So awhile ago in an attempt to get even in a personal conflict one Harvard Law student (Yelena Shagall¹) forwarded an email with controversial racial comments by her rival (Stephanie Grace²) to other parties likely to make sure it got published and ruined her rivals career. While I was stunned by the sheer Machiavellian evil of Yelena Shagall at first I just read a tiny snippet and some commentary and not really paying much attention assumed that the inference of racist motives was reasonable if too weak to justify the harsh reaction. After reading the full email my response has totally changed. Not only is the email not suggestive of racism it’s eminently reasonable and the absurd attempts to condemn the sentiment and the writer bear a disconcerting similarity to the methods employed to try witches in the middle ages. I mean when everyone insists they are taking the scientific and evidential high road but feel the claim is just too obvious and absurd to respond with evidence rather than outrage something is fishy. Now some of the accusations of racism are expected but even the moderate and sympathetic articles seem to take it for granted the email was racist. Worse rather than have the courage to step up and defend the claims in the email as eminently reasonable the Harvard leadership and the academic community more generally threw the student under the bus. That’s disgusting behavior and I think academics have a duty to stand up when this kind of crap happens and publicly admit that, while hardy a model of good communication, this is a completely reasonable way for an academic to express a eminently defensible position.

In fact while I have a few small quibbles I would certainly not be ashamed to have sent a similar email. Moreover, even if you thought she got the science radically wrong that hardly makes her stand out. Most members of congress are totally scientifically illiterate and a non-trivial fraction of the country believes in UFOs or rejects Darwinism so surely scientific error is not cause for public hanging. Obviously the problem was she dared to even consider the truth of the ‘wrong conclusion’ and people wonder why there isn’t an open honest dialog about race in this country.

Just to hammer the point home let me go through the email point by point. I’d hope that other academics will, regardless of how clear cut they think the scientific questions at issue are, at least publicly indicate their horror at this reaction to a mere request for compelling evidence before totally rejecting a potential explanation.

I absolutely do not rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent. I could also obviously be convinced that by controlling for the right variables, we would see that they are, in fact, as intelligent as white people under the same circumstances.

While I could only be convinced that the genetic predispositions to intelligence (to the extent this makes sense) for the two racial groups was within a certain margin of error. Ultimately what is so deeply ironic about all the accusations that Stephanie Grace doesn’t understand the science it’s the people who are insisting that science has absolutely closed the book on the issue of statistical correlations between race and intelligence who don’t understand science. If there is one thing science has taught us about genetics it’s that it’s hugely complicated and there are likely to be a huge number of different gene variants that have some effect on ultimate intelligence³. Given this massive number of different variables, many of which correlate significantly with race⁴ it’s almost absurd to think all these different variables would perfectly balance out. That’s like betting that if you flip a coin 100 times and then flip it another 100 you will get the same number of heads both times. So it’s almost certain that, in a state of perfect racial equality, one race or another would have a slightly higher expected IQ as a result of genetic factors⁵.

Of course one might reasonably insist that the standard rules of conversational implicature make it clear that Stephanie Grace isn’t just allowing for the possibility that by pure chance there are a couple more blacks with some rare congenital mental defect than whites. Obviously what she means not to rule out is the existence of certain genetic variants that correlate reasonably strongly with racial categories that will ultimately be demonstrated to grant some kind of slight increase in intelligence/improvement in brain function. Moreover, implicitly one can take her also to be saying one can’t rule out the fact that some non-trivial amount of the observed intelligence differences between races, in particular the worse results of blacks in measures of IQ, are a result of these genetic variations.

Now there are some some good scientific reasons to think that the vast majority of the observed racial gap in IQ scores, even after controlling for as much as possible, would disappear in an equitable environment. For instance the size of the lead African-American girls have over African-American boys resembles that of past ethnic groups whose average IQ scores used to lag behind the national average. So I certainly wouldn’t bet on any non-trivial fraction of the observed IQ gap turning out to be deeply genetic⁶. But our continued failure to pinpoint the exact social or cultural factors responsible and the continued intractability of questions about the relation between gender and various intellectual skills makes it totally crazy to categorically rule out this possibility⁷.

The fact is, some things are genetic. African Americans tend to have darker skin. Irish people are more likely to have red hair. (Now on to the more controversial:) Women tend to perform less well in math due at least in part to prenatal levels of testosterone, which also account for variations in mathematics performance within genders.

She isn’t pulling this out of her ass. There is some pretty suggestive evidence that testosterone does impact math/science ability (though these seem to indicate the optimal level is in the low male range). Note that all the trumpeted claims about women doing just as well on math tests as guys amount to squat since women actually do better on academic tests across the board then men.

This suggests to me that some part of intelligence is genetic, just like identical twins raised apart tend to have very similar IQs and just like I think my babies will be geniuses and beautiful individuals whether I raise them or give them to an orphanage in Nigeria. I don’t think it is that controversial of an opinion to say I think it is at least possible that African Americans are less intelligent on a genetic level, and I didn’t mean to shy away from that opinion at dinner.

Note that her phrasing here makes it pretty clear that she is simply refusing to rule out the possibility. Now I don’t know her so I have no idea if she’s a racist but this is a completely reasonable, if misunderstandable, way for someone to merely express the belief that the science hasn’t yet conclusively ruled out this possibility. Indeed it has not. It’s given us suggestive grounds to think the answer goes one way but it at this point we simply can’t hope to conclusively rule out this kind of possibility. There are just too many confounding variables and far too much complexity to achieve that level of certainty.

Despite some of the accusations obviously Stephanie is merely using Nigeria as an example of a location where children receive insufficient resources and substandard care relative to what we have available in the United States. Bizarrely some critics seem to think Stephanie is suggesting no one in Nigeria is pretty or smart when this is plainly at complete odds with the claim being made (even with poor resources people can turn out well).

I also don’t think that there are no cultural differences or that cultural differences are not likely the most important sources of disparate test scores (statistically, the measurable ones like income do account for some raw differences).

Now she goes out of her way to emphasize she isn’t rejecting the idea that the observered differences in intelligence measurements are primarly the result of environmental factors. Exactly what one would do if you were trying to express the correct view that we simply don’t have the kind of scientific evidence that would let us totally rule out, as opposed to simply judge to be unlikely, a substantial genetic effect. For the love of god what else do you want this woman to say to make it clear that she is just reasonably refusing to regard a scientific possibility as foreclosed until she is handed conclusive evidence.

I would just like some scientific data to disprove the genetic position, and it is often hard given difficult to quantify cultural aspects. One example (courtesy of Randall Kennedy) is that some people, based on crime statistics, might think African Americans are genetically more likely to be violent, since income and other statistics cannot close the racial gap. In the slavery era, however, the stereotype was of a docile, childlike, African American, and they were, in fact, responsible for very little violence (which was why the handful of rebellions seriously shook white people up). Obviously group wide rates of violence could not fluctuate so dramatically in ten generations if the cause was genetic, and so although there are no quantifiable data currently available to “explain” away the racial discrepancy in violent crimes, it must be some nongenetic cultural shift. Of course, there are pro-genetic counterarguments, but if we assume we can control for all variables in the given time periods, the form of the argument is compelling.

Ok, maybe you want her to add this just to make it extra clear she understands that bias and stereotype can in fact cause observed differences in outcome. Clearly she is outlining here what she wants to see to be convinced that the genetic hypothesis for the observed underperformance of blacks on intelligence tests is untenable. I mean how can someone possibly be engaging in the transparent racist misunderstanding of the science alleged when they are simply asking you to provide the correct scientific argument.

It’s this that gives the outraged condemnations the air of a religious inquisition. If they actually had the kind of totally conclusive scientific arguments they insist exist then presumably they’d be happy to simply share them with people like Stephanie Grace so they too are on the right page. Suspiciously not one of the condemnations I’ve seen, for all they fault Stephanie Grace for insufficient science, cite a single relevant study to rebut her supposedly absurd view. Apparently we are supposed to divine citations to the relevant work through the sheer force of our outrage.

In conclusion, I think it is bad science to disagree with a conclusion in your heart, and then try (unsuccessfully, so far at least) to find data that will confirm what you want to be true. Everyone wants someone to take 100 white infants and 100 African American ones and raise them in Disney utopia and prove once and for all that we are all equal on every dimension, or at least the really important ones like intelligence. I am merely not 100% convinced that this is the case.

Very true Stephanie. Sadly you underestimated just how vicious people can be when you draw attention to what their doing. Unlike me most people haven’t actually read enough studies about genetics and intelligence to have any reason to bet that most of the observed differences are behavioral. However, it’s extremely important to people’s worldview that this be true and vital to their self-image that they believe it to be true. Thus when you challenge that view people’s natural response is to strike out to hide their underlying insecurity and lash out at the cause of the painful mental tension.

I wish there was a facebook group to offer Stephanie support but I suppose that’s not in her best interest.

So if you’ve listened to NPR or read a newspaper during the past year you’ve probably heard someone bemoaning the incipient failure of the newspaper industry. Today I was stunned to find an article on slashdot describing the attempts of newspapers to (more or less) collude to implement paywalls. The thinking at the newspapers seems to be that somehow the evil internet is causing a perfectly efficient well run industry to hemorrhage money by letting their customers recieve their product for too little.

Seems to me that this is the result of biased thinking from an industry reluctant to change. The internet is an amazing tool that radically increases the efficency of news delivery but increases in efficiency are always painful. Just like the printing press before it the increased efficency offered by digital delivery is going to put some people out of work.

Far from being an efficent industry when I look at the newspaper business I see an unimaginable amount of waste. The most obvious form of waste is physical printing and delivery. The overhead of running a printing press every night and distributing the paper plus the indirect costs this incurs is huge. However, even ignoring this I’m constantly amazed at the amount of duplicated effort between newspapers. The need for local physical printing has let each newspaper to employ their own movie reviewers, editors etc.. etc.. Heck, having 20+ reporters at a press conference doesn’t help journalism it just wastes money.

It’s going to be painful for newspapers. Many journalists may lose their jobs. Local papers may be reduced to merely local news but there is an awful lot of efficiency that can be gained without sacrificing any investigative journalism.

So I was pretty upset about the ridiculous idiotic populist outrage over the AIG bonuses. The last week of media coverage has only made me more angry as I listened to pundit after pundit, even those few who argued for leaving the bonuses alone, panderingly assure the public that their outrage over the bonuses was perfectly justified. Should the government have used the depressed job market to reduce AIG employee compensation of all forms when they took over? Maybe, but that doesn’t justify the outrage at paying the bonuses. Of course it’s understandable that this scandal made people so angry, the word bonuses triggers certain associations and people form a mental picture of people being patted on the back for the immoral behavior that has caused them harm. It’s the role of the media to remind us that the issue is more complex than this, that these bonuses aren’t rewards for performance but basically just another form of salary and to point out that most of the people working for AIG’s financial products division were probably perfectly moral people behaving no differently than they would have in the same situation. The media’s craven failure to offer this opposing perspective is particularly aggravating.

Still, if this amounted to nothing more than a national venting no big deal. The extent to which this seems to be motivated by a desire to see others suffer as they are would still be disgusting but that’s a sad part of human nature. Horrifyingly, however, congress really seems to be going through with this plan to levy a 70-90% tax on bonus payments to AIG employees. This law will be subject to constitutional challenge as a bill of attainder (meaning the taxpayers might get to pay for the bonuses and the lawsuits) but even if it fails to meet the constitutional qualifications to be struck down in such a fashion it surely violates the spirit of the prohibition on bills of attainder.

I mean it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the primary motivation here isn’t to save money or raise revenue for the government. If those were the motivations we would at a minimum be broadly taxing compensation at AIG. No, the public is angry at these people and wants to punish¹ them. But even if you think these people deserve to be punished the principal that we don’t punish individuals based merely on public anger is an important one. If this sort of thing passes muster there really is no way to say that taxing the principal of Bill Gate’s investments at 99% because we are pissed about the shody programming in windows is out of bounds or just because we don’t like the way he treated his wife. Ultimately when it comes to this question we have to set aside all consideration of it being taxpayer money or the unfairness of the situation. The government here isn’t acting as an investor in AIG but as the soverign. Nor does it make a difference that these bonuses haven’t been paid yet and that Bill Gates already has his money. Gates doesn’t keep a giant wad of cash in his house, he is content to let banks owe him the money just as AIG owes their employees their bonuses.

And for the love of god what could possibly motivate people to engage in this sort of dangerous punitive action when they don’t even know how most of the people who are receiving the bonuses behaved?

I support the movement afoot to grant the District of Columbia congressional representation but the bill Lieberman, joined by Hatch, Clinton, Kerry amoung others, introduced is patently unconstitutional. While I believe in an evolution of constitutional interpretation over time one can no more interpret the constitution to allow a representative from DC than one can interpret it to allow a 25 year old president. Given the obvious constitutional concerns the supporters of this legislation advance several arguments to justify it’s constitutionality. However, these arguments are so poor I sincerly hope such prominent individuals don’t sincerely find them compelling. It’s unfortunate but giving DC congressional representation is going to take an amendment.

If you had read only the proponents of this legislation one might think the only constitutional obstacle to this legislation was this language in Article 1 Section 2 (emphasis mine)

The House of Representatives shall be composed of members chosen every second year by the people of the several states, and the electors in each state shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the state legislature.

While one can reasonably argue that DC residents are “people of the several states” and if you strain a bit one could interpret the second clause as merely a restriction on how states may choose their representatives, not an implied restriction on who may have representatives. However, the subsequent passage devastates any hope of such an interpretation.

No person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the age of twenty five years, and been seven years a citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an inhabitant of that state in which he shall be chosen. Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.

Short of biting the bullet and saying that DC is a state, which would imply they were due a pair of senators as well, there is simply no way for the representative from DC to “be an inhabitant of that state in which he shall be chosen” since they won’t have been chosen in any state. Nor can one give any sensible interpretation of the requirement that representatives be apportioned among the several states that would permit DC to have a representative. Moreover, any theory allowing congress to use legislation to grant DC a representative would pose a fundamental threat to our electoral system. Either you interpret the formula for apportioning representatives demands DC be given one or forbids it but not both. Thus if congress has the power to either grant or deny representation to DC it must, on any logically consistent interpretation, somehow have the power to grant DC representation unconstrained by this formula. If congress can choose whether to grant DC 0 or 1 representatives then it would seem nothing prevents it from granting DC 200 representatives.

The justifications the proponents offer spend a lot of time arguing that the Framers surely didn’t intend to deny DC residents representation but that merely demonstrates a deep confusion about the role of intent in legal interpratation. The relevant question is whether the framers (original public understanding/whatever) intended the rule to apportion representatives only among the states, not whether they intended a particular consequence of that rule. If Blagojevich had signed an anti-corruption law the fact that he didn’t intended the law to be used against him wouldn’t pose any obstacle to prosecuting him under it. The only time we should look beyond this narrow kind of intentionality is when the legal rule is vague and requires additional preciscification which most assuredly isn’t the situation here. Observing that the alternate rule granting representation to the states and DC according to their population would have better served the framer’s ultimate aims is no more justifies the constitutionality of this legislation than pointing out that war veterans are often wise beyond their years would allow us to elect a 25 year old war veteran to the presidency in violation of the age requirement.

The proponents also try to use court precedents which establish congress’s power to treat DC as a state for the purposes of judicial jurisdiction or to apply other laws to the district to argue that congress has the power to grant the district a representative. This argument is so confused that it’s hard to make sense of it. The courts have ruled that the broad grant of authority the constitution explicitly grants congress over DC gives congress additional powers to pass legislation affecting DC that it’s enumerated powers might not allow with respect to the states. Thus even when the constitutional justification that congress uses to pass a law affecting the states fails congress can still fall back on this alternative authority. However, none of this gives congress the power to ignore specific constitutional restrictions when it comes to DC. Congress still can’t restrict free speech in the district and it can’t ignore the requirement that it apportion representatives among the several states.

Finally, what appears to be the best argument the proponents have is that when DC was first ceded to the federal government congress granted the citizens of that area the right to continue voting in their former congresional districts. At first blush this would seem to conflict with the argument here but on closer examination it’s apparent that no such conflict exists. The constitution merely guarantees that representatives be apportioned amoung the states according to a certain formula, if Maryland or Virgina decided to let citizens of Kentucky vote in their elections I see no obvious constitutional violation. Congress could likely, with the consent of some state, grant the district residents the right to vote for representatives in that state (but it’s unclear if they would count for the purposes of apportioning representatives) but unless you think that congress could dilute Wyoming’s votes by allowing any US citizen to vote in Wyoming elections the state could always revoke this privilege. Moreover, this would have the perverse consequence that DC residents couldn’t select another DC resident to represent them by the residency clause.

This is as clear as constitutional issues ever get. The politicians need to stop posturing and start trying to pass an amendment.

So today on science Friday on NPR they had some kind of expert on smell on the program. According to him scientists have actually done studies that when women pass gas it has a stronger smell per volume of gas than male emissions. Apparently though men pass a greater volume of gas, perhaps explaining the difference.

Frankly, I’m just amazed that this has been studied. To be fair it was probably a result noticed during a more general study of the subject but it’s still amusing to think that some poor grad student’s job was to document people’s farts and collect samples. Makes me glad I’m not doing an experimental science.

On the plus side that grad student had an interesting answer when people asked what they did but I don’t know if it was a plus for getting dates. It would also make for some amusing work experience on a resume.

I wonder if they have this information up on wikipedia. This is the sort of totally useless information that is important to record and catalog. Both to protect future generations of graduate students and to settle drunken bets.

So in a recent post I pointed out how unreasonable it was to assume that aliens advanced enough to transfer their consciousness into computers would have motives or behaviors anything like what the current human species does. Of course there is an implicit assumption here that a simulation of our brain process on a computer would be just as conscious as we are (the strong AI hypothesis). Here I argue that this isn’t really true. Of course I don’t doubt that artificial conscious beings can be constructed. There is nothing magical about conception, if we manufactured nerve cells in the lab and put them together in a brain it wouldn’t be any less conscious than you or I. However, this doesn’t mean that the particular means by which our brain performs it’s calculation is irrelevant to consciousness. As I shall argue here we actually have pretty good reason to believe that simply simulating what the brain does on a microchip as we know them ¹ is unlikely to give rise to any experiences no matter how faithfully it might reproduce the behavior of that brain². This is a pretty long post so I continue below the break.

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On the radio program I’m listening to and all over the web people are (or at least were a year ago) wringing their hands over the fact that 13% of US muslims said that suicide bombing could sometimes be justified. What a dumb fucking question. Of course suicide bombing can sometimes be justified. In fact I think the low percent answering yes suggests a troubling failures of logic and imagination.

I mean how many people would really feel that Stauffenberg would really have been doing a moral wrong if he had staid in the conference room with the bomb and actually made sure he killed Hitler instead of failing. You might not believe he was morally obligated to do so but surely giving your life even for a 10% greater chance of saving millions is not morally impermissable. Now true if we look at the actual PEW center study we see the question is posed in a slightly more troubling manner. It asks about suicide bombing against civilian targets for the defense of islam. But even if history doesn’t provide us with easy examples where this sort of action was acutally justified it isn’t hard to imagine ones where it would be justified. For instance suppose Hitler was clearly a civilian leader of the country (as our president and secretary of defense are) and the holocaust had been directed against muslims.

Admittedly the results of the survey are in fact somewhat disturbing given that there were a small but non-trivial percent of respondants who said that suicide bombing was ‘sometimes’ or even ‘often’ justified as opposed to rarely (but when you are talking 5% and 1% respectively you have to wonder if they are just blowing off steam from a bad day, or just fucking with people. I mean hell what percentage of Australians answered ‘jedi’ for their religion on the census?). However, little of the hand wringing bothers to go beyond saying that some muslims think suicide bombing can be justified as if that was a facially absurd or immoral view.

I’m not going to take a position on whether the survey itself is disturbing or not (though it has been overblown) but let’s drop this stupid pretense that somehow suicide bombing is facially beyond the pale. Our own movies are filled with heroic suicide attacks, even bombings sometimes against targets that would technically qualify as civilian (evil corporate masterminds bankrolling assassinations and murders, drug kingpins who rely on others to implausibly poision children and so forth). The truth is that we find ‘terrorist’s’ suicide bombings so abhorrent because we view their cause as unjust, their means disproportionate and their targets largely innocent. Indeed we are right to do so but we can’t pretend we aren’t making a substantive moral claim by hiding behind a criticism of the means terrorists use. The bombing of the US barracks in Beirut wouldn’t have been ok if the truck was radio controlled instead of driven by a suicide bomber despite obviously being a military target.

So there is this interesting article in the NYT describing a study that shows girls in highschool who think they have lower social status gain more weight than girls with higher social status. Now I think this is a very interesting direction to pursue but the suggestions the study authors offered in response to it were totally absurd.

Parents concerned about a girl’s weight should look not only at eating habits but also at their child’s social network, encouraging relationships with friends and enrolling kids in group activities, the researchers said.

Have these researchers never been to highschool? Do they really think that having your mother fret over your social relationships is going to help?

And as part of other anti-obesity measures, school officials should consider implementing programs to help girls build social skills, they added.

“I think schools have a lot of influence,’’ said lead author Adina R. Lemeshow, now a project analyst at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. “It’s about fostering secure and supportive social environments in which girls feel more accepted.’’

Did they read their own damn article? They reported that social status affects obesity not ‘social skills.’ Not everyone can be on top of the social hierarchy. No amount of intervention by the school can change the fact that 10% of the HS will be the least popular 10% of the highschool.

But I’m feeling silly today so I couldn’t help posting a screenshot of this screwup by the MSNBC editing staff.

The original page is here but they have probably fixed the problem by now. Then again you would have thought a big news organization like MSNBC would have had enough editors to never let this happen in the first place. I suspect someone was leaving their job and wanted to do something funny before they left. They deserve to have someone notice their work.

Apparently teachers were tricked into giving students a bunch of electric shocks.