Scott: "Now I am concerned that colonels work the same way as doctors. I wonder what else is like this."
Possibly everyone, but definitely lawyers.
Some law professors are not being great on what the law actually is, conflating it with what they think the law should be. Lawyer-commenters often get more airtime if they lack compunction about drifting outside their field of expertise.
Some lawyers are also not of especially sound disposition and thus end up with odd analyses which is can be viewed as a feature rather than a bug as far as attention received.
That's not to say there isn't a lot of high quality lawyer commentary out there on social media, just that "being a lawyer," and "speaking correctly on the law" is not a single circle on your Venn diagram.
The economic harm of hurricanes being primarily due to hurricanes that made landfall in the US is one of those things that sounds rather odd in isolation, but isn't really that surprising:
1. Of course it's only hurricanes that make landfall that cause economic harm because, you know, we do not have floating cities.
2. Only a few coasts are at much risk of hurricane (well, tropical storm, they don't call them hurricanes everywhere) landfall. It's basically southeast coasts in the Northern Hemisphere and northwest coasts in the Southern Hemisphere. Much of the rich world is not in those areas, besides the SE United States. So... you cause the most economic harm when you hit built up rich areas, the available places to hit are not mostly built up and rich, the US is the exception, thus hurricanes that make landfall in the US are most of the economic harm.
Possibly related to the hurricane comments, I once spent a bunch of time reading through papers about climate change, and my understanding from the papers I read was that they mostly measured temperature from times before thermometers with changes in tree ring size. As far as I could tell though, most (all?) of the papers I read cited the same tree ring study. I just remember being frustrated because I had trouble finding anything that didn't refer almost immediately to the tree ring study (and that was probably my own incompetence, but it was notable at the time).
There is a lot of talk about scientific consensus, but if the consensus is all built on top of *a* study or two, then it's all contingent on that study being completely correct. And I recall something from like a Feynman lecture about the oil drop experiment, where everyone got the wrong experimental result for however many years because the first person did it wrong, so it's not like this doesn't happen.
There's just a huge difference between 100 different studies that all reach the same conclusion and 100 studies that all depend on 1 study being correct that reach the same conclusion.
And to clarify, I absolutely don't want this to sound like some sort of gotcha, I act in my daily life as if climate change is happening and I believe that basically all of the climate change mitigations are good policy in any case, I just was reminded of this by the hurricane thing...
There are definitely crazy colonels out there, and generals and admirals as well. Usually they can't cause too much damage; sometimes a shooting war will leave them unsupervised long enough to cause a minor catastrophe. The really major operations get enough scrutiny that lone crazies are usually kept in check.
And, glad to be of service providing a reality check on this one. Sometimes the best way to debunk a myth is to post it online and wait for the "Someone is WRONG on the internet!" effect to kick in. The SSC/DSL/ACX community is a pretty good place for that, and I'm glad you're willing to take the heat for occasionally linking to something wrong so that it can be properly corrected.
The "let's bring back privateering" one is a perennial mistake that needs a perennial debunking, and this was our turn :-)
Good point about the Night of Terror at the end. If there is anything I am learning from listening to The Data Detective is that you need to step back and look at the big picture (including trend-lines).
Michael Sullivan points out that it's mainly southeast coasts in the northern hemisphere and northeast coasts in the southern hemisphere that get them, and then when you look at the contingent facts about the shapes of the currently existing continents on that map, you can see that the Caribbean islands, southeastern United States, Philippines, and Taiwan are really the main targets. Given the relative poverty (and thus low financial cost of disasters) of the Philippines and the Caribbean islands, the only thing that needs explaining is why Taiwan hasn't accounted for much more of the damages.
Incidentally, tornadoes are also highly concentrated in the United States, and probably account for a large fraction of the non-hurricane, weather-related disaster damages. Something like 75% of all tornadoes occur in the United States, because North America is the only continent with a large flat region stretching all the way from a warm body of water (the Gulf of Mexico) to the Arctic, so that you can get a warm moist air mass interacting with a cool dry one. Most of the rest of the world, in the current continental configuration, has either mountains or moderately temperate bodies of water in between.
I often wonder just how different global climate was in times of Pangaea, or what weather phenomena existed in the Mediterranean basin during the periods when it was dry. If North America is unique right now, how differently would the world have thought of hurricanes and tornadoes under a different continental configuration? Are there other sorts of weather patterns that would have been common under other configurations that we don't even remark on now?
I'm pretty sure that everything works like colonels and doctors. I see them everywhere I'm familiar with, and see no reason that they wouldn't pop up in fields where I don't have the expertise to detect them. This guy in particular is associated with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which is a top-rank think tank, so I assume he's either Doctor Oz, or read too much Horatio Hornblower growing up and has a bee in his bonnet on this particular issue. (Actually, think tank people are at least somewhat suspect. CNAS published a report a few years ago that failed basic math, and it's still getting wide coverage. I may have vented at it a bit. https://www.navalgazing.net/The-Range-of-a-Carrier-Wing)
To expand some on USNI: Most of the stuff they publish is very trustworthy. My procedure for finding a book on a naval topic I'm not familiar with is to go to the wiki page and look for a book that they published in the citations. It works really well, and the dud books I've gotten from them are of the "this is worse than other USNI books I already had on the subject" rather than "this is wrong". Seriously, naval history in the English-speaking world would not be nearly as healthy as it is without them. Likewise, their news service is very good. Proceedings does a specific job, but that job is to carry out debate, not inform outsiders.
Disclaimer: Yes, I'm a USNI member. No, I'm not getting paid by them, although if they want to do so, they know where to find me.
"Now I am concerned that colonels work the same way as doctors. I wonder what else is like this." I can tell you one thing, that you probably already knew, but is so prevalent that it hurts: economists.
Presumably an organisation like Harvard has less strict auditing than a public company such as Enron or Carillion.
If your accountants get creative in a way that misleads shareholders into thinking your company is doing better than it really is, financial regulators will throw the book at you.
Like with jurisprudence, you can't formalise every accounting edge case nor can you explicitly react fast enough to new technologies. Accountants are going to have to use their judgement decide how fast the brand new iphones you've started handing out to employees will depreciate. and the auditors will have to judge whether their judgement is reasonable.
@Scott: unrelated to the current post, but hopefully-useful info for next Mantic Monday: Tyler Cowen has a Bloomberg article about a new prediction market, Kalshi, which has FTC approval.
Just a few more things about public sector and non-profit accounting. It can be confusing for a few reasons. One, although financial statements have to adhere to GAAP, they have different rules than private sector because the budgets themselves have to be reported purely on a cash basis, not accrual, so to make the financial statements somewhat useful as something that can be used to compare to a budget, the financial statements use something called modified accrual accounting, which is not quite cash or accrual and has extremely inscrutable rules that I never quite learned right even when I was studying this stuff. Even as an accountant, reading them might not make much sense unless you take the time to learn the bases they're using.
Two, the budgets and financial statements for anything legislatively appropriated has to actually be somewhat accurate and not misleading. They can't misclassify expenses to trick people. The big caveat, of course, is that the military has a history of not producing auditable financial statements thanks to the pre-GFEBS impracticality of keeping accurate records in war zones when you're making multimillion dollar cash payments to friendly warlords while getting shot at, plus the sheer urgency with which money is spent and the broad leeway given to field commanders to spend certain amounts pretty much however they see fit. Regular government departments and agencies can't get away with this kind of thing.
Non-profits are not really subject to those reporting rules, though. The one form they are all required to submit annually and can't get too creative with is the IRS Form 990, which is the non-profit tax return. Obviously, they don't pay taxes, but this is the form they use to prove their expenses and revenues actually qualify them for tax-exempt status. The only exception to the filling requirement is churches, but all other non-profits have to both file and make the filed form publicly available, so you can always see how any non-profit is spending its money.
Something else to keep in mind with budgets is they are not financial statements. A budget is a plan for how to spend money. How much you actually spend and on what may differ from the budget, which is the purpose of financial statements in public sector organizations. They're not accountable to shareholders, but they are accountable to the legislatures giving them money to spend on specific things to show that is what they actually spent it on. In Harvard's case, they're not accountable to legislators either. They are only accountable to their donors, but that is still only true with respect to expense categories when the donors earmark donations for specific activities. Very large donors often do this and it's why you see hospital wings and academic buildings with names of rich people, because they specifically gave money with the caveat that you have to use it to build a building with their name on it. Donations that are not earmarked, however, only need to be spent promoting whatever your mission is, and of course not to the financial benefit of any specific individual employee or stakeholder. You can pay very well if your donors don't object, but nobody can get a percentage of donations or pay contingent on financials, for instance, which is the opposite of "non-profit."
Funnily enough, if you never saw it, the whole loophole for churches was a huge plot point in The Wire, where drug lords were laundering money by donating to local churches that then gave them and their families sham jobs doing nothing but earning huge paychecks as consultants and also paid off politicians (which, of course, churches are not actually allowed to do, but it's hard to stop them if they don't have to report financials and can't be audited).
"I would also like to suggest a distinction between class-first leftists and "class-first leftists." Class-first leftists spend most of their time talking about class, are usually found in obscure academic journals and activist groups, and often have wonkish opinions about monetary policy and the labor theory of value. "Class-first leftists" spend most of their time talking about identity politics, can be found on Twitter, Fox News, or erstwhile pro-Trump outfits like American Affairs, and have often have wonkish opinions about how Republicans are correct to say that idpol is bad and Russiagate is fake, prefaced with "as a class first leftist,""
And which group of people has more success promoting class-first leftist ideas? The class-first leftists who are found in obscure journals and activist groups and that nobody knows about, or the "class-first leftists" on Twitter and Fox News?
"Local police departments in Brazil go on strike all the time (I remember 3 different ones while I was in school in Salvador in the early aughts) and no big terrible things happen."
Well, when police went on strike in Espírito Santo (a Brazilian state) a few years ago, chaos ensued. More chaos than the usual in Brazil, I mean. You know, much more chaos than the usual. In Brazil. http://metrocosm.com/homicides-brazil-vs-world/ So I don't where that generalization about no big terrible things happening is coming from. I, however, admit police forces in Brazil do go on strike frequently, and the country still exists, so there's that.
"There’s a problem in medicine where people think doctors are trustworthy experts. While this is often true, there are about a million doctors, and some tiny fraction of them are insane."
Hardly a problem limited to doctors (or retired naval officers).
What fraction of "news" consists of "local lunatic says <thing> about <group>, hence proving that all of city/state/nation/race/gender/occupational-class/age-range are every bit as bad as you thought they were"?
Re: Higher threat response in conservatives. I watched an interview with Derren Brown ( famous British magician and hypnotist ) where he talked about learning of this study and how he decided to test it out and see if he could use it to make an act for one of his shows.
He found that with no other trickery, if he asked people to spend a few minutes imagining images of decay like maggots then those people would give more right wing views afterwards, and if they imagined being invunerable like a super hero then they would give more left wing views. I think he had then answer a questionaire before and after.
I'm not sure this could be considered evidence but I found it interesting and it seems to back up conservatives having higher threat response. The interview is done by Russell Brand on his youtube channel if anyone wanted to watch.
In re higher threat response in conservatives: There's been a lot of research (or maybe a modest amount of research which gets repeated a lot in the media) to find out about deep personality differences between liberals and conservatives.
Should deep personality differences be a strong hypothesis? Or is it just that people want to believe the other side is very different?
As I recall, the public version of these research results don't include information about the size of the overlap. This is also something that annoys me about reports on "the difference" between men and women. The only thing I'm sure of (I haven't seen any research on the subject) is that there are a lot of people who want for there to be a difference.
>My thought when reading that article was “this sounds crazy…but wait! It’s written by a colonel and published by the US Naval Institute! That sounds just wacky enough to make a good link!” Now I am concerned that colonels work the same way as doctors. I wonder what else is like this.
The Media. Something you hear often from "famous" people is something like: "You never realize how wrong the media is until you're the subject of a story". This can be outright falsehoods, misrepresentations, etc.
A lot of people think something "must be true" because it's published in the NY Times or the Washington Post but that is a terribly unreliable mental shortcut and something more and more people seem to reevaluate each year.
Unfortunately, this is something Scott now has some personal experience with. I'd be interested to hear how Scott's "trust" of stories published by majors papers has changed.
Re: Sanders. I think people are placing too much focus on what Sanders and his campaign actually did and underplaying perceptions. Perceptions do not need to be accurate to drive votes.
Sanders did not buy into #DefundThePolice but AOC did, and AOC endorsed Sanders. I would also guess that most people who support #DefundThePolice also endorse Sanders if they endorsed any candidate. For a lot of voters that's enoguh to put Sanders into the DefundThePolice tribe.
I think this would hold true if you used even weaker links. Sanders is the "most left wing candidate", #DefundThePolice is a "most left" issue. Thus it affects perception of Sanders.
It's a general truism among pollsters that most poeple just don't pay much attention to politics. Tracking how much Sanders (or any candidate) says about a topic in speeches, interviews etc, isn't going to be an accurate representation of how ordinary people perceive them.
>The study does find this field is complicated and hard to measure, but so is every field,
This is one of the things that has always made me suspicious about the actual extent of the 'replication crisis'. As someone who has done psychophysics and neuroscience research, I feel I can say that it can be very hard to do correctly, and you often need years of practice and mentorship in a specific narrow technique in order to administer it correctly and get clean data.
And of course, if you do a bad job and collect a ton of noise and random artifacts, then the most likely result of your data analysis is 'no result'.
When I think about how much effort it took to properly implement a backwards-masking task or make sure an eye tracker is working properly or remove all signs of electrical interference from an MEG machine, I shudder to think about someone trying to replicate my results who hasn't spent years learning those techniques and is just picking them up off the shelf to 'see if those results replicate'.
Double-shudder if they themselves are believers in the 'replication crisis' and have a subconscious or explicit motive to want to get no results... getting no results is what happens by default if you're not incredibly careful and just don't do a very good job running the experiment.
The upper-class Trump supporter is pretty much like most other trump supporters. They rely on politics primarily for entertainment purposes because they believe it has little-to-no impact on their lives. They are too blasé about it to have any idea how dangerous that monster is to our democracy, but forming opinions gets the juices flowing like betting on the horses or trading equities. (Or even just rooting for your football team, or baseball team for the more pastoral types.) "Ah, he's just trump being trump," is all they need to hear if anything on MSNBC happens to momentarily trouble them. To this day I don't believe the vast majority of trump voters have a clue about how much damage he did and got away with, or the fact that the democracy we know would have died if he had been reelected.
I say "the democracy we know" because I am well aware that many out there would dearly love to change it. Unfortunately for them the changes they want to see cannot be made except through amending the Constitution. Unfortunately for the rest of us they've decided it's more amusing to own the libs by lying, cheating and stealing, and laughing off a daily barrage of outrageous behavior.
Think what you will about this classless ragtag coalition that, for now, holds a small majority. We won't sit back and abide all this lying, cheating and stealing shit because some of you think this bastard is entertaining! What's more worrying is what all the truly Machiavellian types have learned from all this entertainment. The next attack on our democracy is likely to be much more sophisticated.
I'll venture to say that about half of Trump's supporters fit the upper-class (clueless) category; whether actually upper class or not they believe they have the luxury of treating politics as if it doesn't affect them. Most of the other half are attuned socially to support whoever yells the loudest in a bar. (All the better if he likes to shove aside inferior world leaders while fawning jealously over dictators.) And maybe half of the bar-bully lovers are the basket of true Deplorables. And I leave a point or two for some of the outlying Machiavellian puppetmasters swimming around in the media, the senate, etc -- making up 100 percent.
"Existing records of past Atlantic tropical storm or hurricane numbers (1878 to present) in fact do show a pronounced upward trend, which is also correlated with rising SSTs (e.g., see blue curve in Fig. 4 or Vecchi and Knutson 2008). However, the density of reporting ship traffic over the Atlantic was relatively sparse during the early decades of this record, such that if storms from the modern era (post 1965) had hypothetically occurred during those earlier decades, a substantial number of storms would likely not have been directly observed by the ship-based “observing network of opportunity.” We find that, after adjusting for such an estimated number of missing storms, there remains just a small nominally positive upward trend in tropical storm occurrence from 1878-2006. Statistical tests indicate that this trend is not significantly distinguishable from zero (Figure 2). In addition, Landsea et al. (2010) note that the rising trend in Atlantic tropical storm counts is almost entirely due to increases in short-duration (<2 day) storms alone. Such short-lived storms were particularly likely to have been overlooked in the earlier parts of the record, as they would have had less opportunity for chance encounters with ship traffic."
This is on their "Global Warming and Hurricanes" page.
The bias from pre-satellite era data not picking up hurricanes out at sea is significant.
We basically only have 50ish years of hurricane data, and for reasons we still don't understand, the 1960s-1980s were a particularly quiet era for hurricanes. Start drawing your line from that era, you'll see an upward trend - but if you go back to the late 19th and early 20th century you see a number of extremely active hurricane seasons. Indeed, 2005 isn't even the all-time leader for ACE (Accumulated Cyclone Energy) in a season - the winner is 1933, and that's probably an underestimate as it was from the pre-satellite era. 1893 and 1926 are #3 and #4, respectively, and again, are probably underestimates (especially 1893).
it is interesting that the military experts who offered the critique on the privateering idea did not address the success of Somali pirates. Who are probably much less advanced than any US based pirated would be, and yet it took a long-ish time and non trivial effort to control them.
Re: the discussion about privateers, was it not obvious to everyone that that was an April Fools joke? It's published in April of 2020.
Matt Yglesias claims that Sanders moved concretely to the left on immigration and on gun control.
What's there to be threatened about in Denmark? In the eyes of some there, Muslims, apparently. https://abc3340.com/news/nation-world/denmarks-anti-muslim-politician-rasmus-paludan-and-the-free-speech-debate https://www.brookings.edu/research/islam-as-a-floating-signifier-right-wing-populism-and-perceptions-of-muslims-in-denmark/
Scott: "Now I am concerned that colonels work the same way as doctors. I wonder what else is like this."
Possibly everyone, but definitely lawyers.
Some law professors are not being great on what the law actually is, conflating it with what they think the law should be. Lawyer-commenters often get more airtime if they lack compunction about drifting outside their field of expertise.
Some lawyers are also not of especially sound disposition and thus end up with odd analyses which is can be viewed as a feature rather than a bug as far as attention received.
That's not to say there isn't a lot of high quality lawyer commentary out there on social media, just that "being a lawyer," and "speaking correctly on the law" is not a single circle on your Venn diagram.
The economic harm of hurricanes being primarily due to hurricanes that made landfall in the US is one of those things that sounds rather odd in isolation, but isn't really that surprising:
1. Of course it's only hurricanes that make landfall that cause economic harm because, you know, we do not have floating cities.
2. Only a few coasts are at much risk of hurricane (well, tropical storm, they don't call them hurricanes everywhere) landfall. It's basically southeast coasts in the Northern Hemisphere and northwest coasts in the Southern Hemisphere. Much of the rich world is not in those areas, besides the SE United States. So... you cause the most economic harm when you hit built up rich areas, the available places to hit are not mostly built up and rich, the US is the exception, thus hurricanes that make landfall in the US are most of the economic harm.
Possibly related to the hurricane comments, I once spent a bunch of time reading through papers about climate change, and my understanding from the papers I read was that they mostly measured temperature from times before thermometers with changes in tree ring size. As far as I could tell though, most (all?) of the papers I read cited the same tree ring study. I just remember being frustrated because I had trouble finding anything that didn't refer almost immediately to the tree ring study (and that was probably my own incompetence, but it was notable at the time).
There is a lot of talk about scientific consensus, but if the consensus is all built on top of *a* study or two, then it's all contingent on that study being completely correct. And I recall something from like a Feynman lecture about the oil drop experiment, where everyone got the wrong experimental result for however many years because the first person did it wrong, so it's not like this doesn't happen.
There's just a huge difference between 100 different studies that all reach the same conclusion and 100 studies that all depend on 1 study being correct that reach the same conclusion.
And to clarify, I absolutely don't want this to sound like some sort of gotcha, I act in my daily life as if climate change is happening and I believe that basically all of the climate change mitigations are good policy in any case, I just was reminded of this by the hurricane thing...
There are definitely crazy colonels out there, and generals and admirals as well. Usually they can't cause too much damage; sometimes a shooting war will leave them unsupervised long enough to cause a minor catastrophe. The really major operations get enough scrutiny that lone crazies are usually kept in check.
And, glad to be of service providing a reality check on this one. Sometimes the best way to debunk a myth is to post it online and wait for the "Someone is WRONG on the internet!" effect to kick in. The SSC/DSL/ACX community is a pretty good place for that, and I'm glad you're willing to take the heat for occasionally linking to something wrong so that it can be properly corrected.
The "let's bring back privateering" one is a perennial mistake that needs a perennial debunking, and this was our turn :-)
Good point about the Night of Terror at the end. If there is anything I am learning from listening to The Data Detective is that you need to step back and look at the big picture (including trend-lines).
Incidentally, you can find many great visualizations of the tracks of all historically recorded hurricanes/tropical cyclones: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/7079/historic-tropical-cyclone-tracks
Michael Sullivan points out that it's mainly southeast coasts in the northern hemisphere and northeast coasts in the southern hemisphere that get them, and then when you look at the contingent facts about the shapes of the currently existing continents on that map, you can see that the Caribbean islands, southeastern United States, Philippines, and Taiwan are really the main targets. Given the relative poverty (and thus low financial cost of disasters) of the Philippines and the Caribbean islands, the only thing that needs explaining is why Taiwan hasn't accounted for much more of the damages.
Incidentally, tornadoes are also highly concentrated in the United States, and probably account for a large fraction of the non-hurricane, weather-related disaster damages. Something like 75% of all tornadoes occur in the United States, because North America is the only continent with a large flat region stretching all the way from a warm body of water (the Gulf of Mexico) to the Arctic, so that you can get a warm moist air mass interacting with a cool dry one. Most of the rest of the world, in the current continental configuration, has either mountains or moderately temperate bodies of water in between.
https://www.ustornadoes.com/2013/07/25/from-domestic-to-international-tornadoes-around-the-world/
I often wonder just how different global climate was in times of Pangaea, or what weather phenomena existed in the Mediterranean basin during the periods when it was dry. If North America is unique right now, how differently would the world have thought of hurricanes and tornadoes under a different continental configuration? Are there other sorts of weather patterns that would have been common under other configurations that we don't even remark on now?
I'm sorry but it is not the case that police going on strike in Brazil leads to nothing happening. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Military_Police_of_Esp%C3%ADrito_Santo_strike#Violence_outbreak
I'm pretty sure that everything works like colonels and doctors. I see them everywhere I'm familiar with, and see no reason that they wouldn't pop up in fields where I don't have the expertise to detect them. This guy in particular is associated with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which is a top-rank think tank, so I assume he's either Doctor Oz, or read too much Horatio Hornblower growing up and has a bee in his bonnet on this particular issue. (Actually, think tank people are at least somewhat suspect. CNAS published a report a few years ago that failed basic math, and it's still getting wide coverage. I may have vented at it a bit. https://www.navalgazing.net/The-Range-of-a-Carrier-Wing)
To expand some on USNI: Most of the stuff they publish is very trustworthy. My procedure for finding a book on a naval topic I'm not familiar with is to go to the wiki page and look for a book that they published in the citations. It works really well, and the dud books I've gotten from them are of the "this is worse than other USNI books I already had on the subject" rather than "this is wrong". Seriously, naval history in the English-speaking world would not be nearly as healthy as it is without them. Likewise, their news service is very good. Proceedings does a specific job, but that job is to carry out debate, not inform outsiders.
Disclaimer: Yes, I'm a USNI member. No, I'm not getting paid by them, although if they want to do so, they know where to find me.
"Now I am concerned that colonels work the same way as doctors. I wonder what else is like this." I can tell you one thing, that you probably already knew, but is so prevalent that it hurts: economists.
Presumably an organisation like Harvard has less strict auditing than a public company such as Enron or Carillion.
If your accountants get creative in a way that misleads shareholders into thinking your company is doing better than it really is, financial regulators will throw the book at you.
Not that WeWork won't give it a go (https://qz.com/1685919/wework-ipo-community-adjusted-ebitda-and-other-metrics-to-watch-for/) with the caveat that they have to be clear about which numbers are made according to Generally Accepted Accounting Practices and which are cooked.
Like with jurisprudence, you can't formalise every accounting edge case nor can you explicitly react fast enough to new technologies. Accountants are going to have to use their judgement decide how fast the brand new iphones you've started handing out to employees will depreciate. and the auditors will have to judge whether their judgement is reasonable.
> Now I am concerned that colonels work the same way as doctors. I wonder what else is like this.
Everything. Literally every profession with more than a dozen practitioners works like that.
@Scott: unrelated to the current post, but hopefully-useful info for next Mantic Monday: Tyler Cowen has a Bloomberg article about a new prediction market, Kalshi, which has FTC approval.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-04/predicting-the-future-of-prediction-markets
https://kalshi.com/
Just a few more things about public sector and non-profit accounting. It can be confusing for a few reasons. One, although financial statements have to adhere to GAAP, they have different rules than private sector because the budgets themselves have to be reported purely on a cash basis, not accrual, so to make the financial statements somewhat useful as something that can be used to compare to a budget, the financial statements use something called modified accrual accounting, which is not quite cash or accrual and has extremely inscrutable rules that I never quite learned right even when I was studying this stuff. Even as an accountant, reading them might not make much sense unless you take the time to learn the bases they're using.
Two, the budgets and financial statements for anything legislatively appropriated has to actually be somewhat accurate and not misleading. They can't misclassify expenses to trick people. The big caveat, of course, is that the military has a history of not producing auditable financial statements thanks to the pre-GFEBS impracticality of keeping accurate records in war zones when you're making multimillion dollar cash payments to friendly warlords while getting shot at, plus the sheer urgency with which money is spent and the broad leeway given to field commanders to spend certain amounts pretty much however they see fit. Regular government departments and agencies can't get away with this kind of thing.
Non-profits are not really subject to those reporting rules, though. The one form they are all required to submit annually and can't get too creative with is the IRS Form 990, which is the non-profit tax return. Obviously, they don't pay taxes, but this is the form they use to prove their expenses and revenues actually qualify them for tax-exempt status. The only exception to the filling requirement is churches, but all other non-profits have to both file and make the filed form publicly available, so you can always see how any non-profit is spending its money.
Something else to keep in mind with budgets is they are not financial statements. A budget is a plan for how to spend money. How much you actually spend and on what may differ from the budget, which is the purpose of financial statements in public sector organizations. They're not accountable to shareholders, but they are accountable to the legislatures giving them money to spend on specific things to show that is what they actually spent it on. In Harvard's case, they're not accountable to legislators either. They are only accountable to their donors, but that is still only true with respect to expense categories when the donors earmark donations for specific activities. Very large donors often do this and it's why you see hospital wings and academic buildings with names of rich people, because they specifically gave money with the caveat that you have to use it to build a building with their name on it. Donations that are not earmarked, however, only need to be spent promoting whatever your mission is, and of course not to the financial benefit of any specific individual employee or stakeholder. You can pay very well if your donors don't object, but nobody can get a percentage of donations or pay contingent on financials, for instance, which is the opposite of "non-profit."
Funnily enough, if you never saw it, the whole loophole for churches was a huge plot point in The Wire, where drug lords were laundering money by donating to local churches that then gave them and their families sham jobs doing nothing but earning huge paychecks as consultants and also paid off politicians (which, of course, churches are not actually allowed to do, but it's hard to stop them if they don't have to report financials and can't be audited).
"I would also like to suggest a distinction between class-first leftists and "class-first leftists." Class-first leftists spend most of their time talking about class, are usually found in obscure academic journals and activist groups, and often have wonkish opinions about monetary policy and the labor theory of value. "Class-first leftists" spend most of their time talking about identity politics, can be found on Twitter, Fox News, or erstwhile pro-Trump outfits like American Affairs, and have often have wonkish opinions about how Republicans are correct to say that idpol is bad and Russiagate is fake, prefaced with "as a class first leftist,""
And which group of people has more success promoting class-first leftist ideas? The class-first leftists who are found in obscure journals and activist groups and that nobody knows about, or the "class-first leftists" on Twitter and Fox News?
"Local police departments in Brazil go on strike all the time (I remember 3 different ones while I was in school in Salvador in the early aughts) and no big terrible things happen."
Well, when police went on strike in Espírito Santo (a Brazilian state) a few years ago, chaos ensued. More chaos than the usual in Brazil, I mean. You know, much more chaos than the usual. In Brazil. http://metrocosm.com/homicides-brazil-vs-world/ So I don't where that generalization about no big terrible things happening is coming from. I, however, admit police forces in Brazil do go on strike frequently, and the country still exists, so there's that.
"There’s a problem in medicine where people think doctors are trustworthy experts. While this is often true, there are about a million doctors, and some tiny fraction of them are insane."
Hardly a problem limited to doctors (or retired naval officers).
What fraction of "news" consists of "local lunatic says <thing> about <group>, hence proving that all of city/state/nation/race/gender/occupational-class/age-range are every bit as bad as you thought they were"?
Re: Higher threat response in conservatives. I watched an interview with Derren Brown ( famous British magician and hypnotist ) where he talked about learning of this study and how he decided to test it out and see if he could use it to make an act for one of his shows.
He found that with no other trickery, if he asked people to spend a few minutes imagining images of decay like maggots then those people would give more right wing views afterwards, and if they imagined being invunerable like a super hero then they would give more left wing views. I think he had then answer a questionaire before and after.
I'm not sure this could be considered evidence but I found it interesting and it seems to back up conservatives having higher threat response. The interview is done by Russell Brand on his youtube channel if anyone wanted to watch.
In re higher threat response in conservatives: There's been a lot of research (or maybe a modest amount of research which gets repeated a lot in the media) to find out about deep personality differences between liberals and conservatives.
Should deep personality differences be a strong hypothesis? Or is it just that people want to believe the other side is very different?
As I recall, the public version of these research results don't include information about the size of the overlap. This is also something that annoys me about reports on "the difference" between men and women. The only thing I'm sure of (I haven't seen any research on the subject) is that there are a lot of people who want for there to be a difference.
>My thought when reading that article was “this sounds crazy…but wait! It’s written by a colonel and published by the US Naval Institute! That sounds just wacky enough to make a good link!” Now I am concerned that colonels work the same way as doctors. I wonder what else is like this.
The Media. Something you hear often from "famous" people is something like: "You never realize how wrong the media is until you're the subject of a story". This can be outright falsehoods, misrepresentations, etc.
A lot of people think something "must be true" because it's published in the NY Times or the Washington Post but that is a terribly unreliable mental shortcut and something more and more people seem to reevaluate each year.
Unfortunately, this is something Scott now has some personal experience with. I'd be interested to hear how Scott's "trust" of stories published by majors papers has changed.
Re: Sanders. I think people are placing too much focus on what Sanders and his campaign actually did and underplaying perceptions. Perceptions do not need to be accurate to drive votes.
Sanders did not buy into #DefundThePolice but AOC did, and AOC endorsed Sanders. I would also guess that most people who support #DefundThePolice also endorse Sanders if they endorsed any candidate. For a lot of voters that's enoguh to put Sanders into the DefundThePolice tribe.
I think this would hold true if you used even weaker links. Sanders is the "most left wing candidate", #DefundThePolice is a "most left" issue. Thus it affects perception of Sanders.
It's a general truism among pollsters that most poeple just don't pay much attention to politics. Tracking how much Sanders (or any candidate) says about a topic in speeches, interviews etc, isn't going to be an accurate representation of how ordinary people perceive them.
>Now I am concerned that colonels work the same way as doctors. I wonder what else is like this.
Social Justice advocates, for a start.
>The study does find this field is complicated and hard to measure, but so is every field,
This is one of the things that has always made me suspicious about the actual extent of the 'replication crisis'. As someone who has done psychophysics and neuroscience research, I feel I can say that it can be very hard to do correctly, and you often need years of practice and mentorship in a specific narrow technique in order to administer it correctly and get clean data.
And of course, if you do a bad job and collect a ton of noise and random artifacts, then the most likely result of your data analysis is 'no result'.
When I think about how much effort it took to properly implement a backwards-masking task or make sure an eye tracker is working properly or remove all signs of electrical interference from an MEG machine, I shudder to think about someone trying to replicate my results who hasn't spent years learning those techniques and is just picking them up off the shelf to 'see if those results replicate'.
Double-shudder if they themselves are believers in the 'replication crisis' and have a subconscious or explicit motive to want to get no results... getting no results is what happens by default if you're not incredibly careful and just don't do a very good job running the experiment.
The upper-class Trump supporter is pretty much like most other trump supporters. They rely on politics primarily for entertainment purposes because they believe it has little-to-no impact on their lives. They are too blasé about it to have any idea how dangerous that monster is to our democracy, but forming opinions gets the juices flowing like betting on the horses or trading equities. (Or even just rooting for your football team, or baseball team for the more pastoral types.) "Ah, he's just trump being trump," is all they need to hear if anything on MSNBC happens to momentarily trouble them. To this day I don't believe the vast majority of trump voters have a clue about how much damage he did and got away with, or the fact that the democracy we know would have died if he had been reelected.
I say "the democracy we know" because I am well aware that many out there would dearly love to change it. Unfortunately for them the changes they want to see cannot be made except through amending the Constitution. Unfortunately for the rest of us they've decided it's more amusing to own the libs by lying, cheating and stealing, and laughing off a daily barrage of outrageous behavior.
Think what you will about this classless ragtag coalition that, for now, holds a small majority. We won't sit back and abide all this lying, cheating and stealing shit because some of you think this bastard is entertaining! What's more worrying is what all the truly Machiavellian types have learned from all this entertainment. The next attack on our democracy is likely to be much more sophisticated.
I'll venture to say that about half of Trump's supporters fit the upper-class (clueless) category; whether actually upper class or not they believe they have the luxury of treating politics as if it doesn't affect them. Most of the other half are attuned socially to support whoever yells the loudest in a bar. (All the better if he likes to shove aside inferior world leaders while fawning jealously over dictators.) And maybe half of the bar-bully lovers are the basket of true Deplorables. And I leave a point or two for some of the outlying Machiavellian puppetmasters swimming around in the media, the senate, etc -- making up 100 percent.
Per NOAA:
"Existing records of past Atlantic tropical storm or hurricane numbers (1878 to present) in fact do show a pronounced upward trend, which is also correlated with rising SSTs (e.g., see blue curve in Fig. 4 or Vecchi and Knutson 2008). However, the density of reporting ship traffic over the Atlantic was relatively sparse during the early decades of this record, such that if storms from the modern era (post 1965) had hypothetically occurred during those earlier decades, a substantial number of storms would likely not have been directly observed by the ship-based “observing network of opportunity.” We find that, after adjusting for such an estimated number of missing storms, there remains just a small nominally positive upward trend in tropical storm occurrence from 1878-2006. Statistical tests indicate that this trend is not significantly distinguishable from zero (Figure 2). In addition, Landsea et al. (2010) note that the rising trend in Atlantic tropical storm counts is almost entirely due to increases in short-duration (<2 day) storms alone. Such short-lived storms were particularly likely to have been overlooked in the earlier parts of the record, as they would have had less opportunity for chance encounters with ship traffic."
This is on their "Global Warming and Hurricanes" page.
The bias from pre-satellite era data not picking up hurricanes out at sea is significant.
We basically only have 50ish years of hurricane data, and for reasons we still don't understand, the 1960s-1980s were a particularly quiet era for hurricanes. Start drawing your line from that era, you'll see an upward trend - but if you go back to the late 19th and early 20th century you see a number of extremely active hurricane seasons. Indeed, 2005 isn't even the all-time leader for ACE (Accumulated Cyclone Energy) in a season - the winner is 1933, and that's probably an underestimate as it was from the pre-satellite era. 1893 and 1926 are #3 and #4, respectively, and again, are probably underestimates (especially 1893).
it is interesting that the military experts who offered the critique on the privateering idea did not address the success of Somali pirates. Who are probably much less advanced than any US based pirated would be, and yet it took a long-ish time and non trivial effort to control them.