Austin.soplata

Last week I organized a workshop on the future of academic publication. My point was that our current system, based on private pre-publication peer review, is archaic. I noted that the way the peer review system is currently organized (where external reviewers judge both the quality of the science and the interest for the journal) represents just a few decades in the history of science. It can hardly qualify as the way science is or should be done. It is a historical feature. For example, only one of Einstein’s papers was formally peer-reviewed; Crick & Watson’s DNA paper was not formally peer-reviewed. Many journals introduced external peer review in the 1960s or 1970s to deal with the growth in the number and variety of submissions (see e.g. Baldwin, 2015); before that, editors would decide whether to publish the papers they received, depending on the number of pages they could print.

Given the possibilities that offers the internet, it seems that there is no reason anymore to couple the two current roles of peer review: editorial selection and scientific discussion. One could simply share their work online, get feedback from the community to discuss the work, and then let people recommend papers to their colleagues and compile all sorts of reader’s digests. No time wasted in multiple submissions, no prestige misattributed to publications in glamour journals, who do not do a better a job than any other journal at pointing errors and frauds. Just the science and the public discussion of science.

But there is a lot of resistance to this idea, namely the idea that papers should be formally approved by peer reviewers before they are published. Because otherwise, so many people claim, the scientific world would be polluted by all sorts of unverified claims. It would not be science anymore, just gossip. I have attributed this attitude to conservatism, first because as noted above this system is a rather recent addition to the scientific enterprise, and second because papers are published before peer review. We call those “preprints”, but really these are scientific papers made public, so by definition they are published. I follow the preprints in my field and I don’t see any particular loss in quality.

However, I think I was missing a key element. The more profound reason why many people, in particular experimental biologists, are so attached to peer review is in my view that they hold naive philosophical views about the notion of truth in science. A paper should be peer-reviewed because otherwise you can’t cite it as a true fact. Peer review validates science, thanks to experts who make sure that the claims of the authors are actually true. Of course it can go wrong and reviewers might miss something, but it is the purpose of peer review. This view is reflected in the tendency, especially in biology journals, to choose titles that look like established truths: “Hunger is controlled by HGRase”, instead of “The molecular control of hunger”. Scientists and journalists can then write revealed truths with a verse reference, such as “Hunger is controlled by HGRase (McDonald et al., 2017)”.

The great misunderstanding is that truth is a notion that applies to logical propositions (for example, mathematical theorems), not to empirical claims. This has been well argued by Popper, for example. Truth is by nature a theoretical concept. Everything said is said with words, and in this sense it always refers to theoretical concepts. One can only judge whether observations are congruent with the meaning attributed to the words, and that meaning necessarily has a theoretical nature. There is no such thing as an “established fact”. This is so even of what we might consider as direct observations. Take for example the claim “The resting potential of neurons is -70 mV”. This is a theoretical statement. Why? First, because to establish it, I have recorded a number of neurons. If you test it, it will be on a different neuron, which I have not measured. So I am making a theoretical claim. Probably, I also tested my neurons with a particular method (not mentioning a particular region and species). But my claim makes no reference to the method by which I have made the inference. That would be the “methods” part of my paper, not the conclusion, and when you cite my paper, you will cite it because of the conclusion, the “established fact”, you will not be referring to the methods, which you consider are the means to establish the fact. It is the role of the reviewers to check the methods, to check that they do establish the fact.

But these are trivial remarks. It is not just that the method matters. The very notion of an observation always implicitly relies on a theoretical background. When I say that the resting potential is -70 mV, I mean that there is a potential difference of -70 mV across the membrane. But that’s not what I measure. I measure the difference in potential between some point outside the cell and the inside of a patch pipette whose solution is in contact with the cell’s inside. So I am assuming the potential is the same in all points of the cytosol, even though I have not tested it. I am also implicitly modeling the cytosol as a solution, even though the reality is more complex than that, given the mass of charged proteins in it. I am assuming that the extracellular potential is constant. I am assuming that my pipette solution reasonably matches the actual cytosol solution, given that “solution” is only a convenient model. I am implicitly making all sorts of theoretical assumptions, which have a lot of empirical support but are still of a theoretical nature.

I have tried with this example to show that even a very simple “fact” is actually a theoretical proposition, with many layers of assumptions. But of course in general, papers typically make claims that rely less firmly on accepted theoretical grounds, since they must be “novel”. So it is never the case that a paper definitely proves its conclusions. Because conclusions have a theoretical nature, all that can be checked is whether observations are consistent with the authors’ interpretation.

So the goal of peer review can’t be to establish the truth. If it were the case, then why would reviewers ever disagree? They disagree because they cannot actually judge whether a claim is true; they can only say whether they are personally convinced. This makes the current peer review system extremely poor, because all the information we get is: two anonymous people were convinced (and maybe others were not, but we’ll never find out). What would be more useful would be to have an open public discussion, with criticisms, qualifications and alternative interpretations fully disclosed for anyone to read and make their own opinion. In such a system, the notion of a stamp of approval on a paper would simply be absurd; why hide the disapprovals? There is the paper, and there is the scientific discussion of the paper, and that is all there needs to be.

There is some concern these days that peer reviewed research is unreliable. Well, science is unreliable. That is almost what defines it: it can be criticized and revised. Seeing peer review as the system that establishes the scientific truth is not only a historical error, it is a great philosophical error, and a dangerous bureaucratic view of science. We don’t need editorial decisions based on peer review. We need free publication (we have it) and we need open scientific discussion (it’s coming). That’s all we need.

Two dozen homeless men and women filed out of Rising Hope United Methodist Church, where they had found sanctuary the night before from the wind and brutal cold.

Each winter for more than 15 years, the church has acted as an overnight homeless shelter along the decaying Route 1 corridor in Alexandria, Virginia. Volunteers serve the visitors a hot meal and unroll sleeping bags for them on the church floor. The visitors have to leave the next morning by 7, when the church starts its daytime operations.

That morning in early February, as the men and women gathered in the church parking lot, a few of them noticed three unmarked cars parked across the street. Then a group of seven or eight Latino men split off from the group and headed for the shopping center across the street.

As soon as the men stepped onto the opposite sidewalk, a dozen federal agents burst out of the cars, forced them up against a wall, handcuffed them, and interrogated them for at least half an hour.

Multiple witnesses described the events to The Intercept. “They just jumped out,” said Ralph, one of the men who had spent the night in the church. “Then [the men] were lined up on the wall.”

“They just looked like regular cars,” said Ashley, who witnessed the raid from across the street. “Then the agents just jumped out. It looked like regular police, but the vests said ICE.” Ashley and Ralph both said they were afraid to give their last names.

A sign is displayed on a brick wall on Feb. 26, where ICE allegedly waited before detaining men as they left a shelter at Rising Hope Mission Church in Alexandria, Va., during a Feb. 8 raid.

Photo: Greg Kahn/GRAIN for The Intercept

Oscar Ramirez, one of the men who was interrogated, was released after he convinced agents he had a green card. He told the community newspaper that the agents used portable fingerprint scanners on his hands, then let him go.

Witnesses said the other six or seven Latino men were taken away and shoved into in a van, already half full with other arrestees.

A spokesperson for Immigration and Customs Enforcement told The Intercept that the ICE agents had “conducted consensual interviews” and “identified two criminal aliens.” She refused to say how many people were arrested, or explain why agents were waiting across the street from a church.

But to the longtime pastor of Rising Hope, the message was chilling: His church is now a target.

“They were not here because they were doing a routine community sweep. They were clearly targeting,” said Rev. Keary Kincannon. “They were waiting until the Hispanic men came out of the church. And they rounded them all up. They didn’t question the blacks. They didn’t question the whites. They were clearly going after folks that were Latino.”

Community members gather for a soup kitchen at Rising Hope Mission Church in Alexandria, Va., on Feb. 26, 2017.

Photo: Greg Kahn/GRAIN for The Intercept

“I don’t know their names. I don’t know where they’re being held. I don’t even know how many there are,” immigration attorney Nick Marritz told me. “That does make it very hard for us to put a case together.”

Marritz works for the Legal Aid Justice Center, which serves low-income communities in Northern Virginia. Two weeks after the church stakeout, Marritz was still working with witnesses to figure out who was taken and where they are — information he needs to legally challenge the arrests.

To members of the church community, the men have effectively been disappeared, and ICE officials are still refusing to provide them with any answers.

ICE maintains a public database online that allows anyone to search detainees by name, date of birth, and an alien — or “A” — number. But the database is often crippled by processing delays and clerical errors and is useless to searchers who don’t know exactly who they are looking for.

It can also be difficult for homeless and low-income people to contact someone on the outside. “In the case of people who are experiencing homelessness like this, it’s hard for us to say how big the support network is,” said Marritz. “Who do they know to contact? Whoever might know about [them], they haven’t let me know.”

Marritz, Kincannon, and other United Methodist Church leaders walked into ICE’s regional office in Fairfax on February 17 and demanded the names and whereabouts of the people arrested. “We went to have a vigil and to try with talk with them to find who did they ask, who did they take, what were their charges. Not only would they not meet with us, they wouldn’t tell us the names of anybody,” said Kincannon.

“They just said: ‘We’re not going to meet with you, we’re not going to give you the names. Please leave,’” said Marritz.

It is not uncommon for homeless and low-income immigrants to virtually disappear into the U.S. immigration detention system. Prisoners are frequently shuffled around between more than 200 detention facilities. Most of them are held in prisons run by private companies.

Lawyers and families members often face obstacles in reaching detainees. Audits by the Government Accountability Office have found that officers in immigration prisons frequently deny detainees phone calls, or prevent them from making phone calls during business hours. Some detainees have reported that prison phones drop calls before they can leave voicemails. In many Customs and Border Protection facilities, prisoners have to purchase calling cards to use the phone — which puts a call beyond the financial means of many.

A week after the arrests, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe and Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., both sent letters to ICE inquiring about the raid and their enforcement policies near churches. ICE has not publicly responded to either one.

Pastor Keary Kincannon delivers a sermon at Rising Hope Mission Church in Alexandria, Va., on Feb. 26.

Photo: Greg Kahn/GRAIN for The Intercept

Rising Hope was chartered in 1996 as a mission church to serve homeless people, and to this day between 70 and 80 percent of its congregation is homeless. It occupies a modest, two-story building right off the Route 1 corridor, an impoverished area just south of a wealthy D.C.-area suburb. There’s a tattoo parlor around the corner, and a Goodwill and payday loan agency a few blocks away.

According to Rev. Jeff Mickle, the Alexandria district superintendent for the United Methodist Church, ICE hasn’t targeted any other churches in his district. There are 54 — all far more affluent than Rising Hope.

Kincannon founded Rising Hope out of his car more than 20 years ago, and since then the church has grown into one of Northern Virginia’s most effective charities. Last year, the church’s pantry gave out $1.2 million worth of food, and its soup kitchen served 16,000 hot meals. Its winter shelter program opens every night from December to March.

“Think about it: They’re coming here to keep from freezing to death. They’re coming here to find support and help. By sweeping them up after they left here, [ICE is] putting fear into other people. There may be folks now that may be afraid to come in out of the cold,” Kincannon told me in his office. “It’s real cruelty.”

Parishioners at Rising Hope are afraid the church will be targeted again. Bulletin boards advertised free “know your rights” trainings in English and Spanish. Volunteers have noticed a marked decrease in the number of Latino men and women coming to the winter shelter.

During a Sunday sermon 11 days after the raid, Kincannon told the congregation about a Latino woman and U.S. citizen who frequents the church food pantry. “She is so frightened she will be picked up and deported before she can prove her citizenship,” he said, “she has started carrying her birth certificate with her.”

Members of Rising Hope Mission Church in Alexandria, Va., wish peace upon one another on Feb. 26.

Photo: Greg Kahn/GRAIN for The Intercept

In 2011, ICE adopted a “sensitive locations” policy meant to prevent agents from terrorizing important community sites. It prevents ICE agents from making arrests “focused on” schools, churches, or hospitals without an emergency or prior approval from a high-level department official.

ICE released a statement following the Rising Hope arrests saying it complied with the policy. “The Department of Homeland Security is committed to ensuring that people seeking to … utilize services provided at any sensitive location are free to do so without fear or hesitation,” it read.

But the raid not only impacted the church’s mission, it sent shockwaves throughout the area. After Mickle sent a letter notifying local clergy about the raid, many have reported back about seeing fear in their own communities. “I have already received phone calls from people who are very upset about the situation,” said Rev. Ileana Rosario, a United Methodist pastor who works with Hispanic and immigrant communities. “We have no guarantees that this will not happen again.”

Rosario founded a predominantly Hispanic church in Arlington in 2001, and later that year, President Bush invited her to the White House and recognized her for her ministry. In 2007, she became the United Methodists’ director of Hispanic and Latino ministries for Virginia.

“What is so troubling for them is that it can happen at any time and at any moment,” said Rosario. “Church for them was the sanctuary. It was the safe place. For them, in their culture, church is the place that no one can touch. Where are we going to go if we cannot go to the House of the Lord?”

Francisco Alvarado waits for the soup kitchen at Rising Hope Mission Church. Alvarado, who was born in the U.S., says he has been stopped by police officers and asked to show his papers despite being a citizen.

Photo: Greg Kahn/GRAIN for The Intercept

Churches are playing a big role in resisting emboldened immigration enforcement across the country. Church leaders have trained volunteers, led demonstrations, and even offered sanctuary to people with outstanding deportation orders. Their resolve could signal a coming showdown with a president who already has the tools to dramatically accelerate deportations.

Trump inherited a deportation machine of enormous power: President Obama pumped billions of additional dollars into immigration enforcement and deported more people than any of his predecessors. During the final months of Obama’s presidency, administration lawyers argued before the Supreme Court that the federal agents should be able to imprison immigrants for years on end without a bond hearing.

In his first weeks in office, Trump has begun to unleash the full force of that deportation system. The Department of Homeland Security released memos on February 18 that outline Trump’s vision: They call for hiring thousands of agents, building new detention facilities, deputizing state and local law enforcement, and expanding the categories of people who are “priorities for removal” to possibly include millions of immigrants.

While ICE’s “sensitive locations” policy on targeting churches technically remains in place, it could be modified or revoked. In his letter to district clergy, Mickle asked them to “keep this matter in your prayers” and “be prepared to stand up when the time comes.”

Paraphrasing the remarks of a United Methodist theologian, Mickle wrote: “If the choice is between honoring a president’s campaign promise, or honoring the commands of Jesus, the Church has no choice but to follow Jesus, even if it leads us to stand up against the actions of the government.”

“They’re not coming in unless they have a warrant,” Kincannon said. “If they try and come in without a warrant, I’ll stand in the way.”

Top photo: Members of Rising Hope Mission Church in Alexandria, Va., pray for their pastor, Keary Kincannon, during Sunday service on Feb. 26. Kincannon will be present during President Trump’s next address to the session of Congress as a guest of Virginia Sen. Mark Warner.

The post After ICE Stakes Out a Church Homeless Shelter, Charities Worry Immigrants Will Fear Getting Help appeared first on The Intercept.

Almost every small town in Brazil — especially those in the interior state of Minas Gerais — has its town eccentric, that person the whole town knows, takes care of, and looks after like a sort of patrimony. Ibiá, where I was born, had Zé Tem Dó. With him, I learned about the symbolic value of certain objects. I was about 4 or 5 years old. My mother was a seamstress and Zé collected spools of thread. His visits to my house were constant, because my mother saved all her empty spools for him and always offered him something more like a drink, clothes, or a plate of food.

Once when I thought that Zé was distracted, I tried to grab one of his spools. He jumped up and in two swift steps was right in front of me, protecting the precious goods that to my mother were just scraps. I ran off in the other direction, startled and afraid. Zé gathered his things and went on, conversing with one of the spools that he tied to the tip of a piece of thread and dragged along with him. It was his pet or his little cart, something that went far beyond what I was or ever will be able to see, unless one day I become a Zé and become the folkloric figure of a small rural town. But there, in that moment, I learned something that I will write about here: Zé was not playing with a spool and we are not playing with a head wrap.

Thauane Cordeiro posted on Facebook this image of herself using a head wrap on Feb. 4. Since then, an intense debate has ensued and her photo has received more than 138,000 reactions.

Photo: Facebook

Last week, in Brazil, a young white woman published a message on her Facebook page, explaining that, while using an African-style head wrap because of her cancer treatment, she was approached by a black woman and questioned about her choice. Young black activists say that, based on conversations within their various movements, it is unlikely one of them would make such a comment. This specific case was quickly generalized and the controversy spread through Brazilian news and social media, with attacks and attempts to delegitimize the historic struggle of the black movements.

We are signs created by white people so that our blackness can be commercialized.

Much of the white Brazilian population knows its European origins and cultivates, with pride and care, the Italian last name, the recipe book from a Portuguese great-grandmother, the menorah that has been in the family for many generations. Those with resources travel, at least once in their lives, to visit the place where their ancestors came from and to meet the family members who are still there. But what about the descendants of the African diaspora? When they arrived in Brazil, the traffickers had already destroyed registries of the places they were from and redefined ethnicities with generic names like Mina for all the people who embarked from the costa da Mina, or Gold Coast of West Africa. They had already made them go round and round the Tree of Forgetting (a ritual that was believed to clear their memories and history) or through the Door of No Return, so that they would never want to go back and had already separated them into lots that were more valuable if they were diversified, so that they could not understand one another.

While still on African soil, they were subjected to Catholic baptism, so that they were no longer pagan and acquired a soul through a “civilizing” religion, receiving a “Christian” name that was joined, once on Brazilian soil, to the last name of the family that acquired them. In Brazil, they could not speak their own languages, manifest their beliefs or make decisions about their own bodies and destinies. So that anything at all could be preserved, there were centuries of fighting, lost lives, beatings, torture, humiliations, and confrontations in the name of the thousands that arrived here and also for those who were left along the way.

Protestors on the streets of São Paulo to advocate for the rights of Brazil’s black community during the 13th annual Black Consciousness March.

Photo: Rovena Rosa/Agência Brasil

As a result of this, we are who we are: Beings without a defined belonging, without easily traceable roots, who are no longer from there and were never fully planted here. We have our “belonging lodged in a metaphor,” as the Canadian poet, romanticist, essayist, and documentarian Dionne Brand says in her marvelous “A Map to the Door of No Return.” To live in the black diaspora, according to her, is “to live as a fiction — a creation of the empires, and also self-creation. It is to be a being living inside and outside of herself. It is to apprehend the sign one makes yet to be unable to escape it.”

We are signs made by white people so that our blackness can be commercialized. And we cannot escape from this because without even listening to us, you always already seem to know what we are, what we want, what we know. Blackness, social movements, black women, “those people” — never individuals, always in lots. And we live in a metaphor that from this point forward I am going to call a head wrap, but it could be any other symbol.

The collective head wrap that we inhabit was constantly racialized, disrespected, invaded.

Wearing a head wrap is a form of belonging. It is joining with another member of the diaspora who also wears in a head wrap and, without needing to say anything, know that he or she knows that you know that the head wraps on our heads cost and continue to cost our lives. To know that our precarious housing was once considered illegal, immoral, abject. In order to carry this head wrap on our heads we had to hide, pilfer, disguise, and deny it. It was cover, but it was also a symbol of faith, of resistance, of union. The collective head wrap that we inhabit was constantly racialized, disrespected, invaded, made profane, and criminalized. Where were you when all of this was happening? You who now want to kick down the door and take a seat on the living room sofa, just as we have almost been able to restore the dignity of our head wraps. Where are you when we need help and humanity to preserve these symbols?

I remember seeing a sign at the recent Women’s March that asked, “I’ll see you nice white ladies at the next #BlackLivesMatter march, right?”

“I’ll see you nice white ladies at the next #blacklivesmatter march, right?” — Sign held up during Women’s March (seen on #Tumblr) pic.twitter.com/SHhB8hqbl8

— Mckenzie Lacroix (@MckenzieLacroix) January 22, 2017

You nice white ladies who want to wrap yourselves in our head wraps, you will be with us when we weep over the deaths of young black boys and cry out for justice, right? You will use head wraps when our Afro-Brazilian religious leaders (mães e pais de santo) are kicked out of their communities and held down on top of ant hills by police, right? When we complain of pain because we received less anesthesia than white women while giving birth? When we denounce that we suffer more violence, more abuse, and more assault than you? When we demand to receive the same pay as you? You will echo our voices when we say that we have been rejected by men (white or black), and you will understand and have comforting words for us when we feel guilty for leaving our own children at home in order to care for yours, and you will listen to us and defend us at the top of your lungs when someone else is trying to invade our head wraps by force. Right? Because then the head wrap will be yours. You will listen, understand, and speak with us when we try to explain that our (distorted) claims of appropriation have nothing to do with pizza, jeans, and feng shui, right?

Black Women’s March Against Racism in Brasília, the nation’s capital, in front of Congress on Nov. 18, 2015. During the protest, police fired pepper spray and live ammunition.

Photo: Lula Marques/Agência PT

When you say “I am going to use it, period, I want to see who is going to stop me,” sometimes I feel like sitting you on my lap, just as the “black mothers” that probably played a role in many of your lives, or in the lives of your ancestors used to do, and say that this is not the way good children behave. And say that, yes, some things are yours, because they came from your great-grandmother, from your grandmother, from your mother. We too can have some things that are ours, that we inherited from our family.

Take a look: Pizza! (“It’s Italian food!”). Acarajé, from the Iorubá words akara (a fried rice cake) and ijé (food) — (“IT’S MINE! It’s from Brazil! It’s everybody’s!”). Hashu’al (“It’s Israeli!”). Congado (“IT’S MINE! It’s from Brazil! It’s everybody’s!”) Kimono! (“It’s Japanese!”) Ojá! (“IT’S MINE! It’s from Brazil! It’s everybody’s”!) Kung Fu (“It’s Chinese!). Capoeira! from the Tupi word ko´pwera or the Umbando kapwila (“IT’S MINE! It’s from Brazil! It’s everybody’s!). Abajur, the word for lamp in Portuguese (“Comes from French!”), Moleque, quiabo, berimbau, samba cafuné, zumbi … and an endless list of other Afro-Brazilian words, concepts and cultural manifestations (“IT’S MINE! It’s from Brazil! It’s everybody’s!”).

We got tired of being characters in the jokes that are funny only to you.

And then we are the ones called segregationist, egotistical, without culture, while other groups can keep, without controversy and without being forced to share (“IT’S MINE! It’s from Brazil! It’s everybody’s!”), the “contributions” that their people brought to Brazilian soil. We understand that you think it is (and always has been) all yours. But we got tired of staying in the kitchens, the back rooms, the halls, the pool decks, without being included in what you call “Brazilian people.” We’re tired of hearing that we don’t know, don’t see, don’t understand, don’t want, can’t — of having to ask permission for everything, of having to say we are sorry even when we were the ones who were offended. We’re tired of serving people who don’t know our names. We’re tired of being characters in jokes that are funny only to you.

Our discussions and our intellectual production, which are carried out under our head wraps, are delegitimated by the call to order #WhitesWillUseHeadWraps! (#VaiTerBrancaDeTurbatneSim!), yelled at us with the same arrogance and expectations of obedience that the owners of our ancestors yelled #WeWon’tHaveBlackThingsHere! (#NãoVaiTerCoisaDePretoAquiNão!) Many things happen in our head wraps that you have no idea about: We have to build support networks — which are invisible to you and distant from your privileged existence — to help, console, orient, and strengthen the victims of racism committed by people who, offended when we show where they are lacking, become victims themselves.

Under this head wrap we teach young black children not to take bananas to school for lunch because the other kids will call them monkeys. We tell our children not to use clothes with hoods, not to run, not to make harsh movements in public and not to look suspicious, whatever that means to you. Protected by these head wraps, we share information, discuss theories, we communicate with foreign head wraps and even raise money to pay for the funerals of young people who have been assassinated by the police. We agree, disagree, laugh, cry, tell secrets, shout, love, hate, study, tell one another that we have to have infinite patience to go back five, ten, twenty steps from our point of understanding to be able to respond to egocentric comments like “I read Monteiro Lobato and I didn’t become racist,” or “If I use a head wrap, will I be called racist?” Because we know that they are not innocent comments or questions, they are also metaphors. They are the walls that protect the places where you reside, where we are not admitted, because on the door there has always been a sign that says “whites only.”

You always have another place to go, the place of whiteness.

The head wrap we wear is not the same as yours. What for you is the simple desire to be cool, to project yourself as a free being without prejudice, for us is a place of connection. Connection among us and also with something that we lost, not always knowing exactly what it is or where it was left behind. Wearing our head wraps has the same meaning for us as “going to the villa where my Italian grandparents were born,” or “I could really feel what my great-grandparents went through in that concentration camp.” Yes, because among many others, the head wrap has these two meanings: comfort and pain.

We don’t make fun of you when you defend these places that are part of the history of your people. We do not make jokes about the meanings that these places have for you. We do not say that they are merely constructions of rocks and bricks piled one on top of the other. We do not call them stupid because our ignorance does not let us understand what you all say about these places that are dear to you, because they carry the markings of your great-grandparents, grandparents, parents and will continue to mark the lives of your children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. And, nevertheless, we have to observe in silence, under the threat of being silenced by force, like the ravenous beasts that you think that we are — it’s not action, it’s reaction! — you kicked down our doors, invaded our head wraps with shouts of #WhitesWillUseHeadWraps!

For you the head wrap is temporary housing, the kind that you may come and go from as you please and as style dictates, because you always have another place to go, which is the place of whiteness. We don’t have that, because our existence is embedded in our skin, our home is fixed on our back, just like the snail’s. Our home, for you, is fetish, is exoticism, is accessory, is costume. Our home.

Demonstrator wearing a head wrap at the Black Women’s March Against Racism in Brasília on Nov. 18, 2015.

Photo: Marcello Casal Jr./Agência Brasil

In our home, we aren’t talking about head wraps when we talk about head wraps. Among its many names, the first is racism. It is racism when you think we do not know what you are talking about. It is racism when you deduce that you need to teach us that pizza is Italian, that the cotton used to make the fabric of the head wrap is Indian, that in a globalized world, etc., etc., etc. We have to go back five, ten steps in the discussion that you are not accompanying because you don’t want to — but you still think you are qualified to offer your opinion — so that we can level your understanding, in order to say: It’s the racism, stupid! And before that we have to go back thirty steps to hear “I am not racist!”: It’s the system, stupid! And because it is structural, it structures Brazilian society, which means that you work to maintain it whether you want to or not, whether you know it or not.

We can talk about cultural appropriation after you have read this article by the philosopher Djamila Ribeiro, which was published long before your fight for the right to wear the head wraps came into fashion. Or the poem by the master Nei Lopes, which can be read below. In this case, you can be sure that when you come with the corn flour fubá (from the Quimbundo word fuba or the Quicongo mfuba), we are already eating angú (a dish made with fubá and whose name comes from the Fon àgun).

BRECHTIANA (for Abdias Nascimento)

First,

They usurped math

Medicine, architecture

Philosophy, religiosity, art

Saying they had created them

In their own image and likeness.

Next,

They separated the pharaohs and pyramids

From the African context

Because Africans would not be capable

Of such invention and advancement

Not yet satisfied, they said

That our ancestors had come from far away

From a strange Asia

To invade Africa

To push out the natives

Bosquimanos and hotentotes.

And wrote History in their own way.

Calling the nations “tribes”

Kings “regals”

Languages “dialects”.

Then,

Then they blamed slavery

On the ambition of its own victims

And put racism

On our tab.

So,

They reserved for us

The most sordid places

The most degrading occupations

The dirtiest roles

And they said:

“Laugh! Dance! Make music!

Sing! Run! Play!”

And we laughed, danced and made music

We sang, ran and played

Now, enough!

— Nei Lopes

Translation by Courtney Crumpler.

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President Trump’s national security adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn, was forced to resign on Monday night as a result of getting caught lying about whether he discussed sanctions in a December telephone call with a Russian diplomat. The only reason the public learned about Flynn’s lie is because someone inside the U.S. government violated the criminal law by leaking the contents of Flynn’s intercepted communications.

In the spectrum of crimes involving the leaking of classified information, publicly revealing the contents of SIGINT — signals intelligence — is one of the most serious felonies. Journalists (and all other nongovernmental citizens) can be prosecuted under federal law for disclosing classified information only under the narrowest circumstances; reflecting how serious SIGINT is considered to be, one of those circumstances includes leaking the contents of intercepted communications, as defined this way by 18 § 798 of the U.S. Code:

Whoever knowingly and willfully communicates … or otherwise makes available to an unauthorized person, or publishes … any classified information … obtained by the processes of communication intelligence from the communications of any foreign government … shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.

That Flynn lied about what he said to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak was first revealed by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, who has built his career on repeating what his CIA sources tell him. In his January 12 column, Ignatius wrote: “According to a senior U.S. government official, Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec. 29, the day the Obama administration announced the expulsion of 35 Russian officials as well as other measures in retaliation for the hacking.”

That “senior U.S. government official” committed a serious felony by leaking to Ignatius the communication activities of Flynn. Similar and even more extreme crimes were committed by what the Washington Post called “nine current and former officials, who were in senior positions at multiple agencies at the time of the calls,” who told the paper for its February 9 article that “Flynn privately discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia with that country’s ambassador to the United States during the month before President Trump took office, contrary to public assertions by Trump officials.” The New York Times, also citing anonymous U.S. officials, provided even more details about the contents of Flynn’s telephone calls.

That all of these officials committed major crimes can hardly be disputed. In January, CNN reported that Flynn’s calls with the Russians “were captured by routine U.S. eavesdropping targeting the Russian diplomats.” That means that the contents of those calls were “obtained by the processes of communication intelligence from the communications of [a] foreign government,” which in turn means that anyone who discloses them — or reports them to the public — is guilty of a felony under the statute.

Yet very few people are calling for a criminal investigation or the prosecution of these leakers, nor demanding the leakers step forward and “face the music” — for very good reason: The officials leaking this information acted justifiably, despite the fact that they violated the law. That’s because the leaks revealed that a high government official, Gen. Flynn, blatantly lied to the public about a material matter — his conversations with Russian diplomats — and the public has the absolute right to know this.

This episode underscores a critical point: The mere fact that an act is illegal does not mean it is unjust or even deserving of punishment. Oftentimes, the most just acts are precisely the ones that the law prohibits.

That’s particularly true of whistleblowers — i.e., those who reveal information the law makes it a crime to reveal, when doing so is the only way to demonstrate to the public that powerful officials are acting wrongfully or deceitfully. In those cases, we should cheer those who do it even though they are undertaking exactly those actions that the criminal law prohibits.

This Flynn episode underscores another critical point: The motives of leakers are irrelevant. It’s very possible — indeed, likely — that the leakers here were not acting with benevolent motives. Nobody with a straight face can claim that lying to the public is regarded in official Washington as some sort of mortal sin; if anything, the contrary is true: It’s seen as a job requirement.

Moreover, Gen. Flynn has many enemies throughout the intelligence and defense community. The same is true, of course, of Donald Trump; recall that just a few weeks ago, Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer warned Trump that he was being “really dumb” to criticize the intelligence community because “they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”

It’s very possible — I’d say likely — that the motive here was vindictive rather than noble. Whatever else is true, this is a case where the intelligence community, through strategic (and illegal) leaks, destroyed one of its primary adversaries in the Trump White House.

But no matter. What matters is not the motive of the leaker but the effects of the leak. Any leak that results in the exposure of high-level wrongdoing — as this one did — should be praised, not scorned and punished.

It is, of course, bizarre to watch this principle now so widely celebrated. Over the last eight years, President Obama implemented the most vindictive and aggressive war on whistleblowers in all of U.S. history. As Leonard Downie, one of the editors at the Washington Post during the Watergate investigation, put it in a special report: “The [Obama] administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration.”

It’s hard to put into words how strange it is to watch the very same people — from both parties, across the ideological spectrum — who called for the heads of Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Tom Drake, and so many other Obama-era leakers today heap praise on those who leaked the highly sensitive, classified SIGINT information that brought down Gen. Flynn.

It’s even more surreal to watch Democrats act as though lying to the public is some grave firing offense when President Obama’s top national security official, James Clapper, got caught red-handed not only lying to the public but also to Congress — about a domestic surveillance program that courts ruled was illegal. And despite the fact that lying to Congress is a felony, he kept his job until the very last day of the Obama presidency.

But this is how political power and the addled partisan brain in D.C. functions. Those in power always regard leaks as a heinous crime, while those out of power regard them as a noble act. They seamlessly shift sides as their position in D.C. changes.

Indeed, while Democrats have suddenly re-discovered the virtues of illegal leaking, Trump-supporting Republicans are insisting that the only thing that matters is rooting out the criminal leakers. Fox News host Steve Doocey and right-wing radio host Laura Ingraham today both demanded to know why the leakers weren’t being hunted, while congressional Republicans are vowing investigations to find the leakers. And Trump himself today — echoing Obama-era Democrats — said that “the real story” isn’t the lies told by his national security adviser but rather the fact that someone leaked information exposing them:

The real story here is why are there so many illegal leaks coming out of Washington? Will these leaks be happening as I deal on N.Korea etc?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 14, 2017

But this is just the tawdry, craven game of Washington. People with no actual beliefs shamelessly take diametrically opposite views on fundamental political questions based exclusively on whether it helps or hurts their leaders. Thus, the very same Democrats who just three months ago viewed illegal leaking as a grave sin today view it as an act of heroic #Resistance.

What matters far more than this lowly and empty game-playing is the principle that is so vividly apparent here. Given the extreme secrecy powers that have arisen under the war on terror, one of the very few ways that the public has left for learning about what its government officials do is illegal leaking. As Trevor Timm notes, numerous leaks have already achieved great good in the three short weeks that Trump has been president.

Leaks are illegal and hated by those in power (and their followers) precisely because political officials want to hide evidence of their own wrongdoing, and want to be able to lie to the public with impunity and without detection. That’s the same reason the rest of us should celebrate such illegal leaks and protect those who undertake them, often at great risk to their own interests, so that we can be informed about the real actions of those who wield the greatest power. That principle does not change based upon which political party controls the White House.

* * * * *

From the creation of The Intercept during the Obama presidency through to today under Trump, a central principle of The Intercept — a key reason it was created — was to enable whistleblowing and report on leaks in the public interest. As our pinned article on our front page says: “If You See Something, Leak Something,” with instructions on how to do that as safely as possible.

The post The Leakers Who Exposed Gen. Flynn’s Lie Committed Serious — and Wholly Justified — Felonies appeared first on The Intercept.

Enlarge / A phishing e-mail aimed at worker rights activists in Qatar and Nepal crafted to fool targets into giving up their credentials. (credit: Amnesty International)

Over the course of the last year, a number of human rights organizations, labor unions, and journalists were targeted in a "phishing" campaign that attempted to steal the Google credentials of targets by luring them into viewing documents online. The campaign, uncovered by Amnesty International, is interesting largely because of the extent to which whoever was behind the attack used social media to create a complete persona behind the messages—a fictional rights activist named Safeena Malik.

Malik translates from Arabic as "King," so Amnesty International refers to the spear-phishing campaign in a report posted to Medium today as "Operation Kingphish."

The party or parties behind the operation created Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and Twitter profiles for "Safeena Malik" using a young woman's photos, which were apparently harvested from another social media account. "It appears that the attackers may have impersonated the identity of a real young woman and stole her pictures to construct the fake profile," wrote Nex, a security researcher working with Amnesty International, "along with a professional biography also stolen from yet another person."

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(credit: Jan Krutisch)

By scanning the growing brains of 148 babies with high and low risks of autism, researchers could predict which children would develop the disorder within the first year of life before symptoms began appearing, and diagnoses were made at two, researchers reported Wednesday in Nature.

Those researchers, led by psychologists Heather Cody Hazlett and Joseph Piven at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, got the idea for the study after finding earlier that children with autism tended to have larger brains than kids without the disorder. To follow up, they used magnetic resonance imaging to track and predict brain overgrowth as it happened. In all, the study raises hope that doctors will one day be able to make diagnoses quickly, allowing for earlier and earlier interventions.

The study has limitations, of course: it was small, so researchers will need to repeat it with far more children to confirm the findings. It also only applies to babies with a high-risk of developing autism, which are babies who have siblings already diagnosed with the disorder. For families with one child with autism, there’s about a one-in-five chance that subsequent children will also be affected. In the general population in the US, autism is diagnosed in about one in 68.

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The exclusive licenses granted to three for-profit companies on key discoveries about the revolutionary genome-editing technology CRISPR-Cas9 threaten to “bottleneck” its use “to discover and develop useful human therapeutics,” patent experts argued in a paper published on Thursday.

What the exclusive licenses have done “is give an entire industry to … companies that will never be able to fully exploit it,” Jorge Contreras of the University of Utah, a co-author of the paper in Science, said in an interview. “And that may hold back the development of therapies.”

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There’s an interesting article over at Bloomberg about how data scientists have struggled at some hedge funds:

The firms have been loading up on data scientists and coders to deliver on the promise of quantitative investing and lift their ho-hum returns. But they are discovering that the marriage of old-school managers and data-driven quants can be rocky. Managers who have relied on gut calls resist ceding control to scientists and their trading signals. And quants, emboldened by the success of computer-driven funds like Renaissance Technologies, bristle at their second-class status and vie for a bigger voice in investing.

There are some interesting tidbits in the article that I think hold lessons for any collaboration between a data scientist or analyst and a non-data scientist (for lack of a better word).

At Point72, the family office successor to SAC Capital, problems at the quant unit (known as Aperio):

The divide between Aperio quants and fundamental money managers was also intellectual. They struggled to communicate about the basics, like how big data could inform investment decisions. [Michael] Recce’s team, which was stacked with data scientists and coders, developed trading signals but didn’t always fully explain the margin of error in the analysis to make them useful to fund managers, the people said.

It’s hard to know the details of what actually happened, but for data scientists collaborating with others, there always needs to be an explanation of “what’s going on”. There’s a general feeling that it’s okay that machine learning techniques build complicated uninterpretable models because they work better. But in my experience that’s not enough. People want to know why they work better, when they work better, and when they don’t work.

On over-theorizing:

Haynes, who joined Stamford, Connecticut-based Point72 in early 2014 after about two decades at McKinsey & Co., and other senior managers grew dissatisfied with Aperio’s progress and impact on returns, the people said. When the group obtained new data sets, it spent too much time developing theories about how to process them rather than quickly producing actionable results.

I don’t necessarily agree with this “criticism”, but I only put it here because the land of hedge funds isn’t generally viewed on the outside as a place where lots of theorizing goes on.

At BlueMountain, another hedge fund:

When quants showed their risk analysis and trading signals to fundamental managers, they sometimes were rejected as nothing new, the people said. Quants at times wondered if managers simply didn’t want to give them credit for their ideas.

I’ve seen this quite a bit. When a data scientist presents results to collaborators, there’s often two responses:

1. “I knew that already” and so you haven’t taught me anything new
2. “I didn’t know that already” and so you must be wrong

The common link here, of course, is the inability to admit that there are things you don’t know. Whether this is an inherent character flaw or something that can be overcome through teaching is not yet clear to me. But it is common when data is brought to bear on a problem that previously lacked data. One of the key tasks that a data scientist in any industry must prepare for is the task of giving people information that will make them uncomfortable.

MENLO PARK, Calif. — The new immersive art installation here in the heart of Silicon Valley was dreamed up by David Byrne, the front man of the Talking Heads, and loosely modeled after the work of neuroscience and psychology labs at top institutions like Caltech and Harvard.

So when I showed up at a warehouse on a rainy Sunday morning earlier this month, I wasn’t sure what to expect.

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The clinical trial industry, which I work in, is in crisis.

Roughly half of clinical trials go unreported. Industry-sponsored trials are four times more likely to produce positive results than non-industry trials. And even when trials are reported, the investigators usually fail to share their study results: nearly 90 percent of trials on ClinicalTrials.gov lack results.

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PALO ALTO, Calif. — For Thomas P. Yacoe, the word is “terrifying.”

Leah Hemberry describes it as “constant fear.”

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The new issue of Jacobin is out now. To mark its release, we’re offering discounted introductory subscriptions.

Last week, the New Yorker published a cartoon that quickly became an ideological Rorschach test.

When Clintonite liberals looked at the drawing — which depicted an angry airplane passenger calling on fellow travelers to support his bid to take over the plane from the “smug,” out-of-touch pilots — many discerned a biting, incisive satire of the populist shift in contemporary politics. They sung the cartoonist’s praises and tutted at the confused, idiotic masses foolish enough to think that they should decide who flies the metaphorical plane.

Others reacted quite differently, viewing the cartoon as another example of the preening condescension that’s helped elevate populist politicians of various stripes. They fumed as their timelines filled up with jokes about the rubes that refused to leave politics to the experts.

A week later, the controversy has largely died down. But the contretemps revealed plenty about elite liberalism in the process.

The plane analogy breaks down after a moment’s consideration.

For one, it assumes that the existing pilots have been doing a decent job.

But what if they kept periodically crashing, and declined to repair the damage before taking off again? What if, due to operator negligence, the people in the cheaper seats were forced to hold on for dear life because some of their windows were shattered? What if, in other words, the pilots didn’t seem to care about the health and safety of those in economy class because they were too busy trying to keep the passengers in first class happy?

This rendering is much closer to reality. And it points to why many passengers might be eager for a change. Even if it’s unclear whether an alternative pilot would actually make things better, it may seem worth the gamble — particularly for those edging closer to the smashed windowpane. Announcements from the cockpit that repairs are unnecessary because the plane is “already great” are likely to fall on deaf ears.

To stretch the airplane metaphor to its absolute limit, the rebellious would-be pilot could advocate a couple different solutions to the passengers’ predicament. He could try and win over people on one side of the aisle by claiming that the people on the other side were the cause of the problem. The windows would go unfixed, but perhaps the illusion of a solution would placate the passengers.

An entirely different tactic would be to take the trays used to serve drinks in first class and nail them over the shattered windows. The pampered passengers up front, who’d grown accustomed to being waited on hand and foot, would of course oppose this move. But it would improve the basic security and livelihood of those in economy class. (Perhaps it could even snowball into a mass takeover of the plane.)

The logic of the New Yorker cartoon recognizes no distinction between these two approaches. The idea that passengers want change of any sort is mocked as inherently ridiculous.

That nobody could possibly do a better job than the professionals is a core belief of elite liberalism. Suspicious of mass democracy and emboldened by the fall of the Soviet Union, elite liberals came to assume that we’d reached the end of history — that every other social order had been tried and proven inferior. Capitalist democracy, stewarded by sharp, well-intentioned experts, had allegedly emerged from the scrum as the unquestioned victor.

For people like this, it’s been hard to understand the increasing rejection of the political and economic consensus as anything other than an outbreak of irrationality and self-sabotage. While there may be room to fine tune, why would anyone want to tear down or significantly alter something as good as what we’ve got?

If politics is about nothing more than the effective administration of the current system — if it’s about nothing more than putting one’s faith in an able pilot — experience and technical expertise are the primary requirements. Ideological differences are immaterial, conflicting interests obsolete.

Elite liberals grew so confident that their “pilot” conception of politics had triumphed that when fury erupted from the outside, many were apoplectic, having forgotten that their views were even open to contest. For years they’d felt little need to police the boundaries of respectable discourse, because the only viable political options were reasonably close to the existing center and decidedly hostile to any program of radical change.

Sanders and Trump, in very different ways, upset all of that. Liberal denizens of the political establishment reacted to both with strident denunciations. Populism was treated as a cancer, whether from the right or left.

Sanders’s chief crime was his persistent denunciation of political and economic elites. But the Nordic-style social democracy he advocated was also considered to be too far from the status quo. (Liberal elites tend to presume that the limits of political possibility fall exactly in line with existing Democratic Party policy for the same reason ancients assumed that Earth was at the center of the universe.)

During the Democratic primary, Sanders’s campaign was tolerated until it became an inconvenience, at which point the Vermont senator was castigated for failing to step aside and support the establishment candidate. His attacks on Clinton’s Wall Street and health industry connections were labeled unacceptable and even sexist by people whose notion of good governance is drawn largely from West Wing box sets.

For those who believe the best politicians are those with the most experience wielding power — on the theory that they’re likely to have the best understanding of how it all works — Clinton was self-evidently the rightful nominee. Not only had she previously served as secretary of state, it wouldn’t even have been her first time living in the White House.

The Clinton campaign betrayed the same hubristic sense of inevitability, down to the “I’m With Her” slogan. Her candidacy was about her own ascendance — voters were just along for the ride.

Yet when she was beaten by a permatanned, loose cannon reality TV star with no political experience and a habit of making comments that alienated whole swathes of the population, the response of several liberal commentators was to suggest that the public had let her down. Her bland wonkery wasn’t evidence of her incompetence, but an indictment of the millions of voters who had turned their back on a candidate with unimpeachable expertise.

In the minds of her staunch defenders, ambitious proposals and Sanders-style rhetoric were the mark of the unserious, nothing more than demagogic appeals to the unlettered. Hillary was above all of that. To bring things back to the plane analogy, she wouldn’t stoop to the level of taking a drinks tray from first class and using it to patch over the windows. So the choice was between Trump’s noxious populism (scapegoating those in the other row) and Clinton’s patronizing insistence that nothing was actually wrong.

The fervent applause for the New Yorker cartoon shows that many elite liberals still haven’t learned the lessons of the general election.

Rather than mocking voters fed up with the political establishment, Democratic elites should be asking themselves how they managed to lose to an opponent with such obvious weaknesses. If they have any sense, they’d look to Sanders as an example of an alternative approach.

The problem is, this would require acknowledging that there are major problems with the existing system. It would require rejecting the politics of technocracy and calling out those in first class.

Instead, it seems many Clintonite liberals are choosing to cling to the comfort blanket of smug condescension and class-tinged ridicule, as the catastrophe they helped create inches toward the White House.

Celebrate the new issue of Jacobin, “The Party We Need,” with a discounted subscription.

CLEVELAND — In the span of a few days, the anti-vaccine screed of a Cleveland Clinic doctor prompted a social media firestorm, an apparent retraction from the physician, and promises of disciplinary action by administrators of his prestigious hospital system.

But those reactions will not entirely contain the damage caused by the rant, which has already been picked up by anti-vaccine organizations, or address a more fundamental question: Why do hospitals that espouse evidence-based medical care operate alternative medicine institutes that offer treatments with little foundation in science?

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In the past six weeks, the Washington Post published two blockbuster stories about the Russian threat that went viral: one on how Russia is behind a massive explosion of “fake news,” the other on how it invaded the U.S. electric grid. Both articles were fundamentally false. Each now bears a humiliating editor’s note grudgingly acknowledging that the core claims of the story were fiction: The first note was posted a full two weeks later to the top of the original article; the other was buried the following day at the bottom.

The second story on the electric grid turned out to be far worse than I realized when I wrote about it on Saturday, when it became clear that there was no “penetration of the U.S. electricity grid” as the Post had claimed. In addition to the editor’s note, the Russia-hacked-our-electric-grid story now has a full-scale retraction in the form of a separate article admitting that “the incident is not linked to any Russian government effort to target or hack the utility” and there may not even have been malware at all on this laptop.

But while these debacles are embarrassing for the paper, they are also richly rewarding. That’s because journalists — including those at the Post — aggressively hype and promote the original, sensationalistic false stories, ensuring that they go viral, generating massive traffic for the Post (the paper’s executive editor, Marty Baron, recently boasted about how profitable the paper has become).

After spreading the falsehoods far and wide, raising fear levels and manipulating U.S. political discourse in the process (both Russia stories were widely hyped on cable news), journalists who spread the false claims subsequently note the retraction or corrections only in the most muted way possible, and often not at all. As a result, only a tiny fraction of people who were exposed to the original false story end up learning of the retractions.

Baron himself, editorial leader of the Post, is a perfect case study in this irresponsible tactic. It was Baron who went to Twitter on the evening of November 24 to announce the Post’s exposé of the enormous reach of Russia’s fake news operation, based on what he heralded as the findings of “independent researchers.” Baron’s tweet went all over the place; to date, it has been re-tweeted more than 3,000 times, including by many journalists with their own large followings:

Russian propaganda effort helped spread fake news during election, say independent researchers https://t.co/3ETVXWw16Q

— Marty Baron (@PostBaron) November 25, 2016

But after that story faced a barrage of intense criticism — from Adrian Chen in the New Yorker (“propaganda about Russia propaganda”), Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone (“shameful, disgusting”), my own article, and many others — including legal threats from the sites smeared as Russian propaganda outlets by the Post’s “independent researchers” — the Post finally added its lengthy editor’s note distancing itself from the anonymous group that provided the key claims of its story (“The Post … does not itself vouch for the validity of PropOrNot’s findings” and “since publication of the Post’s story, PropOrNot has removed some sites from its list”).

What did Baron tell his followers about this editor’s note that gutted the key claims of the story he hyped? Nothing. Not a word. To date, he has been publicly silent about these revisions. Having spread the original claims to tens of thousands of people, if not more, he took no steps to ensure that any of them heard about the major walk back on the article’s most significant, inflammatory claims. He did, however, ironically find the time to promote a different Post story about how terrible and damaging Fake News is:

‘Pizzagate’ shows how fake news hurts real people https://t.co/cOh7RZ4RqK

— Marty Baron (@PostBaron) November 26, 2016

Whether the Post’s false stories here can be distinguished from what is commonly called “Fake News” is, at this point, a semantic dispute, particularly since “Fake News” has no cogent definition. Defenders of Fake News as a distinct category typically emphasize intent in order to differentiate it from bad journalism. That’s really just a way of defining Fake News so as to make it definitionally impossible for mainstream media outlets like the Post ever to be guilty of it (much the way terrorism is defined to ensure that the U.S. government and its allies cannot, by definition, ever commit it).

But what was the Post’s motive in publishing two false stories about Russia that, very predictably, generated massive attention, traffic, and political impact? Was it ideological and political — namely, devotion to the D.C. agenda of elevating Russia into a grave threat to U.S. security? Was it to please its audience — knowing that its readers, in the wake of Trump’s victory, want to be fed stories about Russian treachery? Was it access and source servitude — proving it will serve as a loyal and uncritical repository for any propaganda intelligence officials want disseminated? Was it profit — to generate revenue through sensationalistic click-bait headlines with a reckless disregard to whether its stories are true? In an institution as large as the Post, with numerous reporters and editors participating in these stories, it’s impossible to identify any one motive as definitive.

Whatever the motives, the effects of these false stories are exactly the same as those of whatever one regards as Fake News. The false claims travel all over the internet, deceiving huge numbers into believing them. The propagators of the falsehoods receive ample profit from their false, viral “news.” And there is no accountability of the kind that would disincentivize a repeat of the behavior. (That the Post ultimately corrects its false story does not distinguish it from classic Fake News sites, which also sometimes do the same.)

And while it’s true that all media outlets make mistakes, and that even the most careful journalism sometimes errs, those facts do not remotely mitigate the Post’s behavior here. In these cases, they did not make good faith mistakes after engaging in careful journalism. With both stories, they were reckless (at best) from the start, and the glaring deficiencies in the reporting were immediately self-evident (which is why both stories were widely attacked upon publication).

As this excellent timeline by Kalev Leetaru documents, the Post did not even bother to contact the utility companies in question — the most elementary step of journalistic responsibility — until after the story was published. Intelligence officials insisting on anonymity — so as to ensure no accountability — whispered to them that this happened, and despite how significant the consequences would be, they rushed to print it with no verification at all. This is not a case of good journalism producing inaccurate reporting; it is the case of a media outlet publishing a story that it knew would produce massive benefits and consequences without the slightest due diligence or care.

The most ironic aspect of all this is that it is mainstream journalists — the very people who have become obsessed with the crusade against Fake News — who play the key role in enabling and fueling this dissemination of false stories. They do so not only by uncritically spreading them, but also by taking little or no steps to notify the public of their falsity.

The Post’s epic debacle this weekend regarding its electric grid fiction vividly illustrates this dynamic. As I noted on Saturday, many journalists reacted to this story the same way they do every story about Russia: They instantly click and re-tweet and share the story without the slightest critical scrutiny. That these claims are constantly based on the whispers of anonymous officials and accompanied by no evidence whatsoever gives those journalists no pause at all; any official claim that Russia and Putin are behind some global evil is instantly treated as Truth. That’s a significant reason papers like the Post are incentivized to recklessly publish stories of this kind. They know they will be praised and rewarded no matter the accuracy or reliability because their Cause — the agenda — is the right one.

On Friday night, immediately after the Post’s story was published, one of the most dramatic pronouncements came from the New York Times’s editorial writer Brent Staples, who said this:

Now that this story has collapsed and been fully retracted, what has Staples done to note that this tweet was false? Just like Baron, absolutely nothing. Actually, that’s not quite accurate, as he did do something: At some point after Friday night, he quietly deleted his tweet without comment. He has not uttered a word about the fact that the story he promoted has collapsed, and that what he told his 16,000-plus followers — along with the countless number of people who re-tweeted the dramatic claim of this prominent journalist — turned out to be totally false in every respect.

Even more instructive is the case of MSNBC’s Kyle Griffin, a prolific and skilled social media user who has seen his following explode this year with a constant stream of anti-Trump content. On Friday night, when the Post story was published, Griffin hyped it with a series of tweets designed to make the story seem as menacing and consequential as possible. That included hysterical statements from Vermont officials — who believed the Post’s false claim — that in retrospect are unbelievably embarrassing.

VT Gov. Peter Shumlin on Russian hacking attempt: 'One of the world's leading thugs, Putin, has been attempting to hack our electric grid.' pic.twitter.com/liJbVLdT5A

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) December 31, 2016

That tweet from Griffin — convincing people that Putin was endangering the health and safety of Vermonters — was re-tweeted more than 1,000 times. His other similar tweets — such as this one featuring Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy’s warning that Putin was trying to “shut down [the grid] in the middle of winter” — were also widely spread.

But the next day, the crux of the story collapsed — the Post’s editor’s note acknowledged that “there is no indication” that “Russian hackers had penetrated the electricity grid” — and Griffin said nothing. Indeed, he said nothing further on any of this until yesterday — four days after his series of widely shared tweets — in which he simply re-tweeted a Post reporter noting an “update” that the story was false without providing any comment himself:

In contrast to Griffin’s original inflammatory tweets about the Russian menace, which were widely and enthusiastically spread, this after-the-fact correction has a paltry 289 re-tweets. Thus, a small fraction of those who were exposed to Griffin’s sensationalistic hyping of this story ended up learning that all of it was false.

I genuinely do not mean to single out these individual journalists for scorn. They are just illustrative of a very common dynamic: Any story that bolsters the prevailing D.C. orthodoxy on the Russia Threat, no matter how dubious, is spread far and wide. And then, as has happened so often, when the story turns out to be false or misleading, little or nothing is done to correct the deceitful effects. And, most amazingly of all, these are the same people constantly decrying the threat posed by Fake News.

A very common dynamic is driving all of this: media groupthink, greatly exacerbated (as I described on Saturday) by the incentive scheme of Twitter. As the grand media failure of 2002 demonstrated, American journalists are highly susceptible to fueling and leading the parade in demonizing a new Foreign Enemy rather than exerting restraint and skepticism in evaluating the true nature of that threat.

It is no coincidence that many of the most embarrassing journalistic debacles of this year involve the Russia Threat, and they all involve this same dynamic. Perhaps the worst one was the facially ridiculous, pre-election Slate story — which multiple outlets (including The Intercept) had been offered but passed on — alleging that Trump had created a secret server to communicate with a Russian bank; that story was so widely shared that even the Clinton campaign ended up hyping it — a tweet that, by itself, was re-tweeted almost 12,000 times.

Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank. pic.twitter.com/8f8n9xMzUU

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) November 1, 2016

But only a small percentage of those who heard of it ended up hearing of the major walk back and debunking from other outlets. The same is true of The Guardian story from last week on WikiLeaks and Putin that ended up going viral, only to have its retraction barely noticed because most of the journalists who spread the story did not bother to note it.

Beyond the journalistic tendency to echo anonymous officials on whatever Scary Foreign Threat they are hyping at the moment, there is an independent incentive scheme sustaining all of this. That Russia is a Grave Menace attacking the U.S. has — for obvious reasons — become a critical narrative for Democrats and other Trump opponents who dominate elite media circles on social media and elsewhere. They reward and herald anyone who bolsters that narrative, while viciously attacking anyone who questions it.

Indeed, in my 10-plus years of writing about politics on an endless number of polarizing issues — including the Snowden reporting — nothing remotely compares to the smear campaign that has been launched as a result of the work I’ve done questioning and challenging claims about Russian hacking and the threat posed by that country generally. This is being engineered not by random, fringe accounts, but by the most prominent Democratic pundits with the largest media followings.

I’ve been transformed, overnight, into an early adherent of alt-right ideology, an avid fan of Breitbart, an enthusiastic Trump supporter, and — needless to say  — a Kremlin operative. That’s literally the explicit script they’re now using, often with outright fabrications of what I say (see here for one particularly glaring example).

They, of course, know all of this is false. A primary focus of the last 10 years of my journalism has been a defense of the civil liberties of Muslims. I wrote an entire book on the racism and inequality inherent in the U.S. justice system. My legal career involved numerous representations of victims of racial discrimination. I was one of the first journalists to condemn the misleadingly “neutral” approach to reporting on Trump and to call for more explicit condemnations of his extremism and lies. I was one of the few to defend Jorge Ramos from widespread media attacks when he challenged Trump’s immigration extremism. Along with many others, I tried to warn Democrats that nominating a candidate as unpopular as Hillary Clinton risked a Trump victory. And as someone who is very publicly in a same-sex, inter-racial marriage — with someone just elected to public office as a socialist — I make for a very unlikely alt-right leader, to put that mildly.

The malice of this campaign is exceeded only by its blatant stupidity. Even having to dignify it with a defense is depressing, though once it becomes this widespread, one has little choice.

But this is the climate Democrats have successfully cultivated — where anyone dissenting or even expressing skepticism about their deeply self-serving Russia narrative is the target of coordinated and potent smears; where, as The Nation’s James Carden documented yesterday, skepticism is literally equated with treason. And the converse is equally true: Those who disseminate claims and stories that bolster this narrative — no matter how divorced from reason and evidence they are — receive an array of benefits and rewards.

That the story ends up being completely discredited matters little. The damage is done, and the benefits received. Fake News in the narrow sense of that term is certainly something worth worrying about. But whatever one wants to call this type of behavior from the Post, it is a much greater menace given how far the reach is of the institutions that engage in it.

The post WashPost Is Richly Rewarded for False News About Russia Threat While Public Is Deceived appeared first on The Intercept.

(updated below [Fri.])

Julian Assange is a deeply polarizing figure. Many admire him and many despise him (into which category one falls in any given year typically depends on one’s feelings about the subject of his most recent publication of leaked documents).

But one’s views of Assange are completely irrelevant to this article, which is not about Assange. This article, instead, is about a report published this week by The Guardian that recklessly attributed to Assange comments that he did not make. This article is about how those false claims — fabrications, really — were spread all over the internet by journalists, causing hundreds of thousands of people (if not millions) to consume false news. The purpose of this article is to underscore, yet again, that those who most flamboyantly denounce Fake News, and want Facebook and other tech giants to suppress content in the name of combating it, are often the most aggressive and self-serving perpetrators of it.

One’s views of Assange are completely irrelevant to this article because, presumably, everyone agrees that publication of false claims by a media outlet is very bad, even when it’s designed to malign someone you hate. Journalistic recklessness does not become noble or tolerable if it serves the right agenda or cause. The only way one’s views of Assange are relevant to this article is if one finds journalistic falsehoods and Fake News objectionable only when deployed against figures one likes.

The shoddy and misleading Guardian article, written by Ben Jacobs, was published on December 24. It made two primary claims — both of which are demonstrably false. The first false claim was hyped in the article’s headline: “Julian Assange gives guarded praise of Trump and blasts Clinton in interview.” This claim was repeated in the first paragraph of the article: “Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has offered guarded praise of Donald Trump. …”

The second claim was an even worse assault on basic journalism. Jacobs set up this claim by asserting that Assange “long had a close relationship with the Putin regime.” The only “evidence” offered for this extraordinary claim was that Assange, in 2012, conducted eight interviews that were broadcast on RT. With the claimed Assange-Putin alliance implanted, Jacobs then wrote: “In his interview with la Repubblica, [Assange] said there was no need for WikiLeaks to undertake a whistleblowing role in Russia because of the open and competitive debate he claimed exists there.”

The reason these two claims are so significant, so certain to attract massive numbers of clicks and shares, is obvious. They play directly into the biases of Clinton supporters and flatter their central narrative about the election: that Clinton lost because the Kremlin used its agents, such as Assange, to boost Trump and sink Clinton. By design, the article makes it seem as though Assange is heralding Russia as such a free, vibrant, and transparent political culture that — in contrast to the repressive West — no whistleblowing is needed, all while praising Trump.

But none of that actually happened. Those claims are made up.

Despite how much online attention it received, Jacobs’s Guardian article contained no original reporting. Indeed, it did nothing but purport to summarize the work of an actually diligent journalist: Stefania Maurizi of the Italian daily la Repubblica, who traveled to London and conducted the interview with Assange. Maurizi’s interview was conducted in English, and la Repubblica published the transcript online. Jacobs’s “work” consisted of nothing other than purporting to re-write the parts of that interview he wanted to highlight, so that he and The Guardian could receive the traffic for her work.

Ever since the Guardian article was published and went viral, Maurizi has repeatedly objected to the false claims being made about what Assange said in their interview. But while Western journalists keep re-tweeting and sharing The Guardian’s second-hand summary of this interview, they completely ignore Maurizi’s protests — for reasons that are both noxious and revealing.

.@ggreenwald I am completely furious about how my interview with Julian #Assange has been distorted and strumentalised

— stefania maurizi (@SMaurizi) December 28, 2016

To see how blatantly false The Guardian’s claims are, all one needs to do is compare the claims about what Assange said in the interview to the text of what he actually said.

To begin with, Assange did not praise Trump, guardedly or otherwise. He was not asked whether he likes Trump, nor did he opine on that. Rather, he was asked what he thought the consequences would be of Trump’s victory: “What about Donald Trump? What is going to happen? … What do you think he means?” Speaking predictively, Assange neutrally described what he believed would be the outcome:

Hillary Clinton’s election would have been a consolidation of power in the existing ruling class of the United States. Donald Trump is not a D.C. insider, he is part of the wealthy ruling elite of the United States, and he is gathering around him a spectrum of other rich people and several idiosyncratic personalities. They do not by themselves form an existing structure, so it is a weak structure which is displacing and destabilizing the pre-existing central power network within D.C. It is a new patronage structure which will evolve rapidly, but at the moment its looseness means there are opportunities for change in the United States: change for the worse and change for the better.

Most of those facts — “Clinton’s election would have been a consolidation of power” and Trump is creating “a new patronage structure” — are barely debatable. They are just observably true. But whatever one’s views on his statements, they do not remotely constitute “praise” for Trump.

In fact, Assange says Trump “is part of the wealthy ruling elite of the United States” who “is gathering around him a spectrum of other rich people and several idiosyncratic personalities.” The fact that Assange sees possibility for exploiting the resulting instability for positive outcomes, along with being fearful about “change for the worse,” makes him exactly like pretty much every political and media organization that is opportunistically searching for ways to convert the Trumpian dark cloud into some silver lining.

Everyone from the New York Times and ThinkProgress to the ACLU and Democratic Socialists has sought or touted a massive upsurge in support ushered in by the Trump victory, with hopes that it will re-embolden support for critical political values. Immediately after the election, Democrats such as Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Chuck Schumer said exactly what Assange said: that they were willing and eager to exploit the ways that a Trump presidency could create new opportunities (in the case of the first two, Trump’s abrogation of the TPP, and in the case of the latter, fortified support for Israel; as Sanders put it: “To the degree that Mr. Trump is serious about pursuing policies that improve the lives of working families in this country, I and other progressives are prepared to work with him”). None of that remotely constitutes “praise for Trump.” And if it were anyone but Assange saying this, nobody would pretend that was so — indeed, in those other cases, nobody did.

If one wants to be generous and mitigate that claim as sloppy and deceitful rather than an outright fraud, one could do so. But that’s not the case for The Guardian’s second and far more inflammatory claim: that Assange believes Russia is too free and open to need whistleblowing.

In that part of the interview, Assange was asked why most of WikiLeaks’ publications have had their biggest impact in the West rather than in countries such as Russia or China. To see how wildly deceitful Jacobs’s claim was about his answer, just read what he said: He did not say that Russia was too free to need whistleblowing. Instead, he explains that any Russian whistleblower who wanted to leak information would have many better options than WikiLeaks given that Assange’s organization does not speak Russian, is composed of English-speaking Westerners, and focuses on the West:

In Russia, there are many vibrant publications, online blogs, and Kremlin critics such as [Alexey] Navalny are part of that spectrum. There are also newspapers like Novaya Gazeta, in which different parts of society in Moscow are permitted to critique each other and it is tolerated, generally, because it isn’t a big TV channel that might have a mass popular effect, its audience is educated people in Moscow. So my interpretation is that in Russia there are competitors to WikiLeaks, and no WikiLeaks staff speak Russian, so for a strong culture which has its own language, you have to be seen as a local player. WikiLeaks is a predominantly English-speaking organization with a website predominantly in English. We have published more than 800,000 documents about or referencing Russia and President Putin, so we do have quite a bit of coverage, but the majority of our publications come from Western sources, though not always. For example, we have published more than 2 million documents from Syria, including Bashar al-Assad personally. Sometimes we make a publication about a country and they will see WikiLeaks as a player within that country, like with Timor East and Kenya. The real determinant is how distant that culture is from English. Chinese culture is quite far away.

What Assange is saying here is so obvious. He is not saying that Russia is too free and transparent to need whistleblowing; indeed, he points out that WikiLeaks has published some leaked documents about Russia and Putin, along with Assad. What he says instead is that Russian whistleblowers and leakers perceive that they have better options than WikiLeaks, which does not speak the language and has no place in the country’s media and cultural ecosystem. He says exactly the same thing about China (“The real determinant is how distant that culture is from English. Chinese culture is quite far away”).

To convert that into a claim that Assange believes is Russia is too free and open to need whistleblowing — a way of depicting Assange as a propagandist for Putin — is not merely a reckless error. It is journalistic fraud.

But, like so much online fake news, this was a fraud that had a huge impact, as The Guardian and Jacobs surely knew would happen. It’s difficult to quantify exactly how many people consumed these false claims, but it was definitely in the tens of thousands and almost certainly in the hundreds of thousands if not millions. Here’s just one tweet, by the Washington Post’s Clinton-supporting blogger (and Tufts political science professor) Dan Drezner, that spread the claim about Assange’s purported belief that Russia is too open to need whistleblowing; as of today, it has been re-tweeted by more than 7,000 people and “liked” by another 7,000:

The next time you're inclined to take Julian Assange seriously, remember this. https://t.co/JIPcns2KTa pic.twitter.com/TUoqHa1KNp

— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) December 25, 2016

Nothing illustrates the damage done by online journalistic deceit better than this: While Drezner’s spreading of Jacobs’s false claim was re-tweeted thousands and thousands of times, the objection from the actual reporter, Maurizi, pointing out that it was false, was almost completely ignored. At the time this article was published, it had a grand total of 14 re-tweets:

.@dandrezner this is completely false: Julian #Assange never ever declared that in my interview

— stefania maurizi (@SMaurizi) December 26, 2016

Worse still, the most vocal Clinton-supporting pundits, such as The Atlantic’s David Frum, then began promoting a caveat-free version of the false claims about what Assange said regarding Trump; he was now converted into a full-fledged Trump admirer:

Part of why this happened has to do with The Guardian’s blinding hatred for WikiLeaks, with whom it partnered to its great benefit, only to then wage mutual warfare. While the paper regularly produces great journalism, its deeply emotional and personalized feud with Assange has often led it to abandon all standards when reporting on WikiLeaks.

But here, the problem was deeply exacerbated by the role of this particular reporter, Ben Jacobs. Having covered the 2016 campaign for The Guardian U.S., he’s one of those journalists who became beloved by Clinton’s media supporters for his obviously pro-Clinton coverage of the campaign. He entrenched himself as a popular member of the clique of political journalists who shared those sentiments. He built a following by feeding the internet highly partisan coverage; watched his social media follower count explode the more he did it; and generally bathed in the immediate gratification provided by online praise for churning out pro-Clinton agitprop all year.

But Jacobs has a particularly ugly history with WikiLeaks. In August 2015, news broke that Chelsea Manning — whose leaks became one of The Guardian’s most significant stories in its history and whom the U.N. had found was subjected to “cruel and inhumane” abuse while in detention — faced indefinite solitary confinement for having unapproved magazines in her cell as well as expired toothpaste. Jacobs went to Twitter and mocked her plight: “And the world’s tiniest violin plays a sad song.” He was forced to delete this demented tweet when even some of his Guardian colleagues publicly criticized him, though he never apologized publicly, claiming that he did so “privately” while blocking huge numbers of people who objected to his comments (including me).

The absolute last person anyone should trust to accurately and fairly report on WikiLeaks is Ben Jacobs, unless the goal is to publish fabrications that will predictably generate massive traffic for The Guardian. Whatever the intent, that is exactly what happened here.

The people who should be most upset by this deceit are exactly the ones who played the leading role in spreading it: namely, those who most vocally claim that Fake News is a serious menace. Nothing will discredit that cause faster or more effectively than the perception that this crusade is really about a selective desire to suppress news that undermines one’s political agenda, masquerading as concern for journalistic accuracy and integrity. Yet, as I’ve repeatedly documented, the very same people most vocal about the need to suppress Fake News are often those most eager to disseminate it when doing so advances their agenda.

If one really wants to battle Fake News and deceitful journalism that misleads others, one cannot selectively denounce some Fake News accounts while cheering and spreading those that promote one’s own political agenda or smear those (such as Assange) whom one most hates. Doing that will ensure that nobody takes this cause seriously because its proponents will be seen as dishonest opportunists: much the way cynically exploiting “anti-Semitism” accusations against Israel critics has severely weakened the sting of that accusation when it’s actually warranted.

It is well-documented that much Fake News was disseminated this year to undermine Clinton, sometimes from Trump himself. For that reason, a poll jointly released on Tuesday by The Economist and YouGov found that 62 percent of Trump voters — and 25 percent of Clinton voters — believe that “millions of illegal votes were cast in the election,” an extremely dubious allegation made by Trump with no evidence.

But this poll also found that 50 percent of Clinton voters now believe an absurd and laughable conspiracy theory: that “Russia tampered with vote tallies to help Trump.” It’s hardly surprising they believe this: Some of the most beloved Democratic pundits routinely use the phrase “Russia hacked the U.S. election” to imply not that it hacked emails but the election itself. And the result is that — just as is true of many Trump voters — many Clinton voters have been deceived into embracing a pleasing and self-affirming though completely baseless conspiracy theory about why their candidate lost.

By all means: Let’s confront and defeat the menace of Fake News. But to do so, it’s critical that one not be selective in which type one denounces, and it is particularly important that one not sanction Fake News when it promotes one’s own political objectives. Most important of all is that those who want to lead the cause of denouncing Fake News not convert themselves into its most prolific disseminators whenever the claims of a Fake News account are pleasing or self-affirming.

That’s exactly what those who spread this disgraceful Guardian article did. If they want credibility when posing as Fake News opponents in the future, they ought to acknowledge what they did and retract it — beginning with The Guardian.

UPDATE [Fri.]: The Guardian, to its credit, has now retracted one of the baseless claims in Jacobs’ article, and corrected and amended several others:

• This article was amended on 29 December to remove a sentence in which it was asserted that Assange “has long had a close relationship with the Putin regime”. A sentence was also amended which paraphrased the interview, suggesting Assange said “there was no need for Wikileaks to undertake a whistleblowing role in Russia because of the open and competitive debate he claimed exists there”. It has been amended to more directly describe the question Assange was responding to when he spoke of Russia’s “many vibrant publications”.

Unfortunately, those falsehoods were tweeted and re-tweeted and shared tens of thousands of times, consumed by hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions. We’ll see if those who spread those falsehoods now spread these corrections with equal vigor.

The post The Guardian’s Summary of Julian Assange’s Interview Went Viral and Was Completely False appeared first on The Intercept.

Vincent Picaud developed a Mathematica interface to Stan:

• MathematicaStan

You can find everything you need to get started by following the link above. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions, please let us know through the Stan user’s group or the GitHub issue tracker.

MathematicaStan interfaces to Stan through a CmdStan process.

Stan programs are portable across interfaces.

The post Mathematica, now with Stan appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.

Lee Jussim, Jarret Crawford, and Rachel Rubinstein just published a paper in Psychological Science that begins,

Are stereotypes accurate or inaccurate? We summarize evidence that stereotype accuracy is one of the largest and most replicable findings in social psychology. We address controversies in this literature, including the long-standing and continuing but unjustified emphasis on stereotype inaccuracy . . .

I haven’t read the paper in detail but I imagine that a claim that stereotypes are accurate will depend strongly on the definition of “accuracy.”

But what I really want to talk about is this paradox:

My stereotype about a Psychological Science article is that it is an exercise in noise mining, followed by hype. But this Psychological Science paper says that stereotypes are accurate. So if the article is true, then my stereotype is accurate, and the article is just hype, in which case stereotypes are not accurate, in which case the paper might actually be correct, in which case stereotypes might actually be accurate . . . now I’m getting dizzy!

P.S. Jussim has a long and interesting discussion in the comments. I should perhaps clarify that my above claim of a “paradox” was a joke! I understand about variability.

The post The Psychological Science stereotype paradox appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.

By Kat Banyard

Read at Aeon

The celebrated medical-research reformer has a new paper (sent to me by Keith O’Rourke; official published version here), where he writes:

As EBM [evidence-based medicine] became more influential, it was also hijacked to serve agendas different from what it originally aimed for. Influential randomized trials are largely done by and for the benefit of the industry. Meta-analyses and guidelines have become a factory, mostly also serving vested interests. National and federal research funds are funneled almost exclusively to research with little relevance to health outcomes. We have supported the growth of principal investigators who excel primarily as managers absorbing more money.

He continues:

Diagnosis and prognosis research and efforts to individualize treatment have fueled recurrent spurious promises. Risk factor epidemiology has excelled in salami-sliced data-dredged papers with gift authorship and has become adept to dictating policy from spurious evidence. Under market pressure, clinical medicine has been transformed to finance-based medicine. In many places, medicine and health care are wasting societal resources and becoming a threat to human well-being. Science denialism and quacks are also flourishing and leading more people astray in their life choices, including health.

And concludes:

EBM still remains an unmet goal, worthy to be attained.

Read the whole damn thing.

The post Ioannidis: “Evidence-Based Medicine Has Been Hijacked” appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.

‘Maybe I’m the northernmost headbanger in the world.’

Once a thriving Soviet mining settlement, Pyramiden, located far above the Arctic Circle on Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, has been almost entirely abandoned since it was shut down in 1998. Now a tourist attraction, the sprawling ghost town is home to just six year-round residents. Pyramiden chronicles the quiet, largely solitary life of one of them, Aleksandr Romanovsky, who likes to go by the nickname ‘Sasha from Pyramiden’. He has worked as a tour guide at the Russian settlement since 2012 when, he thinks, he was the only person to apply for the job. A loner by nature, Romanovsky has come to feel at home in this unusual, otherworldly place, where he spends the time between giving tours and warding off polar bears by enjoying solitary pursuits, such as playing guitar and learning Spanish.

By Aeon Video

Watch at Aeon

Hovertext: Now, let's have the talk about how individual effort may matter less than other people's inherent ability.

After 800 people pointed out my crappy base-11 number line (that's what I get for doing base-11 before bed), I have altered to votey. So, please press z to go back and give it a look! 

The philosopher John Searle has been dining out for years on a good line about simulation. People think, he says, that if they simulate the mind on a computer it’ll be conscious; but you know what? When they run a computer simulation of a rain storm, nobody gets wet. That hasn’t stopped people t...

By Peter Hankins

Read at Aeon

This list is an attempt to collect and categorize a growing critical literature on algorithms as social concerns. The work included spans sociology, anthropology, science and technology studies, ge...

Tags: critical algorithm studies computational socialism