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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?