"Voting self-interest" -- you're kidding, right?

Some people claim that you can take a bunch of demographic data and decide who is -- and who is not -- voting for their "self-interest", whatever that might mean, based on that data alone.

Several questionable implicit assumptions are built in, such as that people would always want government handouts over the freedom that comes with economic and personal liberty. Or that people are rational actors 100% of the time - is there anybody that really believes that everybody lives their life logically, all the time, with no emotions driving anything? That’s laughable.

They might as well come out and say "I've analyzed things I can measure about you and now I know more about what is good for you than you do."

Shorter version: “I'm smarter than you, because you’re a dumbass.”

This is patently stupid on its face, and immensely troubling for the following reasons, and probably more I haven't thought of yet:

1. It is dangerous to assume you can derive somebody's self-interest given a bunch of demographic data. We are more than the sum of things that the Census bureau and tele-marketers know about us. 
2. It is dangerous to assume a priori that everybody wants handouts over economic and personal liberty. Not everybody likes dependence on others - the history of America comes to mind.
3. It is dangerous to assume you can build accurate models of human behavior from measuring things ... that we measure ... because we can measure them. Which leaves out things we don't measure. Because we can't. Self-select much?
4. It is dangerous to assume that voters pay much attention to policy - because they quite clearly do not. Who gets to decide what an individual's self-interest "should" be? What does that even mean? Voters respond in various emotional ways to voice, manner, appearance, all kinds of things that have nothing to do with policy. JFK got millions of women's votes because he was dreamy … and Nixon was Nixon. Was that in their self-interest, or not? I don’t know, and don't care. Is a woman voting in her self-interest if she, contra the "experts", loves herself a dreamy JFK for president and couldn't care less about economics or any stupid b.s. because, hey, look at him! This is not news. People vote with their gut a lot more than we’d like to think, which is probably not ideal, but there it is.
5. Likewise, Obama got millions of votes because he is "well-spoken" as his running mate famously said. Whose self-interest was met there? The people who like well-spoken black men, apparently. Also, whites feeling racial guilt. And blacks, who turned out almost 100% for the guy. Those black voters got to live to see a black president. This is an accomplishment, at least for them, no? Even though, objectively speaking, that is just as racist as whites voting only for whites, the fact remains, for lots of black folks, that’s all they cared about in 2008. This would meet the criteria of satisfying their self-interest, by definition. Even if others don’t understand it.
6. Even if you could properly model behavior based on all the crucial factors, and collect and organize all of that, then what? You've got a 40-way (or 4000-way) matrix with a bunch of tiny numbers in it. Yay! All cleared up now, right? Some things are just not measurable, and determining whether others are voting in their own self-interest is surely one of them.

I have this same disagreement with baseball stat geeks too.

People who are obsessed with numbers fall into a couple of traps: just because we can measure something does not mean it is more important than something we can't measure, or that the thing we cannot measure is not a factor; and a belief that we understand completely what drives our behavior so that we can build accurate behavioral models from things we can currently measure.

If all of that were true, we should stop researching it, shouldn't we?

Technology is a wonderful thing, except when it's the worst

If you're wondering how many naked pics teens are sending back and forth on their iPhones, the answer is A LOT

Lives of the Selfie-Centered

For those who are blissfully unaware, lots of young people use their smartphones to take pictures and videos of themselves in various states of undress, and send them to others. 

That's flirting today: "hey ur hot, here's a d!ck pic" and "do you like my b00bs?"

Yes it's gross and immature and we raise them to know better, blah blah blah, but they're doing it. Because they can. This mode of self-expression was always there, bubbling under the surface, and it took technology that allows instant sharing of photos and videos, away from the prying eyes of parents, to allow it to bloom. Thanks for that.

And it encourages younger females to bare even more skin than they already did -- and it seems like a race to who can look the most like a hooker, sometimes -- in the uber-competitive race for male attention and social advantage that they already obsess over. 

A race to the bottom in who can degrade themselves the most, by leveraging technology, doesn't seem so wonderful to me. 

This epic advance in civilization is brought to you exclusively by smartphones and the Internet. Just keep that in mind next time you hear somebody talking about the wonders of technology. 

Conservative? Liberal? No. AMERICAN!

I'm not much for labels, and lately have developed an aversion to "conservatives" who, when faced with a power struggle in the GOP, feel called to adhere to a set of ivory tower principles, and damn the election consequences.

And here I thought it was a political party, focused on winning elections! Silly, silly me. Now I know, and I won't make that mistake again.

It has become obvious over the years that Ronald Reagan won those elections based on his charisma and communication skills. He was a once in a lifetime - in a country's lifetime, perhaps - kind of president. Conservatism was just one arrow in his quiver, and the idea that conservatism independent of the charisma and speechifying of a Reagan is powerful enough as a coherent philosophy to motivate voters and deliver presidents to the GOP is, I think, a fantasy. As much as I would *like* it to be true, I prefer facing facts.

Anyway, this excellent short essay by Gerard Van Der Leun at American Digest, Bigger Tents: On Rebranding "CONSERVATIVE" and "REPUBLICAN" with "AMERICAN", does a nice job of reframing the debate, and I agree completely:

What we need to do is a little “rebranding” of our own in order to blunt the brain-dead attacks that keep coming from the attack poodles of the left. Attacks that when examined are all aimed at the label “Conservative” or “Republican.”

"Conservative." "Liberals." These two categories are not the same. Not all “Conservatives” are “Republicans,” and – unfortunately for the life expectancy of the Republican party – not all “Republicans” are “Conservative.”

Let's dump both brands.

I don't know about you, but I do not consider myself either a “Conservative” or a “Republican.” Never have. I consider myself to be one thing and one thing only: I AM AN AMERICAN.

Always have been.

Always will be.

Nothing less.

Couldn't be anything more.

To call me a Conservative is to miss the point.

To call me a Republican is to mistake me by a mile.

To call me an AMERICAN is to know me down to the bone.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

Trump complaints

Rule #1 of criticizing people is stop and think about what you're saying, and see if it applies to others equally. Like, any current politicians, or, you know, sitting presidents.

Because if it does, that means it applies to several people, or even an entire group. And that makes it not very useful as a criticism of an individual.

And please note my Trump disclaimer: I'm not so much a Trump "fan" who blindly worships his every word, as an interested observer who sees blatant hypocrisy all around me, and is willing to listen to Trump's side of any argument because the current political class largely sucks. So the bar is, admittedly, pretty low. But desperate times call for desperate measures.

Let's make a list of some of these complaints.

1. Not conservative enough, or at all
2. Authoritarian strongman
3. Racist xenophobic hater
4. Rude and disrespectful
5. Dumb reality show clown
6. Billionaire who only pretends to care about our problems
7. Weak and vague on policy details
8. Cannot win the general election because appeal is limited 
9. Hates / wants to deport Muslims
10. Won't disavow endorsements from undesirables 

I will write about some of these topics over the coming weeks. Most of them are a little silly, and several apply to our sitting president. All of them can be applied to any number of politicians today, or are exaggerations of his actual quotes or positions.

For instance, #2. Anybody who voted for Obama but wants to express indignant outrage that electing Trump would be electing an authoritarian strongman, i.e. the "Mussolini" argument, is not paying enough attention to the guy in office right now. And by the way, the supposed Mussolini quote that Trump re-tweeted over the weekend, is not actually a Mussolini quote. It's from WWI. 1918. And it's a damn good quote, even if Mussolini appropriated it later, and if he did that, it doesn't render the quote any less true. What kind of argument is that, anyway? "A bad guy said something timeless and true, so that poisons the meaning forever"? What?

FYI: "better to live one single day as a lion than a hundred years as a sheep" isn't Mussolini, it's a famous Italian saying from Piave 1918

— John Schindler (@20committee) February 28, 2016

Let the blogging begin, 2016 edition. Or, why social media blows chunks.

Well, I'm back again. You can thank me later.

After starting my first blog in ... 2002 I think (on Blogger/Blogspot, and here I am back again!) ... and putting in a good ten years at various spots, I saw the writing on the wall re: social media taking over. So I took a 3-4 year break and tried social media for a while.

Social media kinda sucks, as it turns out. Maybe you've heard. At least, it sucks for people like me, who enjoy writing and reading the good writing of others. Social media is *too* social; it's like junior high school, or Lord of the Flies, where small-minded social climbers use gang warfare to isolate, belittle, and silence those they disagree with. Good to know. Thanks for clearing that up, Twitter and Facebook users.

I have tried it, and found it wanting. Most social media yahoos are too lazy and partisan to bother reading anything resembling a decent argument against their views, much less argue back against it. I, on the other hand, have spent the last 15 years of my life reading news-oriented blogs that analyze and examine news coverage, from a mostly oppositional viewpoint. And as a result, I have been able to not just understand those who disagree with me, but to develop serious, informed, and usually devastating arguments to refute those viewpoints. It's called intellectual rigor, and few people, I find, are capable of it, and even fewer are informed enough to try it.

Anyway, enough of this bitching. I need something to blog about tomorrow, ya know.

"By the time they start kindergarten, children from professional families hear 19 million more words than working-class kids."

The title of this post is an amazing quote from "Bootstraps Aren't Enough", a book review of "Our Kids" by Robert D. Putnam, which argues that "children’s access to the core institutions that foster their development—strong families, strong schools, strong communities—is increasingly separate and unequal".

Nineteen million more words, in the first 5+ years (about 2000 days or so). 19,000,000 / 2,000 = 9,500 more words ... per day.

This statistic seems hard to believe, but the larger point still holds, and there is abundant research to prove it: kids in homes with two parents who graduated high school and married before having kids are almost certain to be steeped in a much richer language environment for the crucial first few years of life, when so many patterns are set for the future, and so much brain development is occurring.

People who want to talk about inequality should look here. There's where it begins: the parenting and the overall quality of the upbringing of the kids.

There is lots of research that backs this up, by E.D. Hirsch Jr. and others. The early years, plus the first few years of school, up through 3rd or 4th grade, are what really makes the difference in education. This is because kids who know more can learn more, and learn it faster. The earlier you start the process, the bigger the advantages going forward, and they build upon each other. Rinse, repeat. It is not something you can "fix" in high school or college, because learning doesn't work that way, and cognitive science proves it, regardless of the latest educational lingo.

Being poor does not necessarily imply being uneducated. There have always been poor children in the world, but many of them have overcome those challenges to do great things in their lives. We make an error when we confuse the two, because they are only partially related, no matter what politicians and other professional liars say. Believing that the two are hopelessly intertwined says, essentially, that they're victims who need to be cared for, which is not just passive and whiny, it's the wrong attitude for the poor / uneducated person to take to deal with the problem at hand.

The best way to improve the lives of the poor is to educate them well and prepare them for a future with a job and a life of productivity and abundance, and the best way to do that is to teach them a wide array of knowledge and facts about the world around them, enriching their vocabulary and reading comprehension. And this process has to start in the early years, from K-3, because of the proven benefits of the Matthew effect. This paper by Robert Pondiscio, "Poverty Fighting Elementary Schools: Knowledge Acquisition is Job One", goes into some detail about all of that. More important, it shows that other approaches, such as teaching reading as a skill, do not work, and cannot work, because reading is not really a "skill" like driving a car or playing a guitar.

Today when we talk about the poor, we tend to subconsciously mean "poor and from a dysfunctional cultural or family situation". It's the "dysfunctional cultural or family situation" - the parents and other caregivers - that are the problem, not the "poor" part, although obviously there is some serious overlap in that Venn diagram. Stated another way, kids who are poor but have quality parenting tend not to run into the kinds of problems later in life that the dysfunctional family kids do. Both groups are poor - but the dysfunctional family kids are the ones who mostly end up in jail or dead by the time they're 21.

As good parenting can lead to good outcomes, and to well-adjusted, life-affirming, socially-adaptable offspring, so too can bad parenting lead to bad outcomes, and poorly adjusted, nihilistic, socially toxic offspring. This idea should not shock or surprise, and the fact that it does shock or surprise some people is cause for concern, because it's not just common sense, it is validated by thousands of years of human history across every culture that has ever existed. It's as true and honest as the sun rising in the East every morning.

With the occasional exception - obviously, some people are just born bad, but those are very rare - children are not born stupid or anti-social; but some of them are turned that way by the influences of the world they are born into. By the people in their families, and in their communities, and by the serial interactions they have with those people. This list would include a lot of people we are supposed to pretend are not toxic to their children and to society at large, even though we know that they are.

Think gang-banger fathers who sired children at 15 with girls who see no future for themselves and figure, "why not have a kid at 14, what the hell else am I going to do with my life?" Think immature, unmarried, poorly-educated, dysfunctional young "parents", which is really the wrong word for people who do almost nothing for their kids. Think grandma is 31, mom is 14, dad is nowhere to be found. Think neighborhoods where punks hang out on street corners, selling drugs when they should be in school, and where the liquor stores are extra busy on the day the government checks arrive.

Most kids born into that world, with their lives dominated by bad influences at every turn, are doomed, although a few will escape, against all odds.

And when these kids enter school, a product of a toxic home environment that does almost nothing to cultivate or enrich their existence, it is pure folly to expect teachers and classrooms to fix what is wrong in their lives and teach them things too. Kids who worry about getting shot walking to school might not be able to focus in class very well, compared to a suburban kid who gets driven to school by Mom in some giant SUV.

Education has to build on top of culture, and work within it; education simply cannot make up for a toxic culture that causes a kid to make bad decisions and view the world as a place filled with victims and oppressors rather than a place filled with opportunities.

We view the inequality problem as an education issue, but it is more of a cultural problem. We're just not honest enough with ourselves to even begin to have that conversation.