocate affirmative action, an unpopular social policy these days. What’s your argument?

A. That it’s a flat-out good because, as I said earlier, it makes everything we do more powerful.

For a while, I chaired admissions in the graduate political science department at the University of Michigan. We didn’t just look at high test scores. We looked at things like whether an applicant had worked with Teach for America. We wanted to bring in people who had experiences and modes of thinking that would improve everyone else.

At a university, people learn from each other as well as their professors. Another suburban kid who was raised to score high on tests doesn’t add all that much to the mix.

Page elsewhere points to a paper he coauthored in 2004 as alleged proof of this theory, using absurdly simplistic models of problem solvers in which diversity trumps competence. Ultimately, it's Page's bait-and-switch that makes this so infuriating: he claims diversity of knowledge is important, but argues for a sort of watered-down quota system based on diversity of identity. Unsurprisingly, Page's paper is cited 753 times, according to Google Scholar. It is a kind of grasping at straws for the identity politics crowd, who have precious little in the way of proof to cling to in their voodoo cult.

Bullety Stuff, Sunday Edition

• The narrative that Republicans are the principle reason why Obamacare isn't working is remarkably durable. Maybe Democrats should have created a system that wouldn't depend on their political enemies implementing it?
• The rise of the employer-provided "exclusive provider" health insurance plan. It eliminates out-of-network options for most things, but at a substantial savings ("double digit").
• Data Gone Odd looks at rape statistics (and particularly false reporting of rape) in a two-part series (part 1, part 2). As Scott Greenfield summarizes,
  
  

  The 2-10% false rape accusations stat is untrue. Actual stats:
  
  True-ish: 35.3%
  Definitively False: 5.9%
  Inconclusive: 58.8% https://t.co/6fMxzd3EaL

  — Scott Greenfield (@ScottGreenfield) July 16, 2017

• Perhaps the first recorded instance of publish or penis, i.e. the theory that getting cited in others' work "contribute[s] to 'white heteromasculinity'". 
• Steven Pinker thinks Harvard's attempt to shut down off-campus clubs starting in 2022 is a terrible idea. 
• Free speech is terrible, says progressive Christina Berchini.
• Even Vox Dep't: Nancy MacLean's hackish attack on the Public Choice school of economics backfires, Vox runs a wholly reasonable response, warning against reading everything as a conspiracy theory.

Letter to David Noe, General Manager Of Rev-A-Shelf, LLC

Sent to David Noe, General Manager of Rev-A-Shelf, LLC this morning:

I have ordered three of your products for our kitchen, two of which have not fulfilled the basic requirement of fitting in the minimum advertised depth. The first was a clear manufacturing error (installed on slides at least two inches too long for the space, and so large they broke through the provided shipping box) and was replaced. The second, more vexing issue is with a 4WCSC-1835DM-2 two-bin drawer that extends approximately 3/16” past the limit of the 21-3/4” depth it is supposed to fit in. I have been in contact with Joe Dowdle in your customer service department, and have provided him with photos of the product and the obvious problem we have with it. He has twice told me he would get in touch with manufacturing and would call back, but never did. When I contacted him today, he didn’t even know my phone number (which I provided in my initial email on the subject) or email address (which he would have known had he kept it).

Frankly, your customer service is atrocious. It is simply inconceivable that for an organization this large you don’t have a trouble ticket system for dealing with such issues that retains such basic information as customer contact data (he didn’t remember that), product model (neither that), description of the problem (also forgotten), and history of the problem (nope) with its resolution. This is the third call I have had to initiate to get this resolved one way or another. It’s clear your company is shipping defective products; whether you care to rectify that situation will tell how much longer you stay in business.

In response, I got an autoresponder saying he would be out of the office until June 12. SRSLY.

Update 16:29 CDT: After sending this and posting it to Rev-A-Shelf's Facebook page and Twitter account, I heard back from a very contrite Mr. Dowdle. He at last determined that the issue was a manufacturing change that altered the depth requirement, which had not been propagated to the customer-facing parts of the company, including the website and resellers. He apologized for the delay as well. I also received a call from a woman who identified herself as the head of customer service for Rev-A-Shelf, and she, too, apologized. She also told me that she was surprised to learn that he had said they had no trouble ticket management system, because the company uses Salesforce internally.  Clearly if they have it, their support people aren't using it.

The Vacant, Commercial Symbolism Of "Fearless Girl" (And How She Could Be Forced To Go Away)

I wanted to pass on an excellent essay by Noah Rothman at Commentary about "Fearless Girl", the statue in New York City opposing the Wall St. bull:

Via Wikimedia

 Rothman notes that

The statue’s alleged purpose—both stated by its sponsors and plainly evident in the figure’s demeanor—is to present a challenge to orthodoxy. It is a call to address the perception that there are not enough women amid the rarefied ranks of Fortune 500 boards. This audacious assault on the staid prejudices of the gatekeepers of wealth and power in America was sponsored by the exclusive Boston-based investment services company State Street Global Advisors and approved by the New York City Parks Department. If the aim of this artistic display was to challenge intractable conventions and change minds, they chose an audience that has been uniquely receptive to their message.

Ironic, then, that

Only 17 percent of State Street’s leadership positions (five out of 28) are women. In terms of gender representation—a metric that measures neither an employee’s aptitude nor benefit to their employer—SSGA trails the average S&P 500 firm.

One might ask, therefore, if this isn't a sort of very public way to atone for perceived sins, true or false. It represents tribal affiliation gone mad, yet another public exercise of empty virtue signaling. A more interesting question is, will the girl stick around? Techdirt notes that bull statue creator Arturo Di Modica is trying to get rid of the girl using a novel (in the United States) legal theory: that of moral rights.

Importantly, though, this is interesting timing as it relates to moral rights. The US has been correct in (mostly) resisting putting in place a moral rights regime, and focusing on copyright as an economic right. Unfortunately, at this very moment, the Copyright Office is "studying" the issue of whether or not moral rights should be expanded. The first round of public comments has closed (you can read those comments if you'd like), but response comments are open until May 15th. Given this example of moral rights gone mad, perhaps it might be useful for the Copyright Office to be reminded of how moral rights might be used to stifle and stamp out important expression

The story goes on with an update by law professor James Grimmelmann who claims "Di Modica probably has no legitimate moral rights claim either", which probably is just as well, but copyright maximalism knows few bounds. I would not be too surprised if someone makes a serious go at defending Di Modica's claim.

Trump Voters Are Racists Because Only Racists Would Vote For Trump

Possibly the dumbest thing ever published at The Intercept, "Top Democrats Are Wrong: Trump Supporters Were More Motivated by Racism Than Economic Issues" by Mehdi Hasan does nothing to advance the title thesis. Opening with the smirking "facts are stubborn things" line, he proceeds to bring none of those to bear, instead filling up with circular logic and appeals to authority (Philip Klinkner). And then there's the fallacy of the excluded middle:

Klinkner himself grabbed headlines last summer when he revealed that the best way to identify a Trump supporter in the U.S. was to ask “just one simple question: is Barack Obama a Muslim?”

Do all Trump voters (or even most) agree with that sentiment? Who knows! Klinkner appears not to be terribly interested in that question, only in pushing his thesis that racists voted for Trump. The answer to that question is obviously "yes". In the end, Hasan is stuck assuming his conclusion, using his proxy Klinkner (all emboldening below mine):

Defenders of the economy narrative have a “gotcha” question of their own: how can racial resentment have motivated Trump supporters when so many of them voted for Barack Obama, across the Rust Belt, in 2008 and 2012? “They’re not racists,” filmmaker Michael Moore passionately argued last November.  “They twice voted for a man whose middle name is Hussein.”

Klinkner, though, gives short shrift to this argument. First, he tells me, “most of them didn’t vote for Obama. There weren’t many vote switchers between 2012 and 2016.” Second, “working class whites shifted to Trump less because they were working class than because they were white.” Klinkner points out that in 2016, Clinton, unlike Obama, faced a Republican candidate who “pushed the buttons of race and nativism in open and explicit ways that John McCain and Mitt Romney were unwilling or unable to do.”

Yet, where is the data underlying this? "A vote for Trump must be racist because racists voted for Trump" fails the hasty generalization test, but that's the sum total of his argument. It's a convenient hat rack for identity politicians, but as sound politics go, a disaster.

Update: A couple non-dumb essays on this subject, the first from Andrew Doyle at Spiked:

Identity politics, as it currently operates, is a mostly tokenistic endeavour. Too often it assures progression for women and ethnic-minority people who already come from a privileged background. It’s very easy for the middle classes to make their scattershot assumptions of ‘straight white male privilege’, to pretend that opportunity has nothing to do with socioeconomic status and everything to do with race, gender and sexuality. It’s a convenient method by which they can assert their own virtue while continuing to benefit from an inherently unequal economic system.

The election of Donald Trump should have been a wake-up call for the left. Instead, we have seen a doubling down on the very strategies that guaranteed his victory in the first place. Trump supporters are scorned and derided with increased vehemence, Brexit voters are still smeared as racist, and the working classes are urged to know their place and vote in accordance with the instructions of their technocratic masters. It would also appear that the word ‘Nazi’ has been redefined as ‘anyone with whom the left disagrees’. I’ve never met a Nazi, although I’m assured by many of my liberal friends that you’re never more than six feet away from one.

Next, Mark Lilla in the NYT:

One of the many lessons of the recent presidential election campaign and its repugnant outcome is that the age of identity liberalism must be brought to an end. Hillary Clinton was at her best and most uplifting when she spoke about American interests in world affairs and how they relate to our understanding of democracy. But when it came to life at home, she tended on the campaign trail to lose that large vision and slip into the rhetoric of diversity, calling out explicitly to African-American, Latino, L.G.B.T. and women voters at every stop. This was a strategic mistake. If you are going to mention groups in America, you had better mention all of them. If you don’t, those left out will notice and feel excluded. Which, as the data show, was exactly what happened with the white working class and those with strong religious convictions. Fully two-thirds of white voters without college degrees voted for Donald Trump, as did over 80 percent of white evangelicals.

You keep on keeping on, guys. I'll be here with the popcorn.

The Frauds at PUPscan

I forgot to mention Carol Beuchat's excellent two-part series on PUPscan (part 1, part 2). Mostly, what they appear to be doing is taking the public's money and playing with an ultrasound imaging device. As Carol writes in her second piece, "A published, peer-reviewed study failed to find any evidence that ultrasound examination of young puppies was predictive of the development of hip dysplasia as adults."

We don't know what they are measuring. We don't know if they have any evidence that these mystery measurements tell us anything about hip dysplasia. We don't know how measurements of a structure that is cartilage in a puppy can tell us something useful about what to expect in the adult dog after it has been converted to bone. We don't know why they think they can ascribe to genetics any problems they see in their ultrasound examination.

As far as I can tell, they have no data that link whatever they are measuring to a diagnosis of or predisposition to hip dysplasia. If that's the case, then this is essentially a research project (and note that they call it the "PUPscan Project") in which the owners of the dogs will pay for collection of data that may or may not be useful, and at best it will be several years before they will even be able to say.

What I find especially disturbing is the fact that they are leading people to believe that they are providing useful information and "new hope for breeders of 'dysplastic' dogs", as in the title of their published article. Unless they can provide answers to the very basic questions I have asked them, I don't see that they have anything useful to offer.

But they still want your money, I'm sure.

The Empty Trend Story

The trend story is a particularly noxious form of journalism, making broad claims about society while eschewing anything resembling data collection beyond the anecdotal. Every now and then, you find one so egregiously bad, it exerts a strange sort of fascination — as this New York Times thumbsucker from Anemolla Hartocollis, "On Campus, Trump Fans Say They Need ‘Safe Spaces’". This graf:

Conservative students who voted for Mr. Trump say that even though their candidate won, their views are not respected. Some are adopting the language of the left, saying they need a “safe space” to express their opinions — a twist resented by left-leaning protesters.

Okay, so we're going to get an example of this soon, right? Well, not so much, and in fact nowhere in this piece is a single conservative person or group interviewed claiming they need such a thing. The closest it comes to that destination is this passage:

Ibtihal Makki, a self-confident senior in a pink hijab who is studying biopsychology and neuroscience and is chairwoman of a student government diversity committee, objected to conservatives on campus saying they needed safe spaces to express their views.

“To turn around and say that they need safe spaces after their candidate won I think is ironic and hypocritical,” Ms. Makki said.

Could we maybe actually quote those people making those demands? Or is this a whole-cloth fabrication of Ms. Makki's? Were the demands made ironically (i.e. is she omitting crucial context)? We certainly wouldn't know from the article. Speaking of fake news...

How Black Lives Matters Entryism Shut Down The Toronto Pride Parade

Walter Olsen, whose Overlawyered blog is on my sidebar, today comes to us with a Storify link to his tweets of Sunday's takeover by Black Lives Matter protesters. The most disturbing part is Black Lives Matters was asked to lead the parade:

"BLM said they did not tell organizers about their plan to hijack the parade, an act that has since been called a “win” by the group, but widely criticized by many others.

Pride president Mathieu Chantelois called BLM's hijacking of the event the mere opening of negotiations:

“Yesterday, we agreed to have a conversation about this. We agreed that we will bring this to the community and to the membership, but at the end of the day, if my membership says no way, we want to have police floats, they decide.”

 Unsurprisingly, this has resulted in a flood of hate mail aimed at BLM, whose behavior is simply inexcusable and childish. BLM went on to complain about this as "pink-washing":

Charges of "pinkwashing" are invariably some mixture of eyewash, brainwash, and hogwash. #PrideTO https://t.co/90V9Y8su0k

— Walter Olson (@walterolson) July 6, 2016

Relations between the petulant BLM protesters and city hall appear to be still surprisingly good, as the city planned on giving them a race relations award, part of a pattern of collapse in the face of organized protest, no matter how childish.

The short history of Black Lives Matter in Toronto proves that so long as you’re the victim group du jour, bullying and intimidation can win you obeisance from officials, to say nothing of reverential coverage in the media. When they staged a sit-in outside police headquarters to protest police racism, the Toronto Star depicted them as freedom fighters. After they demonstrated outside the home of Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne, she met them on the steps of Queen’s Park and declared, “I believe we still have systemic racism in our society.” When they accused the city of racism for shortening the schedule of an African music festival (the neighbours had complained about the noise), the city hurriedly restored it. In response to their demands, both the city and the province have called for investigations into the racist practices of the police – despite the obvious fact that Toronto is one of the most racially peaceable cities in all of North America.

As much as I'd like to think the Pride organizers will win this one over time, I'm not entirely convinced.

The Ouroboros: Black Lives Matter Shakes Down Toronto Pride

The Toronto Pride festival yesterday ground to a halt for half an hour for a Black Lives Matter protest. "The parade didn't re-start until after Pride Toronto executive director Mathieu Chantelois signed a document agreeing to the group's demands." Those demands are interesting to read:

Among the nine, three explicitly cite funding, while the rest (save #8) are implicit funding demands, either through hiring/staffing demands or expenditures (as for "community spaces", "community full control over hiring", "increase community stages/spaces", etc.). It is hard to see how this can possibly stick; Chantelois signed an agreement under duress, i.e. the Black Lives Matter leaders forced him to submit or else they would not allow the parade to continue. So if this gets to court, it's very hard to imagine how this would be enforceable. Moreover, kicking police out of Pride activities sends a terrible message: it really is Us vs. Them, with no dialogue possible.

Already, Pride has backed off the idea that the police ban will remain in force in future events, saying,

"Pride Toronto never agreed to exclude police services from the Pride parade... We have had, and will continue to have, discussions with the police about the nature of their involvement as parade participants," the organization said in a statement.

"Frankly, Black Lives Matter isn't going to tell us there's no more floats in the parade," Pride Toronto executive director Mathieu Chantelois told CP24 earlier in the day.

One wonders just how much longer they will adhere to the other, less visible but still significant terms inflicted on them. While the tantrum's outcome drew praise from many quarters, it appears from this vantage that it was nothing short of a commercial shakedown of the sort American race hucksters have engaged in for decades. Intersectionalism means there's always someone more privileged than you, if you just try hard enough; converting that to money and power is always the goal.

Ezra Klein Doesn't Understand Libel Law

Ezra Klein has a penchant for being spectacularly ignorant and wrong, but is nevertheless unafraid to opine on such subjects, viz. healthcare. A couple days ago I encountered a typing of his which purported to make the case that Peter Thiel's funding of lawsuits against Gawker is a bad thing, because, money:

Billionaires might have the resources to fund endless lawsuits that bury their media enemies beneath legal fees, but that doesn't mean they should use that freedom. There's plenty that billionaires can do that they shouldn't, and the more frequently and gleefully they cross that line, the likelier they are to eventually lose the ability to cross it.

But of course, this would not be possible if Gawker didn't have journalistic standards that would make a whore blush. Klein makes the reasonable point that at one time, we did not allow third parties to finance lawsuits — that practice is known as champerty, and was forbidden under the old English common-law regime. But as even Klein admits, citing Walter Olson (all emboldening mine):

...[T]he law used to bar unrelated third parties from paying someone else to engage in litigation and financing a lawsuit in exchange for a share of the damages.

But those laws have fallen out of favor over the past 50 years, in part because lawyers began to see easy access to the courts as being in the public interest. This was driven in part by the rise of public interest litigation — think, for example, of an environmental group finding a third-party plaintiff to sue a company to stop an environmentally sensitive development project.

 So live by the sword, die by the sword, as it were. But so far, at least, all of Klein's perceived threats to Gawker are entirely illusory, or caused by their own sleazebag tendencies. I have a hard time crying for them.

Update 2016-05-30: Comes an excellent summary of why this is a nothingburger, or at least, why the broad public treats it so, by Cathy Young, with many examples of why Gawker is ragingly hypocritical here.

The ACLU Comes Out Against Another Civil Right, Mens Rea

It's been a long while since I wrote any checks to the ACLU, and even then, I only gave to the nonprofit ACLU Foundation, which is the arm that files lawsuits. It might surprise some to learn that the ACLU proper is a 501(c)4 and engages in much politicking I despise, which informs their at first strange but entirely comprehensible rejection of the return of mens rea to criminal law. As explained in Gideon Yaffe's New York Times editorial,

As a legal principle, mens rea means that causing harm should not be enough to constitute a crime; knowingly causing harm should be. Walking away from the baggage carousel with a suitcase you mistook for your own isn’t theft; it’s theft only if you knew you didn’t own it. Ordinary citizens may assume that this common-sense requirement is already the law of the land. And indeed law students are taught that prosecutors must prove not just that a defendant did something bad, but also that his frame of mind made him culpable when he did it.

But over the years, exceptions to the principle have become common because mens rea requirements have not been consistently detailed in laws. In one often-cited case, the president of a company that mistakenly shipped mislabeled drugs was convicted of a crime even though he had no way of knowing that the labels were incorrect. In another, a truck driver crossing the Canadian border into Washington to deliver cases of beer was convicted of drug trafficking even though prosecutors produced no evidence that he knew or should have known that the truck had a secret compartment filled with drugs. In these cases and many more like them, the prosecution secured conviction without showing that the defendant had a guilty mind.

ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero objected that

These plans, if implemented, would require prosecutors to prove that a defendant was aware of the illegal nature of his or her actions and intended to cause them. Proving such intent would be nearly impossible for many financial, environmental and regulatory crimes but relatively simple for drug and property crimes

In other words, because such a law could defend rich white guys, because we want to convict people we know are guilty despite their own knowledge of the facts on the ground (and mental state, therefore), we would rather throw out the whole legislation. It's hard to express just how corrupt and political the ACLU has become, but there it is.

The Ambitious Man

Mencken, in his model constitution for the commonwealth of Maryland, made a provision forbidding state's attorneys from running for any elective office for some period after they vacated that current seat. This is so for the obvious reason that many such use it as a jumping off point for higher office, with concomitant contempt for justice. With this in mind, Slashdot today brings us what would otherwise be an unremarkable example of this kind of hucksterism, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. raving against zero-knowledge encryption. This has been going on for some time now, but mainly from the FBI. Normally the career arc of such charlatans would run through Albany, but it appears he wishes his next post to have an address at Fort Meade.

Physician, Heal Thyself: TechCrunch's "Diversity" Hypocrisy

So, this happened:

Here’s the breakdown of gender and racial diversity of venture firms http://t.co/P9TmmdYH8o pic.twitter.com/suoMBznbRD

— TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) October 7, 2015

So, um, let's check out the diversity of the staff at TechCrunch:

Writer Sex Ethnicity Matthew Panzarino Male White Matt Burns Male White Alex Wilhelm Male White Anna Escher Female White Anthony Ha Male Asian Bryce Durbin Male White Catherine Shu Female Asian Chris Nesi Male White Connie Loizos Female White Drew Olanoff Male White Felicia Williams Female White Frederic Lardinois Male White Greg Kumparak Male White Henry Pickavet Male White JaNelle Hasty Female Black Ingrid Lunden Female White Joey Hinson Male White John Biggs Male White Jon Russell Male White Jonathan Shieber Male White Jordan Crook Female White Jesse Chambers Male White

Writer Sex Ethnicity Josh Constine Male White Kim-Mai Cutler Female Asian Leslie Hitchcock Female White Matthew Lynley Male White Megan Rose Dickey Female Black Mike Butcher Male White Natasha Lomas Female White Ned Desmond Male White Nicholas Vincent Male White Nicole Wilke Female White Romain Dillet Male White Sam O'Keefe Female White Sarah Buhr Female White Sarah Lane Female White Sarah Perez Female Hispanic Stephen Wood Male White Steve Long Male White Steve O'Hear Male White Tito Hamze Male White Travis Bernard Male White Yashad Kulkarni Male Arabic?

In graphical form:

Oh, dear, overwhelmingly male (64%) and/or white (83%), which latter is worse than the "senior investment team" they decry on racial grounds. I don't expect this will end TechCrunch's apparently limitless belief they should be able to shove their nose into other people's companies, but it does serve to illustrate what a raging bunch of hypocrites they are.

Update: If we look at bylines, the numbers are, well, interesting:

Men are still the dominant writers at TechCrunch (73% of bylines), and whites are even more so (83% of bylines). Yeah, whatever, TechCrunch.

The Dog Fancy Steals A Page From The "Rape Crisis" Hoaxers

I've previously written about the various bogus surveys of rape and its much broader sister charge, sexual assault, and how political motivation has expanded that to include clumsy attempts at hand-holding. With its engineered results that turn virtually any unwanted advance or gaffe into sexual assault, it's little wonder those trying to prove there's a huge sexual assault problem on college campuses come up with numbers vastly higher than actual rape statistics, which latter have been in decline for decades — unlike the static "1-in-5" factoid. File under "figures don't lie, but liars can figure".

The dog fancy has taken a similar approach to dealing with their flawed product. Two years ago, UC Davis published a study finding some genetic diseases common to all dogs apparently occur at the same rates in mutts and purebreds. AKC apologists rapidly seized on this finding, even though it didn't actually say what they thought it did. In fact, for 10 of the 27 diseases surveyed, purebred dogs had notably higher incidence rates than mutts. Yesterday, I encountered a similar study (original at PLOS One) with even brighter news for the KC (or so they would have you believe). Originating from a survey of English veterinary records and paid for by the RSPCA, the press release version claims "purebreds are no more likely than crossbreeds to suffer the most common disorders", i.e. the diseases they studied had equal incidence in both purebreds and mutts, based on reviews of veterinary practice data throughout that country. In fact,

• For three of the most common 20 diseases (otitis externa [ear infections], obesity, and skin masses), the incidence in purebreds was materially higher (p<0.05) than in "crossbred" dogs (in fact, dogs of unknown provenance).
• Four of the 20 "mid-level" diseases (musculoskeletal issues, aural, opthamological, and again obesity, though not sure why that latter is counted in this group again) again have materially higher incidences in purebreds than mutts; none were higher in mutts than the general population.
• For specific breeds, some problems were more frequent and some were less than the general population. This is to be expected.

So rather than a rigged study, the Telegraph article simply fails to note the cases where there were in fact more problems among purebreds; but ignoring those cases does not make them go away. Likewise, the survey doesn't attempt to address breed-specific genetic or genetically-linked diseases (hip dysplasia, cancer, collie eye anomaly, Leonberger polyneuropathy, high uric acid in Dalmatians, inability to whelp vaginally, etc.) that are much more likely in certain breeds and contribute to overall health problems. I eagerly await more detailed studies that include such conditions.

The Dumb Rejoinder To Ahmed Mohamed's Arrest: Common Sense Clocks Out

So in case you've been living in a cave the last couple of weeks, an Irving, Texas boy, Ahmed Muhamed, claimed to bring a clock of his own manufacture to school. In his English class, he plugged it in to a wall socket, whereupon it made some noise that the teacher decided was suspicious. Someone at the school declared the device a "hoax bomb", i.e. not a real bomb, whereupon police arrested and handcuffed Ahmed while they waited for his parents to take custody of him. As one Facebook poster observed, it is entirely clear neither the school officials nor the police believed he had a bomb; the observation of the "bomb", and his arrest and detention all took place within the school; the bomb squad was never called, and the "bomb" was never isolated.

More recently, poster Jeremy at Artvoice wrote a long-form piece about the incident that makes a compelling case against at least Muhamed's title claim, i.e. that he made the clock, a sentiment also endorsed by Richard Dawkins (who cited that piece). I won't go into that, because his photographs provide sufficient evidence that it's highly likely Muhamed merely stripped the cover off an old Radio Shack digital clock and threw it in a pencil case to make it look homebrew. But Jeremy then drifts into speculation and sophistry when he endorses subsequent police and administration behavior:

If we stop and think – was it really such a ridiculous reaction from the teacher and the police in the first place? How many school shootings and incidents of violence have we had, where we hear afterwards “this could have been prevented, if only we paid more attention to the signs!” Teachers are taught to be suspicious and vigilant. Ahmed wasn’t accused of making a bomb – he was accused of making a look-alike, a hoax. And be honest with yourself, a big red digital display with a bunch of loose wires in a brief-case looking box is awful like a Hollywood-style representation of a bomb. Everyone jumped to play the race and religion cards and try and paint the teachers and police as idiots and bigots, but in my mind, they were probably acting responsibly and erring on the side of caution to protect the rest of their students, just in case. “This wouldn’t have happened if Ahmed were white,” they say. We’re supposed to be sensitive to school violence, but apparently religious and racial sensitivity trumps that. At least we have another clue about how the sensitivity and moral outrage pecking order lies.

Because, is it possible, that maybe, just maybe, this was actually a hoax bomb? A silly prank that was taken the wrong way? That the media then ran with, and everyone else got carried away? Maybe there wasn’t even any racial or religious bias on the parts of the teachers and police.

Well, yes, it was a ridiculous overreaction. Arresting a kid for having a clock? For what crime? Handcuffing him? If the charge is that the kid lied about its manufacture, in what universe is that a colorable crime? And if the point was it might have been a hoax bomb (when the kid consistently declared otherwise, per the Dallas Morning News report), who made that determination? Subsequent investigation prompted Irving police chief Larry Boyd to say "there’s no evidence to support the perception he intended to create alarm". In other words, the only people stirring up trouble were the paranoid panicky teachers, administrators, and police at the high school. (Wait, police at a suburban high school?) I get his point that "none of us were there", but if we take media reports seriously (i.e. based on evidence presented), this is a zero-tolerance nightmare. To dismiss criticism of the actions of the officials on the scene as specious ("we jump to conclusions and assume we’re experts") is equally misguided. The Muhumad case joins a long list of official freakouts over very little, and if anything, should open a dialogue about the wisdom of using police to perfect society.

No, Freddie, Kickstarters Aren't A "Swindle" (Necessarily)

Fredrik deBoer has a rant up about the sequal to the PC game Divinity: Original Sin (unimaginitively titled Divinity: Original Sin II), which is being published, as its predecessor, as a Kickstarter. DeBoer, who so far as I have ever known, has never run a company or had to manage assets, calls this a "swindle":

Let’s be 100% clear about what this is. This isn’t fans helping the little guy out. This isn’t charity. It’s not the townsfolk banding together to save the local community theater. It’s a for-profit company that just had a very successful product placing the financial risk of their next product on the people they’re going to be selling the product to. Once upon a time, in ye olden days, corporations that wanted a chance to make profits also had to accept the risk of a failed product. Now, hey, just crowdfund; place the risk burden on the very consumers that you want to wring profits out of in the first place! What could go wrong? Typically, criticism of crowdfunding turns on the possibility of failed product launches, such as in this great Gideon Lewis-Kraus piece on an overly ambitious coffeemaker, or the ubiquitous risk of out-and-out fraud. But I find these successes more disturbing: why not just keep going back to the well, no matter how profitable your company is, and reap the profits free of risk?

 No, not free of risk; we don't know, specifically, how much (if any) of their own capital they're putting into the product. But even if that figure is zero, deBoer's argument comes around, essentially, to "for historical reasons", i.e. because a thing has always been done a certain way, it must always be done in the future the same way. But even this utterly ignores the existing real-world examples in which customers put up risk capital in exchange for future goods and services: magazine subscriptions, community supported agriculture, even good faith money on building construction. Instead of Kickstarter supporters being patsies, as deBoer asserts, they're helping the creators mitigate risk and thereby aid in the creation of products those customers want. A great example of this mitigation was the highly successful Exploding Kittens card game; as Ben Kuchera in Polygon wrote,

If Exploding Kittens' creators wanted to print 420,000 copies of the game and ship them, hoping they would sell, the project would cost around $6.3 million, with no guarantee of return. Using Kickstarter allowed them to not only promote the project, but use sales to fund the game's creation, removing that risk and allowing them to increase the profit margin.

While everyone involved with Exploding Kittens will likely earn a very nice payday, the number of copies sold and the profit made from them won't be ridiculous; a better word is meaningful. Kickstarter allowed them to scale expectations and sales while removing much of the upfront cost and risk. It's not a perversion of the crowdfunding model; it's a great example of a team using it well.

Now, is that to say Kickstarters always work? No, of course not. One particular example that some friends got burned on was a proposed biopic of the dog trainer Dick Russell, Dog Man; reading the team's biographies, the title "producer" nowhere appeared at the time. (It is a separate job for a reason.) There's clearly interest in highlighting such failures, as for instance this spreadsheet documenting all game launches funded for $75,000 or more, or Kickfailure, a website dedicated to documenting notable failures. But none of these mean that Kickstarted projects are intrinsically fraud, or amount to exploitation of the customer (save for cases of fraud or incompetence).

Trans-Pacific Pact, Destroyer Of Worlds

Some bullety stuff now that the "fast track" on the Trans-Pacific Pact has been greenlit:

• The TPP will undermine US law, including Supreme Court decisions, despite BS assurances from its corporate architects.

  In practice, this means state governments -- including things like research universities -- are able to infringe on patents in the public interest, claiming sovereign immunity in state courts against such claims. We've pointed out in the past how hypocritical it is that state universities frequently use such sovereign immunity claims to avoid lawsuits, while at the same time being some of the most aggressive patent trolls in going after others (with the University of California being a prime example). However, it is the law of the land and in the Constitution that sovereign immunity on things like patents cannot be abridged.

• The Prime Minister of New Zealand admits drug prices will rise under the TPP, despite the fact that Kiwis already are facing shortages of some medicine and high prices for others. Here's the AARP:

  Specifically, AARP objects to intellectual property provisions in the draft TPP agreement that unduly restrict competition by delaying consumers’ access to lower-cost generic drugs. These anticompetitive provisions include extending brand drug patent protections through “evergreening” drug products that provide little to no new value and prolong high prescription drug costs for consumers, linking approval to market generic or biosimilar drugs to existing patents in a way that protects only brand drugs, and increasing data exclusivity periods for biologics that further delays access by other companies to develop generic versions of these extremely high-cost drugs. These provisions are all designed to ensure monopoly control by brand-name drug companies.

• Like You Expected Anything Else Dep't: The USTR is listening exclusively to corporate interests while shoving public interest groups aside.

Sigh.

Previously: The Right's Insane Distortions About Trade Agreement Secrecy.

The Thankless, Expensive Task Of Undoing The Drug War

Techdirt has a heartbreaking post about Massachusetts forensic drug lab technician Annie Dookhan, who was a real people pleaser, at least among the police and prosecuting attorneys of that state. She

... had been falsifying drug tests (e.g., claiming that samples contained narcotics without testing them and even adding cocaine to samples to get a positive result when prior testing came back negative). She had worked at the lab for nearly a decade, and these revelations called into question the outcomes in tens of thousands of cases.

How many cases were involved? The list extends to 40,000 known thus far, a number amplified because

[Dookhan's bosses] weren't looking for a problem at the drug lab. They were looking for productivity. [The Massachusetts forensic lab at Jamaica] Plain's suspiciously-fast output wasn't greeted with suspicion. It was greeted with praise and an increased workload.

The report shows that the Hinton lab leaned heavily on Dookhan’s productivity. Supervisors lauded her work ethic and assigned her an increasing share of tests.

“From January 1, 2004, through December 31, 2011, Dookhan was assigned 25.3% of all analyses in the Drug Lab and completed 21.8% of all tests conducted by staff,” the report said.

No one has a budget this big. "There's a point when a problem is still manageable," Techdirt author Tim Cushing continues, "and there's a point when it becomes too big to correct within the confines of the system that helped create it."

Now consider that the FBI has a similar problem involving hair evidence.

Deconstructing The Latest 1-In-5-Are-Raped Poll

The Weekly Standard has a great takedown of a poll by the Washington Post purporting to resurrect the hoary and multiply-discredited 1-in-5 rape/sexual assault statistic for young women on campus; it's old wine in new bottles, leavened with dubious anecdotes even as the lead example:

But the end of the article lets slip that in fact this, the paper’s lead example of a campus sexual assault, seems instead to have been a regretful, but not atypical, drunken hookup that neither party remembers well. The scary bleeding was apparently self-inflicted when Sienkowski fell out of her loft bed onto the floor, while the male was asleep. The person she brought back to her room wasn’t a Michigan State student (and might not have been a college student at all). And, the Post disclosed in the last 120 words of a 2,870-word article, even Sienkowski conceded that “she doesn’t know for sure whether she had wanted sex in the moment.” She said this after seeing the police report, including photographs of the hickeys that the accused said her lips had branded on his neck as evidence that she “was very into everything that was happening.”

David French at the New Republic Online goes into more detail on the leading questions and assumptions in the poll:

First, the actual poll question was not limited to “sexual assault” (a far more explosive term) but instead specifically asked respondents about sexual assault or “unwanted sexual contact.” Unwanted sexual contact is not a synonym for sexual assault. In fact, the term is so broad that it can encompass behaviors that are not only not criminal, but may not — depending on the circumstances — even constitute unlawful sexual harassment (which the Supreme Court has said requires proof of conduct so “severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively bars the victim’s access to an educational opportunity or benefit.”)

... These definitions don’t come close to matching the legal definition of the various sex crimes prohibited by state laws... no, one in five college women have not told surveyors that they were “sexually assaulted.” The negative experiences encompassed in the definitions include everything from entirely lawful behavior, to sexual harassment, to actual sex crimes. The numbers are troubling, to be sure, but even the surveyed students themselves don’t see sexual assault as a crisis — only 37 percent of them described it as a problem on campus. (A much greater number of them — 56 percent — were concerned with alcohol and drug use.) In fact, large majorities of students gave their schools an “A” or “B” for their handling of sexual assault complaints.

The point, of course, is to feed the panic machine that has been in operation since the 1980's (and suspiciously invariant since then) and the bureaucracy jobs program that even now develops its own tools. It has nothing to do with actual crime, and everything to do with seeking sinecures.

Bankruptcy, The Key To Solving The Student Loan Debt Crisis

Yesterday's piece on Lee Siegel's narcissistic views about money was by no means unique, as Bre Payton at The Federalist rightly had similarly contemptuous things to say about Siegel's behavior. But I wanted to take a moment and address a remark I see frequently repeated: "popularizing student loan fraud certainly won’t bring about the change he says he’s hoping for", and a section header that reads, "Refusing to Pay Won't Improve Higher Education". I think this is wrong for some very basic reasons.

First, it is largely impossible to discharge student loan debt through normal bankruptcy. This has several unfortunate side effects:

1. It makes such loans especially attractive to banks, who are all but guaranteed repayment.
2. It means banks need to do far less due diligence on the loans than other forms of debt.
3. It adds to the tsunami of money entering universities, providing no incentives to reduce actual costs.

 The straightforward way to deal with college costs is to restore student loans as ordinary debt for bankruptcy purposes. This will have three salutary effects:

1. It will allow those under crippling levels of debt to escape through established legal means.
2. It will force banks to perform due diligence on institutions, degree programs, and students prior to writing loans based on prior loss experience. Want to go into six figures of debt to get a degree in puppetry or gender studies? Maybe you need to ask your rich aunt about that.
3. Finally, as banks turn off the money spigot holding up the college-industrial complex, universities will need to rationalize their degree programs and overhead to fit with the new market realities.

And the last point is the most important one. For all the money roaring into colleges these days, it's unclear what students receive in exchange for exponentially increasing tuition. But we have a pretty good idea about what universities are doing with it, and it's not adding new instructors: mostly, it appears they're engaged in bureaucratic empire building, with administrative staff positions growing more than twice as fast as student populations.

But critics say the unrelenting addition of administrators and professional staffs can’t help but to have driven this steep increase.

At the very least, they say, the continued hiring of nonacademic employees belies university presidents’ insistence that they are doing everything they can to improve efficiency and hold down costs.

“It’s a lie. It’s a lie. It’s a lie,” said Richard Vedder, an economist and director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity.

“I wouldn’t buy a used car from a university president,” said Vedder. “They’ll say, ‘We’re making moves to cut costs,’ and mention something about energy-efficient lightbulbs, and ignore the new assistant to the assistant to the associate vice provost they just hired.”

This is exactly the sort of  thinking that drives never-ending tuition hikes: with no need to think about costs, colleges don't. Absent people walking away from their product (my second point above), there can be no rationalization; hitting them where it hurts, in their wallet, is the only way this will change.

Please note I am in no way advocating bankruptcy as a desirable end; the sanctity of contracted debt is important. Siegel, particularly, stands out as an entitled mooch. But many young people have amassed huge debts in service to universities that cavalierly ignore the burdens they inflict. For them, and for future generations, it's time to restore some sanity.

Update: Scott Alexander has a fun metaphor for the current situation, likening it to Dutch tulip mania with the added twist of subsidy. He also goes in to review what medical school looks like in Ireland vs. the US; in the US, you have to get through an undergraduate degree of some sort prior to going to medical school, but in Ireland it's treated as a sort of trade school, which anyone may enter upon graduation from high school. The US approach has some awful side effects:

Americans take eight years to become doctors. Irishmen can do it in four, and achieve the same result. Each year of higher education at a good school – let’s say an Ivy, doctors don’t study at Podunk Community College – costs about $50,000. So American medical students are paying an extra $200,000 for…what?

Remember, a modest amount of the current health care crisis is caused by doctors’ crippling level of debt. Socially responsible doctors often consider less lucrative careers helping the needy, right up until the bill comes due from their education and they realize they have to make a lot of money right now. We took one look at that problem and said “You know, let’s make doctors pay an extra $200,000 for no reason.”