Month: January 2023

I'm probably going to regret this, but L'Affair Bostrom has intrigued me. Here's the background.

Nick Bostrom is a professor of philosophy at Oxford University who did something unfortunate 26 years ago: he engaged in an online conversation with a bunch of other 23-year-olds on an email listserv. The topic was communication styles, and Bostrom averred that he liked blunt talk. Unfortunately, the example he came up with was . . .

Blacks are more stupid than whites

. . . as an alternative to:

On average, Black people score lower on standardized IQ tests than white people.

In the email, he followed this up with a complaint that the blunt version of the statement strikes most people as no more than:

I hate those bloody n-----s!!!!

So far there's no controversy. Everyone, including Bostrom, agrees that this was idiotic, offensive, and repulsive. Bostrom apologized for it within 24 hours of writing it, and there it would have lain for the next 26 years, untouched and unknown, except for one thing: Bostrom apparently caught wind that someone was trawling through the old archives of the listserv looking for offensive stuff to use in "smear campaigns." Instead of waiting for this to happen, he posted a preemptive apology a week ago.

This blew up a corner of the internet because the apology—as usual—was deemed insufficient and insensitive. Here it is:

I completely repudiate this disgusting email from 26 years ago. It does not accurately represent my views, then or now. The invocation of a racial slur was repulsive. I immediately apologized for writing it at the time, within 24 hours; and I apologize again unreservedly today. I recoil when I read it and reject it utterly.

What are my actual views? I do think that provocative communication styles have a place—but not like this! I also think that it is deeply unfair that unequal access to education, nutrients, and basic healthcare leads to inequality in social outcomes, including sometimes disparities in skills and cognitive capacity. This is a huge moral travesty that we should not paper over or downplay. Much of my personal charitable giving over the years has gone to fighting exactly this problem: I’ve given many thousands of pounds to organizations including to the SCI Foundation, GiveDirectly, the Black Health Alliance, the Iodine Global Network, BasicNeeds, and the Christian Blind Mission.

Are there any genetic contributors to differences between groups in cognitive abilities? It is not my area of expertise, and I don’t have any particular interest in the question. I would leave to others, who have more relevant knowledge, to debate whether or not in addition to environmental factors, epigenetic or genetic factors play any role

Peter Wildeford explains why he was offended:

Bostrom’s apology was absolutely idiotically executed and showed a stellar amount of indifference to the harm that his original email and expressed views caused.

But this isn't true. Bostrom's original email caused almost no harm and would have continued to cause no harm except that someone apparently planned to dredge it up and attack Bostrom with it. This is the person who caused harm.

What else? Other commenters have suggested that the apology was "defensive"; that it spent too little time apologizing; that it was tone deaf; that it didn't offer to make amends; and that it showed a lack of empathy toward the people Bostrom is apologizing to. Wildeford himself is upset at Bostrom's "smug and arrogant social ineptitude and flagrant dismissal of this incident."

Matt Yglesias takes a different view: Since Bostrom's original email recommended that offensive views should be dressed up for public consumption, maybe that's all he's doing here. "Under that circumstance, you face an unusually high bar if you want to genuinely persuade people that you have genuinely changed your mind....To my eye the 'apology' totally failed to meet that bar."

I don't really buy any of this. Bostrom has been a highly public and widely published figure for the past 26 years, and I don't know how a bar can be any higher. If he's done nothing in 26 years to suggest he has racist views, either he's not a racist or else he's a liar who could give George Santos a run for his money.

Nor do I really buy all the tonal criticisms. No apology has to be perfect, and the intent of Bostrom's seems fairly clear. We should do our best to give apologies a fair reading, not an obviously hostile one.

But then there's one more weird thing: After the excerpt I cited above, Bostrom abruptly veers into a short discussion of eugenics. Why? Everyone seems to be assuming that it demonstrates a deep well of racial obsession that bubbles up in Bostrom's brain constantly, which he doesn't have the self-control to shut up about. But I don't think that's right. Bostrom is deeply involved in the bioenhancement movement—which some people associate with eugenics—so he probably figured he needed to address it since it was certain to come up. Unfortunately, he puts it this way:

Do I support eugenics? No, not as the term is commonly understood.

This is pretty obviously open to mockery, and he really should have had the smarts to choose different wording. The point he wants to make is that in "contemporary academic bioethics" the word eugenics is sometimes used in the sense that parents should have access to genetic screening and, presumably, the choice to enhance their children if they wish to do so. Bostrom apparently (?) supports this, and wants to make sure that if anyone suggests he's ever written something that "endorses eugenics," this is all he was referring to.

My view is that the real villain of this episode is the person who was planning to attack Bostrom by dredging up this old email (assuming that such a person actually exists). Beyond that, I think that a fair reading of the apology convicts Bostrom, at most, of some awkward writing, but no more.

Finally, there's this: I have thought for some time that the art of apologizing has gone off the rails. In social media land, it's virtually impossible to offer an apology that doesn't attract mountains of criticism. For one reason or another, apologies are never good enough—it's a "non-apology apology"; you can't unring that bell; it showed too little appreciation of the deep harm that was caused; you need deeds, not just words; etc.—and this is so no matter how they're phrased or what they're about.

I'd just as soon not add to this. Let's save the pile-ons for genuinely insincere or tone-deaf apologies.

A reader asked me today to explain my analogy of inflation to the law of gravity. It's simple. Here's a picture of an airplane. Lift is providing an upward acceleration of 2 meters/sec², so everything is hunky dory.

But wait. We need to adjust for the downward force of gravity:

Once we've done that, the real acceleration of the airplane is 7.8 meters/sec² straight down.

There are occasions when you don't care about gravity and you only want to know about lift—for example, if you're testing a model in a wind tunnel. But in nearly all real-world applications, you need to adjust prices for inflation and you need to adjust the aerodynamic lift of an airplane for gravity. If you don't, your view of reality is faulty and you're going to crash and burn.

Here is a headline today in the Wall Street Journal:

Shopper Rebellion Against Higher Prices Helps Slow Inflation

Indeed? Let's investigate how this rebellion against inflation is manifesting itself:

Conagra Brands Inc., which makes Hunt’s ketchup and Slim Jim meat sticks, raised prices 17% in its latest quarter, on top of two previous quarters, when it increased prices more than 10% [for a total of 27% over two years].

The company said it is done boosting prices for now. Conagra’s sales volumes fell 8.4% for the quarter ended Nov. 27, which the company attributed in part to shoppers recoiling from the price increases.

So this is not just about inflation, which has raised food prices 19% over the past two years. It's also due to the fact that Conagra decided to tack on an extra 8% just for the hell of it. And sales volume fell! Imagine that. It's exactly what they taught us in Econ 101.

A recent study provides more detail:

The study, by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, found that higher markups—the gap between what a firm charges and what it costs to produce an item—were a major driver of inflation in 2021.

In plainer terms, companies decided to use inflation as an excuse to boost their gross profit margins just because they could—or thought they could, anyway. But they sure didn't do the same thing with wages:

Since the start of 2021, weekly wages for food manufacturing workers have grown more slowly than inflation. In real terms, the folks who make Slim Jim meat sticks are earning about 5% less than they did two years ago.

So prices are up 8% and wages are down 5%. That should make Wall Street happy, but it's understandably worth a bit of rebellion for the rest of us.

Rain, rain, rain. We'll have more water in April when the snowpack melts, but our streams and rivers and flood channels are already filling up (temporarily) from our recent bomb cyclones and atmospheric rivers. This particular one is a stream that flows down alongside Mt. Baldy Road. Further up the mountain there's another picturesque bunch of rocks for the stream to flow over, but it was getting near sunset and I only had time for one. So this was it.

In the Wall Street Journal yesterday, James Mackintosh put up the following chart:

I don't get it. Why would you deliberately put up a chart that ignores inflation? It's like ignoring the law of gravity. "If you don't count the effect of gravity, our plane is ascending nicely. Oops."

Here is the 20-year total return for a 60-40 fund based on the numbers in the chart above:

It looks good! Until you account for inflation, that is. Once you do that it's never more than barely above an S&P index fund, and mostly well below it.

Today's blog/Twitter/column categories:

• For anyone: Quote Martin Luther King Jr. so you can acknowledge MLK Day without doing any real work.
• Repeat his belief that Chicago was worse than the South.
• Print an entire speech/work. "Birmingham Jail" and "I Have a Dream" are the favorites, but less prominent speeches/works can show sophistication. The Riverside Church speech is a good one.
• For liberals: Point out ways that MLK was a full-blown economic revolutionary, not just a cuddly, nonviolent civil rights leader.
• Make your audience go hmmm by declaring that dissent is the real patriotism.
• For conservatives: Point out that MLK would have been a conservative today.
• Continue to oppose any legislation that helps Black people and assert that MLK would have agreed.
• For the ambitious: Write a couple thousand words comparing Ukraine to the civil rights movement, with Volodymyr Zelensky cast as a modern-day MLK.
• For the visually minded: Post a photograph of some kind.

Here are average weekly earnings for full-time workers:

Since 2000, men's earnings have gone up 0.16% ($2) per year in real terms. Since 2019, men's earnings have gone down 0.08% ($1) per year.

Since 2000, women's earnings have gone up 0.67% ($6) per year in real terms . Since 2019, women's earnings have gone up 0.76% ($7.50) per year.

NOTE: This is the median for full-time workers and does not include those who don't work or work only part-time. Thus, it doesn't account for the fact that fewer people are working than in 2000. Compared to 2000 levels, about 300,000 more women are working and 2 million fewer men.

As preparation for my leukopheresis next month, when T-cells will be extracted from my bloodsteam, my body needs to be cleaned up as much as possible. That means stopping the chemo treatments. Hooray! But yesterday I learned that it also means stopping the Evil Dex™. Doubleplus hooray!

I already feel a little better, and within another two or three weeks I should be feeling pretty good. Then, a few weeks after that, it will be time for the CAR-T treatment and I'll go back to feeling crappy. But then, a few months after that, I'll be fine again!

There's an ironic problem hovering over all this, though. I took up my astronomy hobby because I was looking for something I could do on dex days, when I'd be awake all night anyway. But now it's possible that I'll never take dex again, which makes astrophotography a bit of a problem. Will I be able to stay up all night and still be alert enough to drive home in the morning? Or will I be able to sleep a bit in the car while the telescope does its thing?

Next week I plan to find out on a test trip for three different deep sky objects, including the C/2022 E3 (ZTF) comet, aka the "green comet." I'll report back.

On Monday, CBS News published a report saying that "a small number" of classified documents had been discovered while cleaning out Joe Biden's old office at the Penn Biden Center. Subsequent reports put the number of documents at about ten.

On Wednesday, NBC News reported that more classified documents had been found in Biden's garage at his home in Wilmington. Later reports put the number at about ten.

On Thursday, the attorney general appointed a special prosecutor to investigate the situation.

Today the White House announced that another six classified documents had been found in a room "adjacent" to the garage.

Shortly after the first report I called this whole thing a nothingburger, and I stand by that on substantive grounds. But on media grounds, I said that one reason the story didn't have legs was because "there's no reason to think that any further documents will be found, which would have provided the drip-drip-drip that stories like this need to stay alive."

That was sure wrong! It's been a whole week of drip-drip-drip so far, and who knows what will happen next. There's still probably nothing here, but there's not much question that it will be a media show for quite a while.

A new study is out that tries to measure the effectiveness of social media advertising campaigns in political races. The unique part of this study is that it makes use of an actual advertising campaign during the 2020 presidential contest that deliberately held out a control group so that its effectiveness could be measured:

We present the results of a large, US$8.9 million campaign-wide field experiment, conducted among 2 million moderate- and low-information persuadable voters in five battleground states during the 2020 US presidential election. Treatment group participants were exposed to an 8-month-long advertising programme delivered via social media, designed to persuade people to vote against Donald Trump and for Joe Biden.

The funny thing is that I think the authors underrate their own results. For example, here is turnout for Republicans and Democrats:

The authors say, "We found both small mobilizing effects among Biden leaners and small demobilizing effects among Trump leaners." But this is a net difference of 1.8% in turnout. In most political campaigns this would be considered pretty substantial and the price tag of $8.9 million for five states pretty modest. Most campaign managers in battleground states would be thrilled with it.

Basically, I think you can say two things here. First, on an absolute basis this study shows a fairly small effect. Second, within the context of a close political race, it shows a very substantial effect.