Kieran Healy

Top Jobs

Via Brian Leiter, a list of the 200 Best Occupations ranks Actuary at #1, Historian at #5, and then, a little further down, this:

I guess if the Life of the Mind is good, it follows that the the Life of the Head must be even better.

Presumed Consent Again

Some work of mine on presumed and informed consent for organ donation has been picked up by Catherine Rampell at the New York Times’ Economix blog. It’s a good summary of the paper. I’ve discussed this stuff before on CT, in the context of the possible introduction of a presumed consent rule in Britain.

I can’t go on. I’ll go on. Now I can’t get off.

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The Scottish Verdict

A prompt from Dan Hirschman made me dig up this review essay on Donald MacKenzie’s An Engine, Not a Camera. A shorter version appeared ages ago on OrgTheory, and this version never quite got finished, but some people have found the discussion useful so here it is as a PDF.

Minarets in Switzerland

I hadn’t been following the story of Switzerland’s efforts to ban the construction of minarets. Switzerland has about 400,000 muslims and — though there are many mosques — precisely four minarets. The referendum succeeded by a comfortable majority. As you can see from the poster, the rights of women under Islam were pointed to as a reason to support the ban. The Guardian reports that the pro-ban SPP

said that going to the European court would breach the popular sovereignty that underpins the Swiss democratic model and tradition … It dismissed the arguments about freedom or religion, asserting that minarets were not a religious but a political symbol, and the thin end of a wedge that would bring sharia law to the country, with forced marriages, “honour” killings, female genital mutilation and oppression of women … The prohibition also found substantial support on the left and among secularists worried about the status of women in Islamic cultures. Prominent feminists attacked minarets as male power symbols, deplored the oppression of Muslim women, and urged a vote for the ban.

The Times reports that there’s some evidence that more women were in favor of the ban than men, too. One can only suppose that, having waited until 1971 to give women the vote in Federal elections, and in some parts of the country until 1990 in Cantonal elections, the Swiss are now making up for lost time making good on their commitment to feminism.

The Visual Display of Stupid

I’d almost be happier if this turned out to be some kind of fake. But in the meantime, while you may think of it as a badly flawed and unfair pie chart, I prefer to see it as actually just an extreme version of a genuine pie chart.

Sixty Seconds of Thanksgiving

From the uniformly excellent David Friedman, a short film.

Facts and Values

I recall a short but striking conversation with the formidable Piero Sraffa at the Economics Faculty cocktail party after Dennis Robertson’s Marshall Lectures. I well knew that it was Sraffa whom Wittgenstein had described as his mentor during the gestation of the Philosophical Investigations, but I still ventured a rather simple-minded remark about the obvious importance of the fact-value distinction to the social sciences. He turned on me his charming smile and glittering eyes. Did I really suppose that one could switch from fact to value as if simply moving a handle? His voice rose and his Italian accent grew sharper. “Fact, value! Value, fact! Fact, value! Value, Fact! FACT, VALUE! VALUE, FACT!” I beat a swift and chastened retreat. — W.G. Runciman, Confessions of a Reluctant Theorist, 18.

Bach and before, Ives and after

From a 1949 issue of Life Magazine, your guide to the “three basic categories of a new U.S. social structure—and the high brows have the whip hand”. With the rise of the cultural omnivore still well off in the distance, this is your must-have guide for the vagaries of mainstream culture in postwar America. Click for a larger version.

Pissing off the other crowd

Andrew Gelman discusses Superfreakonomics saying,

The interesting question to me is why is it that “pissing off liberals” is
delightfully transgressive and oh-so-fun, whereas “pissing off conservatives” is boring and earnest?

Several years ago bumper stickers appeared that read “Annoy a Liberal. Work hard. Succeed. Be happy.” I was living in Arizona at the time, so they became a routine part of my commute. Possessing neither the blunt empirical thesis of “Guns Bought Your Freedom” nor the slow fuse of “Body Piercing Saved My Life”, the barefaced cheek of the non sequitur made the sticker absurd and irritating at the same time. I remember wondering what a parallel message to conservatives would look like. Sure enough, attempts at rebuttal soon started appearing on (other) bumpers. They were lame—stuff like “Annoy a Conservative. Think for yourself. Defend the Constitution. Balance the Budget.” Noble sentiments, but watery stuff by comparison.

Why did they seem so ineffective a response? Perhaps stronger material was needed. Might “Annoy a Conservative. Burn the Flag. Convert to Islam. Have an Abortion” work better? No. While that kind of thing can have some punch (“Jesus Loves You, But Everyone Else Thinks You’re An Asshole”), it doesn’t seem like the right tack. Instead, the best riposte to the “Annoy a Liberal” sticker is simply the same thing with the target swapped out: “Annoy a Conservative: Work. Succeed. Be Happy”. The effect is more or less the same as the original, especially if placed on the back of your Lesbaru. Temporarily suspending my longstanding irritation at divisions of this sort, much of what passes for “Pissing off Conservatives” is really an effort to rebut some ridiculous charge or other, instead of a genuinely symmetrical attempt to piss someone off. Or, as the story has Lyndon Johnson arguing, it’s better to kick off the conversation in a way that forces the other guy to deny that he’s a pig-fucker.

Looking at Data

Jeremy Freese is doing some analysis:

So, the General Social Survey reinterviewed a large subset of 2006 respondents in 2008. They have released the data that combines into one file the respondents interviewed for the first time in 2008 and the 2008 reinterviews of the respondents originally interviewed in 2006. In a separate file, of course, you can get the original 2006 interviews for the latter people.

What has not yet been released, however, is the variable that would identify what row in the first file corresponds to what row in the second file. In other words, you know that person #438 in the reinterview data is somebody originally interviewed in 2006, but you don’t know what person in the 2006 data there are.

Well, especially because the last thing I need to be doing right now is procrastinating, that sounded like a challenge. Just as I have learned that just because there are no microwave instructions for a frozen dinner doesn’t mean you can’t microwave it, just because there isn’t a merge variable doesn’t mean you can’t merge the data. At least if no secure data agreement is involved.

All I have to say is: holy crap. You’d think knowing somebody’s sex, survey ballot (which was kept the same both times), zodiac sign, year of birth, self-identified race, region where they lived where they were 16, whether they lived with their parents when they were 16, whether they lived in the same place they did growing up, who they said they voted for in 2004, their marital status, their education, what they say they did for a living, how many years their mother went to school, inter alia, would allow you to pretty easily pinpoint who is who. I am here to tell you this is not the case.

I was able to devise some convoluted scheme and check how well it was doing thanks to a pretty big clue that I’ll refrain from posting, but even then there ended up being 50 cases that out of 1500 that I wasn’t sure who they were. In general the experience affirmed a fundamental suspicion I’ve had about analyzing survey data: the data seem so much less real once you ask the same person the same question twice.

The real distinction between qualitative and quantitative is not widely appreciated. People think it has something to do with counting versus not counting, but this is a mistake. If the interpretive work necessary to make sense of things is immediately obvious to everyone, it’s qualitative data. If the interpretative work you need to do is immediately obvious only to experts, it’s quantitative data.

Make Shift-Enter do a lot in ESS

If you use Emacs and ESS to run R, then here’s a nice tweak I found on the Emacs Wiki. The following bit of elisp goes in your .emacs file (or equivalent). Starting with an R file in the buffer, hitting shift-enter vertically splits the window and starts R in the right-side buffer. If R is running and a region is highlighted, shift-enter sends the region over to R to be evaluated. If R is running and no region is highlighted, shift-enter sends the current line over to R. Repeatedly hitting shift-enter in an R file steps through each line (sending it to R), skipping commented lines. The cursor is also moved down to the bottom of the R buffer after each evaluation. Although you can of course use various emacs and ESS keystrokes to do all this (C-x-3, C-c-C-r, etc, etc) it’s convenient to have them bound in a context-sensitive way to one command.

This is in my fork of the Emacs Starter Kit, by the way.