Hannah Arendt on referenda

I decided it was about time to reread The Origins of Totalitarianism. I was pleased to come across her description of the role of referenda, which I have often thought of in the context of recent UK history, but whose origin I had forgotten:

The mob is primarily a group in which the residue of all classes are represented. This makes it so easy to mistake the mob for the people, which also comprises all strata of society… Plebiscites, therefore, with which modern mob leaders have obtained such excellent results, are an old concept of politicians who rely upon the mob.

I was also pleased to see this comment about Jules Guérin, the founder of the French Ligue Antisémite:

Ruined in business, he had begun his political career as a police stool pigeon, and acquired that flair for discipline and organization which invariably marks the underworld.

I think that is all the demonstration required for my honesty and good character.

An inspiration to associate professors everywhere

I just discovered that Donna Strickland, the woman who just won a Nobel Prize in physics, is an associate professor at the University of Waterloo.

There are 20 full professors in the department, and I bet their research is pretty fucking amazing.

Obesity and cancer

The Guardian has prominently posted a report by Cancer Research UK with a frightening headline:

Obesity to eclipse smoking as biggest cause of cancer in UK women by 2043

That’s pretty sensational. I was intrigued, because the mortality effects of obesity have long intrigued me. It seems like I’ve been hearing claims for decades, loudly trumpeted in the press, that obesity is turning into a health crisis, with the mortality crisis just around the corner. It seems plausible, and yet every time I try to dig into one of these reports, to find out what the estimates are based on, I come up empty. Looking at the data naively, it seems that the shift from BMI 20 to BMI 25 — the threshold of official “overweight” designation — has been associated in the past with a reduction in all-cause mortality. Passing through overweight to “obesity” at BMI 30 raises mortality rates only very slightly. Major increases in mortality seem to be associated with BMI over 35 or 40, but even under current projections those levels remain rare in nearly all populations.

There is a chain of reasoning that goes from obesity to morbid symptoms like high blood pressure and diabetes, to mortality, but this is fairly indirect, and ignores the rapid improvement in treatments for these secondary symptoms, as well as the clear historical association between increasing childhood nutrition and improved longevity. Concerned experts often attribute the reduction in mortality at low levels of “overweight” to errors in study design — such as confusing weight loss due to illness with healthy low weight — which has indeed been a problem and negative health consequences attributable to weight-loss diets tend to be ignored. All in all, it has always seemed to be a murky question, leaving me genuinely puzzled by the quantitative certainty with which catastrophe is predicted. Clearly increasing obesity isn’t helping people’s health — the associated morbidity is a real thing, even if it isn’t shortening people’s lives much — but I’m perplexed by the quantitative claims about mortality.

So, I thought, if obesity is causing cancer, as much as tobacco is, that’s a pretty convincing piece of the mortality story. And then I followed up the citations, and the sand ran through my fingers. Here are some problems:

Just to begin with, the convergence of cancers attributable to smoking with cancers attributable to obesity is almost entirely attributable to the reduction in smoking. “By 2043 smoking may have been reduced to the point that it is no longer the leading cause of cancer in women” seems like a less alarming possible headline. Here’s the plot from the CRUK report:
The report entirely conflates the categories “overweight” and “obese”. The formula they cite refers to different levels of exposure, so it is likely they have separated them out in their calculations, but it is not made clear.
The relative risk numbers seem to derive primarily from this paper. There we see a lot of other causes of cancer, such as occupation, alcohol consumption, and exposure to UV radiation, all of which are of similar magnitude to weight. Occupational exposure is about as significant for men as obesity, and more amenable to political control, but is ignored in this report. Again, the real story is that the number of cancers attributable to smoking may be expected to decline over the next quarter century, to something more like the number caused by multiple existing moderate causes.
Breast cancer makes up a huge part of women’s cancer risk, hence a huge part of the additional risk attributed to overweight, hence presumably makes up the main explanation for why women’s additional risk due to overweight is so much higher than men’s. The study seems to estimate the additional breast cancer risk due to smoking at 0. This seems implausible. No papers are cited on breast cancer risk and smoking, possibly because of the focus on British statistics, but here is a very recent study finding a very substantial increase. And here is a meta-analysis.
The two most common cancers attributable to obesity in women — cancer of the breast and uterus — are among the most survivable, with ten-year survival above 75%. (Survival rates here.) The next two on the list would be bowel and bladder cancer, with ten-year survival above 50%. The cancer caused by smoking, on the other hand, is primarily lung cancer, with ten-year survival around 7%, followed by oesophageal (13%), pancreatic (1%), bowel and bladder. Combining all of these different neoplasms into a risk of “cancer”, and then comparing the risk due to obesity with that due to smoking, is deeply misleading.

UPDATE: My letter to the editor appeared in The Guardian.

Anti-publishing

George Monbiot has launched an exceptionally dyspeptic broadside in the Guardian against academic publishing, and in support of the heroic/misguided data scraper Alexandra Elbakyan, who downloaded millions of papers, and made them available on a pirate server.

I agree with the headline “Scientific publishing is a rip-off. We fund the research – it should be free”, but disagree with most of the reasoning. Or, maybe it would be better said, from my perspective as an academic his complaints seem to me not the most significant.

Monbiot’s perspective is that of a cancer patient who found himself blocked from reading the newest research on his condition. I think, though, he has underestimated the extent to which funding bodies in the UK and US, and now in the EU as well, have placed countervailing pressure for publicly funded research to be made available in various versions of “open access”, generally within six months of journal publication. In many fields — though not the biomedical research of most interest to Monbiot — it has long been the case that journal publication is an afterthought, with research papers published first as “preprints” on freely accessible archive sites. Continue reading “Anti-publishing”

Hysterical costs

There’s an interesting article in the NY Times about a young legal scholar, Lina Khan, who is gaining attention for a novel and detailed argument that antitrust enforcement in the US has come to be inappropriately fixated on price as the sole anticompetitive harm, and so giving a free pass to Amazon. I have no original thoughts about the argument, but I am intrigued by the dismissive language of the critics cited in the article. One (antitrust lawyer Konstantin Medvedovsky) called her approach “hipster antitrust”. And then there’s this:

Herbert Hovenkamp, an antitrust expert at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, wrote that if companies like Amazon are targeted simply because their low prices hurt competitors, we might “quickly drive the economy back into the Stone Age, imposing hysterical costs on everyone.”

Is “hysterical costs” a real thing? Or was he just reaching for a word that would impugn the rationality of a female opponent, and came up with the classic wandering womb?

Self-deconstructing clichés: Weight-loss edition

Continuing my series on figures of speech being modified to eliminate their actual meaning, we have this comment on the discovery of the “holy grail” of obesity research. The holy grail, as a reminder, was a unique item in Christian mythology, the dish that caught Jesus’ blood, the single holy focus of the quest of King Arthur’s knights. According to legend it had magical healing properties. As for this holy grail,

Tam Fry, of Britain’s National Obesity Forum, said the drug is potentially the “holy grail” of weight-loss medicine… “I think there will be several holy grails, but this is a holy grail and one which has been certainly at the back of the mind of a lot of specialists for a long time.

As for the magical healing,

All of the other things apply – lifestyle change has got to be root and branch part of this.

And then we have to wonder — a self-deconstructing cliché twofer — what does he mean by “root and branch part”?

Feeling good about my chances on this coin flip…

People in the know are starting to think a disastrous “no deal” Brexit is now not at all unlikely. According to UK trade secretary Liam Fox

I have never thought it was much more than 50-50, certainly not much more than 60-40.

The Latvian foreign minister is only slightly more optimistic:

The chances of the UK securing a Brexit deal before it leaves the European Union in March are only 50:50, Latvia’s foreign minister has said ahead of talks with Jeremy Hunt.

Edgars Rinkevics said there was a “very considerable risk” that, with time rapidly running out, Britain could crash out of the bloc without a withdrawal agreement.

But not to worry. Rinkevics went on to say that

having said 50:50, I would say I am remaining optimistic.

I suppose, technically, he is more optimistic than Hunt. Why so gloomy, Jeremy, with your exaggerated estimate of 60% chance of disaster? I think it’s more like 50 percent. That’s a glass half full if ever I saw one…

Of course, an “optimist” is usually thought to be someone who thinks the chances of disaster are significantly less than a coin flip. Continue reading “Feeling good about my chances on this coin flip…”

Statistics, politics, and causal theories

A new headline from the Trump era:

Fewer Immigrants Are Reporting Domestic Abuse. Police Blame Fear of Deportation.

Compare it to this headline from a few months ago:

Arrests along Mexico border drop sharply under Trump, new statistics show

This latter article goes on to comment

The figures show a sharp drop in apprehensions immediately after President Trump’s election win, possibly reflecting the deterrent effect of his rhetoric on would-be border crossers.

It must be noted that these two interpretations of declining enforcement are diametrically opposed: In the first case, declining reports to police are taken as evidence of nothing other than declining reports, whereas the latter analysis eschews such a naive interpretation, suggesting that the decline in apprehensions is actually evidence of a decline in the number of offenses (in this case, illegal border crossings).

I don’t mean to criticise the conventional wisdom, which seems to me eminently sensible. I just think it’s interesting how little the statistical “facts” are able to speak for themselves. The same facts could mean that the election of Trump was associated with a decline in domestic violence in immigrant communities, and also with a reduction in border patrol effectiveness. It’s hard to come up with a causal argument for either of these — Did immigrant men look at Trump with revulsion and decide, abusing women is for the gringos? Did ICE get so caught up with the fun of splitting up families in midwestern towns and harassing Spanish speakers in Montana, that they stopped paying attention to the southern border? — so we default to the opposite conclusion.

Do loony leftists use the right-hand rule?

So Leave.EU is still active, and apparently last year they were soliciting a graphic to ridicule journalist Carole Cadwalladr:

As a mathematical scientist it strikes me as significant that she is considered to be discredited by association with three images: Flat Earth, Illuminati (though it looks to me like the Masonic eye from the US dollar bill), and what looks like a cheat sheet for an introductory electromagnetism course. Down in the corner we see that she’s been learning the right-hand rule for multiplying vectors. Right above it she has the formula for calculating power, which seems problematic.

Neanderthal science

I just listened to all of a two-hour discussion between journalist Ezra Klein and professional atheist Sam Harris, about Harris’s defense of the right-wing policy entrepreneur (as Matthew Yglesias has described him) Charles Murray, famous for his racist application of intelligence research to public policy, most famously in a notorious chapter of his book The Bell Curve. Klein pushes back effectively against Harris’s self-serving martyrdom — Harris, not unreasonably, identifies with the suffering of a wealthy and famous purveyor of quack science whose livelihood is ever-so-slightly harmed by public criticism* — but he doesn’t sufficiently engage, I think, with Harris’s contention that he is promoting the values of real science. Unfortunately, the “mainstream social science” that Harris and Murray are promoting exists only in secret messages from “reputable scientists in my inbox, who have totally taken my side in this, but who are too afraid to say so publicly”. Harris doesn’t allow for a second that there is any good-faith argument on the other side. Anyone who disagrees is merely trying to shut down scientific progress, or simply confusing scientific truth with do-gooding wishful thinking.

The truth of the matter is, Murray and other brave seekers of truth are doing the opposite of helping to clarify reality. They are wading into a swamp of confusion, and pulling out some especially stinky slime that they can hurl at disfavoured groups.

As much as Harris tries to promote Murray as a pure-hearted “content-of-our-character” anti-racist individualist, as long as “race” exists as a social factor affecting people’s self-image, the communities they belong to, and the way they are perceived by others, it remains a potent social force. When demographers argue that “race” isn’t “real”, they are saying that racial categories don’t separate natural clusters by genetic or physical traits. When Murray says, let’s stop talking about race, let’s talk about individual genetic endowments, he is saying that racial groupings have no causal effect on their own, but only label clusters whose difference arise from deep physical causes — wrong on both sides. Continue reading “Neanderthal science”