Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

My Facebook feed has been filled up with postings about the unfortunate clash between white nationalists in Charlottesville and those who came out to protest them.

“White supremacy: Are US right-wing groups on the rise?” (BBC) suggests that roughly 10,000 Americans might qualify as active white supremacists. In a population of 325 million, that’s roughly 1 out of every 27,000 people old enough to hold a firm political point of view.

How is it that such a small percentage of the population can capture such a large mindshare? Here’s an idea from UK-based Brendan O’Neill:

It’s becoming so clear now why the war of words between SJWs and the new white nationalists is so intense. It isn’t because they have huge ideological differences — it’s because they have so much in common. Both are obsessed with race, SJWs demanding white shame, the alt-right responding with white pride. Both view everyday life and culture through a highly racialised filter. SJWs can’t even watch a movie without counting how many lines the black actor has in comparison with the white actor so that they can rush home and tumblr about the injustice of it all. Both have a seemingly boundless capacity for self-pity. Both are convinced they’re under siege, whether by patriarchy, transphobia and the Daily Mail (SJWs) or by pinkos and blacks (white nationalists). Both have a deep censorious strain. And both crave recognition of their victimhood and flattery of their feelings. This is really what they’re fighting over — not principles or visions but who should get the coveted title of the most hard-done-by identity. They’re auditioning for social pity. “My life matters! My pain matters! I matter!” The increasing bitterness and even violence of their feud is not evidence of its substance, but the opposite: it’s the narcissism of small differences.

[Note that I don’t subscribe to the characterization of a clash that left a woman dead as a “war of words,” but perhaps the above was written prior to the confrontation in Virginia?]

Friends who are reasonably analytical are inferring from news coverage of this gathering of a few hundred people that Nazi ideology is sweeping the U.S. Is that reasonable? What if the media had simply refused to cover this gathering? None of the counter protesters would have showed up (and therefore none would have been killed). Nobody other than locals in Charlottesville and their Facebook friends would ever have found out about it. Especially if you don’t agree with it, why give a platform to an ideology that is persuasive to 1 in 27,000 adult Americans? Is there some concrete political advantage to be gained by featuring this fringe group?

Sampling of what I’ve seen on Facebook:

Racist white nationalist groups showing your colors: you will only unite us against your hatred. Thanks to the true patriots who speak out against you.
Trump supporters: When Trump refuses to call out the bigots (unlike virtually everyone else, Republican or Democrat), it’s because he thinks they’re his base. [i.e., Trump is desperate for 10,000 extra votes spread across the nation]

There was a terrorist attack in the United States today. But our commander-in-chief chose to play to his base — rather than call it for what it was.

White supremacy laced bigotry lingers everywhere, even in the left-leaning bastion of Berkeley. I’m hopeful that before too long, we can look back on this disgusting period of revitalized hate and discrimination thankfully in that some long festering pockets of discrimination have now, finally, openly exposed themselves. Now that we can all witness the ugliness in plain sight, we just need to root them all out. More of this! [link to “Berkeley’s Top Dog fires employee who went to white nationalist rally” about a purported white supremacist named “Cole White“! Next question: does having unpopular political views qualify someone for disability benefits? Who is going to hire this guy?]

Just to be clear, those were actually white supremacists in Charlottesville and they’ve found an ally in Donald Trump [gathered a response: “Trump cannot specifically disavow the KKK, racists, Neo-Nazis, or White Supremacists as they represent a substantial portion of his base and he fears alienating them.”]

Update: The comments below, which the moderators are struggling mightily with to keep the number under 50 (at which point the Harvard software provides no interface to the first 50, but you can find them at http://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2017/08/15/the-unfortunate-events-in-charlottesville/comment-page-1/), contain one interesting theme, which is also all over the media. People are apparently desperate to hear scolding/soothing words from President Trump. This strikes me as a good illustration of the general phenomenon of Americans viewing their President as a god-like figure with special powers of insight. The theory is that someone a statement from Trump will cause people to change their views on the merits of neo-Nazism? Why is Trump more persuasive than a beloved Hollywood celebrity, a popular religious leader, or a scholar? The same people who rejected Trump as an authority on the behavior of women who circle around rich guys and reality TV stars (“when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything … Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”) now accept Trump as an authority on the subject of political philosophy.

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What are readers doing to prepare for the 2017 total eclipse?

I went to Harvard Bookstore and, amidst the social justice titles (featured prominently were She Persisted, for children, MAD About Trump: A Brilliant Look at Our Brainless President, and An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, which turned out not to be about the limitations of MySQL compared to Oracle) found Totality: The Great American Eclipses of 2017 and 2024, which I recommend ordering in hardcopy (too many illustrations and photos to be handled gracefully by the Kindle).

Totality explains clearly why there are more solar eclipses than lunar and why there are more annular eclipses than total solar eclipses. It also contains some practical information for eclipse viewing.

[It seems that most of the text of this book is lifted from a 2009 version, at which point the topic of gender ID for science nerds wasn’t front and center for the public. So the book is missing the discussion of female astronomers that occupies much of a more recent work that I reviewed. On the plus side, leaving out the chapters on female victimhood left room for actual explanations of the orbital mechanics. Note that these are non-mathematical and heavily illustrated so you don’t have to bend your mind around Calculus 101-type material.]

My personal plans are to fly from KBED to KCKV, KCEU, or KCAE, depending on which has the best forecast. All of these airports are in the path of totality. I would be delighted to meet any readers who find themselves at one of these airports.

Readers: How are your eclipse plans shaping up?

Related:

• Inspiration to watch the eclipse on August 21
• Watch the Great American Eclipse of 2017 from a light airplane?

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One of the (many) things that I love about the Google Heretic, aside from the fact that Americans are more interested in him than the possibility of nuclear war with North Korea, is what the discussion reveals about American education levels and reasoning styles.

A friend who earned a Ph.D. and is now a business school professor shared “‘Dear Mr. Google Manifesto’: Epic Response From Chemical Engineer, Corp VP, Mom Of 5” as a Facebook status, adding her own “Epic response to “Mr Google Manifesto” guy. Nothing to gain from fueling a war of the sexes — but sometimes one has got to respond.”

The author, Melissa Aquino, is listed by Bloomberg as the VP of Marketing and Director of Human Resources at McCrometer, a water meter business with about $32 million/year in revenue. She has a bachelor’s degree in engineering and is apparently smart enough that she no longer has to work as an engineer. The journalist at Patch describes her as “a chemical engineer who serves as a corporate vice president for a Fortune 200 company” (part of the confusion may be that this small company where Ms. Aquino is a VP was acquired by a large company; Fortune itself suggests that $14 billion/year is the threshold of Fortune 200).

Summary of the conversation between James Damore and Melissa Aquino:

• Research on a sample population shows that the median woman has a lower tolerance for stress than the median man
• I climbed the corporate ladder while pregnant with five separate children

[The last part is interesting. The “epic response” uses the term pregnant five times. It seems that being in an air-conditioned house on maternity leave and then parking an infant in daycare is sufficient for claiming modern-day Sacagawea status. See also Bill Burr.]

An equivalent conversation:

• The distribution of age for Hispanics in the U.S. has a lower median age than that of the general population (Pew)
• That can’t be right because I met this old Cuban guy at a jazz club.

(Separately, Ms. Aquino says that she studied engineering and then addresses the Google programmer as “a fellow scientist“.)

I pointed out that she was responding to a hypothesized distribution with a data point. The B-school professor’s (male) friends responded:

• No. She is telling her story. And it is a very common story. I see it all the time. (this guy is not a chemical engineer, so it is unclear what part of Melissa Aquino’s story he might have seen)
• Google broflake doesn’t realize that women in tech, worldwide, are heavy into coding. India, Malaysia and others have over 50%. While the number in the US are lower, it is more a cultural phenomena in the West that they do not participate. He needs to see the world and get out of his bubble before he makes baseless claims. The only thing he normalized in the whole thing was that there should be an increase in Silicon Valley.

India and Malaysia rank lower in gender equality (UN) than the U.S. Can we can infer that women in those countries are willing to toil in front of a screen all day because better jobs are not available to them? Or is it that these societies are especially gender-equal in computer nerdism while being gender-unequal in everything else?

[I’m still kind of surprised that people see the male-heavy ratio of computer nerds as signs that computer nerdism is the world’s best job or requires special mental skills. When Hillary arrives at an FBO in her Gulfstream and finds that the people pumping Jet-A in -10 degree temps and 20 knot winds are men and the people sitting behind the front desk in the luxurious lounge are women, does she say “Pumping Jet-A in cold, rain, heat, snow, and/or wind must be a great job that women are excluded from”? When that Gulfstream needs new paint and the people sanding off the paint in the 100-degree hangar are men while the people designing the scheme in an air-conditioned office are women, does anyone say “This shows that men have brains that are genetically better suited to sanding Gulstreams”?

If we step back from the inter-gender issues being debated, we find that engineering grad students are mostly foreigners (Inside Higher Ed). America’s most unpleasant jobs have typically been done by immigrants. Why don’t we infer from the unwillingness of young Americans to study engineering that engineering of all types is unpleasant? Then if we want to go back to the inter-gender issue the question can be handled more generally as “Why are there more men than women doing unpleasant jobs?”]

I wonder if people in Taiwan, Singapore, Korea, China, Germany, et al., will look at this discussion and say “Let’s make sure that if we invest in the U.S. it is something that doesn’t require hiring people with math or analytical skills.” James Damore highlighted some already-well-known research results so his memo wasn’t interesting per se. But maybe his memo itself can be considered an experiment in “How capable are the best-educated Americans at reasoning about distributions and synthesizing research results?” He essentially administered something like the Collegiate Learning Assessment to middle-aged people.

Related:

• “Women in Science”
• Glassdoor on McCrometer, the company where Melissa Aquino is Director of HR: “Backward people, the company is run by 20 year employees that do as little as they can to get by.”; “Management consists of human jellyfish. … Exploitation of people’s skills and a lot of lip service about advancement but ZERO action to actually help people advance”; “Management has no clue as to what the customer wants and needs”
• David Brooks in the NYTimes:

Which brings us to Pichai, the supposed grown-up in the room. He could have wrestled with the tension between population-level research and individual experience. He could have stood up for the free flow of information. Instead he joined the mob. He fired Damore and wrote, “To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not O.K.” That is a blatantly dishonest characterization of the memo. Damore wrote nothing like that about his Google colleagues. Either Pichai is unprepared to understand the research (unlikely), is not capable of handling complex data flows (a bad trait in a C.E.O.) or was simply too afraid to stand up to a mob.

(Response from a former Googler: Brooks is smart, but his position makes no sense, so let’s look at the fundamentals: Sundar is one of the highest paid executives on the planet, and he’s looking out for #1 (that’s Sundar), and his political nose told him that the heretic had to be burned to please the important executives at Google, so he did the right thing for himself… what’s to hate about that, and why should he resign? There is a famous saying on the street, “don’t hate the player, hate the game,” and Sundar’s game is formidable: I’m sure he’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars at a minimum. Does Sundar even care about his issue? I suspect not, unless it interferes with his ability to get paid. [Factcheck: CNBC says Pichai made $200 million last year.])

• Academically Adrift, a book looking at how young Americans do on the Collegiate Learning Assessment (answer: going to college is increasingly less useful for improving one’s score)

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The Google Heretic is the gift that keeps on giving…

From my recent Facebook feed, both from current (i.e., not-yet-purged) Google employees:

• “After canceled town hall meeting, Google CEO Sundar Pichai speaks at girls’ coding event” (Let’s hope none of the attendees asked “if you’re so passionate about employing women, why couldn’t you find any female managers or engineers to deliver this message?”)
• “In ‘I’m Gonna Be an Engineer,’ Peggy and Pete Seeger Talk Women in Science” (47-year-old song on the Union of Concerned Scientists web site)

The last one is interesting. If this union consists of “scientists,” how come they can’t tell the difference between engineering and science?

Lyrics samples:

What price for a woman?
You can buy her for a ring of gold,
To love and obey, without any pay,

The boss he says “We pay you as a lady,
You only got the job because I can’t afford a man,
With you I keep the profits high as may be,
You’re just a cheaper pair of hands.”

You got one fault, you’re a woman;
You’re not worth the equal pay.

Well, I listened to my mother and I joined a typing pool
Listened to my lover and I put him through his school
If I listen to the boss, I’m just a bloody fool
And an underpaid engineer
I been a sucker ever since I was a baby
As a daughter, as a mother, as a lover, as a dear
But I’ll fight them as a woman, not a lady
I’ll fight them as an engineer!

Despite the first bit having been made obsolete by changes in California family law during the intervening 47 years, I think it would be awesome for CEO Sundar Pichai to sing this song next time he is at a “Girls Code” or similar event (or maybe for the all-hands meeting if they can ever feel safe again on their own heavily guarded corporate campus?).

Separately, I wonder if Google is discouraging women from pursuing computer nerdism as a career. The company is in the news for being attacked by the Federales on the grounds that women at Google are paid less than men. By not having a “Boys Code” event, the company is suggesting that boys can learn to program by sitting down at a PC and teaching themselves while girls need special assistance (what better evidence of lower natural aptitude? You don’t see too many “Learning how to retrieve a tennis ball” classes for Golden Retrievers). Finally, by talking about the critical importance of protecting female employees, the company is suggesting that women are under constant attack once they get into a software development workplace.

Why would an intelligent diligent young woman look at the Google harlequinade and say “I’ll drop out of pre-Med and switch to software engineering”?

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My Trek T80+ bike is now two years old (review) and the battery is getting weaker. The Bionx battery system design seems to be something like seven years old.

A replacement battery for this bike costs $819, i.e., substantially more than what a Chinese consumer would pay for an electric bike with a similar battery capacity and a healthy fraction of the $1,300 that I paid for the (discontinued) bike.

Given the reductions in costs and improvements in battery technology that we’ve seen in the electric car world, it seems reasonable to expect cost reductions and improvements in the electric bike world, but there is a bewildering array of battery sizes, shapes, and connectors. Our local bike store has bikes costing from $2,500 to $5,000 with at least 10 different types of mutually incompatible batteries. Next year’s battery might be better, but it seems unlikely to fit on last year’s bike.

Readers: Is the lack of a standard for batteries, with the possibility of lower prices and better quality every year, keeping smart American consumers from spending $2,000+ on an electric bike?

Related:

• if a 50-lb. bike isn’t hard enough to pedal: a 160 lb. electric bike (48-mile electric range (downhill in a tailwind?))
• eBikeSchool links to Chinese component suppliers

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The Google Heretic is the gift that keeps on giving for anyone publishing a blog.

The Heretic’s memo and firing wouldn’t have happened but for Google’s desire to have a workforce that is “representative” of the general population, i.e., roughly 50 percent women. Despite management’s noble sentiments and the preponderance of Hillary supporters within the company, Google failed at their stated goal. This led the former science grad student (and current heretic) to turn to his science journals while it led me to ask “Why not pay women more if you’re so keen on hiring them?”

Supposedly it is illegal to pay women more simply because they are women. I’m not sure if this is true in practice because we are told by various politicians that employers pay women less because they are women.

I’m wondering if the sex discrimination laws that were enacted to help women get higher pay are now working to reduce female pay below market-clearing levels.

BLS data show that male labor force participation rate for ages 25-54 was 88 percent in 2014. Female labor force participation rate the same age range only 74 percent. With approximately equal numbers of men and women in this age group, there will be 88 men for every 74 women in the labor force, right? If every employer wants to have a 50/50 gender ID distribution not all of them can succeed. In a market economy, the typical way in which a scarce resource is allocated is via pricing. Women should be worth more in the labor market than men and companies such as Google would have to outbid other firms that seek gender ID balance in order to achieve it.

Readers: What am I missing? Now that being seen as pro-women is a business necessity, given the relative scarcity of women in the American labor force, are laws requiring equal pay to men and women working against women?

Related:

• “Accenture Commits To Boosting Its Workforce To 50% Women By 2025”

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“Judge Drops Rape Case Against U.S.C. Student, Citing Video Evidence” (nytimes):

In the early hours of April 1, neither student at the University of Southern California knew what the other had had to drink. An Uber was called, and the male student was seen on video following the female student into her dorm, where they had sex.

The woman later told the police she did not remember the encounter, and in May, prosecutors charged the male student, Armaan Premjee, 20, with rape. But a California judge dismissed the case last week after reviewing security video from the Banditos nightclub in Los Angeles and the woman’s dorm.

The videos showed the woman leading Mr. Premjee from the club, taking his photograph, following him into an Uber and, at her dorm, swiping an access card and allowing him inside.

The judge said during a preliminary hearing last week that he believed that the sex was consensual and that the videos were a “very strong indication” the woman was the initiator, according to reports.

Employers Googling for background won’t find anything when the accuser (“the woman”) applies for a job, but for in any background check on Armaan Premjee, “a junior studying business administration,” it will be tough to miss this unfortunate incident.

Premjee isn’t in the clear yet:

A student misconduct investigation involving Mr. Premjee within the university’s Title IX office remains active.

But let’s assume that he does beat the rap. Who is going to hire him? What employer would take the risk of having an accused rapist as a business manager? Google won’t be hiring Mr. Premjee to replace James Damore, right?

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“Our Broken Economy, in One Simple Chart” (nytimes) shows that the highest-income Americans are also the ones with the “largest income growth.” I wonder if Thomas Piketty and friends followed individuals over time or just looked at brackets of income that contained different people from year to year. If they followed individuals then these data suggest that the most energetic and motivated Americans are the richest. Instead of slacking off and enjoying their yachts, Gulfstreams, and 7 luxury homes worldwide, they are doing something that gives them a 6% pay raise every year.

If they didn’t follow individuals, though, aren’t the stated conclusions wrong? Suppose that the income of rich people is highly variable, e.g., inflated one year due to selling a company and comparatively depressed the next year. In that case, from simple volatility and economic growth you might see that the high end of the income scale was doing well (how else did those people get to the high end of the scale?) but it wouldn’t be the same people year after year. Similarly, for those with low income, someone who goes onto a diet of SSDI and OxyContin might have the same income as last year’s consumer of SSDI/OxyContin.

[Separately, the chart note suggests that it includes “transfers and non-cash benefits” for the poor, but I wonder how that is possible. Ever since the Clinton-era “welfare reform,” simple cash transfers have been a small component of modern-day welfare in the U.S. The non-cash stuff is tough to track and value. When a new apartment building is constructed, for example, the developer may be required to hand over 10 percent of the units to a government housing ministry for distribution to the poor. The value of these units are not on the government’s books. And if real estate prices go up, does the person who lives in a free apartment in Manhattan experience a boost in income according to Piketty and friends? Collecting child support and alimony is a big part of the U.S. economy and there are no convenient authoritative sources for the total cashflow (generally from higher-income defendants to plaintiffs with lower wage income).]

The article came to me from a hedge fund manager friend:

First, there has always been a distribution of income and we know it is skewed right. It pretty much has to be, if income is bounded by 0 but not limited on the upside. Allowing for negative income tax rates (the earned income credit) creates some weird growth rates. Overall, growth rates are compressed for people receiving income-based transfers when those transfers are progressive.

There is a tautological aspect to the results. People whose income rose the fastest (e.g. Steve Jobs) ended up in the 1% or the 0.1% because of that growth. So it shouldn’t be surprising that people who now have the highest incomes also had faster rates of growth in that income. That is how they got into the right tail. Few people complain when Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg leapfrogs into the high income brackets but it really bothers economists like Thomas Piketty that the averages behave different from the averages of other income brackets. Remember, we are measuring how fast the average moved, not how fast the income of a third-generation trust baby’s income rose over that period. Their income may have determined the average in 1980 but they are not part of the tiny super-high income brackets any more. Those brackets are reserved for people who grabbed the brass ring and held on for a meteoric rise in pay.

Related:

• Book review: Piketty’s Capital

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“Google cancels all-hands diversity meeting over safety concerns: Google feared questioners would face threats if their names leaked online.” (ArsTechnica) is disappointing to any Lisp or SQL programmer because it was a missed opportunity to use the headline “Group of C programmers say that they feel unsafe.”

Apparently the issue is that adherents can’t anonymously suggest or vote on questions for the high priests. If done with Google’s existing discussion infrastructure, real employee names are attached to postings.

What if Google told everyone who wanted to participate in this process to sign up to AOL and get a username such as “SupportDiversity2017”? Then they could use AOL’s infrastructure to gather questions, vote questions up/down, etc.

Related:

• Casting out the heretic at Google
• Google is replacing Uber, but not quite the way that I predicted
• Google Heretic sparks interest in the history of Computer Science

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“Australia’s Desperate Refugee Obstinacy” shows that Roger Cohen and his colleagues are brave enough to sit in the Manhattan offices of the New York Times and denounce the hard-heartedness of people on the other side of the planet. What’s interesting, though, is the Readers’ Picks section among the comments. It seems that even the loyal Hillary supporters who read the New York Times aren’t supportive of taking in these “asylum-seekers and refugees.” (I put in my own comment, making my standard offer:

If Mr. Cohen would like to house one of these families in his apartment or house for at least one year, I’ll be happy to pay for the airfare from Nauru.

So far Roger Cohen hasn’t emailed to accept.)

The top pick:

I believe these refugees are predominantly from the Middle East, hence they had to travel through SE Asia, eventually to Indonesia, in order to board the rickety boat that people smugglers are using.

I know people here won’t like me for asking this, but I genuinely wonder if they couldn’t stay and feel safe in any of the countries they passed through, such as Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore or Brunei? If your only concern is flight from danger present in your native land, then any of these countries would have been enough to provide that sanctuary until events settled back home. But they had to come to Australia, after paying close to $10,000 to people smugglers. I genuinely wonder, if their motive wasn’t to improve their lot in life by coming to a wealthy democracy, why do they do this?

Another highly voted one:

Iran is not at war, and these people are not escaping persecution. They just want a better standard of living, but couldn’t get to Australia by legal channels. Why should Australians let them in, just because they tried to sneak in through the back door? How is this fair to people who emigrate legally? Pushing to the front of the queue should not be rewarded.

Separately, I wonder if the Great Migration of the 21st Century is going to relieve some of the media pressure on Israel. If scolding other countries for their resistance to immigration consumes the average journalist’s sanctimony budget, how much will be left over to complain about what Jews in Israel are doing?

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