Still Wondering

If people are so worried that Big Brother government is snooping on their every complaint and criticism, why do they spend so much time on social and electronic media calling attention to their rage at Big Brother?

Why is it “inappropriate” for the IRS to examine organizations’ applications for tax exemption, when those organizations publish ten point manifestos, all of which have to do with legislative reforms, including major changes to the tax code?

Why does the ACLU defend the right to privacy, but not when the Newtown parents want to keep the last moments of their children private from the eyes of the media?

Just Wondering

If you’re going to expose your government’s technology spying secrets because you believe the public has the right to decide what that government should and should not be doing to its citizens, why would you seek refuge in China?  Because they’re so scrupulous about not prying into their people’s lives, not stealing information through hacking, and allowing free criticism of the government?  See the Mikado for “The idiot who praises in enthusiastic tone/Every century but this and every country but his own.”

Opening Up or Shutting Down?

            Just when the shock of the Boston Marathon attack was beginning to settle a bit (I was less than two blocks from the infamous boat on the Thursday afternoon), the horror story out of Cleveland again shatters our sense of safety and human decency.  Everyone will make their own moral story out of each event, and I’ve been thinking about mine.

            Of the facts that have come out so far, the description of the homeowner’s way of living struck me most.  He was a man who, according to neighbors, never used his front door, but drove into his back yard, locked the gate, and entered from the rear.  People said he was friendly when outside, but that he never had company and never visited anyone else. 

            What occurred to me was my own childhood in a lower-middle to middle class neighborhood in Queens in the 1950s and 1960s.  There were about ten houses on each side of our street, and I can still recall at least eight of the families on my side, and about half those on the other (there was more movement on the other side, so a few families changed over in my six years before college).  Every family interacted with every other over the backyard fences, on the front lawns, and in each other’s houses.  A few families didn’t have kids, but they were as connected to the rest of the block as all those with school-age children. 

            Before that I lived in a far more urban part of Brooklyn, where three-story and somewhat taller apartments were the norm.  Every day from first through sixth grade I walked 8 blocks to school, often four times a day, since we could go home from lunch.  I was at the outer edge of the school catchment area, and I often heard from my mother that another mom had seen me doing something like wandering up one of the streets between school and home at the end of the day.  My wife lived in suburb of Providence, and recalls how the five-year-olds and up would walk to school, picking up members of their little crew on the way.

            Today we live on a block with 16 houses.  We have exactly one friend on the block (two others moved away), and perhaps two others with whom we have a cordial acquaintance.  The rest are total strangers to us, and I think, to each other.

            Beyond anecdotes, numerous studies report that parents are far more fearful for their children’s safety than at any time in the past.  The distance even older children are allowed to travel unsupervised has shrunk from miles to backyards.  Yet there is no evidence that events like that in Cleveland are any more common than in the past.

            The problem, it seems to me, is twofold.  First, we know about every incident immediately, no matter where it happens.  That means we have a collection of frightening events that covers at least all 300+ million Americans, plus occasional major abominations abroad.  But one evolutionary biologist has suggested that we take in these events as if they had occurred in the small, local social unit that was what our ancestors knew: a hundred people or somewhat more.  So our calculation of odds is inevitably warped. (I know one person who is fanatical about locking the back door to her well-fenced yard in a very safe neighborhood.  Why: because she can list three home invasions leading to murder that appeared on the local news: one in Massachusetts, one in Connecticut, and one in New Hampshire over a period of six years.)

            But the paradox is that the more we shut down in order to feel safe, the less safe we are.  On my current block there are no block parties, the yards are larger and farther apart, and most people spend their time indoors.  Everyone has a garage, so no one comes home, parks on the street, and chats with another neighbor arriving at the same time.  In fact, 15 of the 16 homes on my street have attached garages, so hidden movement between car and house would be even easier than in Cleveland (the 16^th had a garage but converted in into added living space).

            So we follow the reverse strategy of what many living creatures have developed to protect themselves against predators.  Instead of flocking together, watching out for the whole herd, or circling around the young, we do exactly what predators hope for: we carve ourselves out from the herd and so have no one but ourselves around when the predator comes stalking.  And we put our faith in security cameras, while complaining that these are an invasion of privacy when put up by government to protect us, but not when installed by businesses to protect themselves.  (And even though they helped capture the perpetrators in Boston, they aren’t very good at the “See Something, Say Something” model, except in tightly monitored circumstances.) No wonder a frightening number of us want assault rifles by our bedsides. 

The Happiest Day, or April Fool?

            Having just watched a piece on “Good Morning America” in which a reporter conversed with a gorilla to demonstrate a major scientific breakthrough, I was primed for more April Fool’s fun.  So when the Harvard Business Review Daily Statistic sent me an article purporting to be by scholars in Germany and the U.S., I thought our collective legs were being pulled by that usually fairly humorless institution.   Here’s why.  The breakdown of this 16-hour happiest day was:

106 Minutes a day of “intimate relations”

82    Socializing

78    Relaxing

75    Eating

73    Praying or meditating

68    Exercising

57    Talking on the phone

56    Shopping

55    TV

50    Preparing food

48    Computer

47    Housework

46    Napping

46    Caring for children

36    Work

33    Commuting

But if it’s a joke, Harvard either created a fake web site for the renowned Elsevier publishers, or had them put up a hoax dated February 13.

            I can happily accept the rough validity of some of these allocations: Socializing, Eating, Praying, Exercising, and Napping all seem to me pretty much on target.  But then it gets dicier.  Who can spend 106 minutes a day in “intimate relations”?  As the old joke goes:

       Preacher: Do you want to suffer in hell for an hour of carnal pleasure?

       Congregant: How do you make it last an hour?

I guess the reason you have to spend 78 minutes relaxing and 46 napping because of the intimate relations, since otherwise you have only about 5 hours of activities that you need to rest from, (and over 4 like socializing and talking on the phone or watching TV, that seem pretty relaxing).  And who wants to spend even 33 minutes commuting, or 47 in housework? 

And what do the academics mean by “Work”?  On the one hand, that isn’t enough work to buy most of us a computer, a TV, food, a couch for napping, a bed for intimate relations, a means of commuting, or much else for ourselves or the children.  Without those things, how many happy days would you have?  On the other, if you enjoy your work, is 36 minutes enough? 

Of course, it’s hard to argue with researchers who provide tables with “Comparison of 5 day schedules: calculated schedules based on log, squared, and hedonic utility functions, linear (assuming no utility decrease from activities), and actual schedule.”  But that’s only because it’s hard to understand them.

Aside from the specific quibbles, there’s the whole “one size fits all” form.  At what age?  Rich, retired, or in the midst of a working life? What interests?  What aversions?  What temperament? And what about the missing categories? 

My added categories would be Reading, Listening to Music, Being in Nature.  I would enjoy the full complement of 6 to 7 hours a day interacting with others, at least some of the time, but many would like much more alone time, some even more interaction. (Of course many can be combined, like being in nature, exercising, and socializing.)

My suggestion: start with a new category: My Favorite Activities. Allocate ideal time to them.  (Maybe 120 minutes reading, 30 just listening to music, and 90 in nature, for me.)  Then take the rest, drop any that are simply necessities, and calculate your ideal day off.  Then do a second plan for a work day, calculating how long you’d like to work at the job you have now, and parcel out the rest for what the church calls “ordinary days.”  Finally, add a third: ultimate reward days, that might include devoting almost all your waking hours to one activity, minus the necessities like eating or, if necessary resting or napping.  Maybe yours is a multi-day wilderness trip, or a visit to a world-class city to drink wine, shop, and take in the sights, or just a full day fishing, sailing, painting, or whatever.  Then plan your year to allow you at least 100 days of time off and about 10-20 of ultimate reward.

            Give it a try and let me know what you find.

Too Rich? Not Thin Enough?

Two apparently disparate issues in the news caught my eye recently.  Here in Massachusetts, unprecedented beach erosion is causing homes, many of them quite expensive, to tumble into the sea or come perilously close to doing so.  Just across the border, Rhode Island’s CVS Pharmacies have announced that overweight employees will have to pay $50 a month more for their health insurance.  Both events have caused outcries from those affected.  The homeowners want to be allowed to protect their homes by seawalls or any other means they can afford, and employees and other advocates are angry at CVS’s intrusion into their personal lives.

            Very different issues it seems: in one case, the government is preventing people from doing something costly that they want to do; in the other a business is requiring employees to pay unless they take an action.

            But both in some ways amount to the same thing: the belief that individual rights always trump those of the group.  Both ideas are very popular in the U.S., but both have serious limitations that often go unacknowledged.

            In the case of homeowners, it might be useful to apply the “right to swing my fist ends at my neighbor’s nose” principle.  There are many things I can’t do with my property because they affect my neighbor adversely: raise roosters or pigs in a crowded suburb, put up a windmill that is overly loud around his house, perhaps let trees grow so they block the view that made his house desirable, etc.  Since seawalls shift water’s action, they can easily cause greater erosion in their near neighborhood.  So the homeowner who has the funds to protect his property may be hastening the loss of his neighbor’s. 

One solution is the “no man is an island” model.  If you do indeed own an island, maybe you can protect it by a 360-degree seawall. Otherwise, you and all your neighbors will have to bear the mutual risks of nature, not additional risks imposed by one another.  There is an adage, after all, “Oceanfront property is God’s way of telling you you have too much money.”

            As for health insurance, the case is actually simpler.  If you want your employer to pay for your health insurance, as we unfortunately have decided to do in America, can your employer expect responsible action from you to hold down costs? Take the analogy of expense accounts.  A company may provide expense accounts, but put numerous restrictions on their use: caps on meals, travel rules, overnight stays, etc. If you buy life insurance, the company may restrict dangerous activities for which it will not pay.  Sports teams likewise place contract restrictions on physically hazardous activities of their players. If your habits raise the cost of health insurance for the whole company, should you be exempt from paying for those habits? 

            Certainly there’s a slippery slope argument.  But where both the health risks and the costs to society of smoking and obesity are so well documented and the prevalence of the activities is so widespread, selecting these and only these for intervention makes sense, while, say, charging anyone who skydives or bungee jumps has minimal payoff for society as a whole.

            The best reason for intervening is that its opposite is socially unthinkable.  No one, I imagine, is ready to say “If you smoke or are obese we won’t give you care for the subsequent illnesses.”  (There’s an interesting analogy: nine states so far bill people for the costs of being rescued, say from mountaineering. Is that different from billing people ahead of time for the insurance coverage they will statistically need because of their risky behavior?)

            I do see one error in CVS’s approach.  As it has been designed, it’s an individual punishment, or at least that’s what it feels like.  Why not reverse it?  All employees will pay $600 a year more for their health insurance.  But if you weigh in and are less than 10% over an accepted weight, you get the $600 back.  Anyone who doesn’t want to be intruded on just pays the $600.  (Thanks to Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s Nudge for alerting me to the benefits of this kind of approach.)

Guns by the Numbers

    Let me start by saying I’m no math whiz.  The fact that all three of my college roommates were math majors had no impact whatsoever on my understanding of the field.  In fact all I recall from conversations with them about their disciplines comes down to this: from the point of view of topology, a human being is just like a doughnut, and there’s a formula that can prove there’s always one spot on earth where the wind isn’t blowing, and one spot on a head with no hair.
    That being said, I think I know enough math and science to disqualify me for membership in the NRA and the Republican Party.  I thought my beef with them was limited to evolution and global warming, but now I see it extends to simple statistics and basic scientific method as well.
    I’m talking about the NRA’s gun logic, and its gun proposal.  Let’s review their recent arguments: guns are not the problem.  Violent video games are the problem, and media coverage of these events.  The solution: guns in every school.  (Let's skip the fact that the great majority of mass killings happen in places other than schools, from malls to movie theaters to religious establishments, and most often in workplaces.)
  What do you do when you’re building a hypothesis about what causes Phenomenon B?  You look at the possible factors, and eliminate them one by one until you’re left with unique characteristics of the environment where B happens, or as close as you can get.  That’s how we finally proved smoking caused cancer, microbes caused disease, seat belts saved lives, etc.
    So let’s try that.  The U.S. has violent video games and media coverage of violence.  Let’s compare some other places that have both, and let’s choose places as like the U.S. as possible.  We’ll use English-speaking countries that share a lot of our heritage: Canada, right next store, England, and say Australia.  Do any of them ban violent video games?  No.  Is there any reason to believe these games are not sold there, as they are here?  No.  Do any of them avoid media coverage of violent events?  Apparently not: replacing “U.S.” with “Canada,” “Britain” or “Australia” in a Google search of “Sandy Hook coverage” reveals 114 million hits for the U.S., 92 million for Canada, 32 million for Australia, and 28 million for Britain.  In fact, Canada has almost three hits for every Canadian, and Australia more than 1 per Australian.  (As a sidebar, the video game industry has pointed out that since the 90s sales of video games have quadrupled, while rates of homicide by juveniles have decreased by 71%.)
    Now what about gun ownership?  The U.S. has nearly 90 privately owned guns per 100 people, Canada 30, Australia 15, and Britain 6. Homicide rates in these four countries: 4.8 per 100,000 in the U.S., 1.8 per 100,000 in Canada, 1.4 in Australia, and 1.2 in England.
Most important, firearms account for 67% of all U.S. homicides, 26% of Canadian homicides, and 8% and 6% of Australian and British homicides, respectively.  Putting it at its simplest, your chance of being killed by a gun in Britain is about 1 in 1.6 million; in the U.S. it’s about 1 in 30,000. 
    I wish I was a great chart-maker or statistician, but it’s pretty clear that the number of guns a country has is the key variable in murder rates, at least among the factors the NRA has proposed versus the guns themselves.
    One more excursion into numbers.  What would we need to put the NRA's "guard in every school" into effect?  We’d need more than 132,000 full time guards, assuming exactly one per school.  How does that compare with the protections we have now? It’s more than all the police officers in the 36 largest police departments in American cities.  If we eliminate New York, which has an astonishing 26% of those 131,000 officers, it means more trained officers than all the other 106 cities with over 250 police.  It’s actually equal to 47% of all the police in all the 867 cities listed by the FBI.  It’s more than 3 times the Coast Guard, and nearly ¾ as large as the Marines.
    And what would that cost?  If we paid these people the same amount as the lowest starting police officer’s salary in the country, it’s around 4.2 billion dollars.  If we pay them a teacher’s average salary, it’s 6.2 billion, besides the cost of arming and training them.  That’s about 20 times the NRA budget, so I’m afraid they couldn’t help much even if they wanted to.
    And of course they don’t.  What they want is to preserve an antiquated right that has now been extended far beyond what any signer of the Constitution could have imagined, when no gun existed that could fire more than one shot before being reloaded by hand, a  process that took between 20 seconds and a minute.  Maybe that’s the answer: go back to the hallowed “strict construction” and allow anyone who wants to own a single-shot weapon that takes at least 20 seconds to reload.  Make everyone who wants more than that to build a case (e.g showing they’re engaged in a dangerous profession, or are a proven hunter or have been trained by one to use the standard weapons for hunting game), or else spike their guns and hang them on the wall as antiques from a more savage and violent era.

How Not to Write

As anyone can see, I’ve been away for a while.  The main reason is course work; I’m taking two classes for my certification in mediation and organizational conflict.  Unlike last semester, I’ve fallen into the land of the pure social scientist.  My courses require formal submissions in APA style, and I’ve done six papers in that genre.  The experience has been so traumatic that I fear I’ve forgotten how to write like a normal human being, so aside from the time it’s taken to produce 34,000 words in this dialect, I’ve been reluctant to risk confusing real writing with what’s done in social science courses.
    But the last paper is in, and it’s time to start recovering.  I thought the best way to do that would be to contrast what’s been required for the past four months with the way people normally write.
    Now I know every field has its jargon.  But some fields are worse than others.  English and history, I would say, except when contaminated by dogmas like semiotics, can actually produce something approaching real communication.  There are peculiarities, of course.  Mike Rose, in his wonderful Lives on the Boundary, said that when you write an English paper about a play or a novel, you’re not supposed to do what any normal person does when they’re talking about plays or novels: tell what happens and tell if it was any good.  Instead you’re supposed to delve deeper into matters of style, theme, archetype, ambiguity, etc. that prove you can read more carefully than the average best-seller consumer.  But you’re still connecting your reader to the book, often with extensive quotations.  You may also take issue in English and history with other prior writers, whose case you describe in more or less detail before demolishing it.
    The key here is that you’re writing about things that have been written, whether imaginatively or historically.  Often you’re actually reading excellent writing, which may improve your own.
    But in the world of social psychology and the like, none of the above applies.  You don’t follow most of the rules of ordinary discourse, and you almost seem to avoid illuminating your reader.  Take the mention of Mike Rose, above.  This might be re-written as: “Rose (Year) has analyzed the narrative-evaluative paradigm and its inapplicability to the academic setting.”  You would then have to supply the full reference to Rose in a list of references, like “Rose, M. (Year). Lives on the Boundary. New York: Penguin.”  That, of course, is an oversimplification.  To do the job right, you might have to put “Rose, 1995/2005)” to distinguish when the book came out from the edition you consulted.  But you aren’t giving a page number or even a chapter number, so if anyone wanted to find out if Rose really said what you say he said, they would have to read the whole book.  Even more complex, if you bought the book while traveling, you might feel you should cite the country (out of 8) where Penguin has offices; or maybe you should say “London,” because that’s where their registered office is.  This often means interrupting the flow of your thoughts to track down all the data, or else facing hours and hours of citation management just when you’re done and would like a walk, a beer, or some other distraction, like reading a real book.
    The wisest among the professors I’ve had in this program explained to me that my problem is I’m not the intended reader of the article.  The authors are writing for the select group of people working in the same field or sub-field, who know Rose inside out, and they’re just trying to tell the readers that they’re filling in a hole left by Rose and whoever else they cite, so that the others can see whether it’s a hole they need to know about while they’re filling in whatever hole they’ve staked out.
    Question 1, then, is why are we reading people who are not writing for us, and whom we can’t understand until we’ve read everyone else?  Question 2 is, really?  One article I read had 77 references for seven pages.  What are the odds that reader X or Y has read all 77 things that writer A has read, and remembers them in such detail that a single word and a last name brings it all back?  (One of the interesting tricks played is that these writers also cite everything they’ve ever written that is remotely germane to the current piece.  Are they just showing off, or are they listing 8 other articles so that a research engine will tick off 8 more citations of their work for “mine is bigger than yours” judgments by the powers that be?   They also play the Alphonse-Gaston game: if Larry, Curley and Moe do three pieces of work together, they evidently negotiate whose name goes first, so each of them, or at least each with clout, can get “lead author” props.)
    Believe me, I do not exaggerate the time and energy spent citing.  I have counted paragraphs where 66 words are actual text and 61 are citations in parentheses.  My own long papers have consisted of 80% writing and 20% references, not counting the parentheses in the text that lead you to the 20% at the back of the paper.  This proportion is required by the demand, articulated by one of my teachers, that you need to cite everything that is not your own opinion or observation.  Mention D-Day and you’d better have evidence that it happened on June 6, 1944.  Quote the phrase “the rest is silence” and you’d better credit Shakespeare.  I’m not kidding.  For a sentence that said Lord of the Flies and The Fountainhead reflected views of their era about human nature, I was told to give full citations: last name of author, first initial, date of publication, and city, with details if the city isn’t a famous one.  Do I have a copy of either book nearby?  What edition should I cite?  Will any of my readers go to New York to buy Lord of the Flies and read it to see if I’m right?
    Now it’s easy to play this game.  Think of an idea you want to include, state it in a word or two (Oedipus complex, cognitive dissonance, conditioned response), go look on your shelf or in Google, and you’ve got another citation.  My 14-page paper had 102 citations; my 347-page doctoral thesis 112. 
    What I find worse than the tedium and the impenetrability, the cliqueishness and the petty point-scoring, is the impersonality. No one gets a first name, no one’s argument is given any scope. (A teacher even said it’s bad writing to quote other people: just paraphrase them.)  Everyone else’s work is simply one more pebble piled on the mound that will get you to the top of tenure hill.
    To paraphrase Edgar Lee Masters: Tick, tick, tick.  Such little citations. While Homer and Whitman roared in the pines.  (“Petit the Poet,” Spoon River Anthology, written for all time.  Read it.)