Supreme Court Vs Business

The Minnesota Law Review has posted an interesting study that attempts to decide how pro-business the Supreme Court is. Please go and read it yourself, starting with this lead piece - as near as I can tell, the study is extremely well put together and as fair as possible.

If you can't stand thinking for yourself, an alternative is to go read this NYT article and assume they're only printing their motto - "Half the News that's Fit to print".

The interesting thing to me, and the thing that speaks to good study design, is the discussion of Judge Posner's review and re-coding of the cases in the Spaeth Datasets. In essence, the new codes eliminate some of the old simplistic business-wins-equals-conservative, business-loses-equals-liberal ideology that seems to have warped Spaeth's results.

Another very interesting result is that it appears that business-wins-equals-conservative assumption only holds statistical validity in Spaeth's "Core" business cases, and shows a small negative correlation in the wider set of business-related cases in which business was not the first named party.

Figure 2 shows an amazingly close correlation in Spaeth's dataset, and a splatter in the ones that Spaeth decided not to include - which to me is a clear indication of cherry-picking.

On the other hand, the reversal of sign in the "non-core" cases may actually indicate a failure of the simplistic conservative-liberal axis to accurately state the ideologies at issue. A case where a union member wants to keep his own money in his pocket, rather than let the union give it to a politician, would be coded as "conservative" or "pro business", when really it is a case of liberal or libertarian individual right of free speech and political expression - a classic liberal position.

Oh, and the result is that the Supremes are pretty pro-business at the moment. (Of course, swinging back the pendulum can look like that even if the decisions are just moving the law back to neutral.)

Nice job, Minnesota Law Review!

Expensive Study, Trivial Results

Yep, there's another politically biased study out of Harvard, this time by an Eric Fleegler, about guns.

Here's a chearleader's view from Boston's NPR station, which doesn't seem to be able to understand the statistics involved.

Here's the scant praise that comes for the study from Garen Wintemute, an emergency medicine physician and director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis:

"In the end, Fleegler and colleagues provide no firm guidance and leave us with more questions than answers. Do the laws work, and if so, which ones? Should policymakers enact the entire package, or just some of the measures?" he said.

Professor John Lott had a more pungent analysis here

But the report is based on embarrassingly bad statistics that are rigged to get the result the authors wanted.

How would that work? I mean, it's a scientific study, how could it possibly be wrong?

In addition, we calculated household firearm ownership rates per state using the firearm suicide/total suicide ratio, which is the proportion of all suicides in a state caused by firearms.

Okay, so we're first going to figure out what percentage of gun ownership is by using the suicide rate (with guns) as a proxy.

Then we're going to calculate how much gun control laws reduce crime by comparing the gun violence rates (including suicides) between the various states.

And the result, of course, is that more gun ownership means more violence, because the numbers above can't come out any other way. If people are going to commit suicide anyway, easy access to buying guns means more of the suicides are accomplished with guns. That increases both the "household firearm rate" and the "overall firearm violence rate".

OTHER FLAWS

The study authors admitted that the difference only became significant if you compared the bottom quartile to the top quartile.

The study authors conveniently omitted Washington DC, which has extremely onerous gun laws and a sky-high gun violence rate.

The study authors conveniently did not omit Louisiana, which has lax gun laws and a sky-high gun violence rate.

(According to Power Line, dropping out louisiana from the study results in the remaining bottom 25% in gun laws being 12% safer than the top 25% in gun laws.) The study made no attempt to figure out how much violence there may have been that gun ownership prevented.

Cheat, much?

Good Research - And Marshmallows!

Okay, so sometimes the government funds research that actually is both interesting and not politically biased into nonsensicality. Here's one about Marshmallows!

No, really, this is good stuff. There's an old psychology test for children where you ask them if they want one marshmallow or two. (Two, always, duh!)

Then you tell them that you'll leave one marshmallow in the room with them, and if they wait to eat it until you get back, then you'll give them the second one. Some kids wait, some don't. The result - the kids that wait are the ones who are good at delaying gratification. The ones that don't, maybe have bad impulse control, because it's obvious that waiting for two is better than just getting one.

Sounds reasonable, right? Maybe even self-evident?

Well, there's a new study that points out something else that should have been obvious.

The kids aren't told how long they'll have to wait. The researcher said "a few minutes" or "a little while". Now, how often have you heard a parent use that phrase for something that you knew couldn't be done in less than an hour? I was always as specific as possible with my toddler, but almost every other parent I know uses fuzzy language like that for anything from literally a few minutes, to literally days.

So, in a very real sense, the children have no idea if the researcher is ever going to come back and give the children that second marshmallow. The guy may be gone for days. Maybe their parents will come to get them before he gets back.

The researchers went on to study related issues in adults.

“Our intuition is that when we are waiting for something, the longer we wait the closer and closer we get to that thing, which is what we see when we ask people about familiar things, like how long a movie will last,” Kable says. “But what we’ve found is that, if you don’t know anything about when the outcome will occur, the longer you wait the more you think you're getting farther and farther away from that outcome.”

Good stuff, well worth funding more of. We can wait for the results.

Obesity, Lesbians, Federal Money, Bias and Blindness

Okay, so it's all over the internet that the Federal government decided to fund a multimillion dollar study to find out why lesbians are fat. That's one way to put it.

The Atlantic writes a couple more:

All of which is to say, these headlines would have been accurate as the inverse: "Obama administration spends $1.5 million to figure out why straight men are fat." Or: "Obama administration spends $1.5 million to figure out why gay men have rocking bodies." Or perhaps: "America is overweight (except for gay men?) and scientists are trying to determine why."

Which is not quite true, though. Read this quote from one of the researchers, which appeared in a CNS news piece:

“It will be impossible to develop evidence-based preventive interventions unless we first answer basic questions about causal pathways, as we plan to do,” they said. “Our study has high potential for public health impact not only for sexual minorities but also for heterosexuals, as we seek to uncover how processes of gender socialization may exacerbate obesity risk in both sexual minority females and heterosexual males.”

So, you can see that it is not a study to see why lesbians are fat at all. It is a study to see how processes of gender socialization make lesbians fat.

That's just sad. A total blindness on the part of the researchers. Heck, even a caller on the Rush Limbaugh show can come up with an obvious, sensitive, scientific and rational explanation that has nothing to do with "processes of gender socialization".

The lesbian woman doesn't have to deal with a visual, shallow man. She just has to please her partner, and usually women are less concerned with physical attributes and more concerned with ... their personality and so forth. And the homosexual man, he has to please a man, who is visual and shallow. Therefore, if a woman doesn't want to give up all her cookies and it's okay with her partner, no big deal, okay?

I've tidied up the quote out of habit, but the "likes" and "you knows" are there in the Limbaugh transcript if you really need them.

So, let's pretend for a moment we were actual scientists, trying to identify the possible factors that lead to 75% of lesbians being obese, as compared with 50% of heterosexual American women. Let's list the theories, shall we?

• Whatever brain and body chemistry causes homosexuality in women also predisposes them to obesity. (The "Made That Way" Theory)
• Their lovers' acceptance of bodily variation reduces the stigma associated with obesity in homosexual women, thus allowing more of it. (The "Less Stick" Theory)
• Since women have a greater acceptance of bodily variation, some obese heterosexual women may choose to become adaptive homosexuals. (The "More Carrot" Theory)

Okay, so there's a few obvious theories that fit the observed facts and can be intuited by anyone possessing even a rudimentary understanding of sociology, biology, and psychology. Notice, none of those theories require "processes of gender socialization" in order to apply. In fact, I can't figure out what the so-called scientists that produced this report might even mean. Let's pretend they're not total wackos, and make up another theory or two, hey?

• Some traumatic events that cause women to become homosexual predispose those women to (over)eating disorders. (The "Trauma Implant" Theory)
• Some homosexual women unconsciously overeat in order to become less attractive to men. (The "Guys are Icky" Theory)
• Gender socialization in heterosexual women gives them a gender-identity-based ability to resist obesity. (The "Better To Be A Babe" Theory)

Those are reasonable ideas, and not particularly controversial in the abstract and on the margin. The percentage of lesbians who have experienced sexual trauma is extremely high, at least according to the few dozen that I've had intimate conversations with. (I used to live and hang out near Santa Cruz and Monterey, California.)

But, here's the question: If you studied those last three theories, and found them to be true, what would the resulting societal prescription look like? Nothing that requires theories of how "processes of gender socialization" cause the problem in lesbians, right? The only gender socialization in any of those theories is the one that draws heterosexual women to emulate Barbies.

If this study was designed or overseen by the person that wrote that revealing quote, and if the study authors really see "gender socialization" as the likely source of the critical difference that needs to be studied, then the study isn't science, it's some kind of pseudo-scientific social agitation, having nothing to do with obesity at all. They have their eyes closed to several obvious factors that each is an order of magnitude more significant than anything having to do with gender socialization.

Dang, I'm starting to type that phrase without quotes...

It's too bad, because an actual study on the reason for the difference might be interesting and worthwhile. Don't expect anything rational or insightful out of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Mass, though. Sigh.