news

Reflections on the Charlie Kirk assassination

PNRJ core principles, current events, politics, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 28 JDN 2460947

No doubt you are well aware that Charlie Kirk was shot and killed on September 10. His memorial service was held on September 21, and filled a stadium in Arizona.

There have been a lot of wildly different takes on this event. It’s enough to make you start questioning your own sanity. So while what I have to say may not be that different from what Krugman (or for that matter Jacobin) had to say, I still thought I would try to contribute to the small part of the conversation that’s setting the record straight.

First of all, let me say that this is clearly a political assassination, and as a matter of principle, that kind of thing should not be condoned in a democracy.

The whole point of a democratic system is that we don’t win by killing or silencing our opponents, we win by persuading or out-voting them. As long as someone is not engaging in speech acts that directly command or incite violence (like, say, inciting people to attack the Capitol), they should be allowed to speak in peace; even abhorrent views should be not be met with violence.

Free speech isn’t just about government censorship (though that is also a major problem right now); it’s a moral principle that underlies the foundation of liberal democracy. We don’t resolve conflicts with violence unless absolutely necessary.

So I want to be absolutely clear about this: Killing Charlie Kirk was not acceptable, and the assassin should be tried in a court of law and, if duly convicted, imprisoned for a very long time.

Second of all, we still don’t know the assassin’s motive, so stop speculating until we do.

At first it looked like the killer was left-wing. Then it looked like maybe he was right-wing. Now it looks like maybe he’s left-wing again. Maybe his views aren’t easily categorized that way; maybe he’s an anarcho-capitalist, or an anarcho-communist, or a Scientologist. I won’t say it doesn’t matter; it clearly does matter. But we simply do not know yet.

There is an incredibly common and incredibly harmful thing that people do after any major crime: They start spreading rumors and speculating about things that we actually know next to nothing about. Stop it. Don’t contribute to that.


The whole reason we have a court system is to actually figure out the real truth, which takes a lot of time and effort. The courts are one American institution that’s actually still functioning pretty well in this horrific cyberpunk/Trumpistan era; let them do their job.

It could be months or years before we really fully understand what happened here. Accept that. You don’t need to know the answer right now, and it’s far more dangerous to think you know the answer when you actually don’t.

But finally, I need to point out that Charlie Kirk was an absolutely abhorrent, despicable husk of a human being and no one should be honoring him.

First of all, he himself advocated for political violence against his opponents. I won’t say anyone deserves what happened to him—but if anyone did, it would be him, because he specifically rallied his followers to do exactly this sort of thing to other people.

He was also bigoted in almost every conceivable way: Racist, sexist, ableist, homophobic, and of course transphobic. He maintained a McCarthy-esque list of college professors that he encouraged people to harass for being too left-wing. He was a covert White supremacist, and only a little bit covert. He was not covert at all about his blatant sexism and misogyny that seems like it came from the 1950s instead of the 2020s.

He encouraged his—predominantly White, male, straight, cisgender, middle-class—audience to hate every marginalized group you can think of: women, people of color, LGBT people, poor people, homeless people, people with disabilities. Not content to merely be an abhorrent psychopath himself, he actively campaigned against the concept of empathy.

Charlie Kirk deserves no honors. The world is better off without him. He made his entire career out of ruining the lives of innocent people and actively making the world a worse place.

It was wrong to kill Charlie Kirk. But if you’re sad he’s gone, what is wrong with you!?

Why we need critical thinking

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, education, financial fraud, politics, public policy, science and academia , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jul 9 JDN 2460135

I can’t find it at the moment, but awhile ago I read a surprisingly compelling post on social media (I think it was Facebook, but it could also have been Reddit) questioning the common notion that we should be teaching more critical thinking in school.

I strongly believe that we should in fact be teaching more critical thinking in school—actually I think we should replace large chunks of the current math curriculum with a combination of statistics, economics and critical thinking—but it made me realize that we haven’t done enough to defend why that is something worth doing. It’s just become a sort of automatic talking point, like, “obviously you would want more critical thinking, why are you even asking?”

So here’s a brief attempt to explain why critical thinking is something that every citizen ought to be good at, and hence why it’s worthwhile to teach it in primary and secondary school.

Critical thinking, above all, allows you to detect lies. It teaches you to look past the surface of what other people are saying and determine whether what they are saying is actually true.

And our world is absolutely full of lies.

We are constantly lied to by advertising. We are constantly lied to by spam emails and scam calls. Day in and day out, people with big smiles promise us the world, if only we will send them five easy payments of $19.99.

We are constantly lied to by politicians. We are constantly lied to by religious leaders (it’s pretty much their whole job actually).

We are often lied to by newspapers—sometimes directly and explicitly, as in fake news, but more often in subtler ways. Most news articles in the mainstream press are true in the explicit facts they state, but are missing important context; and nearly all of them focus on the wrong things—exciting, sensational, rare events rather than what’s actually important and likely to affect your life. If newspapers were an accurate reflection of genuine risk, they’d have more articles on suicide than homicide, and something like one million articles on climate change for every one on some freak accident (like that submarine full of billionaires).

We are even lied to by press releases on science, which likewise focus on new, exciting, sensational findings rather than supported, established, documented knowledge. And don’t tell me everyone already knows it; just stating basic facts about almost any scientific field will shock and impress most of the audience, because they clearly didn’t learn this stuff in school (or, what amounts to the same thing, don’t remember it). This isn’t just true of quantum physics; it’s even true of economics—which directly affects people’s lives.

Critical thinking is how you can tell when a politician has distorted the views of his opponent and you need to spend more time listening to that opponent speak. Critical thinking could probably have saved us from electing Donald Trump President.

Critical thinking is how you tell that a supplement which “has not been evaluated by the FDA” (which is to say, nearly all of them) probably contains something mostly harmless that maybe would benefit you if you were deficient in it, but for most people really won’t matter—and definitely isn’t something you can substitute for medical treatment.

Critical thinking is how you recognize that much of the history you were taught as a child was a sanitized, simplified, nationalist version of what actually happened. But it’s also how you recognize that simply inverting it all and becoming the sort of anti-nationalist who hates your own country is at least as ridiculous. Thomas Jefferson was both a pioneer of democracy and a slaveholder. He was both a hero and a villain. The world is complicated and messy—and nothing will let you see that faster than critical thinking.


Critical thinking tells you that whenever a new “financial innovation” appears—like mortgage-backed securities or cryptocurrency—it will probably make obscene amounts of money for a handful of insiders, but will otherwise be worthless if not disastrous to everyone else. (And maybe if enough people had good critical thinking skills, we could stop the next “innovation” from getting so far!)

More widespread critical thinking could even improve our job market, as interviewers would no longer be taken in by the candidates who are best at overselling themselves, and would instead pay more attention to the more-qualified candidates who are quiet and honest.

In short, critical thinking constitutes a large portion of what is ordinarily called common sense or wisdom; some of that simply comes from life experience, but a great deal of it is actually a learnable skill set.

Of course, even if it can be learned, that still raises the question of how it can be taught. I don’t think we have a sound curriculum for teaching critical thinking, and in my more cynical moments I wonder if many of the powers that be like it that way. Knowing that many—not all, but many—politicians make their careers primarily from deceiving the public, it’s not so hard to see why those same politicians wouldn’t want to support teaching critical thinking in public schools. And it’s almost funny to me watching evangelical Christians try to justify why critical thinking is dangerous—they come so close to admitting that their entire worldview is totally unfounded in logic or evidence.

But at least I hope I’ve convinced you that it is something worthwhile to know, and that the world would be better off if we could teach it to more people.

A new chapter in my life, hopefully

PNRJ current events, personal, politics , , , ,

Jan 17 JDN 2459232

My birthday is coming up soon, and each year around this time I try to step back and reflect on how the previous year has gone and what I can expect from the next one.

Needless to say, 2020 was not a great year for me. The pandemic and its consequences made this quite a bad year for almost everyone. Months of isolation and fear have made us all stressed and miserable, and even with the vaccines coming out the end is still all too far away. Honestly I think I was luckier than most: My work could be almost entirely done remotely, and my income is a fixed stipend, so financially I faced no hardship at all. But isolation still wreaks its toll.

Most of my energy this past year has been spent on the job market. I applied to over 70 different job postings, and from that I received 6 interviews, all but one of which I’ve already finished. Then, if they liked how I did in those interviews, I will be invited to another phase, which in normal times would be a flyout where candidates visit the campus; but due to COVID it’s all being done remotely now. And then, finally, I may actually get some job offers. Statistically I think I will probably get some kind of offer at this point, but I can’t be sure—and that uncertainty is quite nerve-wracking. I may get a job and move somewhere new, or I may not and have to stay here for another year and try again. Both outcomes are still quite probable, and I really can’t plan on either one.

If I do actually get a job, this will open a new chapter in my life—and perhaps I will finally be able to settle down with a permanent career, buy a house, start a family. One downside of graduate school I hadn’t really anticipated is how it delays adulthood: You don’t really feel like you are a proper adult, because you are still in the role of a student for several additional years. I am all too ready to be done with being a student. I feel as though I’ve spent all my life preparing to do things instead of actually doing them, and I am now so very tired of preparing.

I don’t even know for sure what I want to do—I feel disillusioned with academia, I haven’t been able to snare any opportunities in government or nonprofits, and I need more financial security than I could get if I leapt headlong into full-time writing. But I am quite certain that I want to actually do something, and no longer simply be trained and prepared (and continually evaluated on that training and preparation).

I’m even reluctant to do a postdoc, because that also likely means packing up and moving again in a few year (though I would prefer it to remaining here another year).

I have to keep reminding myself that all of this is temporary: The pandemic will eventually be quelled by vaccines, and quarantine procedures will end, and life for most of us will return to normal. Even if I don’t get a job I like this year, I probably will next year; and then I can finally tie off my education with a bow and move on. Even if the first job isn’t permanent, eventually one will be, and at last I’ll be able to settle into a stable adult life.

Much of this has already dragged on longer than I thought it would. Not the job market, which has gone more or less as expected. (More accurately, my level of optimism has jumped up and down like a roller coaster, and on average what I thought would happen has been something like what actually happened so far.) But the pandemic certainly has; the early attempts at lockdown were ineffective, the virus kept spreading worse and worse, and now there are more COVID cases in the US than ever before. Southern California in particular has been hit especially hard, and hospitals here are now overwhelmed just as we feared they might be.

Even the removal of Trump has been far more arduous than I expected. First there was the slow counting of ballots because so many people had (wisely) voted absentee. Then there were the frivolous challenges to the counts—and yes, I mean frivolous in a legal sense, as 61 out of 62 lawsuits were thrown out immediately and the 1 that made it through was a minor technical issue.

And then there was an event so extreme I can barely even fathom that it actually happened: An armed mob stormed the Capitol building, forced Congress to evacuate, and made it inside with minimal resistance from the police. The stark difference in how the police reacted to this attempted insurrection and how they have responded to the Black Lives Matter protests underscores the message of Black Lives Matter better than they ever could have by themselves.

In one sense it feels like so much has happened: We have borne witness to historic events in real-time. But in another sense it feels like so little has happened: Staying home all the time under lockdown has meant that days are alway much the same, and each day blends into the next. I feel somehow unhinged frrom time, at once marveling that a year has passed already, and marveling that so much happened in only a year.

I should soon hear back from these job interviews and have a better idea what the next chapter of my life will be. But I know for sure that I’ll be relieved once this one is over.

Why do so many Americans think that crime is increasing?

PNRJ cognitive science, public policy , , , , , ,

Jan 29, JDN 2457783

Since the 1990s, crime in United States has been decreasing, and yet in every poll since then most Americans report that they believe that crime is increasing.

It’s not a small decrease either. The US murder rate is down to the lowest it has been in a century. There are now a smaller absolute number (by 34 log points) of violent crimes per year in the US than there were 20 years ago, despite a significant increase in total population (19 log points—and the magic of log points is that, yes, the rate has decreased by precisely 53 log points).

It isn’t geographically uniform, of course; some states have improved much more than others, and a few states (such as New Mexico) have actually gotten worse.

The 1990s were a peak of violent crime, so one might say that we are just regressing to the mean. (Even that would be enough to make it baffling that people think crime is increasing.) But in fact overall crime in the US is now the lowest it has been since the 1970s, and still decreasing.

Indeed, this decrease has been underestimated, because we are now much better about reporting and investigating crimes than we used to be (which may also be part of why they are decreasing, come to think of it). If you compare against surveys of people who say they have been personally victimized, we’re looking at a decline in violent crime rates of two thirds—109 log points.

Just since 2008 violent crime has decreased by 26% (30 log points)—but of course we all know that Obama is “soft on crime” because he thinks cops shouldn’t be allowed to just shoot Black kids for no reason.

And yet, over 60% of Americans believe that overall crime in the US has increased in the last 10 years (though only 38% think it has increased in their own community!). These figures are actually down from 2010, when 66% thought crime was increasing nationally and 49% thought it was increasing in their local area.

The proportion of people who think crime is increasing does seem to decrease as crime rates decrease—but it still remains alarmingly high. If people were half as rational as most economists seem to believe, the proportion of people who think crime is increasing should drop to basically zero whenever crime rates decrease, since that’s a really basic fact about the world that you can just go look up on the Web in a couple of minutes. There’s no deep ambiguity, not even much “rational ignorance” given the low cost of getting correct answers. People just don’t bother to check, or don’t feel they need to.
What’s going on? How can crime fall to half what it was 20 years ago and yet almost two-thirds of people think it’s actually increasing?

Well, one hint is that news coverage of crime doesn’t follow the same pattern as actual crime.

News coverage in general is a terrible source of information, not simply because news organizations can be biased, make glaring mistakes, and sometimes outright lie—but actually for a much more fundamental reason: Even a perfect news channel, qua news channel, would report what is surprising—and what is surprising is, by definition, improbable. (Indeed, there is a formal mathematical concept in probability theory called surprisal that is simply the logarithm of 1 over the probability.) Even assuming that news coverage reports only the truth, the probability of seeing something on the news isn’t proportional to the probability of the event occurring—it’s more likely proportional to the entropy, which is probability times surprisal.

Now, if humans were optimal information processing engines, that would be just fine, actually; reporting events proportional to their entropy is actually a very efficient mechanism for delivering information (optimal, under certain types of constraints), provided that you can then process the information back into probabilities afterward.

But of course, humans aren’t optimal information processing engines. We don’t recompute the probabilities from the given entropy; instead we use the availability heuristic, by which we simply use the number of times we can think of something happening as our estimate of the probability of that event occurring. If you see more murders on TV news than you used you, you assume that murders must be more common than they used to be. (And when I put it like that, it really doesn’t sound so unreasonable, does it? Intuitively the availability heuristic seems to make sense—which is part of why it’s so insidious.)

Another likely reason for the discrepancy between perception and reality is nostalgia. People almost always have a more positive view of the past than it deserves, particularly when referring to their own childhoods. Indeed, I’m quite certain that a major reason why people think the world was much better when they were kids was that their parents didn’t tell them what was going on. And of course I’m fine with that; you don’t need to burden 4-year-olds with stories of war and poverty and terrorism. I just wish people would realize that they were being protected from the harsh reality of the world, instead of thinking that their little bubble of childhood innocence was a genuinely much safer world than the one we live in today.

Then take that nostalgia and combine it with the availability heuristic and the wall-to-wall TV news coverage of anything bad that happens—and almost nothing good that happens, certainly not if it’s actually important. I’ve seen bizarre fluff pieces about puppies, but never anything about how world hunger is plummeting or air quality is dramatically improved or cars are much safer. That’s the one thing I will say about financial news; at least they report it when unemployment is down and the stock market is up. (Though most Americans, especially most Republicans, still seem really confused on those points as well….) They will attribute it to anything from sunspots to the will of Neptune, but at least they do report good news when it happens. It’s no wonder that people are always convinced that the world is getting more dangerous even as it gets safer and safer.

The real question is what we do about it—how do we get people to understand even these basic facts about the world? I still believe in democracy, but when I see just how painfully ignorant so many people are of such basic facts, I understand why some people don’t. The point of democracy is to represent everyone’s interests—but we also end up representing everyone’s beliefs, and sometimes people’s beliefs just don’t line up with reality. The only way forward I can see is to find a way to make people’s beliefs better align with reality… but even that isn’t so much a strategy as an objective. What do I say to someone who thinks that crime is increasing, beyond showing them the FBI data that clearly indicates otherwise? When someone is willing to override all evidence with what they feel in their heart to be true, what are the rest of us supposed to do?