BC CULTURE
Saved by @CodyyyGardner

Publishing works on long schedules, which means that long-planned books can be overtaken by events...like covid.

2020 was tough for those of us with books in trail, especially nonfiction. But for a few lucky writers, covid imparted a terrible salience to their books.

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 One such writer is @TimHarford, host of @BBCRadio4's @bbcmoreorless, which is hands-down the greatest statistical literacy program in the world, using the numbers in each week's headlines to impart statistical lessons and render the news in perspective.

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Harford's latest book is THE DATA DETECTIVE (published as HOW TO MAKE THE WORLD ADD UP in the UK), which should really have been entitled HOW TO TRUTH WITH STATISTICS.

https://t.co/09AcSoFsyv

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You've likely heard of Darrell Huff's 1954 classic HOW TO LIE WITH STATISTICS, a classic, accessible guide to statistical malpractice in service to pushing an agenda. What I didn't know (until I heard Harford discourse on it) was that Huff himself had an ulterior motive.

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Huff was a shill for the tobacco industry, which, in 1954, was deliberately muddying the waters about the link between cancer and smoking. Huff's book isn't just a guide to statistical malpractice - it's a broadside against cancer science.

https://t.co/lurIujpAHd

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(Huff's followup volume, HOW TO LIE WITH CANCER STATISTICS, was never published)

Huff and his paymasters at Big Tobacco created the scientific doubt playbook - a system that weaponizes critical thinking by demonizing inconvenient science as junk science.

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Superficially, Harford's work - especially More or Less - is a critique of bad stats (certainly, it's grimly fun to listen to Harford and his colleagues reveal the bad math behind the UK government's covid spin), but as this book demonstrates, there's more going on there.

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What Harford and More or Less strive for isn't merely debunking - it's discovering truth. His brand of statistical sleuthing isn't merely a critique, it's a fact-finding mission, a campaign to find out, to the greatest possible extent, what is actually happening.

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That's where Harford and Huff's approaches diverge. Huff's book is a sharp critical toolsuite, but it's also a counsel of despair. Huff tells you how to lie with statistics - but he never tells you how to use statistics to discover the truth.

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To read Huff - and his successors in various denial and doubt movements - is to conclude that the world is unknowable. It is nihilism packaged up as mathematics.

Enter THE DATA DETECTIVE: a book about statistical best practice AND malpractice.

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DATA DETECTIVE proffers ten rules for getting stats right:

I. Vaccinate yourself against motivated reasoning by examining your emotional reaction to any statistical finding; use this check-in to adjust your intuition about whether a claim is true or false

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II. Neither the quantitative statistical picture ("bird's eye view") nor the qualitative lived experience ("worm's eye view") is sufficient: to understand a stat, you need both

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III. Check carefully to determine what a statistical label refers to (for example, in stories about links between "violent behavior and violent video games," how are "violent behavior" and "violent games" defined?)

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IV. Get "comparisons and context" - numbers with a lot of zeroes after them SOUND big, but are they? For example, if a bridge will cost $10m to build, is that an expensive bridge, or a cheap one?

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V. Understand survivor bias: if someone tells you that "every successful business does X," find out whether every failed business also does X.

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VI. Investigate statistical measurements for what's NOT being measured - are mortality stats broken out by age? Sex? Was a study conducted on a representative random sample, or just a bunch of grad students whose prof ordered them to fill in a survey?

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VII. Theory-free machine-learning algorithms have specific, pernicious, and possibly irredeemable failure modes. Between bad training data, spurious correlations, and opacity, they are a source of continuous mischief.

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VIII. Understand the "bedrock statistics" - censuses and other important, widely relied-upon measures, generally produced by governments, and defend the statisticians who produce them from political interference and retaliation.

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IX. Data visualization is a powerful tool for illuminating the meaning of data, but also for convincing (and misleading) people. Learn to parse visualizations and to spot their implicit arguments.

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X. Curiousity (and its correlate, humility about the things you think you know) is the best tonic against being deceived - by others, or yourself.

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Harford is a gifted science communicator, a wonderful and sprightly writer. He's spent many years teaching millions of people to consume statistics critically - but with this book, he's doing something nobler:

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He's teaching us to consume statistics WISELY.

eof/

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When it's railroading time, you get railroads.

When the railroads turn into the personal satrapies of rail-barons, you get trustbusters.

A couple decades ago, it was online service time. We had the users, the telcoms systems, the computers, the modems, so we got platforms.

1/

We had that, but we lacked something important: effective antimonopoly enforcement. Lax merger laws allowed companies with access to capital markets to buy out or neutralize all their competitors, so we got monopolies.

Right on schedule, we're getting digital trustbusters.

2/

Now, some people aren't technically sophisticated, but they do understand a lot about competition law. That's how you get meat-and-taters antitrust proposals like @amyklobuchar's #CALERA, which address the structural problems with antitrust

Klobuchar's bill is hugely important. The reason we have monopolies is that we stopped enforcing anti-monopoly law 40 years ago. Monopoly isn't a tech problem, it's everywhere from sneakers to glass bottles to pro wrestling to candy to

Klobuchar's CALERA doesn't just seek to apply antitrust law to tech - it also explicitly restores the pre-Reagan basis for fighting monopolies: we fight monopolies because they concentrate power and corrupt our politics. All monopolies are guilty unless proven otherwise.

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Surveillance companies assure us that they employ safeguards to ensure that their customers aren't abusing their products to engage in unlawful or unethical surveillance. And yet, inevitably, these companies abuse their tools THEMSELVES.

1/


It's almost as though being the kind of person who dreams of achieving incredible wealthy by spying on people makes you kind of an asshole.

2/

Like the people at @VerkadaHQ, "a fast-growing Silicon Valley surveillance startup" whose male employees used its own products to sexually harass their female colleagues and received the barest wrist-slaps for

Male Verkada employees maintained a private Slack channel where executives posted photos of female employees - captured with the company's own surveillance tools - and made sexually explicit remarks about them.

4/

When this came to light, the company's founder and CEO Filip Kaliszan called an all-hands meeting, expressed disappointment in the harassers, and told them that they could either quit...or lose some stock options. They chose the latter and remain employed there to this day.

5/
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The pandemic has afforded all of us a refresher course on the five stages of grief, a theoretical and controversial framework for describing how people cope with tragedy: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

https://t.co/nqPmjCvyab

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A far slower-moving unfolding of these stages can be seen in the reactions of the super-wealthy to the breakdown in neoliberal orthodoxy, the tale that says that inequality results from meritocracy, and makes us all better

Denial came out in the "rationalist" view: the world is better off than ever - richer, less violent, healthier, and any discontent you feel with your plummeting fortunes and the contracting possibilities for your kids is just your tunnel vision. Lack of perspective.

3/

But the Great Financial Crisis and Occupy triggered the anger of the elites: violent suppression of protests, the "Doom Boom" in new luxury bunkers, Howard Schultz's insistence that "billionaire" is a slur (he says we should call him a "person of wealth").

4/

The pandemic - and the "K-shaped recovery"- has revealed the existential threat inequality poses for our species, between price-gouging, fraud, profiteering, flouting health directives, and coercing the poor and vulnerable into risking their lives to keep the economy afloat.

5/
SOCIETY
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When you hear the phrase "free market," you probably think of "a market that is free from regulation" but that's the opposite of the phrase's original meaning!

1/


Adam Smith used the term to describe a market that was free from "economic rents" - money earned by owning things, rather than doing things. Smith recognized that markets attract parasites - "rentiers" - who seek to drain wealth by "investing" rather than building and doing.

2/

Which meant that, in the absence of muscular state intervention, markets would become less and less free - more and more dependent on the whims of rentiers who used money to breed money by creating toll-barriers between parts of the productive economy.

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For Smith, markets were only free if they were regulated. But that's the opposite of the way that we talk about free markets today. Today, a free market is a market where you are free to collect rents - passive income from owning things, at the expense of people doing things.

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This is true in so many metaphorical ways, but it's especially true when we're talking about actual rent - actual homes that people need to survive and produce, whose primary role today is to serve as an asset class to be maximized, not a basic human right.

5/
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my first argument is that the Clone Wars were a really complex morally gray moment in Star Wars canon in like, 5 different directions and I'd kind of like to know why Lucas did that.

especially with the direct line that's drawn in the OT with the allegory of WW2 and Vietnam with the rebels being the Vietnamese and the Empire being America. That...doesn't exist in the Clone Wars.

for starters: it's weird it's called the Clone Wars. I get why, because that's what Kenobi calls it in STAR WARS, but the clones are a small facet in the larger story of the war.

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Question:

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@MissingWords retweeted the following:


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But isn't the #StarWars franchise itself partly a simplistic comparison to the Holocaust?


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https://t.co/OP5Tbb42w7
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