I may edit this later to be a proper, stand-alone article, but for now, I'm just going to paste it and give you some background. I used to be a cop, and my little brother and his wife still are. My brother's Facebook posts are pretty much limited to pictures of American flags and memes celebrating the heroism of police and military personnel. It's the kind of starry-eyed, patriotic stuff I might have posted when I was a ten-year-old Cub Scout if we'd had Facebook back then. On one of these recent posts--a video monologue by a young woman gushing about how wonderful police were and attacking anyone who felt less intensely about it than she did--one commenter dared to offer that, while police work was indeed both dangerous and noble, it wasn't the most dangerous job in the world, statistically speaking. Specifically, he cited construction work as being more dangerous. Predictably, there was a vicious dogpile as law enforcement officers and those who love them tore the man to shreds for having the temerity to share such an offensive fact. The poor guy scrambled to clarify that he had no ill will towards the police, but it wasn't enough. They got nasty, so he got nasty back, and it completely fell apart. At that point, I posted this:
Saturday, April 11, 2015
Thursday, April 2, 2015
Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics, Again
Reading a few articles over on everydayfeminism.com, I'm overwhelmed by the logical fallacies and failures of reasoning that the readers are supposed to just swallow without question. Permit me to "mansplain" one of the more problematic ones.
Let's say we have ten targets, and we line them up left to right along a wall. Standing just a few feet away, I take a bow and arrow, aim at the target furthest to the right, shoot, and hit that one target. Ten percent of the targets on that wall have now been hit by an arrow.
This does NOT mean, however, that, "If you're a target on that wall, you have a ten percent chance of being hit by an arrow." It means that the one I aimed at had a very likely chance of getting hit (the exact percentage depends on such variables as my marksmanship and the quality of the archery equipment), while the ones I wasn't aiming at were very unlikely to get hit at all. The chances that my arrow would have left the bow, taken a sharp left turn, zoomed to the target furthest to the left, taken a sharp right turn, and then planted itself in that far-left target are something close to zero percent.
And yet that's exactly the sort of assertion being made when they say that a person of color has a 44%-50% chance of going to prison or that a woman has a one-in-three chance of being raped. It presumes that there is a sole, relevant variable--in these examples, being a person of color and being a woman, respectively. For that to be true, we have to assume that because President Obama is a person of color, he has the same chance of going to prison as does a black gang member who sells crack in front of a police station, or that an old woman alone on a sailboat in the middle of the ocean is as likely to be raped as is a teenage girl in sub-Saharan Africa who's been kidnapped by enemy soldiers. That kind of claim doesn't pass the most basic of credibility tests.
Let's say we have ten targets, and we line them up left to right along a wall. Standing just a few feet away, I take a bow and arrow, aim at the target furthest to the right, shoot, and hit that one target. Ten percent of the targets on that wall have now been hit by an arrow.
This does NOT mean, however, that, "If you're a target on that wall, you have a ten percent chance of being hit by an arrow." It means that the one I aimed at had a very likely chance of getting hit (the exact percentage depends on such variables as my marksmanship and the quality of the archery equipment), while the ones I wasn't aiming at were very unlikely to get hit at all. The chances that my arrow would have left the bow, taken a sharp left turn, zoomed to the target furthest to the left, taken a sharp right turn, and then planted itself in that far-left target are something close to zero percent.
And yet that's exactly the sort of assertion being made when they say that a person of color has a 44%-50% chance of going to prison or that a woman has a one-in-three chance of being raped. It presumes that there is a sole, relevant variable--in these examples, being a person of color and being a woman, respectively. For that to be true, we have to assume that because President Obama is a person of color, he has the same chance of going to prison as does a black gang member who sells crack in front of a police station, or that an old woman alone on a sailboat in the middle of the ocean is as likely to be raped as is a teenage girl in sub-Saharan Africa who's been kidnapped by enemy soldiers. That kind of claim doesn't pass the most basic of credibility tests.
Thursday, March 5, 2015
Some Thoughts on Netanyahu's Speech to Congress
- Liberal pundits in America have gone on at great length about how Netanyahu disrespected Obama. From what I've heard so far, he's expressed nothing but praise, admiration, and deep gratitude towards President Obama.
- Netanyahu seems not to be aware that, unlike him, we are not at war against Islam.
- He lists Iran's support of terror while remaining silent on the issue of Israel's daily terror against the Palestinians.
- He says that the greatest threat to the world is "the marriage of militant Islam with nuclear weapons." Could it possibly be that he's never heard of Pakistan? Pakistan, which has had nukes for ages, was hiding Osama bin Laden in his last days, and they've never nuked anyone.
- He goes on about how Iran is not to be trusted because it's not forthright about it's military nuclear ambitions. What, Mr. Netanyahu, is Israel's nuclear capability? Mind if we send some inspectors to verify?
- "Why should Iran's radical regime change for the better when it can enjoy the best of both worlds--aggression abroad, prosperity at home?" Like us!
- Speaking of which, where does the US, which has more nukes than anyone, get off telling other countries they shouldn't have them?
- "...my country, Israel, the one and only Jewish state!" How many Jewish states does he think there should be? Why should there be even one? Our nation was founded on a separation of church and state. To us, theocracy is tyranny. Why should we stick our necks out defending the very sort of tyranny we established this country to be free from? I'd be a lot more supportive of Israel's right to exist if they'd abolish state religion, end religious apartheid, and weed out all traces of their ideology of Jewish supremacy.
- "For the first time in a hundred generations, we, the Jewish people, can defend ourselves!" With billions of dollars of American military aid, so long as we don't form any treaties with Iran.
- Wait a minute...is he saying that the Jews twenty years ago couldn't defend themselves? Forty years ago? Sixty years ago?
- Could you imagine Christian fundamentalists in the GOP making this big a deal over the Pope? Would we support the Vatican having nukes and taking billions of dollars of our tax money, especially if it was oppressing the Italians, waging war on Tunisia, and rattling sabers at Libya and Algeria while talking about the Christian struggle to resist extermination?
Obama's response:
tldr, re:Obama's response: Yeah, we like Israel, but Netanyahu has no ideas on how to keep Iran from getting the bomb.
Sunday, March 1, 2015
Relevant Skills
I think it's tragic that, in a culture as centered as ours is around video entertainment, when kids put on plays in school and study Shakespeare and Miller and so on, all they study is theater and not cinema. And a good many teachers, even when I was a kid, *play movies in class* for the kids to watch. Even when they're studying a play, the teacher will play a film adaptation of the play. But when they walk the kids through the motions, it's always for a live performance, not a film. Any actor will tell you that stage acting and acting for a camera are totally different beasts, yet most film actors get their start on stage, because that's the only acting experience schools generally offer.
I say it's tragic because it walls off a huge, lucrative industry into the realm of the unknown and untouchable. I think when most people think about "working in movies" or TV, they're only thinking about the talent. But where does a kid go to learn how to mix sound? How many high school art classes teach kids to build movie props? How many vo-tech kids studying electricity even know what a gaffer is?
When I was a kid, I wasn't interested in acting, but I liked to pull the ropes to open and close the curtains (and in doing so, I ended up learning everybody's lines). Broadway is maybe the one place in the whole world that has any use for that, and I'm sure they have motorized curtains now.
But how many places worldwide do they record commercials? Nightly news programs? I've seen and heard of kids acting out reporting the news, but that's all they do--write a script and read it in front of an audience. They don't build a set, work the lights and sound, record it, and broadcast it. They don't promote it. They don't have to hire and manage the crew and the talent. They don't find the stories and cull them and decide what to lead with and make it all fit in the allotted time between commercial breaks.
When I worked at Columbus State, one of the jobs I volunteered for was asset inventory. Every piece of equipment the college owned that was worth more than some certain amount of money has to be tracked and has a bar code physically attached to it. So I'd go around putting on stickers or checking serial numbers on everything from pianos and digital projectors to gas chromatographs and airplanes. This led me to discover that the college has its own television studio tucked away in the back of the library. It was almost never used. I was told that they used to have a class that used it back in the sixties or seventies, and that they'd use it to televise a meeting or something now and again, but that the students no longer used it regularly, even though the equipment all seemed pretty modern. It's like they continued to funnel resources into this, as though they needed to think up something to spend money on, but they didn't bother to use it to train people to go into broadcasting.
When a kid expresses an interest in making movies or TV shows, if we assume she means acting, we dismiss it as a silly ambition, because actually becoming rich and famous as an actor is a long shot. But you know who pretty reliably gets rich in that industry? The people who PAY the actors. And even if you're not looking to get famous or rich, doing the tech work behind the scenes must be steady work in a culture where people spend a good chunk of their waking lives living vicariously through screens.
Maybe it's more transparent in Los Angeles or New York. But given that a studio is the modern equivalent of a printing press, wide participation in this form of media seems pretty basic to our democracy. I think this is why Youtube has become such a sensation. It does for video broadcasting what the Internet did for publishing. But if you look at the quality of most of the stuff on Youtube, it's clear that most of the people generating content are completely ignorant of how to do it well. And let's face it--a video that's well produced is going to be more enjoyable to watch than one that isn't. People will feel more comfortable sharing it, and it'll get more views. Simply having the presence of mind to use a tripod makes a video more watchable. And, like a person who dresses well being taken more seriously than someone who doesn't, the more professional the quality of a video is, the more seriously the viewers will take the content.
I say it's tragic because it walls off a huge, lucrative industry into the realm of the unknown and untouchable. I think when most people think about "working in movies" or TV, they're only thinking about the talent. But where does a kid go to learn how to mix sound? How many high school art classes teach kids to build movie props? How many vo-tech kids studying electricity even know what a gaffer is?
When I was a kid, I wasn't interested in acting, but I liked to pull the ropes to open and close the curtains (and in doing so, I ended up learning everybody's lines). Broadway is maybe the one place in the whole world that has any use for that, and I'm sure they have motorized curtains now.
But how many places worldwide do they record commercials? Nightly news programs? I've seen and heard of kids acting out reporting the news, but that's all they do--write a script and read it in front of an audience. They don't build a set, work the lights and sound, record it, and broadcast it. They don't promote it. They don't have to hire and manage the crew and the talent. They don't find the stories and cull them and decide what to lead with and make it all fit in the allotted time between commercial breaks.
When I worked at Columbus State, one of the jobs I volunteered for was asset inventory. Every piece of equipment the college owned that was worth more than some certain amount of money has to be tracked and has a bar code physically attached to it. So I'd go around putting on stickers or checking serial numbers on everything from pianos and digital projectors to gas chromatographs and airplanes. This led me to discover that the college has its own television studio tucked away in the back of the library. It was almost never used. I was told that they used to have a class that used it back in the sixties or seventies, and that they'd use it to televise a meeting or something now and again, but that the students no longer used it regularly, even though the equipment all seemed pretty modern. It's like they continued to funnel resources into this, as though they needed to think up something to spend money on, but they didn't bother to use it to train people to go into broadcasting.
When a kid expresses an interest in making movies or TV shows, if we assume she means acting, we dismiss it as a silly ambition, because actually becoming rich and famous as an actor is a long shot. But you know who pretty reliably gets rich in that industry? The people who PAY the actors. And even if you're not looking to get famous or rich, doing the tech work behind the scenes must be steady work in a culture where people spend a good chunk of their waking lives living vicariously through screens.
Maybe it's more transparent in Los Angeles or New York. But given that a studio is the modern equivalent of a printing press, wide participation in this form of media seems pretty basic to our democracy. I think this is why Youtube has become such a sensation. It does for video broadcasting what the Internet did for publishing. But if you look at the quality of most of the stuff on Youtube, it's clear that most of the people generating content are completely ignorant of how to do it well. And let's face it--a video that's well produced is going to be more enjoyable to watch than one that isn't. People will feel more comfortable sharing it, and it'll get more views. Simply having the presence of mind to use a tripod makes a video more watchable. And, like a person who dresses well being taken more seriously than someone who doesn't, the more professional the quality of a video is, the more seriously the viewers will take the content.
Thursday, January 15, 2015
Explaining Natural Selection to Believers in Intelligent Design
Believers in intelligent design often argue with great passion and conviction that when an organism perfectly fits its environment or its ecological niche, that's proof that it "couldn't have been an accident." Just as it couldn't be an accident that a particular key fits a particular lock, they believe that random chance can't account for any two things in nature fitting together so perfectly.
It's rubbish, of course, but their argument makes intuitive sense if you don't understand natural selection. They think, apparently, that random genetic mutation is the only factor in evolution, and don't fully appreciate how environmental forces can carve a species into shape. I've thought of a few ways to illustrate it.
Cookies. Gingerbread men aren't the result of balls of dough dropping and some of them randomly flattening out into the shape of gingerbread men. Genetic variability would be like dropping a big wad of dough on the table and rolling it out. The shape after the initial plop is random. As you push the rolling pin this way and that, you're not trying to precisely roll out the shape of a gingerbread man. It's just a wider, thinner blob. But then comes the cookie cutter. The cookie cutter could represent any selective force--a storm, a plague, climate change, whatever. The dough inside the cookie cutter perfectly fits the shape of the cookie cutter, and the dough outside it is discarded.
But I decided I didn't like that example, because someone made the cookie cutter. Someone deliberately used it to make a cookie that shape, so that example probably wouldn't really succeed in stretching the awareness of someone who already believes in the existence of a designer.
So then I got to thinking about unintentional impressions, like a footprint in the dirt. When you walk, your shoes (or feet) perfectly match the footprints you leave on the ground. You don't intentionally indent the dirt to match your shoes, it just happens. But even there, we have a sapient agent and a man-made shoe, and we really need to remove people from the illustration for it to work right.
A branch! A branch ripped off a tree by the wind during a rainstorm crashes to the ground and falls in the mud. The impression in the mud perfectly matches the shape of the branch. Nobody had to do anything to make the mud that shape, and yet the shape in the mud is so perfectly suited to the shape of the branch that, according to the reasoning of those who believe in intelligent design, it couldn't possibly have happened by accident. Except that it did. Is it an accident that they match? The match happened because of the accident. If we can document that the branch was weak and the wind was strong and the mud was soft, then the preponderence of the evidence suggests that the stick fell and made an impression in the mud by accident rather than that an invisible, supernatural being broke the stick off and placed it in the mud in a precise position for reasons we can never understand. We have an abundance of evidence suggesting an accident, and absolutely none to support wild speculation about divine intervention.
It's rubbish, of course, but their argument makes intuitive sense if you don't understand natural selection. They think, apparently, that random genetic mutation is the only factor in evolution, and don't fully appreciate how environmental forces can carve a species into shape. I've thought of a few ways to illustrate it.
Cookies. Gingerbread men aren't the result of balls of dough dropping and some of them randomly flattening out into the shape of gingerbread men. Genetic variability would be like dropping a big wad of dough on the table and rolling it out. The shape after the initial plop is random. As you push the rolling pin this way and that, you're not trying to precisely roll out the shape of a gingerbread man. It's just a wider, thinner blob. But then comes the cookie cutter. The cookie cutter could represent any selective force--a storm, a plague, climate change, whatever. The dough inside the cookie cutter perfectly fits the shape of the cookie cutter, and the dough outside it is discarded.
But I decided I didn't like that example, because someone made the cookie cutter. Someone deliberately used it to make a cookie that shape, so that example probably wouldn't really succeed in stretching the awareness of someone who already believes in the existence of a designer.
So then I got to thinking about unintentional impressions, like a footprint in the dirt. When you walk, your shoes (or feet) perfectly match the footprints you leave on the ground. You don't intentionally indent the dirt to match your shoes, it just happens. But even there, we have a sapient agent and a man-made shoe, and we really need to remove people from the illustration for it to work right.
A branch! A branch ripped off a tree by the wind during a rainstorm crashes to the ground and falls in the mud. The impression in the mud perfectly matches the shape of the branch. Nobody had to do anything to make the mud that shape, and yet the shape in the mud is so perfectly suited to the shape of the branch that, according to the reasoning of those who believe in intelligent design, it couldn't possibly have happened by accident. Except that it did. Is it an accident that they match? The match happened because of the accident. If we can document that the branch was weak and the wind was strong and the mud was soft, then the preponderence of the evidence suggests that the stick fell and made an impression in the mud by accident rather than that an invisible, supernatural being broke the stick off and placed it in the mud in a precise position for reasons we can never understand. We have an abundance of evidence suggesting an accident, and absolutely none to support wild speculation about divine intervention.
Thursday, January 8, 2015
Media Illusions
The media that says the police are out of control and that you should rightly fear for your life any time you see a cop is the same media that gave pit bulls their bad reputation. Some pit bulls really have chewed people's faces off over nothing, same as some cops have committed criminal acts of assault and murder. No denying either one, but all you "pibble" lovers out there have a pretty good idea how representative that picture is of the whole truth.
It's the same media that told us in the 1980s that Satanists were behind every tree, waiting to abduct your children and pets and murder them in ritual sacrifices. It's the same media that told us that these devil worshipers could be positively identified by their interest in heavy metal music and Dungeons & Dragons--if they weren't already sacrificing the neighborhood pets, continued exposure to this devilish game and music would soon warp their minds and open a gateway to demonic possession. Every D&D player and headbanger who lived through that era without so much as entertaining the thought of offering a youngster's blood to Beelzebub, but lived in fear of people's insane reactions to the media hype that said it was all but inevitable, has a pretty clear picture of what cops are being put through right now.
That same media was at work before my time, giving people the impression that every American serviceman to have ever set foot in Vietnam enjoyed shiskebabing babies on bayonets in between burning villages and raping the inhabitants. Before that, the witch hunt of the day was against "commies," which had less to do with targeting those seeking collectivist economic policies and more to do with persecuting gays, artists, liberal Democrats, and anyone who challenged authority and tradition. The so-called "fourth branch of government" has long made its living by using scapegoats to create sensations that captivate their audience and keeping them watching for the latest news. Wake up, people. You're being played. Clip the marionette's strings. Don't get fooled again.
It's the same media that told us in the 1980s that Satanists were behind every tree, waiting to abduct your children and pets and murder them in ritual sacrifices. It's the same media that told us that these devil worshipers could be positively identified by their interest in heavy metal music and Dungeons & Dragons--if they weren't already sacrificing the neighborhood pets, continued exposure to this devilish game and music would soon warp their minds and open a gateway to demonic possession. Every D&D player and headbanger who lived through that era without so much as entertaining the thought of offering a youngster's blood to Beelzebub, but lived in fear of people's insane reactions to the media hype that said it was all but inevitable, has a pretty clear picture of what cops are being put through right now.
That same media was at work before my time, giving people the impression that every American serviceman to have ever set foot in Vietnam enjoyed shiskebabing babies on bayonets in between burning villages and raping the inhabitants. Before that, the witch hunt of the day was against "commies," which had less to do with targeting those seeking collectivist economic policies and more to do with persecuting gays, artists, liberal Democrats, and anyone who challenged authority and tradition. The so-called "fourth branch of government" has long made its living by using scapegoats to create sensations that captivate their audience and keeping them watching for the latest news. Wake up, people. You're being played. Clip the marionette's strings. Don't get fooled again.
Thursday, December 18, 2014
Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics
In a sustainable agriculture forum I follow on Linkedin, a farmer questioned whether food deserts actually exist and suggested that the problem may be exaggerated. The statistics he cited suggested, for example, that it takes poor people in low-access areas only 4.5 minutes longer to get to the grocery store than it takes wealthy people in well-served neighborhoods.
The problem with this is that, as is typical in these kinds of studies, it's using averages. In most higher-income, higher access areas, almost all individuals will be traveling by the same means: privately-owned automobiles. This means respondents from such areas will all fall within a very narrow statistical band; whether they make $30K a year or $300K a year, their car still gets them to the grocery store in the same amount of time.
In poor, low-access areas, though, transportation methods used will be more diverse. Some will have automobiles. Some with a little money might take the bus. Those with slightly less money might ride a bicycle. Many will walk. Of the walkers, some will have backpacks, carts, or wagons; others will be able to carry only the grocery bags they can hold in their hands. Elderly and disabled people might pay for taxis or use publicly funded or non-profit taxi services, or they may rely on friends or relatives with cars to give them a ride. The statistical result is that you're going to have a really wide spectrum, with people on one end starving unless they walk several miles every day, and people on the other end whose numbers match those in the high-income neighborhoods. Neither the mean nor the median in that set will give us a clue of what the people at the bottom are going through unless we also know the percentage of households in the poor neighborhoods that have on-demand access to a functioning automobile.
"Using the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), researchers found individuals in low-income low access areas spend an additional 4.5 minutes traveling to the grocers over the national average and average a trip every 8 days over the national average of 7 days."
The problem with this is that, as is typical in these kinds of studies, it's using averages. In most higher-income, higher access areas, almost all individuals will be traveling by the same means: privately-owned automobiles. This means respondents from such areas will all fall within a very narrow statistical band; whether they make $30K a year or $300K a year, their car still gets them to the grocery store in the same amount of time.
In poor, low-access areas, though, transportation methods used will be more diverse. Some will have automobiles. Some with a little money might take the bus. Those with slightly less money might ride a bicycle. Many will walk. Of the walkers, some will have backpacks, carts, or wagons; others will be able to carry only the grocery bags they can hold in their hands. Elderly and disabled people might pay for taxis or use publicly funded or non-profit taxi services, or they may rely on friends or relatives with cars to give them a ride. The statistical result is that you're going to have a really wide spectrum, with people on one end starving unless they walk several miles every day, and people on the other end whose numbers match those in the high-income neighborhoods. Neither the mean nor the median in that set will give us a clue of what the people at the bottom are going through unless we also know the percentage of households in the poor neighborhoods that have on-demand access to a functioning automobile.
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