Links for August 2024

Critical theories, victim blaming, historical stats, university politics, yellowjackets

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It’s a hectic time for me, with classes starting, article deadlines coming due, and some family stuff going on (including my wife departing academia and my son’s upcoming birthday). So this month’s links list is going to be short and light on commentary. Now on to some items of interest from around the interwebs:

At Skeptic, sociologist Bradley Campbell discusses the colonization of sociology by neo-Marxian critical theories: “Tension Between Science and Ideology: Exploring Paths to Social Justice.” He argues that critical theories aren’t particularly good for either social science or social justice.

There are two problems with social justice efforts informed by critical theory. First, this form of social justice—often called “critical social justice” by supporters and “wokeism” by detractors—deliberately ignores the insights that might come from other sociological perspectives….. The second problem is that, unlike most other sociological perspectives, critical theory assumes an oppositional stance toward science…. The claim is that scientific norms and scientific knowledge—just like other norms and other forms of knowledge in liberal democratic societies—have been constructed merely to serve the interests of the powerful and enable the oppression of the powerless.

There’s a problem with trying to change the world while rejecting the norms and institutions that allow you to learn how it actually works.

In Quillette criminologist Richard Felson writes “Victim Blaming Revisited.”

So why are crime victims sometimes criticized? This happens to both male and female victims when we believe that their reckless behavior made their victimization more likely. We still assign the lion’s share of the blame to offenders since their behavior was intentional. For example, I deserve criticism for not locking my door, but the burglar deserves most of the blame. My mistake gives him no right to burgle my house.

In most instances, we don’t think victims made any mistakes, so we don’t engage in any victim blaming. We only assign blame when we think the victim did something risky….

There are biases in victim blaming, but they can apply to any type of crime. These biases can lead us to assign too much blame to victims or too little. In other words, sometimes we are too critical of victims and sometimes not critical enough.

The last point is something it’s hard to imagine many contemporary academics saying. But he argues that sympathy for the victim might lead us to not criticize reckless behavior that ought to be criticized:

“Blaming those who fail to take precautions is itself a crime prevention strategy, as it encourages citizens to be careful in the future. It is easier to influence potential victims to take care than it is to influence potential offenders to stop behaving badly.”

He also argues there’s no good evidence behind the idea that rape victims are blamed more than victims of other crimes, at least in contemporary America. (But compare to material in Black’s Moral Time about the handling of rape in other times and places. He gives the impression crimes of overintimacy are often seen as particularly filthy, with the effects sometimes extending to the victim.)

At Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cown links to an economics paper on how slavery and the Jim Crow caste system affected black families. The authors track families from 1850 onward, finding that descendants of those free before the Civil War had more wealth, income, and education than those whose ancestors were still enslaved at war’s beginning. And some of this is accounted for by enslaved families tending to stay in the Jim Crow states for generations after the war. It’s a plausible account but I haven’t had time to read the paper very closely.

When you see people cite casualty figures for the plagues, famines, and wars of prior centuries, you might well wonder who in the world people come up with that number. At Asimov Press, Saloni Dattoni discusses how to estimate the casualties from the Black Death of the 14^th century:

Direct records of mortality are sparse and mostly relate to deaths among the nobility. Researchers have compiled information from tax and rent registers, parish records, court documents, guild records, and archaeological remains from many localities across Europe. However, even those who have carefully combed over this data have not reached a consensus about the overall death toll.

The spread in estimates ranges from 38% to 60% of Western Europeans dying from the plague. The problem isn’t entirely limited to the past, either, as estimates of the COVID-19 global death toll range from 19 to 35 million.

In Palladium, Stephen Hsu discusses the politics of science and academia. The most interesting parts aren’t on the influence of national politics, but on internal organizational politics. Hsu himself worked in administration, and claims he was an oddball who actually cared about the institutional mission over his career as an administrator.

You can imagine what it is that makes someone who’s already a tenured professor in biochemistry decide they want to take on this huge amount of responsibility and maybe even shut down their own research program. They are very, very careerist people. And that is a huge problem, because incentives are heavily misaligned.

The incentive for me as a senior administrator is not to make waves and keep everything kind of calm. Calm down the crazy professor who’s doing stuff, assuage the students that are protesting, make the donors happy, make the board of trustees happy. I found that the people who were in the role so they could advance their career, versus those trying to advance the interests of the institution, were very different. There were times when I felt like I had to do something very dangerous for me career-wise, but it was absolutely essential for the mission of the university. I had to do that repeatedly.

And I told the president who hired me, “I don’t know how long I’m going to last in this job, because I’m going to do the right thing. If I do the right thing and I’m bounced out, that’s fine. I don’t care.” But most people are not like that.

Those of you in other regions might not know that this summer parts of Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio are suffering a plague of yellowjackets that would make Pharaoh let his slaves go. My neighbor got 20 stings a few weeks back and has dug four nests out of his yard. The farmer down the road runs into two or three nests a day cutting hay. I’ve killed two nests in my yard and still the foragers coat the ground like honeybees on a field of clover. The outdoor spaces are nigh unusable.

I’ve noticed they seem to love congregating on freshly mowed grass — joy — and this article in Etymology Today says cut plants send out compounds to attract carnivorous insects as a defense mechanism. And here’s some advice on making yellowjacket traps.

And now for something completely different: I made a book for my kids about our pet cat: “Meet Johnny Ringtail.” It’s aimed at my youngest (aged 3) and made with photos of cats. Yes, it’s a far cry from my normal writing output about murder, suicide, and moral controversy. I’m also working on one aimed at older kids about the kind of commercial fishing men in my hometown have done for generations.

Thanks for reading!