Random links

This Person Does Not Exist Is the Best One-Off Website of 2019
How real can computer-generated faces look? Take a look.
Death on demand: has euthanasia gone too far?
"well over a quarter of all deaths in 2017 in the Netherlands were induced."
Researcher Bias and Influence: How Do Different Sources of Policy Analysis Affect Policy Preferences?
"Partisan organizations are effective at influencing individuals that share their ideology, but individuals collectively are most responsive to analysis produced by nonpartisan organizations. ... The results suggest that increasing the availability of nonpartisan analysis would increase the diffusion of information into the public and reduce political polarization." (via John Holbein)

Murder and misperception

Been thinking back to this National Review article again after recent tweets. e.g.

I think it's worth noting - as the National Review article does - that the MS-13 alone has had members hit with 207 murder charges betwen 2012 and the time of the article's publication vs. 138 killed in school shooting from 2014 til then1 (or 150 since 1999). i.e. MS-13 - just a single gang - has probably resulted in more deaths per year in recent years than school shooters.

As Gardner's thread observes, if one looks at the data student victimizaion of various sorts over the time period has seen substantial decreases in pretty much all measures. I also saw a number of references to Lisa Gilbert's twitter thread on school shooter trainings and thought this the most revealing:

To me the primary purpose of the drills that are being run is political theatre. I fall more in line with the perspective in The Atlantic's Active-Shooter Drills Are Tragically Misguided. Not only do such drills traumatize children over extremely unlikely events, but it seems that in the case of Parkland the killer may have used knowledge from past drills of how the school would react in order to stage his attack.

That's school shootings but I wonder how a similar dynamic of misperception plays out re: campaigns like Black Lives Matter? How accurate are people's risk perceptions there and are people accounting for the costs of the tactics deployed on the people involved? That's one though that'd come to mind when I'd encountered Black Lives Matter: The Wellbeing Cost of Racial Shootings in the United States a little while back. Haven't found a corresponding paper on this but here's the abstract from the talk:

This paper discusses the impact of racial shootings on Black well-being in the United States between 2008 and 2015. Using data from the Gallup Daily Polls, we first reveal a sudden and persistent drop in life satisfaction recorded by Blacks compared to similar Whites from early 2013. There is no similar effect for Hispanic individuals, and results are robust to the inclusion of state, time effects and household characteristics. To explain this finding, we exploit withinstate variation in public and media awareness of police-race interactions, following the Trayvon Martin case in 2012. Contrary to other groups, internet searches and reported cases of arrest-related deaths have a strong negative well-being effect within the Black community that can explain up to half the Black-White decline after 2013.

i.e. The Black Lives Matter movement seems to have resulted in a sudden, persistent relative drop in life satisfaction for African Americans relative to their peers - with the price paid for this by the African American community not very well accounted for I think. Personally I suspect that one of the big reasons for this effect is media-driven misperceptions of the degree to which American police officers kill African Americans.

The outrage over police shootings had prompted the Washington post to start collecting a database of them and they found a lot more than expected. What do the demographics look like though? Depending on how you account for the unknown and other categories, somewhere between 26-33% of those shot by police were African American.

Were people to be polled asking their estimate of the fraction of those shot by police I'd guess the general answer would be more like 90%. Even someone like John McWhorter who's written some not-particulary-politically-correct books on the topic of race - e.g. Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America had expressed surprised about this:

The heart of the indignation over these murders is a conviction that racist bias plays a decisive part in these encounters. That has seemed plausible to me, and I have recently challenged those who disagree to present a list of white people killed within the past few years under circumstances similar to those that so enrage us in cases such as what happened to Tamir Rice, John Crawford, Walter Scott, Sam Debose and others. The simple fact is that this list exists ...

Taking a raw figure like 26-33% and figure out how to treat it in public communication is more complicated. e.g.:

  • police shoot a disproportionate number of African Americans relative to their rate in the US population

  • police shootings of African Americans are roughly proportionate to what Gallup reports as their perceived rate in the US population

  • police shootings of African Americans are lower than the population fraction estimated to be African Americans reported by Tressie McMillan Cottom2 as the results of polls in the undergrad sociology classes she teaches.

Basically, as usual, the population is generally extremely bad at estimating the rates of things and, in this case, there's also interplay between rates of police shootings and the fraction of the population that's African American. ... and this hasn't even yet accounted for how this might different for other aspects of interaction between African Americans and the police, for which I'd expect you'd see a larger difference3, or issues like class.

At the moment it seems to me that the media is not unbiased but differently biased relative to population at large, and perceived by the public as such (Fox / Breitbart just being a bigger skew in a different direction than most).

I think it's much easier to convince someone that some stuff in the media is fishy, but the question of what fraction is fishy is different and much more complicated to assess. In general as well, "We overestimate what we worry about" which makes this even worse. It's the sort of thing that over years seems to have enabled Fox News to consolidate a viewer base that's over the years become increasingly out of touch with reality at time and similarly, I think, created fertile ground for someone like Trump.


  1. How to account for the precise number of MS-13 murders I'm not sure. e.g. I'd think multiple people who together committed a crime might be charged for the same murder (which may count as one or multiple charges) which might reduce the number of murders. That said, I'd that there've been more MS-13 murders than times MS-13 has been charged for it which would underestimate the murders. ↩︎

  2. Would consider McMillan Cottom's views fairly conventional as judged by her articles in The Atlantic↩︎

  3. See, e.g., Surprising New Evidence Shows Bias in Police Use of Force but Not in Shootings↩︎

Random links

Study: giving out cash in Uganda helped after 4 years. After 9 years, not so much.
"While the people who got cash were earning 38 percent more money than the control group in year four, the control group caught up to the cash recipients by year nine. Overall income was no higher in the treatment group, and earnings were higher by a small (4.6 percent), statistically insignificant amount. The recipients did have more assets on average than people not getting the money, which makes sense; they had a sudden influx of money, some of which was sure to go toward buying durable assets like metal roofs, fruit-bearing trees, or work tools. ... But I think what a lift out of poverty means is not just that you have some extra savings and a buffer, but actually that you have some real, sustained earnings potential, and that’s not what we’ve seen.”"
The Paradox of Viral Outrage
"The same individual outrage that would be praised in isolation is more likely to be viewed as bullying when echoed online by a multitude of similar responses, as it then seems to contribute to disproportionate group condemnation."
Can Electronic Monitoring Reduce Reoffending?
"we find electronic monitoring reduces reoffending within 24 months by 16 percentage points compared to serving a prison sentence. For offenders who are less than 30, the reduction is 43 percentage points, with sizeable and significant reductions in reoffending persisting for 8 years. Our calculations suggest that criminal justice costs are reduced by around $30,000 for each eligible offender who serves their sentence under electronic monitoring rather than in prison." Would be nice if this works.

Nazis in the US South

One of the things that I try to keep in mind of is how people can be blind to things and how placing them in a different context can make them realize things that they might otherwise be unaware of. If I talk of Nazis in America, people might think of neo-nazis and some might be aware of this element of the American past. However, what I'm thinking of in this case are Nazi prisoners of war sent to live in camps in the US, specifically as described here, and more specifically the weird sort of situations that might arise when you expose Nazis to some of the conditions in the US South at the time.

The POWs also found friends in the most unlikely of places, as they worked alongside African Americans hoeing and picking cotton, talking away long days in the hot sun. African American field hands were painfully aware that white Americans treated Nazi prisoners far better than they did people of color. African Americans waited on POWs when they were transported in Pullman cars to their camps, and prisoners were also allowed to eat in whites-only cafeterias. At the camp, they were dealt the most menial jobs, including spraying the prisoners with delousing foam. The slights hurt all the more because African-American soldiers fought diligently during WWII in all-black units such as the renowned Tuskegee airmen.

Yet, on an individual level, they got along with the Germans. And Germans were fond of them, in part because African American soldiers had protected them from the mobs of people who wanted to kill the POWs.

Surprisingly, given the blatant racism of the Nazi party, some of the German soldiers were also shocked by the shoddy treatment of their fellow farmworkers. “The blacks…didn’t do much better than us,” remarked one POW. “They were just in front of the wire, and we were behind the wire.” Another German soldier, who was a farmer in his civilian life, noted that African American were expected to pick two to three more times the cotton required of the POWs. “You have to see how they lived,” he said after the war. “These people were so exploited.”

Put Nazis in a different context and they might start to think differently... at least to an extent. That said, there are limits particularly when it comes to things too close to home:

Listening to American radio news reports eventually convinced Daumling that the films weren’t propaganda, but unvarnished truth, but he was the exception. Fewer than half believed that the Holocaust was real by the end of the war, according to a poll conducted by the U.S. government.

I wonder what fraction of those former Nazi soldiers who then had disbelieved the Holocaust changed their minds by the end of their lives.

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