The Only Winning Move

Sometimes I think we should nominate the False Dilemma for a special Facebook award - you know, for being the argumentative fallacy most frequently featured on Facebook. Not a week goes by that I don’t see it on proud display in some friend’s status update.

This week’s is: “X thinks we can find better ways to innovate than developing porn movies in 3-D.”

Well, sure, no doubt we can. As a statement of fact, it’s unassailable. And yet pragmatically I know she means more than that. She means her audience to infer that because there are better ways to innovate, we should naturally choose to focus on those ways rather than this way.

Missing from this argument, of course, is any evidence that innovation in porn video technology in any way crowds out innovation in other areas. The error is particularly galling in this case since not only is there NO reason to believe this, there is in fact no reason to believe that the porn industry is responsible for this innovation in the first place. And indeed, a quick google search turns up a lot of references to a $3million Hong Kong 3-D porn flick that’s apparently the first of its kind, but NO indication whatever that any special porn-specific technology happens to have been developed for this film. Quite the contrary, the impression one gets is that it’s simply co-opting technology that’s been available for other genres of film for years and … using it to shoot a porn. So it’s a bit like saying, really, upon the occasion of the first nude photograph being taken, that we, as a society, are wasting our time “innovating” pointing cameras at nude bodies when we could be inventing other things instead. Because, you know, I’m sure the dude who first accomplished pointing a camera at a nude body and pulling the shutter was just chock-full of other ideas that are now lost to posterity forever. There they were, in his head, and the moment he pulled the shutter and had time for other things, nope! time’s up! too late! No more egg rolls for you! Oh, the humanity!

It’s such obvious tripe. Taking technology that’s already developted, pointing it at a target that some given moralist doesn’t like, and concluding from this that we missed out on some other unspecified innovation takes a special kind of mental laziness. And it takes an even specialer kind of mental laziness to assume - as the author of this FB post apparently does - that whatever is developed in and for the porn industry can’t possibly spill out to other kinds of movies (or general image technology). As though, say, since the first movie filmed was an ordinary garden scene, all movies must be garden scenes? Can’t use motion picture tecnology for anything else? Please.

So, let’s go over this again. Just because there’s the one thing, and the other thing, doesn’t mean that there’s not also the “still other thing” and the “even different thing” as well. If you want to present me with two options (a. we innovate for the porn industry vs. b. we innovate for “something else”) and you expect me to take one or the other of them, you’ve got to first convince me that these are, in fact, the only two options. Importantly, in this case, you’ve got to convince me that there’s even reason to believe that the two options you give me are mutually exclusive.

In this case, of course, they are NOT EVEN REMOTELY mutually exclusive, for it turns out we can innovate for one thing AND for the other thing all at once! Which is damned lucky, if you think about it, because I’d be really afraid of the kind of Devil’s Bargain where humanity got to pick one, and only one, innovation to pursue at a time! What a mess working that out would be!

Seriously - the person who wrote this FB post is in her 30s and a journalist. There is no excuse.

OK, I guess others will have had more intelligent things to say about the recent Reason debate about Liberaltarianism. Brink Lindsey, who got the ball rolling by inventing the term in a 2006 New Republic article, makes his (much updated, it must be said) case for severing all ties with the Right and embracing at least the rhetoric of the Left (though, honestly, the new position seems to be just to come unmoored and be an equal opportunity supporter of whichever candidate on whichever side promises us the most), and Jonah Goldberg and Matt Kibbe (Matt who?) take issue.

In a nutshell: I guess I’m getting old, but I have less and less tolerance for flourishes like this:

Goaded by the conservative message machine’s toxic mix of intolerance and self-pity, mass opinion on the right has veered off into feverish self-delusion. Witness the “birther” phenomenon. According to Public Policy Polling, 63 percent of Republicans either believe Obama was born in a foreign country or aren’t sure one way or the other. A more recent poll by the same outfit shows that 52 percent of Republicans believe that ACORN stole the 2008 election for Obama with voter fraud, while another 21 percent are undecided. This polling outfit is closely tied to the Democrats, so take the exact numbers with some grains of salt if you wish. But it is beyond doubt that paranoia is rampant in right-wing circles these days.

Stop right there. Just stop. It may indeed be “beyond doubt” that “paranoia is rampant in right-wing circles these days,” but what about the Left? If you’re basing your case on the pervasiveness of right-wing paranoia, then at the very least you need to establish that the left is any better. And really, not just “any” better, but better enough that it isn’t just something we can chalk up to their being in power (people tend to be more paranoid when they’re not pulling the strings, after all). And here’s a hint about how to do that credibly: don’t cite their opponents’ polls on the subject! It isn’t just “with a grain of salt” that I take Democrat polls on whether Republicans are paranoid - since Republican paranoia seems to be their main argument against Republicans, I tend to outright discredit them!

Look, what we’re voting for isn’t the grassroots troops. It’s the elected officials. When I decide which candidate I’m going to support, I really do think the intelligent thing to do is to look not to what kind of supporters he’s attracting so much as to do an honest evaluation of what I think he’ll do in office. Granted that what kind of supporters he attracts has something to do with that - but I think we all know that politicians say a lot of things during election season to mobilize supporters that they don’t really mean and don’t tend to follow up on once they’re safely in office and largely (sadly) out of the public spotlight. If you want to know how a politician is going to vote, it isn’t enough to look at the outrageous wing of his shock troops. More revealing is going to be what moneyed interests are backing him and how dedicated they are to their causes. THESE are the groups that tend to hold politicians accountable. The shock troops just make the process official.

But in any case, in my own - admittedly unscientific - personal experience, Lindsey’s assertion here is just false on its face. YES, there are lots of Republican crazies out there. YES, they’re annoying and often downright scary. But NO, this isn’t something confined to the Republican supporters as those of us who lived through the Bush years well remember. Honestly, during the Bush years, I tilted right largely because I was so offended at the sheer idiocy of a lot of what I heard coming from the Left. It was so base and so crass and so uninformed and unintelligent and generally offputting that I found myself defending Bush in a lot of discussions just because some intellectual housecleaning seemed to be in order. Likewise, I currently find myself defending Obama a lot - and I CAN’T FUCKING STAND OBAMA - just because I get so fed up with all the stark raving idiocy I hear from the right these days. My point being that having a President Obama with a Democrat majority Congress has been therapeutic for me in a way - as a reminder that there’s no need to carry water for people I can’t stand (i.e. the Republicans for most of the 2000s) just to keep the playing field balanced; the pendulum swings anyway.

None of this is to say that I’m now tilting Left. I’m not. I’m still hugely skeptical of the “Liberaltarian” proposal mostly because I see a clearer and more present danger to our rights and freedoms from the Democrat nanny state than I do from the Republican nationalist state. That isn’t to say there isn’t a clear and present danger from the Republicans too - just that at least some people on the Republican side do talk about free markets and individual rights from time to time. I’m all for killing off the Republicans now while they’re weak as a strategy for replacing them with a resurgent Libertarian Party (a surgent Libertarian Party?), but that’s pure opportunism. I’d be just as happy - happier, probably - to advocate moving in on Dem territory if they were the weak ones.

Long story short, Lindsey isn’t winning me over with this kind of crass pandering, and it’s galling that he thinks he can win anyone over that way. It’s just a fantasy, but I really wish we could found a movement to just start publicly ridiculing people who make these kinds of transparently awful arguments. If you want my support, give me a reason. Don’t fucking say things like “some poll from an admittedly unreliable source said that these people are ignorant,” because therefore WHAT? Therefore I don’t even bother to check wheter the ticket I’m being sold is equally ignorant or even worse? Fuck off, Brink Lindsey.

Today’s Bogus Stats Award in the amateur category goes to Megan McArdle, who claims, in an Atlantic article called How Real are the Defects in Toyota’s Cars? to have discovered that the “overwhelming majority” of the sudden acceleration incidents involved people “over 55.”

First of all, this isn’t even clear from the graph she provides, which has a 50-60 category, but nothing that cuts off at 55 specifically. Here it is (without permission, but also available at the original site):

And second of all, I count 20 - not 24, as she claims elsewhere - out of 35, which is a clear majority, sure, but not really an “overwhelming majority.” It’s 57%. Now, granted, this total includes 5 unknowns, and if we extrapolate from the knowns (which I don’t recommend, but just for shits and giggles), in which case older people are 20 in 30, or 67%, then we would expect about 3 of those unknowns to be above 50 - i.e. 23/35, or 66%. And 66% is nothing if not an “overwhelming majority.” Not to mention, people over the age of 50 are, according to the 2000 census, only about 27.3% of the total population. Even if we take that with the grain of salt that fully 10% of the population is below driving age, the over-50 category is still less than half of the population but is accounting for almost 70% of these accidents - WAY more than their fair share. So McArdle is on to something, right? There’s a high correlation between age of driver and these incidents?

Yeah, not so much. This is a classic example of what I like to call the “baseline fallacy,” and it works like this: you take a completely legitimate sample (I have no reason to believe that McArdle is cooking her numbers - no doubt the demographics of these incidents work out just as she claims) and conclude things about the relations between arbitrary subsets of that sample BUT - and this is the key step - you neglect to take into acount how unlikely membership in the sample is to begin with. No matter how you cook these numbers, we’re still talking about 35 affected drivers out of millions of Toyota drivers. So yeah, when you say 23/35 affected drivers were over 50, aka 66%, that looks significant. But when you put these numbers in perspective? I can’t find any exact numbers on how many Toyotas are on the road vs. other kinds of cars, but in 2006 about a million Japanese cars were sold in the US, and there are close to 300 million vehciles registered in the US, just under half of which (about 136 million) are passenger cars. So, let’s just throw up a number of something like 100,000 Toyota cars per year for the last 15 years and just arbitrarily decide that 1.5 million of the 136 million autos on the road are Toyotas. That srikes me as a GROSS underestimation, so I think I’m being fair when I say that if we’re really talking about 23/1.5million drivers who are elderly and 12/1.5million who are not, then your chances of having this happen to you if you’re old are 0.000015% and 0.000008% if not. The chances are so vanishingly small for both groups - because 35/1.5million is only 0.000023% of all Toyota drivers, even by my bogus and overly generous estimation - that I would really hesitate to make anything out of this. I would feel more comfortable saying that when you pull 35 marbles out of a 1.5million-marble jar, it sometimes happens that 23 of them are red and not blue is all.

McArdle’s point seems to be that because older people are slower to react (and she also throws in some numbers that indicate that most of the incidents happen when stoping and starting back up), that there’s no real problem here. It’s just the molehill of old people getting confused while driving being blown up into a mountain. I agree that this is basically a nonissue (Toyota should, of course, proceed with the recall, but the lawsuits are all frivolous, and I really very seriously doubt that Toyota has been just sitting on the knowledge that there might just maybe be a sudden acceleration problem without doing anything about it) - but NOT because there’s one way of looking at the data that provides some exremely slight statistical evidence that mostly old people have this problem! I say “one way of looking at the data” because to do this properly she would have to show that old people weren’t disproportionately likely to be Toyota owners - which they might be - that old people don’t clock more road hours - which they might well, and so on. There are a lot of potentially significant variables unaccounted for here. No, the reason this is a nonissue is just because it doesn’t seem to happen very often. Her basic point is solid:

At any rate, when you look at these incidents all together, it’s pretty clear why Toyota didn’t investigate this “overwhelming evidence” of a problem: they look a lot like typical cases of driver error.

Right. When no more than 35 of your millions of customers call to complain about sudden acceleration, and the damage in most cases is minimal because it happened in parking lots, you do rather tend to assume that the person in question probably just stepped on the gas by accident. ESPECIALLY when making the opposite assumption with little to no evidence would cost you billions precisely when the economy is troubled and your competitors are getting free money from the government! No, at best Toyota’s guilty of political stupidity; they’re certainly not guilty of callousness - at least, I don’t see any evidence for it. So let’s cut the crap about spurious correlations, shall we?

I like to think that McArdle knows what’s wrong with her article, and she wrote it partly to have something to publish, and partly because the “safety über alles” crowd won’t be convinced by the actual facts (they truck in this kind of statistical fallacy for a living, after all). But even so, she’s doing her readers a disservice by not telling them what she’s up to. Now, instead of just the “safety über alles” crowd playing useful idiots for the Big Three, even Toyota’s defenders are getting their stats wrong. I don’t know when political discourse first got moronic - probably it was ever thus - but I do know this isn’t helping.

Interesting (though in retrospect probably obvious) thought gelled out of a discussion with Alexis about animal rights: there are both raising and lowering solutions to inequality problems, and a lot of times people get pigeonholed into saying things they don’t really mean by failing to consider the raising solution if they’ve already thought of the lowering solution, or vice versa.

I’m not just borrowing terminology from Syntax. “Raising” and “Lowering” for meta-politics is this: when you’re confronted by a percieved inequality, such that one group is, from where you stand, getting an unfair share of the attention surrounding something, there are two broad ways of evening things out. You can “raise” the other groups to the status of the privileged, or you can “lower” the privileged to the status of the excluded. And of course two corollaries probably go without saying here: (1) that of course one can both raise and lower at the same time in the same problem space and (2) that raising and lowering will in many situations be empirically indistinguishable anyway, as they are relative terms.

I wonder whether there isn’t a correlation between awareness of the existence of “lowering” solutions and predilection for libertarian political tendencies.

Consider gay marriage. The fundamental injustice is that heterosexuals have de facto property rights that homosexuals do not. And here is an issue where I think that the “raising” solution is inappropriate. Typically this issue gets framed in terms of what gays are being denied, and so the obvious solution that occurs to everyone is to extend the marriage franchise to include them. We have hetero marriage, so it seems unproblematic to extend this to include homo marriage. But to me this isn’t the REAL issue, and assuming that it is is a mistake that leads to all sorts of nasty side effects. For example - it leads people to make the frankly ludicrous suggestion that love between the members of a homosexual couple is somehow less real until the government puts a stamp of approval on it. The idea that anyone’s feelings need legitimizing by the state is laughable in any other context, and yet on this issue people buy into it because they cannot think how else to articulate their frustrations. Another nasty side effect is that the problem of government sanction of lifestyle is not eliminated, merely transformed. Other kinds of a priori legitimate relationships are left out in the cold, such as polygamy, polyandry, group unions, temporary unions, and good ol’ fashioned living in sin. By continuing to exclude these groups, people who argue that the government should stay out of people’s bedrooms ironically end up legitimizing its role there.

None of these problems come with the “lowering” solution, however. The lowering solution is to take official sanction away from heterosexual couples. It just says “fine, we agree, this privilege is no longer justified (if it ever was), so now you have to live like everyone else.” Under the lowering solution, the government really does get out of everyone’s bedrooms, and everyone is on a level playing field. To the extent that there are legal marital unions, it’s up to the people involved and their lawyers to hammer out a contract.

I think lowering type solutions appeal to libertarians because they are minimalist. We don’t say it out loud often, but one of our motivations for wanting to shrink the government - in addition to just wanting to leave people free - is wanting to make the law clear and accessible. And lowering solutions typically do that. They ELIMINATE special exceptions in favor of laws that apply to everyone equally. To the extent that laws can be made simple and universal, the system itself becomes simple, universal, and easier to maintain.

My question is whether this is a general category of thinking that extends to other domains as well, such that people with libertarian sensibilities could be identified by their positions on other issues. And I think it’s possible it can. The discussion with Alexis was about animal rights, but including animal cognition. She’s a vegetarian, and her reasoning there is that animals are sentient, and so we owe them moral consideration - what is typically called an “ethical vegetarian.” And I really agree - that animals are sentient and that we owe them moral consideration. I will not use products that I believe are unnecessarily tested on animals, and I prefer to eat meat (such as beef) that I know has been killed humanely. I don’t have any ethical problem with eating animals - since this seems to be the natural order, and humans are certainly evolved to be ominvores - but I can certainly understand the case from the other side. I have a problem with any moral system that extends full rights to animals - but only because of the communication barrier. Animals don’t seem to extend rights to me, and since rights are reciprocal, I can’t really do it unilaterally, etc.

In any case, the relevance to raising and lowering is that I hear a lot of goofy opinions about animal cognition that I think are the result of applying a raising solution when a lowering one is more appropriate. A lot of vegetarians (though not Alexis, I should hastily add!) - wanting to persuade people to give up meateating - are led to make exaggerated claims about the mental abilities of animals. It is a raising solution in that it attempts to raise animals to the status of humans, and it doesn’t work because it’s self-evident that animals do not have the same range of reasoning abilities nor the same mental capacity that humans do. The lowering solution avoids this problem though - and the lowering solution here is to give up on the idea that human mental abilities are different in kind, in favor of saying they are just different in magnitude. In other words, give up on the idea that humans have souls - at least for political and ethical purposes, which is independently appropriate in a secular society anyway.

And this extends, much more interestingly, to the question of whether machines can think. As far as I’m concerned, they can, and this is not an interesting question. Edsger Dijkstra puts it nicely:

The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.

In other words, computers only don’t think if you’re willing to ascribe some sort of unjustified mystical status to human thinking. If you’re not - and I’m not - they do. They recieve inputs, process them internally, and produce outputs. It’s thinking - just as humans do. It may not be done according to exactly the same methods - and certainly it’s not done in the same medium - as human thinking, but if we ever replicated a human brain in silicon it would be essentially the same. This falls under the rubric of “to the rational mind, nothing is inexplicable, merely unexplained.” Human thought - especially consciousness - is largely unexplained, but I reject the idea that it is inexplicable! And this is, it seems to me, a lowering solution rather than a raising solution. The raising solution would be to say that there IS something inherently mysterious about thought, but that computers (bzw. animals) can do it - whatever it may be - too, and so they’re in the privileged group. Mine and Dijkstra’s opinion is a lowering solution because it asserts that there’s nothing special about human thinking - it is just thinking, and if there’s a difference between human and computer thinking then it’s a difference in complexity and wiring, not in fundamentals. I am a meat machine.

Applying raising solutions when lowering ones are more appropriate also accounts for the ease with which people are confused by the charge that Atheism is a religion. This is a raising solution - but to an insidious end. In using it, Chrisians seek to afford Atheism the same categorical status that their religion has in hopes of avoiding their burden of proof (this, at least, is already a named fallacy). So they say things like “Atheism is a faith, because it’s asserting that which can never be satisfactorily proven: the existence of a negative.” But of course Atheism is making no such claim. What believers fail to understand is that atheists aren’t as concerned with them as they are with atheists. Not believing in God has the same status as my not believing in all those other things that I don’t believe in because I have not been supplied with adequate evidence: unicorns, leprechauns, the Loch Ness Monster, magic, telekinesis and so on. It’s not that these things are a priori impossible, it’s just that (a) believing in them would require some revisions to the model of the way the world works that I’ve built up on the basis of my experiences, and (b) although I might be willing to do that if I had seen convincing evidence of their existence, there isn’t any such convincing evidence. The burden of proof is on the people who believe in unicorns, leprechauns, the Loch Ness monster, magic, telekinesis … and God. *I* am the one who is owed an explanation - and everyone knows this, and they further know that the burden of proof has never satisfactorily been met, and so one sneaky way around this problem is shifting it to me by “generously” “raising” Atheism to the status of a religion. My point here is that I think so many people fall victim to it because there is a general tendency to err on the side of raising solutions. But the lowering solution is the appropriate one: religion is a hypothesis about reality that has to meet the same burden of proof as any other. It may well be that individual believers have access to information that they cannot share with the rest of us (because it is available only by mystical and personal revelation), and that obviously suffices to ground their own beliefs, but it is inadequate for anyone else. I am an Atheist until someone can show me either that there is a God (in which case I will become a believer), or that it is likely that there is a God (in which case I will become an Agnostic). I call myself an Atheist because I do not overlook lowering solutions to the same extent that most people do. (Most people - recently including Noah, to my mild chagrin - implicitly accept the validity of the raising options and call themselves “Agnostics” out of a misguided sense of fairness).

So this sort of error is pervasive. Now, I’m not making any claim that it’s always an error to prefer the raising solution to the lowering one. But I guess I am making the claim that people are more likely to err on that side than the other - if only because they are more existentially comfortable with “building things up” than “tearing things down.” One of the reasons why Libertarianism is a hard sell is because it tears things down, and if we’re going to sell it at all we face the problematic task of selling a system of negative liberties as a progressive step forward. People are inherently unsatisfied with answers that are “none of the above,” and too frequently that’s what our answer is. But of course I assume in general that there are also cases where the raising solution is appropriate in an environment where the lowering solution has been applied instead.

An interesting question is which Socialism is? I can see the case both ways. On the one hand, it’s a lowering solution because it focuses on bringing down the rich and powerful to the level of everyone else. On the other hand, it’s a raising solution, because it focuses on extending the status of the privileged to all citizens. But I think what asking this question at all really serves to illustrate is that we can’t always extend neat models of categorizing things to all domains. Socialism is neither a raising nor a lowering solution - it is simply a category error, based on false assumptions about the purpose of government and the ends of human society.

Just for kicks, here’s a bit of gratuitous internet boneheadedness courtesy of “A Tiny Revolution.” The title of the blog entry is “Once Again Adam Smith Betrays the Principles of Adam Smith.” And it links this New York Times column from some financial analysts who claim that American workers are overpaid. Then, apropos of absolutely nothing, it quotes Adam Smith way back in 1776 saying that businessmen are often hypocritical in complaining about worker wages being too high while saying nothing about being overcompensated themselves. And then comes the money quote:

Once [sic] of the strangest things about the American overclass is the way they cite Adam Smith and The Wealth of Nations all the time.

Now, click the link to the column they cite and do an Apple-F for “Smith” and watch it turn up nothing. Why? Because there isn’t a single mention of Adam Smith in this column that they cite in the context of complaining about how the American “overclass” (whoever they are) cites Adam Smith and the Wealth of Nations “all the time.” Yeah, I couldn’t believe it either, so I did actually take the time to read the whole column to confirm. And … nope … not one mention of Adam Smith. And of course don’t take MY word for it - the column is right there on the internet completely devoid of any Adam Smith reference for any- and everyone to (not) read.

So if the “American overclass” cites Adam Smith and the Wealth of Nations “all the time,” then why not just pick one of the columns where they actually, you know, cite Adam Smith to include in your blog entry about selective citation of Adam Smith? That’s the question, innit Ladies and Gents? Picking a column where they (you know, anyone writing a financial column is ipso facto a memeber of the “overclass” - THAT “they”) don’t mention Adam Smith AT ALL and using it as evidence that the “overclass” often quotes Adam Smith selectively is a bit like holding up Quantum Leap as evidence that all science fiction shows erroneously have sound effects in space. I mean, OK, fine, Quantum Leap doesn’t involve any ACTUAL space travel per se, much less space laser cannons making space laser cannon sounds in a vacuum, but it’s a science fiction show isn’t it, and you know what THEY’RE like. They’re all written in the same room at Paramount by the same rugby-shirted basement-dwellers, for one thing.

Nope, sorry mate. FAIL. Maybe there are people out there in the world who quote Adam Smith selectively. You can’t even quote THEM selectively. Move along.

Everything that’s wrong with internet commentary is right there. Pass it on.

Here’s the situation: a guy at work likes to rib me about being from the South, so he takes every opportunity to imply that I’m racist in some way or another. It’s all in good fun, so I don’t mind, but the other day a different, more douchebaggy cowoker got around to asking why Greg was always calling me a racist. I mumbled something about him thinking with his stereotypes, and here’s where the nonsense started. “You know, though, that there’s a reason there are stereotypes.” Implication being, of course, that stereotypes tend to be true, with the offensive corollary that I actually am racist after all. I mean, I’m from North Carolina, right? He then launches into this diatribe about how he’s half-black (patently impossible - dude has blue eyes, so he’s at most a quarter black) and invites me to guess what was served at his last family reunion. It’s a trap, but whatever, I say “chitlins” and get a gold star. “So you see,” the lesson seems to be, “stereotypes are actually all true.”

It’s sort of incredible to me that after 40 years of civil rights awareness and at least 20 of over-the-top political correctness anyone has still done so little introspection on how stereotypes work that he could really be peddling as insightful the idea that they’re always true. So here, for the statistically challenged, is the right way to think about stereotypes.

First, “tend to be true” is not the same thing as “always true” or even “true in all but a handful of cases.” Nor, even if a particular stereotype is true, does it actually imply anything about the person sitting in front of you over and above “there is a certain better-than-chance statistical probability that this guy meets a certain description.” So, to take my favorite example, there is a certain better-than-chance probability that any girl seated across a chessboard from me is worse at Chess than I am, just because it so happens that guys are, on average, better at Chess than girls. But the difference in performance is not really that large at the mid-levels (it’s dramatic at the upper levels, but I am not anything like a Chess master, so it’s the mid-levels that I’m concerned about), and in any case the truth of the generalization leaves PLENTY of room for the particular girl seated across from me at the table to be a better Chess player than the particular male who is me. So, if I’m sitting down to play with a girl, the best strategy is … yup! … give it my best, because I really don’t know much about the individual across from me. I know that out of every hundred games with girls I play I can expect to win more than half of them, but I don’t know ANYTHING about this particular game with this particular girl.

Second, generalizing from a single example is NOT VALID. Notice said coworker’s defense of the idea that stereotypes are generally true: his particular black relatives eat chitlins, therefore what? ALL black people do? ALL stereotypes are therefore true because he can cite one datapoint in all of human experience that conforms to one? Balderdash. To be convincing on this point he’d have to show a lot more than one black family eating chitlins. At the very least, he’d have to take a random sampling of black families and a random sampling of families from other races and show that there are some statistically-signifiant greater number of instances of chitlin-eating in the black families than in those of other races. And even that’s being generous, because he’d be failing to control for all sorts of probably-relevant variables like region of origin and socioeconomic status. I’m willing to bet that while it is in general true that more black people eat chitlins than white people, that difference largely disappears when you consider white families of low socioeconomic status from the South. In other words, it’s poor southerners of any race who eat them, and blacks just happen to be disproportionately poor and southern. In any case, NOTHING about this would be convincing on his broader point, which is that stereotypes in general are true. For that, he’d need to test a whole bunch of stereotypes, being careful to control for extraneous variables in all cases, etc. etc. One black family with regard to one popular stereotype is one helluva long way from making the case.

Third and most subtly, there’s some variant of the genetic fallacy going on here too - by which I mean things that were true in the past are not necessarily true now. It is this point that is most aggravating about stereotypes, I think: they have a tendency to outlive their usefulness. “Black people eat chitlins” is actually a case in point. I’m willing to bet that where older black people do indeed eat a lot of chitlins, you won’t find them all that popular with the youth. Tastes change, financial circumstances change, and what was true in the 50s need not be true now. A more accurate thing for my coworker to have argued would have been “stereotypes generally come from somehwere,” where it’s understood that the place they come from might be in the past and no longer relevant to present discussion.

It’s this last point that’s relevant to racism in the South. Certainly in the 1950s the South was quite racist, noticeably more so, probably, than other regions of the country. But a funny thing happened on the way from the 1950s to now: 50 years passed in which the South really changed, largely due to legal pressure from the rest of the country. Is there racism in the South today? Well, yes - and in some parts of it much more than others. But if you want to make a generalization about Southerners - certainly about Southerners from places like Tennessee and North Carolina that weren’t as involved in the Secession project as everyone else - I think you’ll find that what was true in the 1950s is no longer true today. Indeed, I would say that even by the 70s - certainly if the sheer level of violence and subsequent White Flight that accompanied desegregation in Detroit and Boston (both of which were a decade behind any major Southern city) are any indication - the shoe was firmly on the other foot. The South may have started off a lot more racist than the North, but it’s also had to face its problems more directly, and that tends to work better than pointing the finger at other people and saying “well at least I’m not as bad as THEM,” which was, roughly speaking, the Midwest’s strategy for dealing with its race problem.

Fourth and finally, just because a lot of stereotypes started out true, it doesn’t follow that you should believe any generalization that you hear. My favorite comedy expose of this is Dave Chapelle’s sketch on Slavery Reparations, where he imagines what happens if every black family got the $20,000 Jesse Jackson says the federal government owes them. They make a point of showing KFC stock skyrocketing, but then noting that watermelon sales are unchanged. Which pretty much squares with my experience of blacks in high school too: they eat a lot of chicken, but the watermelon thing just isn’t and probably never was true. Sometimes stereotypes are just malicious lies, and I guess the watermelon thing was probably just really funny to some racist types in Hollywood for whatever reason, and so it stuck in defiance of all reality.

So yes, I suppose that it’s true that stereotypes all come from somewhere. But “somewhere” (a) may not be relevant anymore, (b) may be someone’s (malicious) imagination, (c) may be real and relevant in general without being relevant to the case at hand and/or (d) may be a single example that was never even a general trend to begin with.

The moral of the story is not very revealing of course: you have to be careful with stereotypes. What’s incredible to me is that there are still people out there who don’t know that.

Matt Yglesias fails basic statistics!:

This chart was posted on his blog purporting to lend some “perspective” to the “current rightwing freakout over shaking hands with Hugo Chavez.” You see, Obama did - on his visit to the recent Latin American summit.

Let me go ahead and say that I personally have no problem with Obama shaking hands with Mr. Chavez. Let me go ahead and say that I agree that the general reaction in right-wing columns to this is indeed a “freakout.” And let me further go ahead and agree that there’s some truth to what Mr. Yglesias (apparently) takes this graph to show: that the right-wing “freakout” over shaking hands with Chavez is a predictable sophomoric ploy for attention given just how unpopular the Republican Party currently is.

None of that, however, excuses the commentariat from doing their statistics homework. So let’s see if we can spot what’s wrong here.

Well, first, obviously, the numbers for “Venezuela” have been tampered with. Everything other comparison looks like it plausibly adds up to 100% (note: it would be OK if it added up to less since presumably not everyone polled will have an opinion one way or the other) - but Venezuela is pushing 110%. Hmmm… So some people find Venezuela both favorable and unfavorable all at the same time?

Second, where are the Democrats on this? The only way to make sense of Republican popularity ratings, given the way our system operates, is to compare them with the popularity ratings of their biggest competitors, and yet…

Third, is it really OK to compare popularity ratings of nations with those of domestic political parties? Nation states don’t stand for election here, after all - nor are people’s opinions of nation states formed entirely on the basis of the country in question’s politics. This isn’t even comparing apples and oranges - it’s more like apples and sofas.

Fourth, since when does the popularity of Venezuela have anything to do with the appropriateness of shaking hands with its leader? I think Venezuelan women are as hot as the next guy does, so all told I have a pretty favorable opinion of the place. That doesn’t stop me thinking their government - the president in particular - is silly.

Fifth, isn’t it even a little bit fishy that there’s no “no opinion” bar on this graph? I don’t know how much you can really conclude from this kind of forced choice - especially if you’re trying to detect animus. I was, for example, all ready to vote for McCain in the last election despite strongly disapproving of him. The issue was that I didn’t approve of the Libertarian Candidate either, I was voting in a swing state, and I had a visceral allergic reaction to the Democratic candidate, whom I continue to find completely unacceptable. It’s simply wrong to assume that a party has to win popularity contests in a two-party system. All it really has to do is cough up something better than the opposition.

Since point five is closely related to point two, my composition algorithm tells me to stop. The conclusion register contains the information that Matt Yglesias could vastly improve his blog by taking an introductory course in Experimental Methods.