UBI, the left pole, and death

1. There are few issues I'm closer to 50/50 on than Universal Basic Income.
    A. Here is Sam Harris and Andrew Yang on the UBI (Yang is running for president in 2020)
    B. Here is Mike Munger on Econtalk regarding the UBI
    C. Jordan Peterson has an opinion too

2. Steven Pinker and Jordan Peterson show up on the Unbelievable Podcast (a podcast that facilitates discussion between theists and atheists).

The people sitting across from Pinker and Peterson were not terrible.

3. The "left pole": the mythical spot where all directions are branded as right-wing.

4.

5. “Cat, cry, have-sorry, Koko-love, unattention, visit me,”

6. The App that reminds you that you are going to die. Because you will, and ignoring it will lead to a worse life.

How do Democrats win 2020?

I have one or two ideas:

1. Say “America” more

2. Say “Racist” less

3. Promote a brand not an ideology

4. Don’t dismiss libertarians as right-wing. There are a lot of them, and they will vote for you if you’re good to them.

5. Say something anti-PC once in a while (like this guy)

6. Do just enough to get the vote of the Social Justice people, and then distance yourself from them

7. Nominate a minority

8. But not an atheist or a muslim

9. Don't affirmative action a completely unelectable minority into place just so you can say you had one (like this guy)

10. And once you have a non-atheist non-muslim electable minority, don’t talk about how they’re a minority.

11, Hope to God Trump doesn’t run again. He’s an intuitive political genius and a branding machine.

12. If Trump runs keep the spotlight off him

13. If Trump runs remember that there's enough to criticize in him without misinterpreting him in weird ways

14. If Trump does run don’t let him bait you into portraying yourself like this:

15. Instead remember this guy:

16. Take back your reputation for being pro free speech

17. Don’t talk about guns, immigration, or abortion

18. Talk about marijuana, gay marriage, and international peace

19. Not nominating a celebrity might seem like it’s on the wrong side of the trend, but it’s on the right side of the pendulum.

20. Remember that Americans want lower taxes, more spending, and a reduction in the deficit. Pretend like that makes any sense.

21. Unlearn that the electoral college is why you lost

22. Unlearn that not electing Bernie Sanders is why you lost

23. Unlearn that racist backlash is why you lost

24. It is possible to talk about helping poor people without talking about hurting rich people

25. Don’t limit your moral appeal by only connecting on care and fairness. Authority, sanctity, purity, and liberty are moral intuitions too

26. Remember health is holy

27. Remember education is holy

28. Remember the environment is holy

29. Remember the constitution is holy

30. Remember the founders are holy

31. Remember democracy is holy

32. Don’t think that if the other side does it, it’ll work for you.

33. Mention God once or twice and in the absolute most generic way possible

34. Nominate someone without the slightest smidge of elitism

35. Say "family" more

36. Say "sexist" less

37. No, America is not ready to take on the trans issue at the federal level, unless you're talking about the Trans-Pacific Partnership

38. Nominate someone with a strong enough presence that people feel like they're voting for a person, not a party.

39. Don't let the right monopolize the equality of opportunity message. You want equality of opportunity too, remember?

40. Wear compassion without putting on moral condemnation

41. Don't nominate a socialist. Instead, nominate someone who knows the term"mixed economy"

42. Don't trust cable news to help you. They're losing credibility rapidly because they abandoned even the guise of neutrality. #fakenews

"Not racial. Not racially charged. Racist. ... The sentiment the President expressed today is a racist sentiment." Anderson Cooper reacts to Trump's "shithole countries" remark https://t.co/d29zymhvqy https://t.co/CnCS0plgVL

— CNN (@CNN) 12 January 2018

43. Which reminds me: stop crying wolf

44. Speak in clear simple language. If you can't communicate with people with under 100 IQ, you can't communicate with half the American population.

45. Don't force your candidate so far left in the primaries that they can't credibly pivot back to the center for the general election.

46. They look better in identity politics than you do

47. The center is disappearing. Everybody is polarized. Grab the moderates that are left like its the last 5 seconds of Hungry Hungry Hippos

48. If you're not hearing from the other side it doesn't mean you're winning, it might mean you've frightened people away from voicing their opinion.

49. The person you think is least likely to win is the one to watch out for.

51. Joe Biden should be the one (if you want to win)

The Economist's Diet Vs. Food insecurity

"The hard truth about the economists' diet, and all diets that actually work, is that you are going to feel hunger at times...

To start, we need to emphasize that hunger is very different from starvation. In our culture, people often say, "I'm starving," "I'm famished," or "I'm so hungry I could die" to describe normal, healthy feelings of hunger. Such words should probably be wiped from our collective Lexicon. Starvation is a real phenomenon that affects far too many people in the world, but we're confident that anyone picking up this book has probably never experienced true starvation -- that is, extreme, prolonged hunger; not what you experience after going a few hours between meals. You're not starving, you're hungry, and that's an okay thing to be."

This is taken from The Economist's Diet by Christopher Payne, and Rob Barnett.

It's hard to mesh this commonsense message with the worry about "food insecurity" going around. Then again, those who preach food insecurity base much of their cause on iffy definitions and deceptive statistics.

Better to discover effective altruism through Givewell.org

Links: School Funding Edition

1. Random Critical Analysis: No, US school funding is actually progressive, response to the NYTimes article on school districts, test scores, and income, and a Twitter thread.

2. From the left-leaning Brookings Institute:

The measure is a simple one: we calculate the average per-pupil funding levels of districts attended by poor students (those from families below the federal poverty level), compared to the funding of districts attended by non-poor students. Specifically, we calculate two weighted averages of the funding of all regular school districts in each state: one using the number of poor students in each district as weights, and the other using the number of non-poor students as weights. We adjust funding levels in each district using average wage levels in its local labor market... 

Nationwide, per-student K-12 education funding from all sources (local, state, and federal) is similar, on average, at the districts attended by poor students ($12,961) and non-poor students ($12,640), a difference of 2.5 percent in favor of poor students...

The interpretation of these results will likely vary based on the reader’s expectations. Someone expecting to find widespread evidence of “savage inequalities” will be pleasantly surprised to learn that, on average, poor students attend schools that are at least as well-funded as their more advantaged peers. They might also be heartened by the fact that the gap in local funding of districts attended by poor vs. non-poor students has narrowed rather than widened during a period of rising economic inequality.

3. The argument for using property tax to fund education:

   A. Property tax is more stable than sales or income taxes (see graph in link #5)
   B. Some states don't use sales or income taxes, alternative funding might be difficult
   C. Untying property tax from school funding creates a disincentive for civic engagement. How?

Homeowners with school age children in public schools usually have a greater incentive to vote on issues that relate to public education when their property taxes are used to fund public education. Moreover, property-rich districts have higher property values and ownership, are less likely to vote on plans that recommend equity in school financing.

4. From Ed.Gov

Annual Secondary Education Expenditures per Student

Total U.S. Expenditures for Elementary and Secondary Education

Total Expenditures per Pupil (for Fall Enrollment)

Title I Grants for Disadvantaged Children

5. The Property Tax - School Funding Dilemma (Lincoln Institute)

Though, "K-12 education is funded by property tax" gives the wrong impression,
that is not to say property tax is unimportant

There may be something to the stability argument of #3

\

Many still cite outdated statistics on how much local and property tax
contributes to school finance

6. The future of U.S. public school revenue from the property tax

Quote:

Congress has reduced spending on public education since 2010, besides a large infusion of federal stimulus dollars for local school districts during and immediately after the Great Recession of 2007–2009. Between 2010 and 2016, the two primary sources of federal aid—Title 1 for high-poverty schools and special education aid—were cut by 8.3 and 6.4 percent respectively, after adjusting for inflation

(Links) Race, Gender, and Psychopaths

1. Being black in America can be hazardous to your health vs. black Americans see gains in life expectancy

Also see report on life expectancy by race and gender

2. Which face looks more like what you imagine God to be?

The face on the right was perceived to be more masculine, older, more powerful, wealthier, and more closely associated with how conservatives imagine God. On the left is a more feminine, younger, more African American, more loving, and more closely related to how liberals imagine God.

4. This study makes me wonder how much of the recent decline in violent crime rates had to do with peak television/internet.

5. Related: Video games too!

6. Study shows a large reading gap in favor of girls; no explanation needed. The same study also shows  a much smaller math gap that sometimes favors boys, New York Times focuses in and blames environmental discrimination.

7. illiberal left vs. everyone else

8. Maternal mortality ratios. Everything is awesome nobody is happy.

9. Triplets:

-Immigrants and Their Children Use Less Welfare than Third-and-Higher Generation Americans.

-Immigrants Haven't Hurt Pay for Americans

-Open Boarders would double world GDP

10. When considering all fatal shootings, it is clear that systematic anti-Black disparity at the national level is not observed (actually, they show some anti-white disparity, but that can be explained by crime rates being biased against blacks).

Instead of benchmarking against population, this study benchmarks against exposure to crime.

The problem with benchmarking an outcome against population proportions is that this carries with it a critical assumption: The opportunity for the event to occur is equally likely for every person within each group. In terms of understanding racial disparities in death by police gunfire, adjusting raw shooting values by population proportions necessarily requires that White and Black citizens are equally likely to occupy situations in which deadly force is used. 

access via Sci-hub

11. Has the Flynn Effect reversed?

12. Guys like different kinds of movies than girls. Critics give guy movies 10s and girl movies 8s. Film critics are also 78% male.

13. Another adoption study: parenting has no effect on IQ (so long as you feed them and don't drop them on their head.)

14. The evidence is becoming more and more clear: Economists mostly disagree with gender studies people over the gender pay gap because economists are so politically biased and never learned how to do statistics.

15. From Heterodox Academy, the Open Mind conference

16. Related: Sam Harris and Jonathan Haidt talk about their differences in a super productive way. (into is long, fast forward to 27:00 for the conversation.)

17. Head First Heart Second

18. Attractive people do better

19. Do psychopaths have empathy? My answer:

Of course! Good manipulators are masters at putting themselves in other people's shoes. But empathy is a word we've packed with such moral virtue that we're unable to admit how harmful it can be.

20.

Since America landed on the moon first it owns the moon and since then every country has had to pay us a million dollars for using the tides.

— Frank J. Fleming (@IMAO_) 16 June

Take that, John Locke

(Links) Why Trump can never win and still might

1. Cherry picking the evidence on GMOs

2. You're Still Crying Wolf by Scott Alexander has been updated

3. Trump will never win in 2020

4. Gender Gap:
    -What people miss about the Gender Wage Gap -Vox
    -Are Women Paid less than Men? -The Economists
    -Don't Mind the Gap -Oxford Institute of Population Ageing

5. Everything's Awesome Nobody is Happy, Malthus edition:

Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio, Subsistence, increases only in an arithmetical ratio.

Sure about that?

6. Sorry kid, I still don't know how to cook my own dinner

7. Why we should arbitrarily deplore sexual harassers (for the same reason we arbitrarily deplore chemical weapon users (Response here)

8. IQ might predict something

Head First Heart Second

You can't escape how you feel toward heart wrenching stories, but you always have a choice to exert some mental energy and figure out their frequency. If you do, you may find your perspective changes. Specifically, when you choose numeracy over passion you're less likely to say, "the world sure it terrible", and more likely to say, "the world sure is big."

Consider a few examples:

I read someone ringing the hysteria alarm because 172 American children died from influenza this season, and most of them didn't get a flu shot! However, this is out of 74 million American children, making the odds of any child dying of influenza about 1 in a million! This is not the national emergency some make it out to be.

Example two: someone bang the freak-out drum because 37 kids die a year in hot cars. It's tragic. It's morbid. It's also extraordinarily rare. Thank God. Your child may be at greater risk walking through the parking lot than staying in the car, but because we don't hear about it as often, we decry the parent who leaves their child in the car while they run into the post office to mail a letter.

Someone hire a punk band, make sure they practice 3 times a week, and fire the lead singer if need be because we need someone to play the panic song over "stranger danger". Yet, these kinds of child abduction cases are an extremely small portion of all missing children. The total number? 115 cases.

Finally we have the mother of all examples; school shootings. 40 children have died in school shootings so far this year. News outlets like to frame school shootings as an epidemic that keeps getting worse and worse, neglecting clear-cut statistics that show a long term decrease in school shootings and violent crime more generally. Regardless, school shootings could increase tenfold and would still not warrant a blip on our risk radar. There are 50 million school age kids and about 100 thousand public schools in the United States. It's not an exaggeration to say that the risk of your child being caught up in a school shooting is vanishingly small.

All these examples of mathematical illiteracy can be avoided by simply noticing the relevant denominator. Stories should not inform our assessment of danger, data should. In a country with 340 million people there will always be enough tragic stories to fill the news, but that doesn't tell you how common they are.

By the way, I frequently agree with the causes these fear tactics are designed to promote. I'm just trying to make the point that when our tears cloud our vision, our attempts to improve the world are likely to misfire/backfire.

How so? We have to make risk assessments every day. If they're not accurate, we divert time and energy from other more statistically informed dangers.

If we ignore mathematical realities, we'll also tend to make poor risk/quality of life tradeoffs. While admitting any sort of risk trade-off for your children is taboo, anyone who has taken their child on an unnecessary car trip has done it. Maybe buying your child body armor for school makes them a tad safer, but at a certain point you have to admit maybe you're being a bit extreme. The safest possible life isn't the best life.

Perhaps most importantly, we spend too much time worrying. Anxiety crushes well-being. I'd go insane if I went through life worrying about every statistically trivial risk that pops up on the news.

When we place "school shooting" closer to "car accident" and further from "getting struck by lightning" in our risk spectrum, something is wrong. We're not only mismanaging our lives, we're forming political opinions based on radical exceptions. Policy that effects hundreds of millions of people can't improve the world if they're founded on stories about someone somewhere doing something.

Some people feel uncomfortable with what I'm saying. Like I'm putting my head above my heart. But the fact is I'm using both. Your moral compass is a piece of junk if your mental map doesn't accurately describe the world. We need to take a cold dispassionate look at the numbers before we thrust ourselves into moral outrage. Then, if the situation warrants, outrage away.

I'd predict that if we really did follow the head first heart second rule, we'd spend less time in a state of angry confusion, and more time in mental peace.

What nobody wants to see about the Implicit Bias Test

I was listening to a new (to me) podcast called Very Bad Wizards. It's hosted by a psychologist and a philosopher, and they approach their topics with a fair amount of skepticism. In looking at their history, I notice several episodes with Paul Bloom that I'll probably listen to. It's also interesting that one of them is related to Christina Hoff Sommers whom is someone of note (I don't know if I like her yet)

This particular episode was about Implicit Bias. Though conversation was thoughtful and fair, I thought they missed an important point. It's rather obvious why the point is overlooked, but for science(!) it seems like it should be considered:

What if implicit bias is just accurate statistical reasoning? For whatever causes, African Americans have ended up with some undesirable qualities on average (high violent crime rate and low IQs for example). We can put Murrayism aside and say this is 100% due to generations of systemic bias. It doesn't really matter because the outcome is there. If someone intuits that outcome correctly then it isn't a bias, it's accurately assessing a baseline probability.

Listen to Bret Weinstein

Some people binge watch Netflix. I binge watch intellectuals.

Lately, I've been binge watching Bret Weinstein. Like many in the intellectual dark web, he takes evolution very seriously. Also in line with his membership with the IDW, Bret (and his wife Heather Heying) skirmished with the Social Justice Warrior left, which eventually concluded with them leaving the college at which they both worked.

With that said, I want to throw a few videos at you. These are some of the best conversations/talks I've heard of Mr. Bret Weinstein.




Boy oh boy. Sam Harris had the interview that really got into the stuff that they burn you at the stake for. Bret is careful and precise as he spoke about populations and liniages, and he brought ideas I had never heard to that conversation.

The conversation ended with an audience Q&A segment. I usually hate these segments, but this one was actually very good.




This talk with Robert Wright was actually the 2nd one they had. The first one wasn't bad, but I had heard the Evergreen story so many times by then. It's truly a miraculous story, I'm just not interested in hearing it the 8th or so time.

Robert Wright seems to think the Intellectual Dark Web skews to the right of the political spectrum. Weinstein places it in the dead center. I would have guessed they were more left-wing than right. I think that's somewhat hidden by the fact that a fair chunk of the criteria for making it into the IDW is based in conflict with the far left (or perhaps better described as the authoritarian left).




This last video is something we need more of. A lot of people like me are now interested in Bret Weinstein, in the same way we were interested in Jordan Peterson. But here's the thing, Peterson had hundreds of fascinating lectures already posted online. Bret Weinstein has 18 at the moment on his Youtube channel.

With Peterson an audience came for the controversy, they stayed for the psychology.
With Weinstein an audience is showing up for the controversy, we just need some more of his biology (and ideas in general) to stick around for.

Weinstein has shown that he can talk about a lot of different subjects in an interesting way. We just need more, and I really really hope we get it, because this guy is totally worth listening to.

How much would you need to get paid to be Black?

Ezra Klein and Tyler Cowen recently had a conversation about American healthcare, social justice/free speech on campus, social media's addictivity/utility, and racism. I love whenever Tyler Cowen does an interview. He's the man who's brain I would most like to download.

This part was especially intriguing:

"Ezra: Is America a racist country? 

Tyler: Probably, but what do you mean by the word? 

Ezra: I mean is America still a country where the way the country is constructed, and the way the structures of power are constructed - if you're born African American in this country, through no fault of your own you're likely to have significantly worse life outcomes.

Tyler: That's correct. I remember something very striking. There was once a poll of white people who were asked, 'if you had been born with the same level of parental income but you would have been born a black person, how much would we have to pay you to feel compensated?' And the numbers were very high..."

I looked up the study,

Participants generally required low median amounts, less than $10,000, to make the race change, whereas they requested high amounts, $1,000,000, to give up television. To the extent that larger amounts were requested, support for reparations also increased. Attempts to educate participants about Black cost/White privilege had negligible effects on assessments of the cost of being Black and support for reparations.

The authors of the study, as well as the many publications reporting on it, framed the $10,000 as being a relatively low amount. This is in contradiction with Tyler who thought it was "very high."

I don't now if $10,000 is a high or low number, but to the extent that commenters thought it was a low number, they thought it was obviously wrong and biased. From the study:

Relative to Whites, Blacks fall on the negative side of a wide array of important social indicators, with infant morality rates 146% higher; life chances of imprisonment ~state or federal facility! 447% higher; rate of death by homicide 521% higher; lack of health insurance coverage 42.3% more likely; median income rate 55.3% lower; poverty rates 173% higher; and proportion with a college degree or beyond 59.5% lower. Strikingly, the average White American will even live five and one-half years longer than the average Black American ~seven years for males!

...Together, these results suggest that White resistance to reparations for Black Americans stems from fundamental biases in estimating the true cost of being Black.

I'm naturally inclined to criticize the public for being ignorant, but this just doesn't seem right to me. When I'm asked, "how much would you have to be paid to be black," I answer as though all else is equal, not as though I'm being offered a bundle. We don't even have to talk about the controversial topic of race differences in personality or IQ. I assume my neighborhood, family, schools, and environment more generally are all the same. I don't assume I'm exchanging entire lives and experiences with a random black person.

The only thing I'm being offered $10,000 for is changing the color of my skin, and whatever else comes as a consequence of that. That's all.

I believe that's the normal way of understanding the question, and that's how those surveyed answered. It is; however, not how the authors of the study or many commentators understood it, I suspect that comes as a result of their preference for a certain conclusion.

One more thing.

I also would have preferred the authors asked black people how much money they would need to get paid to be white, so a proper baseline that takes status quo bias into account can be set. I can't be sure, but I suspect that if you ask any race how much they would need to get paid to transition to any other race, the average number is above $0.

Pinker's Hair looks like Pasta

From the web:

1. 709 genes found associated with intelligence

2. All we've done is cure contagious diseases. Scary if true.

3. Can things be both Popular and Silenced? Scott Alexander on the IDW

4. Is there any other way?

5. A Texas Teacher is in trouble because she showed students a picture of her wife. Free Speech issue?

6. The long awaited conversation between Steven Pinker and Jordan Peterson has low video/sound quality, interruptions, cuts, and delightfully pleasant conversation.

7. Study: Learning Others’ Political Views Reduces the Ability to Assess and Use Their Expertise in Nonpolitical Domains

8. Everything is Awesome and Nobody is Happy. From HumanProgress.org:

"When surveyed, only 1% of people correctly answered that world poverty decreased by 50% over the last two decades. There were five options in the survey. A random guess would do 20 times as well as a human at getting the right answer."

9. "Women are still
-routinely subjected to domestic violence in their homes,
-sexual harassment in their workplaces,
-gender bias at their schools."
From article, Jordan Peterson Does Not Support Equality of Opportunity

10. "Klein purports to channel the views of this group when he describes their putative belief that “this is my experience and you don’t understand it.” Klein apparently knows what they think even without asking them."

From article, Why Sam Harris—Not Ezra Klein—Is the One Making Space for People of Colour

11. Meta-analysis shows vitamin supplements might do a little good, might do a little bad, and overall probably pretty useless.

12. The dumbest thing Batman has said, even dumber than "chicks dig the car"?

13. Cognitive Strain Quote of the Week:

"To the extent that we are rational we share the same identity." -Rebecca Goldstein

14.

Not a problem for me. I just look at my wife the wrong way and she gets pregnant again.

— CognitiveStrain (@CognitiveStrain) 28 May 2018