Skip to main content

Academics, Fraud and Integrity

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Research, Standards. No Comments on Academics, Fraud and Integrity

Suppose you asked 1,000 people how many miles they drove their car last year, recorded the results, then put them into a graphic (a ‘histogram’ in this case). What do you think it would look like?

Something like this:

A few people drive hardly at all, less then 250mi/year in this case, and a very few people drive more than 50,000 miles/year, but most are grouped around a median number between 2,000 and 10 thousand miles per year. This gives the very familiar ‘bell curve’ shape to the distribution of results, as you see above. This general shape is so ubiquitous that statisticians have come to call the continuous version of this a ‘normal’ distribution. (Strictly speaking, the normal distribution has tails at either end that go on forever at lower and lower levels. The distribution above is ‘truncated’ at either end, in stats lingo.)

Very many of the distributions that one gets from observations of occurrences that are influenced by many factors end up looking like this, whether the data is from medical studies (height , weight, systolic blood pressure), education (SAT scores), or nature (rabbits have 1-12 kits per litter, with an average of around 6.)

In 2012 Lisa L Shu, Nina Mazar, Francesca Gino, Max Bazerman and Daniel Ariely published a paper in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences titled ‘Signing at the beginning makes ethics salient and decreases dishonest self-reports in comparison to signing at the end’ (a mouthful, I know) which reported on, among other things, the following field experiment.

Subjects who were clients of an auto insurance company were asked to fill out a form in which they were asked how many miles they drove their cars last year. All had to sign a statement saying they had answered honestly, but on some forms the statement of honesty was at the top of the form, and in the others it was at the bottom. The startling result was that the clients who signed at the beginning were claimed to report more honestly, because customers assigned to the ‘sign-at-the-top’ condition reported driving 2,400 more miles (10.3%) on average than those assigned to the ‘sign-at-the-bottom’ condition.

Such a simple thing can make people more honest, that’s truly remarkable, eh? Actually, it is mostly bullshit, and said paper was in fact retracted by the PNAS a year or two ago, due to the efforts by some scholars at a place with the wonderful name of ‘Data Colada’, who determined that the research was suspect. Really suspect.

The data reported in the paper regarding how clients answered this mileage question, put into a histogram like the one above, looked like this:

The ‘Car #1’ refers to the fact that some clients owned more than one car, and this is their report on the first (or only) car they owned. N=13,488 refers to the fact that there were 13,488 clients included in this study, all of whom of course reported on at least one car’s mileage. The histogram above is what statisticians would call a (approximately) uniform distribution. Data on miles driven in a year does not look like this, period. It looks like the first graph above.

Understand that this paper was refereed by other ‘experts’ in the field. Anyone who has been a social scientist for longer than 20 minutes would know that this sort of data should never produce this kind of histogram.

This is by no means the only anomaly the Data Colada sleuths turned up regarding this paper. You can read their entire write-up about it here, in which they conclude that in fact much of the data used in the paper was faked and as I said, their efforts eventually (meaning years later) led to PNAS retracting the paper. Retractions of papers by academic journals are rare occurrences, albeit they are happening more then they used to.

The pre-publication ‘peer review’ of this paper was supposed to be a mark of credibility. Other experts supposedly went through this paper carefully and pronounced it sound and worthy of publication in a professional outlet. Except…..they missed the simple point made above. If reviewers are not looking at the most basic attributes of the data used in the paper, what the hell are they doing?

Very often, not much, sadly. Indeed, it is common when an Important Academic gets a paper to review for a professional journal they give it to one of their grad students to do. I cannot say this happened in this case, but that it happens is well-known. And, to be sure, grad students might do a more careful job, as they want to impress their supervisor. The point is that Important Academics (as well as unimportant ones) often do not take the task of refereeing papers very seriously.

There are two names in the list of the authors of that paper who are particularly noteworthy. Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino. Ariely is a professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, and Gino is currently on unpaid administrative leave from her position as a tenured professor at Harvard Business School.

Ariely has written many books, including Predictably Irrational in 2008, a copy of which sits on my bookshelf here at home. He has given numerous TED talks, wrote an advice column in the Wall Street Journal for a time, and his life was the basis for an NBC TV crime drama, The Irrational, that ran for two seasons. He’s a big deal.

Gino was certainly a rising academic star on the study of ‘honesty’ until being put on unpaid leave by Harvard in 2023. Tenured prof at The Harvard Business School, and head of HBS’s Negotiations, Organizations and Markets unit. Harvard suspended Gino after undertaking an internal investigation of their own, an investigation that also resulted in three other papers with Gino as an author being retracted from three other journals, and Gino suing Harvard and the Data Colada investigators..

Gino’s defamation suit against the Data Colada people has since been dismissed by a judge, along with some aspects of her suit against Harvard. However, suits accusing Harvard of breach of contract and sexual discrimination are both proceeding as I type this. She has decided that a good offense is the best defense, it would seem.

By no means is the insurance-form paper the only one with Ariely as a co-author that has been thought suspicious. However, unlike Gino, he has to date avoided any sanctions. Some quotes from the Wikipedia page on him –

“In 2021, a 2012 paper written by Francesca Gino, Max H. Bazerman, Nina Mazar, Lisa L Shu, and Ariely was discovered to be based on falsified data and was subsequently retracted.[5][6] In 2024, Duke completed a three-year confidential investigation, and according to Ariely, concluded that “data from the honesty-pledge paper had been falsified but found no evidence that Ariely used fake data knowingly.”

“In November 2022, the Israeli TV investigative show Hamakor (Channel 13), aired an episode[30][31] questioning a number of Ariely’s studies that were not reproducible or whose reliability was dubious in terms of the way they were carried out, the data collected, or whether the studies were carried out at all. For example, Ariely claimed that data for his “Ten Commandments” study were collected in 2004–2005 at UCLA with the assistance of Aimee Drolet Rossi. However, despite being thanked in the 2004 paper for collecting the data almost 20 years later, Rossi denies having run the study,[32][33] and UCLA has issued a statement that the study did not take place there.”

I dunno, does that seem odd to you? On the blogs and other sites I read, other papers in Ariely’s body of work come in for regular skepticism, if not derision. Yet, he sails on, doing TED talks.

I conjecture that Gino’s rather harsher treatment by Harvard is at least partly due to all the bad press Harvard got about their former president in the recent past, but I cannot say that with any confidence.

A particularly disturbing sidelight to all this – at least to me as a former academic – is the following related story, which you can read in more detail here.

It is a story written by one Zoe Ziani, who, as a  graduate student in France working on her PhD, dove deeply into another paper, ‘The Contaminating Effects of Building Instrumental Ties: How Networking Can Make Us Feel Dirty’, published in Administrative Science Quarterly in 2014, and written by Gino and two others. Ziani got into this paper because her dissertation was about networks, and this paper was, in Ziani’s own words, ‘…a cornerstone of the literature.’ on this topic.

She initially came to doubt that the results in the paper could possibly be correct, then eventually concluded that the data used in the study had been fabricated. Seen this movie before? I note this paper was not one of those retracted after Harvard’s investigation, and that in fact you can go here to the ASQ website and find it, although anything beyond the abstract is behind a paywall.  You will also find a link there labelled ‘correction’, and if you click it, you will find that the two authors of the paper whose name is not Gino voluntarily contacted the editors of ASQ with corrected versions of the data for three of the four studies in the paper, which led to changes in some of the results.

Getting back to Ziani, she was an aspiring researcher, a PhD student, and when she brought her concerns about this important paper to the faculty members who were supervising her work, they told her to drop it. Ziani persisted, however, writing up a 10-page criticism of the paper to include in the first chapter of her dissertation. To quote from Ziani’s blog:

“The three members of my committee (who oversaw the content of my dissertation) were very upset by this criticism. They never engaged with the content: Instead, they repeatedly suggested that a scientific criticism of a published paper had no place in a dissertation. After many frustrating exchanges, I decided to write a long letter explaining why I thought it was important to document the issues I had discovered in CGK 2014. This letter stressed that I was not criticizing the authors, only the article, and encouraged the members of my committee to highlight anything in my criticism that they viewed as inaccurate, insufficiently precise, or unfair.

The three committee members never replied to this letter.”

Then, after she had defended her thesis, a ritual all PhD candidates go through, two of the three members of her committee made it clear that they would not sign off on her dissertation if she did not remove from it all traces of her criticism of the Gino et al paper (which she refers to as CGK 2014).

So, fearing for her career, worried that she would not actually be granted a PhD after all those years of work, she did as they insisted.

That working academics would suggest that criticism of another paper had no place in a dissertation is simply appalling. Science advances in no small part when researchers realize that what was thought to be correct is not, and our understanding of the world needs to change. Criticism and correction of past research is at the heart of science.

Now, all I have here is Ziani’s account of the appalling behavior of her faculty supervisors, and nothing from them. Sadly, my 42 years in the business makes it very easy to believe her account.  The paper she thought was deeply flawed, if not indeed a complete fraud, was published by three noted scholars from three prestigious institutions and published in a prestigious academic outlet. It had been refereed by other experts. Many, many academics take the view that you do not push against that, you do not criticize in that instance, as it could go hard on you in the future. (Not all academics, fortunately, but too many.) After all, you have to submit your own papers to these journals, and if the editor or referees who deal with your submission turn out to be any of those people – or their friends/colleagues/admirers – you might worry that you will find your own papers getting rejected a lot.

This is not how science advances, and this is not how scholars should behave. But it happens.

Note: Data Colada also took a run at the paper that Ziani picked apart (i.e., CGK 2014), and you can read their analysis here. They say they were aided in their investigation by ‘early career researchers’. I rather suspect Ziani was one of those, although they remain anonymous on the Data Colada website.

Conclusion: This, and a host of other things about the way 21st century academia operates, bothers me a lot. My own research was highly theoretical, so no one much cared about it, and certainly it was never of any use to anyone trying to formulate government policy or get their company to run better. But plenty of academic research is used for those purposes, and plenty of it (no, not all of it) is crappy. It may not be fraudulent in the way that the stuff above seems to be, but it is very badly done, and done in a way designed to deliver pre-ordained findings.

I will be writing more about all of this in the future (this post is already too long), because it does indeed piss me off, probably because I was – sort of – in the same business for 42 years.

For now, just remember that what ‘studies say’ may well be bullshit. Fraudulent bullshit, at that.

AI is (gonna be) SO Awesome

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Politics, Popular attitudes, Standards. No Comments on AI is (gonna be) SO Awesome

I will start this post with what would have likely been the opening line in a post about the internet that I have yet to write:

Search engines today are shit.

 

Google, Bing, or Duck-Duck-Go, my current default, it does not matter, they are all nearly useless. The reason is not hard to determine, their job is not to aid you in finding stuff, if it ever was, it is to keep you hopping around the internet, hopefully clicking on things that will get them paid a bit, then eventually getting you to buy shit. I estimate at this point that at least 60% of the sites on the www have only one purpose – to sell people shit. The internet is going to converge to 100% dedicated to selling shit, eventually, as the internet becomes the only advertising/marketing platform anyone uses.

Anyway, that is the simple explanation for why search engines on the web suck, what I find harder to understand is why non-commercial search engines also suck. I have a membership in the London Public Library, and as a retired faculty member I have access to everything in the university library system.

To find anything, I have to use their online search engines, as card catalogs disappeared years ago.

Well, their in-house search engines suck, too.

An extended example for you.

I go to the UWO library catalogue search engine (ominously called ‘UWO Libris Discovery’), log in with my credentials, and type in “Richard J Evans”. He’s a noted historian, specializing in German history, and I have read some of his books on the 3rd Reich. The first entry is some chemistry paper, ok, fair enough, there is a chemist with the same name, and so I re-type, adding “history” to my search query. Now I do get an initial page of references to 10 different things written by the person in which I am interested. However, at the top of the page it says

“1-10 of 199,282 results”

Jeezus. Evans is prolific, but no way has he written that much of……anything.

Curious now, I skip to page 5 of these many many results (at 10 entries per page, there are 20,000 pages to check if I want), and find more things written by Richard J Evans, but the second result on page 5 is “US Marines and Irregular Warfare” written by one Stephen S. Evans.

Well, if you include anything with Evans in it, and then maybe anything with Richard, the results are indeed going to pile up, but…..why?

Were I using a card catalogue, once I’d looked at all the cards with “Richard J Evans” as author I would stop and move on.

Can’t do that here, have to go through all the Stephen Evans, etc, because there are more Richard J Evans entries after that, and if I were to go on to page 283, well….what would I find? ( I looked ahead a bit, page 8 had an entry on the history of ranching by one Simon Evans. Bloody hell….)

Anyway, all this is to say that even search engines without advertising suck, and I really miss card catalogues, the Yellow Pages and businesses that answer their telephones. [A positive note. The search engines on the websites of the Globe and Mail and Wall Street Journal work pretty well. So it can be done.]

One might…..well, I might….think the generally agreed shittiness of search engines would lead to careful thinking about how to make them better. No, no, what we do now is seek to replace the shitty thing with something else that is shitty in a new and different way.

Here is a quote from a column in the WSJ in which the author explains at length why she stopped using Google for search, and switched to AI:

“While I’m in favor of shifting the stale search paradigm, I do have AI reservations. These systems hoover up answers from the internet, but rarely push you to the original source.

Your trusted sources of information—like this very publication—stand to lose visibility, subscribers and traffic. If too many online platforms suffer, we’ll end up losing the open web in exchange for one big answer machine with zero citations or accountability.”

But other than that, using AI for search is just peachy, right?

The leader of the discussion group on the US election that I was part of last Fall was a retired academic, like me. He said two remarkable things in the course of our six sessions, as we discussed the US Presidential election.

  1. “I do not pay for news.”
  2. “I learn a lot about the election by watching the late night TV comedy shows”.

You can perhaps imagine the knowledge base this man brought to bear on our discussions of the US election.

Soon, it will be unnecessary to spend all that time watching late night comedians, we will be able to simply type into ChatGPT – “Who is the best candidate?”

Way better, clearly.

 

What Does it Mean to ‘Trace Woodgrains’?

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Standards. No Comments on What Does it Mean to ‘Trace Woodgrains’?

I have a menu at the top of this blog titled ‘Blogs I Read’ which lists just that – blogs I read regularly. Occasionally I add one that I have come across and found useful or enlightening. I don’t imagine many of you pay any attention to this; just because I found something useful or enlightening is no reason to think anyone else will, and we all have only so much time to spend reading things online.

Still, I just added a blog titled ‘Tracing Woodgrains’ to my list, and I am going to say a bit about it here, because I found it particularly enlightening. It strikes me as the sanest blog I have come across ever. If you like, you can find it here, for free.

First, as to the question, I think the answer is that it refers to looking carefully at the fine details of a piece of wood, at the grain that runs through it. That is a fair statement of what the articles in the blog do, I would say. And, the set of topics the author writes about is wide and varied. The goings on at Wikipedia, a hiring scandal at the FAA, why he voted for Kamala Harris in the last US election, an essay on a culture of excellence in education, and much more.

As to the author of the blog, I have no idea, no name is provided, and in the About section of the blog one finds this:

“Welcome to Tracing Woodgrains, the chronicle of a former Mormon’s chaotic pursuit of order in a world gone mad.

In my essays, I wander towards whatever happens to catch my interest. Usually, that means a focus on learning and the strength of narratives and deliberate restrictions, reflections on culture war and internet nonsense, stories of institutional corruption and failure, and attempts to present both the beauty and harm of Mormonism to a secular audience.”

Honestly, there is little in that description that would suggest I would have any interest in anything that person wrote. Yet, as I said, it is the most thoughtful and sane writing I have found yet in my travels on the internet, so I do recommend it to you, heartily. I will say just a bit more about one piece on it, titled ‘Kamala Did Not Represent the Center’ in which, among other things, he explains why he voted for Harris last November, and why it pained him to do so. Again, this does not mark him out (I’m not at all sure he is a ‘he’, btw) as someone I would follow avidly. Had I been in the US last November, I would have done what I do in Canada in some elections, voted for a candidate who had no chance to win, as the only way a citizen of a modern democracy has to register their ‘none of the above’ sentiment. However, that post is incredibly thoughtful and wise, so I can disagree with Woodgrains yet respect what he has to say about the election. Indeed, his view of that election is as close to mine as I have seen articulated anywhere.

I hasten to add that every post I have read so far on the blog is equally thoughtful. The writing on this blog sets a standard to which I can only hope to aspire. I add, however, that I am sure I will in the future read posts on this blog with which I disagree rather completely and/or find less than compelling. Such is human nature.

The AI World to Come

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Culture, Education, Standards. No Comments on The AI World to Come

This is about an article in Inside Higher Ed from November of ’23. I just saw a reference to it on Gelman’s statistics blog. It’s titled ‘Study Uses AI to Review Admissions Essays’

and the first sentence is –

“A team of researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Pennsylvania have created AI tools to help admissions officers by analyzing students’ application essays.”

What a great idea, eh?

Another quote:

“Humans have limitations,” Benjamin Lira, a doctoral student in psychology at Penn and co-author of the study, said in a statement. “You’re not going to read the first essay of the day in the same [way] you read the last one before lunch.”

It’s a good thing AI has no limitations, isn’t it? And, AI can do things like this

“If I say, ‘I donated clothing to a homeless shelter,’ the AI will tell me that it has a 99.8 percent probability of showing prosocial purpose,” Lira said. “But if I say something like ‘I like cheese,’ that drops to less than 1 percent.”

Is that brilliant, or what? No human can match that, surely.

Then –

“The researchers did caution that as students—particularly higher-income students—become more savvy with technologies such as ChatGPT, they could alter their essays to fit what they believe will bring the best results.”

Indeed, I’m sure that until ChatGPT came along, students – particularly higher income students – never tried to match what they wrote in their essays to what they thought the university readers were looking for.

Oh, and about those human ‘limitations’? Well…..

“The AI algorithm can also make mistakes. For example, in the study, if a student were to say they donated heroin to the children’s shelter, it brought a very high score in the “prosocial purpose” category.”

Ah, a mere glitch. I’m sure they’ll clean that up in the Beta version.

It is clear where this is going, and Gelman pretty much says it. In no time we will be at the point where students use AI on their computer to write the essay, and the university uses the AI on their computer to read and evaluate it. No need whatsoever for any human involvement, and Bingo! You’re in university. Or not.

There are so many analogous possibilities. One day AI can write movies which are then reviewed by AI and used by other AI as input to write more movies. Same for e-books.

My favourite though, is this, for which I quote Gelman directly….

“Same thing with internet advertising. The AI writes the ad and conducts the bidding to put the ad online. The ad is then read by various bots so that the company that sells the ad gets to say they have traffic. We human users fight through the muck to find actual content.”

I can hardly wait.

Education Outcomes and Inputs in Canada and the US

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Education, Standards. No Comments on Education Outcomes and Inputs in Canada and the US

This is going to be a post without a strong message, prompted by a graph that I happened on while looking into something completely unrelated. The graph is below, and it shows changes in spending per pupil in the US state of Oregon, along with changes in the NAEP scores Oregon students earned in Reading and Math, all between 2013 and 2024. NAEP stands for National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is a set of tests given typically to grade 4 and 8 students in the US. NAEP is administered by a section of the US federal Department of Education. I am showing the Oregon results only because they are what I stumbled across. One can go to the website and see results for all other states too, but if you are so interested, I would suggest you go here instead.

Edunomicslab.org is a website of the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University, devoted to education finance, and it is the org that produced the graph below, using the stats provided by the Department of Education. It is simply more reader-friendly and organized than the US gov website.

Again, not to pick on Oregon, you can find a similar graph for each of the US states, my quick perusal said that Oregon is not atypical. Spending on education has increased at a rate much greater than inflation in Oregon, at the same time that NAEP scores have decreased.

Below is the same graph for the US as a whole, which certainly indicates that most US states look like Oregon, since the national graph does.

Finally, here is another graph from the same source, which compares staffing on a national basis to student numbers.

 

So, to note the obvious, staffing in US elementary schools has increased by close to 12% over this 10-year period, while the number of students has decreased by 2%. The graph does not indicate, and I could not find, any stats telling us how many of those added staff actually work in classrooms, rather than in the bureaucracy. I know what I would bet on in that regard, but cannot find corroboration, so far.

Anyway, the aggregate message here is clear. Over the covered period, US primary education has seen spending increase at a rate much greater than inflation, while also seeing staffing increase while student numbers fell (a primary reason for the spending increase, one must think) all resulting in worse student NAEP outcomes. It says nothing good about the current state of (largely publicly funded and administered) primary education in the US. I hasten to add, as does Edunomicslab, that there are US states in which the picture is better, in that student NAEP outcomes have gotten at least a bit better over this period. Their takeaway from that is that what states do with regard to education can make a difference.

I am not going to dive into state-by-state comparisons, I don’t live in the US. I am interested in how things look along these same dimensions in Canada, and here I run into the usual problem. No org in Canada does anything like the data gathering and organization of important public stats that you find in the US. StatsCan in the early years of my professional life had a reputation as one of the best such orgs on the planet. No more. Getting things from their website is difficult, they no longer produce user-friendly graphs and tables of such things, and on top of that, Canada does not have the same density of non-profit think tanks and such which take up the slack. The one exception to that latter  statement that I know about is The Fraser Institute, whose efforts are none the less dwarfed by what is done by edunomicslab, among others.

My complaining aside, I did what I could to find something comparable for Canada, and succeeded partially, with the results below.

A Fraser Institute Report from August of 2024 provides the following stats, among others:

– Per-student spending adjusted for inflation (price changes) increased by 5.1% nationally from 2012/13 to 2021/22.

–   Student enrolment across Canada increased by an average of 5.1% from 2012/13 to 2021/22. Three provinces saw a decrease in enrolment: Newfoundland & Labrador (5.8%), New Brunswick (1.8%), and Ontario (0.1%).

–  Compensation remains the largest and costliest aspect of education spending and has contributed the largest portion to the growth of total education spending in Canada.

The time period here is close to the one in the US graphs above, but it aggregates primary and secondary school stats together. I could not find any stats on staffing level changes in Canada.

Canada has a variety of provincial testing regimes for its students, but what I found readily available were results on the PISA scores in Canada. PISA is the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), a triennial survey run by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that assesses 15-year-olds’ abilities in reading, mathematics, and science. Thus, it is given to secondary students every three years in most countries. I don’t know what percentage of students in every country take it, but get the impression that it is high. It has the advantage of making Canada US comparisons easy, and the last round of PISA test was done in 2022.

I found the following:

Average mathematics scores have dropped consistently in Canada, from an average of 532 in 2003 to an average of 497 in 2022.

PISA reading scores in Canada went from 520 in 2018 to 507 in 2022, just four years.

PISA science scores in Canada went from 528 in 2015 to 515 in 2022

The Canadian average scores in 2022 in Math and Science were notably better than for the US, the reading scores in the two countries were almost the same. It is worth mentioning that Canada’s average score over the three areas was the eighth highest of all countries in 2022, while the US’s average ranked it eighteenth.

So my take, based on this admittedly non-optimal data, is that the situation in the two countries is similar, but rather more stark in the US than in Canada. Neither country’s educational systems are performing well in producing student outcomes from the resources they use in the sense that outcomes have been getting worse while spending and staffing have increased. No doubt some of the declines in achievement can be attributed to school lockdowns during the Covid era, but they started before that, so that is not the entire story.

None of this points clearly at what to do about any of this, the data is too aggregate for that. However, if more is being spent per student to hire more personnel per student, and outcomes are getting worse, I don’t see any way to avoid the implication that the increased spending and personnel are being badly deployed.

 

 

Whatever The Hell That Is….

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Education, Standards. 1 Comment on Whatever The Hell That Is….

….it’s not thinking.

I write these posts and most everything else in Word, like most of the human race, at least in North America. Every time I start a document, and then every time I start a new line in a document, a symbol pops up in Word on the left hand margin letting me know that Copilot is ready and waiting to make my writing better and easier.

I cannot get rid of this annoying symbol, because the Word program I am using is not mine, I am just renting it from Microsoft, and I have very few choices about how it works. I expect before I die that Word will no longer give me the option to ignore Copilot, just as my Microsoft Windows OS no longer gives me many real choices about how my laptop operates. We who use computers -as in, almost everyone – are all just dancing to Microsoft’s tune, nowadays.

Well, I want to report here on a blog post I just came across on a website called Mind Matters, written by Gary Smith, an economist at Pomona College. It has nothing to do with Econ, trust me, and if you want to skip the middleman (me) and read his long-ish post yourself you can do that here.

 

Assuming you are still with me, I’ll give you the basic story and then some related commentary based on other stuff I’ve come across on the interweb thingie regarding LLMs (Large Language Models).

Smith is reporting on what happened when he put a question to four AI LLMs – Deepseek, Copilot, Gemini Flash and OpenAIo1.

Here’s the initial question, which Smith asked in two parts –

Gary:  I’d like to discuss a new version of tic-tac-toe called 90-degree tic-tac-toe.

The four chatbots all respond enthusiastically with some variation on – ‘sounds interesting, tell me more’

Gary: It is still a 3×3 grid but the grid is rotated 90-degrees to the right.

Smith says he edited the LLMs responses down a bit, as they do go on and on, and here are the four responses.

OpenAI:  Interesting concept! By rotating the grid 90 degrees to the right, you’re visually changing the perspective of the classic 3×3 Tic-Tac-Toe board. The gameplay itself might remain the same, but the rotated perspective could create a novel experience for players.

DeepSeek: Ah, I see! So in 90-degree tic-tac-toe, the 3×3 grid is rotated 90 degrees to the right….This could be a fun twist because the rotated grid might disorient players initially, making it harder to spot winning opportunities or block opponents.

Copilot:  That sounds like a fun twist on the classic game! By rotating the grid 90 degrees to the right, it gives players a fresh perspective and challenges them to think differently about their moves.

Gemini:  This rotation doesn’t change the core concept of getting three of your symbols in a row, but it does significantly alter the strategy and how players approach the game.

Philosophers have an accepted definition of ‘bullshitting’. One is honest when one says what they believe to be true, one is a liar when one says things they believe are false, and one is bullshitting when one is unconcerned about the truth or falsity of what one says.

LLMs bullshit, because it is all they can do. They have no idea what is true. One writer on AI that I read said that what comes out of an LLM is simply the result of a billion incredibly fast coin tosses. Not exactly right, I suspect, but close enough.

As for LLMs learning as they go, Smith goes on from here and drags more BS out of the LLMs. He asks them if they think it would be better to rotate the grid right or left, and they have definite opinions about that, as well as on the question of which direction of rotation will make the game more difficult for expert players.

Smith notes some key features of how LLMs generate answers –

They write hundreds of words when a dozen would do, they are always positive and enthusiastic (lots of !s), reluctant to say ‘I don’t know’, and they lack common sense.

His bottom line: ‘If you know the answer, you don’t need to ask an LLM; if you don’t know the answer, you can’t trust an LLM.’

All this made me realize something. LLMs are algorithms that rather faithfully replicate the behaviour of all the bad students I taught over the years.

I never asked painfully obvious questions about tic-tac-toe during my years in the trenches, but I almost always asked a question or two that could be answered with a few simple lines by any student who had studied. (I never asked multiple choice questions in my last 20 or so years of teaching.) And, there were always some number of students who gave long and ludicrous answers to those questions, because their lack of effort in the course meant they had no idea there was a simple clear answer. They were left trying to guess at words and phrases that would match up well with the words in the question. They were, in a word, bullshitting, in hopes that something they wrote would get them some points, in spite of their utter incomprehension.

I don’t suppose any company is likely to come out with a general use LLM called ‘BadStudent’, though.

A further (last, I promise) thought. I bet if you put Smith’s rotated tic-tac-toe question to a hundred second-year undergrads, some positive number of them would answer with bullshit not too dissimilar to what the LLMs spit out. However, those students would be doing that because they were not confident that they weren’t missing something about the question, perhaps reinforced by a lack of confidence in their own thinking. The LLMs have no ‘reasons’ for bullshitting, it’s just what they are designed to do.

In The Midst of Tragedy, A Remarkable Fact

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Safety, Standards. No Comments on In The Midst of Tragedy, A Remarkable Fact

The first thing I saw when I digitally ‘opened’ my Wall Street Journal this morning was a headline about the crash between a military helicopter and an American Airlines jet near the National Airport in Washington, DC. This was jarring, of course, as is the fact that none of the 67 passengers and crew in the two craft are expected to have survived. It is a sad tale with which to start one’s day.

However, as I read about this, the WSJ also told me that this is the first airline crash involving any fatality in the US since 2013. That’s eleven years. That’s astounding. To get a feel for how astounding it really is, I looked for some data – it’s what I do.

This is an estimate, as the numbers are just huge and 11 years is a long time, but according to Statista, US airlines have flown somewhere between 600 and 800 billion domestic passenger miles in each of those 11 years. That adds up to something more than 7 trillion passenger miles flown in the US without a fatality.

In an era and a world in which it sometimes seems that nothing works as it should, that is one remarkable statistic.

Postscript (again): For the record, I wrote and posted this before hearing about DJT’s fact-free statements about the cause of this crash. So, it was not written in response to his remarks. That aside, you would be hard-put to find a more adamant critic of everything DIE (or EDIDA) than me, but maybe it would be worthwhile to wait until people who know something about air transportation have a chance to gather some evidence before declaiming on causes of this crash. And, the numbers I wrote above certainly constitute indirect evidence about the performance of the US air traffic system over the past 11-plus years.

Canada’s Next PM

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, News Media, Standards. 1 Comment on Canada’s Next PM

We don’t know when it will happen, because us ordinary citizens have to sit around and wait until at least Feb 24 to get any clues from the Important People as to when we may have an election and thus, almost certainly, a new government and PM, but it seems impossible to bet that it won’t happen by the middle of the year.

Today’s poll on the website 338canada.com/federal has the federal Conservatives’ support at 44%, the Liberals at 22% and the NDP at 18%. The election is not being held today, and the Liberals are in the process of selecting a new party leader, and shit surely can happen over two to four months but it would be very brave – or foolhardy – to bet against Pierre Poilievre being the next Canadian PM, leading a Conservative-majority government.

Is that a good or bad thing? I am asking this in a purely selfish way. A federal election is surely going to happen (although it seems Dougie is going to send Ontarians to the polls first, I will write about that down the road) and I will need to decide for whom to vote. Unlike the custom in the Canadian press and throughout society these days, I do not see myself voting for Poilievre or Carney or Singh. I am voting for who I want to represent me in Parliament, and in that vote, the party to which a candidate belongs is only one factor, albeit an important one.

Unfortunately, there is really no evidence that Canadian federal MPs of any party are allowed by their party leadership to truly represent their ridings, and I am not oblivious to this. Hence, a critical factor in how I vote in my riding is going to be what I think of the leaders of the various parties. I have nothing good to say about Singh or Trudeau after observing them govern Canada over the last many years. I see Freeland as having been very much a Trudeau acolyte until she suddenly got religion last month, although I give her kudos for changing her stripes, however late in the game.  Mark Carney so far seems to me to be a classic Ottawa mandarin. We don’t need any more of those in my view, but he is also new to politics so I plan to listen carefully to what he has to say throughout the Liberal leadership race; assuming, of course, he has things to say.

That leaves Mr. Poilievre, who has been covered assiduously (and almost universally negatively) in the Canadian press as the Leader of the Official Opposition. In that role he has been very much in Attack Dog mode, and while I get that can be seen as pretty much his job description up to now, it has not made me favorably inclined toward him as an improvement over Trudeau as PM. Or over Carney (who at this point I would bet on winning the Liberal leadership race). Poilievre would certainly be preferable to Singh, but almost anyone would be in my view. The NDP does not believe in arithmetic, and that is disqualifying, in my opinion.

A couple of people I respect have pointed out to me that Poilievre sat down to be interviewed by Jordan Peterson on Peterson’s podcast last Dec 21. This was before Trudeau announced his intention to resign, but PP was riding high in the polls, and the episode is titled ‘Canada’s Next Prime Minister’.

So, I took the time (it’s an hour and 40 minutes long) to sit and watch the interview, in hopes of learning more about Mr. Poilievre than is possible from reading mostly hostile press reports.

However, getting information from podcasts is not my usual thing, so I will lay all my biases and misgivings about this out before turning to what I think I may have learned about Mr. Poilievre.

I don’t watch or listen to podcasts. Many people I know do, but I am very much a fan of the written word. This makes me a dinosaur, I know, but so be it. Had a transcript of this podcast been available (I could not find one) I would surely have read that instead of listening to the podcast.

I am not entirely a fan of Jordan Peterson, although I have a great deal of respect for him, and I thought his original 12 Rules for Life book, which I read, added something valuable to the culture. A psychologist of my age characterized that book to me as a bunch of wisdom you might get from a good 6th grade teacher. I think that’s actually fair, but what the psychologist failed to appreciate is that there are few such wise teachers anymore. Much that is written and published is not blindingly new, but if it fills a need felt by many (as Peterson’s book clearly did, particularly for young men), it is valuable. Peterson’s book was valuable.

Peterson is a rarity in that he has a wide-ranging mind, and, having heard him speak more than once, I appreciate that. I also think that his years in the spotlight have turned him into a media creature, and that this has not served him well. He is almost always in combat mode, and that has to be a very hard place to be. While I think I understand how that can happen to someone who has been attacked as much as he has, it still gets in the way of some of the good things I think he is trying to say.

Finally, and this is not unique to Peterson, I think that on this podcast, in which he was supposed to be playing the role of interviewer, there was too much Peterson. Another reason to see a transcript, because if one could, I bet the word count for Peterson would be higher than for Poilievre. As it is, I bet in the video there are more minutes of Peterson’s voice than of Poilievre’s, but I know of no way to check that. This has been my typical experience when I have listened to interviews done by podcasters. They are used to declaiming, they are used to being the focus, and the role of a good interviewer is to ask good, concise questions and then shut up and listen. Peterson did much too little of that in this interview, in my opinion.

As a result of this, I don’t feel like I learned all that much about Mr. Poilievre from this interview. None the less, here are some things I think I did learn.

The revelatory part of the interview to me occurs at about the 1:14 point in the podcast. Peterson notes that he doesn’t envy the task Poilievre will face as PM in taking over after 10 years of Liberal governance. I think that’s a fair comment, and keep in mind that this was said before Trump started blathering on about tariffs on Canadian imports into the US.

He then asks PP a pretty direct question and in my mind, a good one. This is not an exact quote but he asks Poilievre ‘Why should Canadians have confidence in you, what is your plan when you take office?’

Poilevre replies, again not an exact quote:

Cut bureaucracy, cut foreign aid, cut out the consultants, cut corporate welfare and use the savings to bring down the deficit and lower taxes. Unleash the free enterprise system, repeal C-69, which he calls ‘the anti-energy law’ to start a ‘massive’ energy boom in our country. Incentivize the municipalities to get building.

Then, an even better question: Can you highlight who are the key members of your coming administration and lay out what their roles will be once you form a government, and what their strengths are.

I will write out PP’s response to this in the form of a list:

Andrew Scheer, former party leader and Speaker of the House, he knows the rules of the game in Parliament, and that’s important for getting legislation passed.

Dr Leslie Lewis, current shadow minister of infrastructure, she’s doing a great job of talking about how we can improve infrastructure in this country.

Gamil Giovanni (spelling?, I’m working off an audio tape here) recently elected in an overwhelming mandate in Durham.

Melissa Lantzman, deputy leader, extremely well-liked in Toronto, terrific communicator, very smart.

We’re recruiting new candidates in ridings we don’t currently hold, to help me win the election and govern.

Asked by JBP in a follow-up – who PP has on the ‘energy side’, PP responds by saying ‘we’re very lucky as we have a lot of MPs from Alberta and Saskatchewan, and very few of them don’t understand energy’.

PP then shifts to talking about the good conversations he’s had with Premiers Danielle Smith and Scott Moe.

The conversation then moves off onto other topics.

So as to JBP’s first question about what is PP’s plan, what he says is not awful, there is nothing in it that I have any real disagreement with. However, beyond the repeal of C-69, there is nothing at all specific in it, either. What bureaucracies will you eliminate, what is an example of the corporate welfare you will eliminate, and how exactly do you plan to incentivize the municipalities to get more building done? Municipalities are creations of provinces, what on earth can the federal government even do in this realm?

To be sure, had any other party leader been asked that question, or Freeland or Carney, I would not expect any more detailed answers.

Even less inspiring was PP’s answer to the question about his team. It was all politics, a good house leader (ok, fair enough, that matters) MPs who won big mandates or are well-liked and smart. And, I’m sorry, but being from Alberta, particularly being a politician from Alberta, doesn’t imply you know doodly about energy.

Even more than the first, PP’s answer to that second question sets him out in my mind as a career politician. To be sure, that is who party leaders always are in the 21st century, although Carney may end up being an exception. And, there is no better example of the fact that not being a career politician does not necessarily make one a good leader than Donald J Trump.

Locally, London currently has a couple of city councillors who are well-known to be the candidates for various parties in the looming federal and/or provincial elections. People get into municipal politics not to contribute to their city – at least rarely so – but as a stepping-stone into a ‘real’ career as a higher level politician. The pension is very good, I hear.

So, we end up ruled by career politicians.

Returning to my selfish motivations, listening to this interview did not turn me away from the idea of voting for the Conservative candidate in my federal riding when that decision comes, it just showed me that if I do, I will be voting for a candidate whose party is led by a career politician. Not disqualifying, but not really a plus, either. So, I guess I gotta keep listening.

Releasing the Pressure A Little

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, Standards. 1 Comment on Releasing the Pressure A Little

Canadian politics rose to the top of the news in Canada today, a relatively rare occurrence, when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced, during a press conference outside his residence, that he intends to resign as Prime Minister and leader of the Liberal Party.

You know that already. You also likely know what that verb ‘intends’ means. A quote from his speech, taken from the Globe and Mail:

“I intend to resign as party leader and as prime minister after the party selects its next leader through a robust, nationwide competitive process. Last night, I asked the president of the Liberal Party to begin that process,” Mr. Trudeau said.

So, to be clear, this is an announcement of an intention to resign from those two offices, an intention with no date set for its fulfillment. There is one date that has been set, as the Globe also reports that The Puppet….er, Governor General of Canada, Mary Simon, has granted the Prime Minister’s request to prorogue Parliament until March 24.

Thus, the Parliament of Canada will not meet, and Mr. Trudeau will not face the people’s elected representatives, until two months after the new US presidential administration has taken office. I note – just in passing – that the 119th Congress of the US, the one that was elected into office last November 5, began its session on January 3. Congress will not meet every day until the next Congressional elections in 2026. Each house of Congress meets only on the days determined by – wait for it – Congress.

Why am I bothering to write and post all these things you can read/hear about in a million places?

Good question.

I think it is a hope that if I type it all out I will be sufficiently less pissed off about Trudeau’s Latest Folly that I can get on with my day.

“When one is in office one has no idea how damnable things can feel to the ordinary rank and file of the public.” – W. Churchill, 1948

Addendum: After posting this I found myself thinking more about Churchill. (Evidence, perhaps, that writing the above got my mind off that other PM.)

At no time during Churchill’s term as Prime Minister in World War II was the British Parliament prorogued. It met, and Churchill gave notable speeches, on days that German bombs fell on London. He did face a vote of no confidence on 2 July, 1942, prompted by the fact that the Brits were getting their asses kicked right across the globe. In simple terms, the British people’s representatives questioned his government’s handling of the war. He won that vote. Handily. One can read an entire transcript of the debate in Parliament that preceded that vote here. It’s remarkable, with extensive and highly detailed questions and remarks from a variety of MPs, as well as statements from military officers, concluding with a long speech by the PM. Truly remarkable. Democracy.

Thinking – And Learning – Like Shakespeare  

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Culture, Education, Standards. 1 Comment on Thinking – And Learning – Like Shakespeare  

I’ve just finished reading a book titled ‘How to Think Like Shakespeare’, which I first learned of on Gelman’s statistics blog, of all places. Having mentioned it to my sweetheart, she kindly gave me a copy as a Christmas gift. It’s very interesting, not long at 170 pages, but also very dense. Lots of quotations, from ol’ Will and many others, and a lot to think about. I will surely read it at least one more time in an attempt to do it justice.

What it is really, as its author Scott Newstok writes, is an argument for adopting many of the principles that underlie the Renaissance education that Shakespeare would have received into our contemporary educational system. On the face of it, this is nuts, as Newstok admits. Up at 7am to translate Latin for 12 hours, corporal punishment, exclusion of girls – really?

Well, no, not that, but he argues that there was much in the way youngsters were educated back then that would be highly valuable to contemporary students facing a world of information overload and the looming spectre of AI. A sub-text is that these practices would be valuable to all of us.

As I note above, I cannot claim to have digested all the book’s claims and arguments, but a couple of things seem immediately very worthwhile to me. Needless to say, they are not compatible with what Newstok calls ‘…our own student-centered, present-focused, STEM-driven schools’.

Idea 1.

He notes that in Erasmus’s Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style is recommended an exercise of writing out the thought ‘Your letter has pleased me greatly’ in 15 different ways.

So –

Your letter mightily pleased me.

Your affectionate letter brought me great joy.

Your brief note refreshed my spirits

My heart was gladdened by your kind note.

And so on…..

The point Erasmus is making is that to have an abundant style, one which is both precise and a pleasure to read, it is necessary to not use the same words and phrases over and over. To avoid doing that, one must practice. The value of ‘practicing’ runs throughout the book, in fact.

The ignorance of this principle of the value in variety is an aspect of contemporary journalism which causes me no end of despair. Every so-called journalist describes things using the same ‘correct’ words and phrases. It might as well all be written by the same person (and with the advent of AI, perhaps it soon will be, sans the ‘person’).

For example, it is not currently possible for any journalist to write about anyone famous without using some form of the word ‘icon’. Jimmy Carter, Beyonce, Leadbelly and Susan Sarandon – all ‘icons’, and the things they did were ‘iconic’.

People no longer criticize or object or excoriate or castigate – they ‘call out’.

No one tells or says or declares or states or claims, they ‘share’, or if in public, ‘speak out’.

Do copy editors shut down attempts by journalists to use different phraseology, or do said journalist simply not know of any way to write beyond the most common? Either way, it is a sad situation.

Idea 2.

In all student essay writing, whatever point the essayist wishes to make, half the essay must be devoted to arguing against that same point.

Revolutionary, but the idea is not simply to induce students to see that issues always have (at least) two sides, but also to help them develop empathy. In the non-Shakespearean phrase, to ‘walk a mile in another man’s moccasins’. The ability to see things from another person’s point of view is fundamental to functioning in society. And, Newstok argues, the ability to inhabit, and to get playgoers to inhabit, the lives of other people, was Shakespeare’s greatest talent.

This development of empathy lies behind another recommendation that pervades the book. That is, that students – not to mention the rest of us – must read. Read widely, and especially read what was written by authors of the past. What they wrote is the ‘stock’ society must use to move forward, and one cannot contribute to improving that stock unless one understands what is already in it.

As I said, much to think about in this book. I’m quite sure I don’t buy everything Newstok says – ‘twould be shocking if I did. But there seems to me much of value in it. Not that anyone in the contemporary educational establishment will have any sympathy with it. I can just imagine what the so-called Teaching and Learning Centre at my former employer would think about having university students read Erasmus or Ralph Waldo Emerson, or write an essay that includes arguments against immigration, the adoption of indigenous ways of knowing or democracy or any other current piety. Acts of oppression, I expect.

On Sin

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Culture, Education, Health Care, Popular attitudes, Standards. No Comments on On Sin

I recently did a post about disability accommodations at Canadian Universities, in which ADHD diagnoses played a prominent role. ADHD is far from the only non-physical disability whose presence in universities has increased greatly, but it is up there. After writing that, I was reading a post in a blog which I have come to find very interesting, called On the Contrary, written by a fellow named Simon Sobo. He bills himself as ‘81 year old unheralded, frustrated, but serious writer’.

The particular post I read was titled ‘ADHD and Other Sins of Our Children, Part 2’, and you can read it here. Free. (There is a Part 1, which I have not yet read, and which opens with the remark that Part 2 has been read five times as often as Part 1. Hmmm…..)

The post is quite long, and the first section of it is sub-titled A Memory. It’s an interesting account of how his Jewish parents raised him, and his attempts to behave as they wished him to, especially during a long sermon by the Rabbi in his synagogue. My own Catholic upbringing was not dissimilar. The penultimate section of the article is subtitled ‘Sin and ADHD’ and starts with this sentence:

“First a few interesting statistics about adults diagnosed with ADHD and their sense of moral responsibility.”

It makes for fascinating reading, although the academic in me wishes Sobo had done a better job of providing citations for those stats. (There is a set of serious references at the end of the article, which I intend to pursue).

Anyway, I found it thought-provoking, and think you might, also.

Enlightenment Follows Confusion

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, Standards. 1 Comment on Enlightenment Follows Confusion

It happens, as I hope to show you, but I was quite confused at first.

The Globe on Christmas Eve ran a story titled ‘Border measures announced as part of Canada’s response to Trump’s tariff threat begin to take effect’

One measure taking effect that the story focuses on is to eliminate ‘flagpoling’. What is that, you ask. The story says this –

“Immigration measures announced as part of Canada’s border response to president-elect Donald Trump’s 25 per cent tariff threat are starting to be implemented, beginning with a ban on what’s known as “flagpoling.”

This is when someone who was in Canada on a temporary visa leaves for the U.S. then quickly re-enters Canada to access immigration services at a port of entry.

The restriction on providing work and study permits to flagpolers takes effect today.

Last week, Immigration Minister Marc Miller said that going forward temporary visa holders will have to apply online to extend their stay in Canada.”

This prompted a Question From Confused Al –

Ignoring the US President-Elect for the moment, why would Canada want to ban this? More basically, why did anyone holding a temporary visa do this in the first place? If you are holding a temporary visa to be in Canada, and you are in Canada, the obvious way to try to extend it would be to do that in Canada before your current visa expires. Why were people leaving Canada (to go to the US or anywhere else) and doing it from outside the country? Does this involve some kind of attempt to hoodwink Canadian immigration authorities? I can’t see how. If you hold a temporary visa and you try to extend it, from anywhere, the authorities are going to know all about you and proceed accordingly.

Well, then, it must be that the reason Canada is now banning flagpoling is precisely to mollify the President-Elect, right? (I am on record as saying that we should not do that, but….)

Except I can think of no reason for Donald Trump to give a fig about holders of temporary Canadian visas going to the US to renew them from there. The whole point is to get one’s visa to stay in Canada renewed, and hence to go back to Canada. Unless there is evidence that these flagpolers are engaging in drug-dealing or bank-robbing while in the US, what concern of this is anyone in the US, including Donald Trump? People enter the US for brief periods in the millions every year, these flagpolers must, like anyone else, have to talk to the nice US border people when they go into the US to flagpole in order to gain entry, so – what’s the big deal?

Trump is not a man for details, so I doubt he’s heard of flagpoling, but if someone he trusted explained it to him, I cannot see any reason for its banning to impress him regarding Canada’s efforts to keep bad people from crossing into the US from Canada. Flagpolers don’t sound to me like bad people, unless, as I say, they get up to no good during their time in the US. Were that frequently the case, I would have expected the G&M article to mention it.

So I was quite confused as to how banning flagpoling has anything to do with Trump’s tariff threat.

That is, until I went back and read an earlier G&M article from Dec 17, titled ‘Ottawa’s plan to secure border includes more dogs, drones and action to combat fentanyl trade’

Here this flagpoling is explained in more detail. The key sentences:

“He also said Canada intends to put an end to an irritant with the U.S. known as flagpoling.

The ruse, where foreign nationals already in Canada cross the border without going further into the United States, and then immediately return here, takes up lots of resources and distracts border officers from enforcement, he said.

Foreign nationals do this to speed up the renewal of study or work permits or to complete the process of obtaining permanent residence, applying at the border rather than applying online in Canada, which can take weeks or months.”

Now I get it. Flagpolers talk to the nice US border guards at, say, the Ambassador Bridge, but do not even go into Detroit, they immediately turn around, right on the bridge, and go see the nice Canadian border guards, and there they apply to have their Canadian visas renewed.

Why do they do this? Because the Canadian government has in place an immigration system in which applying for visa renewal from inside Canada takes weeks or months, but if you flagpole you get to apply immediately, in person, and you are done. It is not the US for which this practice is an ‘irritant’ it is an irritant for the Canadian border people. They don’t just do the usual border check with flagpolers, they have to help them fill out the visa renewal form. What Donald Trump thinks about banning flagpoling is irrelevant, banning it is better for Canada – or at least for it’s CBSA workers.

Having now read the entire earlier G&M article in detail, I think I see a trend, and I think I like it. I think all Canadians should.

The article also says Canada is stepping up border surveillance. So, to quote again:

“RCMP Commissioner Michael Duheme, who was at the launch of the plan in Ottawa, said the Mounties are hoping to use more helicopters very swiftly and may rent them at first for a speedy deployment. He has also been speaking to government departments about their inventories to see whether there is equipment the RCMP could use to enhance the work of their border detachments, such as Valleyfield in Quebec.

The RCMP’s new Aerial Intelligence Task Force, which will include the use of mobile watchtowers, will provide round-the-clock surveillance of parts of the border between official ports of entry.”

So, leaving aside the sad fact that the RCMP is going to lower-level police forces to scrounge up more helicopters, and also setting aside the fact that I cannot even imagine what a ‘mobile watchtower’ is, what this says is that Canada’s police force(s) is going to be keeping a closer eye on the parts of Canada near the US border but between points of entry.

No doubt Team Canada will spin this to the President-Elect as an effort to keep bad things and people from going into the US from Canada, but any adult knows that those guys in the choppers will be investigating anyone suspicious they see in those areas, whether they are walking towards or away from the border.

Again, a good thing for Canadians, if indeed weapons and drugs are being smuggled into Canada from the US, as we so often are told.

There’s more good news for Canadians. Quoting again:

“Under the plan, the Canada Border Services Agency will also train and deploy more dog teams to sniff out illegal drugs. And CBSA officers will have access to new chemical detection tools capable of detecting the precursor chemicals used to make synthetic opioids such as fentanyl as they come into Canada.”

Again, this sniffing and detecting will all happen in Canada. I don’t know if Trump will be impressed, I don’t care, these are good things for those of us who live here if they are effective.

More:

“Changes designed to streamline the asylum system “to deal quickly with illegitimate claims” are also being prepared, Mr. Miller said.

The government said it would also impose restrictions on countries that do not facilitate the rapid return of citizens who are subject to a removal order in Canada, or who came here fraudulently.”

Again, getting fraudsters and other bad actors out of the country and back to from wherever they came – good things for Canadians.

Now, I have no idea if any of this will be effective, this is still the government that can’t shoot straight, but the idea behind all these measure is to make it harder for bad people and bad things to get into and stay in Canada. If that means they are less likely to go from Canada to the US and that impresses Mr. Trump, fine.

This is the pattern I see. A Canadian government that has generally not shown much interest or ability in carrying out the basics of government has apparently been induced to finally do so in at least one dimension by the blustering of an incoming US President. I don’t know if this is any part of what Trump cares about, and I don’t care. Maybe Canadians are going to have to learn to appreciate Mr Trump a bit more, even though he has no visible appreciation for us. Don’t look a gift Trump in the mouth, eh? He’s got our government doing its job – at least a little.

Epilogue: After writing a draft of this I came across a long article in the Free Press by Niall Ferguson, the eminent British historian. He does go on, but that being said, he’s a smart guy and a good writer, and he makes a much broader version of my points above about Trump’s impact across the globe. It’s an interesting read.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Disability, Inc.

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Education, Health Care, Standards. 1 Comment on Disability, Inc.

‘You don’t ask a barber whether you need a haircut’.

I have no idea from where or who that bit of wisdom comes, but I also have no doubt of its wisdom.

A story in the Dec 27 Globe and Mail is titled ‘As demand for disability accommodations in universities grows, professors contend with how to handle students’ requests’

Not far into the piece one sees the graph which I have reproduced below:

 

A more than two-fold increase in the percentage of individuals in any sub-category of any population is notable. When something changes that dramatically there is something going on. Maybe more than one thing, but something, almost surely.

An important aspect of the phenomenon is depicted in the following graph, also from the article:

It is clear that the number of students with physical disabilities has not changed much over the depicted 5-year period, as the purple region’s upper boundary is nearly flat. However, the number of students registered with non-physical disabilities has increased by some 20,000 over the same period. Non-physical disabilities refer to things like test-taking anxiety, ADHD, difficulty with concentration, etc.

It is thus unavoidable that the source of the steep increase in students with registered disabilities is to be found in the source of the steep increase in non-physical disabilities. Importantly, these disabilities are not objectively verifiable. If a student claims to be blind or deaf or unable to walk, this can be verified by a doctor. More pointedly, if a test (like the PSA, for example) is used to diagnose prostate cancer, it is possible to determine how accurate the PSA test is. That is, it is possible to determine what percentage of false positives and false negatives arise in any population in which the test is used diagnostically. That is because surgeries and autopsies of individuals who are diagnosed in this way can determine whether they actually had prostate cancer.

There is no analog to surgery for test-taking anxiety or ADHD. There are tests, of a sort, and questionnaires, and criteria, for sure, but all of these have been developed by the ‘experts’ who are doing the diagnosis, and again – there is no way to objectively verify their results. One has ADHD if an expert on ADHD – whoever that may be – says so. That expert perhaps went through some process in determining that diagnosis but there is no device outside that ring of experts which can tell us how accurate are their diagnoses of ADHD. Determining ‘accuracy’ is impossible without the ability to determine what is true in a way that does not depend on who is doing the determining.

You can go to this link to get, for example, a pdf containing the DSM-5 Diagnostic Criteria for ADHD in children. You will find it a series of statements about observed behavior, such as ‘Lacks ability to complete schoolwork and other assignments or to follow instructions’ and ‘Incapable of staying seated in class’. The reality is that none of these observations are actually likely to be done by the ‘expert’, but come from the expert interviewing the parents and perhaps a teacher or two. The point is that this set of ‘criteria’ is all there is. An MD or psychologist talks to the parents and/or teachers, maybe the kid for a bit, consults this checklist, and then ‘decides’ ADHD, yes or no. One can go to another expert then, who might or might not agree, but one cannot get verification. It is not possible.

It is known, for example, that the PSA test produces ‘false positives’ at a high rate. This results in urologists generally requiring more evidence than a high PSA test value before they do anything invasive to a guy whose test showed such a high value. There is no way to talk about a ‘false positive rate’ for an ADHD diagnosis. Different experts might do the interviews, go through the checklist, then come to different answers, but there is no such thing as a ‘false positive’. If some expert says you have ADHD, the law and the university treat that as a certainty.

In my latter teaching career, when the explosion in disability exemptions among students was well underway, I was told that most university students with a disability diagnosis went into their first year with it already in place from their high school, if not earlier. The universities just carried on with accommodating them. The ‘advisors’ at Queens mentioned in the article don’t diagnose these conditions, they just decree what accommodation the student must be given for having them.

The psychology and psychiatric professions have been devoted to expanding the range of disabilities for decades now. Pretty much every kind of behavior has been given a spot as a ‘disorder’ in the DSM, including ‘oppositional defiant disorder’. Type that into google and see what comes up. I’m not an expert, but I’m quite sure I suffered from a bout of it at one point in high school.

These are barbers setting the rules for when someone must get a haircut. To be sure, not all members of all health care professions buy into the medicalization and amelioration of life. There is a reader comment at the end of the GM article from a health care worker who notes that when she pushed back against providing a ‘sick note’ for a student, the parent threatened to report her to her professional college.

Professional colleges in ‘regulated professions’ have become great agents for the enforcement of conformity. And the counsellors who set the accommodations for these diagnostic students, cannot be argued with, either. Certainly not by the likes of lowly faculty. It is worth noting that there is no science whatever behind the ‘accommodation’ business. That is to say, there are no scientific studies of the effects of giving vs not giving various ‘accommodations’ to students with registered disabilities. The standard two accommodations given are to allow more time to complete things, or to take tests in an environment separate from other students. Note that these are things that would likely allow any student to get a higher mark.

So, the disability accommodation system in Canadian education has become a system in which professionals with an interest in seeing disabilities and accommodations grow are in a position to help it do so, and in which the accommodations are such that every student would find them beneficial.

I would timidly suggest we may have found a cause for the pattern shown in the second figure above.

Predictably, this Globe article generated plenty of outrage in the comments sections, as well as some suggestions for what would or should happen now. I will close by dealing with a few of these.

  1. Universities should indicate on degree certificates or transcripts when a student has received accommodation in earning their credential. That’s a non-starter under both privacy and discrimination law. That it would improve the information available to society is quite beside the point, this cannot be done under current law, even if universities were willing.
  2. These accommodated students will be unable to compete or hold a job once they get out into the real work world. I fear this is false. The various Disabilities Acts in federal and provincial law – not to mention the Canadian Charter – pretty much insist that accommodation be given once someone is expertly diagnosed. I expect this will apply no less to workplaces than it does to educational institutions, so those accommodated students are likely to move into the workforce and insist on – and receive – similar special treatment from their employers. It is likely just a matter of time before most firms of any size have ‘disability counsellors’, just as they have HR and DEI people now.
  3. Once people start dying on operating tables and bridges start falling down, society will see that these accommodations are granting credentials to incompetent people and this will have to stop. This point is also often made with regard to DEI (now EDIDA at my old employer – guess what that stands for, gwan) policies, as well.

I actually think there is something to this, as some very undeserving and – honestly, ignorant – people have been receiving both high marks and degrees at my former place of employment for some time, and I have no problem believing their general ignorance, coupled with a sense of entitlement, will have costs down the road. Costs to others, I mean.

But neither the existence of EDIDA nor of disability accommodation means that all university graduates are ignorant and entitled; only that too many are. After all, universities have always given credentials to some who were undeserving. However, it is likely to take a loooong time for the impact of that increase in the undeserving to be visible out in the world, and an even longer time for it to be sufficiently obvious to enough people that the will to do something about it takes hold in society in general.

I would not hold my breath. Actually, I won’t be able to, as I expect to be long gone before it happens.

Climate Change…..Again?

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, Standards. No Comments on Climate Change…..Again?

More like weather change, I guess.

I am putting together here things I have recently read in a couple of places, because it seems to have led to something interesting. Our story starts in Germany, but trust me….it will end up back in good old Ontario.

First, from a story I read today in Watts Up With That, which I have mentioned before.

You can read it too, free, here.

The jist – in two recent periods, Germany faced a problem supplying itself with energy. To quote the article:

“From November 2 to November 8 and from December 10 to December 13, Germany’s electricity supply from renewable energies collapsed as a typical winter weather situation with a lull in the wind and minimal solar irradiation led to supply shortages, high electricity imports and skyrocketing electricity prices.

At times, over 20,000 MW, more than a quarter of Germany’s electricity requirements, had to be imported. Electricity prices rose tenfold (93.6 €ct/kWh).”

Germany has been the most aggressive European country in pursuing ‘green’ energy, the article noting that it shut down 19 nuclear power plants, and that 15 coal-fired power plants were taken off the grid on April 1, 2023 alone.

The claim is that during the periods mentioned some 25+% of Germany’s electricity demand had to be supplied by importing from neighboring countries during this period, and they are not entirely happy about this, as it drives up electricity prices in their own countries. Quoting again from the article….

“Norway’s energy minister in the center-left government, Terja Aasland, wants to cut the power cable to Denmark and renegotiate the electricity contracts with Germany. He is thus responding to the demands of the right-wing Progress Party, which has been calling for this for a long time and will probably win the next elections. According to the Progress Party, the price infection from the south must be stopped.

Swedish Energy Minister Ebba Busch was even clearer: “It is difficult for an industrial economy to rely on the benevolence of the weather gods for its prosperity.” And directly to Habeck’s green policy: “No political will is strong enough to override the laws of physics – not even Mr. Habeck’s.”

(Robert Habeck has been serving as Vice Chancellor of Germany, Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Action in the cabinet of Chancellor Olaf Scholz. That government recently collapsed, and Scholz has said he will call a confidence vote on January 15, which will presumably result in an election if it fails. )

That sounds bad, right? Germany has pushed hard on green energy, and this has led to periods in which the weather (ironically, one might say) has led to their being unable to supply their citizens and companies with sufficient electricity. It appears this is pissing off their neighbors, but a second-level thought comes to me immediately – what would have happened if Germany’s neighbouring countries had all gone as gung-ho on green energy as Germany?

However, after reading this I kept internet-meandering, as I do, and came upon another site, called Climate Etc where the second article posted was titled ‘The climate case of the century’.

The opening paragraph of this article is:

“On the 12th of November, the Hague Court of Appeal ruled in the “climate case of the century” that Milieudefensie (“FoE”) filed against Shell in 2019. FoE demands that Shell reduce emissions throughout the entire chain by at least 45% by 2030. The foundation “Man & Environment” (M&E) joined the case to represent the interests of Dutch citizens.”

It gets long and complicated at that point, as does anything involving lawyers, but the article suggests that although the plaintiff was largely shut down by the Hague Court of Appeals, that court bought into the claim that there is indeed a ‘climate emergency’. Here’s just one excerpt from the article:

“A case in point, the Court arrives at the alarmist conclusion that “the climate problem is the biggest problem of our time” and that the danger of climate change is great and even “life-threatening”. Based on the non-factual findings of fact and obligatory references to the Paris climate agreement, the Urgenda judgment and the Klimaseniorinnen ruling of the European Court of Human Rights, the Court confirmed a right to protection against “dangerous climate change.”

“Protection against dangerous climate change,” the Court says, “is a human right,” without any caveats or qualifications.”

The Ontario connection. A commenter on this second article notes that there is currently a similar case winding its way through the Ontario court system, a suit brought by a group of minors (one expects said minors have had some help from….majors). The defendant in the case is the Government of Ontario, accused of setting a target for decarbonization that is too low.

The commenter claims that the trial court, which denied the claim on constitutional grounds but then had it sent back by an Appeal court, was ‘impressed by the arguments in the Hague case’.

I am thus led to wonder – what happens if the Ontario courts system, with all its deference to scientists determining what is ‘right’ for us, finds in favour of the plaintiffs?

Dougie Ford better play nice with those electricity producers in New York and elsewhere, eh?

Addendum: The Watts Up post that got me started on this also makes another interesting point. Namely, that wind turbines that have no wind use electricity. To quote:

“This is because all technical components (oil pumps, fans, control systems, etc.) must remain in operation even when they are still. Vestas specifies an electricity consumption of 55,000 kWh per year for a 4.2 MW turbine at standstill. During production times, the turbine supplies itself with electricity. But it is virtually idle 120 days a year.”

I have no idea if this is true, but it seems plausible, and if it is….talk about Catch-22.

The Universe is a strange and wonderful place, no?

 

Silence is Golden – So Shut Up     

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, Language, Safety, Secrecy, Standards. No Comments on Silence is Golden – So Shut Up     

This is about the City of London Council, whose members’ behaviour and policies often irritates me deeply. In this case it has made a decision that is reflective of a much wider problem in 21st century government – the culture of Shut Up Already.

Susan Stevenson is the 1st-term city councillor representing the Ward that contains Old East Village in London, the area that has seen the most serious depredations by lawless individuals. Last time I was there was with friends going to a bar, and we walked down its main street Dundas to get there, having to pass at one point a ‘Mission’ outside of which some 20 people were injecting drugs, nodding off, presumably from having just injected drugs, and generally lying about on the sidewalk. It was what I would term a shit show.

A group of OEV merchants showed up at a recent Council meeting at which was discussed issues related to homeless encampments. The merchants made it clear they were fed up with what was being allowed to happen in their part of the city, that it was hurting their business and their lives.

Ms Stevenson’s job is to represent those people, and the City Council has just voted to dock her 30 days pay (just over $5,000) for the way she has done that. This is not the first time she has run afoul of the Council, as  she was previously taken to task (but not fined) for posting photos on social media of the sort of scene I described above from her Ward.

Her sin this time is that she put up a post featuring quotes from a city bureaucrat about homeless encampments. The charges against her adopted favoured 21st century words – ‘bullying’, ‘targeting’ and ‘harassment’ of this staff person. The step of docking her pay was recommended in – get this – a ‘report from Principles Integrity, the firm hired by the city to act as its integrity commissioner’, according to a London Free Press story.

Those terms for Stevenson’s behavior also come from that report. Council then voted to carry out the recommendation of 30 days loss of pay, after a debate, in an 8-6 vote.

I think this paragraph from the same LFP story is key:

“The report found Stevenson editorialized the quote with “provocative emojis,” unnecessarily identified Dickins, and appeared to suggest he was responsible for homeless encampments in the city, leaving him vulnerable to attacks from the public.”

I cannot read that without getting angry.

As I noted, I have walked through the shit show on Dundas East that is the very direct result of City Council policies, and more than once. People who live and work in OEV must do this on a daily basis, and that is by no means the only part of the Ward where such shit-shows reign.

I will also say that I did not actually fear for my physical safety on said walk, as I think the people starring in those shit shows are pathetic rather than dangerous. That walk is highly unpleasant, and it makes me despair for my city.

But this ‘Integrity Commissioner’ thinks that this city bureaucrat should not be subjected to ‘provocative emojis’ on a social media post. And, Stevenson ‘appeared to suggest’ something? What does that even mean? I read the guilty post, I saw no such suggestion in it, and I don’t know if a case could be made. But the more basic question is: why should Stevenson not suggest he is responsible for the situation if she believes that to be the case? Because he might be subject to ‘attacks from the public’? Why should he not be attacked by the public if they think he is responsible? If you are in a job in city government and you go out and get yourself quoted about city issues, then why on earth should you not be called to account for what you say by councillors and/or the public?

This is the utter disconnect of our current governmental bodies. Nothing wrong with people shooting drugs on a city street in broad daylight, no councillor should have their pay docked for that happening, but suggest that a highly paid city staffer’s quote is problematic and a $5k fine is the result. And, of course, 8 fellow councillors voted for Stevenson to be penalized.

City politicians and bureaucrats should never be made to feel ‘unsafe’, no matter how silly the supposed reason for that feeling – provocative emojis, indeed. But London residents – you’re on your own, folks.

Yea, it enrages me every time I read about it.

The Freeps and CBC London stories on this – there are many – include many quotes from Stevenson and her council colleagues. I’ll discuss those in a separate post, so stay tuned.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dumb Epilogue

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, News Media, Standards. No Comments on Dumb Epilogue

In this post just last week I took the Canadian Press to task for not asking questions about the possibility that Doug Ford might cut off electricity to three US States in response to Trump’s threatened tariffs on Canadian imports to the US.

The questions were not revolutionary: Can Ford do this? Are there legal contracts in place?

Well, an organization called The Globe and Mail thought those were good questions, and put someone on the job of finding answers to them. You can read the resulting article here if you’re a subscriber. If you’re not, why not? I don’t work for them, but the G&M seems to be the only org in Canada that still tries to do some reporting.

The gist of this ‘Explainer’ article is that there are no actual contracts under which Ontario supplies power to the US. Rather, the electric grid in the Northeast and Northern Midwest of the US is highly intertwined with that of Ontario.

Here are three key paragraphs from the piece.

“Before 2005, Ontario had a relatively balanced electricity swapping arrangement with its American neighbours. It subsequently became a substantial net exporter, but its international transfers peaked around 2015 and have been on a gradual downward trend since then.

The Ford government places little value in those exports. Ontario’s nuclear power plants and hydro dams often produce more power than the province needs, typically overnight during the spring and fall. This forces the Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) to export some of that surplus power, typically at low or even negative prices.

“The former government set up a process where we do a lot of exporting at a loss,” Mr. Lecce said last week.”

Well, now. It turns out Ontario is selling that power to the US at a loss, sometimes even paying the US to take the electricity (that’s what is meant by a negative price) because Ontario is producing more than it can use.

What to make then of Ford’s threat to ‘stop selling electricity to the US’??

More ‘I’ll shoot my puppy’ threats from Ford, it would seem. No, Ontario does not make a profit on these sales generally, in fact they seem to often sell at a loss, which might seem to indicate that Ontario is not hurting itself if it cuts this electricity to the US off.

But, but, but – it’s not that simple. One cannot forget that Ontario is doing this as the currently easiest way to deal with its own over-production during certain times. So, what’s it gonna do if it does not send this unneeded-in-Ontario power to the US at bargain rates? Light up Queens Park? Send it to Mexico instead?

The electricity exports from Ontario to the US are the easiest way for Ontario’s hydro producers to get rid of excess production, which happens because they cannot shut nuclear and hydro-electric generation facilities down quickly. Or, rather, it is highly costly to do so, so they send the extra power to the US. Even if they have to pay the US users to take it, this is less expensive than the alternative of shutting down production.

More puppy-shooting threats by Ford, then, but a tip of my hat to the Globe for digging into this. Nice to see journalists being journalists rather than click-baiters.

I admit that I do wonder, though: why do those US states want Ontario’s excess electricity if it is available overnight in Spring and Fall? What’s their story?

Well, not our problem, and one cannot answer every question in a single post.

Kudos, Ms. Freeland

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, Standards. No Comments on Kudos, Ms. Freeland

Like many Canadians, I read with some surprise today that Chrystia Freeland had resigned from the Liberal Cabinet. (Maybe you saw it coming, I was surprised.) I have never been a fan, but I should admit that was based on two somewhat superficial aspects of her.

One, in any public statements I saw her make, she conveyed an attitude of lecturing to lesser mortals who did not understand the subtleties of governing. Two, she seemed to be a(nother) toady to Justin Trudeau, speaking only in bureaucratic language designed to make shit smell like roses.

Neither of those things is all that damning, the first being perhaps just a deficiency in her communication skills, and the second being widely shared by her peers in government.

However, I want to say in this post that I read her entire resignation letter, and it raised her in my estimation considerably. This is largely due to her writing the following, which I quote in full:

“Our country today faces a grave challenge. The incoming administration in the United States is pursuing a policy of aggressive economic nationalism, including a threat of 25% tariffs.

We need to take that threat extremely seriously. That means keeping our fiscal powder dry, so we have the reserves we may need for a coming tariff war. That means eschewing costly political gimmicks which we can ill afford and which make Canadians doubt that we recognize the gravity of the moment.”

The implied economic analysis in that quote does not impress me. I am on record as being doubtful that the 25% tariff threat is all that grave a matter at this point, and I don’t see why Canada needs to keep its fiscal powder dry for a tariff war, as that will happen only if the Canadian government behaves as stupidly as Trump is promising to behave. Even then it will cost Canadian citizens rather than our government.

But the ‘costly political gimmicks which we can ill afford’ do indeed make this Canadian doubt the government’s seriousness. That Freeland seems to see that, and that she was willing to put it in writing impresses me. Not such a toady as I once thought. She has principles.

And, I give her high marks for two other aspects of her resignation. In the letter she explicitly states that she will again run for her seat in Parliament in the next election – she could have, but did not, add ‘good luck in your riding, Mr. Prime Minister’. And, she resigned on the morning that she would have otherwise had to deliver the Fall Economic Statement, in which she would have had to say that the government of which she was a part had blown by its own fiscal deficit promise by more than 50%. Yes, goodonya Chrystia for forcing your former boss to find some other toady to deliver those numbers.

Epilogue: I have now posted applause for a politician twice on this blog. I’m a little worried…..

Dumb and Dumber

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, News Media, Standards. 1 Comment on Dumb and Dumber

It’s impossible to live in North America and not read about President-elect Trump’s various blusters about the US’s relations with Canada and Mexico. Living in the former naturally causes me to focus on it, but my impression so far is that the government in Mexico is doing a much better job of dealing with said bluster. Mexico’s president hasn’t said much, and what she did say was pretty clear.

A major kerfuffle up here in the Great White North is Trump’s threat to impose a 25% tariff on all goods imported into the US from either country. His ‘reason’ to do this is to get Canada to stop the flow of drugs and illegal immigrants into the US.

Let’s start there. If one knows anything about international relations, one knows that it is the duty of each country to police its own borders. Specifically, if the US or Uganda or Sweden wants to keep something from coming into the country – whether animal, vegetable, mineral or people – then it is responsible for doing that. This is why, when Canadians travel to the US, they do not find themselves talking to a Canadian Border Agent about where they’re going, how long they plan to stay, and what they might be bringing with them. They get to talk to a very nice US border guard about all those things. If there are Canadian border guards patrolling the Great Lakes in boats, they are there to stop things and people from entering Canada, not from entering the US.

There are and have been countries in which citizens leaving the country have to talk to a border guard working for their own government. Citizens of good ol’ East Germany and the Soviet Union had to do that, back  in the day, and they could be sure they would be turned around and sent back home – if not arrested – if they did not have documented high-level permission to leave. We don’t live in countries like that. Thankfully.

I had to answer an hour’s worth  of questions from Israeli border security agents when I left their country after my one visit there in the 90s. We don’t live in a country in Israel’s precarious position of constant war, either. Thankfully, again.

For a while in the aftermath of 9-11, US border officials (in combat fatigues, no less) would lurk on the US roads that run from the US onto the Ambassador Bridge, randomly stopping cars that were heading to Canada. I don’t know what they would have asked me had I been stopped, I was always waved on, but I viewed it as one more step toward Big Brother when I saw it. Maybe they’re still doing it, I don’t know, I have not crossed that bridge in a long time.

So, if Mr Trump is proposing we start doing that to people leaving Canada for the US, the appropriate Canadian governmental response would be – ‘We’re not that kind of country. What enters your country is your responsibility.’

This has not been the response of Canadian government(s). They have instead looked like the proverbial chickens running around with their heads cut off, because not only the PM and his ministers have responded to this tariff threat, but so have a number of provincial premiers.

I will consider these responses in a bit, but first we have to be clear about the nature of Trump’s threat. The President-elect has said he will punish Canada for ‘letting bad things and people into the US’ by imposing a 25% tariff on all goods the US imports from Canada.

So, he is proposing to raise the prices of a large set of goods purchased by Americans and US -based companies, as a way to punish Canada, presumably until it stops those bad things from going to the US. To be sure, these tariffs, if enacted, will not be good for Canadian companies that export to the US, or their workers. The rise in prices in the US that the tariff will surely cause will reduce US demand for those products and that will mean lower sales and presumably lower profits for those Canadian companies. It is not impossible that some companies in Canada will be driven out of business by this.

So, definitely bad for (some) Canadians for sure. But also bad for most American consumers, and many American companies. Higher prices are not good if you are a buyer.

In other words, Trump is saying  ‘Do what I want or I will kill this puppy.  Yea, I know it’s my puppy, but dammit, I’ll shoot it, and you’ll be sorry.’

He is proposing to get what he wants by punishing his own citizens and companies. Waytago, Donald.

Not to be outdone, various Canadian officials in various governments have proposed to retaliate in much the same spirit. Ontario Premier Doug Ford has suggested his government will stop selling hydro-electricity to three US states in which, according to this Canadian Press story Ontario sells enough electricity to power 1.5 million homes. The three states involved are apparently New York, Michigan and Minnesota.

What will this cost Ontario and its taxpayers? Anyone? The answer hinges on what will happen if Ontario does stop exporting that electricity to the US. If it just means Ontario produces less electricity, then the question becomes whether Ontario was making a profit on those exports. If so, then we are foregoing those profits, and once again a government is punishing its own citizens to retaliate against a government leader who is punishing his citizens. If, on the other hand, the Ontario suppliers were not making a profit on that electricity then….well, why not?

Ford’s other idea is to stop the LCBO from importing US-produced alcoholic beverages, so….Bourbon, wine, and – one can hope – their crappy beer.

Bad for Jim Beam, Jack Daniels and California wine producers, I guess, as the LCBO does buy a lot of booze, but once again, it’s gonna be us Canadian consumers who also pay, through less choices in booze.

The province apparently (the CP story gives no source for this) is also considering restricting exports of minerals to the US that are used in battery production. It’s not clear to me that a province has any ability under the Canadian constitution to restrict what Canadian companies export, but once again, if they can, this is punishing the companies in Ontario that would otherwise be making a profit and employing Canadians by selling these minerals. I mean, c’mon, folks. Trumps says he will tax something we sell to the US and Ontario’s response is well, then we won’t sell it at all? That’s all you got? We’ll shoot our own puppy?

Now, not every Canadian premier is clueless. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is quoted in the article as saying “Under no circumstances will Alberta agree to cut off oil and gas exports,” she said. “Our approach is one of diplomacy, not threats.”

And, we are not going to cut our own throats, she might have added.

Another quote from the CP article:

Michael Sabia, president and CEO of Hydro-Québec, said “it’s not our current intention” to cut off Quebec’s exports to Massachusetts or New York state, but he conceded it might be possible.

“Our intention is to respect those contracts, both because they’re legally binding, but also because it’s part of, in our view, a sound relationship with the United States,” he said. “It’s a questionable instrument to use in a trade conflict.”

Okay, then if these contracts are legally binding, what about the contracts Ontario has with US states for providing electricity? Are they not legally binding? Did any journalist think to ask Ontario’s officials about that? And, given what Sabia says in that last paragraph, did the writer of the article mean to write that Sabia ‘….conceded that it might be impossible’ (to cut off electricity to the US). Y’know, beecause they have legally binding contracts. (Sorry, I have zero faith that journalists get things right any more….)

Another quote from the Ontario Premier in the CP article.

“We’re sending a message to the U.S. (that if) you come and attack Ontario, you attack livelihoods of people in Ontario and Canadians, we are going to use every tool in our tool box to defend Ontarians and Canadians. Let’s hope it never comes to that.”

Give a 21st century politician any excuse to use combat metaphors and they can’t stop themselves. Trump is attacking Ontarians and Canadians. I imagine that’s how Trump sees it, too, but what in fact he is doing, if we’re going to stick with the combat rhetoric, is attacking us in a way that guarantees his own people get hit with friendly fire. And, of course, our own ‘generals’ are threatening to ‘defend’ us by responding in kind.

I say keep your head down for awhile, none of these leaders can shoot – or think – straight.

Oh, yea, and just to make sure there is something completely ridiculous in this post, there’s the ‘Canada as 51st state with Governor Trudeau’ jab from Trump. It says a lot about 21st century journalism that journalists write intentionally serious stories about Canada becoming a US state, and their employers print/post them. There remain few grownups in the room anymore. Any room.

Endnotes

1, I was talking to someone the morning before I wrote this article and she told me she’d heard that Trump was going to stop selling US booze to Canada. I just said ‘That sounds implausible’ and of course it isn’t true, but it shows that people watching all this happen often have no idea about how things work. Who can do what, who is actually doing what, what are its impacts; none of this is obvious to most people. This makes it all more of a shame that the media is so bloody bad at explaining anything.

2. More beating up on CP. They deserve it. This note appears at the bottom of the CP article I quote above:

“Note to readers: This is a corrected story. A previous version stated that Ontario exported enough energy to power 1.5 million homes in three states in 2013.”

Um….that’s still what the story says, and in addition, it names three specific states, but doesn’t give the year. So……just what was wrong about that original story? Is it that you are now saying you don’t know what bloody year those numbers apply to? Or…..you know the year but you’re not going to tell us? But, you’re sticking to the 1.5 million homes number?

You know things are bad when you can’t tell what mistake a correction is correcting.

 

Motivational Workshops are Good For You. Really. Stanford Says So

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Health Care, Research, Standards. No Comments on Motivational Workshops are Good For You. Really. Stanford Says So

I mentioned in my last post I had been reading about academic fraud, and I was. I do. Frequently. I didn’t post anything on it, but after posting my last piece I came upon some material I had dug up a while back on a case that is, well, improbable. Not fraud, or so say the experts who know more than I, but research that makes you wonder ‘What were these people thinking?’

The story starts with an improbable figure: Tony Robbins. You may remember him, motivational speaker, was all over TV at one point, good looking guy, great teeth. This guy:

He was on OWN for a while, wrote several books, like Unlimited Power: The New Science of Personal Achievement (1986) and several others. He also went through some rough times, accused of sexual misconduct in Buzzfeed in 2019. I don’t know what came of that, and it is quite separate from his role in our current story.

A group of researchers, some from Stanford’s Genetics Department and its Stanford Health Innovation Lab (SHIL) undertook some research projects in which Robbins’s seminars figured. I don’t know how many projects there were in total, or how many papers they got published on them, here I will focus on two I do know about:

Non-traditional immersive seminar enhances learning by promoting greater physiological and psychological engagement compared to a traditional lecture format  

This was published in the journal Physiology and Behavior in 2021, and you can read it here if you like. I’ll refer to this as the learning paper. The other is

Effects of an immersive psychosocial training program on depression and well-being: A randomized clinical trial

Published in The Journal of Psychiatric Research in 2022, you can read it here. I’ll refer to this as the depression paper.

Each paper lists 9 separate author-researchers, five of whom appear as authors on both papers. Michael Snyder, the Director of SHIL, is listed only on the depression paper, but other authors on the learning paper are from the Stanford Dept of Genetics.

The learning paper’s abstract starts with this sentence:

“The purpose of this study was to determine the impact of an immersive seminar, which included moderate intensities of physical activity, on learning when compared to traditional lecture format.”

In fact the researchers observed 26 people, 13 in an ‘immersive treatment’ group and 13 in a control group, all 26 of whom went through a two-day seminar. The difference in the two groups is described as follows:

“For the IMS group, participants were provided with a hard copy of lecture material which was presented at UPW with a combination of state elevation sessions (jumping, shouting, fist pumping, and high five behaviors) which were conducted approximately once every hour to raise arousal and to interrupt sedentary behavior, as well as mindfulness mediation[sic] that focused on a wide variety of awareness, affective states, thoughts and images [35] that were conducted once at the end of each day.”

The control group got the same seminar and hard copy of material, but without the meditation and ‘elevation sessions’.

What does this have to do with Tony Robbins? You will find his name in the paper, sort of, at the very end –

Funding

This study financially supported by Robbins Research International Inc.

What this does not mention is that the ‘lectures’ the research subjects attended were in fact a two-day Robbins seminar, one of those things one pays a lot for.

Still, nothing wrong that I can see with someone like Robbins sponsoring research to see if one of two different approaches leads to better learning outcomes in his seminars. However, because all the subjects are people who paid a lot to be in this environment, one can’t really claim they are representative of the general population, so one has no reason to think that the results of this study tell us much about the impact of such ‘immersive’ learning in other situations.

Beyond that, there are only 13 research subjects in each group. That is a rather small number,  which makes one wonder whether the results mean much. Here’s what the researchers say they found:

            “The primary findings of this study were that learning was greater in the IMS compared to the CON as the increased performance on the exam was sustained 30- days post event when compared to CON, which decreased 30-days post event.”

Ok, but the question that comes to me at this point is – why did these well-placed researchers bother with this? The paper’s Conclusion section actually notes that “Previous studies have shown that physical activity can promote learning in traditional classrooms [2,3].” They then go on to note that those previous studies utilized different types of exercise. Whoop-de-do. I would think researchers at this high level would be interested in research that could move the needle more than that. I get that Robbins (maybe only partly) funded the work, but I doubt these people are hard up for research funding. So, in the end my only question is really: why and how did these researchers get involved with Robbins at all, and on such a mediocre project?

Hang on. I came upon this in Gelman’s statistics blog, which I read regularly and mention here often. He didn’t take these guys on, all he did was reprint some material from an article in The San Francisco Chronicle which, based on the bits I’ve been able to read (paywall) was really hard on these researchers and this research.

As I noted, Robbins had been in the news not long ago for bad behavior, so if the learning paper was the extent of this Robbins/researchers interaction, I would likely chalk this up to no more than a newspaper thinking it can score points by embarrassing some Stanford researchers for their association with Robbins, and take another strip off Robbins himself in the process. Nothing (much) to see here.

But then there’s the depression paper.

Again, Robbins’ name appears only once, at the end of the paper, like this:

“This study was not funded by Robbins Research International; however, they did allow participants to participate in the DWD program at no charge. They also provided housing for two research coordinators who stayed on site during the trial.”.

DWD here refers to Date With Destiny, which is a Tony Robbins seminar that the paper describes as follows:

“…a six-day immersive training program that includes a subsequent 30-day daily psychosocial exercise follow-up period. DWD is popular with thousands of people using this intervention annually. The program combines a variety of lifestyle and psychological approaches that seek to improve well-being, including cognitive reframing, guided meditation and visualization, neurolinguistic programming, gratitude, goal setting, guided hypnosis, community belonging and engagement, and exercise. Although components of the program such as exercise, gratitude, and cognitive reframing have independently been found to improve mental health and wellness (Goyalet al., 2014; Kvam et al., 2016; Mikkelsen et al., 2017; Schuch et al., 2016), the effectiveness of the DWD program has not been investigated.”

No mention anywhere of the fact that this is an ongoing Tony Robbins (money-making) seminar series for which people (although not the subjects of this study) pay big bucks to attend, although people familiar with the Robbins operation would recognize the DWD name. Here’s what the Robbins website says about DWD:

Create life according to your terms

Dive deep into the patterns that are holding you back, ignite your motivation, and build momentum toward the life of your dreams.

I guess that’s kinda ‘mental health and wellness’, right?

The researchers describe their experiment as follows:

            “A randomized clinical trial was conducted in which 45 participants were randomized at 1:1 ratio to DWD (n = 23) or a gratitude journaling control group (n = 22) (Fig. 1). Depressed individuals (n = 27), as assessed by the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9; see below), and those without depression (n = 18) were recruited by email, flyers, and physician referral in the U.S.

At least there are more subjects this time, right? Ah, no. In fact there were 14 depressed subjects assigned to the Seminar and 13 assigned to the ‘gratitude journaling’ control group. The other 18 subjects, 9 in each group, were not designated as depressed according to their own original responses on the above-mentioned PHQ-9 questionnaire, and as we shall see, it is the originally depressed subjects who are the star of the show.

That’s because the big question that is being asked here is: does attending a Tony Robbins six-day DWD event reduce depression?

Can anyone guess what answer Mr. Robbins would like to hear to that question?

And indeed, that is the answer we get – in spades. Here’s the payoff, from the paper’s Abstract:

“Seventy-nine percent (11/14) of depressed participants in the intervention condition were in remission (PHQ-9 ≤ 4) by week one and 100% (14/14) were in remission at week six.”

In remission here means that on that self-reported questionnaire, the scores generated by their answers were below the threshold at which they are considered depressed. In other words, the Tony Robbins DWD seminar has a 100% cure rate for depression.

One need not even ask how the control group did, my god, all the depressed people were cured by the treatment. Huzzah!

More times than I could count, I have written in this blog, ‘If it seems too good to be true, it ain’t true’.

Reasons for skepticism are many and varied.

In clinical trials of anti-depressants, typically something like half of participants report ‘feeling better’ after six to eight weeks. A paper in the Lancet I dug up said that 62% of adults reported ‘improvement’ in depression after psychotherapy, at varying time frames.

But DWD – 100% cure rate. Go, Tony.

There is once again the small sample issue here, just as in the learning paper, but to this under-educated economist, the subjects themselves are the big question mark. These are people who self-reported being depressed, went to a DWD seminar for six days for free and then were asked again afterward about how they felt. Ya think maybe they were inclined to believe in the power of DWD?

The bits of the SF Chronicle article that are quoted on Gelman’s blog suggests that some of the SHIL researchers knew and were fans of Robbins before the research started. I can’t say anything about that, and I don’t think you need to know that to wonder about the results in the depression paper.

A final note. If you do go to download the depression paper, you will find that the journal in 2024 also published a Corrigendum about the original 2022 paper, and this corrigendum has the same original nine authors on it. These corrigenda are published by a journal when a mistake is found in a published paper, but is thought not so egregious as to warrant retracting the paper completely. It notes that there was an error in calculating the post-treatment PHQ-9 score for one of the treatment subjects, and as a result, the cure rate was ‘really’ only 93%.

Most interesting in this corrigendum, all two pages of it, is the following paragraph, which I quote:

“Finally, we note that after the article was first made available online on March 9th, 2022, Dr. Snyder became a co-founder of a startup, Marble Therapeutics, on July 12th, 2022. Mr. Robbins later invested in Marble Therapeutics on September 26th, 2022, three months after the final version of the article was published. We do not believe there was a conflict at the time this work was done, but nevertheless wish to note this relationship.”

There’s that other thing I often write: can’t make this shit up.

Pardon My Principles         

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, Standards. No Comments on Pardon My Principles         

As the dreary, disappointing, never-ending US Presidential election campaign wound its way through the early summer months, I did my best to ignore it. I posted nothing here about it, other than this post about some ignorant (post-Biden/Trump debate) statements by a former Mayor of Atlanta. My one constant comment when the topic arose, as it too often did, was to say ‘Neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump should ever be allowed within 1000 yards of The Oval Office’

In July, however, I changed my tune, to ‘Neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump should  ever be allowed within 1000 yards of The Oval Office’.

Now that Joltin’ Joe has issued a Presidential pardon to his son Hunter, I must once again change my tune, to ‘We’re sure gonna miss Biden once that unprincipled asshole Trump is inaugurated, eh?’.

Coda: the news-reader on CBC Radio One at noon today actually said that Biden’s justification for the pardon ‘almost sounded like something Donald Trump would say’.

One really can’t make this shit up.

Canadian Health Care System Goes in for an Exam

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Health Care, Standards. 3 Comments on Canadian Health Care System Goes in for an Exam

My title is a bit inaccurate, maybe even a lot, because even though people write and talk a lot about the ‘Canadian’ health care system, in fact health care is a provincial responsibility. The Canada Health Act is intended to promote some level of commonality across the provincial systems, but I have little doubt that there is a good deal of variation in the quality and timeliness of the provision of health care services across the provinces.

Still, folks do talk as though we have a ‘Canadian system’, and the report by my favourite Canadian think tank, the Fraser Institute, that prompted this article is no exception.

Before I tell you about that, here’s a different report regarding what Canadians think about the health care system. In a poll done in August of ’23, Angus Reid asked a sample of Canadians a variety of questions about health care. Some highlights (you can read the entire AR report here):

– two-thirds of Canadians (66%) think there are structural problems within health care that will not be solved with more funding.

– 19% reported not having a family doctor, and 29% reported that they have one but find it difficult to get in to see them.

– 68% did not expect to see improvement in health care system in two years, and 56% did not expect to see improvement in five years.

– 68% report they think their province is doing a poor or terrible job measuring health care system performance, and 69% think that performance would improve if key health care indicators were made public.

Now this is an interesting snapshot of what a sample of Canadians think about the health care system under which they live, but it prompts a lot of questions. What health care indicators do the people surveyed have in mind? What do they mean when they tick the box ‘there are structural problems in health care that money won’t fix’?

Still, the survey suggests a lot of folks aren’t happy with the system, and my own circle of friends and acquaintances echoes that, although I will add that, in my experience, there is also a not-insignificant set of people who get angry at the suggestion that Canada has anything less than one of the best health care systems in the world.

Which leads one to wonder – at least it leads me to wonder – just how good is it?

Well, the good ol’ Fraser Institute wondered that too, and the result of that wondering is a new report from them titled ‘Comparing Performance of Universal Health Care Countries, 2024’, which you can download and read here. Really, all 66 pages, no paywall.

Suspecting that not all my readers are as enthusiastic about 66 pages of numbers, graphs and tables as am I, I valiantly dug in to see what I could learn and then report on here.

One thing to note right off is that Fraser decided to look only at OECD countries with relatively high incomes, and only those with universal health care systems. That tossed the USA out of the comparison right off, as well as low income countries  like Mexico, Costa Rica and Poland. This left 31 countries that met the Fraser criteria, and it includes all the countries you would expect: Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Australia and New Zealand, even Israel and Slovenia.

There’s a lot in the report obviously, and the first key comparison is – how much does Canada spend on its health care system relative to these other countries? The next comparison will be, of course – what we get for that spending.

The first question is answered in two ways. First converting all monetary amounts into US dollars (despite its absence from the list) at purchasing power parity exchange rates (don’t ask) it does two international comparisons. One looking at expenditures as a percentage of GDP, and a second looking at expenditures per capita.

Canada is the fourth highest spending country on the first measure, spending 11.5% of its GDP on health care, trailing only Germany, Switzerland and New Zealand. On a per-capita basis, Canada comes in 9th of 31 countries, spending $US7035/person, the leader of the pack being Switzerland at $US9218/person.

So, Canada’s system is not inexpensive. We spend a bigger chunk of our national income on health care than all but three other rich countries and are in the top half of countries ranked by spending per person.

So now, what do we get for this?

This is much harder to measure in any credible way than are expenditures, so Fraser measures a lot of different things to try and get a handle on what and how well the system delivers. An imperfect place to start is to measure inputs. How well does the system do in providing the labour and capital (cuz that’s what it is, folks) that is needed to deliver health care services?

The answers are varied.

Canada ranks 28/31 in the number of physicians per capita, but a better 13/31 in the number of nurses per capita. However we slip to 25/31 in the number of each of overnight-stay and psychiatric hospital beds per capita. We are 27th in MRI units per capita and 28th in CT scanners. We are a surprising 3rd in Gamma scanners per capita, a device that detects gamma radiation emitted by radioisotopes. (I had to look that up.)

Canada doesn’t look good on this dimension outside that gamma scanner thing, but the report notes quite reasonably that what matters is not inputs but output. When these people and equipment go to work, what results do they get?

This is even harder to measure (it’s relatively easy to count people and pieces of equipment).

So….

Step 1: How well are the people and equipment utilized?

Two countries were left out of this part of the report for lack of data, but

Canada ranks 17/29 in doctor consultations per capita, 22/27 in MRI exams per capita, 13/27 in CT scans per capita.

We squeaked into the top half on that last one, but Canada also ranked dead-last in ‘curative-care discharge rates’ from hospitals, which are basically instances per thousand population of a patient being admitted to a hospital for treatment of an illness or injury (so, not maternity stays, for example) and then being discharged.

So, last in just going to the hospital to be treated and released. Hard to give that a positive spin, I think. (Thinking about it, that number could be low either because we have a hard time getting into the hospital to be treated, or because when we are, we tend to die rather than be discharged. Or both.)

And now, everybody’s favourite….ok, my favourite, waiting to be treated.

The set of countries in this ranking is even smaller, and I’m not sure why. The countries included are Netherlands, New Zealand, Canada, Switzerland, Germany, Australia, France, Sweden and Switzerland.

– 65% of Canadians reported waiting more than one month for an appointment with a specialist, placing Canada 8th out of 9. [France was even higher. Sacre bleu.]

– 58% waited more than two months for elective surgery, placing Canada 9/9.

Based on the stories I hear from my (admittedly mostly not-young) friends, I find it amazing that 42% of Canadians apparently got elective surgery of any kind in less than two months. I will add the cautionary note that this is based on patient self-reports, which are never the most accurate stats. Ideally one would like administrative data on wait times.

Anyway, on to –

Step 2: what happens to people who do get into the system?

There are a number of measures of how well the system actually does in making people better. I won’t go through them all, but here are a few so you can see what sorts of things are involved and how we did. Not all the 31 countries are included in each measure, data again.

a. The rate of diabetes-related lower extremity amputations was not statistically different from the 23-country average.

b. Canada ranked 8th (out of 26) for performance on the indicator measuring 30-day mortality after admission to hospital for acute myocardial infarction (heart attack) which was statistically better than the average.

c. 11th (out of 26) for performance on the indicator measuring 30-day mortality after admission to hospital for a hemorrhagic stroke, which is not statistically different from the average, and

d. 15th (out of 26) for performance on the indicator measuring 30-day mortality after admission to hospital for an ischemic stroke, which is also not statistically different from the average.

Wait, there’s more….

e. Canada ranks 5th (out of 28) on the indicator measuring the rate of 5-year survival after treatment for breast cancer (statistically better than average),

f. 11th (out of 28) for the rate of 5-year survival after treatment for cervical cancer (not statistically different from the average),

g. 8th (out of 28) for the rate of 5-year survival after treatment for colon cancer (statistically better than average),

h. 6th (out of 28) for the rate of 5-year survival after treatment for rectal cancer (statistically better than average)

Clearly, Canada does okay on these measures overall, so I will take a paragraph here to note what I think is ironic The most terrible thing you can suggest to most Canadians is that we make our health care system more like that of the US. In fact, no one reasonable ever suggests that, but Canadians seem to be terrified of the very idea of the US system, which they think leaves people dying on the sidewalk, unless they can afford the Cadillac-level health care available to those with money and/or good jobs.

But what this report suggests is that Canadians have a terrible time getting access to health care, yet if they do, the system does a good job of treating them. So, in the US access is difficult unless you have money, but you get good care if you get in, while in Canada access is difficult because governments won’t spend the necessary money, but again, if you get in, you get good care.

Not what I would have expected before reading this report.

There’s a lot more in it, including comparisons of longevity and mortality and such. I don’t think those things tell us anything much about our health care system, as they depend on too many other things, so I will pass on reporting them, but you can read the report if you’re interested. The one exception is ‘treatable mortality’, which, as its name suggests, is mortality from causes that a health care system can ameliorate. On that measure, Canada is 20/31, not terrible, consistent with the numbers we just saw.

My bottom line is what it has been for a long time regarding the Canadian Health Care System. Despite it’s acronym, OHIP is not an Insurance Program. It may have been at the start, based on what I have read about its origins. Now, it has morphed into an all-encompassing bureaucratic nightmare in which too many decisions are made at too high a level. The politicians and high-level bureaucrats in Ontario try to ‘run’ the system from Queens Park, and if the Soviet Union was not sufficient demonstration that that doesn’t work I don’t know what could be. In addition, politicians are unwilling to commit the spending to the system needed to reduce wait times and ameliorate other access issues, because doing so would make it much harder for them to do the things they believe will get them re-elected: subsidies to manufacturing plants, sending cheques to taxpayers and the like.

I have seen the enemy of good health care, and it ain’t us, it’s the people we vote into office. All of them.

 

 

 

 

 

AI and the End of Thinking

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Language, Popular attitudes, Standards. 1 Comment on AI and the End of Thinking

I hypothesize that the topic that comes in second after the US election in the news is AI. So, this post is about me….cuz in most fonts, Al and AI are indistinguishable.

This was prompted by a long article in last Saturday’s Globe and Mail Opinion section, titled

The Automation of Writing is Almost Here

Followed by the tag line:

‘But what will happen to us, Michael Harris asks, if we cede our written language to AI?’

It is a long article, and Harris makes a number of points, all of which I basically agree with.

As to what is wrong with AI writing, he says “There is the shape of meaning and yet nothing solid.”

I would only add that this can also be said about most bureaucratic writing from universities, government, corporations. Indeed, AI makes all writing sound bureaucratic – only the shape of meaning.

He typifies the coming of AI as the third great revolution in communication, the first being writing itself, the second the invention of the printing press.

Another quote: “Passing around pre-fabricated blocks of text is efficient, to be sure, but it also makes a mockery of the word ‘communicate’….”

Again, I cannot disagree, except perhaps to wonder at what ‘efficient’ means in that context. It is easy, yes, but efficient?

As someone who taught a lot of what my employer deigned to call ‘Essay courses’ (simply meaning student grades were determined by my evaluation of a minimum number of their written words), I said to those students often that ‘writing is thinking’. I meant it, even though most of them didn’t like what that implied. Thinking is hard, so writing well is also hard. Students….no, humans….are pretty ingenious at avoiding things that are hard. That’s not necessarily a moral failing. Well, it is when it gets people hurt or killed, but it is also probably part of our evolutionary heritage. Struggling along on the savannah, smaller. slower and weaker than most of what we wanted to eat, our ancestors absolutely had to conserve their energy in any way they could, so as to have a hope of winning a battle against a tougher, stronger and faster opposing animal.

The instinct to conserve energy seems to have survived, the need to best superior predators, not so much.

There is another vein of thought about AI and language that I have read about but which Harris ignores. So far as I understand it, it is that AI generated language is destined to turn into meaningless mush, eventually. It has something to do with the fact that AI will increasingly find itself training itself on a mountain of verbiage out there on the web which it has increasingly generated itself, and this process is inherently unstable. Here’s two sentences from the Abstract of a paper about this, titled ‘The Curse of Recursion’

“What will happen to GPT-{n} once LLMs contribute much of the language found online? We find that use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models, where tails of the original content distribution disappear.”

It doesn’t say what those ‘irreversible defects’ are but some simple examples in the paper suggest that as a LLM (Large Language Model) is trained successively on text that it generated itself, the output it produces becomes what we would now call gibberish.

Given what I write below, I would call that good news.

My own concern with these LLMs follows from what I see their owners selling them for already. It is an extension of the same concern I had the few times students used AI for their writing in the last years of my career. I came upon these recent AI sales pitches because I watch sports online, and the commercials are mostly those that are broadcast on US TV. The ones I am going to talk about below are all, so far as I can remember, from Apple Intelligence, the cleverly named AI wing of Apple.

I recall three such TV ads.

  1. A guy enters a business meeting, sits down, and quickly realizes he has no idea what is going on. He quietly scoots his wheeled chair out the door, checks on his phone for what I assume was the original emailed materials for the meeting, and hits the ‘AI’ button on his program. The algorithm immediately gives him a ‘summary’ of said material. He smiles, slides himself slowly back into the meeting, and says ‘OK, let’s get into the prospectus’.

Lesson: You don’t have to prepare for anything, and you certainly don’t have to study. AI will prepare you in seconds.

  1. A guy is sitting at his desk, thinking out loud about something that is never clearly described. He speaks some garbled thoughts into his phone, hits the AI button, and his gibberish is turned into a paragraph of clear prose, which he sends to someone (his boss, it appears). Boss reads it, looks up and says something like ‘This is from Gibberish-guy?’.

Lesson: You don’t have to write or even think clearly, just say something, anything, and AI will make it brilliant.

  1. A guy (natch) is incensed about someone stealing his pudding cup from the office fridge, and he is writing an inflammatory email to the entire office, castigating whoever was asshole enough to steal it, and promising dire consequences if it is not returned. Before hitting Send he looks at the Teddy Bear sitting across the office from him (No, there were no teddy bears in the office when I worked, either) and hits the ‘Kindness’ button on his AI program. The email is duly transformed, he sends it, and a young lady walks over to his desk, says ‘Such beautiful words.’ and returns his stolen pudding cup.

Lesson: You don’t have to emotionally regulate or understand proportionality, AI will make you seem like a nice (and articulate) person.

If AI is going to self-referentially crash some day, I say bravo. I fear however that the message to most of my fellow humans prior to that is that it will eliminate the need for them to think, be articulate, prepared, or an adult, and that will be too attractive to resist. However, I will have to interact with those people in situations in which they cannot rely on AI. In line at the grocery store, out for a walk, sitting at the bar. Doing so will be extremely unpleasant, because without their AI they will be ignorant, inarticulate and angry.  Unless they let their phone do their talking for them.

That’ll be great.

 

 

Not Political  

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, News Media, Standards. No Comments on Not Political  

Hey, Kids!

This is going to be an article about the recent US election that is not about politics. I’m sure you’re all relieved – I know I am.

One staple of any US (or Canadian) election is pre-election polling. Media organizations do it, the parties and candidates do it if they can afford it, and movements in those polls are written about endlessly in the months leading up to the election. It might even be true that they matter for the outcome, because they affect people’s beliefs about the eventual likely outcome, and there is credible evidence that the expected closeness of an election affects people’s decisions to vote. Why bother if you expect a landslide?

This last US election was predicted by almost all polls to be close at every moment, but there were differences, and one notable difference was in the predictions made by traditional polls relative to those made by prediction markets. These market platforms, like Polymarket, allow people to make real-money bets on who will win the election. The price of betting on a Trump win is set on this market platform, based on what bets are being made, and varies between .01$ and 1$. Paying the going price at any moment gives you one ‘share’ in a Trump victory, which means that if he wins, as he did, you collect $1 for each share you bought. Similarly for shares in Harris, which trades on its own separate market (although prices on the two markets are obviously linked). Thus, if a share in Trump costs 40cents, that suggests that in this market the general belief is that Trump is more likely to lose than win, while if his shares are going for 65cents, as they were at various times a week or so before the election on Polymarket, that suggests the general view is that he is more likely to win. Those who bought Trump shares when the price hit $0.65 (see below) made $0.35 for each share they bought.

Polls, on the other hand, do not directly predict the winner, but rather try to predict the share of votes each candidate will get, both nationally and in each state, based on surveys of likely voters. Those state vote predictions then have implications for the Electoral College vote count, which can of course be used to generate a prediction about who will win.

Below is the plaform Fivethirtyeight‘s final poll from Election Day.

Well, here are some facts (so far as I can tell) about all these predictions and polls in this election.

1, All the polls I know about got the national popular vote wrong. Not by a lot, maybe, but the ones that I know about predicted that however the Electoral College turned out, Harris would win the popular vote. They’re still counting votes in California for some reason, but it looks like Trump’s national vote total will exceed Harris’s by maybe 3 or 4 million.

2. None of the polls I saw at any point predicted that Trump would sweep the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin.

3. If this makes you want to thumb your nose at polls generally, you should probably pick on the one that appears in – wait for it – The Economist. On Election Day – yes, you read that right – it posted an update to its prediction about the winner, giving Harris a 56 percent probability of victory.

Gonna be hard to live that one down……

4, There is plenty of chatter out there in the mainstream media now that the polls, like those in The Economist, are done for, having had their collective asses kicked by the political betting markets. That’s unwarranted, for sure. If you want to go full geek you can read a blog post here by statistician Andrew Gelman as to why that is an unwarranted conclusion, but know that Gelman was involved in putting together the prediction model used by The Economist. (I don’t believe he is involved in its day-to-day operation, so is likely innocent of any involvement in that big Harris jump on Election Day.)

However, I think I will back Gelman on this. First of all, it is worth noting that the betting markets back in 2016 were predicting a Clinton victory right up to election night, by which I mean a Clinton share cost more than $0.50 and a Trump share cost less than that. Beyond that, it is important to note that all US presidential elections in this century have been quite close, some of them really really close. It has become a 50/50 country at the national level politically, so predicting election outcomes is always going to be done with a great deal of uncertainty. That’s what makes sporting contests between equally capable teams fun, right? Whether that fun translates into politics you can judge for yourself.

All of which brings me to one particular prediction market in which something a bit unusual happened this year. I think it’s an interesting story in its own right. A couple of weeks before the election, the prediction market Polymarket, which had been selling Trump and Harris shares for prices not far from $0.50 for some time, suddenly saw the price of a Trump share vault into the middle 0.60s.

It turned out, and Polymarket was pretty up front about this, that the price had increased so markedly because a large buyer – later know as ‘The Trump Whale’ – had jumped in and bought a lot, as in millions of dollars worth, of Trump shares. It’s called a market because that’s what it is, that’s how it’s designed, so his big buy pushed the price of a Trump share up markedly.

It is still not known who this is, and Polymarket sure isn’t going to say, but The Wall Street Journal has featured a couple of stories on him, in which he has said he has no political agenda, but rather that he had a ‘hunch’ that Trump was going to win, that the polls were missing something. [It appears now to be common knowledge that he is a wealthy Frenchman who goes by the alias ‘Theo’. The WSJ claims he is set to rake in some $50 million from his election bets.] He bet not only that Trump would win the presidency, but also that he would win the national popular vote, something no poll got right.

The latest version of his story is that he believed that the polls were once again missing a ‘shy-Trump-voter’ effect, as they did in 2016 and 2020. That is, people who are going to vote for Trump, but won’t tell a pollster that, or just don’t respond to polls.  The WSJ story continues as follows –

To solve this problem, Théo argued that pollsters should use what are known as neighbor polls that ask respondents which candidates they expect their neighbors to support. The idea is that people might not want to reveal their own preferences, but will indirectly reveal them when asked to guess who their neighbors plan to vote for.

Théo cited a handful of publicly released polls conducted in September using the neighbor method alongside the traditional method. These polls showed Harris’s support was several percentage points lower when respondents were asked who their neighbors would vote for, compared with the result that came from directly asking which candidate they supported.

Well, now – that’s an interesting idea. If you think so, too, Gelman has an entire post devoted to it, not completely geeky, but very long, which you can read here. Bottom line: he also thinks ‘ask about your neighbors’ polling is an interesting (although not entirely new) idea, but needs more research. Of course he does, Gelman’s an academic, remember.

It is by now well-recognized by pollsters themselves that getting truly representative samples of people to survey has become more difficult with the demise of the universal use of landline telephones. What that all means for the polling business going forward remains to be seen, for sure, but it seems at least true that after three Trump-involved elections, US pollsters have still not figured out how to stop underestimating his support.

 

Grade Inflation Two – Local

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Education, LBOs, Standards. No Comments on Grade Inflation Two – Local

There are times when this blog writes itself. No sooner did my last piece on Harvard’s grading practices get posted than I acquired – by various means – documents that reveal what is going on in my old department regarding undergraduate marking.

First, a memo was sent around (including to me, for some reason) about new grading standards to be followed within the Dept. Instructors in the first year introductory courses and in the second year core theory courses (which almost all students take) have been informed that they should plan to give an average course mark of 75% (a middle B) and to award As and Bs to 60% of their students. Now, this is nowhere near Harvardesque, as that fine institution of higher learning is, as noted, giving As and A minuses to nearly 80% of its students. Even the Econ Dept-inclusive Faculty of Social Science at Harvard is giving out A-range marks to 65% of its students, much more generous than the new UWO Econ guideline, which in any case only applies to first and second-year courses.

None the less, this is a much higher grading expectation for UWO Econ students than reigned in my day, and the reasons for this are illustrative of what goes on in much of higher ed these days.  A separate report to the Department’s Committee on Academic Policy (also sent to me) notes that Economics tends to award fewer As and Bs than other Departments in courses of all levels. This is bad for enrollment in Econ courses, and enrollment in courses is what Departments live on in the 21st century. This is no doubt why the new grading guidelines have been struck.

Further, other information I have seen indicates that enrollment in all UWO Econ programs is on the decline, precipitously so, in some cases. For example, in UWO Econ’s once world-class Econ Honours undergrad program, enrollment in non-required courses has dropped 60% in five years. The PhD program took in 8 new students last year, when it used to take in 15-20 not long ago, when I was still employed. Even the new and previously successful Master’s program in Financial Economics has only 16 new entrants, where it used to have nearly 30.

The reasons for this are many and varied, as is always true, but for the undergrad Honors program, one cause is abundantly clear. Some 20 years back, when the Ivey Business School’s MBA program crashed and burned, Ivey had to find a new way to generate revenue. It chose to massively expand its undergrad HBA program, which students enroll in for only their last two years. Tuition for Ontario students in this program is for this year $25,200/year, so $50K for the program ($60K/year for foreign students). Ivey’s intake into the first year of this program has, since the 2000s, gone from less than 200 to 765 students in 23/24, according to its own website.

Not many programs at UWO have grown like that, although another one that has is also relevant, and its name is MOS. That stands for Management and Organizational Studies, and is a program within the Faculty of Social Science that – so far as I can tell – has also grown massively over the same period. The Faculty of Social Science is the largest at UWO, with nearly 8.000 students, and when I left my position two years ago, half of those Social Science students were said to be MOS students. (I note in passing that MOS now likes to be referred to as DAN Management, as entrepreneur Aubrey Dan left it a couple of large donations, and got the program and Department re-named in his honour some years back.)

Anyway, this quasi-business school’s growth, coupled with that of the older Ivey undergrad program has left UWO as The Business School of Western Ontario, and done much to reduce enrollment in Econ, as well as other non-Bus programs, I expect. The fact that Econ courses are hard, and, as noted last week, Econ profs are not much inclined to be easy markers, has helped feed the recent precipitous decline in Econ enrollment, and the resulting attempt to reverse this downward trend by awarding higher marks. This illustrates one of the forces militating against having grading standards that are difficult for students to meet. Another one can be seen in a document sent to me by one of my not-yet-retired colleagues in Econ. Said document is a product of what UWO calls its ‘Teaching and Learning Centre’ or TLC. It is headed:

Professional Development Workshop

Grading and Assignments

Under the heading ‘Assignment Design’ in the document is included this advice:

‘Cut down on the stuff they have to think about (and perhaps reduce cheating).’

Well yea, less reason to cheat – or study – if you aren’t expected to think about very much. I mean – who comes to university expecting to think about a lot of stuff, right?

The bureaucrats, who are really in charge now at Western, do not want faculty messing things up by making students thinkhard, or – heaven forbid – giving them low marks. It’s very bad for business and business, with a  Capital B – or maybe Capital I – is what BSWO is all about.

Learning, thinking – not so much.

I add an epilogue to further demonstrate what has happened in 40 years to Ontario universities. When I arrived at Western in 1980 I was absolutely floored by how well-prepared, smart and hard-working were UWO undergrads compared to the US undergrads I had taught during my graduate training. When I first was given an Intro Econ course to teach, I was sternly told that the Dept’s undergrad grading guidelines were to give about 1/3 of students an A or B, 1/3 a C, and 1/3 a D or F. Easy to remember, eh? 1/3, 1/3, 1/3.

So, 33% As and Bs versus 60% now, or 79% As, as at Harvard. You do the math. It’s a good bet UWO undergrads can’t. Math requires thinking about many things.

Grade inflation, Harvard Edition  

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Education, Standards. 1 Comment on Grade inflation, Harvard Edition  

I sometimes write posts for this blog and then file them without posting, either thinking I will get back to them later and improve/shorten them, or just deciding that the post isn’t up to snuff. I have a looong one sitting in limbo right now on grade inflation, specifically in US universities. I think it’s an issue in Canadian universities (and secondary schools) also, but there is better data on it for the US.

Anyway, I may post that still-simmering article at some point, as it is a topic about which I care, but the Harvard Crimson, that august institution’s student paper, has published an article about grade inflation at Harvard that provides a nice introduction to the topic – and a shorter post.

Kurt Vonnegut is reported to have said ‘Most kids can’t afford to go to Harvard to be misinformed.’, and he wrote that long before Harvard’s most recent troubles – in 1987, in fact. It turns out that if a kid can afford it, he is at least all but assured of getting an A while being misinformed.

   or……….  

The Crimson article is from 2023, and titled ‘Harvard Report Shows 79% A-Range Grades Awarded in 2020-21, Sparking Faculty Discussion’

The Crimson has no paywall, so you can find the article and read it yourself, I expect, but here’s the graph that it opens with.

So, nearly 80% of the course grades awarded in 2020/1 were As or A minuses. Wow, is all I can say. I thought we gave marks that were too high at UWO back in the day, but I don’t think we ever approached 70+% As.

As is always the case, the percentage of As awarded varies by discipline. Here’s another graph from the Crimson report, which also goes further back into Harvard history.

SEAS is the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and I have to admit that I am surprised that Social Science profs were just as tough graders as were those in Science. (Economists, almost always housed in Social Science, are typically tough graders, but this is normally more than made up for by the Sociologists, Psychologists, Political Scientists, etc. Not at Harvard, apparently.) That the A & H faculty were the easiest graders should surprise no one. They would almost certainly look tough compared to the faculty in the Faculty of Education – if Harvard has one. And, of course, I am using ‘tough’ here ironically. The 60% A marks handed out in SEAS is anything but ‘tough’.

Yet the truly remarkable thing here is that the percentage of A grades awarded has more than doubled in 20 years in all faculties.

Now why do you think that happened?

I can tell you that there were administrators at Western in my day who attributed the ever-rising admission average to get into the Faculty of Social Science to the fact that ‘Western is just attracting better and better students.’ Secondary School grade inflation? – oh, no, certainly not.

The Crimson has some quotes from various administrators at Harvard about this, one of them from Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh:

In the meeting, Claybaugh said that the “report establishes we have a problem — or rather, we have two: the intertwined problems of grade inflation and compression.”

By ‘grade compression’ academics mean the fact that all grades awarded are concentrated on a few possibilities, making it hard to distinguish really outstanding students from others. I find it encouraging – remarkable, even, given my own interactions with administrators – that the Dean thinks this is a problem. She is later quoted again:

“There is a sense that giving a wider range of grades would give students better information about their performance, and it would give us better information about where they are ranked against other students,” Claybaugh said in an interview after the meeting.

Claybaugh said that the evidence for the existence of grade inflation was less clear, as many student grades are well-deserved and faculty have increasingly focused on learning objectives.

Yea, that sounds more like an administrator – these grades are well-deserved. At least, ‘many’ of them are.

The next quote actually makes me grumpy. Well, grumpier…..

Nonetheless, she said it seems, as one faculty member put it, external “market forces” are influencing grading, particularly as faculty rely on positive course evaluations from students for professional advancement, she said in the interview.

Ok, I’m an economist, I am used to the fact that everyone wants to blame those awful ‘market forces’ when things go bad, but c’mon, unnamed faculty member. If faculty are giving high marks to get higher student evaluations there is nothing ‘market’ about that, it is an internal Harvard decision to use those (almost entirely uninformative, imho) student evaluations for ‘professional advancement’. You could stop doing that, you know. I’m talking to you, Harvard.

Here’ my favourite quote:

Claybaugh said she would defer to the full faculty to decide whether or not to implement concrete reforms to Harvard’s grading policies, but said she would be “interested in exploring” changes “that put more information on the transcript that put the grade in context.”

The Crimson then mentions some of the things that ‘the full faculty’ considered in their meeting. Someone from A&H (natch) suggested grading simply be abolished, but in the end nothing was decided. Shocking. A faculty meeting in which nothing was decided.

Here’s a fact, from my time in the trenches, that is never mentioned in the article. Giving grades that use the entire grading range, from F to A at Harvard, from 0 to 100 at Western, is hard. It is hard for faculty to give students low marks, partly because they will come to your office and bitch and moan and plead, and their parents may call you (yes, they do) and plead on their behalf, but also because it is not fun. It is not pleasant. Few faculty are sadists, few want to be known as The Grim Reaper of Harvard – or Western.

But the thing is, it is part of the job. That is, it is part of the job to give accurate information to students about their learning, and giving almost everyone an A is not doing that. It is also part of the job to inform the world outside academia how good a student is. Giving almost everyone an A is not doing that, either.

This is, if you ask me – and I know you didn’t, but it’s my damn blog – the fundamental reason why over the last twenty years marks in secondary and post-secondary institutions all over North America have gone up and up and up. Instructors (most of them) don’t want to do that part of their job. And, since they don’t have to, they don’t. Giving lots of As is waaaaay easier on everyone, so that is what happens.

It is the ultimate slogan of the 21st century. ‘Easy is best.’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I Couldn’t Not Write About This

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Standards. No Comments on I Couldn’t Not Write About This

By now I’m sure you have all seen headlines or read something about this on a newsfeed, but I’ll paste in here the first paragraph of the story that was in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday afternoon, Sept 17.

BEIRUT—Pagers carried by thousands of Hezbollah operatives exploded at about the same time Tuesday afternoon in what appeared to be an unprecedented attack that authorities said injured more than 2,700 and killed eight across Lebanon.

Pagers. Exploding pagers, and not a few of them, more than 2,700 of them, exploding simultaneously. This is James Bond stuff, no, it’s not really, Ian Fleming would not have tried to sell such an outrageous idea as plausible, and even in the 007 movies, this would be a stretch. It’s more like Maxwell Smart stuff, except that in Smart’s case the pagers wouldn’t explode and the remote control that was supposed to detonate them all would blow up in Smart’s face, and 99 would have to rescue poor Max from his own folly.

How the hell does one pull this off? How does one get exploding pagers into the hands – or, I suppose, onto the belts – of 2800 of your enemies and then set them off? And, if eight people were killed by these things, they are not just devices that go bang, they are potentially lethal.

Hezbollah immediately blamed Israel, and of course they would, because 1) Israel and Hezbollah are long-time enemies, and 2) there is no other organization or state on the planet who anyone  could imagine being capable of pulling this off. The CIA, MI6, Canada’s CSIS – not a chance, especially that last one, and the CIA repeatedly failed to assassinate just one Caribbean dictator.  Supposedly with an exploding cigar, as I recall. Russia’s FSB might be good at basic murder, poison umbrella tips to kill one man, but not something as complex and audacious as this. I don’t know much about China’s Ministry of State Security, I suspect no one does, and while they may have the technical chops for this, you still have to put your money on Mossad.

Later, like the next day, radios and walkie-talkies started blowing up, even more lethally. One can easily imagine Hezbollah operatives having the fridges and washing machines removed from their homes.

Sorry, I have nothing intelligent or insightful to say about this other than – you really don’t want Israel as an enemy.

 

A Tip of My Hat to Jagmeet Singh

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, Language, Standards. 1 Comment on A Tip of My Hat to Jagmeet Singh

Canadians will know that Jagmeet Singh is the leader of the Federal New Democratic Party, and they can probably guess that I have nothing good to say about any of the policies espoused by him or his party.

However, I want to here and now give him a public tip of my hat for something I saw him do in a video on the CBC website, which you can also view here (you’ll have to scroll to the bottom of the page for the ‘Featured Videos’, and I don’t know how long it will stay posted).

Singh is walking near Parliament with a staffer when two dudes come up behind him, filming him with their phones, and Dude 1 says out loud ‘Would you vote a non-confidence today if it came up?”

Singh ignores him and keeps walking.

Then Dude 1 can easily be heard to say “Corrupted bastard.”

At that Singh turns around and walks back toward Dude 1, saying “Wanna say something?”

Dude 1: “What?”

Singh: “Wanna say something to me?”

Dude 1: “I didn’t say nothing.”

And it goes on like that, with Dude 1, in the manner of confronted cowards everywhere, denying that he said anything, while his buddy, Dude 2, continues to film.

Security officers were right there the whole time, but I here tip my hat to Mr Singh for turning around and calling out the asshole who was only willing to insult him while Singh’s back was turned. Bravo, Mr Singh. Had Singh smacked the guy up side the head, no jury of real people would convict him of anything. The asshole asked for it.

 

What Does a 226% Improvement Smell Like?

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Research, Standards. 4 Comments on What Does a 2264 Improvement Smell Like?

Let me first express my thanks to Andrew Gelman of Columbia whose blog (see above) first brought this to my attention, so I can bring it to yours.

This is another of those ‘if it seems too good to be true it probably is’ research papers that I so love. The paper is titled ‘Overnight olfactory enrichment using an odorant diffuser improves memory and modifies the uncinate fasciculus in older adults’ and it was published in Frontiers in Neuroscience in July of 2023.

It reports on a study in which participants – all elderly, like me – were given scent diffusers to take home and use for two hours each night, starting when they went to bed – the diffusers automatically shut off two hours after they were started. The participants were given cognition tests and a functional MRI (that’s where the uncinate fasciculus bit in the title comes from) before they started the experiment and again six months later, after they had used the diffusers for that period of time.

The ‘treatment group’ got a set of 7 genuine essential oils to use in their diffusers, while the control group got ‘de minimis amounts of odorant’ according to the researchers. (Do you suppose those in the Control Group noticed that their diffusers produced no scent? But I digress.)

In the end there were a total of 43 participants in the two groups, and the headline result of this research was, quoting the paper,

“ A statistically significant 226% improvement was observed in the enriched group compared to the control group on the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test….”

Pretty impressive, eh? Six months of smelling essential oils for two hours/night at bedtime, that’s all it took to get that huge improvement in Auditory Verbal Learning.

Anyone smell anything?

Here are some facts about this ‘controlled’ experiment. First, 43 participants? A bit more than 20 in each group? That is what statisticians call a small sample. But wait, there’s more. If you look at the flow chart of how they recruited and screened participants for this study, you find that 132 subjects passed the initial screening. Of these, only 68 were included in the Control and Treatment groups that were used in the statistical analysis of the results, and of those 68, 25 dropped out during the study. That leaves the 43 whose results are reported on, of the 132 who passed the screen.

Smell anything yet? Why did those 25 people drop out? That’s 36% of the 68 whose results were analyzed and reported. What does that drop out rate imply for the credibility of the results? People don’t drop out randomly, they do it for reasons.

And, as one of the readers of the Gelman blog pointed out, that 226% improvement claim comes from the control group scoring on average 0.73 points worse post-treatment than pre-treatment on a particular test, while the treatment group scored 0.92 points better on average. So you have a difference of 1.65 points in the two groups’ average ‘improvement’ on the test, and 1.65 is 2.26 times 0.73.

Interesting arithmetic. I think Gelman’s reader is right, as that 226% number doesn’t come up anywhere else in the paper. However, note that 1.65 being 2.26 times 0.73 is not the same as 1.65 being a 226% ‘improvement’ over 0.73. The latter would mean that it was more than three times greater, and it is not. Neuroscientists don’t do a lot of basic arithmetic, I guess. That detail aside, just looking at the difference in average scores for the two groups – what does a ‘point’ mean in this context, anyway? Is it big? How ‘big’ is a 1.65 point improvement on this test? What does that actually translate into, memory-wise? The researchers do not say.

One last thing. At the end of the paper there is a section called Funding, under which is written ‘This research was sponsored by Procter and Gamble.’

There, now you smell it, eh?

I know nothing about the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience, but if their editors did not stop and wonder about that 226% claim, well, I don’t think I’ll subscribe. Actually, it’s an open access journal so I can read it for free, as I did this smelly article. But I won’t. Read the journal, I mean. Unless maybe I’m looking for something else to write about here.

An Ex-Mayor and an Editor Walk into a Bar

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, News Media, Standards. No Comments on An Ex-Mayor and an Editor Walk into a Bar

A tip of the hat to The Wall Street Journal for putting this in their Notable and Quotable column. The Journal’s Editors don’t comment on whatever appears in this column, they just publish it for their readers to see. Having seen it, I have a comment or two.

As background, Keisha Lance Bottoms is a former mayor of Atlanta, Georgia, a city with a population of about 500,000, which is the centre of a metropolitan area of some 6 million. Not a small job.

Ms. Bottoms has a different job now, something in the commentariat business. After the Biden-Trump debate, she was interviewed on MSNBC, and here is the WSJ’s report of part of that conversation –

Former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms speaks with MSNBC host Chris Jansing, July 1:

Ms. Jansing: Your hometown paper the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is among those saying it’s time for President Biden to pass the torch. The editorial board wrote, “This wasn’t a bad night. It was confirmation of the worst fears of some of Biden’s most ardent supporters.” . . .

Ms. Bottoms: Let me just say I was very disappointed with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. We have talked about making sure we’re protecting elections and making sure there’s no undue influence. This was undue influence by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution or an attempt to influence. I think voters should be able to make decisions the same way they did in the primaries.

Ms. Jansing: But isn’t that what editorial boards are supposed to do?

Ms. Bottoms: Editorial boards are supposed to honor fair elections. I don’t think it’s fair when an editorial board with 10 people sitting in a room are trying to influence an election.

– There you have Ms. Bottoms’ take on the role of newspapers in the 21st century.

I’ll first just say that this is a good example of the tendency for supposedly knowledgeable people to say things that would have – even 20 years ago – been considered laughable.

Note the use by Ms. Bottoms of the terms ‘undue influence’, ‘protecting elections’, and ‘honor fair elections’. This is typical cant for most members of what passes for an intelligentsia in the 21st century. There is a list of unquestionable and unpardonable sins, like colonialism and oppression, ready and waiting to be attached to anything one is against. ‘Election influencing’ is another such sin – although I suspect only when practiced by the wrong people to influence elections in the wrong way.

Beyond that – what is it about the ‘10 people sitting in a room’ that is unfair? Would 5 people be fair, or would a thousand be more fair? Is it the fact they are sitting in a room at all that makes it unfair? Would it be fair if they were standing, or – kneeling?

And the sentence ‘I think voters should be able to make decisions the same way they did in the primaries.’ is beyond the pale. Does Ms. Bottoms believe that The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Editorial Board did not publish any commentary on the candidates in the primaries when those were being held? Or, perhaps they did not write those when sitting in a room.

It has become the sole job of virtually all political operatives, be they candidates, office-holders, advocates, activists or spin doctors, to quote talking points. Never mind a reasoned analysis, god forbid you should explain why you disagree with the Editorial Board’s position. Just get in your words – ‘honor fair elections’ – and retreat from the field claiming a score.

As I say, someone 20 years ago who said what Ms. Bottoms said above would have been laughed at. Today, I’m sure she has been favourably quoted by other, similar, political operatives.

The impact of strip clubs on sex crimes

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, Research, Standards. No Comments on The impact of strip clubs on sex crimes

I ended a post back on April 25 with the following question:

Does the presence of bricks-and-mortar adult entertainment establishments have a positive, negative, or no effect on the commission of sex crimes in the surrounding neighborhood?

I then asked you to consider what sort of data would be required to provide credible evidence as to what is the correct answer to that question.

Fair warning, this is going to be a longish article, but I would suggest that a credible answer to the first question above has some social value. And, full disclosure, this post is part of my ‘Studies show’ inoculation campaign.

‘Swat I do.

I do think the answer to this question is of more than passing interest.

If the presence of adult entertainment establishments (aee’s, henceforth) like strip clubs and such could be shown to reduce the incidence of sex-crimes like sexual assault and rape, this might be counted as a reason to allow them to operate. If, on the other hand, they are associated with an increase in such crimes, then that is a reason to ban them entirely. The ban/allow decision for aees is of course complex, and other factors may also be important (e.g., links to organized crime, drug use). Still, the answer could be a significant input into city policy-setting on such places.

More disclosure, this is not a very original post. I got wind of all this reading Andrew Gelman’s Statistical Inference blog back when. However, he didn’t dig into the details much.  I have, and I think it is another nice illustration of an important principle: if it sounds really good, be skeptical.

Ok, then – our story begins with a paper by two economists titled “THE EFFECT OF ADULT ENTERTAINMENT ESTABLISHMENTS ON SEX CRIME: EVIDENCE FROM NEW YORK CITY”,

which was written by Riccardo Ciacci and Maria Micaela Sviatschi and published in 2021, in The Economic Journal, a well-respected outlet in my old discipline.

The following sentence from the Abstract of their paper lays out what they find –

“We find that these businesses decrease sex crime by 13% per police precinct one week after the opening, and have no effect on other types of crime. The results suggest that the reduction is mostly driven by potential sex offenders frequenting these establishments rather than committing crimes.”

Trust me, if true, that’s a big deal. A 13% reduction on average, and in the first week after the aees open.

Social scientists rarely find effects of that size attributable to any single thing. That’s huge. One might even venture to say – unbelievable.

It is not surprising that The Economic Journal was happy to give space in its pages to publish these results. And, coming back to what I wrote above, what city politician could ignore the possibility that licensing aees in their jurisdiction might reduce sex crimes by 13%?

To dig deeper we return to the ‘extra credit’ question I posed on that post of April 25 – what kind of data would one need to answer the question?

Well, you need to be able to make a comparison of sex crime numbers between areas where aees operate, and areas where they do not. An obvious possibility is to find two political jurisdictions such that one contains aees, and the other, perhaps due to different laws, does not. Then you can compare the incidence of sex crimes in those two jurisdictions and get your answer.

That approach is just fraught with difficulties, all following from the fact that the two jurisdictions are bound to be different from one another in a whole host of ways, any one of which might be the reason for any sex-crime difference you find. Demographics, incomes, legal framework, policing differences, the list goes on and on. You can try to account for all that, but it’s very difficult, you need all kinds of extra data, and you can never be certain that any difference you find can actually be attributed to the presence/absence of aees.

The alternative is to look at a single jurisdiction, like NYC, and find data on where aees operate and where they do not. Now NYC is a highly heterogeneous place – it’s huge, and its neighborhoods differ a lot, so it sort of seems like we’re back to the same problem.

However, suppose you can get data on when and where aees open and close in NYC. Then, you have before and after data for each establishment and its neighborhood. If an aee started operating in neighborhood X on June 23, 2012, you can then look at sex crime data in that area before and after the opening date. You still want to assure yourself that nothing else important in that neighborhood changed around that same time, but that seems like a doable thing.

This is pretty much what our economists did, as we will see, but there is still another issue; data on sex crimes.

All data on criminal activity carries with it certain problems. Data on arrests and convictions for crimes is generally pretty reliable, but crimes are committed all the time for which no arrests are made and/or no convictions occur. Still, the crimes occur, and for the purposes of this question, you want data on the occurrence of sex crimes, not on arrests for them.

We’ll come back to the crime data below, but I’ll start with the data on aees.

The authors note that if you are going to open a strip club in NYC there is a bureaucratic process to go through, and the first thing a potential operator of such has to do is register the business with a government bureau.

To quote directly from the paper:

“We construct a new data set on adult entertainment establishments that includes the names and addresses of the establishments, providing precise geographic information. We complement this with information on establishment registration dates from the New York Department of State and Yellow Pages, which we use to define when an establishment opened.”

So, the researchers know where each aee opened, and they know when, but do note for later, that for the ‘when’ bit they use the date of registration with the NY Department of State.

The location that they get from the Dept and the Yellow pages then allows the researchers to determine in which NYPD precinct the aee is located, and that is going to allow them to associate each aee, once it opens, with crime data from that precinct.

So, what crime data do they use? As I’ve noted, such data always has issues.

Here’s one thing the economist say about their crime data.

“The crime data include hourly information on crimes observed by the police, including sex crimes. The data set covers the period from 1 January 2004 to 29 June 2012. Since these crimes are reported by the police, it minimises the biases associated with self-reported data on sex crime.”

Ok, hold on. ‘Crimes observed by police’? What does that mean? How many of the people arrested for or even suspected of a crime by the police had that crime observed by the police? Speeders, stop-sign ignorers, perhaps? But burglars, murderers, and – the point here – sexual assault or rape? How often are those crimes observed by police?

The vast majority of crimes come to light and are investigated by police on the basis of a report by a private citizen. In the case of sex crimes, most often a victim is found somewhere or comes to the police after the crime has occurred, inducing police to begin an investigation.

This sentence from the paper clears things up….a bit.

“We categorise adult entertainment establishments by New York Police Department (NYPD) precincts to match crime data from the ‘stop-and-frisk’ program.”

Ah. You may remember NYC’s (in)famous ‘stop and frisk’ program of several years (and mayors) ago. NYPD officers would stop folks on the street and – chat them up. Ask questions of various kinds, and then fill out and turn in a card that recorded various aspects of the encounter. As we will see below, virtually none of these s-a-f encounters resulted in a report of a crime or an arrest.

So….’crime data’? From stop and frisk encounters? Need to know a lot more about how that data was used.

And we shall, but let’s go back to the other key bit of data – where and when aees opened in NYC. The date used for the aees ‘opening’ is, according to the quote above, the date on which each establishment was registered  with the NY Dept of State.

Can you think of any establishment that needs a city or health or any other license to operate, that actually starts serving customers the day after it files the licensing paperwork?

To be sure, I have never operated a business, but I don’t think that can possibly be how it works. For one thing, how many different licenses do you suppose a strip club needs to operate at all? A health inspection, a liquor license, a fire inspection, building safety certificate….?

This is not a detail, because the BIG Headline this paper starts with is that a strip club reduces the number of sex crimes in the precinct in which it is located in the first week of operation. If the researchers are using the date of registration to determine when was that first week – there’s a problem.

 Ok, time to let the rest of the cats out of the proverbial bag. I mentioned above that I came on this research through a post on Gelman’s blog in which some folks expressed considerable skepticism about the economists’ findings. Those skeptics are, to give credit where due:

Brandon del Pozo, PhD, MPA, MA (corresponding author); Division of General Internal Medicine, Rhode Island Hospital/The Warren Alpert Medical School

Peter Moskos, PhD; Department of Law, Police Science, and Criminal Justice Administration, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York

John K. Donohue, JD, MBA; Center on Policing, Rutgers University

John Hall, MPA, MS ; Crime Control Strategies, New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority Police Department

They lay out their issues with the paper in considerable detail in a paper of their own titled:

Registering a proposed business reduces police stops of innocent people? Reconsidering the effects of strip clubs on sex crimes found in Ciacci & Sviatschi’s study of New York City

which was published in Police Practice and Research, 2024-05-03.

This post is already quite long, so I am going to just give you the two most salient (in my opinion) points that are made by the skeptics in their paper.

First, as to the economists’ ‘sex crime’ data:

“The study uses New York City Police Department stop, question and frisk (SQF) report data to measure what it asserts are police-observed sex crimes, and uses changes in the frequency of the reports to assert the effect of opening an adult entertainment establishment on these sex crimes. These reports document forcible police stops of people based on less than probable cause, not crimes. Affirmatively referring to the SQF incidents included in the study as ‘sex crimes,’ which the paper does throughout (see p. 2 and p. 6, for example), is a category error. Over 94% of the analytic sample used in the study records a finding that there was insufficient cause to believe the person stopped had committed a crime….In other words, 94% of the reports are records of people who were legally innocent of the crime the police stopped them to investigate.”

And then, for the data on the openings of aees:

“This brings us back to using the date a business is registered with New York State as a proxy for its opening date, considering it provides a discrete date memorialized by a formal process between the government and a business. However, the date of registration is not an opening date, and has no predictable relationship to it, regardless of the type of business, or whether it requires the extra reviews necessary for a liquor license. New York City’s guidance to aspiring business owners reinforces the point that registration occurs well before opening.”

I close with the following. It turns out our four skeptics sent a comment to The Economic Journal laying out all their concerns about the original research, the Journal duly sent said commentary on to the authors, Ciacci and Sviatschi, and those authors responded that they did not think these concerns affected the important points in their paper. So, the journal not only did not retract the paper, it declined to publish a Commentary on its findings by the four skeptics. (Econ Journals do publish such Comments from time to time. Not this time.)

I mean, that would just make the original authors – and the Journal – look bad, no? The skeptics did, as we saw, eventually get their concerns into the public domain via a different publication – one read by pretty much nobody who reads The Economic Journal, I’m thinking.

Again – if it seems too good to be true…Objects in mirror may be smaller than they appear.

Sample-based bullshit

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Education, Standards. No Comments on Sample-based bullshit

Standards in general, and in academia in particular, are a keen concern of mine, and I will be writing about them frequently here. This post is about an open letter written by a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Regina to the Head of the Department, a letter which he shared in a publication to which I subscribe.

The letter concerns an email sent to all CS students and faculty at UR on August 30, 2023, in which the following sentence appears – “In an effort to provide timely feedback on student work, some of our courses will be moving to a sample-based marking approach.”

The email goes on to explain what that means – that when a student turns in an assignment or test, not all of it will be marked. The parts to be marked will not be revealed until after the marked work has been returned to the students, and their grade will be determined only by that which is marked. So if a test consists of 6 problems, perhaps only three will be marked and feedback provided; the same three for all students.

The reason given for this is the increase in the size of CS classes, driven in turn by an increase in the number of CS majors, said to be nearly 1000 in the email.

The faculty member wrote his open letter to the Head of his Department (Computer Science) decrying this new grading approach, and explaining why he thought it would lead to a decline in academic standards.

I will first just record here that ‘sample-based marking’ as described, is in itself a reduction in academic standards. When I taught at University my assignments and tests were conceived as a whole, different parts of it designed to test different parts of the material, but also different abilities. Some questions could not be answered well without having the ability to write clearly and concisely about something complex, while other questions were designed to test one’s ability to deal with more formal logical or technical issues. To mark or provide feedback on only some aspects of the work is to ignore some part of what the course is about.

I understand well that the idea behind this is that, because the students don’t know up-front which parts of their work will be marked, they still have an incentive to work hard learning all of it. This does not change the fact they will get no feedback on some of their work, a primary point of marking. But in addition, anyone who knows students knows this will lead to a cottage industry in figuring out which parts of work any given instructor is likely to mark, which is not in any way part of what higher education is supposed to teach students.

This policy is, in the end, a further piece of evidence as to what University administrators’ goal is. Get as many students through to a degree as possible, at as low a cost as possible. So far as I can tell, their political masters in Canada are perfectly in agreement with this goal.

This is why sample-based marking is being implemented, rather than the solution suggested by the CS faculty member who objected to it; hiring more faculty to accommodate the growing number of students. Faculty are expensive. And, note that the letter did not indicate that CS students would be seeing a discount on their tuition bill to accompany this sample-based marking initiative.

Imagine a McDonald’s franchise-holder, or local restauranteur, who found themselves with a (delightful) increase in patronage, and responded by filling only part of all food orders, rather than hiring more workers, while charging for everything ordered.

One final note. The original email laying out how this scheme is envisioned working at UR also says that the parts of any student work that are not marked will none the less have solutions posted for the non-marked parts, or they will be gone over in class so as to provide students with the correct solutions. So, there’s your all-around feedback, eh?

Right. In a university atmosphere in which students feel free – indeed, are encouraged – to argue for higher marks for most any reason they can think up, this will open up a whole new area of student appeals. To wit: “ I got the parts of the exam you did not mark nearly perfect, according to your own solution key, so I deserve much more than the 63 I received, which is based solely on the parts you did mark.”…followed by the ever-popular ‘This isn’t fair.’

 

 

Following the Hot Hand of Science

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Research, Standards. No Comments on Following the Hot Hand of Science

Anyone vaguely familiar with basketball has heard of the ‘hot hand’ phenomenon. Someone on the team gets a hot shooting streak going, they can’t seem to miss, and their teammates start looking to get the hot-handed player the ball. I played backyard hoops a lot in my youth, and there were (very few) times when it happened to me; every shot I threw up seemed to go in – briefly.

Well, academics got wind of this long ago also, and decided to investigate whether there was anything to it. Yea, sure, players talk about experiencing it, or seeing it, but it could easily be just a matter of perception, something that would disappear into the ether once subjected to hard-nosed observation and statistical analysis.

The canonical paper to do this analysis was published in 1985 in Cognitive Psychology, authored by Gilovich, Tallone and Tversky. The last of this trio, Amos Tversky, was a sufficiently notable scholar that young economists like me were told to read some of his work back in the day. He died young, age 59, in 1996, six years before his frequent co-researcher, Daniel Kahnemann, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics. The work the Nobel committee cited in awarding the prize to Kahnemann was mostly done with Tversky, so there is little doubt Tversky would have shared the prize had he lived long enough, but Nobels are, by rule, not given to the dead.

Now, as a research question, looking for a basketball hot hand is in many ways ideal: the trio used data on shots made and missed by players in the NBA, which tracks such data very carefully, and beyond that, they did their own controlled experiment, putting the Cornell basketball teams to work taking shots, and recording the results. Good data is everything in social science, and the data doesn’t get much better than that. Well, bear with me here, this is most of the Abstract of that 1985 paper:

“Basketball players and fans alike tend to believe that a player’s chance of hitting a shot are greater following a hit than following a miss on the previous shot. However, detailed analyses of the shooting records of the Philadelphia 76ers provided no evidence for a positive correlation between the outcomes of successive shots. The same conclusions emerged from free-throw records of the Boston Celtics, and from a controlled shooting experiment with the men and women of Cornell’s varsity teams. The outcomes of previous shots influenced Cornell players’ predictions but not their performance. The belief in the hot hand and the “detection” of streaks in random sequences is attributed to a general misconception of chance according to which even short random sequences are thought to be highly representative of their generating process.”

That is, a player who hits a shot expects he is likely to hit the next one, too. When he does, he files this away as ‘having a hot hand’, but the actual frequency with which he hits the second shot is not actually higher than when he had missed his previous shot. Standard ‘cognitive bias’ causes the player – and fans – to see it that way, that’s all. They remember when the second shot is made more than they remember it being missed.

Damn scientists are always messing with our hopes and dreams, right? No Easter Bunny, no extra-terrestrials in Mississauga, and no hot hand. Is nothing sacred?  Other researchers went looking for evidence of a hot hand over the ensuing years, but it became known in academic circles as ‘the hot hand fallacy’, the general consensus being that it did not exist in the real world of basketball.

33 years later

But wait, it’s now 2018 and a paper by Miller and Sanjurjo appears in Econometrica, the premier journal for economic analysis involving probability and/or statistics. It’s title is “Surprised by the hot-hand fallacy? A truth in the law of small numbers”

Here’s some of what their Abstract says:

We prove that a subtle but substantial bias exists in a common measure of the conditional dependence of present outcomes on streaks of past outcomes in sequential data…. We observe that the canonical study [that is, Gilovich, Tallone and Tversky] in the influential hot hand fallacy literature, along with replications, are vulnerable to the bias. Upon correcting for the bias, we find that the longstanding conclusions of the canonical study are reversed.

It took over 30 years for two economists to figure out that ‘the canonical study’ of the hot hand did its ciphering wrong, and that once this is corrected, it’s findings are not just no longer true, they are reversed. The data collected in 1985 do provide evidence of the existence of a hot hand.

Think about this. In 1985 some very clever academics showed there was no such thing as a hot hand in the real world of basketball, and the academics who peer-reviewed their work agreed with them. Thirty-plus years later, some other clever academics realized that first set had gotten something wrong, and that fixing it reversed the previous findings – and the academics who peer-reviewed their work agreed with them.

Ain’t social science wonderful? A question for which there is excellent data, a situation rarer than hen’s teeth in social science, is investigated and a conclusive answer arrived at, and thirty years later that answer is shown to be not just wrong but backwards.

No one did anything shady here. There was no messing with data, the 2018 guys used the same data used in 1985. A mistake, a subtle but significant mistake, accounts for the turnaround, and it took 33 years to discover it. One can hardly blame the 1985 researchers for not seeing the mistake, given that no one else did for such a long time.

The Lesson?

So, in case my point is not yet obvious, science is not a set of settled facts. Those do exist – sort of – but anyone who understands the process of science even a little understands that settled facts are settled only until they are overturned. And if that is true for such a clean research question as an investigation of a basketball hot hand, think about a more typical social science question in which two things are almost always true. One, the data is not at all what the researchers need, so they make do with what they can actually gather. Two, the right way to analyze that data – among endless possibilities – is a matter of disagreement among respectable social scientists. Following that kinda science will make you dizzy, my friends.

A teaser: think about this social scientific question. It is arguably of more importance than basketball shooting.

Does the availability of bricks-and-mortar adult entertainment establishments have a positive, negative, or no effect on the commission of sex crimes in the surrounding neighborhood?

Whaddya think is the right answer?

For extra credit: what kind of data would a researcher need to gather to answer that question?

Now that’s real (i.e., messy) social science.

Stay tuned, because a couple of economists set out to investigate the question above, and I’ll have a go at what they did and their findings in a future post.

 

 

Streaming service warnings, or…..huh?

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Culture, Language, Standards. No Comments on Streaming service warnings, or…..huh?

A pervasive feature of the 21st century in North America is the deterioration in the quality of written language. Words with a quite precise meanings, like ‘phone’, ‘mail’, ‘email’ and ‘text’ get replaced with the coverall ‘reach out’.

I have access to exactly one internet streaming service, and it provides one of the more amusing examples of language abuse in the warnings it attaches to the previews of the films that one can watch on it.

Now, some of these warnings are easily understandable: Nudity, Sex, Violence – the Classics. Attaching any of these to the preview of a film is particularly useful to any teens or pre-teens who live in the household. I have experience from an earlier era. In my pre-teen years my good Polish Catholic parents subscribed to The Catholic Chronicle, a weekly paper put out by the local diocese. This featured a lot of boring stuff I never read, but it also provided ratings of all the movies that would be shown that week on the 5 or 6 TV stations available in our town. Those ratings told me which channel to put on when I stayed up past my parents’ bedtime on Friday or Saturday night. I was most grateful to the Bishop for this service, even though nothing on TV in that era was actually all that scandalous. It doesn’t really take much to get a 12-year-old boy excited.

However, contemporary warning words beyond that Big Three are rather more mysterious to me.

One warning is Language. Not Profanity, not Cussin’, not even Bad Language, just – Language. That seems to suggest that the characters in the film are going to talk, but there is also another warning of Pervasive Language. I suppose it is useful for some people to know there will be a lot of talking, so they should pause the stream if they have to go to the bathroom.

There is also a warning for Smoking, which I presume is due to our enlightened age realizing that all it takes is for some young’n to see someone smoking in a film to provoke them to go out and steal some smokes and try it themselves.

However, there is also a distinct warning about Historical Smoking. Clearly this would be attached to a film set in the past in which people smoke. What is not clear to me is whether the distinction is made because seeing past smoking is more or less harmful than seeing current smoking. Whichever way it is, why is there not then a warning about Historical Nudity (Adam and Eve?) or Historical Violence (Conan the Barbarian?) or, really – Historical Sex; you know, before people knew how to do it right like we do.

Undoubtedly, the biggest mystery to me is when a film preview comes with this warning:

Some Thematic Elements

Whatever in the hell does that mean? I can’t even make a joke about it.

One might think that, whatever the environment, posting a warning whose meaning is unclear would be a terrible idea. Do we want Environment Canada putting out Alerts that say Something Might be Coming? [I admit, EnvCan’s Special Weather Statements are pretty close to that.]

However, here in the 21st century, when offence lurks around every corner, it may be that posting a warning on a film the meaning of which no one understands has value.

Consider this scenario – a subscriber phones up or texts the customer service dept of the service.

Subscriber: “Hey that movie had a blonde-haired woman chasing a blue aardvark around with a flyswatter, that was appalling, I had no idea me and the kids  would be exposed to that. What is wrong with you people?”

Customer Service: “Ah, but Madam, we did make it clear the movie contained Some Thematic Elements.”

Young, Rogan and the Cost of Principles

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Popular attitudes, Standards. No Comments on Young, Rogan and the Cost of Principles

Came across an article in the Wall Street Journal last month headlined as:

Neil Young Will Return to Spotify After Two-Year Boycott Over Joe Rogan

Singer-songwriter says he had no choice but to return to streaming platform due to wider distribution of Rogan’s podcast

March 13, 2024 Gareth Vipers

For you non-WSJ subscribers who may have forgotten what this is all about, here’s a quote from the WSJ piece:

Young penned an open letter to his manager and label in 2022 asking them to remove his music from the platform, saying it was spreading fake information about Covid-19 vaccines through Rogan’s show.

The article explains that in fact, “…Young’s label legally has control over how and where his music is distributed…” but Vipers claims that they had reason to honor his request. The piece does not say if they actually did, and if they did not, then this would seem to have been a rather empty gesture on ol’ Neil’s part.

Anyway, the point of this piece was that Rogan had since 2022 made a very lucrative deal to have his podcast more widely streamed, including on Apple and Amazon, and in light of that, Young was going to start letting his musical recordings be distributed on Spotify again. [I am inferring from that piece of info that Warner Bros did indeed pull his stuff from Spotify in ’22.]

I am a fan of Young’s music. Hearing Cinnamon Girl blasting out of a pair of car speakers was one of the great thrills of my youth, and one of the few truly wonderful musical moments on the old Saturday Night Live show was when Young and Crazy Horse brought down the house with a searing version of Rockin’ in The Free World. The man was a serious rocker, and he wrote some great songs.

One of my favourite Neil Young moments was in 1988, when he put out an album titled This Note’s for You. It was a blast at other musicians who allow their music to be used to sell shit. One of my (admittedly costless to hold) convictions is that musicians (or actors or other performers) who have made serious money in their career and then allow their output or their selves to be used to sell shit – any shit – are putzes who I wouldn’t trust if I ever ran into them.

As one example, I was depressed a couple of years ago to hear the Who’s Eminence Front – one of their best recordings – being used to sell Nissans. From the movies we have Samuel L Jackson, Danny DeVito, Rob Lowe, Matthew McConaughey, Jennifer Garner and on and on….one sees them more often in ads than in movies.

[I would like to think there is a special place in hell for celebs who accept money to promote online gambling sites – Gretzky, McDavid, Matthews, Jamie Foxx, etc. But I’m sure there’s not.]

These people are not needy. I’m an economist, I get it, no one thinks they have enough money, but I happen to think there ought to be some things one will not do for more. And no, I am not saying that celebrities or people with more wealth than some specified number should be prohibited from selling other people’s shit. They all have a perfect right to do what they are doing. I’m really only saying I think less of them for doing it –  which troubles them not the least, I know.

So back to ol’ Neil. His original move to pull his music from Spotify had two characteristics. One, it harmed Spotify – maybe. Spotify operates a subscription model in which folks pay a monthly fee for the right to listen to music from its catalog, including Young’s. So, it would appear that Young’s move hurt Spotify only to the extent to which people cancelled their Spotify plans, either out of sympathy with Young, or simply because they would no longer be able to listen to his tunes on the platform. I don’t know if that happened (though I rather doubt it), but more important to me is the second characteristic, which is that Young paid a price himself for doing that. He lost his share of that revenue, too, and about that there is no doubt. To me, that speaks to a level of integrity in Young. I don’t mean to say I agree with Young’s apparent position that Rogan is evil. I’ve never listened to one of Rogan’s podcasts, and don’t know what was said on them that upset Young. My point is only that incurring a cost yourself over a principle signals integrity. Anyone can run around bashing others, imposing costs on others, people can do that just for amusement. Taking a hit yourself says something, it says you mean it. Similarly, Young’s apparent past refusal to let his music be used to sell shit cost him real $. Someone would surely have paid him to use his music to sell cinnamon or something, back in the day.

Of course, the corollary to all this is that Neil could have reacted to the recent news of the now-wider distribution of Rogan’s podcast by asking Warner Bros to pull his music from Amazon and Apple, too. That would be even more costly to Young, and would leave me even more impressed with his integrity and commitment. What he has actually done by, according to the article, allowing his music back on Spotify (along with leaving it on the other platforms) says to this observer that Young was not willing to pay that high a price for his principles.

And, to be clear, in ‘price’ I am not pointing only to the money he would lose from streaming payments. He’s a musician, composer and performer, and having people hear his music has been his life’s work. Losing that is a serious price to pay, even were no cash involved.

I judge Neil Young not, and I still thank him for putting out the This Note’s for You album and writing and recording Cinnamon Girl. I merely point out that everything has a price, and we all have to decide which prices we will pay and which we will not, and I continue to believe that those who pay a price to adhere to a principle deserve my respect, if not necessarily my agreement. And – those who have made millions, become famous and then go on to accept money to sell other people’s shit deserve my contempt.

Btw, if I’m right that Young’s original move in 2022 cost Spotify nothing, it raises another question: what was ol ‘Neil trying to accomplish? Topic for another post, perhaps.

 

Sci-fi in aid of Science

Written by Editorial Team on . Posted in Education, Research, Standards. 2 Comments on Sci-fi in aid of Science

I was a pretty big fan of science fiction in my younger days, and still read some from time to time. I think Frank Herbert’s  Dune is a great novel (the sequels not so much), enjoyed reading works by Heinlein, Le Guin and Asimov.. 

One of the genre’s leading lights back then was Arthur C Clarke, who wrote the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey (in 1982) [not true, see below] on which the film was based. I was not a Clarke fan, don’t remember that I read any of his stuff. However, he made an interesting contribution to the culture beyond his books themselves, when he formulated three ‘laws’ regarding technology that have come to be known as Clarke’s Laws. He didn’t proclaim these all at once, and in any case it is the third law that is most cited, which so far as I can determine first appeared in a letter he wrote to Science in 1968. [If anyone has better info on the third law’s original appearance and antecedents I’d love to hear it.]

Clarke’s Third Law is: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’

That strikes me – and many others, apparently – as a perceptive statement. Think of how someone living in 1682 anywhere in the world would regard television or radio. 

As with any perceptive and oft-repeated assertion,  this prompted others to lay down similar edicts, such as Grey’s Law: “Any sufficiently egregious incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.”

[I cannot trace Grey’s law back to anyone named Grey – if you can, let me know.]

Note that there is a difference, as Clarke’s law speaks to how something will be perceived, whereas Grey’s points at the consequences of incompetence vs malice. If you are denied a mortgage by a bank despite your stellar credit rating, the impact on you of that decision does not depend on whether it is attributable to the credit officer’s incompetence or dislike of you. 

On to Science, then, and what I will call Gelman’s Law (although Gelman himself does not refer to it that way). 

Most non-academics I know view academics and their research with a somewhat rosy glow. If someone with letters after their name writes something, and particularly if they write it in an academic journal, they believe it. 

It does nothing to increase my popularity with my friends to repeatedly tell them: it ain’t so. There is a lot of crappy (a technical academic term, I will elaborate in future posts) research being done, and a lot of crappy research being published, even in peer-reviewed journals. What is worse is that as far as I can tell, the credible research is almost never the stuff that gets written up in the media. Some version of Gresham’s Law [‘bad money drives out good money’] seems to be at work here. 

A blog that I read regularly is titled Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference and Social Science (gripping title, eh?), written by Andrew Gelman, a Political Science and Stats prof at Columbia U. I recommend it to you, but warn that you better have your geek hard-hat on for many of the posts. 

Although I often disagree with Gelman, he generally writes well and I have learned tons from his blog. One of the things that has endeared it to me is his ongoing campaign against academic fraud and incompetent research. 

He has formulated a Law of his own, which he modestly attributes to Clarke, but which I will here dub Gelman’s Third Law: 

“Any sufficiently crappy research is indistinguishable from fraud.”

I think this law combines the insights of Clarke’s and Grey’s. The consequences of believing the results from crappy research do not differ from the consequences of believing the results from fraudulent research, as with Grey. However, it is also true that there is no reason to see the two things as different. If you are so incompetent at research as to produce crap, then you should be seen as a fraud, as with Clarke. 

I will be writing about crappy/fraudulent research often here, in hopes of convincing readers that they should be very skeptical the next time they read those deadly words: “Studies show…”

I will close this by referring you, for your reading pleasure, to a post by Gelman titled:    

 It’s bezzle time: The Dean of Engineering at the University of Nevada gets paid $372,127 a year and wrote a paper that’s so bad, you can’t believe it.

It’s a long post, but non-geeky, and quite illuminating. (Aside: I interviewed for an academic position at U of Nevada in Reno a hundred years ago. They put me up in a casino during my visit. Didn’t gamble, didn’t get a job offer.) You can read more about this intrepid and highly paid Dean here. His story is really making the (academic) rounds these days. 

You’re welcome, and stay tuned. I got a million of ‘em….

p.s. Discovered this since I wrote the above, but before posting. One of many reasons this stuff matters, from Nevada Today

University receives largest individual gift in its history to create the George W. Gillemot Aerospace Engineering Department 

The $36 million gift is the largest individual cash gift the University has received in its 149-year history 

Anyone care to bet on whether this Dean gets canned?

 Corrigendum: An alert reader has pointed out that Clarke’s novel was not written in 1982 – indeed, the film came out in 1968. In fact the 2001 film was based largely on one of Clarke’s short stories from 1951: The Sentinel. Clarke did write a novel called 2010: Odyssey Two, in 1982, and a not-so-successful movie was based on that, in 1984.