I’ve long wondered why comets have such eccentric orbits and come from the far outer reaches of the solar system. Why aren’t there more asteroids with eccentric orbits? Why aren’t there comets in round orbits? Why don’t they generally hang out closer to the sun?
Happily, I think I’ve figured it out. Yes, a comet is a “snowball in space.” But a comet isn’t just formed when liquid water freezes, as it often does on Earth. A comet is formed when a body gets so cold, the air on it freezes. The nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, etc. This only happens very far from the sun–so comets can only form far to the sun. If they formed close-in, their gases wouldn’t freeze.
So long as a frozen body stays way out there away from the sun, we’re not going to see it. It’s only when comets come closer to the sun (say, by getting knocked out of their original orbits,) that their gases begin to sublimate under the sun’s glare and they appear as bright, fiery comets in the night sky. Then, if it is lucky, the comet swings back to its frigid neighborhood before it totally melts away.
This explains why the comets we see have such eccentric orbits–the eccentricity allows the comet to freeze, sublimate, and freeze again. Without that orbit, no bright comet.
I just remembered an essay I wrote back in my school days, comparing rates of Behavior X in the US to various European countries, and recommending that we should, as a public policy matter, adopt legal standards on the matter closer to the European ones, but forgot to control for ethnicity.
In retrospect, it seems like such an obvious thing I should have controlled for when presenting the data.š¦
Effective Altruists mean well. They want to be moral people. They just don’t quite get what morality is. This leads to amusing results like EAs stressing out to themselves about whether or not they should donate all of their money to make animals happy and, if they don’t sacrifice themselves to the “save the cockroaches” fund, are they being meta-inconsistent?
The best synthesis of game-theoretic morality and evolutionary morality is that morality is about mutual systems of responsibility toward each other. You have no moral duties toward people (animals, beings, etc.,) who have none toward you. Your dog loves you and would sacrifice himself for you, so you have a moral obligation to your dog. A random animal feels no obligation to you and would not help you in even the most dire of situations. You have no moral obligation to them. (Nice people are nice to animals anyway because niceness is a genetic trait, and so nice people are nice to everyone.)
The EA calculations fail to take into account the opportunity cost of your altruism: if I donate all of my money to other animals, I no longer have money to buy bones for my dog, and my dog will be unhappy. If I spend my excess money on malaria nets for strangers in Africa, then I can’t spend that money on medical treatment for my own children.
If you feel compelled to do something about Problem X, then it’s a good idea to take the EA route and try to do so effectively. If I am concerned about malaria, then of course I should spend my time/money doing whatever is best to fight malaria.
As I mentioned in my post about “the other”, a lot of people just use our ideas/demands about what’s best for people they really have no personal interest in as a bludgeon in political debates with people they strongly dislike. If you are really concerned about far-off others, then by all means, better the EA route than the “destroying people’s careers via Twitter” route.
But morality, ultimately, is about your relationships with people. EA does not account for this, and so is wrong.
Leftist ideology (cultural Marxism) ascribes all observed statistical differences in group performance to nefarious cultural forces, therefore nefarious cultural forces must be at work everywhere, therefore you must be oppressed at all times, thus you must dedicate yourself to finding the oppression in every aspect and moment of your life. So we deconstruct every movie, commercial, TV show and book, searching for the hidden oppression that will explain why more of us aren’t math professors or CEOs or magical flying unicorns.
If more people have seen the latest Avengers Movie* than got raped in Rotherham, then the portrayal of women in the Avengers must be what’s holding women back. A white woman who loved black people so much she pretended to be black people and spent her life trying to advance black causes must secretly be causing racism.
I remember my days in the feminist trenches. (In my defense, I was in college.) Reading daily about rape and abuse is quite stressful. Our brains aren’t great at coping with information systems that aren’t neighborhood gossip, which results in massively overestimating the likelihood of rare events just because people are talking about them.
Convincing yourself that every interaction is oppressive, threatening, and dangerous creates feedback loops of anxiety and fear, making people miserable as fuck.
I want to move toward a political/social system and discourse are based on trust, rational discussion, and not making ourselves miserable.
The flipside of criminals is, obviously, the police. No consideration of criminality can be complete without some consideration of the folks making the technical determination.
That involves more people than just the police, of course.
Much of the time, the police do a decent job. But the Legal/Justice System is out of whack. Has been for as long as I’ve been paying attention.
Some major issues:
1. Major corporations use lawsuits to destroy their competition. Maybe good for them; definitely bad for humanity.
2. Corporations and the wealthy pass laws that benefit themselves at the expense of everyone else.
3. The wealthy have way more ability to use the system to their advantage.
4. Politicians pass a lot of laws just to sound good, with terrible effects.
5. Prosecutors pursue convictions even when they know they probably have the wrong guy; judges are complicit. (This is a biggie.)
6. Plea bargaining.
7. Prisons are shitty.
It is fairly easy to imagine the police (and related folks,) after dealing day in and day out with criminals, begin to think less in terms of specific crimes, and more in terms of making sure that dangerous “criminal types” stay behind bars for a good, long time. So what if the guy didn’t commit this particular crime? He looks like a criminal; he probably did something.
Statistically speaking, they’d probably be correct. Take recidivism rates; knowing that 84% of carjackers will commit another crime, how eager would you be to let a carjacker out of prison? Would you try to find some reason to keep them in?
But what about the 16% who never commit another crime again in their lives? (Or at least, don’t get caught). It is unfair to imprison them for the rest of their days for the sins of others, after all. Next we’ll be imprisoning people for pre-crime.
The Justice System involves a lot of people who have to deal with a lot of very dangerous people in stressful situations; mistakes will be made. To be clear: this is a hard job, and one mistake can have quite disastrous consequences. In a nation of >300 million people, you will hear horrible stories of things gone horribly wrong no matter how great things are overall. Thus the importance of determining whether we are just hearing about tragic but basically random accidents, or regular, systematic abuses that we can actually do something about.
Unfortunately, I suspect we tend to focus on the former, rather than the latter–probably because the latter involves reading things like DOJ statistics, which appeals to most people like moldy pie.
In a good world, people can trust the police. Our justice system, unfortunately, does not inspire trust. This really needs to be changed, or else I just don’t see how the country can function.
“Prosecutors told KREM 2 News on Wednesday that they plan to get tough on Limpert with his latest trial.”
“Larry Haskell, the Spokane County prosecutor, said Limpert’s history of crimes could final[ly] be catching up to him.”
70th time’s the charm, right?
“”I think every day what I could’ve done to prevent myself from getting into trouble,” Limpert told a judge.”
Not get caught; clearly this man needs to work on his skills at not getting caught.
It is possible that Limpert actually has some desire to not get into trouble, but simply lacks any ability to control his actions and act in a non-criminal manner. It is also possible that Limpert just doesn’t want to go to jail for his criminal activities. Either way, nothing’s going to change.
They say that about 1 in 200 people alive today is descended from Genghis Khan (or one of his brothers, if he had any.) Obviously most of the Great Khan’s descendants are in Asia; what about the rest of the world?
“Tracking [Y chromosome] mutations allows scientists to create a family tree of fathers and sons going back through time. … Two-thirds of modern European men are found on just three branches (called I1, R1a and R1b). Our results show that these branches each trace their paternal ancestry to a surprisingly recent individual (shown as red dots in Figure 1). By counting the number of mutations that have accumulated within each branch over the generations, we estimate that these three men lived at different times between 3,500 and 7,300 years ago.”
Female genetics–mitochondrial DNA–show no such feature. “… when looking at this maternal tree, there is no similar explosion. This indicates that whatever factors were responsible for this pattern were specific to men.”
This seems reasonably strong evidence that we aren’t just looking at something that could be explained away as founder/bottleneck effect, because I would expect such an effect to act equally on males and females. However, I don’t know if anyone has adequately addressed the question of patrilocality.
On a potentially related note, another study came up with this graph of Y chromosome diversity over time
Now if you ask me, these look like they’re describing the same phenomenon, but the dates are supposedly different.
A couple of thoughts:
1. I really really wish they’d made the Y Chromosome graph bigger and spread it out more so I can actually see what’s going on. According to the article summarizing the paper, the Siberian population did not suffer a decrease in Y chromosome diversity at this time, but I can’t tell it from looking at the graph.
2. Wow, look at the African Y chromosome diversity drop and then never fully recover. The Near East Y-diversity (the orange part) shoots up much higher than it was initially after the drop, as does the European. If the suspicion that farming was the cause of the drop is correct, then it looks like African Y chromosomes never quite recovered–consistent with the theory that African horticulture has traditionally been easy enough for women to do, leading to polygyny, leading to a few males dominating most of the women and the other males being excluded, etc. See, eg, West African Marriage and Child-Rearing Norms vs. African American Norms. (I’ve got another post on the subject, but it’s not going up for a few more weeks.)
3. What’s been happening to mtDNA diversity in the past few thousand years?
So was it agriculture? Or were did agriculture just make people sitting ducks for horse-born invaders? Or perhaps both?
“3 in 4 former prisoners in 30 states arrested within 5 years of release” (from the Bureau of Justice Statistics press release, April 22, 2014.)Inspired by my recent musings, I thought I would refresh my memory on recidivism stats–I have a vague memory that murderers tend not to recidivate, (murderers tend to stay in prison for a very long time) and that car jackers do, but it’s a bad idea to make claims based on vague memories of old data.
So here’s what the press release has to say:
“An estimated two-thirds (68 percent) of 405,000 prisoners released in 30 states in 2005 were arrested for a new crime within three years of release from prison, and three-quarters (77 percent) were arrested within five years…
More than a third (37 percent) of prisoners who were arrested within five years of release were arrested within the first six months after release, with more than half (57 percent) arrested by the end of the first year.”
We could probably save some time and effort if we could effectively identify those third before releasing them. HOWEVER, I don’t know what percent of these people are being re-arrested on parole violations that the rest of us might not really consider “crimes”, like missing a meeting with one’s parole officer or forgetting to register one’s address.
“Recidivism rates varied with the attributes of the inmate. Prisoners released after serving time for a property offense were the most likely to recidivate. Within five years of release, 82 percent of property offenders were arrested for a new crime, compared to 77 percent of drug offenders, 74 percent of public order offenders and 71 percent of violent offenders.”
I’m guessing violent offenders spent longer in prison, and thus were older when released.
“Recidivism was highest among males, blacks and young adults. By the end of the fifth year after release, more than three-quarters (78 percent) of males and two-thirds (68 percent) of females were arrested, a 10 percentage point difference that remained relatively stable during the entire 5-year follow-up period.
Five years after release from prison, black offenders had the highest recidivism rate (81 percent), compared to Hispanic (75 percent) and white (73 percent) offenders.”
So, while while the chances of being a criminal vary widely between groups, criminals from all the groups recidivate at fairly similar rates. This suggests that we are probably actually arresting the subset of people who are criminals most of the time.
“Within five years of release, 61 percent of released inmates with four or fewer arrests in their prior criminal history were arrested, compared to 86 percent of those who had 10 or more prior arrests.”
Maybe guys with 10 prior arrests shouldn’t be released until they’re well over 40?
Some finer grain on recidivism by specific crime, after five years (note: this does not tell us the new offense,) from the PDF:
Looks like my vague memories were correct. Murderers are the least likely to recidivate, probably due to the personal nature of many murders (you’ve got to really hate that guy,) and murderers being older when released, but they are still folks who aren’t great at solving inter-personal problems or running their lives. Rapist probably figure out non-illegal ways to have sex, or else get old enough to be less interested in it. Drunks probably learn to call a cab when drunk.
Relatively speaking, of course. A 50 or 60% recidivism rate still isn’t something that inspires great confidence. To be clear, again, this is not data on how many released murderers commit another murder or how many released rapists commit another rape–this is arrest for any crime. A further breakdown of re-arrest by new crime vs. old crime would be interesting.Carjacking, by contrast, looks like the Xtreme sports of crime–people attracted to this form of violent thrill-seeking seem unlikely to change their spots or find more legal alternatives.
From the abstract: The role of parenting in the development of criminal behavior has been the source of a vast amount of research, with the majority of studies detecting statistically significant associations between dimensions of parenting and measures of criminal involvement. An emerging group of scholars, however, has drawn attention to the methodological limitations-mainly genetic confounding-of the parental socialization literature. The current study addressed this limitation by analyzing a sample of adoptees to assess the association between 8 parenting measures and 4 criminal justice outcome measures. The results revealed very little evidence of parental socialization effects on criminal behavior before controlling for genetic confounding and no evidence of parental socialization effects on criminal involvement after controlling for genetic confounding.
In other words, looks like my basic thesis is holding up. Overall, I suspect it is far easier to fuck up a kid so they don’t meet their full potential (say, by abusing/neglecting) than to get rid of the effects of negative traits. It’s probably best to try to work with people’s inclinations by finding them life-paths that work for them, rather than trying to mold them into something they aren’t.
“Divorce is not a new thing, people have been getting divorces in this part of the world for centuries. The truth is that marriage was not necessarily about love, but wait this is not a bad thing, marriage was a contract in which both the husband and the wife would receive mutual benefits. In addition, women married families, not just the man. If the wife was not gaining her benefits, why should she stay in the marriage? Some of us are the grand- or great-grand daughters of women who divorced several times. It was not a taboo and was not treated as something shameful. Apparently no woman getting married believed that it would last a lifetime. Women left their husbands under various pretexts and returned to their parentsā home leaving children with the husbandās family, they would frequently return to continue playing a role in their childrenās lives. Women could have several husbands in their lifetime not unlike men who married multiple women.”
“I have noted that the most popular women in Yoruba history who are still remembered today are thought to have never married or had children (starting with Efunsetan). When women divorced, sometimes they would leave their children with their husbandsā families, so blended families always existed too. And there were several reasons people did not marry, sometimes not by choice, for example certain priests/priestesses never married because they were already married to the dieties they worshipped.”
” I canāt speak authoritatively for every society, but in parts of Yorubaland this love of kids was not limited to ones biological children. Itās interesting that people would say Africans in the past loved kids, but would limit this to biological children. Have we all not heard of the āit takes a whole village to raise a childā thing? Marriage was never for procreation because children were seen as communal. I have learned that adoption was not uncommon among some Yoruba of the past (and in fact among other ethnic groups, remember King Ahebiās most beloved son was adopted). Usually temporary unlike the Western adoption model today, it was normal for children to live away from their parents. My own parents did not grow up with their parents but with relatives. It was common back in the day to send children to a place where they could learn a trade and work as an apprentice. Basically everyone took care of children.”
“I think a lot of us tend to be ashamed of polygamy when referring to the past but look at it this way; the polygamy of the past existed because people needed to make a living. Again marriage was mutually beneficial. In places where land was usually owned by men, wives would work on land, farm and sell their produce in order to make money for themselves.”
From Slavery Site: “Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country, with a population of 149,229,090. It is bordered on the coast by Benin to the west and Cameroon to the east. Lagos was originally settled by the Yorubas, and is now the largest city in Nigeria (8-10 million population) and one of the largest in Africa, second to Cairo in urban area population. Located on the Slave Coast, it was a major center of the slave trade from 1704 to 1851.”
From Protecting Children from Abuse and Neglect: Trend and Issues (discussing the CA foster care system):
“Foster Care Population by Race/Ethnicity. As shown in Figure 10, AfricanāAmerican and Native American children make up a disproportionately high amount of the foster care population relative to their share of the total state population (for those ages 20 or younger). The rates of AfricanāAmericans in foster care are four times that of the rates of AfricanāAmericans in the stateās total population, [bold mine] and similar disproportionality exists for Native Americans. Conversely, there are lower rates of Whites, Latinos, and Asian/Pacific Islanders in the foster care population as there are in the stateās total population. Most notably, Asian/Pacific Islanders make up approximately 11 percent of the state population but only 2.5 percent of the foster care population. [Me: Even though a lot of these folks were Vietnamese refugees who’ve had it pretty damn hard in life.]
“Foster Care Outcomes by Race/Ethnicity. There are also differences in foster care outcomes when comparing one race/ethnicity to another, some of which are displayed in Figure 11. As shown in the figure, AfricanāAmerican and Native American children are significantly more likely to be the subject of a substantiated maltreatment report and enter foster care as compared to White, Latino, or Asian/Pacific Islander children. … AfricanāAmerican and Native American children are also less likely to reunify with their families than White, Latino, and Asian/Pacific Islander children. Further, AfricanāAmerican children have less stability in their foster care placements on average than children of all other races/ethnicities.”
ChildStats.gov states, “Seventy-four percent of White, non-Hispanic, 59 percent of Hispanic, and 33 percent of Black children lived with two married parents in 2012.” That leaves 77% of black kids living with one parent or no parents; 77-55= 22% of black kids living with no parents. A large% of those kids live with grandparents, aunts, or other relatives, but a lot are in foster care.
Conservatives like to claim that if black people would just form two-parent families and raise their kids together, black poverty, incarceration, drug use, low SAT scores, etc., would all disappear.
While a bit of stability might help, (or might not, since males commit the vast majority of violence, so you might just trade neglect for physical abuse,) conservatives are probably on the wrong general track.
The quotes at the top of the post, about the Yoruba, are the sort of thing you might read in your anthropology class and come away with the idea that before evil white people showed up, the rest of the world was full of wonderful gender egalitarians who had lovely, enlightened views about childrearing. Even the title of presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton’s book, “It Takes a Village to Raise a Child,” is supposed to come from an African proverb on child rearing. There’s some controversy over whether or not it is an actual proverb, or just loosely based on one of the many very similar African proverbs, eg, “A child does not grow up only in a single home,” and, “A child belongs not to one parent or home.” (from the Wikipedia page on the book.)
Various conservatives have responded, “No, it takes a family to raise a child,” just showing that no one involved understands tribal family structure, because a “village” in tribal society is an extended family.
But a village isn’t an extended family in the US, which makes the notion of trying to transfer the model to a population where outbreeding has been the norm for over a thousand years, tribalism is almost non-existent, and most people don’t live anywhere near their extended kin (and they are less closely related to their extended kin than people in a tribal society who’ve been marrying their first and second cousins for generations,) sound rather fraught with difficulties.
The rest of the post is meant to caution against seeing the world through rose-colored glasses. Here we have descendants of that same population (plus others) with very similar marriage and child-rearing norms, but the general reaction is completely opposite. What is a sign of the wonderfulness of tribal Africans is considered a sign of degeneracy and/or dysfunction here at home. (It is, of course, a total mystery how the same group of people could come up with the same childrearing and marriage norms while living in totally different times, places, and dominant cultures. /sarcasm)
Here in the US, we can see for ourselves rates of child abuse, malnutrition and neglect (and we think of this as a problem.) Until someone invents a time machine, we’ll have a much more difficult time getting a first-hand view of the pre-colonial Yoruba. (Heck, the vast majority of us don’t even have a first-hand view of the current Yoruba.) I’m sure some colonialists wrote accounts of what they saw when they arrived in the area–but any colonialist account that paints pre-colonialized people in a negative light is generally assumed to be biased and tainted by racism, which makes such accounts not-so-useful for supporting arguments in polite discussion. We’d need some kind of data, and data is often hard to come by.
Here are my own suspicions, though:
The tribal/village structure of these west African communities probably provided enough kin support that families could move children around like this and still have many of them reach adulthood. The system may, in fact, have been superior to just having the kids home with mom. Similar to modern day care, the extended kin network could look after the kids while mom worked in the fields or traveled to other cities to trade or do other work.
This system has low incentives for marital fidelity or monogamy, leading to an excess of males, which helped catapult the slave trade in the first place, though that is beyond the scope of this post.
However, rates of child abuse/neglect/abandonment/starvation/malnutrition were probably pretty high, just as they are in various communities today. These sorts of unpleasant details just don’t tend to show up in accounts that are trying to cast their subjects in a positive light, and frankly, horrible rates of infant mortality were so common in the past as to be unremarkable to many observers.
Here in the US, the system is less functional because, for starters, there are few African American men with large farms for their wives to raise crops on. People who would have been on the top of the social pile in Yorubaland, people who had all of the traits necessary to be a successful, thriving, happy member of Yoruba society may not have the traits necessary to out-compete, say, Taiwanese immigrants with their nose-to-the grindstone approach to getting their kids into medical school. Living in modern America is also much more expensive than living in a tribal village–the cost of housing, transportation (car), health care, etc., in the US will set you back many a small third world farm. Not to mention different policing standards.
Per capita GDP in modern Nigeria is $3,005.51. This is after tremendous growth; in 2000, it was only $377.50–I’m guessing oil is mostly responsible for the difference, because I recall hearing about a joint venture between the Russian gas company Gazprom and the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, so I’d caution against assuming that a ton of that money went to ordinary citizens. Looking backwards, pre-colonial per capita GDP was probably also pretty darn low, with most people engaged in subsistence agriculture.
Our perceptions of “wealth” are entirely dependent on how the other citizens of a society lives–a guy with a fifty acre farm can be “wealthy” in a third-world agricultural society, while “desperately poor” by first world standards. How he sees himself probably has a lot to do with how he sees his neighbors–is he on top of his society, or at the bottom?
Oh look, W. Hunter posted about Lotteries.
“Lotteries can be useful natural experiments; we can use them to test the accuracy of standard sociological theories, in which rich people buy their kids extra smarts, bigger brains, better health, etc.
David Cesarini, who I met at that Chicago meeting, has looked at the effect of winning the lottery in Sweden. He found that the āeffects of parental wealth on infant health, drug consumption, scholastic performance and cognitive and non-cognitive skills can be bounded to a tight interval around zero.ā “
I count this as evidence in favor of my theory that winning the lottery does not have a significant effect on a person’s likelihood of committing crimes (eg, drug consumption,) and that the converse, becoming suddenly poor, probably also has no major effect.
There’s also a somewhat garbled reference in the article to an interesting 1800s land-lottery in Georgia; I recall the longer post on the subject and recommend it if you can find it.
