There’s a report that’s been floating around this week called Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape. Based on a survey of about 8,000 people, the aim was to cluster people in to different political groups, then figure out what the differences between them were.

There are many interesting things in this report and others have taken those on, but the one thing that piqued my interest was the way they categorized the groups as either “wings” of the party or the “exhausted majority”. Take a look:

It’s rather striking that traditional liberals are considered part of the “exhausted majority” whereas traditional conservatives are considered part of the “wings”.

Reading the report, it seemed they made this categorization because the traditional liberals were more likely to want to compromise and to say that they wanted the country to heal.

I had two thoughts about this:

1. The poll was conducted in December 2017 and January 2018, so well in to the Trump presidency. Is the opinion of the “traditionalist” group on either side swayed by who’s in charge? Were traditional liberals as likely to say they wanted to compromise when Obama was president?
2. How do you measure desire to compromise anyway?

It was that second question that fascinated me. Compromise seems like one of those things that it’s easy to aspire to, but harder to actually do. After all, compromise inherently means giving up something you actually want, which is not something we do naturally. Almost everyone who has ever lived in a household/shared a workplace with others has had to compromise at some point, and two things become quickly evident:

1. The more strongly you feel about something, the harder it is to compromise
2. Many compromises end with at least some unhappiness
3. Many people put stipulations on their compromising up front…like “I’ll compromise with him once he stops being so unfair”

That last quote is a real thing a coworker said to me last week about another coworker.

Anyway, given our fraught relationship with compromise, I was curious how you’d design a study that would actually test people’s willingness to compromise politically rather than just asking them if it’s generically important. I’m thinking you could design a survey that would give people a list of solutions/resolutions to political issues, then have them rank how acceptable they found each solution. A few things you’d have to pay attention to:

1. People from both sides of the aisle would have to give input in to possible options/compromises, obviously.
2. You’d have to pick issues with a clear gradient of solutions. For example, the recent Brett Kavanaugh nomination would not work to ask people about because there were only two outcomes. Topics like “climate change” or “immigration” would probably work well.
3. The range of possibilities would have to be thought through. As it stands today, most of how we address issues already are compromises. For example, I know plenty of people who think we have entirely too much regulation on emissions/energy already, and I know people who think we have too little. We’d have to decide if we were compromising based on the far ends of the spectrum or the current state of affairs. At a minimum, I’d think you’d have to include a “here’s where we are today” disclaimer on every question.
4. You’d have to pick issues with no known legal barrier to implementation. Gun control is a polarizing topic, but the Second Amendment does give a natural barrier to many solutions. I feel like once you get in to solutions like “repeal the second amendment” the data could get messy.

As I pondered this further, it occurred to me that the wings of the parties may actually be the most useful people in writing a survey like this. Since most “wing” type folks actually pride themselves on being unwilling to compromise, they’d probably be pretty clear sighted about what the possible compromises were and how to rank them.

Anyway, I think it would be an interesting survey, and not because I’m trying to disprove the original survey’s data. In the current political climate we’re so often encourage to pick a binary stance (for this, against that) that considering what range of options we’d be willing to accept might be an interesting framing for political discussions. We may even wind up with new political orientations called “flexible liberals/conservatives”. Or maybe I just want a good excuse to write a fun survey.

The month of October is a tough on for me schedule-wise, so I’m probably going to be posting a lot of short takes on random things I see. This study popped up on my Twitter feed this week and seemed pretty relevant to many of the themes of this blog: “Mediatization and the Disproportionate Attention to Negative News“.

This study took a look at airplane crashes, and tracked the amount of media attention they got over the years. I’ll note right up front that they were tracking Dutch media attention, so we should be careful generalizing to the US or other countries. The authors of the study decided to track the actual rate of airplane crashes over about 25 years, along with the number of newspaper articles dedicated to covering those crashes as a percentage of all newspaper articles published.

The whole paper is interesting, but the key graph is this one:

Now the authors fully admit that the MH17 airplane crash in 2014 (plane brought down by a missile, mostly Dutch passengers,) does account for that big spike at the end, but it appears the trend still holds even if you leave that out.

It’s an interesting data set, because it puts some numbers behind the idea that things are not always covered in the media in proportion to their actual occurrence. I think we all sort of know this intuitively in general, but it seems hard to remember when it comes to specific issues.

Even more interesting is that the authors did some analysis on exactly what these articles covered, to see if they could get some hints as to why the coverage has increased. They took 3 “eras” of reporting, and categorized the framing of the articles about the plane crashes. Here were there results:

Now again, the MH17 incident (with all its international relations implications) is heavily skewing that last group, but it’s interesting to see the changes anyway. The authors note that the framing almost definitely trends from more neutral to more negative. This supports their initial thesis that there is some “mediatization” going on. They define mediatization as “a long-term process through which the importance of the media and their spillover effects on society has increased” and theorize that “Under the conditions of mediatization, certain facets have become more prominent in media coverage, such as a focus on negativity, conflicts, and human-interest exemplars”. This tendency is the fault of “the decreasing press–party parallelism and media’s growing commercial orientation has strengthened the motives and effort to gain the largest possible audience media can get”.

As a result of this, the authors show that within the month after a plane crash is reported by the media, fewer people board planes. They don’t say if this effect has lessened or increased over time, but regardless, the media coverage does appear to make a difference. Interestingly, the found that airline safety was not related (time-series wise) to press coverage. Airlines were not more or less safe the month after a major crash than they were the month before, suggesting that crashes really aren’t taking place due to routine human error any more.

Overall, this was a pretty interesting study, and I’d be interested to see it repeated with some new media such as blogs or Twitter. It’s harder to get hard numbers on those types of things, but as their effect is felt more and more it would be interesting to quantify how they feed in to this cycle.

The AVI passed on an interesting post about a new study that replicates the finding that many psychological studies don’t replicate. Using 21 fairly randomly selected studies (chosen specifically to avoid being too sensational…these were supposed to be run of the mill), replication efforts showed that about 60% of studies held up while almost 40% could not be replicated.

This is a good an interesting finding, but what’s even more interesting is that they allowed people to place bets ahead of time on exactly which studies they thought would fail and which ones would bear out. Some of the people were other psych researchers, and some were placing bets for money. Turns out that everyone was pretty darn good at guessing which findings would replicate:

Consistently, studies that failed to replicate had fewer people guessing they would replicate. In fact, most people were able to guess correctly on at least 17 or 18 out of the 21.

Want to try your hand at it? The 80,000 hours blog put together a quiz so you can do just that! It gives you the overview of the study finding with an option to read more. about exactly what they found. Since I’m packing up for a work trip this week, I decided not to read any details and just go with my knee jerk guess from the description. I got 18 out of 21:

I encourage you to try it out!

Anyway, this is an interesting finding because quite often when studies fail to replicate, there are outcries of “methodological terrorism” or that the replication efforts “weren’t fair”. As the Put A Number on It blog post points out though, if people can pretty accurately predict which studies are going to fail to replicate, then those complaints are much less valid.

Going forward, I think this would be an interesting addendum to all replication effort studies. It would be an interesting follow up to particularly focus on the studies that were borderline….those that just over 50% of people thought might replicate, but that didn’t end up replicating. It seems like those studies might have the best claim to change the methodology and repeat.

Now go take the quiz, and share your score if you do! The only complaint I had was that the results don’t specifically tell you (I should have written it down) if you were more likely to say a study would replicate when it didn’t or vice versa. It would be an interesting personal data point to know if you’re more prone to Type 1 or Type 2 errors.

 

I was talking to my son (age 6) a few days ago, and was surprised to hear him suddenly state “Mama, I NEVER want to go to the middle of America”. Worried that I had somehow already managed to inadvertently make him in to one of the coastal elite, I had to immediately ask “um, what makes you say that?”. “The middle of America is where tornadoes are, and I don’t want to be near a tornado”, he replied. Oh. Okay then.

Apparently one of his friends at school had started telling him all about tornadoes, and he wanted to know more. Where were most of the tornadoes? Where was the middle of America anyway? And (since I’m headed to Nebraska in a week), what state had the most tornadoes?

We decided to look it up, and the first thing I found on Google image search was this map from US Tornadoes:

Source here. I was surprised to see  the highest  concentration was  in the Alabama/Mississippi area, but then I realized this was tornado warnings, not tornadoes themselves. The post that accompanies the map suggests that the high number of tornado warnings in the Mississippi area is because they have a much longer tornado season there than the Kansas/Oklahoma region that we (or at least I) normally think of as the hotbed for tornadoes.

Areas impacted by tornadoes vary a bit depending on what you’re counting, but this insurance company had a pretty good map of impacted areas here:

Measuring can vary a bit for two reasons: what you count as a tornado, and how you calculate frequency. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration puts out a few different types of numbers: average number of tornadoes, average number of strong to violent tornadoes, tornadoes by state and tornado average per 10,000 square miles. Those last two are basically to help account for states like Texas, which gets hit with more tornadoes than any other state (155 between 1991 and 2010), but mostly because it’s so big. If you correct that to look at a rate over 10,000 square miles, it dips to 5.9….well below Florida (12.2) and Kansas (11.7).

Florida coming in ahead of Kansas surprised me, but this is where strength of tornadoes comes in. Apparently Florida has lots of weak tornadoes. Looking at only strong to violent tornadoes only, we get this:

The NOAA also breaks down risk by month, so I decided to take a look and see what the risk in Nebraska was for September:

I think I can reassure the kiddo that mommy is going to be just fine. Apparently if you want to go to the middle of America but avoid tornadoes, fall is a pretty good bet.

Of course after we got the numbers down, we went to YouTube and started watching storm chaser videos. While he thought those were fascinating, he did have a reassuring number of questions along the lines of “mama, why did the people in the video see the tornado but not run away?”. Good impulse kid. Also, continuing his mother’s habit of rampant anthropomorphizing, he informed me that this video made him “very sad for the trees” (see the 35-40 second mark):

 

The news about the fire at the National Museum of Brazil was rather shocking, and I feel even worse about it now that I’ve read this roundup of some of the pieces that were lost in the flames.

Hat tip to Jonathan for sending me this great NPR piece on the school shootings that weren’t. Their reporting found that out of the 238 school shootings that got reported last year, 227 were due to errors filling out the form and 11 were actual shootings. A cautionary tale about what happens when you rely on people filling out online forms to report things like school shootings, and a good example of base rate issues in action.

As a proud member of the Oregon Trail Generation, I really liked this history of the game and why it became so ubiquitous for a certain age group.

In an interesting point/counter-point this week, we have a Vox article that explains how Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is getting unfair amounts of criticism for her errors because she’s a young female, and this Washington Examiner piece points out that much of their criticism of the criticism is just wrong. For example, the Vox piece points to several incorrect statements Paul Ryan has made, then says “No one saw these statements and said Ryan is unfit to serve in Congress. No one told him to go put training wheels back on. No one told him he wasn’t ready for primetime.” The Washington Examiner piece points out that there’s an anti-Ryan super PAC named “Unfit to Serve“,  2 years ago Nancy Pelosi actually released a long fact check of Ryan that started with the phrase “time to take the training wheels off!“, and in 2012 Obama’s re-election campaign released a statement saying Ryan was “not ready for prime time“. Oops. Now regardless of your opinion of Ocasio-Cortez or Paul Ryan, this is a good moment to remember the Tim Tebow Effect. Paul Ryan’s approval rating has never been above 48%, and the last numbers I can find suggest it’s closer to 34% or so now, with 46% of the population viewing him unfavorably. He was also popular enough to be named speaker of the house. Neither liking him nor disliking him is an underrepresented viewpoint. Ocasio-Cortez has been called “the future of the Democratic Party” by the DNC chair, and roundly criticized by many others, as the original Vox article points out. She has no approval rating polls I can find (likely since she currently holds no office). In other words, if you’re going to claim “no one is criticizing” either of these people, you may want to Google a bit first. Otherwise you’ll be wandering in to premature expostulation territory pretty quickly.

Somewhat related: a new paper on tipping points in social conventions. Apparently once around 25% of people feel a certain way about a particular issue, the majority viewpoint begins to sway. Interesting to consider in light of political parties, which tend to be about a third of the country at baseline. How much of a party base needs to be on the same page before the party starts to sway?

Also related: a new study highlights the paradox of viral outrage. People view one person scolding a bad online post positively, but they view 10 people scolding that person negatively. Interesting research, with NeuroSkeptic raising some good counter questions.

John Ioannidis is back with a good piece on the challenge of reforming Nutritional Epidemiology. I’ll probably due a summary post of this sometime soon.

Another one I want to review soon: Many Analysts, One Data Set. A paper exploring how different choices during the analysis phase can lead to very different results.

Not a thing I’m reading, but I got in to a conversation this weekend about the most worthwhile eco-friendly trade offs people had made. Mine was buying these microfiber cleaning cloths and using them instead of paper towels. They clean better (both for scrubbing and dusting), can be thrown in with any load of laundry to get them clean, and last for a long time. At around $12 a pack for 24, I am guessing we got our money back pretty quickly in what we saved on paper towels.  I got so weirdly passionate about these that I apparently inspired others to buy them, so I figured I’d pass the link along.