The cherished American ideal of self-reliance has a flip side: discomfort with the idea of bailouts and safety nets. The notion that even a small portion of such aid might find its way to the undeserving can be enough to scuttle support, or restrict help so drastically that few can use it. The specter of moral hazard haunts a basic tension in American life: to what extent are people responsible for their own problems? The more trouble you’re in, moral hazard suggests, the less we should help.— Shiala Dewan in NY Times article on “Moral Hazard”
My email to iStockphoto:
This is about the creepiness and utter Wallstreetiness of your “credits can expire” policy. I want to state that I object to this. There is absolutely no reason that credits should ever expire — it’s money in the bank for you if I don’t use them anyway, so why make them expire? I want that situation changed on my account or I will personally make it a mission to tweet and blog my ass off about how stupid the policy is, you thieves. Say you’re sorry.
An article today in the NY Times by Patricia Cohen summarizes some research conclusions that suggest that the way to preserve your brain into old age is to get more education. The problem is that the main study being cited appears from the article to be what we call a ‘correlational study,’ which may prove nothing of the kind.
Correlational studies are done by rounding up a bunch of people who, say, all went to college and comparing them to people who didn’t, and then comparing their “brain fitness” test results in middle age. These studies can be extremely valuable and, as my old grad school prof Tom Bouchard used to teach us, they are often the best way to study the really really interesting things in science, because they may provide a tremendous wealth of information.
The problem with such studies is that they can suggest, but not necessarily prove, that one thing caused another. A mantra that all undergraduate psych student will have memorized is that “correlation does not equal causation.” Just because two things tend to happen together, like education and healthier brains, doesn’t prove that the one thing caused the other. It’s equally likely, say, that people with healthier brains were the ones who were both motivated to, and who could succeed at completing, additional years of education. (You might be more “motivated” to go to college just because for you, it’s easier. Kids with reading or attention problems, say, or who just aren’t as sharp, may find it harder and more painful to study, so the thought of four more years of slogging through books and tests may seem much less pleasant for them than for other kids. In contrast, a simple job at the widget factory may sometimes seem to be the best way to go.)
Despite Cohen’s lovely and exciting article, from what she reports we really don’t know if the older folks with the more resilient brains got that way because they went to college, or if they chose and managed to get through college because they had better brains in the first place. If someone had set up the proper experiment fifty years ago, by randomly assigning some people to go to college and keeping others out, we might have had very different results when testing their smarts when they were older.
We know what, for instance, that young people who develop Alzheimer’s decades later have in at least one study been easily and accurately distinguished from those who didn’t, based on their high-school essays. A study of elderly nuns showed that the ones who eventually developed Alzheimer’s had, as young women applying to the religious order, a very different style of writing. They used few or no complex sentences, for instance (the kinds with commas in them and so on; the other girls didn’t do that.) The researchers in that study were able to do a sort of “experiment” by simply seeing how well reviewers could predict who got the Alzheimer’s later by simply rating the younger girls’ essays on a simple variable or two, like whether they used “linguistically dense” sentences that had things like multiple ideas, or even just commas in them. Turned out the predictive value of that kind of thing was weirdly high.
While it is probably true that going to college develops a stronger brain, and there are certainly many studies (some cited in her story) now supporting the belief that mental exercise in general makes the brain healthier, the point is that readers need to recognize when reporters are perhaps jumping too hard on squishy findings.
Sloppy reasoning gets tedious to read over and over again in the popular press. Reporters and publications know that they can attract “mindshare” with dramatic but misleading headlines, stories based on poorly done or poorly reported half-truths. What’s worse, reporting correlational studies with “proof of causation” headlines is misleading and sometimes has bad real-world consequences.
When I was in college we were assigned to read a little workbook for honing our skills at spotting false conclusions derived from research. The earliest articles were the easiest to figure out — the opening article, by someone allegedly named “Pileous Lupus Swarthy,” was about determining whether werewolves could be “diagnosed” based on their response to a “silver allergy” test that consisted of firing a silver bullet in the brains of suspected werewolves. (Since it was “well known” that werewolves are allergic to silver… well, you get the idea.) The article concluded that the diagnostic test worked perfectly, since 100% of the test subjects who were shot in the head died, proving that they were all werewolves.
Which is silly, but not so much when you remember that the identical reasoning was used in the middle ages to kill thousands of women suspected of witchcraft, by binding them hand and foot and throwing them into ponds. The “proof” they were innocent of witchcraft would be that they drowned. ”Real” witches were assumed to be any women who floated. Who would therefore be burned.
Thank you, Senator, for your email of the 4th regarding the “PROTECT IP” Act. As a published author, I certainly am concerned about the issue of piracy of intellectual property.
However, I am even more concerned about the many risks posed by your act, and think that considering the many, many highly knowledgeable experts who have expressed concerns about the potential negative impact of such a law, I urge you to withdraw consideration of the present act and to spend some more time designing something that is less likely to have a damaging or even fatal impact on the internet.
You are no doubt aware of the criticisms of the act, including but not limited to those expressed by the founders and heads of major online resources such as Wikipedia and Reddit. I need not repeat their arguments. But I would like to add one of my own, one which may represent what we psychologists tend to refer to as the “elephant in the room” that nobody wants to talk about. It’s the issue of how laws are framed in an era when our government has shown itself all too willing, all too often, to undermine our very democratic traditions in the service of political expediency or the “threat du jour” or let’s face it, in our leaders’ obedience to what many of us now see as their “corporate masters.”
Our country seems too often to be just one crazy speech away from discarding the Constitution; the concern is that the present law might create an opening (not your “intent,” but an opening is the real danger, is it not?), whether accidentally or to serve some President’s aims, to shut down user content on the internet. I’ve lived through Nixon and through Bush and I’ve no illusions that a president might not take advantage of poorly crafted laws to control free speech.
Just a few years ago, protesters at Bush events were kept in pens, for heaven’s sake! More recently, legitimate protesters and press have been pepper sprayed and assaulted by law enforcement officials. We detain people with no constitutional rights or protections in Guantanamo… why would it be beyond the government to use your nice law, despite the best intentions, to keep me from posting my concerns about these thingson the internet? Why wouldn’t someone eventually intimidate sites such as Reddit into censoring content, using the pretext of “protecting copyright holders”?
We no longer live in a country where we can honestly rely on the government, including the Dept of Justice, to be on our side. Our courts blatantly twist “well-intentioned” law up to and including Constitutional amendments to serve the needs of corporations (e.g., “corporate personhood”); our presidential contenders will go to court to prevent election results from being fairly counted, our Congress (including you) will pass laws that remove our individual protections from being unlawfully detained, all while protesting that “we didn’t mean it.” Given the dire nature of this recent turn of events, whatever your law’s intentions, it gives potentially too much power to our leaders who no longer, frankly, are to be trusted to “always do the right thing.” I weep for what we have become in the past dozen years.
There is also the question of the law’s real intent, and the perception of whose interests are mainly served by such laws: not “artists” but corporate interests, primarily. As pointed out by the founder of Reddit today, “”Why is it that when Republicans and Democrats need to solve the budget and the deficit, there’s deadlock, but when Hollywood lobbyists pay them $94 million dollars to write legislation, people from both sides of the aisle line up to co-sponsor it?”
As a sometime Quaker, I have come to appreciate the wisdom of an approach to solving community problems that says, if members of the community are sufficiently alarmed about a proposed course of action, it probably means it’s time to postpone the implementation of a decision until things have been better sorted out. Please respect the grave concerns of so many leaders in the internet and fellow citizens, and reconsider your support of this law.
The post-911 legal environment in the US long ago passed the point of corrosive paranoia with regards anything relating to terrorism, and has drifted into a realm quite unhinged from the constitutional protections of which America was justifiably proud.— Australian Senator Scott Ludlam
If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed quickly, to trap them before they escape.— —Ray Bradbury
I think Kristof’s NY Times column today makes a good point, especially in his title (“Occupy the Agenda”), though I wish he had something more specific about what to do and how to do it. I think “income inequality” is an issue structurally for any economy that needs serious attention, but the real problem is the fact that the rich in America can buy and pay for the government and laws they need.
There is something called a “wealth protection industry” and generally it refers to the armies of accountants and lawyers and lobbyists the rich can afford to hire. Generally the term is NOT used to refer to the United Stated Congress and the Supreme Court… but that’s what we’ve come to. Fix THAT and the “income inequality” issues become another practical problem, something an honest congress could whittle away at by tinkering experimentally with everything from international trade to incentives for banks to provide mortgages to tax codes. An honest Congress and Supreme Court would gradually right the problems in the economy; the Congress and Supremes we have now guarantee that nothing of the sort will ever happen.
This will probably take a constitutional amendment to decisively remove the fiction of “corporate personhood” from the legal system (what a travesty to use the 14th amendment, written to ensure the rights of former slaves, as a way to create a more modern form of lifetime bondage of all non-rich citizens to corporations!), and to mandate ONLY public funding of elections. And this will have to come from the citizens of the various states, because it’s damned sure Congress will never pass such an amendment.
— Matt Taibbi - How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the OWS ProtestsWe’re all born wanting the freedom to imagine a better and more beautiful future. But modern America has become a place so drearily confining and predictable that it chokes the life out of that built-in desire. Everything from our pop culture to our economy to our politics feels oppressive and unresponsive. We see 10 million commercials a day, and every day is the same life-killing chase for money, money and more money; the only thing that changes from minute to minute is that every tick of the clock brings with it another space-age vendor dreaming up some new way to try to sell you something or reach into your pocket. The relentless sameness of the two-party political system is beginning to feel like a Jacob’s Ladder nightmare with no end; we’re entering another turn on the four-year merry-go-round, and the thought of having to try to get excited about yet another minor quadrennial shift in the direction of one or the other pole of alienating corporate full-of-shitness is enough to make anyone want to smash his own hand flat with a hammer.
If you think of it this way, Occupy Wall Street takes on another meaning. There’s no better symbol of the gloom and psychological repression of modern America than the banking system, a huge heartless machine that attaches itself to you at an early age, and from which there is no escape. You fail to receive a few past-due notices about a $19 payment you missed on that TV you bought at Circuit City, and next thing you know a collector has filed a judgment against you for $3,000 in fees and interest. Or maybe you wake up one morning and your car is gone, legally repossessed by Vulture Inc., the debt-buying firm that bought your loan on the Internet from Chase for two cents on the dollar. This is why people hate Wall Street. They hate it because the banks have made life for ordinary people a vicious tightrope act; you slip anywhere along the way, it’s 10,000 feet down into a vat of razor blades that you can never climb out of.
That, to me, is what Occupy Wall Street is addressing. People don’t know exactly what they want, but as one friend of mine put it, they know one thing: FUCK THIS SHIT! We want something different: a different life, with different values, or at least a chance at different values.
Philip K Dick would be so “toldja so!” about plans to house Homeland Security in a castle originally built as an insane asylum, a structure built back in the days when Edgar A. Poe still wrote terror by candlelight and Kafka wasn’t even born yet, before Nazis came up with the term “homeland” to mean “our little prison of a country.” The castle makes it kind of comic, instead of merely bureaucratically rainy day dystopian, this massive “security apparatus” that is the lasting gift of Cheneybush to America in general and to screenwriters in particular.
Meanwhile… about that repeal of the newspeakily named “Patriot Act” — Whitehouse.gov has well over their 5000 required minimum signatures needed to trigger their “we will definitely do something” response. Love to see what they plan to do, keeping in mind that all their phones are probably tapped, too.
Let’s get some perspective here. You can be all for good national security and still fight to preserve constitutional freedoms. Wish more than half the citizens had the ability to imagine both goals in their head at once, but one should’t get one’s hopes up. Fear makes people stupid, and already-stupid people way stupider, and half the voters, after all, have IQs below 100, the score needed to know how to make macaroni and cheese without a box mix.
The best response to terrorism is “more democracy,” not making speeches about “they want to take away our freedom” as a justification for doing it to ourselves. But in too many ways over the past ten years, we have become the kind of country that we used to imagine ourselves taking a stand against: a country that bombs and murders hundreds of thousands of civilians then celebrates this as a “victory for freedom,” that imprisons people without trial or hope of ever seeing daylight again, that spies in its own citizens, that can always count on its bought “journalists” and young “patriotic” thugs (both the personal and the internet bully versions) to enforce its will on a cowed public.
Of course, it’s not “all bad.” But “it’s not all bad” is how it always seems inside a country that is tilting toward the dark side. They have their nice years of domestic tranquility except around the edges; they have their lovely Oktoberfests and Thanksgivings. But they are not the same place anymore, and somewhere, their bad karma is accumulating.
A woman who “looked Arab” and two men were removed from a jet-escorted plane and interrogated for “suspicious activity.” (See article here.) The problem with this kind of story is: why don’t we ever hear about who, exactly, the dumb fucks were who reported her as “suspicious”??
She seems to have been very gracious about the whole thing. But I’d love to know who the idiot was that decided that a woman sitting in her seat on an airplane was “suspicious” just because she… what? Well, looked a bit too brown for somebody?
We should stop planes and search for really stupid people.
