"Science Isn’t Broken"

"If we’re going to rely on science as a means for reaching the truth — and it’s still the best tool we have — it’s important that we understand and respect just how difficult it is to get a rigorous result. I could pontificate about all the reasons why science is arduous, but instead I’m going to let you experience one of them for yourself. Welcome to the wild world of p-hacking...

The data in our interactive tool can be narrowed and expanded (p-hacked) to make either hypothesis appear correct. That’s because answering even a simple scientific question — which party is correlated with economic success — requires lots of choices that can shape the results. This doesn’t mean that science is unreliable. It just means that it’s more challenging than we sometimes give it credit for.
Which political party is best for the economy seems like a pretty straightforward question. But as you saw, it’s much easier to get a result than it is to get an answer. The variables in the data sets you used to test your hypothesis had 1,800 possible combinations. Of these, 1,078 yielded a publishable p-value,¹ but that doesn’t mean they showed that which party was in office had a strong effect on the economy. Most of them didn’t...

P-hacking and similar types of manipulations often arise from human biases. “You can do it in unconscious ways — I’ve done it in unconscious ways,” Simonsohn said. “You really believe your hypothesis and you get the data and there’s ambiguity about how to analyze it.” When the first analysis you try doesn’t spit out the result you want, you keep trying until you find one that does. (And if that doesn’t work, you can always fall back on HARKing — hypothesizing after the results are known .)

Subtle (or not-so-subtle) manipulations like these plague so many studies that Stanford meta-science researcher John Ioannidis concluded, in a famous 2005 paper, that most published research findings are false. “It’s really difficult to perform a good study,” he told me, admitting that he has surely published incorrect findings too. “There are so many potential biases and errors and issues that can interfere with getting a reliable, credible result.”...

But the Internet is changing the way scientists distribute and discuss their ideas and data, which may make it harder to pass off shoddy papers as good science. Today when researchers publish a study, their peers are standing by online to discuss and critique it. Sometimes comments are posted on the journal’s own website in the form of “rapid responses,” and new projects such as PubMed Commons and PubPeer provide forums for rapid, post-publication peer review. Discussions about new publications also commonly take place on science blogs and social media, which can help spread information about disputed or corrected results...

But the Internet is changing the way scientists distribute and discuss their ideas and data, which may make it harder to pass off shoddy papers as good science. Today when researchers publish a study, their peers are standing by online to discuss and critique it. Sometimes comments are posted on the journal’s own website in the form of “rapid responses,” and new projects such as PubMed Commons and PubPeer provide forums for rapid, post-publication peer review. Discussions about new publications also commonly take place on science blogs and social media, which can help spread information about disputed or corrected results."... Media accounts of science tend to gloss over the nuance"
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/science-isnt-broken/?ex_cid=538fb

Related: Yahoo Answers is not Research one

(Credit to KM and CT)

"Living in a Post-Delete World"

"We're living in a moment of cognitive dissonance when it comes to deleting. The more evidence we're presented with that anything we do online can haunt us forever, the more we persist in trying to control our digital histories. A guy can send a barrage ofangry tweets at a woman he doesn’t know online and then delete each one, but he can't stop her from posting screenshots. Same goes for celebrities who hit on much-younger women through direct messages. Hillary Clinton's deleted emails are still lurking on a server somewhere, ready to be unearthed. And it’s not just evasive politicians and individual creeps who suffer from delusions of deletion. BuzzFeed and Gawker might be able to appease advertisers or revise editorial standards in real time by deleting posts, but they can't pretend the posts didn't happen. By the time the offending posts come down, we’re all already talking about them...

As Colson Whitehead describes it, "Our entire lives as B-roll, shot and stored away to be recut and reviewed at a moment’s notice when the plot changes: the divorce, the layoff, the lawsuit."

http://nymag.com/thecut/2015/08/living-in-a-post-delete-world.html

Too much data.

And I liked the conclusion this essay came to - we SHOULD stop pretending like the internet is distinct from normal life, and like we can have different rules.

"Study: Girls do better in school when taught by women "

"two economists from Texas A&M University report that schoolgirls do even better than their male counterparts when they are taught by female teachers. Specifically, the authors found a significant change in female test scores in math—long considered the last bastion of male educational dominance—when taught by a woman instead of a man...

“Female students report feeling that their female teachers are more likely to give students an equal chance to participate,” he writes, adding that “their female teachers are more likely to encourage creative expression.”

This may be great news for young women learners, but Meer believes these findings are worrisome for anyone concerned that boys are increasingly falling behind their female classmates in school. “I’m personally deeply worried about male performance in schools,” Meer wrote, citing the mounting evidence showing a large and growing gap in educational achievement between females and males."

http://qz.com/466246/study-girls-do-better-in-school-when-taught-by-women/

The stats here are reported kinda weirdly? And this is done in South Korea, which might have different systems of gender oppression from the American ones that would be relevant here. But interesting and telling!

Like, the logical leap at the end from more women in teaching --> fewer men want to be teachers --> male teachers are worse than female teachers. That's the same flawed logic used about women in traditionally male fields.

"Drone blowback in Pakistan is a myth. Here’s why"

"human rights organizations and even some former U.S. military commanders argue that drone strikes inadvertently increase terrorism by exerting a “blowback” effect. Their logic is simple. Drone strikes kill more innocent civilians than terrorists, which radicalizes affected populations and motivates them to join terrorist groups to retaliate against the United States...

Opinion polls, such as those carried out by the Pew Research Center since at least 2009, indicate widespread Pakistani anger at drone strikes. Pew’s latest 2014 survey showed that 67 percent of respondents opposed drone attacks because they kill “too many innocent people.” However, Pew data on drones is deeply misleading as the organization draws its samples mostly from areas not directly impacted by drone strikes because the Pakistan military and/or militants limit or deny access to the conflict zone. Nonetheless, in a 2011 survey conducted by a local NGO in FATA, 63 percent of the respondents thought drone strikes “are never justified.” But when the results are disaggregated, support for drone strikes is the highest in North Waziristan, the FATA agency (district) where the CIA has carried out most of its lethal drone operations, compared to the other six...

To assess local perceptions of drone strikes, I conducted 147 semi-structured interviews with adult (18 years or older) residents of North Waziristan in the summer and winter of 2015...

the data contradict the presumed local radicalization effects of drones. In fact, 79 percent of the respondents endorsed drones. In sharp contrast to claims about the significant civilian death toll from drone strikes, 64 percent, including several living in villages close to strike locations, believed that drone strikes accurately targeted militants...

Recent studies have also posited a link between drone fatalities and revenge in the FATA. When someone dies in a drone strike, the argument goes, their family members are obligated to take revenge in accordance with their ethical code of Pashtunwali. But less than 15 percent of the respondents supported the revenge thesis. As many tribal elders stressed to me, militants are motivated by a violent jihadi creed, not Pashtun customs predating Islam... 

However, almost one-fourth of the respondents affirmed drones’ negative psychological effects on locals if for no other reason than, as a journalist with extensive experience of reporting from North Waziristan told me, the perception that the “drones are always watching us” and can “strike any time.”"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/05/17/drone-blow-back-in-pakistan-is-a-myth-heres-why/?utm_campaign=5/19/16&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Sailthru

Interesting. 

I've been trying to recognize the issues that I have instinctive opinions on because of my cultural group (West Coast liberal), not because I've actually been educated about it. These are typically the areas that have the worst partisan divides and these constant policy failures and unproductive reactive media coverage. It's echo chamber stuff, where everyone in your social network has the same idea about it but no one can remember exactly how they learned about it and no one knows solid details, just a series of logical assumptions that reinforce the original idea that X needs to go or Y is necessary. And people don't seek out real information because (a) it doesn't occur to you that you might not actually know anything, and (b) most information sources are going to be political and biased and more informative about ideology than the subject matter. 

Drones are in my set of cultural disapprovals, and I need to remind myself that (a) I know nothing, really; and (b) I don't NEED to have an "opinion", at least not at this moment in my life. 

"The big money behind the ongoing student loan disaster"

"In theory, loans provide a leg up for underprivileged students attempting to move up the socioeconomic ladder. However, the path to receiving a coveted diploma is often fraught with dubious lending practices and deliberate misinformation — to say nothing of the exorbitant price tag...

In the past three years, the number of colleges and universities charging over $50,000 per year for tuition has increased by 2400%. During the same time period, the average wage of the American worker grew by a paltry 2%...

There are shockingly few consumer protections in place to guard former students from facing the collector. Wages, social security, and even disability checks may be garnished by the Department of Education if a borrower falls behind on payments.

Alarmingly, even death is not an obstacle. Unlike other kinds of debt, which can be forgiven through declaring bankruptcy, student loan debt is a specter that may haunt graduates for life. If a debtor dies, many private lenders will strong-arm their mourning family into paying off the remaining amount in full."

http://bulletin.represent.us/the-big-money-behind-the-ongoing-student-loan-disaster

I had this substitute teacher in 5th grade who randomly decided to deliver a lecture on how we should all plan to get a job and use that money to put ourselves through college. Her son had put himself through college, she told us, and employers chose him over other candidates because he was clearly responsible.

And that is yet another piece of the American Dream narrative that is now hopelessly out of date.

"TV’s Dwindling Middle Class"

"In 2007, television underwent a great expansion — beyond the major broadcast networks, beyond televisions and into all kinds of genres — just at the moment the economy shrank, and a fantasy emerged. As real people became poorer and lost their jobs, the ones on TV got richer, and their jobs seemed more beside the point. All that space to tell new stories ended up dedicated to a limited set of jobs and an increasingly homogeneous notion of what work even means...

When the economy began to tank in 2007, television was barely equipped to reflect the collapse, in part because the people who make shows were largely immune: They were well-compensated creatures of the entertainment industry, mostly unaffected by a shrinking economy. That disconnection sanitized TV against the complexities of race and class. Many sitcoms now are set in the places their creators know best: soundstages and writers’ rooms.

There is, currently, a diet version of the Huxtable-Conner dichotomy recurring on ABC. It pairs “The Middle,” about getting by in the heartland, with “Black-ish,” which asks whether prosperity dilutes blackness. But the network’s marquee show, “Modern Family,” a masterful machine that makes highly polished sitcommery, has so little to do with most modern families that its claim of modernity often feels like a joke"

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/05/01/magazine/tvs-dwindling-middle-class.html?_r=0&referer=

"Liberalism and Gentrification"

"Like a lot of cities, Washington is really two cities in the same space. We’ve got “Washington,” the place of popular imagination, gleaming white marble monuments and Aaron Sorkin speechifiers, the mostly-from-out-of-town professional class keeping the rusty wheels of state administration turning.

We’ve also got “DC,” the city distinct from the operations of the federal government, made up of “residents,” who are mostly poor and mostly black. These two cities are locked in a one-sided war of attrition, with affluent “newcomers” and their local allies conducting clear-and-hold operations against their less well-heeled neighbors...
Gentrification has always been a top-down affair, not a spontaneous hipster influx, orchestrated by the real estate developers and investors who pull the strings of city policy, with individual home-buyers deployed in mopping up operations...

Real estate is practically recreation in DC — go to a bar and instead of gabbing about local sports (few yuppies grew up with Washington’s teams, and feel little loyalty to them), people chat about the up-and-coming neighborhoods, where the deals are, which neighborhoods have undergone the most drastic change. And which are still “scary” or “sketchy.”...

This leaves DC’s professional class with a choice. If their household income is in the six-figure-range, they can generally secure mortgages in gentrifying neighborhoods, buy property, have low-wage workers fix it up for cheap, and ride those property values into a secure position in the middle class. Or they can pay exorbitant rent until they move back to Peoria. Not much of a choice. If they buy, they’re putting everything on the line, albeit a line that, in this city, has only gone one way in the past decade...

This produces racism. Racism isn’t just a bad feeling in your heart, as a liberal believes when she insists that she isn’t at all racist. It’s a force that emerges from the pressures of maintaining one’s own position, and the resentments that spring forth from this process. It produces fear and hatred of the poor for being poor, for having any pretense of being on equal footing with the propertied. It is a hatred for the potential threat to the property values which underpin a tenuous future among the professional middle class: blackness...

Recently, the Atlantic published an article on the history of gentrification in the U Street corridor of DC that ran over 4500 words. Large financial interests merited two of them. The rest was the typical shambling, rambling piece about restaurants rising from the ashes of the 1968 riots, of the fascinating existence of the nonwhite petty bourgeoisie, of Obama eating a sausage at local mainstay Ben’s Chili Bowl. In short, it had nothing new to say. Nevertheless, it had to keep saying it, for 4500 words. The repression of urban class struggle can never be total, and it weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the liberal gentry, surfacing again and again in hand-wringing op-eds."

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/09/liberalism-and-gentrification/