Jonathan Chait, Oppressor And Oppressed

Jonathan Chait, one of my least favorite columnists thanks to his willful obtuseness (especially in his coverage of Obamacare), recently wrote a long piece at New York on the subject of free speech. It's been widely praised (in libertarian circles, Matt Welch was one such), and in the limited sphere of his criticism of fellow liberals, with good reason. But as Sean Davis at The Federalist points out, Chait's insistence on tolerance pretty much ends once you get outside his ideological comfort zone. Alex Pareene spies some of the exact same problem from the other direction, writing that now

Chait, like many liberal commentators with his background, is used to writing off left-wing critics and reserving his real writerly firepower for (frequently deserving) right-wingers. That was, for years, how things worked at the center-left opinion journalism shops, because it was simply assumed that no one important—no one who really matters—took the opinions of people to the left of the center-left opinion shop seriously. That was a safe and largely correct assumption. But the destruction of the magazine industry and the growth of the open-forum internet have amplified formerly marginal voices. Now, in other words, writers of color can be just as condescending and dismissive of Chait as he always was toward the left. And he hates it.

I find Pareene's review of the exchange with Ta-Nehisi Coates to be much less satisfying; claiming he "embarrass[ed] himself" largely amounts to exactly the kind of dismissive and condescending attitude Chait condemns. (And Coates, for his part, is a man running out some very old ideas while he is running out of time; what do reparations for slavery mean to a Mexican immigrant forced to pay for them?) But the weirdest response so far has to be from Fredrik deBoer, who flat out calls Chait "a jerk who somehow manages to be both condescending and wounded" and then cites examples of exactly the kind of narrow-minded ideological beatdowns on offer from the modern left. This one, in particular,

I have seen, with my own two eyes, a 20 year old black man, a track athlete who tried to fit organizing meetings around classes and his ridiculous practice schedule (for which he received a scholarship worth a quarter of tuition), be told not to return to those meetings because he said he thought there were such a thing as innate gender differences. He wasn’t a homophobe, or transphobic, or a misogynist. It turns out that 20 year olds from rural South Carolina aren’t born with an innate understanding of the intersectionality playbook. But those were the terms deployed against him, those and worse. So that was it; he was gone.

Yes, well. It's hard, reading that and his other examples, to understand how Chait "gets the basic nature of language policing wrong". Worse, since Chait appears to embrace a liberalism committed to free speech whose "glory rests in its confidence in the ultimate power of reason, not coercion, to triumph", this puts deBoer in the uncomfortable position of appearing to support speech codes. Chait's indifference to actual freedom of speech treads frequently in the gray area of criticism, i.e. the sort of thing Sarah Palin used to gripe about when she said dumb things and expected no one would notice, but with the stridency of critics who brook no heterodox opinions, it lives in another area code altogether. If you want free speech, support that. Criticism is what we have instead of censorship. And if the left is intellectually intolerant, if it has its secret codes of intersectionality and religious, gender and racial orthodoxy that none within its walls dare broach, perhaps it's worth examining why someone like Chait, who cites many of the same problems, should also get slammed as "a jerk" and "an asshole" by a fellow traveler merely for pointing that out.

Update: Elizabeth Nolan Brown has a nice roundup of more lefty reactions to the Chait piece. Unsurprisingly, neither Jezebel nor Vox were too pleased with it.

Chastising the "radical left" (or "radical feminists") for this sort of thing only muddies things up. It is very much mainstream liberalism, or at least one branch of it, taking up the p.c. mantle these days.

Similarly, I think it's a mistake to read this nouveau-p.c. cult as coming from academia. Sure, it shows up there frequently, but where are 18-year-olds taking their cultural cues from? It's not professors but media and online culture. As Sessions suggests, "the misguided excesses of the Social Media Left" are in very large part a product of "the dynamics of the Internet." In part, this means the way Twitter and Facebook incentivize certain sorts of attitudes and actions (in the vein Sanchez mentioned above). And in part, it's a product of the fact that "identity-based outrage is now one of the most reliable sources of clicks and Facebook shares" for the mainstream press.

The Overuse Of "Hater": No, It's Not "Cool" To Hate Breeders

One of the most pernicious tendencies in recent years has been that of inserting "hater" and all its variants into various kinds of discourse. Google gives it as "a negative or critical person", but I incline to add "for irrational reasons"; that is, a "hater" is someone who doesn't actually have an argument or evidence or facts behind them; they merely hate, for whatever reason. I bring this up because of this blog post about how "Hating Dog Breeders Is Cool Now", by which I infer that even small-time breeders are terrible humans (never mind apparent puppy millers that the GoDaddy ad actually lampoons as insensitive and commercial). In case my comment gets eaten or rejected, I cut and paste it below in its entirety.

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The feud to define “reputable breeder” is a long way from over, and probably never will be, but it is utterly inconceivable that any such would ever agree to sell to a third party. I cannot discern the author’s position on this matter, but the lack of condemnation of the practice comes very close to at least tolerating it.

This is a conversation that the AKC has been decidedly absent from. The biggest name in purebred and well-bred dogs in the United States seems reluctant to campaign for the people that support them. Yes, the AKC has a part in fighting legislation occasionally. But a group with so much reach should be doing so much more, in my humble opinion. Let’s figure out a way to help them do it, or just do it ourselves if they are unwilling to.

This is a futile pursuit. The AKC is dying, slowly, a victim of its own “success”, which mostly is opposite of any rational and scientific concern for dogs, a subject I wrote about some months ago. (An even better source is my friend Heather Houlahan in 2010 in her essay, “The Emperor’s Striptease”.) The AKC is at war with itself; it cannot tell the puppy millers to get lost, as they generate so many registrations. Neither can it blow off the Westminster participants and their multi-thousand-dollar campaigns. But the two have fundamentally different and opposing interests. The question therefore becomes, which breeders?

4) Advertise: Advertise your puppies absolutely everywhere that will allow you to do so. Facebook, Kijiji, Puppyfind, Ebay, Hoobly.

My question is, why are you creating puppies for which you had not ascertained qualified homes long before the prospective pairing? My background is in working dogs — herding dogs, particularly — and no breeder of my acquaintance with any repute would sell their dogs in such a manner.

Rule By Telephone Sanitizers

A busy Tuesday precluded me from posting anything about this Harvard Business Review essay (hat tip to Robyn Weisman) asking a deep, sad, and entirely relevant question: when do regulators become more important than customers?

While working with a huge Russian hydrocarbon company in Texas last year, our innovation conversation quickly zeroed in on customers. Who was the energy giant’s most important customer? Which customer had the biggest impact on new value creation? What customer would matter most in five years?

The wide-ranging English/Russian debate raged for 20 minutes. Then one of the engineering executives, a fracking enthusiast and unconventional extraction technologies champion, spoke up. The answer, he declared, was now obvious. The company’s most important customer — by far — was Russia’s government. Strategic success required pleasing Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin.

The room went quiet. That single comment rebooted the entire discussion. No one disagreed. The innovation roadmap was hauled out and reviewed less in the spotlight of global opportunities than the cold reflection of domestic politics. State satisfaction mattered more than market disruption.

"Your most important customers", Michael Schrage goes on, "may not be the people who buy your products but the ones who regulate your company and industry." And the world is filled with people all but sure they need to inflict their vision on your company, both from without — and from within e.g. Emma Watson, whose heart's desire is to add another layer of telephone sanitizers. That such people desperately need to be fired should be trivially obvious. The Constitution as written was engineered to prevent the proliferation of dickless meddlers, but the modern regulatory state is a kind of agar, and we all are in the Petri dish.

The Fantasist's Pony

Greg Sargent today has a longish piece that pretty well captures the level of pants-down delusion Obamacare supporters are left with in opposing King v. Burwell (which they have to pray goes for the defense). It's pretty harebrained, but most of these arguments are, too:

If Congress intended to threaten states with the loss of subsidies, why were so many government officials — including many Republicans in Congress and even officials in the states themselves — entirely unaware that any such threat existed, for many, many months after the law passed, at the very moment when those state officials were grappling intensely with the implications of the law for them?

The obvious rejoinder to this is, because nobody reads the damned bills.  This is a convenient and bogus excuse for what appears entirely to be either bad drafting, or malicious drafting; the Jonathan Gruber videos make it clear it was the latter. The depressing part, of course, is this:

This week, a number of states will file a brief siding with the government, arguing that nothing in the ACA indicated opting for the federal exchange would cost them subsidies. They will argue — as in a similar, previous brief — that the challengers’ interpretation raises serious constitutional questions: The states were never given clear warning that the failure to set up exchanges could bring them serious harm, and thus the Supreme Court should opt for the Constitutional interpretation — the government’s — when that option exists.

That many of these are Republican-majority states should call into question a lot of the assumptions about that party's bona fides in the small-government department, but no matter.

To this argument, the challengers respond that of course the states didn’t think they’d lose subsidies, because the IRS rule — first proposed in late summer of 2011 and made official in the spring of 2012 — told them so, a key reason many states declined to set up exchanges. Thus, the challengers argue, if invalidating the IRS rule now would hurt millions in these states, that’s the fault of the IRS’s original act of lawlessness, i.e., departing from the ACA’s plain text to make subsidies available in them.

Well, duh.

... [L]aw professor Laurence Tribe suggests, that the Justices could conclude this case is about more than statutory draftsmanship, and see at stake momentous questions about the relationship between the federal government and the states.

Tribe supports very expansive readings of law, which is to say, he is an enemy of textualism. King is about the rule of law in no small way; if it fails, the law is whatever the mandarins say on a given day. Somewhere in the room full of shit is a pony, they're convinced, and will go to their graves believing.

The North Star

Amelia Earhart:

The most difficult thing is the decision to act. The rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life and the procedure. The process is its own reward.

 It seems to me that a great deal of the "we must have more women in STEM careers" chanting is driven by people who assume that other things than the work itself will prove rewarding. This is a difference between intrinsic and extrinsic reward, and the former will always outmatch the latter for the very best in any career.

When Did You Stop Beating Your Wife?

I was not a little shocked to see Mary Anne Franks make a terrifically disingenuous argument about Arizona's recently overturned, insanely broad revenge porn law:

But the American Civil Liberties Union sued in September, arguing House Bill 2515 was so broad it made anyone who distributes or displays a nude image without explicit permission guilty of a felony. U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton issued an order putting the law on hold in November as part of an agreement between the Arizona attorney general's office and the groups that sued. The order blocks enforcement of the law to allow the Legislature time to work on changes.

The ACLU sued on behalf of several bookstores and publishing associations, the owner of the Village Voice and 12 other alternative newsweeklies nationwide, and the National Press Photographers Association.

The groups sent Mesnard and legislative leaders a letter early this month suggesting changes to the law to address its concerns that the law was overly broad. They said, for instance, that the law would make it a felony to publish a book containing a Pulitzer Prize-winning Vietnam war photo of a burned and nude little girl running from her bombed village.

As Mark W. Bennett writes,

The argument is either ignorant or dishonest. Franks doesn’t get to plead ignorance here. She knows the argument is dishonest and she makes it anyway.

This strikes me as a constant with many feminist lawyers, as for example the horrible Alexandra Brodsky essay that dispenses with due process by substituting a totalitarian and ironic "fair process". Brodsky is presumably conversant enough with the law that she should know the difference — or perhaps does and doesn't care. Similar issues hold with Russlyn Ali and her "Dear Colleague" letter (PDF). It reminds one of nothing so much as the awful, complex question, "When did you stop beating your wife?" The ends are what is important; the means, not so much.

Snarking At Leslie More Rigorously

What an awesome rejoinder to Leslie et al. (PDF):

This is the paper that concludes that “women are underrepresented in fields whose practitioners believe that raw, innate talent is the main requirement for success because women are stereotyped as not possessing that talent.” They find that some survey questions intended to capture whether people believe a field requires innate talent correlate with percent women in that field at a fairly impressive level of r = -0.60

The media, science blogosphere, et cetera has taken this result and run with it. A very small sample includes: National Science Foundation: Belief In Raw Brilliance May Decrease Diversity. Science Mag: the “misguided” belief that certain scientific fields require brilliance helps explain the underrepresentation of women in those fields. Reuters: Fields That Cherish Genius Shun Women. LearnU: Study Findings Point To Source Of Gender Gap In STEM. Scientific American: Hidden Hurdle Looms For Women In Science. Chronicle Of Higher Education: Disciplines That Expect Brilliance Tend To Punish Women. News Works: Academic Gender Gaps Tied To Stereotypes About Genius. Mathbabe: “The genius myth” keeps women out of science. Vocativ: Women Avoid Fields Full Of Self-Appointed Geniuses. And so on in that vein.

Okay. Imagine a study with the following methodology. You survey a bunch of people to get their perceptions of who is a smoker (“97% of his close friends agree Bob smokes”). Then you correlate those numbers with who gets lung cancer. Your statistics program lights up like a Christmas tree with a bunch of super-strong correlations. You conclude “Perception of being a smoker causes lung cancer”, and make up a theory about how negative stereotypes of smokers cause stress which depresses the immune system. The media reports that as “Smoking Doesn’t Cause Cancer, Stereotypes Do”.

This is the basic principle behind Leslie et al (2015).

The obvious counterargument is that people’s perceptions may be accurate, so your perception measure might be a proxy for a real thing. In the smoking study, we expect that people’s perception of smoking only correlates with lung cancer because it correlates with actual smoking which itself correlates with lung cancer. You would expect to find that perceived smoking correlates with lung cancer less than actual smoking, because the perceived smoking correlation is just the actual smoking correlation plus some noise resulting from misperceptions.

Alexander goes on to analytically dispose of this silly argument by looking at GRE Quantitative scores and finding — shockingly — "a correlation of r = -0.82 (p = 0.0003) between average GRE Quantitative score and percent women in a discipline". In other words, the better you score in those areas, the more likely you are to end up in a STEM career, and men typically are the ones on the right side of that graph (with higher scores). There's a lot more solid analysis there, including the observation that Leslie overweighted verbal and writing scores. It's well worth the read.