It’s Payback Time

I’m back! Yay! Sorry about all that, but my workload was just ridiculous. Things should be a lot more slack for the next few months, so it’s time I got back blogging. This also means I can finally put into action something I’ve been sitting on for months.

Richard Carrier has been a sore spot for me. He was one of the reasons I got interested in Bayesian statistics, and for a while there I thought he was a cool progressive. Alas, when it was revealed he was instead a vindictive creepy asshole, it shook me a bit. I promised myself I’d help out somehow, but I’d already done the obsessive analysis thing and in hindsight I’m not convinced it did more good than harm. I was at a loss for what I could do, beyond sharing links to the fundraiser.

Now, I think I know. The lawsuits may be long over, thanks to Carrier coincidentally dropping them at roughly the same time he came under threat of a counter-suit, but the legal bill are still there and not going away anytime soon. Worse, with the removal of the threat people are starting to forget about those debts. There have been only five donations this month, and four in April. It’s time to bring a little attention back that way.

One nasty side-effect of Carrier’s lawsuits is that Bayesian statistics has become a punchline in the atheist/skeptic community. The reasoning is understandable, if flawed: Carrier is a crank, he promotes Bayesian statistics, ergo Bayesian statistics must be the tool of crackpots. This has been surreal for me to witness, as Bayes has become a critical tool in my kit over the last three years. I suppose I could survive without it, if I had to, but every alternative I’m aware of is worse. I’m not the only one in this camp, either.

Following the emergence of a novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) and its spread outside of China, Europe is now experiencing large epidemics. In response, many European countries have implemented unprecedented non-pharmaceutical interventions including case isolation, the closure of schools and universities, banning of mass gatherings and/or public events, and most recently, widescale social distancing including local and national lockdowns. In this report, we use a semi-mechanistic Bayesian hierarchical model to attempt to infer the impact of these interventions across 11 European countries.

Flaxman, Seth, Swapnil Mishra, Axel Gandy, H Juliette T Unwin, Helen Coupland, Thomas A Mellan, Tresnia Berah, et al. “Estimating the Number of Infections and the Impact of Non- Pharmaceutical Interventions on COVID-19 in 11 European Countries,” 2020, 35.

In estimating time intervals between symptom onset and outcome, it was necessary to account for the fact that, during a growing epidemic, a higher proportion of the cases will have been infected recently (…). Therefore, we re-parameterised a gamma model to account for exponential growth using a growth rate of 0·14 per day, obtained from the early case onset data (…). Using Bayesian methods, we fitted gamma distributions to the data on time from onset to death and onset to recovery, conditional on having observed the final outcome.

Verity, Robert, Lucy C. Okell, Ilaria Dorigatti, Peter Winskill, Charles Whittaker, Natsuko Imai, Gina Cuomo-Dannenburg, et al. “Estimates of the Severity of Coronavirus Disease 2019: A Model-Based Analysis.” The Lancet Infectious Diseases 0, no. 0 (March 30, 2020). https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(20)30243-7.

… we used Bayesian methods to infer parameter estimates and obtain credible intervals.

Linton, Natalie M., Tetsuro Kobayashi, Yichi Yang, Katsuma Hayashi, Andrei R. Akhmetzhanov, Sung-mok Jung, Baoyin Yuan, Ryo Kinoshita, and Hiroshi Nishiura. “Incubation Period and Other Epidemiological Characteristics of 2019 Novel Coronavirus Infections with Right Truncation: A Statistical Analysis of Publicly Available Case Data.” Journal of Clinical Medicine 9, no. 2 (February 2020): 538. https://doi.org/10.3390/jcm9020538.

A significant chunk of our understanding of COVID-19 depends on Bayesian statistics. I’ll go further and argue that you cannot fully understand this pandemic without it. And yet thanks to Richard Carrier, the atheist/skeptic community is primed to dismiss Bayesian statistics.

So let’s catch two stones with one bird. If enough people donate to this fundraiser, I’ll start blogging a course on Bayesian statistics. I think I’ve got a novel angle on the subject, one that’s easier to slip into than my 201-level stuff and yet more rigorous. If y’all really start tossing in the funds, I’ll make it a video series. Yes yes, there’s a pandemic and potential global depression going on, but that just means I’ll work for cheap! I’ll release the milestones and course outline over the next few days, but there’s no harm in an early start.

Help me help the people Richard Carrier hurt. I’ll try to make it worth your while.

Graham Linehan, Cowardly Ass

Sorry all, I’ve been busy. But I thought this situation was worth carving some time out to write about: Graham Linehan is a cowardly ass.

See, EssenceOfThought just released a nice little video calling Linehan out for his support of conversion therapy. As they put it:

Now maybe you read that Tweet and didn’t think much of it. After all, it’s just a call for ‘gender critical therapists’. Why’s that a problem? Well gender critical is euphemism for transphobia in the exact same way that ‘race realist’ is for racism. It’s meant to make the bigotry sound more scientific and therefore more palatable.

The truth meanwhile is that every major medical establishment condemns the self-labelled ‘gender critical’ approach which is a form of reparative ‘therapy’, though as noted earlier it is in fact torture. Said methods are abusive and inflict severe harm on the victim in attempts to turn them cisgender and force them to adhere to strict and archaic gender roles.

I response, Linehan issued a threat:

Hi there I have already begun legal proceedings against Pink News for this defamatory accusation. Take this down immediately or I will take appropriate measures.

Presumably “appropriate measures” involves a defamation lawsuit, though when you’re associated with a transphobic mob there’s a wide universe of possible “measures.”

In all fairness, I should point out that Mumsnet is trying to clean up their act. Linehan, in contrast, was warned by the UK police for harassing a transgender person. He also does the same dance of respectability I called out last post. Observe:

Linehan outlines his view to The Irish Times: “I don’t think I’m saying anything controversial. My position is that anyone suffering from gender dysphoria needs to be helped and supported.” Linehan says he celebrates that trans people are at last finding acceptance: “That’s obviously wonderful.” […]

He characterises some extreme trans activists who have “glommed on to the movement” as “a mixture of grifters, fetishists, and misogynists”. … “All it takes is a few bad people in positions of power to groom an organisation, and in this case a movement. This is a society-wide grooming.”

I suspect Linehan would lump EssenceOfThought in with the “grifters, fetishists, and misogynists,” which is telling. If you’ve never watched an EssenceOfThought video before, do so, then look at the list of citations:

[4] UK Council for Psychotherapy (2015) “Memorandum Of Understanding On Conversion Therapy In The UK”, psychotherapy.org.uk Accessed 31st August 2016: https://www.psychotherapy.org.uk/wp-c…

[5] American Academy Of Pediatrics (2015) “Letterhead For Washington DC 2015”, American Academy Of Pediatrics Accessed 19th September 2018; https://www.aap.org/en-us/advocacy-an…

[6] American Medical Association (2018) “Health Care Needs of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Populations H-160.991”, AMA-ASSN.org Accessed 21st September 2019; https://policysearch.ama-assn.org/pol…

[7] Substance Abuse And Mental Health Services Administration (2015) Ending Conversion – Supporting And Affirming LGBTQ Youth”, SAMHSA.gov Accessed 21st September 2019; https://store.samhsa.gov/system/files…

[8] The Trevor Project (2019) “Trevor National Survey On LGBTQ Youth Mental Health”, The Trevor Project Accessed 28th June 2019; https://www.thetrevorproject.org/wp-c…

[9] Turban, J. L., Beckwith, N., Reisner, S. L., & Keuroghlian, A. S. (2019) “Association Between Recalled Exposure To Gender Identity Conversion Efforts And Psychological Distress and Suicide Attempts Among Transgender Adults”, JAMA Psychiatry

[10] Kristina R. Olson, Lily Durwood, Madeleine DeMeules, Katie A. McLaughlin (2016) “Mental Health of Transgender Children Who Are Supported in Their Identities” http://pediatrics.aappublications.org…

[11] Kristina R. Olson, Lily Durwood, Katie A. McLaughlin (2017) “Mental Health And Self-Worth In Socially Transitioned Transgender Youth”, Child And Adolescent Psychiatry, Volume 56, Issue 2, pp.116–123 http://www.jaacap.com/article/S0890-8…

What I love about citation lists is that you can double-check they’re being accurately represented. One reason why I loathe Stephen Pinker, for instance, is because I started hopping down his citation list, and kept finding misrepresentation after misrepresentation. Let’s look at citation 9, as I see EoT didn’t link to the journal article.

Of 27 715 transgender survey respondents (mean [SD] age, 31.2 [13.5] years), 11 857 (42.8%) were assigned male sex at birth. Among the 19 741 (71.3%) who had ever spoken to a professional about their gender identity, 3869 (19.6%; 95% CI, 18.7%-20.5%) reported exposure to GICE in their lifetime. Recalled lifetime exposure was associated with severe psychological distress during the previous month (adjusted odds ratio [aOR], 1.56; 95% CI, 1.09-2.24; P < .001) compared with non-GICE therapy. Associations were found between recalled lifetime exposure and higher odds of lifetime suicide attempts (aOR, 2.27; 95% CI, 1.60-3.24; P < .001) and recalled exposure before the age of 10 years and increased odds of lifetime suicide attempts (aOR, 4.15; 95% CI, 2.44-7.69; P < .001). No significant differences were found when comparing exposure to GICE by secular professionals vs religious advisors.

Compare and contrast with how EssenceOfThought describe that study:

They also found no significant difference when comparing religious or secular conversion attempts. So it’s not a case of finding the right way to do it, there is no right way to do it. You’re simply torturing someone for the sake of inflicting pain. And that is fucking digusting.

And the thing is we know how to help young people who are questioning their gender. And that is to take the gender affirmative approach. That is an approach that allows a child and young teen to explore their identity with support. No mater what conclusion they arrive at.

Compare and contrast both with Linehan’s own view of gender affirmation in youth.

“There are lots of gender non-conforming children who may not be trans and may grow up to be gay adults, but who are being told by an extreme, misogynist ideology, that they were born in the wrong body, and anyone who disagrees with that diagnosis is a bigot.”

“It’s especially dangerous for teenage girls – the numbers referred to gender clinics have shot up – because society, in a million ways, is telling girls they are worthless. Of course they look for an escape hatch.”

“The normal experience of puberty is the first time we all experience gender dysphoria. It’s natural. But to tell confused kids who might every second be feeling uncomfortable in their own skin that they are trapped in the wrong body? It’s an obscenity. It’s like telling anorexic kids they need liposuction.”

So much for helping people with gender dysphoia. If Linehan had his way, the evidence suggests transgender people would commit suicide at a higher rate than they do now. EoT’s accusation that Linehan wishes to “eradicate trans children” is justified by the evidence.

Unable to argue against that truth, Linehan had no choice but to try silencing his critics via lawsuits. Rather than change his mind in the face of substantial evidence, Linehan is trying to sue away reality. It’s a cowardly approach to criticism, and I hope he’s Streisand-ed into obscurity for trying it.

Equal Rights

The two strongest arguments for allowing transgender athletes to compete as the gender they identify are the argument from biological diversity and the argument from human rights. When I was outlining the latter case, I settled for merely establishing the right to self-identify existed and just assumed everyone would agree to indivisibility.

Human rights are indivisible. Whether they relate to civil, cultural, economic, political or social issues, human rights are inherent to the dignity of every human person. Consequently, all human rights have equal status, and cannot be positioned in a hierarchical order. Denial of one right invariably impedes enjoyment of other rights. Thus, the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living cannot be compromised at the expense of other rights, such as the right to health or the right to education.

Now that I’m some distance from the argument, I can better picture someone rejecting indivisibility. I mean yes, as I pointed out back then, rejecting indivisibility also rejects decades of legal precedent, but leaning entirely on the letter of the law makes for an iffy argument. I should have propped up the argument by pointing out how devaluing one right harms the ability to enjoy every other right.

Trans people routinely face challenges to their basic humanity every day. Their very existence is being contested. How much rights they should be allowed to have is considered a topic for debate. When some group of people are seen as equal in dignity and rights, the rest of the society doesn’t argue about whether they should have the same rights that everybody else takes for granted. […]

Trans people are routinely discriminated by landlords and potential employers. For example, one of Freethoughblogs bloggers is a trans woman who is forced to dress as male at work, because nobody will hire her as a woman. Cis people aren’t forced to present themselves as a gender they are uncomfortable with in order to find a job. […]

I personally have been refused access to healthcare, because several transpobic doctors felt like kicking me out of their offices. Here you can read the full story about that. I am a European Union citizen, The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that trans people have a right to obtain various medical procedures that would change their gender. Nonetheless, transphobic doctors and bureaucrats still figured out a loophole how to de facto deny me the surgery I requested.

Fortunately, Andreas Avester has my back. As one of his debut blog posts, he’s done an excellent job of pointing out all the consequences of rejecting indivisibility. It’s well worth a read, all on its own.

How Was Your Boycott?

I was planning on signal-boosting the YouTube boycott, thanks to a message by Great American Satan, until everyone else beat me to it. For an awareness campaign like this, it’s more useful to space out your messages than doing one big blast, so I deliberately held back. But what is there to do once the boycott’s done, you ask?

Well, some of you might be tempted back to YouTube. There are alternatives out there, though. For instance, Intransitive posted an animated short about the Le Mans crash of 1955. Problem: it was host on YouTube. Solution: it was also on Vimeo! Rather than blindly follow that YouTube link, do a bit of digging to see if any other site is hosting it. I’d also like to plug the Internet Archive, which hosts everything from Democracy Now! to classic cartoons.

You could also contact Google/YouTube directly. Yeah, Google’s support ranges from byzantine to bad, but did you know they post a mailing address for YouTube? Track down that pen that’s migrated to the back of your desk, fish out a blank sheet of paper from the printer tray, and send them a polite but firm message about their new terms of service.

If that all sounds like too much work, why not hit them in the pocketbook? There are multiple YouTube ad blockers available, all of which can be installed with a single click, and these tools are popular enough to keep up with Google’s countermeasures. Just be sure to uninstall it if or when Google relents! It’s what I’ll be doing, now that I can watch PyData videos again.

[HJH 2019-12-14] With the benefit of hindsight, I can see an objection to my last bit of advice. Yes, blocking ads will hurt Google’s bottom line, but it also might hurt the bottom line of YouTube creators. Aren’t I taking money out of their pockets?

For the most part, people aren’t making money off YouTube ads. Some big channels rely on Patreon to keep afloat, while others use paid sponsorships, and neither is significantly effected by a YouTube ad blocker. In both cases it’s easy to make up for any lost revenue due to your ad block.

The entities who do make genuine money off YouTube ads either have a second revenue stream you can drop money into, were already famous and don’t need the cash, or are gaming the system in some way. This last category is the one most hurt by removing ad revenue, and while that would prevent a Baby Shark it also prevents Elsagate. Ironically, this gamification is also the cause of YouTube’s draconian new Terms of Service, because the old one could not satisfy video creators, advertisers, and viewers at the same time. The new one solves the issue by allowing YouTube to crack down on creators however they see fit, should bad press float their way.

Blocking ads does not prevent quality content creators from surviving on YouTube, but it does harm those hoping to game the system and pocket a quick buck. So long as that remains true, blocking YouTube ads is perfectly moral.

Deep Penetration Tests

We now live in an age where someone can back door your back door.

Analysts believe there are currently on the order of 10 billions Internet of Things (IoT) devices out in the wild. Sometimes, these devices find their way up people’s butts: as it turns out, cheap and low-power radio-connected chips aren’t just great for home automation – they’re also changing the way we interact with sex toys. In this talk, we’ll dive into the world of teledildonics and see how connected buttplugs’ security holds up against a vaguely motivated attacker, finding and exploiting vulnerabilities at every level of the stack, ultimately allowing us to compromise these toys and the devices they connect to.

Writing about this topic is hard, and not just because penises may be involved. IoT devices pose a grave security risk for all of us, but probably not for you personally. For instance, security cameras have been used to launch attacks on websites. When was the last time you updated the firmware on your security camera, or ran a security scan of it? Probably never. Has your security camera been taken over? Maybe, as of 2017 roughly half the internet-connected cameras in the USA were part of a botnet. Has it been hacked and commanded to send your data to a third party? Almost certainly not, these security cam hacks almost all target something else. Human beings are terrible at assessing risk in general, and the combination of catastrophic consequences to some people but minimal consequences to you only amplifies our weaknesses.

There’s a very fine line between “your car can be hacked to cause a crash!” and “some cars can be hacked to cause a crash,” between “your TV is tracking your viewing habits” and “your viewing habits are available to anyone who knows where to look!” Finding the right balance between complacency and alarmism is impossible given how much we don’t know. And as computers become more intertwined with our intimate lives, whole new incentives come into play. Proportionately, more people would be willing to file a police report about someone hacking their toaster than about someone hacking their butt plug. Not many people own a smart sex toy, but those that do form a very attractive hacking target.

There’s not much we can do about this individually. Forcing people to take an extensive course in internet security just to purchase a butt plug is blaming the victim, and asking the market to solve the problem doesn’t work when market incentives caused the problem in the first place. A proper solution requires collective action as a society, via laws and incentives that help protect our privacy.

Then, and only then, can you purchase your sex toys in peace.

The Crossroads

Apparently I know the solar system very well?

I attended a lecture on Carl Sagan, hosted by the Atheist Society of Calgary, and part of the event was a trivia challenge. While I wasn’t the only person at my table offering answers, my answers seemed to be the ones most consistently endorsed by the group. Assisted by some technical issues, our team wound up with a massive lead over the second-place finisher. The organizer from ASC surprised us all by saying everyone at our table could pick up a free T-shirt. I wasn’t terribly keen on wearing their logo, but I wandered over to the merch table anyway.

Sitting among the other designs was one that stopped me cold.

[Read more…]

The Crisis of the Mediocre Man

I was browsing YouTube videos on PyMC3, as one naturally does, when I happened to stumble on this gem.

Tech has spent millions of dollars in efforts to diversify workplaces. Despite this, it seems after each spell of progress, a series of retrograde events ensue. Anti-diversity manifestos, backlash to assertive hiring, and sexual misconduct scandals crop up every few months, sucking the air from every board room. This will be a digest of research, recent events, and pointers on women in STEM.

Lorena A. Barba really knows her stuff; the entire talk is a rapid-fire accounting of claims and counterclaims, aimed to directly appeal to the male techbros who need to hear it. There was a lot of new material in there, for me at least. I thought the only well-described matriarchies came from the African continent, but it turns out the Algonquin also fit that bill. Some digging turns up a rich mix of gender roles within First Nations peoples, most notably the Iroquois and Hopi. I was also depressed to hear that the R data analysis community is better at dealing with sexual harassment than the skeptic/atheist community.

But what really grabbed my ears was the section on gender quotas. I’ve long been a fan of them on logical grounds: if we truly believe the sexes are equal, then if we see unequal representation we know discrimination is happening. By forcing equality, we greatly reduce network effects where one gender can team up against the other. Worried about an increase in mediocrity? At worst that’s a temporary thing that disappears once the disadvantaged sex gets more experience, and at best the overall quality will actually go up. The research on quotas has advanced quite a bit since that old Skepchick post. Emphasis mine.

In 1993, Sweden’s Social Democratic Party centrally adopted a gender quota and imposed it on all the local branches of that party (…). Although their primary aim was to improve the representation of women, proponents of the quota observed that the reform had an impact on the competence of men. Inger Segelström (the chair of Social Democratic Women in Sweden (S-Kvinnor), 1995–2003) made this point succinctly in a personal communication:

At the time, our party’s quota policy of mandatory alternation of male and female names on all party lists became informally known as the crisis of the mediocre man…

We study the selection of municipal politicians in Sweden with regard to their competence, both theoretically and empirically. Moreover, we exploit the Social Democratic quota as a shock to municipal politics and ask how it altered the competence of that party’s elected politicians, men as well as women, and leaders as well as followers.

Besley, Timothy. “Gender Quotas and the Crisis of the Mediocre Man: Theory and Evidence from Sweden.” THE AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW 107, no. 8 (2017): 39.

We can explain this with the benefit of hindsight: if men can rely on the “old boy’s network” to keep them in power, they can afford to slack off. If other sexes cannot, they have to fight to earn their place. These are all social effects, though; if no sex holds a monopoly on operational competence in reality, the net result is a handful of brilliant women among a sea of iffy men. Gender quotas severely limit the social effects, effectively kicking out the mediocre men to make way for average women, and thus increase the average competence.

As tidy as that picture is, it’s wrong in one crucial detail. Emphasis again mine.

These estimates show that the overall effect mainly reflects an improvement in the selection of men. The coefficient in column 4 means that a 10-percentage-point larger quota bite (just below the cross-sectional average for all municipalities) raised the proportion of competent men by 4.4 percentage points. Given an average of 50 percent competent politicians in the average municipality (by definition, from the normalization), this corresponds to a 9 percent increase in the share of competent men.

For women, we obtain a negative coefficient in the regression specification without municipality trends, but a positive coefficient with trends. In neither case, however, is the estimate significantly different from zero, suggesting that the quota neither raised nor cut the share of competent women. This is interesting in view of the meritocratic critique of gender quotas, namely that raising the share of women through a quota must necessarily come at the price of lower competence among women.

Increasing the number of women does not also increase the number of incompetent women. When you introduce a quota, apparently, everyone works harder to justify being there. The only people truly hurt by gender quotas are mediocre men who rely on the Peter Principle.

The like ratio for said talk. 47 likes, 55 dislikes, FYI.Alas, if that YouTube like ratio is any indication, there’s a lot of them out there.