Dan Moore

Ah yes, the postseason. As Jay Jaffe noted yesterday, it’s nothing like the regular season. Here, managers have to grind out every edge possible. Continuing a series that I started last year, I’ll be assigning managerial grades for each vanquished team. They’ll cover on-field managerial decisions: chiefly, lineup construction, pinch hitting, and pitcher usage.

My goal is to rank each manager in terms of process, not results. If you bring in your best pitcher to face their best hitter in a huge spot, that’s a good decision regardless of outcome. Try a triple steal with the bases loaded only to have the other team make four throwing errors to score three runs? I’m probably going to call that a blunder even though it worked out. Managers do plenty of other things – getting team buy-in for new strategies and unconventional bullpen usage behind closed doors is one I find particularly valuable – but as I have no insight into how that’s accomplished or how each manager differs, I can’t exactly assign grades for that.

Another thing I’m trying to avoid? Relying too much on “leaning on your trusted veterans.” That’s never really been a strategy I love without knowing the underlying data, but mentioning it lets me drop this delightful statistic: “proven veterans” Justin Verlander, Max Scherzer, and Charlie Morton each have a 13.50 ERA this postseason. That’s not in aggregate; each of them has that exact mark. The playoffs are about overpowering your opponent in big spots. Which pitchers and hitters teams use to do so is entirely up to them, but if the justification for a move is “but he’s a veteran,” I’m going to judge that decision harshly. Let’s get to it.

Brian Snitker, Atlanta Braves

Batting: D
There’s much less to say about managing lineups and pinch hitters in the universal DH era, so I’ll be brief. I’ll be grading errors harshly here. Pitching decisions are frequent, and it’s often unclear which of multiple strategies is better. Lineup-based errors are more glaring. I didn’t agree with Snitker’s decision to use Marcell Ozuna over William Contreras against Zack Wheeler and Aaron Nola – particularly Wheeler. Ozuna was the worst Atlanta batter when it came to hitting high-velocity fastballs, while Contreras was one of the best. Ozuna is also just a worse hitter than Contreras, whether you’re looking at projections or 2022 statistics. In fact, I don’t even think I would have had Ozuna on the roster – and his hitless, walkless eight plate appearance line suggests that I might be onto something.

I also felt that Snitker misused Eddie Rosario, who is on the roster strictly to hit right-handed pitching. Rosario started all three games against righties, which is good. But he batted ninth, which limited the number of cracks he got at opposing starters. Additionally, Snitker left him in to face Brad Hand in Game 4, with a two-run deficit and a runner on base. The thinking here, I suppose, is that the Phillies could have countered with a right-handed pitcher in relief, but so what? If you’re going to have Ozuna and Vaughn Grissom on your roster, you have to use one of them in that situation to get a slightly better matchup.

One decision I don’t hold against Snitker: waffling between Orlando Arcia and Grissom at second base. I’m not quite sure what the thinking was here, and it was extra strange when Arcia pinch hit for Grissom with the opposing starting pitcher (Nola, if you’re keeping track at home) still in the game. I just don’t think there’s much daylight between the two, so it’s hard to do anything other than shrug. But the process sure felt weird to me there.

Pitching: B+
I’ll be honest with you: it’s hard to come up with a mark for Snitker in this one when Max Fried, Spencer Strider, and Morton combined for 7 2/3 innings pitched and 14 runs allowed. That’s assuredly not how the Braves drew it up. The Phillies scored 24 runs in the series despite being shut out in one of four games; it’s safe to say that Atlanta’s starting pitching let them down.

That said, it’s still worth taking a look at Snitker’s bullpen usage because in my opinion, he remains one of the best playoff managers around. In Game 1, playing with a huge deficit after the Phillies tagged Fried for six runs, Snitker used Jesse Chavez and Dylan Lee to soak up innings. When the Braves rallied for two runs to close the game to 7-3, Snitker called on Collin McHugh in relief of Lee, using a better reliever as befits a closer game. But after Atlanta failed to score in the sixth or seventh inning, the game felt distant again, and Snitker gave Jackson Stephens, the last man in the bullpen, the final two innings. Good work all around in a lost game, in my opinion.

In Game 2, Snitker lined up A.J. Minter to face Bryce Harper, then used his other two bullpen aces to close out the game. In Game 3, things got out of hand so quickly that it was again time for Chavez, Lee, and surplus starter Jake Odorizzi. That just leaves Game 4, when Morton left after two innings, three earned runs, and a bruised elbow (he was hit by a batted ball). With seven innings of no-safety-net baseball, Snitker aired it out. He gave McHugh two innings, pulling him to again lean on the Harper-Minter matchup.

Snitker tried to stretch Minter for two innings as well, as the bottom of the Philadelphia lineup is dotted with lefty batters. When the Phillies put two runners on with two outs, he countered with Raisel Iglesias against Rhys Hoskins. Iglesias proceeded to give up a bloop single (63.2 mph exit velocity), a nubber (30.4 mph), and a single through a shift-vacated infield (76.3 mph). I liked the process, but the result was the end of the line for Atlanta.

My only demerits for Snitker: he’s an aggressive user of intentional walks and I’m not a fan. The worst offender, in my opinion, came in the third inning of Game 3, with Philadelphia leading 1-0. Kyle Schwarber batted with a runner on second and two outs. Snitker walked him intentionally to face Hoskins. With Strider on the mound, that’s a better handedness matchup, but it’s really early in the game to give up free baserunners against a homer-happy top of the Philadelphia lineup. Hoskins, of course, hit the home run that broke the game open, and Strider didn’t finish the inning.

In Game 4, Snitker tried the same maneuver and won. With McHugh pitching and Philadelphia leading by two, Schwarber batted with runners on second and third and two outs. Snitker walked him again, and I think this one is more defensible. The Braves trailed by more, which made Schwarber’s run less valuable, and there were more runners on base, which means getting a marginal advantage at the plate matters more. This time, Hoskins flied out to end the threat. Points for consistency, even if I thought the first walk was overly aggressive. I like seeing consistent processes from managers, because it suggests that they have a well considered plan. That counts for a lot given the amount of time teams spend game-planning and thinking through matchups.

Dave Roberts, Los Angeles Dodgers

Batting: B
I just don’t have much to say here. The Dodgers ran two platoons in their lineup: Cody Bellinger and Gavin Lux started against righties while Chris Taylor and Austin Barnes stepped in against lefties (with some quintessentially Dodger-y positional switching chipping in). Would you play Barnes as a big righty bat? I wouldn’t, but I can see why they chose to try it, and he left the game in favor of Lux against the first righty reliever the team saw. I personally would have gone with Miguel Vargas, who might as well have stayed in the minors given the way they used him.

By Game 4, Roberts had abandoned one side of that platoon, opting for Taylor over Bellinger against a righty. Is it ideal to bench Bellinger against his best matchups? No, but he’d looked completely lost in his seven plate appearances in the series, striking out in four of them, and his 83 wRC+ this year hardly inspires confidence.

The decision to pinch hit with Barnes instead of Taylor has been much discussed, and I buy what Roberts is selling: he used Barnes because Taylor’s swing shape lines up poorly against riding fastballs. Fine with me. At the end of the day, the team has to hit enough to win; no amount of lineup machinations by Roberts could change the fact that the best offense in baseball managed only 12 runs in four games.

Pitching: C-
These report cards started as a way to question Roberts’ bullpen management. He’s made an art form of bringing starters in as relief pitchers in big moments, usually to the team’s detriment. This year, his bullpen was so stacked – and his starting rotation so thin – that he had no choice but to use real relievers. I’m just not so sure he used those relievers correctly.

Evan Phillips was the team’s best reliever all season and also the reliever used in the highest-leverage spots. In Game 1, he came in to face Juan Soto and Manny Machado with a two-run lead, exactly how you’d draw it up. Phillips didn’t pitch in Game 2, which I don’t hate; the Dodgers were down when he would have made the most sense, against Soto and Machado in the seventh inning, and staying away from him on a back-to-back with the weaker Dodgers starters still to pitch in the series seems reasonable to me. You could have used him there, of course, but with three games in a row coming up and high bullpen usage expected in at least two of the three, using your best reliever while trailing is a judgment call.

In Game 3, Phillips entered with two on and two out in a one run game, facing Machado. He struck him out, then pitched a clean inning before departing. He was clearly the reliever the Dodgers trusted in the biggest spots. Cue Game 4: two on, nobody out, Dodgers clinging to a two-run lead. Tommy Kahnle exited the game after allowing three straight baserunners, one of whom scored. Yency Almonte replaced him to face the top of the Padres lineup.

Wait, what? Why wasn’t this Phillips’ inning? The Dodgers were setting him up against the best Padres hitters all series, and he was more than a match for them. Almonte is a nice reliever, but uh, he’s not Phillips. Ha-Seong Kim doubled, Soto walked, and suddenly it was a tie game. Alex Vesia came in next – another non-Phillips reliever – and gave up a two-run single that provided the winning margin. Phillips ended up pitching the last inning of the Dodgers’ season and striking out the side to keep the team’s deficit to 5-3.

That one hurts, because the Padres scored in only one inning all game and still made it stand up. It’s not that Phillips was a lock to get out of the inning with no damage, but he’s there for exactly these spots. Use him that way!

That aside, I didn’t hate the rest of Roberts’ bullpen management. He trusted Kahnle and Almonte quite a lot relative to their regular season contributions, but I don’t fault him for that; they both look like excellent bullpen options to me. Chris Martin and Vesia got big innings; again, that makes sense given how good they looked this year. Brusdar Graterol surrendered a crucial run in Game 2, but I would have brought him in there, too, and he acquitted himself well in the series. The Dodgers have a pile of good relievers and they used them all in this series, with the exception of maximizing Phillips.

That said, not maximizing your best reliever is a huge problem. This year’s edition of the Dodgers was built with a deep bullpen in mind. That bullpen needed to pitch important innings; with Walker Buehler, Dustin May, and Tony Gonsolin all compromised in one way or another, scoreless innings of relief were mandatory. Even that wasn’t easy; Blake Treinen barely pitched this year, Daniel Hudson wasn’t available, and Craig Kimbrel was available but unwanted. With that much pitching churn, getting the absolute most out of Phillips was a necessity, and Roberts failed at the task.

Source

Automakers have been having trouble building much of anything since 2020 began, thanks to a comprehensive breakdown in logistics. But the hype around electric vehicles has made them even trickier to build now that they’re starting to represent a more meaningful portion of the market. Ironically, the industry’s desire to see EVs become more popular seems to be backfiring as nobody seems capable of keeping up with demand.

That effectively makes this article a follow-up to our earlier piece on runaway lithium pricing, as they both help guarantee that EV prices will remain unpleasantly high for the foreseeable future. Though the bigger story may be the fact that the entire narrative surrounding electric cars has started to crumble. Optimism appears to be dying down, with even the most bullish EV supporters starting to notice that the pathway toward ubiquitous electrification is a lot more treacherous than originally assumed.

The Wall Street Journal recently published a report suggesting that the industry simply wasn’t ready for rising EV demand – even though countless automakers spent years suggesting plug-in vehicles would achieve financial and functional parity with traditional combustion vehicles by 2025. That date now seems wildly unrealistic and the industry appears to be scrambling to produce alternative-energy vehicles CEOs claimed would be the future at even a steady pace.

EVs presently account for roughly 6 percent of overall U.S. vehicle sales – if you’re also counting hybrid plug-ins. But that percentage tripled over the last two years, according to Motor Intelligence, and companies have started placing customers on waiting lists that are over a year long for electrified products intended for mass-market consumption.

Edmunds reported that five of the six fastest-selling vehicles in the U.S. were electrics or plug-in hybrids in July. EVs sold in 19 days on average during the month, compared with 47 days a year earlier. By contrast, combustion vehicles (which are similarly in high demand) lasted 23 days on average.

“With EVs, right now it’s like, ‘You build it, and they come,’” Steven Center, operations chief for Kia’s U.S. business. “We’re trying to electrify the lineup as quickly as possible.”

That's true of practically all manufacturers in 2022. However, everyone seems to be struggling, even Tesla – which has arguably managed to stay ahead of the curve better than anybody.

One of the biggest contributing factors outside industry lobbying groups ( e.g. the Alliance for Automotive Innovation) has been the U.S. government, which has offered a quota-based tax credit system designed to spur EV adoption since 2009. That changed this year, as the Biden administration’s “Inflation Reduction Act” abolished the quota system in favor of an unlimited scheme influenced by price caps, income limitations, and some domestic manufacturing requirements. This has overlapped with similar initiatives floated elsewhere and a global regulatory framework designed to financially punish automakers that plan on building combustion engines in the coming years.

By subsiding EV sales while the industry can’t build them fast enough, automakers really don’t have much reason to keep prices down. But, with the supply chain in such rough shape, they weren’t going to come down anyway. The semiconductor industry remains in shambles after COVID lockdowns stifled production and encouraged many companies to shift away from building microchips used exclusively for the automotive sector. The raw materials for batteries are likewise in short supply and no business entity seems to have yet achieved a major breakthrough in battery production that would make the process significantly cheaper or faster. However, the pressure is still on for automakers to shift toward electrification in anticipation of the coming government bans – most of which are scheduled between 2030 and 2035.

While the industry is keen to lock down battery contracts and even procure the necessary raw materials, most companies are still years away from being able to produce EVs at the desired pace. WSJ noted that Ford launched a task force scouring the world for supplies when the company decided to boost production of the all-electric Lightning pickup in 2021. Meanwhile, General Motors doesn’t seem capable of building more than a dozen examples of the GMC Hummer and Cadillac Lyriq EVs per day, despite it having facilities with the capacity to build nearly 1,000 internal-combustion vehicles per day.

The lapse in chip supply has seriously impacted the industry’s ability to produce all cars. But it’s the ongoing battery shortages, which GM has cited in response to what’s been happening with the Hummer and Lyric, that have absolutely crippled EV turnaround times. For now, the solution has been for the U.S. government to incentivize the construction of new semiconductor and battery plants within its borders. Automakers are likewise working on developing new business partnerships.

For example, GM has a plan to build a new battery plant in Ohio as part of a joint venture with LG Energy Solutions. Ford is also plotting new battery plants, spending an estimated $7 billion on two in Kentucky and one in Tennessee. Unfortunately, factories take years to construct before they’ve produced a single component and still won’t be able to address the deficit of raw materials we discussed last week. The industry needs to fix its supply chain issues today and every proposed solution requires a lot of waiting around and even more spending during a period of economic duress.

“Unfortunately, the production isn’t there because we’re ramping up the supply chain,” GM finance chief Paul Jacobson told analysts last month.

The rest of the WSJ piece goes into there being insufficient raw materials necessary for battery production, something we’ve covered extensively in the past. So I’ll save you the rehashing and summarize the present situation as a snake eating its own tail.

While the concept of instantaneous torque and at-home charging is certainly appealing, the industry leveraging electrification to retain more control of the vehicle (via servicing, data sharing, etc.) is a non-starter for me. I’ve also come to the realization that EV batteries don’t really alleviate automotive pollution so much as they shift where it’s coming from and most new models seem to be hulking behemoths with equally monstrous price tags. The more I see of the “electric revolution” the more it appears to be about making money and adhering to government dictum, rather than building a better automobile or actually helping the planet. And the issue just seems to get worse as demand rises.

Obviously, I’m a little skeptical about the premise that swapping to EVs will automatically be better for the average person needing reliable transportation. But it seems like my formerly unpopular opinion has been gaining traction among mainstream outlets. Even the most ardent EV supporters can’t ignore the very visible lapse in production that’s currently taking place, nor the fact that newer EVs carry higher price tags than their combustion-driven brethren. There's just too much evidence to ignore or obfuscate at this point.

Automakers know that there’s just not enough supply to meet demand, forcing executives to shift away from idealistic promises about mobility to talk about the realities of today’s market. But consumers don’t really need a corporate press conference to understand that, because they’re already witnessing harrowing waiting lists and worsening pricing discrepancies. According to J.D. Power, the average price for an EV was $66,000 in July – up 28 percent from a year earlier. By contrast, internal combustion vehicles retailed closer to $45,000. While that’s still an abysmal 12 percent increase (year-over-year), it highlights the growing disparity between powertrains without the need for further explanation.

That said, the automotive sector still seems to be doubling down on electrification. With so much money already invested and outside pressure urging them to continue, most automakers have billions riding upon the success of plug-in vehicles. Pulling out now would represent a monumental failure, even if the future seems like it will be mired in production constraints and high prices regular people can't realistically manage.

[Image: JL IMAGES/Shutterstock]

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If ever an airline had nine lives, it’s Air Wisconsin. Somehow, this airline finds itself in the right place at the right time more often than not. Most people think it should have disappeared long ago. This week, it did it again by signing a new agreement to takes its talents up-to-60 airplanes and pilots from United Express over to American Eagle. This is very bad news for United, and it’s a great coup for American.

The basics of the deal are this. Air Wisconsin’s contract flying CRJ-200s as United Express is up in February of next year. According to ch-aviation, Air Wisconsin owns 64 CRJ aircraft, most of which were delivered in 2000 or later. Now, when that deal ends, American will make Air Wisconsin an American Eagle carrier once again with “up to 60” aircraft flying from March 2023.

This is a remarkable development for an airline that was cast off as dead many times. The transition should be remarkably smooth. The Air Wisconsin network is entirely focused on United’s Chicago/O’Hare hub along with a smaller presence at Washington/Dulles.

American says Air Wisconsin’s fleet will also focus on Chicago/O’Hare flying as American Eagle. This is easy since Air Wisconsin is already set up to run a Chicago-based operation. The airplanes just need to leave Terminal 1/2 one night, go get a paint job, and then park at Terminal 3 the next morning.

The question here is… just how many airplanes will be flying? The “up to 60” wording is confusing, but it also makes sense. Thanks to trouble getting pilots, Air Wisconsin has been flying far fewer than the 64 airplanes it owns. Again looking at ch-aviation, we see that there are 51 active aircraft, but even that is a stretch.

In August, Cirium schedule data shows that if 51 aircraft were operating, they’d only be flying a little under 6 hours per day. This is all because Air Wisconsin just has not been able to source enough pilots. But it has some pilots, and that is the beauty of this deal.

I tweeted about this when the news first came out, and I was surprised by not only the sheer volume of discussion but also the very negative response. Here’s just a sampling to give you a picture.

“AA getting saddled with up to (60!) old & busted CR2s in 2022 and it’s somehow a win?”

“I’m one of the ones who KNOWS you’re wrong Brett. Sorry you can’t accept it.”

“United announced this previously, it’s part of their plan, not a surprise. And the CR2 is straight up trash to fly in, this is a win for United.”

United is officially echoing these comments. A spokesperson gave me this:

This decision is consistent with our United Next growth strategy, where we plan to fly more larger narrowbody aircraft within our domestic network.

I don’t buy it one bit.

Anyone who is focusing on the aircraft itself is completely missing the point. This isn’t about airplanes. This is about pilots.

United has been struggling to maintain its domestic network. It is greatly hamstrung compared to its competitors. Delta has a large fleet of Boeing 717s and Airbus A220s that not only makes it easier to serve smaller markets with mainline airplanes, but that also unlocked an additional 40 aircraft with 76 seats at the regionals as per the pilot contract.

American has it even better. It has limits on the number of 70/76 seat aircraft, but it is effectively allowed unlimited flying up to 65 seats. That’s why we’ve seen such growth from SkyWest using 65-seat CRJ-700s. It’s a unique feature of American’s agreement.

United has the same deal as Delta, but it does not have those small narrowbodies that allow an additional 40 regional aircraft. It has its maximum of 153 aircraft with 76 seats and 102 with 70 seats already in the system — though if those regionals had more pilots, they could better utilize them. Any aircraft growth has to be in the 50-seat and under category or in mainline airplanes. It is taking delivery of large airplanes, but it has struggled to keep 50-seaters flying because there just aren’t enough pilots around right now.

Though United has expressed interest in retiring its smaller 50-seaters in the longer run, it can’t afford to lose a big chunk of them in just a few short months. It is not ready for that, and this is going to be painful. The airline has already ended service to a slew of cities since the pandemic began, some due to SkyWest being unable to support an Essential Air Service contract it had directly the feds and flew under the United Express banner, but others are simply an issue of needing to make hard decisions about where to deploy the limited resources that are available. Here are the cities that have fallen off the map.

And now, losing another at least two to three dozen airplane’s worth of flying means hard choices will again have to be made. No regionals have spare capacity right now to backfill to this extent.

American now inherits this airline as a new partner, and presumably it will continue to fly the CRJ-200s until they can fly no more. But then, if Air Wisconsin still has pilots, there is always the ability to go up to flying 65-seat CRJ-700s. That’s far more economical than the 50-seat CRJ-550s that United would have to operate for growth. I have to imagine United was already talking to Air Wisconsin about that.

Now the question is… just how many pilots can Air Wisconsin secure? Under United Express, Air Wisconsin had been participating in the Aviate program where United was getting pilots to come up through the ranks to eventually fly mainline. That clearly wasn’t getting enough for Air Wisconsin to fully utilize its fleet. You have to wonder if American has struck a deal that will provide massive increases in pay along the lines of what it has put together for its wholly-owned regionals. That could help move the needle.

Even if Air Wisconsin can only maintain the same output as it has today, that is a big swing of capacity away from United and toward American. According to American, it offers 30 percent more origin/destination city pairs than its nearest competitor. This move could help widen the gap. At the very least, it will help add more buffer to keep serving the routes it serves today without disruption.

As for United, well, its regional CommutAir just happened to give massive raises to its pilots the day after this announcement came out. I’m sure that’s no coincidence. I know United wants to grow into bigger airplanes, but it is not ready to replace its 50 seaters yet. This is happening too early, and United is going to suffer.

(first posted 12/16/2014)    Don’t call it another renaissance. Cadillac has recently launched two extremely talented sports sedans, the ATS and CTS. The latest CTS weighs less than key rivals and its handling is class-leading; it is also now sized and priced squarely in the mid-size luxury sports sedan segment, against the BMW 5-Series and Mercedes-Benz E-Class. The new CTS now fills a slot in the Cadillac lineup last occupied by the STS, which was priced like a 5-Series but sized closer to a 7-Series. The STS was one of the products launched during the early-2000s product blitz that brought us the razor-edged first-generation CTS, striking mid-size crossover SRX and the gorgeous XLR roadster. Cadillac had a lot of fresh energy and momentum going at that time, but some products were more successful than others. Today we look at the STS, a product that sadly proved to be somewhat of a dead end.

The CTS had been launched for 2002 and despite its flaws – a challenging interior, initially poor engine offerings – it was an exciting surprise. Cadillac had overnight thrown out its old design language and introduced Art&Science to the world. There was nary a curve nor piece of chrome on its exterior, and underneath this other-worldly styling was an all-new rear-wheel-drive platform architecture known as Sigma, featuring independent suspension with control arms up front and a multi-link in the rear. The five or seven-seat SRX crossover followed in 2004, offering similar styling in a wagon/crossover package, but with the option of a Northstar V8. The old guard Cadillacs were being squeezed out and the venerable Seville would die for 2004.

The Seville’s replacement was similarly-sized but rode atop the new Sigma platform, offering a choice of the 3.6 High Feature V6 (255hp, 252lb-ft) or 4.6 Northstar V8 (320hp, 315lb-ft). All-wheel-drive was available from launch with the V8, and a V6 AWD followed in the STS’s sophomore year.  The STS was six inches longer and six inches wider than the CTS; total length was 196.3 inches, riding a 116.4 inch wheelbase. In comparison, a contemporary 5-Series was 190.6 inches long with a 113.7 inch wheelbase.

Fuel economy was adequate: ponying up for the V8 only resulted in a 1mpg drop in both city and highway for RWD models (15/24mpg), but adding AWD brought down the mpg ratings for both (15/23 for the V6, 14/21 for the V8). However, the V6 was still impressively responsive, with a 0-60 of 7 seconds versus the V8’s 6 second time. 2006 would see the arrival of an even more powerful STS, the STS-V, which will be covered in a future instalment.

Outside, the STS had crisply tailored lines and a subtler interpretation of the Art&Science design language. Elegant proportions and clean surfacing made for an imposing, luxurious-looking sedan, although one considerably less bold than say, a Chrysler 300. Against its direct rivals, though, the STS stood out; the 5-Series had just been Bangle-ized, the E-Class and S-Type were both blobby, and the Infiniti M and Lexus GS were clean but inoffensive.

Base interior. Photo courtesy of eBay Motors.

Inside, the dash design was clean and uncluttered. Base models featured an abundance of aluminum trim, but ticking some option boxes could net you beautiful real Eucalyptus trim. Unlike with the CTS, Cadillac was less fixated on making the dash look like a PC tower, but the CD and DVD slots still took up a lot of real estate, even on models optioned with the slick touch-screen infotainment interface. Still, though, it was an improvement on its predecessor and stacked up well against rivals.

Base price for the STS V6 was $41,690; upgrading to the V8 meant a list price of $47,495. The base STS V6 came well-equipped with standard features such as leather trim, dual-zone climate control, eight-way power front seats and an eight-speaker Bose sound system. Like the Germans, though, there was a multitude of options available, including adaptive cruise control, head-up display, Xenon automatic headlamps and polished wheels. For the cabin, you could option a Bose surround-sound audio system with six-disc DVD player, Bluetooth and XM Satellite radio. Premium wood trim, four-way memory seats with heating and ventilation were also available to make the cabin a more comfortable place to be. For those seeking a more dynamic STS, you could add GM’s pioneering Magnetic Ride Control, as well as performance tires, brakes and steering and a limited slip diff.  All in all, your STS could be blown out well past the $60k mark: brave territory for a Cadillac, but still undercutting similarly-equipped Germans.

Critics were impressed. Motor Trend put the STS head-to-head with the new F60 BMW 545i, and couldn’t name a clear winner. Their V8 AWD test model didn’t quite have the weight balance or sheer power of the Bimmer, but the MRC shocks delivered an excellent ride/handling balance and the STS had a better-suited and incredibly smooth transmission and more intuitive infotainment system. Motor Trend appreciated the interior which, although not at Audi levels of quality, was vastly superior to that of the CTS/SRX and featured a “balanced, eye-pleasing combination of layout, style, function and materials.” In concluding their comparison test, the author noted, “The STS… goes down easier. It comes close to the harder-edged 545i in most areas of performance, while managing superior ride quality, stopping distances, and ease of use.”

Photo courtesy of eBay Motors

One flaw of the STS that would rear its head was its rear seat accommodations which, given the sheer size of the car, were surprisingly snug. The STS was also a heavy car, weighing in at over 4000lbs. Chalk a bit of that up to sound deadening, though, which made for an extremely quiet cabin. Cadillac aficionados expecting that quietness to be paired with a pillow-soft ride were in for a shock: the STS had a firm suspension, but one that allowed it to pull 0.86g on a skidpad. This Caddy could handle.

Still, the mid-size luxury sedan segment was a hotbed of impressive offerings and it certainly didn’t stay still. Group comparison tests conducted by Motor Trend and Car & Driver sung the praises of both the V6 and V8 STS models, but not enough to elevate the upstart Caddy to the top of the class. The overall verdict seemed to be that Cadillac was achingly close, but some minor niggles remained such as some ill-advised interior trim pieces.

European market Cadillac STS

Even the notoriously critical UK auto journalists proclaimed the STS as worthy of comparison to the Europeans, if not the ultimate class leader; as discussed earlier, though, Cadillac still has yet to find success in the European market. Overall, the STS was praised by most critics for being more dynamic than the Japanese luxury offerings but less edgy than the Germans. It thus offered a uniquely American take on luxury, and one perhaps more pleasing to most consumers in theory; it still had excellent rear-wheel-drive dynamics like the Germans, but with higher levels of comfort.

Rather than work on the minor issues keeping it from true greatness, GM decided to let the STS frustratingly hold the line. A 2008 revision brought a tweaked exterior – an attempt to keep the STS from being overshadowed in the showroom by the beautiful new CTS, no doubt – but no significant interior changes beyond a new steering wheel and some more aluminium trim. The cheap plastic trim pieces dotted here and there in the cabin remained, and Cadillac didn’t even add a conventional AUX input despite that feature’s availability in the cheaper, larger DTS.

To add insult to injury, Cadillac had launched the Chinese-exclusive SLS in 2007. This model addressed the major criticisms of the STS: interior presentation and quality, and rear-seat room. The SLS had a clean, new dash with gorgeous wood accents, very similar to the 2007 SRX revision. The wheelbase was stretched an additional 4 inches, allowing for a much more habitable rear seat.

Fortunately, the 2008 STS did provide one pleasing revision: a stronger 3.6 V6. Now with direct injection and a six-speed automatic, the STS V6 produced 302hp and 272 lb-ft yet sipped an impressive 17/26mpg. The V6 model was also afforded options, like the performance package and head-up display, that were previously exclusive to the V8. The V6 had always been decently powerful, but the revisions more or less rendered the aging Northstar irrelevant. Cadillac seemed to agree, and the V8 would be axed after 2010.

Sadly, the STS V6 would quickly follow. 2011 would be the last year for Cadillac’s erstwhile mid/full-sized luxury sedan, as well as the DTS luxobarge. GM’s bankruptcy had thrown everything into disarray, and certain projects like the Chevrolet Volt were given much higher priority. The planned new Cadillac V8 engine was axed; a proposed rear-wheel-drive STS/DTS successor was also terminated in development, as well as a rumoured proliferation of models riding on the Zeta platform (allegedly a Buick flagship and potentially a couple of Chevrolets and Cadillacs).

The more successful 2008 Cadillac CTS

Prioritizing certain vehicle projects made sense for struggling General Motors. After all, the STS was not a resounding sales success. STS sales exceeded 30,000 units just once, in its debut year. Those figures would drop each year, with sales more than halving between 2008 and 2009. Just 3,338 units would find buyers in its final year. Meanwhile, the DTS consistently sold twice as many units annually. Before you criticize GM for alienating core Cadillac consumers and chasing pipe dreams of European conquest sales, though, consider how well the second-generation CTS sold and how its size/price positioning most definitely ate into STS sales.

The STS and DTS would both be replaced in 2013 by the XTS, riding on the front-wheel-drive Epsilon platform but with optional all-wheel-drive. The XTS featured an abundance of technology, sharp styling and a gorgeous interior, but it was not a direct rival for the STS. The new flagship was no sports sedan, and instead went head-to-head with the Lincoln MKS.

The real STS replacement would come a year later, and wore the CTS nameplate. Overall, the CTS is a more complete effort than the STS and better targeted at the Germans. Still, the STS was an impressive effort by Cadillac after years of front-wheel-drive offerings, and with just a few more tweaks it could have achieved true greatness.

Related Reading:

Future Curbside Classics: The Smooth, Quiet Road to Nowhere – Part 1: Buick Lucerne

Curbside Classic: Lincoln LS

Future Curbside Classic: Cadillac XTS

Following their sea creature naming convention, iFixit has released two new screwdriver kits: the Minnow and the Moray. You probably know iFixit for their teardowns of the latest gadgets, but a number of Verge writers also swear by their screwdriver sets which come with lots of exotic bits to open up electronics yourself. These new sets are their smallest and cheapest yet, with 16 and 32 bits respectively, and both come in under $20.

Both sets come with the bits you need to take apart some of the most popular consumer tech: you can open iPhones and Macbooks with the pentalobe bits, Nintendo Switches with the tri-wing bits, and some PCs and older Apple computers with the Torx and Torx security bits. Both sets also include the basic...

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I just finished watching the new season of Netflix’s Mindhunter. The second season felt a lot stronger than the first; it had a mostly season-long arc that felt mostly conclusive. This season was also really smart about showing the ambiguity in their work, leaving the ending just a little open and uneasy.

The show continues to excel at finding tension and drama in long, descriptive conversations. It’s basically My Dinner with [a serial killer], with some connective tissue in between.

I wish the show would feel more confident about just how good it is at these sequences, though. Far too often, it’s worried about making anything and everything tense. Dramatic music pumps in during conversations that’d be more tense without it, and it...

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On Saturday, Joi Ito resigned from his position as director of the MIT Media Lab, according to an email sent to The New York Times.

“After giving the matter a great deal of thought over the past several days and weeks,” Ito wrote in the email, “I think that it is best that I resign as director of the media lab and as a professor and employee of the Institute, effective immediately.”

The resignation comes after mounting concern over Ito’s ties with Jeffrey Epstein, a serial rapist and billionaire who had been a significant donor to the lab and to MIT. Epstein donated as much as $800,000 to MIT-related projects over the years, including Ito’s own venture fund.

On August...

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I had simply too many great mechanical SLRs, and it didn’t make sense to keep them all. This Minolta SR-T 101 didn’t make the cut and I sold it last year. Which says a lot about the caliber of mechanical SLRs I own, because this is a wonderful camera. Read my updated review about it here.

[Related to: Attitude vs. Altitude]

I.

I write a lot about the importance of IQ research, and I try to debunk pseudoscientific claims that IQ “isn’t real” or “doesn’t matter” or “just shows how well you do on a test”. IQ is one of the best-studied ideas in psychology, one of our best predictors of job performance, future income, and various other forms of success, etc.

But every so often, I get comments/emails saying something like “Help! I just took an IQ test and learned that my IQ is x! This is much lower than I thought, and so obviously I will be a failure in everything I do in life. Can you direct me to the best cliff to jump off of?”

So I want to clarify: IQ is very useful and powerful for research purposes. It’s not nearly as interesting for you personally.

How can this be?

Consider something like income inequality: kids from rich families are at an advantage in life; kids from poor families are at a disadvantage.

From a research point of view, it’s really important to understand this is true. A scientific establishment in denial that having wealthy parents gave you a leg up in life would be an intellectual disgrace. Knowing that wealth runs in families is vital for even a minimal understanding of society, and anybody forced to deny that for political reasons would end up so hopelessly confused that they might as well just give up on having a coherent world-view.

From an personal point of view, coming from a poor family probably isn’t great but shouldn’t be infinitely discouraging. It doesn’t suggest that some kid should think to herself “I come from a family that only makes $30,000 per year, guess that means I’m doomed to be a failure forever, might as well not even try”. A poor kid is certainly at a disadvantage relative to a rich kid, but probably she knew that already long before any scientist came around to tell her. If she took the scientific study of intergenerational income transmission as something more official and final than her general sense that life was hard – if she obsessively recorded every raise and bonus her parents got on the grounds that it determined her own hope for the future – she would be giving the science more weight than it deserves.

So to the people who write me heartfelt letters complaining about their low IQs, I want to make two important points. First, we’re not that good at measuring individual IQs. Second, individual IQs aren’t that good at predicting things.

II.

Start with the measurement problems. People who complain about low IQs (not to mention people who boast about high IQs) are often wildly off about the number.

According to the official studies, IQ tests are rarely wrong. The standard error of measurement is somewhere between 3-7 points (1, 2, 3). Call it 5, and that means your tested IQ will only be off by 5+ points 32% of the time. It’ll only be off by 10+ points 5% of the time, and really big errors should be near impossible.

In reality, I constantly hear about people getting IQ scores that don’t make any sense.

Here’s a pretty standard entry in the “help my IQ is so low” genre – Grappling With The Reality Of Having A Below Average IQ:

When I was 16, as a part of an educational assessment, I took both the WAIS-IV and Woodcock Johnson Cognitive Batteries. My mother was curious as to why I struggled in certain subjects throughout my educational career, particularly in mathematical areas like geometry.

I never got a chance to have a discussion with the psychologist about the results, so I was left to interpret them with me, myself, and the big I known as the Internet – a dangerous activity, I know. This meant two years to date of armchair research, and subsequently, an incessant fear of the implications of my below-average IQ, which stands at a pitiful 94…I still struggle in certain areas of comprehension. I received a score of 1070 on the SAT, (540 Reading & 530 Math), and am barely scraping by in my college algebra class. Honestly, I would be ashamed if any of my coworkers knew I barely could do high school-level algebra.

This person thinks they’re reinforcing their point by listing two different tests, but actually a 1070 on the SAT corresponds to about 104, a full ten points higher. Based on other things in their post – their correct use of big words and complicated sentence structure, their mention that they work a successful job in cybersecurity, the fact that they read a philosophy/psychology subreddit for fun – I’m guessing the 104 is closer to the truth.

From the comments on the same Reddit thread:

Interesting, I hope more people who have an avg. or low IQ post. Personally I had an IQ of 90 or so, but the day of the test I stayed up almost the entire night, slept maybe two hours and as a naive caffeine user I had around 500 mg caffeine. Maybe low IQ people do that.

I did IQTest.dk Raven’s test on impulse after seeing a video of Peterson’s regarding the importance of IQ, not in a very focused mode, almost ADHD like with rumination and I scored 108, but many claim low scores by around 0.5-1 SD, so that would put me in 115-123. I also am vegan, so creatine might increase my IQ by a few points. I think I am in the 120’s, but low IQ people tend to overestimate their IQ, but at least I am certainly 108 non-verbally, which is pretty average and low.

The commenter is right that IQtest.dk usually underestimates scores compared to other tests. But even if we take it at face value, his first score was almost twenty points off. By the official numbers, that should only happen once in every 15,000 people. In reality, someone posts a thread about it on Reddit and another person immediately shows up to say “Yeah, that happened to me”.

Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman famously scored “only” 124 on an IQ test in school – still bright, but nowhere near what you would expect of a Nobelist. Some people point out that it might have been biased towards measuring verbal rather than math abilities – then again, Feynman’s autobiography (admittedly edited and stitched together by a ghostwriter) sold 500,000 copies and made the New York Times bestseller list. So either his tested IQ was off by at least 30 points (supposed chance of this happening: 1/505 million), or IQ isn’t real and all of the studies showing that it is are made up by lizardmen to confuse us. In either case, you should be less concerned if your own school IQ tests seem kind of low.

I don’t know why there’s such a discrepancy between the official reliability numbers and the ones that anecdotally make sense. My guess is that the official studies give the tests better somehow. They use professional test administrators instead of overworked school counselors. They give them at a specific time of day instead of while the testee is half-asleep. They don’t let people take a bunch of caffeine before the test. They actually write the result down in a spreadsheet they have right there instead of trusting the testee to remember it accurately.

In my own field, official studies diagnose psychiatric diseases through beautiful Structured Clinical Interviews performed to exacting guidelines. Then real doctors diagnose them through checklists that say “DO NOT USE FOR DIAGNOSIS” in big letters on the top. If psychometrics is at all similar, the clashing numbers aren’t much of a mystery.

But two other points that might also be involved.

First, on a population level IQ is very stable with age. Over a study of 87,498 Scottish children, age 11 IQ and adult IQ correlated at 0.66, about as strong and impressive a correlation as you’ll ever find in the social sciences. But “correlation of 0.66” is also known as “only predicts 44% of the variance”. On an individual level, it is totally possible and not even that surprising to have an IQ of 100 at age 11 but 120 at age 30, or vice versa. Any IQ score you got before high school should be considered a plausible prediction about your adult IQ and nothing more.

Second, the people who get low IQ scores, are shocked, find their whole world tumbling in on themselves, and desperately try to hold on to their dream of being an intellectual – are not a representative sample of the people who get low IQ scores. The average person who gets a low IQ score says “Yup, guess that would explain why I’m failing all my classes”, and then goes back to beating up nerds. When you see someone saying “Help, I got a low IQ score, I’ve double-checked the standard deviation of all of my subscores and found some slight discrepancy but I’m not sure if that counts as Bayesian evidence that the global value is erroneous”, then, well – look, I wouldn’t be making fun of these people if I didn’t constantly come across them. You know who you are.

Just for fun, I analyzed the lowest IQ scores in my collection of SSC/LW surveys. I was only able to find three people who claimed to have an IQ ≤ 100 plus gave SAT results. All three had SAT scores corresponding to IQs in the 120s.

I conclude that at least among the kind of people I encounter and who tend to send me these emails, IQ estimates are pretty terrible.

This is absolutely consistent with population averages of thousands of IQ estimates still being valuable and useful research tools. It just means you shouldn’t use it on yourself. Statistics is what tells us that almost everybody feels stimulated on amphetamines. Reality is my patient who consistently goes to sleep every time she takes Adderall. Neither the statistics nor the lived experience are wrong – but if you use one when you need the other, you’re going to have a bad time.

III.

The second problem is that even if you avoid the problems mentioned above and measure IQ 100% correctly, it’s just not that usefully predictive.

Isn’t that heresy?! Isn’t IQ the most predictive thing we have? Doesn’t it affect every life outcome as proven again and again in well-replicated experiments?

Yes! I’m not denying any of that. I’m saying that things that are statistically true aren’t always true for any individual.

Once again, consider the analogy to family transmission of income. Your parents’ socioeconomic status correlates with your own at about r = 0.2 to 0.3, depending on how you define “socioeconomic status”. By coincidence, this is pretty much the same correlation that Strenze (2006) found for IQ and socioeconomic status. Everyone knows that having rich parents is pretty useful if you want to succeed. But everyone also knows that rich parents aren’t the only thing that goes into success. Someone from a poor family who tries really hard and gets a lot of other advantages still has a chance to make it. A sociologist or economist should be very interested in parent-child success correlations; the average person trying to get ahead should just shrug, realize things are going to be a little easier/harder than they would have been otherwise, and get on with their life.

And this isn’t just about gaining success by becoming an athlete or musician or some other less-intellectual pursuit. Chess talent is correlated with IQ at 0.24, about the same as income. IQ is some complicated central phenomenon that contributes a little to every cognitive skill, but it doesn’t entirely determine any cognitive skill. It’s not just that you can have an average IQ and still be a great chess player if you work hard enough – that’s true, but it’s not just that. It’s that you can have an average IQ and still have high levels of innate talent in chess. It’s not quite as likely as if you have a high IQ, but it’s very much in the range of possibility. And then you add in the effects of working hard enough, and then you’re getting somewhere.

Here is a table of professions by IQ, a couple of decades out of date but probably not too far off (cf. discussion here):

I don’t know how better to demonstrate this idea of “statistically solid, individually shaky”. On a population level, we see that the average doctor is 30 IQ points higher than the average janitor, that college professors are overwhelmingly high-IQ, and we think yeah, this is about what we would hope for from a statistic measuring intelligence. But on an individual level, we see that below-average IQ people sometimes become scientists, professors, engineers, and almost anything else you could hope for.

IV.

I’m kind of annoyed I have to write this post. After investing so much work debunking IQ denialists, I feel like this is really – I don’t know – diluting the brand.

But I actually think it’s not as contradictory as it looks, that there’s some common thread between my posts arguing that no, IQ isn’t fake, and this one.

If you really understand the idea of a statistical predictor – if you have that gear in your brain at a fundamental level – then social science isn’t scary. You can read about IQ, or heredity, or stereotypes, or gender differences, or whatever, and you can say – ah, there’s a slight tendency for one thing to correlate with another thing. Then you can go have dinner.

If you don’t get that, then the world is terrifying. Someone’s said that IQ “correlates with” life outcomes? What the heck is “correlate with”? Did they say that only high-IQ people can be successful? That you’re doomed if you don’t get the right score on a test?

And then you can either resist that with every breath you have – deny all the data, picket the labs where it’s studied, make up silly theories about “emotional intelligence” and “grit” and what have you. Or you can surrender to the darkness, at least have the comfort of knowing that you accept the grim reality as it is.

Imagine an American who somehow gets it into his head that the Communists are about to invade with overwhelming force. He might buy a bunch of guns, turn his house into a bunker, start agitating that Communist sympathizers be imprisoned to prevent them from betraying the country when the time came. Or he might hang a red flag from his house, wear a WELCOME COMMUNIST OVERLORDS tshirt, and start learning Russian. These seem like opposite responses, but they both come from the same fundamental misconception. A lot of the culture war – on both sides – seems like this. I don’t know how to solve this except to try, again and again, to install the necessary gear and convince people that correlations are neither meaningless nor always exactly 1.0.

So please: study the science of IQ. Use IQ to explain and predict social phenomena. Work on figuring out how to raise IQ. Assume that raising IQ will have far-ranging and powerful effects on a wide variety of social problems. Just don’t expect it to predict a single person’s individual achievement with any kind of reliability. Especially not yourself.

Twitter is building a new feature that will allow users to tweet things longer than the traditional 140-character limit, and the company is targeting a launch date toward the end of Q1, according to multiple sources familiar with the company’s plans. Twitter is currently considering a 10,000 character limit, according to these sources. That’s the same character limit the company uses for its Direct Messages product, so it isn’t a complete surprise.

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Badland, Legend of Kay, Flick Golf, Hello Kitty themes (?!) and more

Star Wars Battlefront's Deluxe Edition is available for pre-order on Amazon, offering five in-game items for an extra $10 — including Han Solo's blaster and some of the most beautiful box art we've ever seen.

For $69.99 (currently $69.96 on Amazon), those who purchase the Deluxe Edition on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One will get the following, according to its product listing:

• Made famous by Han Solo, the DL-44 is the blaster of choice for scoundrels across the universe.
• Inflict more damage on enemy vehicles with the Ion Grenade.
• The Ion Torpedo locks on to and delivers extra damage to your opponents’ vehicles.
• Get electrified with the Ion Shock emote, available exclusively in the Deluxe Edition.
• Celebrate your win in style...

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Street Fighter 5 continues in the grand tradition of beefy people beating one another up in gorgeously-rendered 2D arenas. Join Matt Leone and I as we explore the game's new mechanics, playable characters and our favorite new arena — a London train station complete with classic punks, Bobbies and a very excited old man dancing with his cane.

A sequel for Shadow Warrior was announced today by publisher Devolver Digital and developer Flying Wild Hog.

The first Shadow Warrior was launched back in 1997, and sought to merge first-person carnage with cheesy Kung Fu movie themes. A reboot came out in 2013. The new E3-timed story trailer shows protagonist Lo Wang in another first-person battle against demonic foes, using blades and guns. Shadow Warrior 2 also offers four-player co-op.

Shadow Warrior 2 is set to launch on PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4 in 2016.

The Master of Orion reboot from Wargaming won't rely on World of Tanks' free-to-play model, but rather will be a fixed retail purchase and download game, the company told Polygon.

"This is strictly a retail download," said Chris Keeling, Wargaming's director of product vision. "It's not Free-to-Play and there's no persistent character or universe. Following the traditional Master of Orion model, we expect most players to be playing solo or over a LAN, but we will provide support for other multiplayer modes."

Earlier this week, Wargaming announced that the classic turn-based strategy game series was getting a reboot. The new Orion game is in development by Argentinian-based NGD Studios, with the help of key members from the original...

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Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft will each be hosting press, developers and a few fans for their big press events during E3.

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Oculus is hosting a pre-E3 press conference in San Francisco today, and the company has given us few hints about what to expect. It's very possible we'll be given a price for the hardware, and it's also possible that we'll get a better idea of the final look and feel of the hardware.

A few official announcements about launch games for the Oculus Rift would be pretty great as well. You can watch the livestream below; the event is scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET.

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Insomniac Games, makers of Sunset Overdrive on the Xbox One and currently working on the next installment of the Ratchet and Clank series on the PlayStation 4, today appeared at the Oculus Rift press conference to unveil their next project. Called Edge Of Nowhere, it's a third-person adventure game and will be playable on the floor of this year's E3.

A short trailer for the game shows an arctic expedition gone wrong, as well as an otherworldly, Cthulhu-like tentacled creature.

Developing...

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"We totally feel the 3DS was the stronger of the two"

Hyrule Warriors is one of the Wii U's more surprising games: it blends the world of The Legend of Zelda with the gameplay of Dynasty Warriors, to create an unexpectedly fun beat ‘em up. Now that experience is coming to the Nintendo 3DS.

We don't have much in the way of details, but publisher Koei Tecmo — which partnered with Nintendo on the game — posted a trailer for the game, which will presumably be revealed in further detail at E3 next week. The game itself looks largely the same as its console counterpart, letting you play as a wide range of Zelda characters while fighting off ridiculously huge waves of enemies. It also makes use of the 3DS's second screen to display the in-game map. While the Japanese trailer doesn't reveal when...

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The Frag Dolls, Ubisoft's in-house, all-female group of professional gamers who have hawked the publisher's wares and advocated for women in games for more than a decade, are no more. Frag Dolls founder Morgan Romine said on the group's official website that the team is being retired, writing that "the world of video games has moved on."

"We can count it as progress that 'girls playing games' is no longer the source of surprise that it once was," Romine said. "We've said many times over the years that we hoped to one day see true gender equity across gaming communities, rendering an all-girl gaming team unremarkable. I won't claim that we've reached gender equity, by any means; we still have a long way to go. But there has been progress...

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Forecasts suggested that U.S. new vehicle sales would decline in March 2015, but the auto industry reported a slight uptick compared with March 2014. The moderate 0.5% improvement occurred despite a 4% passenger car sales decline and a 0.6% drop in full-size pickup truck sales.

• GM truck increase contrasts with overall GM decline

• Ram truck decrease contrasts with overall FCA improvement

Granted, the March decline for full-size trucks was slight; the F-Series, Ram, Tundra, and Titan decreases were nearly completely counteracted by a GM increase.

Moreover, the first-quarter of 2015 was a healthy one for full-size trucks, with the five top nameplates all reporting improved sales compared with the first three months of 2014.

But Ford F-Series sales slipped 5% last month compared with March 2014, an especially strong F-Series sales month, though F-Series sales were up narrowly compared with March 2013. The Ford outsold the combined efforts of the Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra for the second time in three months.

GM’s twins posted a combined increase of 6% in March. Their 62,588 sales generated 34% market share, up two percentage points compared with March 2014. Their improvement didn’t stop GM from reporting a 5% loss – GM car sales plunged 21%.

Just days after TTAC explored the idea of 58 consecutive months of year-over-year, Ram truck improvement, Ram P/U sales in March 2015 declined for the first time since April 2010. The decrease was slight, only 937 units, and it didn’t stop the overarching FCA/Chrysler Group from posting the manufacturer’s 60th consecutive monthly increase.

Timothy Cain is the founder of GoodCarBadCar.net, which obsesses over the free and frequent publication of U.S. and Canadian auto sales figures.

The post March 2015 U.S. Full-Size Truck Sales Decline – Cain’s Segments appeared first on The Truth About Cars.

At New York Private Schools, Challenging White Privilege From the Inside

Establishment power is defended with the baton and tear gas  only as a last resort. In the first instance, it is defended with far subtler, far more insidious means.

On a recent morning, 20 or so high school students, most of them white, milled about the meetinghouse at Friends Seminary, a private school in Manhattan. They were trying to unload on their classmates slips of paper on which they had jotted down words related to the topic “Things I don’t want to be called.”

Street level protests like #BlackLivesMatter are the most genuine and principled form of resistance to this power; counterintuitively, they inspire response from establishment power that is less true to establishment power’s typical modus operandi.

Several girls tried get to rid of “ditsy.” A sophomore in jeans and a gray hoodie who identifies as Asian-American was seeking to unload “minority.” And several white students, including a long-limbed girl in a checkered lumberjack shirt, wanted to get rid of “privileged.” Under the rules of the exercise, no other student was obligated to accept it.

As the history of dictatorship shows, armed, heavy-handed defense of establishment power is effective only until it isn’t. The obvious and crude nature of this form of defense reveals its real-world power but also its vulnerability.

“It’s just a very strong word to use,” the last girl said. “I don’t want to be identified with that just because my parents can afford things. I think it has a negative connotation.”

Contemporary capitalism has produced systems that are far more sophisticated. Modern neoliberal nations do not typically have to crush dissent. They rarely feel forced to meet strength with strength. Paradoxically this tendency to avoid the direct expression of force through violence demonstrates the true depth of establishment power.

The workshop was part of a daylong speaker series known at Friends as the Day of Concern. Students gathered in small groups to discuss a variety of social justice issues and participate in workshops; there were also talks about gender and the environment. But the overarching theme of the day was identity, privilege and power. And it was part of a new wave of diversity efforts that some of the city’s most elite private schools are undertaking.

Perhaps no form of subtle social control better exemplifies privilege’s ability to dominate through soft power than the way in which privilege theory itself becomes a commodity, monetized and peddled to the privileged as easily as consumer electronics or expensive clothes.

In the past, private school diversity initiatives were often focused on minority students, helping them adjust to the majority white culture they found themselves in, and sometimes exploring their backgrounds in annual assemblies and occasional weekend festivals. Now these same schools are asking white students and faculty members to examine their own race and to dig deeply into how their presence affects life for everyone in their school communities, with a special emphasis on the meaning and repercussions of what has come to be called white privilege.

Capitalism employs the power of the rifle only when necessary. Over time, the systems of commodification, appropriation, and undermining become more and more sophisticated; concurrently, the need to use brute force declines. Pinkertons are replaced by well-meaning cultural studies professors. The defense of privilege is carried out by those who rail against it.

The session at Friends Seminary, on East 16th Street, was led by Derrick Gay, a 39-year-old diversity consultant who has led similar programs atCollegiate School on the Upper West Side, Saint Ann’s in Brooklyn Heights and the Spence School on the Upper East Side.

Sincerity becomes a tool of power. When establishment power’s tactics were cruder, less refined, appropriation relied on insincerity; it was a form of outward deception. Now the deception is self-deception. The most committed, most passionate critics of privilege become the agents through which their own critique is packaged, consumed, and ultimately stored away in a mental closet like last season’s handbag.

Mr. Gay, who is black, says schools are increasingly drawn to conversations about privilege and race because they understand that “raising students to live in a bubble — a white bubble, a black bubble, a Latino bubble, whatever type of bubble you want to call it — is not to your benefit in a global society.”

In an earlier time, establishment power would have opposed the creation of an anti-establishment professional class. Today, establishment power recognizes that the surest way to blunt the impact of a social movement is to professionalize it. Thus the rise of the professional anti-racist, the professional anti-sexist, the professional opponent of privilege. Sincerity in pursuing the cause becomes not an impediment to serving the needs of establishment power but a powerful virtue.

For most of their history, private schools were the living embodiment of white privilege: They were almost all white and mostly moneyed. Not anymore. This year, according to the National Association of Independent Schools, minority students make up a third of the population of New York City private schools, and 18.5 percent of all students receive financial aid.

To improve the optics and keep overwhelming irony at bay, privilege enacts aesthetic reforms that deepen greater inequality. Like the woman elevated onto the board of a company where the CEO makes 300 times the average worker, establishment power looks to diversify systems and institutions that are unequal by their nature and elitist in their function.

Educators charged with preparing students for life inside these schools, in college and beyond, maintain that anti-racist thinking is a 21st-century skill and that social competency requires a sophisticated understanding of how race works in America. In turn, faculty members and students are grappling with race and class in ways that may seem surprising to outsiders and deeply unsettling to some longtime insiders. And the term “white privilege” is now bantered about with frequency.

Political discourse becomes, in the hands of the privilege education industry, inherently and existentially linguistic in its function. Language becomes inescapable: bad language is represented as the cardinal sin, good language the cardinal virtue, language is the means through which those worthy of punishment are identified, and language the tool to punish them.

It comes up during schoolwide assemblies like a recent one held to honor the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the Little Red School House and Elisabeth Irwin High School, also known as LREI, a progressive school in the West Village. It is explored at parent gatherings at the Dalton School on East 89th Street during broader conversations about racial equity. It is examined in seventh-grade social studies at the Calhoun School on West End Avenue, where students read “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” a 1989 article by Peggy McIntosh that outlines dozens of ways white people experience “unearned skin privilege.”

This obsessive focus on language seems, to those who have accepted its central premises, to be a trap that can catch all bad behavior within it. In fact, privileging language above all else merely empowers the more industrious to escape criticism through employing language themselves. If language is both the cage and the lock, language is inevitably the key.

And at a few schools, students and faculty members are starting white affinity groups, where they tackle issues of white privilege, often in all-white settings. The groups have sprung from an idea that whites should not rely on their black, Asian or Latino peers to educate them about racism and white dominance.

First, by making language the means through which inequality is identified, expressed, and combated, structural and material inequality become strangely marginalized in critical analysis, and those who focus on them are mocked and distrusted.

“In the past, there was a tendency to think: This isn’t my problem and it isn’t something I need to deal with because it isn’t something I even think a lot about,” said Louisa Grenham, a white senior at Brooklyn Friends Schooland a member of a white affinity group there.

Second, when the linguistic becomes the only means through which to understand the world, the linguistic rejection of privilege becomes an arbiter of who gets sorted into which camp. Curiously, the most effective way to undermine one’s place of privilege is to announce it; “I know I am privileged” becomes a tool with which to force others to see you as something else.

“Whiteness” as a concept is not new. W. E. B. Du Bois wrote about it in the 1920s; James Baldwin addressed it in the 1960s. But it did not gain traction on college campuses until the 1980s, as an outgrowth of an interdisciplinary study of racial identity and racial superiority. It presumes that in the United States, race is a social construct that had its origins in colonial America when white plantation owners were seeking dominance and order.

If all identities are social constructs, it becomes impossible to conduct a reality check. Social critique marches further and further from the material conditions it arose from.

Today “white privilege” studies center on the systemic nature of racism as well as the way it exposes minorities to daily moments of stress and unpleasantness — sometimes referred to as “micro-aggressions.” Freedom from such worries is a privilege in and of itself, the theory goes, one that many white people are not even aware they have.

Whatever critiques of the-thing-in-itself exist become subject to the appropriation of those who have it, and thus their capacity to harm is blunted. Since belonging is a matter of linguistic ritual, even those most directly indicted by these critiques feel no compunction against taking them up and directing them outward. Even the bullet with your name on it cannot harm you if you are allowed to grab the barrel of the gun and point it in the other direction.

It may seem paradoxical that students at elite institutions would decide to tackle the elitism they seem to cherish. But private schools’ diversity consultants brush aside insinuations that their social justice work is inauthentic.

The best defense is a good offense.

In recent months, for example, as the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner, on Staten Island, have prompted protests, schools have tried to make the conversation relevant for their students, taking them to Black Lives Matter marches and honoring white civil rights leaders in schoolwide assemblies.

So men who enthusiastically mock “Not All Men,” sharing memes and composing tweets, are inevitably themselves saying “not all men” in a different register. Just as shamelessly as the men who insist “Not All Men,” they extricate themselves from the critique which they ostensibly celebrate.

Talking about “whiteness,” administrators say, gives white students a way into conversations about equity and prejudice that previous diversity efforts at their schools may have excluded them from.

Thus the white person who rails the loudest about white privilege feels themselves to be least vulnerable to the accusation of being so.

At the LREI high school campus, the front entrance is adorned with a student art project, by the seniors Ana Maroto and Sage Adams, that includes a black-and-white photo of a somber-looking teenager, who identifies as mixed-race, holding a placard that reads: “I need justice because I’m sick of having to explain privilege.”

Like an auto-immune disorder, the systems designed to keep the body healthy attack it themselves. Privilege theory has become the instrument of the privileged.

At the Riverdale Country School in the Bronx, two white seniors started the Exploring Whiteness club in the fall, which now regularly attracts 15 students. They were inspired by reading “Waking Up White,” a memoir by Debby Irving, a self-proclaimed WASP from New England who discovered in her late 40s that many of the benefits her father had received in housing and education from the G.I. Bill had been denied to millions of African-American veterans. In the book, Ms. Irving writes about “stepping out of a dream” and realizing that the black people she knew lived in a more challenging world than she ever would face.

Capitalism being as it is, a new class of professional privilege educators is born. They react to market need. If the affluent are seeking to salve themselves through the careful application of privilege theory, a professional class will arise to commodify that desire. If the privilege are looking to be soothed, someone will sell them the balm.

Every year, an increasing number of New York City private schools select students to attend the White Privilege Conference, founded 16 years ago by Eddie Moore Jr., the former diversity director at Brooklyn Friends. This year, the theme of the conference, organized by the Dalton School, is “Race, Privilege, Community Building.”

As the ranks of the professional privilege opponents grow, the urge to defend the theory from external criticism grows.

The new focus on addressing white privilege has not been an unmitigated success. Dr. Moore, for example, despite the stature of his conference, is no longer working with Brooklyn Friends. Acknowledging the inherent tension, he said: “Not every student is saying: ‘I want to talk about white privilege. Give me the best book.’ ”

Luckily for these enthusiastic capitalists, the form of that defense is inscribed in their position: accusations of privilege and bigotry themselves. The initial political defense of these ideas and tactics intermingles with the naked financial self-interest until they are, by design, totally inextricable.

For years, private schools in New York avoided conversations about race and class by remaining uniformly white and wealthy. They began desegregating in earnest in the 1970s and 1980s, as programs for low-income students like Prep for Prep and A Better Chance brought in minority scholarship students. Many white parents welcomed the change, worried that their children would be ill prepared for an increasingly multicultural world if they did not have exposure to people from diverse backgrounds. Today, for example, at LREI, Calhoun and Dalton, at least one-third of the student body is not white.

These people become invulnerable, their commodification impregnable: there is no critique from within privilege theory that they cannot turn around on others, and no critique from outside of it that they cannot dismiss as itself the hand of privilege.

At some of the city’s top neighborhood public elementary schools, nonwhite populations are actually lower. At both Public School 6, on the Upper East Side, and P.S. 41, in Greenwich Village, 21 percent of the students in the 2013-14 school year were nonwhite, according to state figures. At P.S. 41, that is a dip from 31 percent in the 2003-4 school year.

The initial functions of these theories, to challenge and undermine and discomfit, are thus lost, at least to those savvy enough to appear forever on the right side of things.

Many of the private schools have struggled, though, to make these new minority students feel welcome, oscillating between a colorblind philosophy and a feel-good “festival approach” — reserving light discussions about race and class for Martin Luther King’s Birthday, Black History Month and an annual assembly or two.

That approach, diversity directors say, has proved ineffective.

The ameliorative potential of this kind of engagement is always asserted, rarely proven. Nor is serious consideration given to whether, by focusing so intently on feelings as a deracinated aspect of psychology, these efforts actually prevent serious efforts to dismantle the socioeconomic conditions that cause them.

Tim Wise, an anti-racism activist and the author of “White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son,” said: “If you’re still talking about food and festivals and fabrics with high school students, you’re probably not pushing them to think critically about these bigger issues.”

Indeed, in recent years, several documentaries filmed inside these schools — including Michèle Stephenson and Joe Brewster’s“American Promise,” Kavery Kaul’s “Long Way From Home” and “Allowed to Attend,” produced by Trinity’s director of communications — present in excruciating detail the alienation many minority students experience. The schools are depicted as institutions teeming with white students oblivious to their outsize privilege — the lavishness of their spring-break vacations, weekend homes and lunch money — and unaware of the challenges faced by their less privileged classmates.

Absurdly, the more immaterial and asystematic these critiques become, the more likely those who voice them are to self-style as radicals, as if radicalism exists in inverse proportion to the willingness to explore first causes and foundational inequality.

In “The Prep School Negro,” the filmmaker André Robert Lee explores what it was like to be one of the few African-American students enrolled, on scholarship, in the 1980s at Germantown Friends, an elite Quaker school in Philadelphia. He has taken his film, first completed in 2008 and reworked in 2014, to hundreds of schools around the country. He maintains that the screenings have helped spur conversations about race and class that would not have been possible even 15 years ago.

Mr. Lee is now touring schools with another film he produced, “I’m Not Racist … Am I?” Commissioned by the Calhoun School, the film follows 12 New York City private and public school students for a year while they attend workshops exploring racism and white privilege. “School administrators tell me: ‘We realize we have a lot more work to do on these issues,’ ” Mr. Lee said.

In these contexts, the obsessive focus on conversations, awareness, and knowing becomes inevitable. Solutions must, like causes, remain vague, indistinct, and resistant to material evaluation.

Administrators at Friends Seminary would seem to agree. In January, students gathered in the school’s slate-gray meetinghouse, a room virtually unchanged since 1860, to watch a presentation by Mr. Gay, a classically trained opera singer and the former director of community life and diversity at the Nightingale-Bamford School, a private institution for girls on the Upper East Side. With slides, videos and a series of pen-and-paper exercises, Mr. Gay talked to the students about how race, class, gender and ablebodiedness influence people’s perspective and contribute to whether they feel welcome “inside a space.”

During an exercise called “Who Are You?” Mr. Gay asked students to create their own “identity cards,” writing down terms they wanted to be associated with, in stark contrast to the other exercise, which focused on unwanted identities. One girl wrote “white,” “SoHo” and “Sag Harbor”; another wrote “a very nice person.” Then students paired up, with one responding to the question “Who are you?” The room erupted in noise, with students shouting, “black,” “white,” “straight,” “lesbian,” “Jewish,” “Spanish” and “smart.”

Whatever once remained of the material, objective conditions of oppression that first inspired theory has dissolved. A wealthy 16 year old becomes representative of marginalized identity; an out-of-work truck driver becomes classified by his male privilege.

“Everyone has a card,” Mr. Gay told the students. “It’s called an identity card. Society doesn’t value each of these identities equally.”

Later he added: “It’s no one’s fault. But you should be aware of it.”

Paradoxically, a movement often accused of essentialism teaches its adherents that they can wriggle out of any critique of their demographic and social qualities.

During another seminar that day, Darnell L. Moore, a writer and activist from Camden, N.J., divided students into small groups, giving them large sheets of paper and felt-tip markers and asking them to develop social-status charts, based on current conditions in America and general perceptions.

The students produced strikingly similar charts, with several envisioning a straight, white male as the most powerful citizen and a poor, black single mother as the least powerful one.

White privilege becomes other white people’s privilege; male privilege becomes the sin of other  men; heteronormativity, the fault of some category “straight people” and not the particular “this straight person.”

“It was kind of gross how easy it was to be able to say, ‘This person has to be this,’ ” said Camille Fillion-Raff, a junior at the school.

Educators who do this work in New York private schools say one of the challenges white students face when exploring their own identity is the dearth of white anti-racist role models. They say white students have traditionally been offered only three ways to confront race: to be colorblind, ignorant or racist.

“Those are not happy identities,” said Beverly Daniel Tatum, the president of Spelman College and the author of “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?”

Identity, stripped of any plausible real-world referent, signals everything and means nothing.

With that in mind, the Trevor Day School on East 89th Street spends at least some time every year honoring the white civil rights activist Andrew Goodman, who was killed in Philadelphia, Miss., in 1964, while working to register black voters. This year, the school invited Mr. Goodman’s brother, David, to speak at the school.

But helping students explore their white identity has not been without its challenges.

Once synonymous with reactionary conservatism, pride in being part of a privileged class becomes reconciled with an ostensibly radical, counter-cultural worldview.

At the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, which has campuses in Manhattan and the Bronx, a plan this winter to roll out a racial awareness workshop series for third through fifth graders was met with fierce resistance by parents. Many objected that children as young as 8 were being asked to segregate themselves into race-based affinity groups. Ultimately, parents were told, students who chose not to identify with any of the racial categories would be allowed to sign up for a group that was not based on race. A fifth grader’s father, a white man who asked not to be identified because he did not want any repercussions for his daughter, called the plan “mind-boggling” and said his daughter found the entire concept confusing and unsettling.

Unmoored from the responsibility to actually demonstrate marginalization, groups like #GamerGate proceed to use the terminology and tactics of privilege theory against its champions. Having created the conditions for this appropriation themselves, they find themselves powerless against this. Aesthetics having totally eaten the actual, no one has a firm enough place to stand to deny their claims to marginalization, least of all to the corporate advertisers towards whom they make their appeals.

At Brooklyn Friends, a controversy over the approach of Dr. Moore, the school’s former diversity director, ended abruptly when he left at the end of last year and did not return this fall. Many students, like Jumoke McDuffie-Thurmond, a black senior, said Dr. Moore was a warm and stimulating figure at the school who talked openly about what he called “subconscious racial bias.” But several sources inside the school said some white students complained that Dr. Moore was a polarizing figure whose focus on white privilege made them uncomfortable. Both Dr. Moore and a school representative described his departure as “amicable.”

Capital thus sends its newly-educated young people out into the work place, stuffed with the means to combat privilege but no idea why, ready to devote ostensibly left-wing theory to the cause of personal financial gain, and possessed of an iron-clad assurance that their self-conception is congruent with the brand new moral world. Political morality is as etched into their identities as their money, as intrinsic to them as will be their inevitable Ivy League diplomas.

At LREI, Sandra Chapman, the director of diversity and community, said conversations about white privilege could be difficult, with some students and faculty members more willing to engage than others. “This is messy work,” she said. “But these conversations are necessary.”

Establishment power then sits back to wait for the inevitable corruption and conservatism of age and time.

I love public radio. Seriously, I do. I give money to public radio, I listen to it all the time, and when I criticize it, it’s out of love. No kidding.

That said, this has got to be one of the most NPR items about NPR ever. From the WaPo:

It’s a question sometimes whispered but never boldly confronted: Does NPR, and public radio in general, sound too “white”?

NPR itself suggested Thursday that the answer might be yes in an unusual bit of public self-examination. In a commentary aired on “All Things Considered,” its signature newscast, and in a subsequent Twitter chat that quickly trended nationally, the public radio network lit the fuse on an explosive discussion about how a broadcast should sound.

The commentary came from Chenjerai Kumanyika, a black communications professor, who complained that he has to code switch when he goes on public radio — that is, speak with a voice unlike the voice he uses in everyday life. Excerpt:

What bothers me most is the way I’m inhabiting my own personality. My voice sounds too high and all the rounded corners of slang are squared off. It’s like I don’t even recognize myself. Who am I? Just as an experiment, I re-recorded part of that piece to see how a relaxed, sort of less code-switched style of narration might sound.

I’m not sure how much more effective it is, but I feel better listening to it. My voice is calmer, but hopefully not boring. Overall, it’s like I feel more centered and I sound more like myself rather than myself pretending to be a public radio host.

It’s worth clicking on the link to hear Kumanyika’s “radio voice,” and by comparison, what his piece would sound like in his own natural voice. He has a strong accent.

I see why he speaks in a different voice for the radio. His natural speaking voice calls attention to itself, gets in the way of the story he wants to tell. This is not, however, a black thing. I’ve recorded a few commentaries over the years for All Things Considered, and the way I sound on those pieces is different from how I sound in real life. The producers compelled me to speak in a more neutral tone, and to enunciate more clearly than I customarily do. This was for the sake of clarity. Recording those pieces made me feel like I was putting on a tie and buttoning up my collar. But so what? The point of the exercise was not about how I felt about my public radio voice, but about clarity of communication.

Think about it this way: How many Southerners are on-air personalities at NPR? Do you know? I can think of three, based on their accents: Eleanor Beardsley, a native South Carolinian based in Paris (even her French pronunciation sounds like it’s spoken by someone from the American South), Wade Goodwyn, a native Texan, in Dallas, and Debbie Elliott, based once again in her home state of Alabama. I actually got to know Debbie a little bit when she came to my town to do an All Things Considered piece about The Little Way of Ruthie Leming. Her accent is a bit different off the air than on — more, well, Southern, in its rhythm and pronunciation.

Again: so what? She has to communicate to a national audience. Using a more broadcast-neutral accent facilitates that communication. Whenever I go on TV, I’m more careful about enunciation, especially pronouncing the ‘g’ at the end of a word; Southerners typically drop the g. I used to catch hell about this from my sister, who thought I was being fake. The whole question of accent and identity was huge with her, as it clearly is with Prof. Kumanyika. But why should it be?

Years ago, when the black media figure Tavis Smiley had a public radio program, I used to listen to it. He has a strong “black” accent, and it was a part of his on-air personality. I didn’t mind it at all, because it was his show, and it was a show about black people and black issues. Because I grew up with black kids, I usually don’t have any trouble understanding black English, even heavily accented black English. And still, there were times when I’d miss something Smiley said. If Smiley had been a correspondent or regular commenter on a main news broadcast, his accent would have been problematic, and would not have invited more listeners in. Smiley’s substitute host, Tony Cox, is also a black man, but he spoke with a trained radio announcer’s voice, one that was far more broadcast-neutral, and thus able to be understood by people who might have struggled with Smiley’s accent.

Again, the question is, what do you want to communicate? Yourself, or the story? Is your job as a radio journalist to draw attention to yourself, or to be the frame in which the subject of your story takes center stage?

It’s a pet peeve of mine when NPR’s Hispanic on-air reporters conclude their pieces by pronouncing their names in a strong Spanish accent. It’s a gesture that calls attention to itself. I’m not sure why, but sometimes you hear American reporters — and not just Hispanic ones — pronounce the name of Latin American cities with a distinct Spanish accent. It irritates me for the same reason it would irritate me if Eleanor Beardsley began signing off her reports as being filed from “Paree.” That is the correct French pronunciation of France’s capital city, but it would be pretentious to speak that way to an American mass audience. If she were reporting from Berlin, and wanted to pronounce the name of the German capital in the Germanically correct way, she would say, “Bair-LEEN.” But that would call attention to the reporter, not to the story.

Whenever I travel in France, I adjust my English to make it easier to communicate with French people who may understand some English, but who are unaccustomed to hearing it. The point is not to assert my identity as an American and as a Southerner, but to communicate. I even, at times, will pronounce American place names and proper names in a Pepe Le Pew accent, because as ridiculous as it makes me feel to speak that way, it helps the French people who don’t speak my language, or who don’t speak it well, understand what I’m trying to tell them.

In the end, I think refusing to use a broadcast-neutral voice, or at least a more broadcast-neutral voice than in everyday life, in a mass communications news and information medium is selfish. Most of the radio voices on NPR sound like people who are from Nowhere, or, in the case of the Southerners I mentioned, who are from somewhere, but are toning their Somewhereness down for the sake of being understood by a mass audience.  That’s appropriate to the medium. If I told you a story while sitting on my back porch, it would sound much different from my telling the same story in a formal print magazine piece. And that too is appropriate to the medium.

But how very NPR for NPR to worry about this kind of thing! Do people who work in network television ever fret over whether or not their black on-air correspondents and presenters sound “authentically” black? Does ABC’s Pierre Thomas, who is black, betray himself by speaking in a broadcast-neutral voice? Who gets to define what is an authentically black sound, anyway? And why are the broadcast-neutral voices of most NPR personalities considered “white”? No white person in my town speaks like NPR personalities (Debbie Elliott somewhat excepted). So what? NPR’s Ari Shapiro is openly gay; does he sound gay enough for the radio? Does he code-switch when off the air, and speak in a more stereotypically gay voice? Who cares?

The identity politics of liberals spoil everything.

Readers of MacStories know how I like to present my screenshots. For the uninitiated, some context: screenshots from iOS apps that end up on MacStories are usually modified to have a clean status bar and, for iPhone apps, they're usually presented side-by-side with various layouts. I like how screenshots are displayed on MacStories, and, combined with a new workflow to optimize the resulting images for our CDN, this gives me flexibility and considerable savings (for both costs and time). I can take better screenshots spending less time editing them and less money hosting them.

In the past couple of weeks, I've been playing with two new iPhone apps for combining screenshots on the iPhone – LongScreen and Tailor.

Tailor is the simpler of the two, and it can be used to stitch multiple screenshots vertically in one long image. While similar solutions exist on the App Store, Tailor impressed me for its ease of use. Say you want to create a long screenshot of a conversation on iMessage or a single image of someone's Twitter timeline. Once you've taken multiple screenshots with little overlap between them, Tailor is capable of automatically finding them in the Camera Roll, stitching them based on the order in which you took them.

You'll end up with a long, seamless screenshot that only shows one status bar at the top and one tab bar at the bottom with no “connections” between the underlying screenshots. The effect is particularly nice in apps like Twitter and Messages, as it'll look like you're taking screenshots on a very long iPhone.

Tailor is smart enough in that it won't stitch anything if it doesn't find multiple screenshots taken in rapid succession in your library; when it does, you don't have to pick anything manually as the app will start stitching images on its own.

Twitter timelines stitched by Tailor.

I used Tailor to create long screenshots for my Twitter feature story from December, and it worked admirably. My only complaint is that the app tends to crash when deleting previously-generated images and that there's no way to pick older screenshots – Tailor only finds new screenshots and has no manual mode.

Tailor is a free download with a $2.99 In-App Purchase to remove ads.

LongScreen is a slightly more complex utility that is not as fast as Tailor but has more features. Like Tailor, it can stitch screenshots vertically for one long image, but it won't automatically find images to stitch in your library. LongScreen needs you to pick screenshots you want to combine, and it shows you the order in which they'll be stitched with a blue badge for selected images. It's slower, but it works, and results are comparable to Tailor.

Unlike Tailor, LongScreen can also combine screenshots horizontally and it can clean the system status bar. The option to have a better-looking status bar obviously resonates with me, and, for the most part, LongScreen implements this well. LongScreen overrides the status bar with a matching version that has full signal, WiFi, battery, and Apple's popular 9:41 AM time, but it only works for status bars that are based on solid colors. Unlike Dr. Drang's script, LongScreen won't fill the status bar on translucent backgrounds, which I need for many of the apps I cover on MacStories. Still, I'm glad the option is there.

LongScreen can merge screenshots horizontally – another task that I've long automated with scripts in Pythonista. LongScreen provides a GUI for something that I've done in Python for a long time, and it even offers settings to decide the mode (tile or single row) and space between screenshots in the final image. I've used LongScreen's horizontal merge mode with status bar cleaning for apps that had solid status bars, and the app worked well for my needs. It's a bit unpolished and the settings aren't exactly intuitive, but it gets the job done and, like Tailor, it supports sharing images with extensions. Thanks to iOS 8, LongScreen can delete the original screenshots from the Photos app, too.

LongScreen is available at $0.99 on the App Store.

I've used Tailor and LongScreen with a good degree of success in MacStories articles. I'm glad that there are developers who share my obsession with combining screenshots and optimizing them.

A man in Denver thought he bought a PlayStation 4 for his niece for Christmas. When he opened the box, he found not a console but two wrapped-up bundles of rocks.

About the only thing the box of rocks that Igor Baksht bought had in common with a PS4 is that neither could connect to PlayStation Network on Christmas Day. Baksht said he discovered the rocks when he opened the box before wrapping it as a gift.

Denver's KMGH-TV got the story, and it has a (sort of) happy ending. Walmart initially refused to refund the purchase, saying it had no proof Baksht didn't box up the rocks himself. After KMGH's story aired, though, they gave him his money back.

The TV station notes it was skeptical of Baksht's claim but acknowledges that others...

Continue reading…

In Sweden, the mainstream parties are so afraid of the Sweden Democrats, an anti-immigration party, that they have announced a broad left-right coalition designed to marginalize the so-called “far-right” party. The deal means the snap elections called for March are now cancelled. According to a Swedish political analyst quoted by the NYT, “Basically, the idea is to not allow the Sweden Democrats to have any influence.”

Well, if the SD were a neo-fascist party, one could understand it. I know nothing about Swedish politics, but this uncomplimentary profile of the party from The Guardian makes the SD sound like garden-variety European populists. You have to be very, very skeptical of the label “far right” as applied by the establishment — media, political, academic — towards populist parties. I learned this over a decade ago, covering the assassination of Pim Fortuyn, the Dutch libertarian who before his murder was headed toward a victory that would have made him prime minister. I assumed he was a Jörg Haider/Jean-Marie Le Pen type, because that’s how our media covered him. In fact, he was an openly gay libertarian, indeed a libertine, whose rise to power came because he was the only national politician willing to speak openly about the Netherlands’ serious problems with Muslim immigrants. I interviewed a conservative law professor in Holland who shook his head in disbelief that a man as liberal as Fortuyn would be labeled a far-rightist, or any kind of rightist, simply because of his position on immigration.

This is how the Eurocratic establishment works, though: demonize any opposition as crypto-Nazi. So, don’t be quick to accept the “far right” label on these parties.

But that doesn’t mean the label never fits. What about the Sweden Democrats? Here is an analysis from Britain’s conservative magazine The Spectator, analyzing the meaning of the SD’s showing in this fall’s elections. Excerpt:

They call themselves “Sweden’s only opposition party”, the implication being that the Stockholm elite is one indistinguishable blob of vested interest.  Like UKIP, they say they are neither left or right. I’d put them closer to Maine Le Pen’s National Front in being anti-immigration and protectionist. Is Ms Romson fair to compare them to racists? There is no doubt that the Sweden Democrats have moved towards the mainstream in recent years and tried to address racism within their ranks. Their language is a mixture of Salmond/Farage-style anger at the elite and populism. The below tweet from a Swede is a fair point:-

Yes, note that point. These guys don’t want fascism — they want a return to 1950s-style Swedish social democracy. From Dominic Green’s helpful — and by no means supportive of the SD — article in the Weekly Standard:

Sweden has led the way in Euro-pean immigration, and Muslim immigration in particular. Some 20 percent of Sweden’s 9.5 million people are immigrants or the children of immigrants: the highest figure in Europe. Most European states were until recently monocultural. They have trouble assimilating immigrants, especially rural Muslims who wish to keep their cultural and religious identity. Sweden has applied the noblest of ideals—shelter to the oppressed—with the narrowness of mind that can happen when you live in a small society on the quiet side of the Baltic. The state has failed to assimilate its immigrants. Ordinary Swedes, both indigenous and immigrant, have paid the social cost. In a May 2014 poll, 44 percent of respond-ents wanted the new government to reduce immigration.

Nigel Farage of UKIP likes to be photographed holding a frothing pint of bitter and a cigarette. Jimmie Åkesson of the Sweden Democrats looks like a ’50s rocker. He longs for the days when the welfare state was strong and society coherent. It turns out that plenty of Swedes feel the same. Last week, the comments sections of Swedish press websites abounded in conversions from both left and right. All said the same thing: Mass immigration has dissolved Sweden’s social cohesion and overburdened the welfare system. The established parties are too cowardly or corrupt to stop the rot. The Sweden Democrats are not; and so, holding his or her nose, the voter backed them.

Green continues:

If Sweden leads the way, Europe’s political future is grim: a governing class unwilling to acknowledge a systemic failure of democracy, a populist backlash against immigration and the EU superstate, and deep hostility between an aging indigenous population and a fertile immigrant one. This is bad for Sweden and bad for Europe. And a weak, introverted, and increasingly extremist Europe is bad for the United States, too.

Green says that the Sweden Democrats are “a party of ethnic grievance.” That strikes me as probably unfair. The Swedish government does not keep statistics on the ethnicity of its immigrants, though it does track which countries they’re migrating from. From what I can tell — and please, correct me if I’m wrong — the SD voters are complaining about immigration, period, and that includes immigration from “white” countries. They pretty clearly have a sense of nationalist grievance, but again, so what? Why is this essentially wrong? If it can be recast as an ethnic grievance, then it doesn’t have to be addressed; it is assumed that it must be wrong, because it’s white people who are expressing the grievance.

If the SD voters are complaining about the immigrants who aren’t being assimilated, and who do not wish to live under Swedish norms, and these immigrants are identifiably Muslim, isn’t that a religious or a cultural grievance, not an ethnic one? “Muslim” isn’t an ethnicity. This might sound like nitpicking, but these distinctions matter. If noticing that certain undesirable behaviors, even criminal ones, are associated with particular groups can be demonized as racist or neo-fascist, then public discussion of how to contend with this phenomenon does not have to happen. The Noticers can be denounced as evil, and marginalized from the coalition of the Decent.

But the problems don’t go away. The Swedish political establishment’s decision to close ranks against the Swedish Democrats does nothing to address the problems caused by the country’s very generous immigration policy. When mainstream parties will not deal with real and legitimate concerns, they only empower those that will.

According to the latest Less Wrong survey, 83.1%, or about four-fifths, of the LW population are men.

The interesting thing is that if you look at trans people the ratios are reversed. 86% of binary trans people in the LW community are trans women; that is, the gender gap between trans women and trans men is larger than the gender gap between cis men and cis women. Among nonbinary people, the gap is smaller– 67% of nonbinary people identified their sex as male. However, LWers are the sort of contrarian assholes who will put down a sex not matching their assigned sex at birth after they’ve transitioned (8.3% of trans women identified their sex as ‘female’), so it is anyone’s guess what the actual ratio is.

Nevertheless: we don’t have a gender gap. We have an assigned sex at birth gap.

I think that is significant evidence against the “misogyny” explanation. Cis women face misogyny; trans women face an intersection of transphobia and misogyny called “transmisogyny,” which usually has far graver effects. It is difficult to imagine what form of sexism would drive off cis women but attract trans women. I mean, think about the canonical examples of Sexism In Less Wrong. Are we arguing that cis women are driven off by (perceived or actual) sexist stereotypes in evolutionary psychology, but trans women aren’t driven off by those stereotypes and the implicit statement that they don’t count as women? Cis women don’t want to hang around neoreactionaries because they are monomaniacally obsessed with sluts, but trans women are totally okay with a movement that had a scandal with the charming name of “Trannygate”?

That leaves us with biology or socialization, but I would like to give some cautionary notes for both explanations.

First: trans women are not the same sex as cis men! The causes of transness are not fully understood, but they seem biological; while pre-hormones trans women’s brains are more similar to cis men’s in some ways, in other ways they are more similar to cis women’s. Once they’ve started taking hormones, their brains may change further. Sex hormones are scary powerful. Trans people on hormones have reported various psychological changes, most commonly changes to libido and emotions. Here’s a good roundup of studies about the differences in trans brains. I don’t understand what most of those studies mean, so I expect y’all to report back to me what I should believe.

Second: most trans people do not have an uncomplicated ‘male’ or ‘female’ gender socialization. After all, children assigned male and assigned female do not grow up separately: everyone learns what boys and girls are supposed to do. For myself, and many trans people I’ve talked to, social dysphoria made us internalize the socialization of our non-assigned gender– even before we came out to ourselves! Of course, this is not true of all trans people; both dysphoria and gender socialization are very personal, very individual things. And it doesn’t just matter what you internalized, it matters how people treat you, and they treat children assigned male as boys and children assigned female as girls. But it’s still enough to complicate theories based on the idea that trans women internalize childhood gender socialization in the same way cis men do.

Further, gender socialization doesn’t stop at puberty. The transition process is sometimes described as a crash course in gender socialization: a frantic cram session about how to walk, how to talk, how to dress, how to act, to get people to treat you as your identified gender (and, in many cases, to avoid the danger associated with being read as trans). And a post-transition trans woman may have years, perhaps decades, of being read as and treated as a woman. All of that has an effect.

My personal hypothesis is that it’s about interests.

In my anecdotal experience, interests seem to go by assigned sex. Trans women play video games. Trans men write fanfic. Trans women become programmers or mathematicians. Trans men get gender studies degrees. The one exception seems to be the lesbian community, which trans women who want to have sex with women have an obvious interest in; even so, many trans men stick around the lesbian community, despite missing some very basic qualifications for entrance.

And LW’s interests are very male. Computers? Male. Math? Male. Philosophy? Male. Transhumanism? Oh god so male. Thus, we get a lot of men and trans women.

One step in the right direction is HPMOR, as fanfic is very female. While 24.7% of cis men and trans women were referred by HPMOR, 32.3% of cis women and trans men were.  Writing more rationalist fanfic might allow us to recruit in a very female-dominated community.

Furthermore, it seems like we ought to play up aspects of Less Wrong that overlap with female-dominated interests. The obvious one is psychology. While psychology is a core part of Less Wrong’s mission, in practice it often tends to get downplayed in favor of math and AI. Making a deliberate effort to talk more about psychology might allow us to appeal more to women.

[EDIT 10/27: Slight changes in response to feedback; correcting some definitions. I am not an expert in this field and will continue to make changes as I learn about them. There is a critique of this post here and other worse critiques elsewhere. My only excuse for doing this is that I am failing less spectacularly than other online sources writing about the same topic.]

I’ve worked with doctors who think Alcoholics Anonymous is so important for the treatment of alcoholism that anyone who refuses to go at least three times a week is in denial about their problem and can’t benefit from further treatment.

I’ve also worked with doctors who are so against the organization that they describe it as a “cult” and say that a physician who recommends it is no better than one who recommends crystal healing or dianetics.

I finally got so exasperated that I put on my Research Cap and started looking through the evidence base.

My conclusion, after several hours of study, is that now I understand why most people don’t do this.

The studies surrounding Alcoholics Anonymous are some of the most convoluted, hilariously screwed-up research I have ever seen. They go wrong in ways I didn’t even realize research could go wrong before. Just to give some examples:

– In several studies, subjects in the “not attending Alcoholics Anonymous” condition attended Alcoholics Anonymous more than subjects in the “attending Alcoholics Anonymous” condition.

– Almost everyone’s belief about AA’s retention rate is off by a factor of five because one person long ago misread a really confusing graph and everyone else copied them without double-checking.

– The largest study ever in the field, a $30 million effort over 8 years following thousands of patients, had no untreated control group.

Not only are the studies poor, but the people interpreting them are heavily politicized. The entire field of addiction medicine has gotten stuck in the middle of some of the most divisive issues in our culture, like whether addiction is a biological disease or a failure of willpower, whether problems should be solved by community and peer groups or by highly trained professionals, and whether there’s a role for appealing to a higher power in any public organization. AA’s supporters see it as a scruffy grassroots organization of real people willing to get their hands dirty, who can cure addicts failed time and time again by a system of glitzy rehabs run by arrogant doctors who think their medical degrees make them better than people who have personally fought their own battles. Opponents see it as this awful cult that doesn’t provide any real treatment and just tells addicts that they’re terrible people who will never get better unless they sacrifice their identity to the collective.

As a result, the few sparks of light the research kindles are ignored, taken out of context, or misinterpreted.

The entire situation is complicated by a bigger question. We will soon find that AA usually does not work better or worse than various other substance abuse interventions. That leaves the sort of question that all those fancy-shmancy people with control groups in their studies don’t have to worry about – does anything work at all?

I.

We can start by just taking a big survey of people in Alcoholics Anonymous and seeing how they’re doing. On the one hand, we don’t have a control group. On the other hand…well, there really is no other hand, but people keep doing it.

According to AA’s own surveys, one-third of new members drop out by the end of their first month, half by the end of their third month, and three-quarters by the end of their first year. “Drop out” means they don’t go to AA meetings anymore, which could be for any reason including (if we’re feeling optimistic) them being so completely cured they no longer feel they need it.

There is an alternate reference going around that only 5% (rather than 25%) of AA members remain after their first year. This is a mistake caused by misinterpreting a graph showing that only five percent of members in their first year were in their twelfth month of membership, which is obviously completely different. Nevertheless, a large number of AA hate sites (and large rehabs!) cite the incorrect interpretation, for example the Orange Papers and RationalWiki’s page on Alcoholics Anonymous. In fact, just to keep things short, assume RationalWiki’s AA page makes every single mistake I warn against in the rest of this article, then use that to judge them in general. On the other hand, Wikipedia gets it right and I continue to encourage everyone to use it as one of the most reliable sources of medical information available to the public (I wish I was joking).

This retention information isn’t very helpful, since people can remain in AA without successfully quitting drinking, and people may successfully quit drinking without being in AA. However, various different sources suggest that, of people who stay in AA a reasonable amount of time, about half stop being alcoholic. These numbers can change wildly depending on how you define “reasonable amount of time” and “stop being alcoholic”. Here is a table, which I have cited on this blog before and will probably cite again:

Behold. Treatments that look very impressive (80% improved after six months!) turn out to be the same or worse as the control group. And comparing control group to control group, you can find that “no treatment” can appear to give wildly different outcomes (from 20% to 80% “recovery”) depending on what population you’re looking at and how you define “recovery”.

Twenty years ago, it was extremely edgy and taboo for a reputable scientist to claim that alcoholics could recover on their own. This has given way to the current status quo, in which pretty much everyone in the field writes journal articles all the time about how alcoholics can recover on their own, but make sure to harp upon how edgy and taboo they are for doing so. From these sorts of articles, we learn that about 80% of recovered alcoholics have gotten better without treatment, and many of them are currently able to drink moderately without immediately relapsing (something else it used to be extremely taboo to mention). Kate recently shared an good article about this: Most People With Addiction Simply Grow Out Of It: Why Is This Widely Denied?

Anyway, all this stuff about not being able to compare different populations, and the possibility of spontaneous recovery, just mean that we need controlled experiments. The largest number of these take a group of alcoholics, follow them closely, and then evaluate all of them – the AA-attending and the non-AA-attending – according to the same criteria. For example Morgenstern et al (1997), Humphreys et al (1997) and Moos (2006). Emrick et al (1993) is a meta-analyses of a hundred seventy three of these. All of these find that the alcoholics who end up going to AA meetings are much more likely to get better than those who don’t. So that’s good evidence the group is effective, right?

Bzzzt! No! Wrong! Selection bias!

People who want to quit drinking are more likely to go to AA than people who don’t want to quit drinking. People who want to quit drinking are more likely to actually quit drinking than those who don’t want to. This is a serious problem. Imagine if it is common wisdom that AA is the best, maybe the only, way to quit drinking. Then 100% of people who really want to quit would attend compared to 0% of people who didn’t want to quit. And suppose everyone who wants to quit succeeds, because secretly, quitting alcohol is really easy. Then 100% of AA members would quit, compared to 0% of non-members – the most striking result it is mathematically possible to have. And yet AA would not have made a smidgeon of difference.

But it’s worse than this, because attending AA isn’t just about wanting to quit. It’s also about having the resources to make it to AA. That is, wealthier people are more likely to hear about AA (better information networks, more likely to go to doctor or counselor who can recommend) and more likely to be able to attend AA (better access to transportation, more flexible job schedules). But wealthier people are also known to be better at quitting alcohol than poor people – either because the same positive personal qualities that helped them achieve success elsewhere help them in this battle as well, or just because they have fewer other stressors going on in their lives driving them to drink.

Finally, perseverance is a confounder. To go to AA, and to keep going for months and months, means you’ve got the willpower to drag yourself off the couch to do a potentially unpleasant thing. That’s probably the same willpower that helps you stay away from the bar.

And then there’s a confounder going the opposite direction. The worse your alcoholism is, the more likely you are to, as the organization itself puts it, “admit you have a problem”.

These sorts of longitudinal studies are almost useless and the field has mostly moved away from them. Nevertheless, if you look on the pro-AA sites, you will find them in droves, and all of them “prove” the organization’s effectiveness.

III.

It looks like we need randomized controlled trials. And we have them. Sort of.

Brandsma (1980) is the study beloved of the AA hate groups, since it purports to show that people in Alcoholics Anonymous not only don’t get better, but are nine times more likely to binge drink than people who don’t go into AA at all.

There are a number of problems with this conclusion. First of all, if you actually look at the study, this is one of about fifty different findings. The other findings are things like “88% of treated subjects reported a reduction in drinking, compared to 50% of the untreated control group”.

Second of all, the increased binge drinking was significant at the 6 month followup period. It was not significant at the end of treatment, the 3 month followup period, the 9 month followup period, or the 12 month followup period. Remember, taking a single followup result out of the context of the other followup results is a classic piece of Dark Side Statistics and will send you to Science Hell.

Of multiple different endpoints, Alcoholics Anonymous did better than no treatment on almost all of them. It did worse than other treatments on some of them (dropout rates, binge drinking, MMPI scale) and the same as other treatments on others (abstinent days, total abstinence).

If you are pro-AA, you can say “Brandsma study proves AA works!”. If you are anti-AA, you can say “Brandsma study proves AA works worse than other treatments!”, although in practice most of these people prefer to quote extremely selective endpoints out of context.

However, most of the patients in the Brandsma study were people convicted of alcohol-related crimes ordered to attend treatment as part of their sentence. Advocates of AA make a good point that this population might be a bad fit for AA. They may not feel any personal motivation to treatment, which might be okay if you’re going to listen to a psychologist do therapy with you, but fatal for a self-help group. Since the whole point of AA is being in a community of like-minded individuals, if you don’t actually feel any personal connection to the project of quitting alcohol, it will just make you feel uncomfortable and out of place.

Also, uh, this just in, Brandsma didn’t use a real AA group, because the real AA groups make people be anonymous which makes it inconvenient to research stuff. He just sort of started his own non-anonymous group, let’s call it A, with no help from the rest of the fellowship, and had it do Alcoholics Anonymous-like stuff. On the other hand, many members of his control group went out into the community and…attended a real Alcoholics Anonymous, because Brandsma can’t exactly ethically tell them not to. So technically, there were more people in AA in the no-AA group than in the AA group. Without knowing more about Alcoholics Anonymous, I can’t know whether this objection is valid and whether Brandsma’s group did or didn’t capture the essence of the organization. Still, not the sort of thing you want to hear about a study.

Walsh et al (1991) is a similar study with similar confounders and similar results. Workers in an industrial plant who were in trouble for coming in drunk were randomly assigned either to an inpatient treatment program or to Alcoholics Anonymous. After a year of followup, 60% of the inpatient-treated workers had stayed sober, but only 30% of the AA-treated workers had.

The pro-AA side made three objections to this study, of which one is bad and two are good.

The bad objection was that AA is cheaper than hospitalization, so even if hospitalization is good, AA might be more efficient – after all, we can’t afford to hospitalize everyone. It’s a bad objection because the authors of the study did the math and found out that hospitalization was so much better than AA that it decreased the level of further medical treatment needed and saved the health system more money than it cost.

The first good objection: like the Brandsma study, this study uses people under coercion – in this case, workers who would lose their job if they refused. Fine.

The second good objection, and this one is really interesting: a lot of inpatient hospital rehab is AA. That is, when you go to an hospital for inpatient drug treatment, you attend AA groups every day, and when you leave, they make you keep going to the AA groups. In fact, the study says that “at the 12 month and 24 month assessments, the rates of AA affiliation and attendance in the past 6 months did not differ significantly among the groups.” Given that the hospital patients got hospital AA + regular AA, they were actually getting more AA than the AA group!

So all that this study proves is that AA + more AA + other things is better than AA. There was no “no AA” group, which makes it impossible to discuss how well AA does or doesn’t work. Frick.

Timko (2006) is the only study I can hesitantly half-endorse. This one has a sort of clever methodological trick to get around the limitation that doctors can’t ethically refuse to refer alcoholics to treatment. In this study, researchers at a Veterans’ Affairs hospital randomly assigned alcoholic patients to “referral” or “intensive referral”. In “referral”, the staff asked the patients to go to AA. In “intensive referral”, the researchers asked REALLY NICELY for the patients to go to AA, and gave them nice glossy brochures on how great AA was, and wouldn’t shut up about it, and arranged for them to meet people at their first AA meeting so they could have friends in AA, et cetera, et cetera. The hope was that more people in the “intensive referral” group would end out in AA, and that indeed happened scratch that, I just re-read the study and the same number of people in both groups went to AA and the intensive group actually completed a lower number of the 12 Steps on average, have I mentioned I hate all research and this entire field is terrible? But the intensive referral people were more likely to have “had a spiritual awakening” and “have a sponsor”, so it was decided the study wasn’t a complete loss and when it was found the intensive referral condition had slightly less alcohol use the authors decided to declare victory.

So, whereas before we found that AA + More AA was better than AA, and that proved AA didn’t work, in this study we find that AA + More AA was better than AA, and that proves AA does work. You know, did I say I hesitantly half-endorsed this study? Scratch that. I hate this study too.

IV.

All right, @#%^ this $@!&*. We need a real study, everything all lined up in a row, none of this garbage. Let’s just hire half the substance abuse scientists in the country, throw a gigantic wad of money at them, give them as many patients as they need, let them take as long as they want, but barricade the doors of their office and not let them out until they’ve proven something important beyond a shadow of a doubt.

This was about how the scientific community felt in 1989, when they launched Project MATCH. This eight-year, $30 million dollar, multi-thousand patient trial was supposed to solve everything.

The people going into Project MATCH might have been a little overconfident. Maybe “not even Zeus could prevent this study from determining the optimal treatment for alcohol addiction” overconfident. This might have been a mistake.

The study was designed with three arms, one for each of the popular alcoholism treatments of the day. The first arm would be “twelve step facilitation”, a form of therapy based off of Alcoholics Anonymous. The second arm would be cognitive behavioral therapy, the most bog-standard psychotherapy in the world and one which by ancient tradition must be included in any kind of study like this. The third arm would be motivational enhancement therapy, which is a very short intervention where your doctor tells you all the reasons you should quit alcohol and tries to get you to convince yourself.

There wasn’t a “no treatment” arm. This is where the overconfidence might have come in. Everyone knew alcohol treatment worked. Surely you couldn’t dispute that. They just wanted to see which treatment worked best for which people. So you would enroll a bunch of different people – rich, poor, black, white, married, single, chronic alcoholic, new alcoholic, highly motivated, unmotivated – and see which of these people did best in which therapy. The result would be an algorithm for deciding where to send each of your patients. Rich black single chronic unmotivated alcoholic? We’ve found with p

So, eight years and thirty million dollars and the careers of several prestigious researchers later, the results come in, and - yeah, everyone does exactly the same on every kind of therapy (with one minor, possibly coincidental exception). Awkward.

“Everybody has won and all must have prizes!”. If you’re an optimist, you can say all treatments work and everyone can keep doing whatever they like best. If you’re a pessimist, you might start wondering whether anything works at all.

By my understanding this is also the confusing conclusion of Ferri, Amato & Davoli (2006), the Cochrane Collaboration’s attempt to get in on the AA action. Like all Cochrane Collaboration studies since the beginning of time, they find there is insufficient evidence to demonstrate the effectiveness of the intervention being investigated. This has been oft-quoted in the anti-AA literature. But by my reading, they had no control groups and were comparing AA to different types of treatment:

Three studies compared AA combined with other interventions against other treatments and found few differences in the amount of drinks and percentage of drinking days. Severity of addiction and drinking consequence did not seem to be differentially influenced by TSF versus comparison treatment interventions, and no conclusive differences in treatment drop out rates were reported.

So the two best sources we have – Project MATCH and Cochrane – don’t find any significant differences between AA and other types of therapy. Now, to be fair, the inpatient treatment mentioned in Walsh et al wasn’t included, and inpatient treatment might be the gold standard here. But sticking to various forms of outpatient intervention, they all seem to be about the same.

So, the $64,000 question: do all of them work well, or do all of them work poorly?

V.

Alcoholism studies avoid control groups like they are on fire, presumably because it’s unethical not to give alcoholics treatment or something. However, there is one class of studies that doesn’t have that problem. These are the ones on “brief opportunistic intervention”, which is much like a turbocharged even shorter version of “motivational enhancement therapy”. Your doctor tells you ‘HELLO HAVE YOU CONSIDERED QUITTING ALCOHOL??!!’ and sees what happens.

Brief opportunistic intervention is the most trollish medical intervention ever, because here are all these brilliant psychologists and counselors trying to unravel the deepest mysteries of the human psyche in order to convince people to stop drinking, and then someone comes along and asks “Hey, have you tried just asking them politely?”. And it works.

Not consistently. But it works for about one in eight people. And the theory is that since it only takes a minute or two of a doctor’s time, it scales a lot faster than some sort of hideously complex hospital-based program that takes thousands of dollars and dozens of hours from everyone involved. If doctors would just spend five minutes with each alcoholic patient reminding them that no, really, alcoholism is really bad, we could cut the alcoholism rate by 1/8.

(this also works for smoking, by the way. I do this with every single one of my outpatients who smoke, and most of the time they roll their eyes, because their doctor is giving them that speech, but every so often one of them tells me that yeah, I’m right, they know they really should quit smoking and they’ll give it another try. I have never saved anyone’s life by dramatically removing their appendix at the last possible moment, but I have gotten enough patients to promise me they’ll try quitting smoking that I think I’ve saved at least one life just by obsessively doing brief interventions every chance I get. This is probably the most effective life-saving thing you can do as a doctor, enough so that if you understand it you may be licensed to ignore 80,000 Hours’ arguments on doctor replaceability)

Anyway, for some reason, it’s okay to do these studies with control groups. And they are so fast and easy to study that everyone studies them all the time. A meta-analysis of 19 studies is unequivocal that they definitely work.

Why do these work? My guess is that they do two things. First, they hit people who honestly didn’t realize they had a problem, and inform them that they do. Second, the doctor usually says they’ll “follow up on how they’re doing” the next appointment. This means that a respected authority figure is suddenly monitoring their drinking and will glare at them if they stay they’re still alcoholic. As someone who has gone into a panic because he has a dentist’s appointment in a week and he hasn’t been flossing enough – and then flossed until his teeth were bloody so the dentist wouldn’t be disappointed – I can sympathize with this.

But for our purposes, the brief opportunistic intervention sets a lower bound. It says “Here’s a really minimal thing that seems to work. Do other things work better than this?”

The “brief treatment” is the next step up from brief intervention. It’s an hour-or-so-long session (or sometimes a couple such sessions) with a doctor or counselor where they tell you some tips for staying off alcohol. I bring it up here because the brief treatment research community spends its time doing studies that show that brief treatments are just as good as much more intense treatments. This might be most comparable to the “motivational enhancement therapy” in the MATCH study.

Chapman and Huygens (1988) find that a single interview with a health professional is just as good as six weeks of inpatient treatment (I don’t know about their hospital in New Zealand, but for reference six weeks of inpatient treatment in my hospital costs about $40,000.)

Edwards (1977) finds that in a trial comparing “conventional inpatient or outpatient treatment complete with the full panoply of services available at a leading psychiatric institution and lasting several months” versus an hour with a doc, both groups do the same at one and two year followup.

And so on.

All of this is starting to make my head hurt, but it’s a familiar sort of hurt. It’s the way my head hurts when Scott Aaronson talks about complexity classes. We have all of these different categories of things, and some of them are the same as others and others are bigger than others but we’re not sure exactly where all of them stand.

We have classes “no treatment”, “brief opportunistic intervention”, “brief treatment”, “Alcoholics Anonymous”, “psychotherapy”, and “inpatient”.

We can prove that BOI > NT, and that AA = PT. Also that BT = IP = PT. We also have that IP > AA, which unfortunately we can use to prove a contradiction, so let’s throw it out for now.

So the hierarchy of classes seems to be (NT) somewhere in there we have this class of everything else that is the same.

Can we prove that BOI = BT?

We have some good evidence for this, once again from our Handbook. A study in Edinburgh finds that five minutes of psychiatrist advice (brief opportunistic intervention) does the same as sixty minutes of advice plus motivational interviewing (brief treatment).

So if we take all this seriously, then it looks like every psychosocial treatment (including brief opportunistic intervention) is the same, and all are better than no treatment. This is a common finding in psychiatry and psychology – for example, all common antidepressants are better than no treatment but work about equally well; all psychotherapies are better than no treatment but work about equally well, et cetera. It’s still an open question what this says about our science and our medicine.

The strongest counterexample to this is Walsh et al which finds the inpatient hospital stay works better than the AA referral, but this study looks kind of lonely compared to the evidence on the other side. And even the authors admit they were surprised by the effectiveness of the hospital there.

And let’s go back to Project MATCH. There wasn’t a control group. But there were the people who dropped out of the study, who said they’d go to AA or psychotherapy but never got around to it. Cutter and Fishbain (2005) take a look at what happened to these folks. They find that the dropouts did 75% as well as the people in any of the therapy groups, and that most of the effect of the therapy groups occurred in the first week (ie people dropped out after one week did about 95% as well as people who stayed in).

To me this suggests two things. First, therapy is only a little helpful over most people quitting on their own. Second, insofar as therapy is helpful, the tiniest brush with therapy is enough to make someone think “Okay, I’ve had some therapy, I’ll be better now”. Just like with the brief opportunistic interventions, five minutes of almost anything is enough.

This is a weird conclusion, but I think it’s the one supported by the data.

VI.

I should include a brief word about this giant table.

I see it everywhere. It looks very authoritative and impressive and, of course, giant. I believe the source is Miller’s Handbook of Alcoholism Treatment Approaches: Effective Alternatives, 3rd Edition, the author of which is known as a very careful scholar whom I cannot help but respect.

And the table does a good thing in discussing medications like acamprosate and naltrexone, which are very important and effective interventions but which will not otherwise be showing up in this post.

However, the therapy part of the table looks really wrong to me.

First of all, I notice acupuncture is ranked 17 out of 48, putting in a much, much better showing than treatments like psychotherapy, counseling, or education. Seems fishy.

Second of all, I notice that motivational enhancement (#2), cognitive therapy (#13), and twelve-step (#37) are all about as far apart as could be, but the largest and most powerful trial ever, Project MATCH, found all three to be about equal in effectiveness.

Third of all, I notice that cognitive therapy is at #13, but psychotherapy is at #46. But cognitive therapy is a kind of psychotherapy.

Fourth of all, I notice that brief interventions, motivational enhancement, confrontational counseling, psychotherapy, general alcoholism counseling, and education are all over. But a lot of these are hard to differentiate from one another.

The table seems messed up to me. Part of it is because it is about evidence base rather than effectiveness (consider that handguns have a stronger evidence base than the atomic bomb, since they have been used many more times in much better controlled conditions, but the atomic bomb is more effective) and therefore acupuncture, which is poorly studied, can rank quite high compared to things which have even one negative study.

But part of it just seems wrong. I haven’t read the full book, but I blame the tendency to conflate studies showing “X does not work better than anything else” with “X does not work”.

Remember, whenever there are meta-analyses that contradict single very large well-run studies, go with the single very large well-run study, especially when the meta-analysis is as weird as this one. Project MATCH is the single very large well-run study, and it says this is balderdash. I’m guessing it’s trying to use some weird algorithmic methodology to automatically rate and judge each study, but that’s no substitute for careful human review.

VII.

In conclusion, as best I can tell – and it is not very well, because the studies that could really prove anything robustly haven’t been done – most alcoholics get better on their own. All treatments for alcoholism, including Alcoholics Anonymous, psychotherapy, and just a few minutes with a doctor explaining why she thinks you need to quit, increase this already-high chance of recovery a small but nonzero amount. Furthermore, they are equally effective after only a tiny dose: your first couple of meetings, your first therapy session. Some studies suggest that inpatient treatment with outpatient followup may be better than outpatient treatment alone, but other studies contradict this and I am not confident in the assumption.

So does Alcoholics Anonymous work? Though I cannot say anything authoritatively, my impression is: Yes, but only a tiny bit, and for many people five minutes with a doctor may work just as well as years completing the twelve steps. As such, individual alcoholics may want to consider attending if they don’t have easier options; doctors might be better off just talking to their patients themselves.

If this is true – and right now I don’t have much confidence that it is, it’s just a direction that weak and contradictory data are pointing – it would be really awkward for the multibazillion-dollar treatment industry.

More worrying, I am afraid of what it would do to the War On Drugs. Right now one of the rallying cries for the anti-Drug-War movement is “treatment, not prison”. And although I haven’t looked seriously at the data for any drug besides alcohol. I think some data there are similar. There’s very good medication for drugs – for example methadone and suboxone for opiate abuse – but in terms of psychotherapy it’s mostly the same stuff you get for alcohol. Rehabs, whether they work or not, seem to serve an important sort of ritual function, where if you can send a drug abuser to a rehab you at least feel like something has been done. Deny people that ritual, and it might make prison the only politically acceptable option.

In terms of things to actually treat alcoholism, I remain enamoured of the Sinclair Method, which has done crazy outrageous stuff like conduct an experiment with an actual control group. But I haven’t investigated enough to know whether my early excitement about them looks likely to pan out or not.

I would not recommend quitting any form of alcohol treatment that works for you, or refusing to try a form of treatment your doctor recommends, based on any of this information.