A few weeks ago, the Assistant Village Idiot was at my house and noted, with pleasure, that one of his favorite books (Albion’s Seed) was on my bookshelf. Sheepishly, I had to confess that the copy on my shelf was actually one he had lent me “about a year ago”.

He apparently had not remembered this, but remarked that he had bought a new copy as he was unclear what had happened to the previous one. This is a very AVI problem to have, but he also remarked that he was pretty sure the book had been lent closer to two years ago.

Being properly chagrined at this conversation, I promptly did two things:

1. Began reading the book immediately, which I hadn’t quite gotten to yet
2. Looked up the email exchange we had about the book, to figure out when exactly he had lent it to me. October 2017 – 16 months, for those keeping track at home.

In other words, my one year was generous, but I’m not quite so bad as two years. Also, if you lend me a book, you may want to put a time limit on it.

Anyway, I was thinking of this today because I got to an interesting part in the book that had to do with the cultural insights that come from noting how people tweak the truth.

For those of you who have never read Albion’s Seed, the basic premise is that different parts of the US were settled by people from different parts of England, and that led to cultural differences that persist until the current day. I’m still in the part about New England, but they note that the Puritans who settled here highly valued those who lived to older ages. This case is proved in part by the fact that the census data showed that after a certain age, more people claimed to be older than they actually were. Instead of having a relatively even spread between ages like 69, 70 and 71, they found that more people said they were 70, and fewer said they were 69:

This is the reverse of what we see today, where people tend to say they are a little younger than they are. This trend actually did not remain constant with the Puritans, rather the age bias only came in to play in the late 50s:

This struck me as fascinating, because we so often think of lying on a survey as a bad thing. However, when you have access to comparison data, people lying on surveys can actually be helpful. Since everyone tends to exaggerate in a direction that makes them look better, figuring out what direction people lie in can actually give you good insight in to what a culture values.

Things to consider.

Under the weather this week, but I wanted to post this excellent graph from Twitter, showing what different Cohen’s d effect sizes mean in practice for populations:

I love this because despite the efforts of many many people, every time you see some sort of “group x is different from group y” type assertion, you still see people claiming that this either:

1. Can’t be true because they know someone in group y who is more like group x or
2. This  is completely true and every from group x is superior to every member of group y

Both are mistakes. For a more detailed look, there’s a visualization tool here that shows what these translate in to for random superiority. In other words, if you pick one person from each group randomly, what is the chance that the one from the higher group will actually have an outcome above the other person?

• For d=.2, it’s 55.6%
• For d=.5, it’s 63.8%
• For d=.8, it’s 71.4%
• For d=2, it’s 92.1%

This is good to keep in mind, as Cohen’s d is not an overly intuitive statistic for most people. Visualizations are good to help see quickly what these differences might mean on the population level.

Not the most groundbreaking point, but one that seems to bear repeating!

As long as humans have been around and arguing with each other, there have always been disputes about what the interpretation of events. During these disputes, I’d imagine that people wished we had ways of capturing events in real time, believing that this would eliminate disagreements. If everyone could work from a shared set of facts, then of course we would end disputes, right?

While I’m sure that’s what I would have thought if I’d lived 100 years ago, our recent age of ubiquitous cell phone cameras and real time Twitter updates has taught all of us that things are not so simple. Every time we see an example of this, I think of one of my favorite words: parallax. Defined as “the apparent displacement of an observed object due to a change in the position of the observer“, it reminds me that our perception of things sometimes depends not only on the object itself, but also where you’re standing.

If this is true of physical objects, then of course emotional situations up the ante. In the best of circumstances human communication can be prone to difficulties, and differences in perception can complicate things enormously. While the promise of technology is often that it will improve communication, the reality is that it often just creates new opportunities for differences in perception.

I bring this up because I had a really interesting example of this in my personal life recently, when the same Twitter thread led to two really different conclusions.

In the middle of one of the many many Twitter controversies of the past few weeks, I noticed some rather high profile people reacting to a Twitter thread from someone I knew was an acquaintance of my brother. Their reactions were not kind, and she was generally getting kinda dragged. He and I had talked about the issue previously before I knew she had jumped in, so I texted him the thread as an example of what I considered a Bad Opinion.

Basically while opining on the issue of the day, this woman had tried to make point X, but in the process had (IMHO) completely minimized counterpoint Y to a comical extent. My opinion was shared by others, who were mocking her for it.

When my brother and I talked a few days later, I mentioned the incident, and was surprised to find he disagreed with me. He said he didn’t at all see that she had minimized point Y, and in fact had emphasized point Y with points Y₁ and Y₂. At this point I got confused….I hadn’t seen either of those points made. My mind spun a bit. My brother and I have been arguing for years, and I knew he wouldn’t make something like that up. I was in the car so I couldn’t check the Twitter thread, but I started to wonder how I had missed the points she had made. Had I been scrolling too fast? Had I been projecting? Had I jumped to conclusions? I admitted to my brother that it was possible I’d missed something, and agreed that if I had I’d misjudged his friend.

Later that night it was still bothering me, so I went back to my text and reread the Twitter thread. I read all 31 Tweets she had sent, and discovered that neither point Y₁ or Y₂ were in there. Now I was really confused. Like I said, my brother is one of my oldest sparring partners. We’ve been arguing for decades, and at this point I know he would never fabricate a point like that. I also knew that he would have mentioned it if he’d seen it elsewhere. So what the heck had happened?

As I pondered this, I reflexively hit the button “show more replies” to see if I could see some of the reactions he had mentioned and found….there were 4 more Tweets in the thread. Apparently at some point after she had sent the one she labelled 31/31 and said “thanks for listening”, she had added on a few other points. I’m not sure, but I think that because of the time delay between the initial Twetts and the add ons, Twitter hid those Tweets from anyone who accessed the thread directly. Since she had indicated it was the end of the thread, no one reading it that way would have known to go looking for other Tweets. When I clarified this with my brother, he mentioned that when I’d sent him the thread he hadn’t actually clicked on it, he’d just gone directly to her Twitter feed. Since Twitter shows things in reverse chronological order, he had read her added on points first, and then read everything else through that lens. No wonder we’d ended up with different opinions.

I was very struck by this whole thing, as it got me wondering how often this happens in our everyday lives. We believe we’re seeing the same thing due to the promises of technology, but the way it’s presented to us skews our reading. If my brother and I didn’t have years of good faith arguing behind us, I would likely not have been so curious about our different perceptions. If we weren’t both so interested in how information gets presented, we may not have cared or considered how our way of accessing the information had colored our subsequent reading of it. Our belief that we were both seeing the same thing might have actually impeded our communication rather than helped it.

I don’t have a good answer for how to get around this, but it’s good to keep in mind as more disputes are started and perpetuated online. While eliminating some pitfalls, technology does create new ones on a much grander scale. Just because you’re looking at the same thing doesn’t always mean you’re seeing the same thing.

“Terrorism is surging in the US, fueled by right-wing ideologies”

Someone posted this rather eye catching story on Twitter recently, which came from an article back in August from QZ.com. I’ve blogged about how we classify terrorism or other Mass Casualty Incidents over the years, so I decided to click through to the story.

It came with two interesting graphs that I thought warranted a closer look. The first was a chart of all terror incidents (the bars) vs the fatalities in the US:

Now first things first: I always note immediately where the year starts. There’s a good reason this person chose to do 15 years and not 20, because including 9/11 in any breakdown throws the numbers all off. This chart peaks at less than 100 fatalities, and we know 2001 would have had 30 times that number.

Still, I was curious what definition of terrorism was being used, so I went to look at the source data they cited from the Global Terrorism Database. The first thing I noted when I got to the website is that data collection for incidents is open source. Interesting. Cases are added by individual data collectors, then reviewed by those who maintain the site. I immediately wondered exactly how long this had been going on, as it would make sense that more people added more incidents as the internet became more ubiquitous and in years where terrorism hit the news a lot.

Sure enough, on their FAQ page, they actually specifically address this (bolding mine):

Is there a methodological reason for the decline in the data between 1997 and 1998, and the increases since 2008 and 2012?

While efforts have been made to assure the continuity of the data from 1970 to the present, users should keep in mind that the data collection was done as events occurred up to 1997, retrospectively between 1998 and 2007, and again concurrently with the events after 2008. This distinction is important because some media sources have since become unavailable, hampering efforts to collect a complete census of terrorist attacks between 1998 and 2007. Moreover, since moving the ongoing collection of the GTD to the University of Maryland in the Spring of 2012, START staff have made significant improvements to the methodology that is used to compile the database. These changes, which are described both in the GTD codebook and in this START Discussion Point on The Benefits and Drawbacks of Methodological Advancements in Data Collection and Coding: Insights from the Global Terrorism Database (GTD), have improved the comprehensiveness of the database. Thus, users should note that differences in levels of attacks before and after January 1, 1998, before and after April 1, 2008, and before and after January 1, 2012 may be at least partially explained by differences in data collection; and researchers should adjust for these differences when modeling the data.

So the surge in incidents might be real, or it might be that they started collecting things more comprehensively, or a combination of both. This is no small matter, as out of the 366 incidents covered by the table above, 266 (72%)had no fatalities. 231  incidents (63%) had no fatalities AND no injuries. Incidents like that are going to be much hard to find records for unless they’re being captured in real time.

The next graph they featured was this one, where they categorized incidents by perpetrator:

The original database contains a line for “perpetrator group”, which seems to speak loosely to motivation. Overall they had 20 different categories for 2017, and Quartz condensed them in to the 4 above. I started to try to replicate what they did, but immediately got confused because the GTD lists 19 of the groups as “Unknown”, so Quartz had to reassign 9 of them to some other group. Here’s what you get just from the original database:

Keep in mind that these categories are open source, so differences in labeling may be due to different reviewers.

Now it’s possible that information got updated in the press but not in the database. It seems plausible that incidents might be added shortly after they occur, then not reviewed later when more facts were settled. For example, the Las Vegas shooter was counted under “anti-government extremists”, but we know that the FBI closed the case 6 months ago stating they never found a motive. In fact, the report concluded that he had a marked disinterest in political and religious beliefs, which explains his lack of manifesto or other explanation for his behavior. While anti-government views had been floated as a motive originally, that never panned out. Also worth noting, the FBI specifically concluded this incident did not meet their definition for terrorism.

Out of curiosity, I decided to take a look at just the groups that had an injury or fatality associated with their actions (29 out of the 65 listed for 2017):

If you want to look at what incident each thing is referring to, the GTD list is here. Glancing quickly, the one incident listed as explicitly right wing was Mitchell Adkins, who walked in to a building and stabbed 3 people after asking them their political affiliation. The one anti-Republican one was the attack on the Republican Congressional softball team.

I think overall I like the original database categories better than broad left or right wing categories, which do trend towards oversimplification. Additionally, when using crowd sourced information, you have to be careful to account for any biases in reporting. If the people reporting incidents are more likely to come from certain regions or to pay more attention to certain types of crimes, the database will reflect that.

To illustrate that point, I should note that 1970 is by FAR the worst year for terrorist incidents they have listed. Here’s their graph:

Now I have no idea if 1970 was really the worst year on record or if it got a lot of attention for being the first year they started this or if there’s some quirk in the database here, but that spike seems unlikely. From scanning through quickly, it looks like there’s a lot of incidents that happened in the same day. That trend was also present in the current data, and there were a few issues I noted that looked like duplicates but also could have been two things done similarly in the same day.

Overall though, I think comparing 1970 to 2017 shows an odd change in what we call terrorism. Many of the incidents listed in 1970 were done by people who specifically seemed to want to make a point about their group. In 2017, many of the incidents seemed to involve someone who wanted to be famous, and picked their targets based on whoever drew their ire.  You can see this by the group names. In 2017 only one named group was responsible for a terrorist attack (the White Rabbit Militia one) whereas in 1970 there at least a dozen groups with names like “New World Liberation Front” or “Armed Revolutionary Independence Movement“.

Overall, this change does make it much harder to figure out what ideological group terrorists belong to, as a large number of them seem to be specifically eschewing group identification. Combine that with the pitfalls of crowd sourcing, and changing definitions, and I’d say this report is somewhat inconclusive.

Well my best read of the month was the draft manuscript of my brother’s upcoming book Addiction Nation: What the Opioid Crisis Reveals About Us . This book came out of an article he wrote about his own opioid addiction, which I blogged about here. I’m super proud of him for this book, so expect more mentions of this as the publication date draws closer. He’s asked me if I’d do some blogging with him about some of the research around this topic, so if anyone had anything in particular they’d be interested on that topic please let me know.

A recent bout of Wikipedia reading led me to this really interesting visual about the Supreme Court.  My dad had mentioned recently the idea that there used to be a “Catholic seat” on the Supreme Court, before the more recent trend of Catholics dominating SCOTUS. Turns out there’s a visual that shows how right he was:

So basically for almost 60 years there was only one Catholic justice, and they seemed to be nominated to replace each other. Then in the late 80s that all changed, and by the late 2000s Catholics would dominate the court. As it stands today the breakdown is 5 Catholics, 3 Jews, and 1 Episcopalian.

I stumbled across an interesting paper a few weeks ago called “Metacognitive Failure as a Feature of Those Holding Radical Beliefs” that found that people who held “radical” beliefs were more likely to be overconfident/less aware of their errors in neutral areas as well. I haven’t read through the full study, but the idea that radical beliefs are due to generalized overconfidence as opposed to attachment to a specific idea is intriguing.

As someone who was raised with a good dose of 90s era environmentalism, I thought this Slate Star Codex post about “What Happened to 90s Environmentalism?” was fascinating. Turns out some of the stuff we were warned about was solved, some was overhyped and some….just stopped being talked about.

On a totally different note, I’ve decided to do a cookbook challenge this year, and am cooking my way through the book 12 Months of Monastery Soups. I sort of started blogging about it, but I’m not sure if I like that format or not. If I end up ditching that, then I’m still going to post pictures on my heretofore neglected Instagram account.