carrionpigeon

"Witch Trials" I read as more tongue-in-cheek than provocative, given the content of the Harry Potter books. A decent pun, by my standards.

I already listened to much of it, but gave up on the 5th episode in frustration. For a podcast series about J.K. Rowling, there is very little of her voice in it. It's mostly audio from an interview recorded a year or more ago that has been padded out immensely by inclusion of often-immaterial commentary from frankly bloggers and video streamers. Judging by accent, almost all are Americans, not British, and their analyses are invariably superficial. Essentially, the interviewer asks them to give an impression of what was happening years ago on the online fora where they were spending their time.

If they just released the audio for the interview alone, only interrupting for adding context and not commentary, it would be interesting. A desire, I think, to milk it for all it's worth ruined it for me.

And to the point of the original article posted, whatever you think of its contents, my God was it badly written!

I think the main strength of this activist movement in academia is that it operates through fear. In an environment where much depends on word of mouth and personal reputation, people could lose their entire careers for violating new, rapidly transforming cultural mores. So, they self-censor, and some voice support for the activists to avoid becoming a target themselves. (Cue the 60-year-old professors who have never used Twitter putting pronouns in their email signatures and adding '#BLM' messages on their personal websites.[1]) The overall effect is that a minority can extract the obedience of a majority.

Public statements like this will have little effect unless they are actively enforced. This means that violators must be officially sanctioned by administrators, who are often their peers. It's clear to me that most academics (including myself, I'm ashamed to admit) are cowards who will bend their public positions, even on academic matters, in favor of whoever wields the greatest power. Not until activists are met with stern opposition and loss of prestige will people stop currying favor with them.

If, though, I am wrong in my assessment and most academics and students, rather than a dominant minority, wholly believe that offensive utterances must be punished and unsavory research banned, I think there isn't much left to do. Any official action, let alone the posted public statement, will only galvanize people to seek out more aggressive policies and oust those that oppose them.

There are real stakes in this conflict, and right now, activists in academia (hard sciences) are pushing in my view really significant policy proposals.

From MIT geophysical sciences department:

1. Penalize (during peer review) research that doesn't cite black authors.

2. Implement diversity boards that have final say in hiring and tenure decisions. (They need not have field expertise.)

From several Broad Institute faculty and post-docs:

1. Restrict publication of genetic research in white populations until genetic sampling of other populations around the world reach parity.

2. Ban white researchers from conducting genetic research in populations in non-white countries.

3. Ban genetic research that can be stigmatizing to designated vulnerable populations (e.g. genetic component of educational attainment, the genetic architecture of autism, etc.).

[1] For clarity, these two relate to first-hand examples of professors making statements solely out of fear of not being able to attract students their labs/departments.

I, too, am suspicious of this statement. It brings to mind the context of the similar one issued by the University of Chicago a few years ago. While the administration was publicly affirming its commitment to free speech, individual departments and organizations within the university were unobstructed in contravening it. My sense is that, at the time, a number of wealthy private schools had made the national news for the nonsense in which their students were engaging. Rich parents started balking at sending their kids to them, so enrollment (and thus vast sums of tuition money) declined. The University of Chicago put out that statement to buttress its public reputation as an elite, exclusive private school without ever enforcing it.

My sense is that this MIT statement serves a similar purpose in that it panders to the sensibilities of parents paying the tuition bills. However, if their conviction is, in fact, sincere, I think there is one good way to demonstrate it --- officially sanction professors and students engaging in behavior contrary to the free expression of their peers. Has MIT ever done this? If not, I cannot think of this announcement as little more than an advertising stunt.

I removed my original reply upon realization the poster to whom I responded was likely too angry for debate given the tone of the parent post, which I re-read after sending mine. Perhaps the news is too recent and more time is needed for conversation, I thought. It seems that I was entirely correct...

Below is my reply, which I am re-writing for context, and I will have to encroach on everyone's trust that what I write below completely represents the original. Whether I am a "moron and/or a monster" I will leave for you all to decide.

I will say, though, that for Americans, the abortion issue is out of the courts and in the purview of federal and state legislatures. We need to have these conversations sooner than later, if not now. There is a real concern about maternal health and freedom, just as there is one about rights to life and protection in utero.

___

I am speaking about the past and present. One should be skeptical of predictions about the future.

The motivation for the decision process you describe is fear. Fear or harm, fear of death. Fear itself is irrational (I do not mean this in a pejorative sense) but powerful emotion, but it is not one that I believe motivates people when they are trying to have children. Pregnancy can have many complications that can be debilitating or even fatal (depression, internal bleeding, sepsis, hormonal dysfunction, and so on), and lack of access to abortion in the case of ectopic pregnancy, for example, is only of many factors that would weight against a potential pregnancy. If lack of access over abortion is an overriding fear for women looking to have children, I suspect that fear could just as easily be replaced by other non-abortion-related dangers. Becoming a parent can be scary, and perhaps now isn't the right time. Maybe later.

Also, I want to stress the earlier point I made about living under laws, good or bad. Women bear children because they want them. I believe this to broadly be true, but the case is especially strong in societies where abortion and more importantly contraception are available. Women bear children because they want to raise them, watch them grow, and start families of their own. Should any complications arise from pregnancy, one adapts and lives with them. Despite the risks, which historically had been far graver until very recently, over 7 billion of us exist. I believe that red state or blue state, abortion or no, people will continue to have children, and they will do so in whatever state they are able to raise them. While it is certainly understandable for women, especially if sexually active, who don't yet want to have children to avoid moving to states with outright abortion bans rather than restrictions to the 1st trimester, I doubt it will be an important consideration for those who want to have them.

To your specific point, if laws are so poorly written that they endanger women's lives, such as in ectopic pregnancies, then I expect the laws will change in response to outrage over deaths. Laws that affect people's lives are unavoidable but can unfortunately cause that to happen (e.g. raising speed limits, drug testing requirements, etc.). However, I am not so pessimistic that to believe that no law can be written as a reasonable compromise. And I never would be so pessimistic so as to give up entirely on elected legislatures and instead choose to live under the fiat of judges in hope that their decisions are optimal. There is certainly precedent for courts to make (very recently, in many eyes) stupidly written, poorly reasoned decisions.

It's still like that in most of the US. And until today, abortion into the 2nd trimester was legal in the entire US, minus some delta in one state as this case reached the Supreme Court. Also, some consideration is needed for lack of abortion access in some states though abortions themselves were technically legal.

Still, 2nd trimester abortions are very uncommon to be legal in Europe. Is there any evidence to suggest that the liberal abortion laws in the US up until today attracted people from Europe to take jobs in the US instead of their home countries with more restrictive abortion laws?

This strikes me as wildly implausible. The US broadly has very permissive abortion laws compared to most of Europe, but I have never once heard of anyone migrating to the US over greater abortion access. It's always economic/opportunity concerns. Going further back, during the Soviet era when abortion was widespread (i.e. 2-3 abortions per live birth in the 60s-70s), did anyone want to migrate to the Eastern bloc for it? My understanding is that it was overwhelmingly the other way around, again for economic reasons.

I think if people turn down jobs in states because of restrictive abortion laws, it's because they have so much choice in desirable employers that they can select on issues that almost everyone else would live with, whether they personally approve or not.

And lastly, if anything is going to undermine Austin universities in terms of science research and education, it's the rampant devaluation of academic standards, excessive bureaucratization, grade inflation, and churning out of degrees in exchange for tuition money. Abortion will have little if anything to do with it.

The great (unintentional?) irony of that argument is that before seatbelts, that was arguably how cars used to be manufactured. Back then, drivers were often killed in car crashes by being impaled on the steering wheel. Those in the passenger seat would die from being hurled through the window. Despite the elevated risk in those older cars, drivers weren't safer --- they were unsafe to such a degree that it formed the argument for mandating seat belts in the first place.

This never occurred to me before.

I'm thinking back to my time in high school, when I would see rich 16-year-olds drive up in massive SUVs or trucks. The justification parents had for buying them was that putting their kids in large cars would protect them should they ever get into an accident.

I wonder what will happen once parents like that start buying the kids of today those massive cars. Of course they will be electric.

The main reason I "[hate] shopping carts" is that the wheels seem to invariably be defective. I remember reading in the late 90s / early 2000s (the era of 'Walmart is taking over' articles) that this was deliberate. Carts with misaligned wheels that don't run straight force customers to slow down and spend more time moving from aisle to aisle. No idea if actually true, though.

Karl Marx, who was residing in Britain at the time, also wrote much on the topic. He had nothing but withering criticism of mainstream/elite British attitudes for the war, namely the downplaying the importance of slavery in the formation of the Confederacy.

He, unlike his more socially acceptable contemporaries, also deeply admired Lincoln. Many pieces published in prominent periodicals, like The Economist, painted him as a wily and double-dealing politician. One could understand that interpretation given the compromises he was desperately trying to make with Southern states to prevent the outbreak of war, but it gave prominent Brits an excuses to dismiss the sincerity of his anti-slavery rhetoric after the war broke out. (Lincoln himself was also being deeply transformed by the savagery of war. He would come to believe the carnage was divine punishment for the sin of slavery.) Marx would have none of it. He called out the hypocrisy of those who in the years prior condemned American slavery but would not support the cause of Lincoln and the Union because it didn't have an unblemished history of being totally and consistently anti-slavery.

The claim regarding the effectiveness of "Confederate propagandist networks" is overstated, though. People across Britain were divided on the issue, even across political camps and ethnic groups (e.g. Irish and English). To be clear, by "divided", I don't mean that people necessarily individually ambivalent. There were some staunch supporters on both sides.

There were also multiple reasons for preferring one side over another, too. Slavery was just one issue. Another was potential weakening the Monroe Doctrine. (During the Civil War, France under Napoleon III invaded and conquered Mexico, and Spain re-colonized what would become the Dominican Republic.) Others were access to raw materials, support for wars of national unity (European nationalists admired Lincoln, as would Hitler decades later), etc.

This is an oversimplification. It started out as: all things being equal, pick the black one. It applied to cases where one was torn between two equal candidates, and the idea was that a nudge toward hiring more blacks would help fix the disparities that arose from years of segregation and racial prejudice. The issue was that the standard for success of this program was racial proportions being equal to that of the general (or local) population.

As years passed and the standard for success was not reached, affirmative action policies became more and more aggressive. This coincided with civil rights legislation that put pressure on companies and institutions to hire more blacks (expanded to include other racial minorities and women). The consequence is the system we have now, where people, if not explicitly using racial quotas, are creating racially oriented jobs (e.g. diversity staff in large companies / universities) or searching for racially loaded standards (e.g. personality scores for Asians in Harvard admissions) in order to engineer an overall impression of meeting racial proportioning criteria.

'Equal outcome' perhaps is the logical conclusion to this process, but I think the way it works in practice and the way it has evolved has little to do with notions of 'opportunity.'

> claiming that so-called race can be determined from one's DNA is indeed pseudo-science.

That's taking it way too far. Genotyping populations identifies variation, and in cases where populations that have been reproductively isolated for tens of thousands of years (e.g. western Europeans and west/central Africans) are now in proximity, there will be substantial variation that is idiosyncratic to each population.

In the US, reproductively isolated populations were suddenly placed in the same territory, and taboos on inter-racial mating persisted until very recently (50% toleration in the mid-1990s). One can accurately tell whether an American is phenotypically white versus black (or mixed) by DNA.

That isn't to say that our ability to predict accurately black-vs-white will remain. The more race-mixing, the less ability to accurately categorize. We'll instead move to a situation similar to the one in which 'white' people find themselves today, where they are mixes of x percent of a variety of populations and not categorically 'Dutch,' 'Irish,' 'Finnish,' etc.

Race is a sociological concept, yes, but it reflects reality in that people are visibly different. These differences are genetic in origin. It just so happens that in some cases, (e.g. two reproductively isolated and visibly distinct populations suddenly in contact with one another), these social categorizations will map to biological ones. In other cases where there is convergent evolution in terms of physical appearance, they won't.

I remember reading about Brazil resorting to head measurements to see if one were one's claimed race and were not cheating to get an advantage. Just a cursory search seems to show the practice is ongoing.

https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/09/29/495665329/...

https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/04/05/brazils-new-problem-wit...

I was curious about how the Indians handle this, too, so I read Republic of Caste by Anand Teltumbde. It's a long, rambling, but detailed description of how the reservation system was playing out in India. Broadly, he argues that any initial positive effect has been displaced by caste becoming even more of a wedge issue (each caste feeling disadvantaged unfairly and hyper-vigilant for others' corruption) and castes scrambling for favorable designations (e.g. inventing a new history of victimization or fabricating a genealogy in order to be assigned to a more favorable schedule).

Ironically, Teltumbde advocates for replacing reservations with American-style affirmative action.

Even then, 1 year off is a 20% income reduction on paper. 2 years would be 40%. Want to catch people voluntarily taking off work versus being 'legitimately' unemployed? (For example, is a realtor with no income during the housing crisis adequately poor?) Then, every university will have to hire people to do the analyses and make value judgements.

Long term, factoring in wealth creates all sorts of perverse incentives for parents that prioritize their children's education. It means in the present not taking promotions, even negotiating for lower salaries, and being priced out of better neighborhoods with better schools, all out of fear that doing otherwise will hurt their children's futures. And if their children succeed in getting a good education and a high-paying job, it comes at the cost of sacrificing their own children's futures.

Our institutions reflect our public discourse, and right now, discourse is dominated by race. When it comes to school admissions, the elite schools and colleges want to see their students in places of influence and power. It helps attract more talented students, helps grow their influence networks, and attracts donations and other sources of large sums of money.

Ivy league and other top-tier schools dominate placements in industry, the Supreme Court, and public institutions. When race is a factor for consideration (e.g. Biden only considered black women for the Court vacancy), it will be a factor for these schools. If they instead accepted based on standardized test scores and became 50-60 percent Asian, it would mean that most of their students (by virtue of being Asian) would get shut out of positions of influence and power. Those positions would instead be filled by students from other schools.

One must always remember that elite schools exist to grow their own prestige. An honest hard-working student at Harvard Medical School who then opens a small private practice in his hometown, doing good for his community and his family, is, in the eyes of the elite, a waste of an education. These schools want students with talent and ambition who will be well-placed to change the world.

On the other hand, for lower-tier schools, I see little justification (from their perspective, not from a universalist ethical point of view) borderline-quota affirmative action policies.

When I was in high school, one student's parents (one doctor and one lawyer --- very financially well-off) took off work for one year just so they could claim having no income on the FAFSA documentation. She got accepted everywhere, winning across the places she applied over $300,000 in scholarships. The upper-middle class and wealthy can easily game this.

Edit: I should also add that the student and both parents were black. This probably played a large role in the offers.

I doubt that biographical details about Stalin's erudition and connection to his political actions generalize. It's entirely possible for a well-read dictator to perform quite admirably. Take, for example, Pedro II of Brazil. He was the closest I've ever encountered to the Platonic ideal of the philosopher-king.

World leaders are highly idiosyncratic people, I think. Taking empirical psychological results that apply to general populations (more likely Western college students in practice) and expecting prominent historical figures to conform to them is a mistaken approach.

This approach is extremely dangerous. It's baffling to me that it could be seriously considered after No Child Left Behind.

One key variable that needs to be addressed in evaluating school performance is variation in the quality of the students. Some kids are more capable and more driven than others for reasons part cultural and part genetic, and the perceived quality of a school will reflect that of its students. The effects of teachers and administration are not that substantial as long as basic requirements (food/shelter/safety) are met.

Though this notion is distasteful to some, it must be addressed because otherwise, schools and teachers are going to be put on the hook for conditions that are simply outside their control.

I cannot help being underwhelmed by papers on the so-called 'microbiome.' Very seldom is it something more complex than proportion/prevalence of species X correlates with behavior/health outcome Y. Simple correlations with all sorts of imaginable confounding variables that preclude causal explanations. Even in totally hypothesis-free, exploratory studies, almost all variation in species density over time gets explained by two or three PCA components, and gut bacterial populations seem to grow/shrink independently with respect to other populations. These dynamics, whatever they may be, are a far cry from such a lofty, puffed-up term like micro-'biome', where its use always signifies complex (and conveniently uncharacterized!) dynamics of bacterial species interacting with each other and the host.

That said, I don't find the author's framing of this particularly useful. If a theory is wrong, it will be wrong for factual, technical reasons. The extent to which some real phenomena can predict others is testable. Handwaving it away as social contagion, ideology, or mass hysteria --- not that those don't exist, medieval dance fever being my favorite example --- isn't good enough for me.