Owl Man

The Baseball Game

Alpha and Beta

I recently discovered an interesting series of interviews over on Slate.com. A woman who wrote a book on being wrong interviews a random assortment of quasi-famous people.

In statistics, all matters of rightness and wrongness are dealt with probabilistically. In general, there are two classes of error: type 1 and type II (yes...statisticians are really THAT creative).

Science is the process of setting up hypotheses and then trying to disprove them. Whatever one posits as the status quo version of the world, the version the scientist wants to disprove, is set as the "null hypothesis." So, if you were trying to prove that chewing gum increases sperm count, the null hypothesis is that chewing gum does NOT increase sperm count. Most of our standard statistical techniques are set up to show the degree of certainty we can have (based on underlying probability distributions) about rejecting that null hypothesis.

However, as an inherently probabilistic enterprise, there is always the chance of error in these procedures. Type I errors occur when we reject the null hypothesis when in fact it is true. I.E, we say that chewing gum DOES increase sperm count when in fact it does not. A type II error occurs when we ACCEPT the null hypothesis when in fact it is false. We say that chewing gum has no relationship to sperm count when in fact it does.

It may not be apparent, but these two types of error are mirror images of each other. We cannot decrease the probability of one type of error without increasing the probability of the other type. In social science, we generally fear Type I errors more than we fear Type II. We would rather fail to uncover new truths about the world than to accept new "truths" that are really falsehoods. To that end, we set our Type I error rates (referred to as alpha) at 5%. We are willing to be wrong 5 times out of 100. But that means the type II error rate is going to be fairly high (the calculation of the type II error rate is a bit technical).

One of the things I really like about statistics is that it offers a precise language for describing what we do anyway. We ALL make decisions probabilistically, and we all make unconscious tradeoffs between types of error. Statistics just says, hey, let's be precise about it. I can't tell you what's "true." I can only tell you what's probable, given a certain set of assumptions. But I CAN tell you HOW probable it is. It is up to you to deal with that remainder of uncertainty.

So, I've been thinking about this in reference to the Iraq War. It appears from my fairly lazy following of the war in the media that things there have stabilized. It is not impossible that we might pull off some sort of stable, semi-democratic regime there. But, does that mean that the war was a good idea? Not necessarily. The quality of a decision has to be judged according to the probability of success that the actors faced at the time a decision was made. In the same way, a person might play the lottery and win. Does that mean it was a good idea to play the lottery? No: the expected value of a lottery ticket is negative. Playing the lottery is an objectively bad decision.

That's how we should judge policy choices as well. Let's presume for a second that the Iraq War could pass some sort of rigorous cost-benefit analysis (a big IF, but for the sake of argument, let's stipulate that). That is irrelevant for judging the decision to go to war. The question is, given the information available at the time, what was the most prudent course of action, probabilistically speaking? What was the expected value of the action? What was the variance? And what costs associated with those expected values and variances?

The Old Days

Are things better than they were
back then, things were cheaper
when the dinosaurs ate here
and the people were not yet.
I bet they are, now, better
no meteors or giant stomps
to break the day in half,
fore and aft. Before, Christ!,
look at that! It’s a goddamn
dinosaur museum! Ride that
fucker Jimmy! Push that button
Rawr! Ahh! Run! For the hills!

Blue Guy

Big stick

Last night, I read Sudhir Venkatesh's book Gang Leader for a Day. It was excellent. Some thoughts:

1. High rise public housing turned out to be a really bad idea.

2. The concentration of poor blacks in public housing was the result of a confluence of forces, variously malicious, well-intentioned, and impersonal.

malicious: the urban political machines (in the case of Gang Leader for a Day, the first Richard Daley) sought to appease powerful interests in their base. Developers, rich and middle class whites, etc. These political leaders used things like zoning and new infrastructure projects to PHYSICALLY disrupt and/or isolate poor, black communities. Redlining on the part of lending institutions also contributed to this isolation.

well-intentioned: the high-rise concept was designed to improve upon the dilapidated tenement housing that has preceeded it. The new buildings were supposed to be better quality dwellings. That was probably true, until the government stopped providing the money necessary to for upkeep.

Impersonal: simple economic forces eliminated many jobs for low-skilled people and shifted many existing and new jobs out of the ghettos and into the suburbs. Partially, this was the result of a decline in manufacturing employment generally, as we shifter to a service economy. And partially, this was the result of employers following the skill of the people.

3. Once poor people are concentrated in one place, two things happen. One. they become easy for powerful people to ignore. Two, they develop mechanisms for survival that the non-ignored places don't have to develop.

4. One of the central ways that poor people can survive in these places is to "hustle" out a living in the informal economy. Sometimes, this takes the form of simply selling normal goods and services to others (selling candy out of your home. Fixing cars. Child care. Etc). It's informal, because the income isn't reported officially. Sometimes, it takes the form of illegal activities...prostitution, drug dealing, con artistry, etc.

5. When a community is left without formal government, especially when people live in close quarters, it finds ways to adapt. In this book, the drug gangs maintain a sort of quasi-government in these anarchic towers. Moreover, community codes of behavior are enforced, both by the gangs, and by the general community. There is something to be said for having a stable community. Even the police recognize the quasi-authority of these drug leaders, helping to mediate conflict between gangs rather than focusing on "busting" people.

6. The motivation for demolishing the high rises was probably legitimate. They were definitely a bad idea, and they were implemented even more poorly, through a corrupt and inadequate Housing Authority that was consistently underfunded. But doing so had a price for the residents of those places. They had learned how to survive under the rules of that place. When they were forced to move, many of their ways of surviving (based on the social capital they had developed in that place) were eliminated.

7. I tend to dismiss conservative rhetoric about the inevitability of government inefficiency. But I am obliged to admit the following: social problems are often deeper and more complex than our public policies are capable of dealing with. And sometimes, yes...the solution creates more problems than it solves. To me, the lesson isn't that we should give up trying to improve the world through policy. It's just that, when problems are deep and complex, we have to be prepared to think deeply and complexly, and equally important, to SPEND deeply and complexly. When a young black man who has been given an inadequate education must decide between taking public transportation to get to a minimum wage job an hour and a half away, a job with virtually no prospect of advancement, and joining a drug gang where, if he is lucky and works hard, he will earn both respect from his peers and a living wage...well, i'm not sure that offering some midnight basketball is going to make a big difference.

If you got a big problem, you better be willing to get a big stick.

Feedback Loops

I'm going to go ahead and say this: most problems exist because of some sort of feedback loop process. Feedback loops lead to exponential change rather than linear change. problem 1 <----> problem 2 = problems squared.

Personal relationships are like this. They progress or regress at exponential rates, because of this feedback loop issue. I'll use William James's example about a party. A dude goes to a party, refusing to talk to anybody unless he has convincing evidence that they like him. So, he sits in the corner and waits. Nobody talks to him. He concludes that they don't like him. He doesn't go to any more parties. However, if he had shown up, believing that they liked him, he would have chatted with them, would have felt at ease, and they probably would have liked him.

Feedback loops. Vicious Cycles.

These things pop up everywhere in public policy. Let's take the problem of ghetto poverty. After desegregation, whites and middle-class minorities fled central cities in droves, aided by public policies that subsidized suburban mortgages while failing to do the same for central cities, leaving the poor and working class behind. As the economy shifted from a manufacturing to a service focus, industries increasingly located in suburbs, because they needed a more highly educated workforce. So, now, the poor central city neighborhoods lacked good jobs for low-skilled people. Unemployment rose. With limited access to low-skill, high-wage jobs, ghetto residents became increasingly despirited, with low educational attainment and involvement with the underground economy (drugs/prostitution). These crime markets led to increased street violence, which in turn instills a culture of stand-offishness, which makes residents even less likely to succeed in a customer-service oriented economy. One cannot list "drug dealer" on a resume. Moreover, poverty means that few have cars, creating a "spatial mismatch," where they can't physically get to where the jobs actually are. Many who have the skills to succeed simply leave, leaving behind even higher concentrations of despair. These conditions (real and imagined) make whites even more scared of the dark skinned and the poor, making them even more likely to keep fleeing if and when they move into the white suburbs.

Feedback loops. Vicious Cycles.

I eat too much. That makes me heavier. That makes it harder for me to move around. That makes me more likely to sit around and eat. That makes me heavier.

If problems were easy to fix, they'd be fixed. The ones that hang around are feedback loop problems. Exponential problems. Cyclical problems. All around tough nuts to crack.

Sleep!