3 seats in, all Labour in the northeast. Exit polls indicate meltdown for the LDs, but the Tories doing much better than they expected. Also that UKIP will be the third party in England and Wales in terms of votes. Speculate/Enjoy/Analyze away.

Or “I thought Science was a serious peer-reviewed publication…”

A study published today in Science by Facebook researchers using Facebook data claims to examine whether adult U.S. Facebook users engage with ideologically cross-cutting material on the site. My friend Christian Sandvig does an excellent job highlighting many of the problems of the piece and I encourage you to read his astute and well-referenced commentary. I want to highlight just one point here, a point that in and of itself should have stood out to reviewers at Science and should have been addressed before publication. It concerns the problematic sampling frame for the study and how little prominence it gets in the publication (i.e., none, it’s all in the supplemental materials).

Sampling is crucial to social science questions since biased samples can have serious implications for a study’s findings. In particular, it is extremely important that the sampling methodology be decoupled from the substantive questions of interest in the study. In this case, if you are examining engagement with political content, it is important that sampling not be based on anything related to users’ engagement with politics. However, that is precisely how sampling was done here. I elaborate below, but in sum, although the study boasts 10 million plus observations, only seen in the supplementary materials is the fact that only a tiny percentage (single digits) of Facebook users were eligible to make it into the sample in the first place. These are folks who explicitly identify their political affiliation on the site, i.e., people who probably have a different relationship to politics than the average user. They are also relatively active users based on another sampling decision, again, something confounded with the outcome of interest, i.e., engagement with political materials.

Not in the piece published in Science proper, but in the supplementary materials we find the following:

All Facebook users can self-report their political affiliation; 9% of U.S. users over 18 do. We mapped the top 500 political designations on a five-point, -2 (Very Liberal) to +2 (Very Conservative) ideological scale; those with no response or with responses such as “other” or “I don’t care” were not included. 46% of those who entered their political affiliation on their profiles had a response that could be mapped to this scale.

To recap, only 9% of FB users give information about their political affiliation in a way relevant here to sampling and 54% of those do so in a way that is not meaningful to determine their political affiliation. This means that only about 4% of FB users were eligible for the study. But it’s even less than that, because the user had to log in at least “4/7 days per week”, which “removes approximately 30% of users”.

Of course, every study has limitations. But sampling is too important here to be buried in supplementary materials. And the limitations of the sampling are too serious to warrant the following comment in the final paragraph of the paper:

we conclusively establish that on average in the context of Facebook, individual choices (2, 13, 15, 17) more than algorithms (3, 9) limit exposure to attitude-challenging content.

How can a sample that has not been established to be representative of Facebook users result in such a conclusive statement? And why does Science publish papers that make such claims without the necessary empirical evidence to back up the claims?

Can publications and researchers please stop being mesmerized by large numbers and go back to taking the fundamentals of social science seriously? In related news, I recently published a paper asking “Is Bigger Always Better? Potential Biases of Big Data Derived from Social Network Sites” that I recommend to folks working through and with big data in the social sciences.*

Full disclosure, some of my work has been funded by Facebook as well as Google and other corporations as well as foundations, details are available on my CV. Also, I’m friends with one of the authors of the study and very much value many of the contributions she has made to research.

[*] Regarding the piece on which I comment here, FB users not being nationally-representative is not an issue since the paper and its claims are only concerned with Facebook use.

This song is objectively awesome. I…have to go to the doctor in a bit, and I might need to study kanji* re-play Monument Valley, so I don’t have much to say except OMG THIS THIS EVERYTHING!

Lead-singer and guitarist Brittany Howard has an incredible voice, obviously. I thought she was a dude at first. (John professed bafflement that I ever thought this. [This was not a function of her incredibleness, but just plain I didn’t know who was singing and heard it as a dude.]). Alabama Shakes has a really wide range of song-styles. What is this like? I would say sort of reminiscent of the Doors in ways, but I actually kind of hate the Doors, so. The guitar able to go so clean when she wants it to, as all the other instruments cut out, like at 2:19, it’s a later Pink Floyd-ish thing? (Which, btw, I have been really feeling lately. Anybody want to join me for some Shine on You Crazy Diamond? It’s only 25 minutes long. IT’S WORTH IT.)

*I am just going to stop taking topamax. Screw this. My brains have turned to mush and I have horrible headaches anyway. Though to be scrupulously over-generous to myself, our tutor gives us the hardest test I can think of: Japanese sentences with blanks for the kanji and hiragana for the sound, and then we have to write the character. It’s easy to see each character and remember what it means. The sounds…more troublesome. I would do better by just flipping the paper over and writing all 15 characters down. I should probably do that Sunday, then cross them out as they go in, but I’m doing the class with Zoe and I am way slower than her already.

OK, I got y’all this far, now you get a video about outer space. It’s AWESOME.

P.S. I will take ALL THE GRAVY BOATS. Just send’em on over. (John waves hands like X in background mouthing “noooo!”)
P.P.S. I am aware the title is now inaccurate.

In the past week, a mystifying series of sexist posts on parenting boys have proliferated online. For example, this week’s feature on The Week is “What It’s Like to be a Mother of Only Boys.” Last week’s ScaryMommy essay was entitled, “10 Things Moms of Boys Must Do.” Needlessly gendered, these articles hearken back to the era of Mad Men’s first season.

Take the ScaryMommy voice of authority. She advises women expecting boys to “love bathtime,” “think farts are funny,” “do battle with the toilet,” “rethink your standards of safety,” “be prepared for messes,” “rethink your standards of safety,” and more. I don’t question the truth in these statements; indeed, as the parent of a boy, I concur. Rather, I take issue with her basic assumption that none of these nuggets apply to girls. As the parent of two girls, I know firsthand that they all do.

“What It’s Like to be a Mother of Only Boys” assures its readers that mothering (note the verb; no “parenting” used here) boys “leads to a set of personality traits, namely that you’re not fussy and that you roll with the (actual) punches.” While the counterfactual is not provided, presumably mothers of girls are fussy and uptight. Mothers of only boys learn to buy lots of food; the inference is that mothers of girls do not, since their princesses subsist on air. The author “wonders about the future of her stuff,” including her “mother’s gravy boat.” I don’t own a gravy boat and am confident that my two daughters would show no interest in it whatsoever.

At its best, the Internet gives voice to the voiceless and speaks truth to power. At its worst, it reinforces age-old gender stereotypes that can now be broadcast worldwide with a single keystroke.

A public service announcement: we’ll be publishing a seminar on Ken MacLeod’s books next week, with contributions from me, Sumana Harihareswara, Farah Mendlesohn, Cosma Shalizi and Jo Walton, as well as Ken himself. It’s shaping up to be a lot of fun.

My friend and co-author Adam Swift was on the Australian Broadcasting Company’s show The Philosopher’s Zone yesterday (I think it was yesterday) talking about our book Family Values: The Ethics of Parent-Child Relationships. The podcast is here, and the website for that particular show is here. You can also here him on Philosophy Bites here. There’s much more to the book than the consideration of parental partiality on which these two interviews focus, but I can see why they are excited about that part of it. Listening to both broadcasts I was struck by two things — one, which I did already know, is how good Adam is at explaining a fairly complex set of ideas simply but without oversimplifying. The other, though, was how good (in both cases) the interviewers are. Good interviewers really know their stuff, and use it to prompt the interviewee, never showing off what they, themselves, know. This is a rare case where I know exactly how much the interviewer had to know in order to the interview well, and it is a lot! Anyway, enjoy it.

Ronald Reagan in “A Time for Choosing,” the Gipper’s speech for Barry Goldwater in 1964:

Welfare spending [is] 10 times greater than in the dark depths of the Depression. We’re spending 45 billion dollars on welfare. Now do a little arithmetic, and you’ll find that if we divided the 45 billion dollars up equally among those 9 million poor families, we’d be able to give each family 4,600 dollars a year. And this added to their present income should eliminate poverty.

David Brooks in the New York Times, regarding the case of Freddie Gray in 2015:

The problem is not lack of attention, and it’s not mainly lack of money. Since 1980 federal antipoverty spending has exploded. As Robert Samuelson of The Washington Post has pointed out, in 2013 the federal government spent nearly $14,000 per poor person. If you simply took that money and handed it to the poor, a family of four would have a household income roughly twice the poverty rate.

Annie Lowery points out why Brooks’s argument is numerically bogus: just as conservatives don’t count millions of government employees as employed in 1930s, Brooks doesn’t count federal money as money in the 2010s:

Brooks is claiming that federal spending on anti-poverty programs is not lifting families out of poverty… when the government specifically does not include the value of those very programs in its poverty calculations.… A fuller accounting shows that food stamps alone lift 4 million people above the poverty line. The earned-income tax credit lifts nearly 6 million above it. Which is to say that “not bringing down the official poverty rate” is not a good yardstick by which to judge these programs.

But I would like to take David Brooks up on his suggestion: with the absolute same degree of sincerity as 1964-era Reagan, he’s supporting a straight-up transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor. It is a radical solution to poverty, this long-standing Republican proposal, but perhaps one that we should consider.

Socialism! That is really an unfortunate word.

– Adolf Hitler (quoted in Dietrich Orlow, The Nazi Party 1919-1945: A Complete History, p. 88

When one thinks of all the people who support or have supported Fascism, one stands amazed at their diversity. What a crew! Think of a programme which at any rate for a while could bring Hitler, Petain, Montagu Norman, Pavelitch, William Randolph Hearst, Streicher, Buchman, Ezra Pound, Juan March, Cocteau, Thyssen, Father Coughlin, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Arnold Lunn, Antonescu, Spengler, Beverley Nichols, Lady Houston, and Marinetti all into the same boat! But the clue is really very simple. They are all people with something to lose, or people who long for a hierarchical society and dread the prospect of a world of free and equal human beings.

– George Orwell

I was going to try to get good old Montagu to contribute a personal note about his own fascist flirtations, after his long and unaccountable absence from the blog. No dice.

So I’ve solicited some commentary from Oswald Spengler, at least. [click to continue…]

It was hard this week not to think of Frederick Douglass while watching the news from Baltimore. So I wrote a column about it.

Across the street from Baltimore’s Mondawmin Mall, where violent protests erupted last Monday afternoon, stands Frederick Douglass High School. It was from that school that students emerged at 3 p.m., only to find themselves in the crosshairs of the police. The school is named after the famed abolitionist who spent 10 years a slave in Baltimore. Anyone familiar with Douglass’ most famous work—”Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself“—cannot but feel a bitter irony in that juxtaposition of Douglass High and the riots of the past week. For once upon a time, Baltimore offered Douglass a glimpse of freedom, which “laid the foundation and opened the gateway, to all my subsequent prosperity.”

…

There was, in short, something about the city itself, with its forcible confrontation of difference, that made a difference. Especially in the life of this black slave: “A city slave is almost a freeman, compared with a slave on the plantation.”

Historical comparison, across the divide of two centuries, is a risky business. But it’s hard not to reread Douglass’ “Narrative” against the grain of this week’s events in Baltimore and the decades of urban poverty and police brutality that preceded them. Though urban life has experienced a revival across the U.S. in recent years, that revival is premised not on a mixing of racial and economic categories, a meeting of different peoples and nations of the sort described by Douglass, but instead on a grim machine of racial absolutism and economic separation.

Even more jarring is Douglass’ contrast between the coercion of the countryside and the relative (I stress that word) freedom of the city. So tyrannical was the regime of the plantation and its satellites that Douglass resorted to the most political of metaphors to describe it. The plantation is “the seat of government for the whole twenty farms” surrounding it.

Today’s city—if you’re working class or of color—is also policed heavily. But where the plantation’s police—the overseer, the slave patrols—did their damnedest to wrest every last ounce of labor from the slave, today’s police keep watch over the unemployed or semi-employed. In the West Baltimore neighborhood where Freddie Gray—whose death while in police custody sparked the riots—grew up, one in four juveniles is arrested and the unemployment rate is 58 percent. The plantation’s police extracted labor; the city’s police preside over its disposal.

As Alex Gourevitch shows in an article in Perspectives on Politics due out this fall, urban police departments are a relatively new phenomenon. Throughout much of European and early American history, men and women were policed by their lords, owners or employers. But with the abolition of feudalism, slavery and other systems of bonded labor, some of that policing function was assumed by the state, especially in cities, where newly freed workers tended to migrate. In fact, most urban police departments in the U.S. were created in the second half of the 19th century. Their targets were, overwhelmingly, these workers, often operating at the margins of the economy. (With time, their targets became striking workers, operating at the very centers of capitalist production.)

 

It’s Nazi week at Crooked Timber! Do you love thrilling stories about Nazis? Great! [click to continue…]

With Abenesia in the news, I thought it might be useful to talk about another Axis nation’s complicated struggle with the memory of the Second World War. Jennifer Teege found out, at the age of 38, that not only was her grandfather a Nazi, he was an especially infamous Nazi: Amon Goeth, the commandant of PÅ‚aszów concentration camp, the man played by Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List. On trial after the war, Goeth sneered at the witnesses against him, “What? So many Jews? And we were always told there’d be none left.” He gave a Hitler salute on the gallows.

Hence the title of Teege’s memoir: she has an African father, and a Nazi grandfather who would have regarded as subhuman a person of African descent. The book is a great deal subtler than the title suggests. It is saturated in memory, and forgetting, and the fault lines between memory and history run throughout it. Teege describes her attempt to reconcile what she learns about her grandfather with the kind – but, she now knows, complicit – grandmother she remembers. The book presents Teege’s reminiscence and necessarily somewhat therapeutic work alongside the sober, reportorial voice of Nikola Sellmair, whose dry factual rendering of verifiable history often undermines Teege’s hopeful, emotional writing.

There are different kinds of memory in the book. Teege’s adoptive German family had a more usual relationship to the Nazi era – her father didn’t really know the extent to which his family had taken part in Nazi crimes. Sellmair discusses such modern Germans, summarizing Harald Welzer’s study “Grandpa Wasn’t a Nazi.” Latter day Germans seize on any opportunity to construct a guiltless, even noble past for their forebears – as with the French, they were all in the resistance.

Teege’s brief narrative also encompasses also the memory kept by Holocaust survivors and their descendants: before Teege found out about her grandfather, she traveled to Tel Aviv, made friends there, and lived there. Her discovery imposes silence between her and her Jewish friends. She doesn’t know what she can say. Her grandfather might have shot their grandparents.

“There is no Nazi gene,” Teege insists, struggling against the idea that she must bear some guilt for her grandfather. But she clearly feels that guilt. We all inhabit the world the bloodthirstiest conquerors made; only some of us grew up with them, personally.

I have been following the UK election as much as I can given an unusually heavy workload for the time of year. Fortunately the campaign seems to have been pretty dull, so I haven’t missed much — and all the fun will be watching the results come in and finding out what nobody seems to know about the outcome. Most of my following of news is either reading or listening – I don’t watch much. So I miss certain nuances and tend to give politicians the benefit of the doubt when I hear them say things that either seem stupid or are mystifying. So, to get to the point, when I have heard Ed Miliband say that he will not go into coalition or do a deal with the SNP, I have tended to think — well, of course he is saying that to try and scare Scots into voting Labour, but he doesn’t really mean it and, when the time comes, he’ll do what he has to do to become Prime Minister.

But I just watched him on Question Time, and when I see him say it, he really seems to mean it . My first question is: does he really mean it?

One possible outcome is that Labour has the by some distance the most seats of any party, but falls well short of a majority, and can govern successfully in (some sort of) partnership with the SNP. On some possible versions of that, the Tories could not form a majority coalition even with the UUP, the DUP and either the LibDems or UKIP. Second question: Even if Miliband really does mean, now, that he wouldn’t do a deal with the SNP, would he renege on that in such a scenario? Third: What would the political consequences for him be if he did renege?

Please will our UK resident contributors and commenters try to enlighten me?

The migrant crisis in the Mediterranean is a tragic variation of a phenomena we have seen time and again around the world: the indifference, deep ambivalence or, at worst, rage directed at “others” from homogeneous, native populations in the advanced nations. This is a defining social condition of Western Europe, the UK, and Scandinavia today and there is no need to rehearse here the many episodes that fall into this category. Influential splinter parties from UKIP in the UK to the venerable National Front in France to the Danish People’s Party to the Netherland’s Party for Freedom have constructed potent working class voting blocs around anti-immigrant and anti-Islamist platforms. [click to continue…]