Quick hits (part II)

1) This is a really disturbing story (pretty short, just read it), “They took a dog and knocked down the door. Why NC police say they did nothing wrong“

They did plenty wrong.  And, so far, no accountability.  We have so far to go to improve policing in so many jurisdictions. 

2) Pretty cool from Arthur Brooks, “Aristotle’s 10 Rules for a Good Life.”  And the bullet point summary:

Aristotle proposed these happiness virtues more than two millennia ago, but I believe they provide a handy checklist today for living well. Here’s an abbreviated list you might just want to put up on your fridge, or tape to the bottom of your computer screen.

1. Name your fears and face them.
2. Know your appetites and control them.
3. Be neither a cheapskate nor a spendthrift.
4. Give as generously as you can.
5. Focus more on the transcendent; disregard the trivial.
6. True strength is a controlled temper.
7. Never lie, especially to yourself.
8. Stop struggling for your fair share.
9. Forgive others, and forbear their weaknesses.
10. Define your morality; live up to it, even in private.

3) You may be surprised to learn that I am not in this half. Gallup, “Fully Half of Americans Have Tried Marijuana”

4) Loved this from Jamelle Bouie on voting:

Demanding a de facto literacy test for most young Americans to vote is not actually a “perfectly reasonable condition.” It is a direct assault on the basic democratic rights of millions of citizens.

To begin, there’s the fundamental fact that no aspect of political equality hinges on the ability to memorize trivia. What’s more, you do not need a formal education of any sort to embrace the duties of citizenship or to understand yourself as a political actor with a right to self-government. You do not even need one to understand your political interests and to work, individually or with others, to pursue them through our democratic institutions.

To think otherwise is to believe that Americans, from the yeoman farmers of the early Republic to the freedmen of the Reconstruction South to the urban industrial workers of the early 20th century, have never been equipped to govern themselves.

There’s also the practical fact that most new requirements for voting in the United States are — in intent and purpose — new restrictions on voting.

For example, these days we take the secret ballot for granted as the only rational way to conduct an election. Of course the state should produce uniform, standard ballots for all elections. Of course we should vote in private. But for much of the 19th century before the introduction of the secret ballot — also known as the “Australian” ballot — American voters obtained their ballots from their political parties. “Since the ballots generally contained only the names of an individual party’s candidates, literacy was not required,” notes the historian Alexander Keyssar in “The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States.” “All that a man had to do was drop a ballot in a box.”

With a single, standardized ballot — cast in private without the assistance of a friend or relative or party representative — voters had to read to participate. That was the point. As one contemporaneous observer, George Gunton, an economist and social reformer, declared, “So obvious is the evil of ignorant voting that more stringent naturalization laws are being demanded, because too many of our foreign-born citizens vote ignorantly. It is to remedy this that the Australian ballot system has been adopted in so many states.” Its purpose, he continued, was “to eliminate the ignorant, illiterate voters.”

5) On a longer essay about the problematic nature of our elite universities, I loved this idea:

A number of scholars and practitioners have called for using selective college admissions to “nudge” parents and students in several ways. In 2017, for example, Thomas Scott-Railton published a provocative article in the Yale Law & Policy Review urging elite colleges to give a substantial admissions bonus to applicants who had attended high-poverty K–12 schools even if they were not from low-income households themselves. “By rewarding applicants for attending socioeconomically integrated schools,” he argued, “colleges would mobilize the resources of private actors across the country towards integration.”

6) Somehow, I grew up 30 minutes from Great Falls Park but never managed to visit it until this past week. So awesome. And the Potomac River is damn dangerous here. 

7) Post with a great photo essay on the Maui fires. 

8) I was telling my son just the other day about the really interesting situation in El Salvador.  They have made the country far more safe and livable by throwing pretty much everybody even suspected of gang connections in prison.  But, of course, that means a lot of non gang members are wrongly ending up in prison.  One of them is a Raleigh-based rapper and this is such a sad story. 

On Jan. 10, during the last week of his trip, Salvadoran police detained Hernández while he was walking in a park with Morán.

“The police got out of their vehicle as if they had been searching for him,” his 20-year-old fiancée recalled. “We were on our way to get dinner.”

To the police, Hernández fit the profile of a gang member.

They said they didn’t recognize him and hadn’t seen him regularly in that area. Further investigation by police revealed he recorded what they considered to besuspicious rap music in the United States, according to an arrest report in Spanish reviewed by The News & Observer.

Hernández’s mention of Barrio El Calvario – a formerly gang-controlled neighborhood in El Salvador – in his “Freestyle” video was part of the state’s alleged evidence of his gang ties.

9) I was totally fascinated by the popular twitter thread on how maybe we had figured out the sulphur-based hack for climate change.  Drum throws some cold water on it:

Yesterday I wrote about new regulations limiting sulphur content in the bunker fuel used by oceangoing vessels. I concluded that the effect on climate change of these limits was minuscule, but today Alex Tabarrok links to an article in Science that suggests the effect might have been more substantial.

But there are reasons for skepticism. On average, solar radiation amounts to about 1000 watts per square meter. According to a study quoted in the article, this compares to an increase of 0.1 w/m² due to the sulphur limits. That’s not a lot.

The 1991 Pinatubo volcano, for example, reduced solar radiation by about 4 w/m², which led to a global temperature drop of 0.5°C. This suggests that a change of 0.1 w/m² would produce a global increase of about 0.012°C, a very small amount.¹

But what about the North Atlantic specifically, where ship traffic is heavy? The study estimates that the effect on solar radiation is about ten times stronger, which might lead to a sea temperature increase of 0.12°C—though this is probably an upper limit thanks to the inertia of ocean temps. This compares to a recorded increase of 0.91°C so far this year. In other words, the sulphur limits are responsible for at most one-eighth of the total warming.

10) This was interesting.  In this case, it mostly seems the answer is changing technology in darts and dart boards, not the humans. “Studying the Limits of Human Perfection, Through Darts: Why do athletes always seem to get better, generation by generation? It’s not always for the reasons you might think.”

Today’s athletes may be more skilled than their predecessors. But they are often playing with better equipment or technology that can boost their scores. Darts is no exception.

The darts themselves have improved. They’ve become thinner, making it less likely that previously thrown darts will crowd out the board.

But the triple-20 region has also grown in size, because of a change in the construction of the board. In the early 1990s, the wires that separate the scoring sections were as thick as 1.8 millimeters in diameter, according to Lee Huxtable, a production designer at Winmau, a board manufacturer. But they are now closer to 0.6 millimeters wide.

These small changes have increased the height of the triple-20 region to roughly 9.4 millimeters from 8 millimeters. In addition, the wires are now less rounded and angled toward the target. This means darts are less likely to bounce off the board and more likely to be directed toward the triple-scoring segments.

11) I really do think we put way too much focus on the super-elite colleges and that, as long as you don’t want to be a Wall Street investment banker, or a very small number of elite professions, it truly doesn’t matter all that much where you went for undergraduate (and all the stuff about the Supreme Court is legal elites is based on law school, and many of these elites went to ordinary enough undergrad institutions).  But, Annie Lowrey makes a strong case that I’m getting this wrong:

That means that just by changing their admissions policies, these colleges could make the country’s leadership more socioeconomically diverse.

“People sometimes ask: Within the broad scope of trying to increase social mobility and address inequality in America, why is it important to spend your time focusing on 12 colleges that educate less than half a percent of Americans? Surely this can’t be important by the numbers,” Chetty told me. “That is right. But if you look at the people in positions of great influence—leading politicians, scientists, journalists—an incredibly disproportionate number come from these 12 colleges. To the extent those folks have a big influence on lots of other people’s lives, diversifying who is in those positions matters.”

The new research demonstrates that Harvard matters. Yale works. All of the colleges known in the literature as “Ivy Plus”—the Ivies plus Stanford, MIT, Duke, and the University of Chicago—are worth it. These schools really are different in terms of propelling a given student into the country’s ruling class.

That may seem like common sense. But it does contradict or complicate a body of prior research indicating that many kids do not benefit from going to Cornell versus the University of Texas at Austin. If admitted to both an Ivy and a top-tier state school, these studies show, a student’s earnings are likely to end up the same regardless of which one they attend; the real enduring source of advantage seems to be growing up rich in the first place.

But not quite, the new research from Chetty, Deming, and Friedman finds. On average, a kid’s earnings end up roughly the same whether they go to Penn or to Penn State. But kids who attend super-elite schools rather than state flagship institutions are 60 percent more likely at age 33 to be in the top 1 percent of the income distribution, nearly twice as likely to go to a tippy-top graduate school, and nearly three times as likely to be employed at a firm like Goldman Sachs or Google.

You can become a successful doctor whether you go to one of these colleges or not, Chetty told me. “But if you’re talking about access to these positions or institutions of great influence—top companies, top graduate programs, clerkships and so on—there’s a doubling or tripling of your chances. There’s really quite a large effect there.”

12) Jesse Singal just unlocked this four year old post of his and I really love it, “Please Stop Sharing This Viral But Misguided Free-Speech Comic”

But that’s a nerdy side-point. My main gripe with this comic, and the reason that it annoys me so many people think it presents a laudable and common-sense understanding of free speech, is the extent to which it confounds discussions of free-speech law with discussions of free-speech norms.

It is definitely true that no one “has to listen to your bullshit. Or host you when you share it.” But it is only a very small and very under-informed segment of the population whose members believe that when Twitter bans someone, for example, the tech giant is committing a literal violation of the First Amendment. For many of us, the conversation is a lot more nuanced than that. We’re interested in questions like: Under what circumstances should someone be banned from Twitter? To what extent do we want a company like Twitter making decisions about who does and doesn’t have a voice on what is (unfortunately) a very influential platform, at a time when social media is (unfortunately) extremely important to the national discourse? More broadly, when do we want it to be acceptable for someone’s livelihood or social ties or whatever else to be genuinely threatened because of their public utterances?

Many of these questions are difficult and involve tradeoffs. The sentence “If you’re yelled at, boycotted, have your show cancelled, or get banned from an internet community, your free speech rights aren’t being violated” references all sorts of different behaviors and outcomes. Getting yelled at is a temporary annoyance or source of fear. Getting banned from an internet community, if it’s one that you have close or longstanding ties to, can be a pretty big deal. Getting your show cancelled can be a very big deal if that’s your livelihood.

When do we want to consider it okay, as a society, to yell at someone or boot them from an internet community or cancel their show? What manner of speech qualifies? The comic strip misdirects by pretending the only question here is whether there are any legal issues with these sorts of behaviors, which there almost always aren’t. This ties into a common tendency I’ve called out in many lefty free-speech takes to swap out difficult questions for easy ones and then pretend the underlying issues have been addressed. It’s easy to replace a difficult question — When should someone be banned from Twitter? — with an easy one: Is it literally a violation of the First Amendment for Twitter to ban someone?

13) Good stuff from German Lopez on Oregon’s (failing) drug policy:

When Oregon was getting ready to vote on whether to decriminalize all drugs in 2020, I was covering the story for Vox. During my interviews with the leaders of the decriminalization campaign, they often cited Portugal. It decriminalized all drugs in 2000. In the years after, Portugal’s drug-related problems declined.

But I found the comparison to be inexact. Even as Portugal ended prison time for drug possession, it created a unique system that pushed people to stop using drugs — sometimes with the continued threat of penalties, like the revocation of a person’s professional license. Oregon didn’t plan to enact similarly tough penalties, and advocates for decriminalization did not have a clear explanation for why their law would work as well as Portugal’s.

Our conversations left me wondering whether Oregon could repeat Portugal’s successes if the decriminalization initiative passed.

It did pass, with more than 58 percent of the vote. The results have not been good. Overdose deaths have spiked, and drug users have overrun public spaces in Portland, as Jordan Gale and Jan Hoffman reported for The Times this week… In today’s newsletter, I’ll use Oregon’s disappointing experience to consider a larger lesson about drug policy. Carrot, but no stick Drug addiction is an illness, but it is different from many other illnesses in a crucial respect. Most people with diabetes or cancer wish they could make their diseases disappear. Addicts have a more complex relationship with their disease. People with addiction often do not want treatment. They frequently think they have a handle on their drug use. That attitude is at the root of many people’s addictions. “You need to answer the question: Why would people stop using an incredibly rewarding drug if there is no real consequence at all?” said Keith Humphreys, a drug policy expert at Stanford University. A crucial part of Portugal’s change in 2000 was its attempt to nudge people to stop using drugs. The country did not simply decriminalize the substances. It also set up new incentives for seeking help: People caught using drugs can be sent to a special commission that tries to get them into free treatment. If drug users do not cooperate or they show serious problems, the commission can impose penalties, such as barring people from taking some jobs or visiting certain locations. It is a carrot-and-stick approach. Oregon does not have much of a stick. The state imposes a $100 fine for people caught using drugs, but people can easily avoid the fine. A single phone call participating in a health screening, with no commitment to actual treatment, can get it waived. Drug users often ignore the fines, without consequences. Some police officers, knowing the fines can be toothless, no longer issue them. As a result, people continue to use drugs, without an incentive to seek help.

14) Good stuff from Adam Grant, “Women Know Exactly What They’re Doing When They Use ‘Weak Language’”

“Stop using weak language.” If you’re a woman, you’ve probably gotten this advice from a mentor, a coach or a teacher. If you want to be heard, use more forceful language. If you want a raise or a promotion, demand it. As the saying goes, nice girls don’t get the corner office.

This advice may be well intentioned, but it’s misguided. Disclaimers (I might be wrong, but …), hedges (maybe, sort of), and tag questions (don’t you think?) can be a strategic advantage. So-called weak language is an unappreciated source of strength. Understanding why can explain a lot about the way women acquire power and influence — and how men do, too.

It turns out that women who use weak language when they ask for raises are more likely to get them. In one experiment, experienced managers watched videos of people negotiating for higher pay and weighed in on whether the request should be granted. The participants were more willing to support a salary bump for women — and said they would be more eager to work with them — if the request sounded tentative: “I don’t know how typical it is for people at my level to negotiate,” they said, following a script, “but I’m hopeful you’ll see my skill at negotiating as something important that I bring to the job.” By using a disclaimer (“I don’t know …”) and a hedge “(I hope …”), the women reinforced the supervisor’s authority and avoided the impression of arrogance. For the men who asked for a raise, however, weak language neither helped nor hurt. No one was fazed if they just came out and demanded more money.

In 29 studies, women in a variety of situations had a tendency to use more “tentative language” than men. But that language doesn’t reflect a lack of assertiveness or conviction. Rather, it’s a way to convey interpersonal sensitivity — interest in other people’s perspectives — and that’s why it’s powerful.

In the United States and in many cultures, gender stereotypes still hold that men should be dominant and assertive, while women should be kind and caring. When women violate these stereotypes, they often get punished. In a meta-analysis of dozens of studies, when women asserted their ideas, made direct requests and advocated for themselves, they were judged as less hirable. Although they were seen as equally competent, they were liked less than men who engaged in the exact same behaviors.

New evidence reveals that it’s not ambition per se that women are being penalized for. In fact, women who are perceived as intelligent and capable, determined and achievement-oriented, independent and self-reliant are seen as more promotable to leadership positions.

The problem arises if people perceive them to be forceful, controlling, commanding and outspoken. These are qualities for which men are regularly given a pass, but they put women at risk of being disliked and denied for leadership roles. (Not surprisingly, the backlash is even stronger when a woman is Black.) Instead of being judged just on their performance, they are dinged for their personality. Overbearing. Too abrasive. Sharp elbows.

15) This is cool, “How a Microbial Evolutionary Accident Changed Earth’s Atmosphere: An extra membrane that once had digestive functions let marine microbes boost their yield from photosynthesis. Today, they’re responsible for locking carbon in the ocean and putting oxygen in the air.”

An extra membrane that once had digestive functions let marine microbes boost their yield from photosynthesis. Today, they’re responsible for locking carbon in the ocean and putting oxygen in the air.

A dense rainforest or other verdant terrestrial vegetation may be what first comes to mind at the mention of photosynthesis. Yet the clouds of phytoplankton that fill the oceans are the major drivers of that process in nature. The plantlike single-celled aquatic microbes generate more than 50 percent of the oxygen in the atmosphere, and they absorb nearly half of the carbon dioxide, converting it into the glucose, fats, proteins and other organic molecules that nourish the food web of the oceans.

A recently published study in Current Biology finally pins down the source of this unparalleled photosynthetic efficiency, which has long baffled scientists. The new research found that some phytoplankton are equipped with an extra internal membrane that carries a “proton pump” enzyme that supercharges their ability to convert carbon dioxide into other substances. The enhancements due to this one protein modification seem to contribute to the production of nearly 12 percent of the oxygen in the air and as much as 25 percent of all the carbon “fixed” (locked into organic compounds) in the ocean.

Surprisingly, that photosynthetic innovation seems to have evolved by chance from a membrane protein that was originally used for digestion in the ancestor of the phytoplankton. In addition to explaining the cells’ prowess at photosynthesis, the new work helps to confirm the theory that those phytoplankton arose through a symbiotic alliance between a protozoan and a resilient red alga.

“I find it staggering that a proton enzyme that we have known for so many decades is responsible for maintaining such a crucial phenomenon on Earth,” said Dennis Brown, a cell biologist at Harvard Medical School who studies the functions of membrane proteins and was not involved in the study.

16) Nobody better than Elizabeth Rosenthal on the awfulness of the business of American health care, “Your Exorbitant Medical Bill, Brought to You by the Latest Hospital Merger”

After decades of unchecked mergers, health care is the land of giants, with one or two huge medical systems monopolizing care top to bottom in many cities, states and even whole regions of the country. Reams of economic research show that the level of hospital consolidation today — 75 percent of markets are now considered highly consolidated — decreases patient choice, impedes innovation, erodes quality and raises prices…

For many years in the last century the Federal Trade Commission made little effort to go to court to block hospital mergers because judges tended to rule that as nonprofit entities, hospitals were unlikely to use monopoly power to pursue abusive business practices. How wrong they were…

As hospital systems have grown — and become major employers — their sway with state legislatures has created new obstacles to curbing consolidation. Sympathetic state lawmakers have passed so-called Certificate of Public Advantage laws to shield hospitals from both federal and state antitrust action. Such certificates in Tennessee and Virginia allowed the formation of Ballad from two competing systems in 2018, over the F.T.C.’s objections. Just recently, the North Carolina Senate gave the UNC Health system the green light to expand, regardless of regulators’ thoughts.

The newest challenge is how to handle the growing number of cross-market mergers, where huge health systems in different parts of a state or of the country join forces. While the hospitals are not competing for the same patients, emerging research shows that these moves result in higher prices, in part because the increased negotiating clout of the enormous health system forces companies that cover employees in both markets to pay more in what previously was the cheaper region.

17) Some pretty cool technology at work here, “Tired of proving you’re not a robot? Say goodbye to Captcha boxes.”

One basic premise behind the Captcha-killers backed by companies including Apple is that instead of you solving a puzzle, your computer must solve challenges to prove you’re human. You don’t have to do anything.

Captchas are a tiny annoyance, but they’re also one more stodgy technology that’s making your life harder, not easier. Like online passwords and app stores, Captchas have a good reason to exist, but they have clung to life long after the drawbacks outweighed the benefits.

Let’s talk about why Captchas persist to annoy you, and why there’s hope they might slowly die…

The more people and machines find ways to get around Captchas, the harder companies have made them. This creates a doom loop of irritation that might drive you away from buying stuff or accessing your accounts.

Forter, which helps retail websites stop fraud, said that for every dollar a business loses to bogus transactions, it turns away $30 by mistakenly blocking or discouraging legitimate customers, including through use of Captchas…

Instead, Graham-Cumming said, the ticketing company’s computer systems might challenge your web browser to draw a random piece of text.

It might then look for clues in the small differences in fonts between the Chrome web browser on a Mac and Windows computer that signal a browser is being controlled by automated software and not a real person.

Humans also fiddle with a computer mouse or move around a touch screen phone in a “very human way,” Graham-Cumming said, so the ticketing computer might scope out how the cursor is moving.

Apple says a ticketing app might also detect whether you’re logged in to your Apple account and therefore the ticket buyer is more likely to be an individual rather than automated software.

The best-case scenario is that all this happens without you doing anything. The computer on the ticketing end is making a yes-or-no assessment about whether the computer on your end is exhibiting bot-like behavior.

18) I think I diagnosed myself with Achenbach syndrome.  It’s pretty much harmless and definitely weird. 

19) Some good social science on racial attitudes:

From calls to ban critical race theory to concerns about “woke culture,” American conservatives have mobilized in opposition to antiracist claims and movements. Here, we propose that this opposition has crystallized into a distinct racial ideology among white Americans, profoundly shaping contemporary racial politics. We explore opposition to antiracism (or anti-antiracism) across five studies (total N=6,076). We find anti-antiracism is prevalent among white Americans, particularly Republicans, is a powerful predictor of several policy positions, and is strongly associated with—though conceptually distinct from—various measures of anti-Black prejudice (Study 1). Indeed, among whites, anti-antiracism is more strongly related to support for Donald Trump than political ideology, socioeconomic variables, or several measures of racial prejudice, including scores on the Implicit Association Test. Next, we demonstrate in two pre-registered survey-experiments that anti-antiracism predicts whites’ responses to policy frames (Study 2a) and political candidates (Study 2b). Finally, however, we find whites high in anti-antiracism update their beliefs about the severity of anti-Black discrimination when presented with authoritative data (Quillian et al. 2017; Studies 3a-3b). These findings show opposition to antiracism is widespread and influential among white Americans, such that this racial ideology represents a critical axis of political polarization in the contemporary US.

20) As a professor, this was pretty damn interesting, “Labor advantages drive the greater productivity of faculty at elite universities”

Faculty at prestigious institutions dominate scientific discourse, producing a disproportionate share of all research publications. Environmental prestige can drive such epistemic disparity, but the mechanisms by which it causes increased faculty productivity remain unknown. Here, we combine employment, publication, and federal survey data for 78,802 tenure-track faculty at 262 PhD-granting institutions in the American university system to show through multiple lines of evidence that the greater availability of funded graduate and postdoctoral labor at more prestigious institutions drives the environmental effect of prestige on productivity. In particular, greater environmental prestige leads to larger faculty-led research groups, which drive higher faculty productivity, primarily in disciplines with group collaboration norms. In contrast, productivity does not increase substantially with prestige for faculty publications without group members or for group members themselves. The disproportionate scientific productivity of elite researchers can be largely explained by their substantial labor advantage rather than inherent differences in talent.

21) I almost skipped this last month, but was glad I read it and found it a very thought-provoking essay, “In Brazil, Beauty Is a Right. Are They On to Something?”

Because I was in Brazil at the time instead of at home in Virginia, I was given a new vantage point on the way that society treats the desire for beauty as a sign of human flourishing and not mere vanity. The differences I observed in Brazilian society’s relationship with beauty — compared with what I’d grown up with in the United States — forced me to reflect on my past and reconsider what I wanted for my daughter…

Brazil, I learned, prides itself on its huge number of skilledplastic surgeons. The country recognizes a right to beauty, which in practical terms means subsidizing nearly half a million surgeries each year, according to Carmen Alvaro Jarrín, the author of “The Biopolitics of Beauty: Cosmetic Citizenship and Affective Capital in Brazil.” In the 1950s, a famed plastic surgeon convinced the president that ugliness can cause painful psychological suffering and that treatment should be covered. While at first he was referring to those with congenital deformities and burn victims, most procedures covered today are purely aesthetic.

This philosophy has significant drawbacks. In a public health system that’s strapped for resources, it’s certainly arguable that this is the wrong kind of spending. Everyday differences in bodies end up being pathologized by the medical establishment, defining attractiveness in a limiting way. Small breasts, for instance, might be diagnosed as hypotrophy of the mammary glands. Because plastic surgeons gain practice at government hospitals, poor patients are basically guinea pigs, Jarrín says.

For all its failings, however, what Brazil’s policy creates is an acceptance that beauty is a form of self-care and that there’s nothing embarrassing about wanting to meet society’s standard for how we should look, no matter our social class. There’s no denying that small changes we can make to our surfaces have profound influence on our quality of life and that beauty is often a means of gaining power…

Our system in the United States makes the kind of hospital treatment my daughter received a matter of privilege. While her procedure might be considered reconstructive rather than cosmetic, whether she got a chance to see a plastic surgeon would depend on where she was getting treated. For example, hospitals visited by patients on Medicaid are less likely to provide the option of a plastic surgeon, and Medicaid does not cover cosmetic surgery unless the procedure is medically necessary — which, in my daughter’s case, it was not.

Beauty standards continue to rise, yet access to cosmetic care is rarefied.