Author: steinsaltz

Moral panic panic: How much ridicule are the lives of 4500 children a year worth?

As though it need to defend its title as the world’s leading provider of smug, The New Republic has published a piece by NY Times religion reporter Mark Oppenheimer (MO hereafter) about how irrational everyone is. This disturbs him, because when he was growing up, when all was right with the world, “It was taken for granted in my house… that only right-wingers were mad enough to oppose scientifically tested public-health measures.” He describes what he calls “The New Puritanism”, starting from opposition to water fluoridation in Portland (which doesn’t look like an archetypically puritanical cause to the untrained eye), and moving on to Kids Today:

At a birthday party for a three-year-old, I was hit with the realization that most of the parents around me were in the grip of moral panic, the kind of fear of contamination dramatized so well in The Crucible. One mother was trying to keep her daughter from eating a cupcake, because of all the sugar in cupcakes. Another was trying to limit her son to one juice box, because of all the sugar in juice. A father was panicking because there was no place, in this outdoor barn-like space at some nature center or farm or wildlife preserve, where his daughter could wash her hands before eating. And while I did not hear any parent fretting about the organic status of the veggie dip, I became certain there were such whispers all around me.

Now, this could be dismissed as a dreary attempt to channel PJ O’Rourke, or some comparable swaggering humourist, with a cookie-cutter tall tale, but it’s stuffed with all kinds of weird. He hallucinates “whispers all around” about the organic status of the veggie dip, and yet he insists it is the others whose mental stability is in doubt. With that in mind, one might suspect that the father was not “panicking”, but was simply asking where his daughter could wash her hands before eating, which was certainly the custom when I was a child, though perhaps not in Oppenheimer’s antediluvian childhood.

He cites The Crucible, presumably both as a touchstone of left-wing right-thinking and as a marker of his own cultural sophistication, but has clearly never read or seen it. While “witchcraft” are often taken as a metonym for fear of moral contamination, Miller’s play dramatizes political manipulation of mob psychology.

But putting aside MO’s paranoid-pretentious MO, I am fascinated by his comments

When I was a child, birthday parties involved cake, ice cream, and Chuck E. Cheese pizza, or pizza-like substance; and trips to the grandparents’ house involved root-beer floats and late-night viewings of Benny Hill with my grandfather, who liked the T&A humor. I never washed my hands before I ate. And I turned out splendidly.

So, we started with fluoridation of water, which is a “scientifically tested public-health measure” that only a crazy person could oppose, but washing hands before eating — at a “barn-like space” where, presumably, it is not absurd to suppose the children may have been exposed to animal feces — is the kind of over-the-top fear of moral contamination (not just bacterial contamination) that invites mockery.

Now, MO’s aforementioned paranoid delusions may cause one to question his splendid self-appraisal, but he is certainly not alone in trumpeting the formulation “When I was a child we all did X, and we all turned out alright,” where X is some dangerous or unedifying activity that educated middle-class parents today try to limit or eliminate. An extreme version is this text that got forwarded to me a few years back:

To Those of Us Born 1930 – 1979

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they were pregnant. They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can and didn’t get tested for diabetes. Then after that trauma, we were put to sleep on our tummies in baby cribs covered with bright colored lead-base paints. We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, locks on doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had baseball caps not helmets on our heads. As infants & children, we would ride in cars with no car seats, no booster seats, no seat belts, no air bags, bald tires and sometimes no brakes. Riding in the back of a pick- up truck on a warm day was always a special treat. We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle. We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and no one actually died from this. We ate cupcakes made with Lard, white bread, real butter and bacon. We drank FLAV-OR- AID made with real white sugar…. We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents. We would get spankings with wooden spoons, switches, ping pong paddles, or just a bare hand and no one would call child services to report abuse…

You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated so much of our lives for our own good. While you are at it, forward it to your kids so they will know how brave and lucky their parents were. Kind of makes you want to run through the house with scissors, doesn’t it?

The implication is that the kids are all softies and the parents are anxious killjoys. I heard a stand-up comedian a few years back complaining about bicycle helmets: “When I was a kid we all fell off our bikes. We didn’t fall on our heads. If we did, no one died. Have kids’ heads gotten softer?”

Except, of course, that it’s not true that no one died. This is a good example of how people deal with small risks: Some are treated as zero, others are exaggerated. And part of the phenomenon (though I’ve never seen anyone analyse this process in detail) is that people fixate on whatever the current largest risks are, and often succeed in pushing them down. At that point, a new danger pops up that was always there, but masked by a larger risk, and so psychologically zeroed out. Thus, when I was growing up, in the 1970s, public health officials weren’t very concerned with children’s head injuries from bicycle accidents because there were far more of them from automobile accidents in the absence of seat belts, not to mention all the poisonings from medications without child-resistant packaging. If the risk of dying

To put some numbers on it: In the US, in 1998, about 6500 children under the age of 15 died in accidents. In 1981 (the earliest year whose statistics I have easily available at the moment) the number was 9000. In that time, the population under 15 increased from 49 to 60 million. In other words, if the society had held onto its habits of eschewing bicycle helmets, leaving the medications out, riding in the back of a pickup truck and all the rest, we’d have more than 4500 extra dead children a year. How awesome would that be?

That’s not to say that all concerns about health and nutrition and environment are reasonable — or that, even if they are reasonable, that the actions one would take to prevent or mitigate harm would not impose considerable costs, even such that they might be judged to outweigh the benefits. But instead of mockery and “I turned out alright” populism, we need to be clear on what the benefits are: 4500 fewer children being buried every year. And that’s ignoring the costs of nonlethal sickness and injury, the extra miscarriages and stillbirths, and the long-term damage to lungs and other organs that we now know were caused by all those smoking and drinking parents.

Update: The comedian I was thinking of was a woman, but here’s another comedian making fun of bicycle helmets for emasculating our children; in this version, he’s not asking why heads got softer, but why the pavement is harder. Same joke.

Extradition for thee but not for me

CIA agent Robert Lady, convicted of kidnapping and sentenced to 7 1/2 to 9 years in prison in Italy, has been arrested in Panama under an international arrest warrant. For some reason, though, the Panamanians have not held him, but have allowed him to board a plane bound for the US.

He probably think he has cleverly eluded justice. The joke is on him, though, because as we all know, the US is now a passionate advocate of international cooperation in arresting international fugitives, and of the rigorous enforcement of extradition treaties. So we can be sure that Mr Bob (as the Italian press has apparently taken to calling him) will be on his way back to Italy in handcuffs soon. Unless… But it can’t be that kidnapping (and abetting torture) is seen as a less weighty crime than publishing embarrassing political secrets. Can it?

Privacy rights in Germany

Unlike the US, Germany has a constitutional court that doesn’t kowtow as soon as the government yells “National Security”. Whereas the US Supreme Court has chosen to rewrite Catch 22 as a legal judgement, saying effectively that no one has standing to challenge secret government surveillance programs, because they are secret, hence no one can prove (using information the government will allow to appear in open court) that they have been affected.

Deutschlandfunk’s science programme Forschung Aktuell has been reporting this week on problems of information technology, security, and privacy, and today I learned (transcript in German)

In 2001 the police chief of Baden-Württemberg Erwin Hetger demanded a programme of advance data storage, by which all connection data of web surfers in Germany would be stored for six months.

“I think we cannot allow the Internet to become effectively a law-free zone. Hence my clear and unambiguous recommendation: Whoever moves about on the Internet must be willing to accept that his connection data are stored for a fixed period of time.”

The Bundestag did, in fact, pass such a law in 2007. But in 2010 the Constitutional Court annulled the law.

While such advance data storage is not necessarily impossible under the German constitution, the constitutional requirements for such an action would be very strict, and were not satisfied by the law that was passed.

The president of the Constitutional Court Hans-Jürgen Papier specifically emphasised that if such data were to be stored, it would have to be done in a more secure way than the law had required.

The comparison of this process — where the basic parameters of privacy rights and government snooping are set by the normal democratic process of legislatures passing laws that are then reviewed in publicly accessible court decisions — just makes clear how supine the US courts and Congress have been, as has been the UK parliament.
Continue reading “Privacy rights in Germany”

Avastin didn’t fail the clinical trial. The clinical trial failed Avastin.

Writing in the NY Times, management professor Clifton Leaf quotes (apparently with approval) comments that ought to win the GlaxoSmithKline Prize for Self-Serving Distortions by a Pharmaceutical Company. Referring to the prominent recent failure of Genentech’s cancer drug Avastin to prolong the lives of patients with glioblastoma multiforme, Leaf writes

Doctors had no more clarity after the trial about how to treat brain cancer patients than they had before. Some patients did do better on the drug, and indeed, doctors and patients insist that some who take Avastin significantly beat the average. But the trial was unable to discover these “responders” along the way, much less examine what might have accounted for the difference. (Dr. Gilbert is working to figure that out now.)

Indeed, even after some 400 completed clinical trials in various cancers, it’s not clear why Avastin works (or doesn’t work) in any single patient. “Despite looking at hundreds of potential predictive biomarkers, we do not currently have a way to predict who is most likely to respond to Avastin and who is not,” says a spokesperson for Genentech, a division of the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche, which makes the drug.

This is, in technical terms, a load of crap, and it’s exactly the sort of crap that double-blind randomised clinical trials are supposed to rescue us from. People are generally prone to see patterns in random outcomes; physicians are probably worse than the average person, because their training and their culture biases them toward action over inaction.

It’s bizarre, the breezy self-confidence with which Leaf (and the Genentech spokesman) can point to a trial where the treatment group did worse than the placebo group — median survival of 15.7 months vs. 16.1 months — and conclude that the drug is helping some people, we just can’t tell which they are. If there are “responders”, who do better with Avastin than they would have otherwise, then there must also be a subgroup of patients who were harmed by the treatment. (If the “responders” are a very small subset, or the benefits are very small, they could just be lost in the statistical noise, but of course that’s true for any test. You can only say the average effect is likely in a certain range, not that it is definitely zero.)

It’s not impossible that there are some measurable criteria that would isolate a subgroup of patients who would benefit from Avastin, and separate them from another subgroup that would be harmed by it. But I don’t think there is anything but wishful thinking driving insistence that there must be something there, just because doctors have the impression that some patients are being helped. The history of medicine is littered with treatments that physicians were absolutely sure were effective, because they’d seen them work, but that were demonstrated to be useless (or worse) when tested with an appropriate study design. (See portacaval shunt.)

The system of clinical trials that we have is predicated on the presumption that most treatments we try just won’t work, so we want strong positive evidence that they do. This is all the more true when cognitive biases and financial self interest are pushing people to see benefits that are simply not there.

Blackmailing Uncle Sam

Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist responsible for the NSA disclosures, may be going a bit too far into spy noir territory. In a recent interview he announced that

Snowden has enough information to cause harm to the U.S. government in a single minute than any other person has ever had. The U.S. government should be on its knees every day begging that nothing happen to Snowden, because if something does happen to him, all the information will be revealed and it could be its worst nightmare.

I am not making moral judgements. I find this rhetoric understandable, though clearly, whatever Snowden’s motives — and no one in politics has unmixed motives, nor should they be expected to have — by placing this dangerous information in the hands of persons unknown with some kind of dead-man’s trigger, he’s clearly increased the likelihood of it being released accidentally, which is quite a responsibility to take upon oneself.

But I’m thinking about Greenwald’s position. So far, despite the wish of some grandstanding congressmen to criminalise his role, Greenwald has clearly been a journalist. The Obama administration seems eager to draw some kind of line between “real journalists” and everyone else to prevent his administration’s witchhunting from completely gutting press freedom, so they might have played along. But they seem eager to prosecute national security leaks to the extent that they can find a bright line separating a given case from the bulk of journalism. Greenwald has given it to them, and I would be surprised if there were not a secret grand jury preparing charges against him for attempting to pervert the course of justice, or whatever the US federal term is for that.

However he meant it, Greenwald’s announcement sounds an awful lot like the language of blackmail, and that’s surely plenty of a hook for them to hang him on. This moves him from being a reporter to being a participant or, as I’m sure they’ll phrase it in the indictment, a co-conspirator. Blackmailing the feds is a pretty heavy game to play.

[Update 7/15: Greenwald has commented on his remarks, and it definitely looks as though Reuters has gone out of its way to frame a defence of Snowden’s motivations — he has held on to a lot of information that could be of great value to enemies of the US which he has not divulged, though he could reap significant rewards for it — in the theatrical argot of a mobster’s shakedown. That doesn’t change the fact that it’s not hard to imagine creative prosecutors twisting this story into a noose for an uncomfortable journalist; and that Snowden is playing a very dangerous game — just to make one obvious point, not everyone who might be in a position to harm him is opposed to his info bomb being detonated. Beginning with his current hosts…)
Continue reading “Blackmailing Uncle Sam”

Flyin’ kites in the rain: Reflections on American fairy tales

What’s the connection between Ben Franklin and Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly’s character in the 1952 film musical Singin’ in the Rain), aside from being the Americans most famous for felicitous activities during a rainstorm? I was watching the film recently, and was struck by the opening scene, which I had forgotten, where the hero, movie star Don Lockwood, narrates his biography, and we see Lockwood’s intimation of a sophisticated, upper-class upbringing — “[Mum and dad] sent me to the finest schools, including dancing school. . .   We rounded out our apprenticeship at an exclusive dramatics academy… We played the finest symphonic halls in the country.” — humorously intercut with images on the screen of low-class reality — tap-dancing in a pool hall and fiddling in burlesque theatres, piano in honky tonks and whorehouses, being slapped by parents, etc.

It occurred to me that in one paradigm old-world fairy tale, a seemingly riffraff protagonist is revealed to be a person of consequence when his hitherto concealed high birth is recognised. In the American transformation, a seemingly foppish aristocrat is revealed to be a person of consequence when his hitherto concealed low birth and plucky struggle to the top are revealed. And as in so much else, this feature of American character and culture was first limned by Benjamin Franklin, in his famous “Information to those who would remove to America“:

According to these opinions of the Americans, one of them would think himself more obliged to a genealogist, who could prove for him that his ancestors and relations for ten generations had been ploughmen, smiths, carpenters, turners, weavers, tanners, or even shoemakers, and consequently that they were useful members of society; than if he could only prove that they were gentlemen, doing nothing of value, but living idly on the labor of others.

An even more pithy statement of a similar world view, that I have seen attributed to Franklin though without being able to find the reference (so that I suspect the source is in fact someone else):

I care not who my ancestors were. I care who my descendants will be.

Framing the question on electronic surveillance

Quinnipiac has published a poll purporting to find the following facts:

  • 55 percent of Americans say Edward Snowden is a “whistle-blower”, as opposed to 34 percent calling him a “traitor”;
  • voters say 45 – 40 percent the government’s anti-terrorism efforts go too far restricting civil liberties, a reversal from a January 10, 2010 survey … when voters said 63 – 25 percent that such activities didn’t go far enough to adequately protect the country.
  • While voters support the phone-scanning program 51 – 45 percent and say 54 – 40 percent that it “is necessary to keep Americans safe,” they also say 53 – 44 percent that the program “is too much intrusion into Americans’ personal privacy”.

Now, the most striking thing to me is that 88 percent of the people surveyed in January 2010 thought they knew enough about the government’s intrusion on personal privacy to even formulate an opinion — in particular, that 63 percent thought they knew enough about the scope to say that it didn’t go far enough.

But even more interesting is the formulation of the question that got 54% to agree that “the phone-scanning program” is “necessary”. (It is noteworthy that at least 4% of those surveyed both support the program and believe that it is “too much intrusion”. They must have a different concept than I have of either the word “support” or “too much”.) What they were asked was

Do you support or oppose the federal government program in which all phone calls are scanned to see if any calls are going to a phone number linked to terrorism?

Now, if you put it that way, I’d kind of support it myself. “Scanning” sounds pretty innocuous, and “phone numbers linked to terrorism” sound pretty ominous. But that’s only a small part of what’s being done. They are receiving all metadata — that’s a lot more than just a phone number — and storing them, presumably, forever. They are data-mining to try to identify patterns. They are already, or are preparing to, store the content of all communications, so they may be examined in depth if there is sufficient reason in the future.

And how much of this is this about terrorism? We don’t know. And even if it is about terrorism right now, it won’t take long before enthusiastic or corrupt government officials think of all kinds of other legitimate purposes of government that could be promoted by just breaking down some of the petty bureaucratic restrictions on use of the data.

To put it in the crassest terms: This sort of unfocused big-data espionage may be marginally useful for catching terrorists, but it seems certain to be far more useful for pressuring or destroying political opponents of the anti-terror policies.

Insider trading and the birth of America

In Walter Isaacson’s biography of Benjamin Franklin I’ve just encountered the following anecdote. Edward Bancroft was secretary to the American commissioners — Franklin, Silas Deane, and Arthur Lee — who were in Paris negotiating the crucial military alliance with France. The British were desperate to forestall this alliance with their own peace overtures:

The British sent to Paris the most trusted envoy they could muster, Paul Wentworth, their able spymaster. At the time, Wentworth was angry with his secret agent Bancroft for sending inside information to his stock-speculating partner before sending it to Wentworth, who was also a speculator. King George III, upset by the bad news that his spies were giving him, denounced them all as “untrustworthy stock manipulators”, but he reluctantly approved Wentworth’s secret mission.

And indeed,

years later, when he was haggling with the British over back pay, Bancroft wrote a secret memo, telling the foreign secretary that this was “information for which many individuals here would, for purposes of speculation, have given me more than all that I have received from the government.” In fact, Bancroft had indeed used this information to make money speculating on the markets. He had sent 420  pounds to his stock partner in England… and provided him word of the impending treaties, so that it could be used to short stocks… Bancroft ended up making 1000 pounds in the transaction.

I find it delicious to think that American independence was made possible, or was, at least, expedited by British agents’ clumsy insider trading.

(Anyone who is interested in the culture of speculation and market-manipulation driven by political information, and also enjoys a good philosophical yarn, should read Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle.)

Though this be madness, yet there is method in it

One of the key lessons of emotional game theory is that madness — or, at least, the convincing appearance of madness, which may amount to the same thing — can be an effective strategy. You can win some otherwise unwinnable games (Chicken being a favourite example) by convincing your opponent that you are too fixated, angry, or suicidal to be persuaded by threats and/or appeals to what may seem to be mutual best interests.

This seems to me the only way to understand the response of the US government to Edward Snowden. If the most recent news reports are to be believed, the US has somehow persuaded European governments to practically kidnap the president of Bolivia, because they believe Snowden might be on the presidential plane, flying to asylum. The lesson to future whistleblowers is clear: There’s no point trying to game out the usual protocols, the law, or even what might seem to be too much trouble or too embarrassing for the Americans. If you embarrass the US government, and particularly its clandestine services, they will go full berserker.

That was something of the sense I had after 9/11: The torture, the pointless war in Iraq, it wasn’t so much a means to an end, as a direct demonstration that the US was not going to respond in any proportionate, rational, or even legal manner.

The actions of the Europeans are pretty shameful. At the same time that they are howling about the crimes that Snowden has uncovered, they are conniving at US attempts to treat him as a criminal, rather than a political dissident. Germany, among others, has dismissed Snowden’s application for asylum by saying that he first needs to get to Germany before it can be considered; but, of course, they won’t let him come now that the US has revoked his passport.