As my friend Javier always says, “it’s hard to be so perfect all the time.” See who was right when she said that the voters don’t care about either Benghazi or the IRS-Tea Party scandal:

According to the survey, which was conducted Friday and Saturday, 53% of Americans say they approve of the job the president is doing, with 45% saying they disapprove. The president’s approval rating was at 51% in CNN’s last poll, which was conducted in early April.

“That two-point difference is well within the poll’s sampling error, so it is a mistake to characterize it as a gain for the president,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. “Nonetheless, an approval rating that has not dropped and remains over 50% will probably be taken as good news by Democrats after the events of the last week.”

We can disagree on whether the voters should care, but the indisputable reality is that they don’t. As I said from the start.

Contrary to popular opinion, the autistics’ unsociability and incapacity to notice non-verbal clues don’t necessarily make them bad judges of either societal trends or individual people. Here is an example. Once, an administrator was being hired at my university and everybody attended introductory meetings with him.

“Well, he might be a tough administrator,” people agreed afterwards, “but at least he is completely honest and open about everything. You can just see that he is incapable of holding back his opinions.”

I was the only person in the entire group who disagreed.

“No,” I said, “this is a very insincere and fake person. When somebody repeats the words “honesty” and “openness” so many times in one encounter, this must mean he is conscious of possessing neither characteristic.”

Everybody stared at me with a barely concealed exasperation reserved for the deeply unsociable who pretend to understand how the “normal” humans function.

Years passed and the new administrator turned out to be the most dishonest and fake person most of us had ever seen. His capacity for lying and scheming was unparalleled. It turned out I had been completely right about him from the start for the simple reason that I never paid attention to the fake body language and facial expressions meant to convey honesty (and that sociopathic personalities know very well how to imitate) and concentrated only on the words.

The greatest mistake people make when analyzing others is believing that everybody has to be exactly like oneself and attributing one’s own beliefs to everybody else. If I care deeply about Benghazi, then everybody else surely must too, many people say to themselves. This is a mistake which an autistic, a person whose central life experience is that of being different, is a lot less likely to make.

There was this theory for a while that professed that the first 48 hours in a baby’s life were massively important. If the baby and the parents remained close, something called “bonding” would take place. This “bonding” would flood the parents with joy and set the course of the future relationship with the baby.

Sounds great, of course. Make a teensy little effort and the entire relationship is destined to be great forever.

This is all a load of baloney, of course. “Bonding” is a purely American, completely invented concept that has no equivalent in other languages I know. A consumerist society loves to believe that if you press the right button, you will be guaranteed a result with no effort involved. There must be an easy recipe to generate a happy relationship with one’s child on the spot. The reality, though, is completely different. Relationships take years and decades, not hours, to build.

Who cares about some stupid concept that is patently ridiculous, you’ll ask. You would be right, if it weren’t for one thing. People who are duped by the bonding-peddlers into expecting a fountain of joyful emotions to accompany their baby’s birth feel enormously guilty when, instead, they feel disappointment, indifference, anger, sadness, exhaustion, etc.  Such people have no idea that their experiences are completely normal. As a result, their feelings of inadequacy and fear that something must be deeply wrong with them if the magical bonding has not happened might trigger or deepen their postpartum depression.

I’m very glad that a mountain of evidence on the fictitious nature of “bonding hormones” is convincing people to stop torturing themselves with guilt and fear.

The movie has already served a good purpose, as you can see. And I found a not-horrible-at-all infant-raising book at the store. It struggles valiantly to keep ideology to the minimum and even acknowledges that the bonding theory (which states that there is some magical bonding that takes place in the first two days of a baby’s life) is all a load of baloney. I also discovered that bookstores place the 50 Shades trilogy into the romance section. Pornography, yes, but to imagine that somebody can find this swill to be romantic is beyond my powers.

When N. started getting very agitated about an article on teenage sexual habits in the Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, I wondered who its authors were. A very brief search revealed that the very first of the piece’s authors has published research “proving” that women are less competitive than men and that affirmative action is detrimental to “the blacks” who “cannot succeed” in good schools. After such a pedigree, what hot-button issue is left for such a scholar to explore? The answer is obvious: sex.

The article that annoyed N. so much attempts to prove that a reliable and constant access to contraception results in a higher rate of teenage pregnancies. In order to decrease the rate of teenage pregnancies, the article claims, it is crucial to avoid educating teenagers about contraception.

How would it possess one to defend abstinence education in 2012, you will ask. Well, here is the argument its authors make and also the reasons why said argument is deeply flawed.

Arcidiacono, Khwaja, Ouyang. “Habit Persistence and Teen Sex: Could Increased Access to Contraception Have Unintended Consequences for Teen Pregnancies?” Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, April 2012.

This paper attempts to model how teenage sexual behavior in the US would respond to changes in policies related to sex education and accessibility of contraceptives. The authors assume that teenage pregnancies are very costly to both the young parents and the society: having a child at the age of 14-19 tends to cripple the parents’ professional development and place a sizable burden on the government.

The decision making process of the teenage population is formalized in a nice discrete choice model where “choice” refers to whether a teen chooses to have sex and, if s/he does, what kind of contraception (condoms, pill, unprotected) s/he decides to use. In addition, the teen can choose between three levels of sexual activity (low, medium, high), which results in 10 combined choices. Authors propose a certain utility function that governs the choices made. E.g., for some teenagers, the “utility” of unprotected sex is greater than the cost of potential unwanted pregnancy, and so they engage in the former.

The utility function is based on a few assumptions that one may call “hard” and “soft”. The “hard” assumption must hold regardless of whether it is confirmed by the data. One such assumption is that teenagers adjust the level of their sexual activity depending on the accessibility of contraceptives. As the accessibility goes down, some teenagers supposedly reduce the frequency of sex or even switch to abstinence, and vice-versa.

Secondly, a teenager acts in a manner that maximizes the utility over the course of the entire teenage period, which is 4-5 years. The choice made today affects the entire future path. Since each year 10 options are available, in the beginning the teen is supposed to go over some 100,000 possible paths and pick the one the highest utility. In short, he/she is supposed to act like a very skilled chess player who thinks many steps ahead. Have you met many teens who analyze 100,000 possibilities before deciding to get laid?

Continue reading →

N has read an article in the journal of his professional association where the authors have allowed their ideology to interfere with the sacred process of statistical modeling. So now, instead of lying on the beach, he is stuck in the hotel room writing a passionate rebuttal to the article.

I will post the rebuttal later on. Don’t worry, you will like it because it has to do with teenage sex.

Juan Cole has a new article up where he suggests that the state should provide a uniform yearly income of $75,000 to everybody in order to make people happy and not depressed. (I’m still on the beach, still can’t link, please find the article on your own.)

Zygmunt Bauman also suggests in his 2011 book on culture that without a radical redistribution of wealth the existing social and economic problems will not be resolved.

When I read such pronouncements, I always wonder if their authors are really dumb or simply pretend to be dumb.

There is absolutely no way that Juan Cole and Zygmunt Bauman don’t know that a radical redistribution of wealth always leads to the same result. Namely, within just one generation the society where the redistribution took place becomes a lot more stratified socially and economically than it had been before the redistribution. And the more radical the redistribution, the more galling is the resulting stratification. Even if you not only take away all of the wealth of the ruling class but actually slaughter that class including the children. Even if an embargo precludes the entrance of any new wealth into the country. Even if the country where the redistribution occurs is desperately poor / quite wealthy / of moderate wealth to begin with. Even when a fixed income that Cole dreams about is introduced and defectors from that vision of income are punished by death.

Cole and Bauman must surely know all this because there are mountains of historical evidence demonstrating that this is always the result of a radical redistribution of wealth. (Mind you, we are talking about a radical redistribution, not about somebody paying 10% more in tax). As for the evidence that such a redistribution will make everybody happy and not depressed, it doesn’t exist.

Cole and Bauman avoid addressing the pesky issue of history that has proven their dream to be a piece of arrant idiocy more times than should have been necessary to convince even the most stubborn believers. The only argument this camp of trenchant worshippers of redistribution ever offers is racist and xenophobic in the extreme. The redistribution, they say, was simply not conducted right by those bumbling stupid creatures who uselessly inhabit the worthless part of the world that lies outside the US borders.  Now if the mighty Americans were to do it, they would show the world how to redistribute correctly and non-depressively.

The only little glitch with this plan is that its cost is always (again, that annoying evidence) a mountain of dead bodies. Cole and Bauman, in spite of all the verbiage they regale us with, don’t really notice non-Anglo corpses, which is why they consistently forget to mention this little issue.

The reason why this discourse of redistribution is so dangerous is that it precludes us from developing and discussing any real and workable program of action. “Well, since there can be no real redistribution, it’s all useless anyway,” one progressive thinker after another sighs impotently. As a result, we are stuck with repeating the same old useless fantasies that, for a century, have been beguiling people into massacring each other by the million only to end up with a much more stratified society than before.

We found an Austrian restaurant in Marco Island and it serves this. This is the best food in the world. Eric Norbert has been kicking me for the last half hour. He probably wonders why I’m failing to send down some beer to accompany the feast.

If you know me at all, then you can guess which of these two lunches is mine.

After a protracted search, N has come up with a name for our future son:

Eric Norbert.

“Eric” is a name he likes phonetically and “Norbert” is the name of some famous mathematician. And they both go with the last name.

A name database says that Eric is a name of somebody who loves travel and adventure and rejects traditions and conventions. I think that’s a great identity to have.

The news reporting is so shoddy and careless that it’s impossible to figure out what really happened. TV newscasts, newspaper and online headlines are all talking about the IRS “targeting” the Tea Party groups. The word “targeting” is supposed to be self-explanatory in this context but it really isn’t.

Were the tax returns of these groups analyzed more closely because of their ideology? Were they audited? If so, then what’s the big deal? Can’t anybody be audited at any time? Do we refer to all cash-business owners and all small-business owners who contract overseas and who get audited a lot more often than anybody else as being “targeted”?

As for these groups’ tax returns being scrutinized, well, if their raison d’etre is to oppose taxes, wouldn’t it be incredibly stupid on the part of the IRS not to see if they put their ideology into practice? If a student rants and raves about plagiarism being a fully respectable practice, who wouldn’t be extra-careful while grading his papers? If a neighbor declares that she doesn’t believe in private property, who wouldn’t hide the wallet whenever she comes by?

As for the government discriminating against people on ideological grounds, that has been happening forever, and nobody seems to care. Just look at a green card or work visa application and its questions about one’s political affiliations. This is a blatant violation of the right of some political parties in the US to have new members come from other countries. And being denied a visa just because you held a party membership card 50 years ago is a little more serious than undergoing a tax audit, which is something we should all be prepared to do anyway.

I also find it curious that people calling themselves “Patriots” have such an issue with proving their patriotism in the most definitive way ever. Waving flags and making speeches is easy. Declaring every cash payment you received and that nobody could have found about had you not declared it – like I did this year – is much harder.

The Tea Party groups could have used this situation to show the kind of maturity they’ve been lacking and that has cost them most of their support. Instead, they have chosen to antagonize every individual who has been audited by the IRS and who has faced the ordeal bravely.

Oh well. They had no future as a political project anyway.