Would you like your War on Terror with Type I or Type II errors?

A recent column in National Review credited President Trump with the defeat of ISIS' stronghold in Iraq. The writer was also critical of a New York Times piece that was critical of the loss of civilian life in Iraq, seemingly at the hands of Trump.

I think it's important to synthesize these two views because they essentially tell the same story. Unlike Obama, Trump decided to give more control to his generals to do what was necessary to win the war. Obama was reluctant to do so because he wanted to minimize civilian casualties. Trump was okay with that, and thus, ISIS is now very close to being wiped out.

This brings up my new fascination with viewing the world as a continuum of Type I or Type II errors. Civilian casualties are Type I errors, false positives. They were thought to be terrorists, killed, and later identified as innocent civilians. It's a pretty impersonal way to talk about murder but it helps illustrate a larger point.

By using more caution, Obama was more comfortable with Type II errors. However, withholding a drone strike due to uncertainty about the target's innocence can lead to false negatives, identifying someone as innocent who is, in fact, a terrorist.

It's a really tough decision to make and I don't think there is an easy answer. The more you drag out the war, the more American soldiers you lose. However, the more civilians you kill, the more unpopular you become abroad and the harder nation-building becomes.

I think any praise heaped upon either leader's choice should come with an admission of the flaws that come with Type I or Type II errors in the war on terror.

Rethinking Our Criminal Justice System

People have strong feelings about the flaws in our criminal justice system, which are best described as Type I and Type II errors.

Type I errors, false positives, draw the ire of progressives. This happens when a person is falsely accused of a crime he did not commit. In the worst case, he is given the death sentence. As this is most likely to happen to minorities, members of the protected victim class, progressives view this as a form of oppression and stand on their side (the falsely convicted) and against what they perceive as "systemic racism."

Type II errors, false negatives, are the bane of conservatives' existence. This happens when a criminal is set free due to something like police tampered evidence or some other fluky event. (This phenomenon is what gave rise to the TV series Dexter.)

This can also happen if someone is sent to prison and is let out early for good behavior or is sentenced to counseling/community service in lieu of prison and proceeds to commit another heinous crime. The last part is the important one. In conservatives' view, criminals are bad and should be removed from society. Police protect us from bad people so we should stand on their side and against the lawyers and activist judges who want to put bad people back on the streets.

An Imperfect System

Our criminal justice system, like the humans who designed and run it, is imperfect. There will always be Type I and Type II errors. All we can do is tweak things so there is less of one and more of another. Which begs the question, which way should we lean?

My hope is that when people think of it in terms of Type I or Type II errors, they will see that there is no easy answer—only what is less wrong.

Got Spam?

Think of it like an email spam system. You can either tighten restrictions so you don't get spam, but will occasionally miss an email you really need. Or you can loosen restrictions, never miss an important email, but have to deal with some spam.

After much deliberation, I think Type I errors are worse, making a system that leans toward Type II errors less wrong. Not properly convicting a dangerous criminal is bad. But falsely convicting an innocent person is not only harmful for that truly innocent man, it means the real criminal gets to go free.

I look forward to changing my mind several times about this; that's the great part about being pragmatic.

The Google Memo

So some Google employee released an internal memo that leaked and people lost their minds. Then the employee lost his job. He wrote many interesting things that are great if you agree with them and offensive if you disagree with them. I'm less concerned with his conclusions than his methods. So I did some fact checking.

Gender Differences in Spending 

"Considering women spend more money than men and that salary represents how much the employees sacrifices (e.g. more hours, stress, and danger), we really need to rethink our stereotypes around power."

Survey says: on average ... I guess so.
 "Women have been shown to be associated more so with money pathologies than are men: females are more prone to compulsive spending, for instance"

Gender Differences in Personality Traits 

"Women, on average, have more ... Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance). This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs."

Survey says: sure.*
"In college and adult samples, women score higher then men on the Five Factor Model (FFM) personality traits of Neuroticism and Agreeableness."
Although it's difficult to tell when the author is talking about women in leadership roles in the tech field or just the tech field. The data on these traits, if true of women in the entire population, might explain why they are disproportionately not choosing tech. However, if women already in tech are not represented in leadership roles it would be helpful to see if these traits match up within this specific sample.

In other words, do women already in the tech field still score high on neuroticisim? Or does this specific group share more traits with the average man and therefore are being discriminated against? We need more data.

Gender Differences in Leadership 

"We always ask why we don’t see women in top leadership positions, but we never ask why we see so many men in these jobs. These positions often require long, stressful hours that may not be worth it if you want a balanced and fulfilling life."

I disagree with the implication that leadership positions are unequivocally harder. The balance that comes with the "long, stressful hours" of leadership is the ability to make decisions and operate the way you think is best.

The Whitehall Studies showed that a secretary is more likely to die from heart disease than a CEO. It's not stress that causes heart problems, it's a lack of agency.

"The studies ... found a strong association between grade levels of civil servant employment and mortality rates from a range of causes: the lower the grade, the higher the mortality rate. Men in the lowest grade (messengers, doorkeepers, etc.) had a mortality rate three times higher than that of men in the highest grade (administrators). This effect has since been observed in other studies and named the "status syndrome." (Unfortunately, the study only observed men.)

While it's possible that women are more likely to avoid stressful jobs based on their personality traits, that doesn't necessarily preclude leadership positions. I think everyone wants more control over their own life, regardless of the status/stress conflict that "leadership" brings. I don't have the data, but I would guess the search for agency and self actualization is gender neutral.

I'm grading this: unfounded.

Gender Differences in Homelessness, Work-Related Deaths, Prisons, and Dropouts

"Discriminating just to increase the representation of women in tech is as misguided and biased as mandating increases for women’s representation in the homeless, work-related and violent deaths, prisons, and school dropouts."

Survey says: yes.
A bit of a strawman, but I get his point. If men are more likely to be homeless, suffer work related deaths, be in prison, and drop out of school, is discrimination the cause? Or is some other (biological/psychological/sociological?) factor at play?

First, is this gender representation true? Yes, yes, yes, and yes.  So if it's reasonable to assume these biases against men are not strictly due to discrimination, it's possible that women's under representation in tech is also more complicated.

Missing Data

What would bolster his argument about women avoiding (in the aggregate) leadership or tech positions is if there was data about the gender differences in those who apply for these positions. If the applicant pool is 50% men and 50% women but overwhelmingly men are hired, discrimination is more likely. The memo's author seems to suggest the applicant pool heavily favors men, but I can't seem to find any data on this, but it would tell us a lot.

(Update: I did find an article here that states: "Only 18 percent of undergraduate computer science degrees and 26 percent of computing jobs are held by women. It’s worse at the top of the corporate world — just 5 percent of leadership positions in the technology industry are held by women." Give a little perspective but I'd still like to know who is applying.) However, I did find two interesting studies that seem to contradict one another.

The UC Berkely gender bias study showed that men applying to their grad programs were more likely than women to be admitted. A deeper dive into the data revealed something else:
"But when examining the individual departments, it appeared that six out of 85 departments were significantly biased against men, whereas only four were significantly biased against women. In fact, the pooled and corrected data showed a 'small but statistically significant bias in favor of women.'

The research paper by Bickel et al.[15] concluded that women tended to apply to competitive departments with low rates of admission even among qualified applicants (such as in the English Department), whereas men tended to apply to less-competitive departments with high rates of admission among the qualified applicants (such as in engineering and chemistry)."

From the Hewlett Packard internal report: Men apply for a job when they meet only 60% of the qualifications, but women apply only if they meet 100% of them.

These examples explain a bias against women that has nothing to do with discrimination, however seem to say different things about women. Do they apply to competitive college programs but not competitive jobs? The memo's author may be on to something but we need more data to confirm.

*Update: more thoughts on this. I actually can't imagine a more stressful job than being a classroom teacher, a career dominated by women. I don't buy the argument that women avoid stressful, high anxiety jobs. If we buy the author's argument that women tend to choose service jobs and men seek high status jobs, then people trade off job-related stress if it's worth it to them. Some will deal with stress if it means making a difference in a kids life. Some will deal with stress if it means a corner office and fat paycheck.

The most important books I've ever read

These aren't necessarily the best books I've ever read, but the most important as far as shaping my world view.

Walden
I can't even count how many times I've read this book and it never gets old. The best part is that you can open to any page and find something compelling in the third line of the second paragraph.

My favorite section is when he talks about a man living in a house not too far from the pond whom Thoreau would often visit. When asked what he would change about the world the man paused, laughed, and said he thinks it's fine the way it is.

Thoreau was struck by the man's simplicity, unable to decide if he was a fool or a genius. Sometimes that line is thin. (FYI, the title of this blog is a line from Thoreau).

Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen
The barefoot running movement started here. Not just a great story about this reculsive Mexican tribe that dominates ultra marathon running, it provides great research into what makes us human and why technological progress can stifle our natural abilities.

The Story of B
Tribalism is a hell of a drug.

Sex at Dawn
This draws on themes of my previous two selections by looking to our tribal instincts to explain modern pathologies (although this work goes back even further, looking at chimps and bonobos). While there have been criticisms regarding the authors' cherry-picking of evidence, they make a pretty compelling case that humans evolved to be polyamorous creatures and pair bonding is against our nature.

Antifragile
I'm pretty sure anything else I read by Nassim Taleb will make this list eventually, Antifragile was just the first I got my hands on. A brilliant guy who takes a simple concept (natural systems are strengthened by volatility, not harmed) and applies it to numerous instances. And pulls it off.

The Righteous Mind
Probably the book I recommend the most to anyone who ever has a political opinion about anything. Haidt's research shows why people believe they way they do when it comes to politics and uses that research to humanize our political opponents. This should really be required reading at all colleges.

The Three Languages of Politics
Might be jumping the gun here because I just read it, but like The Righteous Mind it really helps you understand how different groups of people see the world. Like Haidt, the author isn't trying to say one language (he uses the term "axis") is correct. Rather he preaches the importance of being able to view the world through all three lens (oppressor vs. oppressed, civilization vs. barbarism, coercion vs. liberty) to better understand why people think they way they do. This should shape the way we approach political discussions.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Philosophy writing that is at once cerebral and accessible. If nothing else, it allows you to crawl around the mind of a literal genius. You see how such a simple concept (what does "quality" actually mean?) can drive a man to madness and watch him beautifully crawl his way back to clarity and happiness.

A plea for a more inclusive intersectionality

Leonard Pitts once wrote a column about the Don Imus/Rutgers women's basketball/"nappy headed hoes" controversy that I still think about to this day. Pitts posed the question: Why can Imus get away with making fun of Oprah but not the Rutgers women's basketball players?

He said that the unwritten rule in our society is that you cannot bully. A nationally-syndicated radio host is in a position to bully a group of college female ballers. But when you're Oprah Winfrey, who the hell is Don Imus? He's the dust you brush off your shoulder as you think about your next billion dollar industry to conquor.

I think about this when I think about intersectionality, which I understand as essentially the layers of victims of oppression. The top of this layer is white men, the ultimate beneficiaries of privilege. However, the above example places a black woman in a more privileged position than a white man. How can this be?

I think we're starting to bump up against the flaws of intersectionality, which is that it does not include class, namely the poor. (I realize many definitions include class but I only hear the term deployed in reference to race or gender discrimination.) The broad brush of "white, straight, native-born men" necessarily includes high school dropouts, with no old money, living on welfare. This groups earns a fraction of a penny for every dollar Oprah makes. That's not a wage gap you hear a lot about.

These are bleak times for being in the bottom 20 percent, regardless of race or gender.

For intersectionality to truly be inclusive, it has to include poor people. Even if that means identifying a certain class of white men as victims of systemic classism.

The politicians we deserve

We get the politicians we deserve.

They are not supposed to be role models for us. We are supposed to be role models for them. The bickering, mudslinging, and refusal to compromise is a reflection of how Americans deal with each other. We keep awarding the partisans with reelection. They won't change to a conciliatory tone until we do.

Meritocracy vs. Marketocracy

The larger we grow as a population, the more we become distanced from celebrities, brands, and politicians; the more we move away from a meritocracy and into a marketocracy. The winners are not based on merit but on who can be marketed to a mass audience.

I like the idea of cutting off government funded social assistance programs, returning that money to the tax payer, and allowing them to donate to charities that provide those services instead. I like that idea ... in theory.

The problem is that donations don't go to the greatest need but to non profits with the best marketing team. Consider the chart below. Breast cancer is the fourth biggest disease killer in the US but it receives the most donations for research. Heart disease is the biggest killer and only gets the third most donations.

Quick: what do Dan Brown, JK Rowling, and John Grisham have in common? They all wrote the year's best selling novel at some point in the last 20 years. What else do they have in common? None of their books are assigned reading to college students. Marketing, not merit, determines their success.

People liked the idea of Donald Trump as president because he was a successful business person. But his wealth pales in comparison to the much more successful Warren Buffet. But Buffet could never be president because he isn't he showman that Trump is.

The Case for Moderation

There has never been a better time in America to be a moderate.

Political polarization is ever-increasing. Look at the growing rate of landslide victories by county for the last seven presidential elections. In nearly 2/3s of our country, the victory margin for Trump or Clinton wasn't even close.

Centrists, who are often mischaracterized as wishy washy, are more concerned with truth than being right. They are bound by pragmatism rather than ideology.

The untold story here is that the middle is shrinking. And now that their size is decreasing, their influence is growing. It is getting harder to convince liberals or conservatives to vote for the opposition––rank and file has become the norm. The only place left to turn is the middle. We are the ones who get to decide elections.

The old maxim "campaign in poetry, govern in prose" has been rendered obsolete so far in the Trump presidency. He's still all talk. And his supporters love him for it. If this trend continues, politicians won't have to create much policy to please their base, as long as they continue to attack their opposition in clever, bite-sized tweets.

That means politicians will be forced to woo moderates. And we won't be swayed by anything less than action.

We are all Katniss Everdeen ... or are we?

At the end of the final Hunger Games movie, Jennifer Lawrence's character Katniss Everdeen fires an arrow into the chest of Alma Coin, Julianne Moore's character, killing her. It is an important part of the story line, one in which Katniss breaks the cycle of despotic rulers plaguing the country. Although guards take her to a cell after the kill, she is soon released and spends her the rest of her days raising a family in the country with her lover.

We are with Kitness as she makes many difficult choices throughout the story and are shown how well-calibrated her moral compass is. We never question her killing of Coin.

Quick recap on that assassination: President Snow—a serial murderer, liar, and sworn enemy of Katniss—tells her that Coin is evil, will rule like he did, and is the reason Katniss' sister is dead. She believes him, kills Coin, and is released without even a trial. She had no authority to kill Coin and completely acted on her own.

She is the hero of the story.

Let's be honest, Katniss makes a very authoritarian decision here, essentially saying: "In the face of evil and corruption, I need to take it upon myself to kill a leader for the good of the country, to protect it."

How many Americans have had that same thought and replaced Julianne Moore with Trump or Obama? It wouldn't be the first time a leader was shot by a citizen.

Here's what is scary: we are all the heroes or heroines of our own story. But we all see ourselves as Katniss and never as Lee Harvey Oswald. We're always righteous and never deluded or misinformed.

That's the thing about crazy people. They don't think they're crazy. They think their violence is justified.

So when we decide it's okay to punch Neo Nazi Richard Spencer in the face, how do we know we're any different than Jared Loughner?

The Antifragility of the New England Patriots

I've been reading Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb lately and have become transfixed with his ideas. It's difficult to summarize the book because the ideas are so grand in scope, but one of the examples he talks about is building an investment portfolio that is protected from Black Swan events.

He recommends the barbell strategy, which he says will protect you from risks of volatility while still allowing you to benefit from its rewards, thus making it antifragile. Like any investment strategy, the idea is that you don't put all your eggs in one basket, you diversify, expecting that some of your investments will fail.

I think about these ideas when I think about this weekend's match up between the New England Patriots and the Pittsburgh Steelers. Not as much as how these teams match up with each other, but rather how they are built to last a season.

Pittsburgh has arguably the best running back and best receiver in the game, along with a top-notch quarterback. But should one of them suffer an injury, does anyone really think they would still find success?

The Patriots, on the other hand, have the best quarterback and the best tight end. Without them? Tom Brady missed 4 games and the team went 3-1. The team hasn't lost a game since losing Rob Gronkowski to injury in early December. The Patriots may not be antifragile (strengthened by volatility) but their coach/GM Bill Belichick manages this team like an investment portfolio more so than any other GM.

Belichick never chases big free agents, cuts/trades guys a year too soon rather than too late, is careful about whom he extends long contracts to, and favors quantity over quality when it comes to drafting (i.e., two second round picks is better than one first round pick). Why? He expects Black Swan events and builds a team immune to such scenarios. That is why they can withstand a Gronk injury or Brady suspension.

With Martellus Bennett and Jimmy Garappolo, the Patriots are protected from volatility. With huge contracts given out to Brock Osweiler and Derrell Revis, their respective teams are harmed by volatility in the form of sucking and old age. Players are investments and smart GMs better diversify their portfolio.