Links for April 2024
AI, Anxious Generation, Religion, Crime, Higher Ed
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Now some items of interest from around the web:
AI Hoax
What did I find interesting last year at this time? See Links for April 2023.
One of those talked about AI voice-cloning technology and its use by scammers. Recently, we’ve also seen it used to produce an effective false accusation against an enemy. From the Baltimore Sun:
Baltimore County Police arrested Pikesville High School’s former athletic director Thursday morning and charged him with crimes related to the alleged use of artificial intelligence to impersonate Principal Eric Eiswert, leading the public to believe Eiswert made racist and antisemitic comments behind closed doors….
Police say Darien made the recording in retaliation after Eiswert initiated an investigation into improper payments he made to a school athletics coach who was also his roommate. Darien is also charged with theft and retaliating against a witness….
Eiswert’s voice, which police and AI experts believe was simulated, made disparaging comments about Black students and the surrounding Jewish community and was widely circulated on social media.
And here’s an odd detail on how it was circulated (pointer from Kat Rosenfield):
Ravenell told police that she had forwarded the email to a student’s cell phone, “who she knew would rapidly spread the message around various social media outlets and throughout the school,” and also sent it to the media and the NAACP, police said.
Cowen Vs. Haidt
I’ve yet to read Jonathan Haidt’s new book The Anxious Generation, which highlights the negative effects of smartphones and social media on youth. It’s getting a lot of flak, some of it stupid, some of it more sensible. Economist Tyler Cowen certainly isn’t stupid, and he’s quite critical and challenging in this interview with Haidt.
While I share a libertarian distrust of moral panics and top-down regulations, I do suspect that this distrust is leading smarter tech and libertarian people to subject Haidt to isolated demands for rigor.
And sometimes in that interview Cowen seems to be comically missing the point. In response to Haidt’s idea that lots of social media use is unhealthy, he suggests the problem could be solved with better AI to more efficiently summarize social media feeds, reducing the time necessary get information from it. At another point he asks why, if being online too much makes people unhappy, they are failing to “maximize.”
I think Cowen tends to model people as having roughly the same levels of intelligence, self-discipline, and autism as a successful George Mason University economist.
Regarding the point about AI making social media more “efficient” from the perspective of an infovore like Cowen, Zvi Mowshowitz points out that Cowen might not even be modelling himself correctly: Wouldn’t lowering the time costs to gather a given amount of information just lead to him gathering more information?
Adaptation vs. Selection
At Quillette, Robin Hanson discusses cultural evolution and cultural drift. The basic idea is that a group’s culture is important to survival or success, but that cultures degrade over time. Enter selection effects:
The usual life history of a firm’s culture is that, after some initial improvement, it will tend to drift, accumulating dysfunction, until the firm ceases to be worth saving and dies. Of course, there’s a lot of variation; some firms improve for a long time before decaying.
….On average, firms today are more productive than in past centuries because they benefit from better technology and better cultures. But why is that so if each firm’s culture degrades over time? The key is selection: firms with bad cultures go out of business fast, while those with good ones grow, inspiring new firms to copy them. If the world had only a few firms, each of which lasted centuries, we’d see vastly worse corporate cultures and far less progress overall.
A similar observation is at the heart of population ecology approaches to the study of organizations. In a 1977 article, sociologists Michael T. Hannan and John Freeman laid out all the constraints that could prevent a firm from rationally adapting to its environment. They concluded that if the population of firms at any given time seemed well-adapted, it was probably due to selection effects: The less well-adapted ones are continually going extinct. They went on to discuss implications of this for things like organizational diversity, or which sorts of organizations survive in rapidly changing environments.
Hanson’s big worry is large-scale macro cultures don’t have much variation, and that selection effects are weak enough in the short-term that nations and civilizations can drift into stagnation and disaster.
Hippies vs. Woke
Arnold Kling compares the hippies of the late 1960s with the current crop of campus protesters. His thesis: The distinctive psychological characteristic of the hippies was openness to experience, while that of the woke is neuroticism.
In less than a decade after 1968, the Hippies had blended into the rest of American society. Mainstream America adopted their music along with some of their style of dress and looser sexual norms. And the Hippies themselves found jobs, without taking political crusades into the work place.
I think that the Hippies were mostly healthy psychologically….Because its distinctive personality characteristic was high openness, it was aligned with free speech and with trying to persuade (the early anti-war actions on campus were “teach-ins” at which government officials were invited to debate anti-war faculty) rather than to cancel. People who were mostly straight could still be accepted by Hippies.
….The social justice activists strike me as closer to being a cult than a movement. I think that the cult attracts people who are unhealthy psychologically. They have a lot of negative emotions, and the social justice ideology serves to validate and reinforce those emotions.
Women tend to be higher in neuroticism than men. I don’t know about the hippie days, but women seem to be overrepresented in woke activism generally and the current campus protests in particular.
Religion and Sex
Women have also, historically, been more religious than men. Ryan Burge at Graphs about Religion writes:
The conventional wisdom is that women are just more religious than men. A Pew study looked at religiosity around the world and found exactly that, “Women are generally more religious than men, particularly among Christians.”
But that seems to have changed in recent American cohorts, with women rapidly catching up to men in having no religion.
As Burge notes, this shows up in multiple datasets and in church attendance as well as self-identification. It is definitely a cohort effect, not a period effect — the religion gap doesn’t disappear among the old, only among those born in 1980 or after. It’s also something that varies according to political alignment:
There is some evidence that Democrats have seen the gender gap reverse. In 2022, nearly 55% of young women had no religious affiliation compared to 51% of young men. However, that reversal does not appear for Independents or Republicans. In the case of Republicans, women are about five points less likely to be nones compared to men.
The obvious rejoinder from many on X is that young women are still more religious — only instead of a traditional faith, it’s wokeness. The idea is that dancing and chanting at BLM and pro-Palestine rallies takes the place of tent revivals, and that the kind of prudish scold lampooned by Dana Carvey’s 1990s “Church Lady” would today be giving HR workshops.
I’ve long avoided the “wokeness is religion” discourse, because it doesn’t seem that well thought-out. I think in practice it’s mostly a form of tu quoque against secular progressives.
Early sociologist Emile Durkheim observed that every group has its rituals — whether the harvest songs or hymns to God or singing the national anthem. Likewise, every group has sacred objects, be they tribal totems, holy books, or the national flag. Starting from that premise, there’s nothing all that distinctive about young activists with their dances, chants, and symbols.
I suppose one could say that some things are more “religion shaped” than others, depending how much such ritual life and veneration is bundled with moral instruction, explanations of the world, and so forth. Which puts me in mind of Arnold Kling’s argument that traditional Christianity was a bundle of goods that is coming unbundled in the modern world.
Maybe if the analogy to religion has any value, it’s because wokeness is doing more bundling than 4/20 celebrations or whatever other rituals and beliefs people have.
Books Don’t Sell
I knew that book sales obeyed some sort of power law distribution, where a tiny minority of authors and books account for most sales. Indeed, that sort of distribution describes just about everything from wealth to academic citations. Still, it was surprising to read this piece from Elle Griffin at The Elysian and realize just how few copies the typical books sells:
The DOJ’s lawyer collected data on 58,000 titles published in a year and discovered that 90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies.
I’ve sometimes said Campbell and I’s Rise of Victimhood Culture sold pretty well for an academic book. Maybe I should drop the qualifier: We’re in the top 10 percent of all books! But the way these distributions work, the 90th percentile is a different world from the 95th, and all of the money is in top fraction of a percent.
Even when the author is someone prominent, their books can flop:
The singer Billie Eilish, despite her 97 million Instagram followers and 6 million Twitter followers, sold only 64,000 copies within eight months of publishing her book….
Representative Ilhan Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota, is no global pop star, but she has a significant social-media presence, with 3 million Twitter followers and another 1.3 million on Instagram. Yet her book, This Is What America Looks Like: My Journey from Refugee to Congresswoman, which was published in May 2020, has sold just 26,000 copies across print, audio and e-book formats, according to her publisher….
Seems like the question when publishing a book is whether it appeals to people who A) like reading books, B) have time to read books, and C) have the capital to buy books. Not sure if one ought to expect “follows newer popular singer on Instagram” to track those categories very closely. But if I knew that much about marketing, I’d have more subscribers.
Lowered Ed
At Silver Bulletin, Nate Silver discusses the cratering public perception of higher education:
In 2015, 57 percent of Americans had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education, according to Gallup polling. By summer 2023, that number had declined to just 36 percent. The decline has been especially bad among Republicans — although only 32 percent of independents have confidence in higher education, and the numbers have also declined among Democrats.
He thinks the drop is hitting elite universities more, and will be consequential:
Importantly, I expect the decline in perceptions of elite private colleges to extend to people tasked with making hiring decisions. I expect an increasing number of hiring managers to look at two resumes — say, one from a recent graduate of Columbia, and one from a recent graduate of the University of the North Carolina — and potentially see advantages for the UNC student. They’ll regard the Columbia grad as: More likely to be coddled; More likely to hold strong political opinions that will distract from their work; More likely to have benefited from grade inflation and perhaps dubious admissions policies.
Given that the whole sector is contracting, I can’t take much comfort in the value of a WVU degree being higher relative to an Ivy degree.
Though I imagine the leadership of WVU are relieved that the various campus controversies of the past several months means fewer people talking about the decimation of the WVU faculty. The roughly 12 percent who are leaving after this year’s cuts are now finishing up their last semester. Among them is 20-year veteran and Morgantown native Lisa Di Bartolomeo, the subject of this Pittsburgh Post-Gazette piece on her last lecture.
I’m not clear on the actual number of departures. A few of the proposed cuts from last fall got walked back. But we’ve also had an exodus of people seeking greener pastures because they can’t trust that their position here is safe, or that the budget cuts won’t otherwise make life difficult.
Modern Crime Cycles
Charles Fain Lehman discusses how crime rates have dropped again lately, noting that the post-2020 crime spike resembled the post-2015 crime spike in size and duration. This is one reason to think both were short-term effects of widespread protests against the police — something that has been dubbed the Ferguson Effect.
What was interesting about the 2014-2016 homicide spike was that it appeared to recede much more quickly than the great crime wave of the 1960s-1990s. If opponents of the Ferguson effect theory were wrong to deny its existence, proponents were often wrong in saying the 2015/16 increases heralded a new explosion of crime. Homicide went up, then it went down—a blip, relative to the long-term trend since the peaks of the 1980s.
….One way to think about the Ferguson effect is as an exogeneous shock that temporarily disrupts the equilibrium state of the criminal justice system.
….Importantly, I am claiming that the Ferguson effect does not necessarily alter the determinants of that equilibrium state, which is the product of both policy and structural variables.
….The long-term rise and fall of violent crime in the 20th century, I would assert, was a structural phenomenon… The spikes in homicide that we are experiencing today are different. Ferguson cycles—high-profile police incidents, protests, temporary reduction in proactivity, then mean reversion—are deviations from the basic trend, caused by exogenous shocks to the system.
Miscellaneous
The bird flu has now jumped to cows, and is spreading across US dairies. The next big concern is whether it jumps to the people who work with the cows. So far only two people have tested positive, and only one probably got it from cows. Thankfully both of the human cases were mild, but in the past this strain has produced a high fatality rate in people. Seems worrisome that it’s jumping species. Apparently, it’s also found its way into cats.
Researchers at the University of Cambridge suggest the industrial revolution began far earlier than most history texts claim, with the shift toward a manufacturing economy already well underway in the 1600s.
As much of Europe remained predominately agricultural, the number of male agricultural workers in Britain fell by over a third (64% to 42%) from 1600-1740.
At the same time, from 1600-1700, the share of the male labour force involved in goods production rose by 50% to just under half of working men (28% to 42%).
Behavioral genetics has taught us that socialization effects are overrated, but it’s worth remembering that overrated isn’t the same as nonexistent. At Patterns of Humanity, Inquisitive Bird goes over the evidence that parents do in fact have an impact on their children, even within the normal range of variation and even after accounting for heredity.
Stuart Ritchie says “Parenting does matter, but it doesn’t matter as much as you think.” I wholeheartedly agree. Parents matter and they make a difference, even if the difference they make is far from as decisive as old-school sociologists thought (and some incorrectly maintain to this day). Yes, the adage that both nature and nurture matter is boring. It is also true.
By the way, if newer subscribers are curious about what a bullfish hole actually is, see this post from last summer.
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