“Where Are The Youth?!”

Sometimes it takes stepping back from a problem to realize the solution. This happened to be a couple days ago at a meeting of one of my groups and made me think, “Do I give up or do I try and solve the problem?”

The situation is this – our group is going through a serious problem, changing locations. With a highly contested vote, we (barely) agreed to rent this location that will be difficult to pay for. Meanwhile, we’re still operating out of our old location, in order to keep paying the bills. So we’re meeting weekly to discuss concerns and address what needs to be done.

So far, so good. So the meeting location suddenly gets moved to the new location, and the president only bothers to tell about… oh, seven people. Considering twenty are supposed to come to this meeting, this comes as a bit of a shock when I come in the old location and find only three bewildered people wondering where the rest of the officers are. Thankfully, we’ve already set things our meetings to be hybrid–both in person and online–so I fire up my computer and connect to the meeting.

This is where things really start to fall apart. The president uses his phone to connect in, because we don’t have wifi up at the new location. The connection was so bad that (at its best), we were barely hearing the folks on the other end. Then it decides to occasionally glitch out, so now we’re only hearing every other word. But what came through clearly at one point was one of the (younger) officers decrying, “Why are we the only ones here? Why are we doing this alone?!”

And that’s when the answer occurs to me. The reason no one’s helping out is because no one asks for help; they just assume you know they need it. This meeting was a case in point. They just decided to go to the new location because it would easier to show everyone the changes that needed to be made before we could move in, rather than rely on diagrams. Good idea. The problem is they didn’t tell anyone they were going to do it. The officers who had arrived early at the old location just told everyone there, “Let’s go,” and they did. They didn’t even consider that more people would be coming.

Which led me to three answers to this situation. One, all the people they considered important were already there, so it didn’t matter telling anyone else. (This is a sin of com-mission.) Two, they didn’t remember that other people were going to show up. (A sin of o-mission.) Or three, it never occurred in their minds to tell anybody else. (Just being stupid.) I’m more inclined based on Hanlon’s Razor that it’s just being stupid.

So this leaves me with a problem of my own, since I’m the communications officer for this group. Do I assume that a) they don’t think I’m important enough to tell me? b) don’t think my work is valuable? c) they’re just clueless. The problem with what I believe is the actual answer is that if they’re clueless, they’re never going to improve. In a way, it also tells me that they don’t think I’m important enough or that my work is valuable. On other hand, they’re not being mean. If this had been the first time this happened, I would understand, but it’s a pattern. Ironically, it was the problem I was brought in to solve, so I guess I failed at my mission.

This reminds of a scene in a autobiography called Outwitting History by Aaron Lansky. He was going to Yiddish groups and asking for their books to help preserve them. Him and his young friends were in basement while the elderly remnant was upstairs blaring, “Where are the youth?!” It never occurred to him to check the basement. It never occurred to him to ask his grandkids or his friend’s grandkids to join. To him, if they were important, they’d already be at the meeting, because after all, he knew it was happening. We are blinded by our own bubble.

So I’m hoping in a couple days I will have calmed down enough to decide let’s fix this problem. But more likely, I’m guessing I’ll just quit… because I don’t think the people in charge are likely to do the changes I think are necessary to fix it, which basically boil down to “When something happens, you tell me, and I tell everyone else.” If they haven’t done it yet, I doubt they’ll do it in the future… but I should give them a chance to try.

Functionality versus Aesthetics

Context: I’m currently taking a class on public planning and this post is actually one of my homework assignments. However, I liked my answers so much I thought I’d share. So enjoy!

For planners like Le Corbusier, his solution for the built environment was that architecture would raise the quality of life for the working classes. This involved raising up buildings on pillars, allowing for open floor planning, and making non-supporting walls to be designed however the architect wished. (Fishman, 1977) This is a concept that is used in much commercial real estate today. This is important for businesses, because their desire to move to a new location is entirely dependent on its functionality. Can you shift this warehouse to meet our needs as a cheese manufacturer? In this situation, perception and aesthetics are secondary, because their customer does not come to their warehouse to purchase their product.

When dealing with residential real-estate, however, perception and aesthetics are primary, not secondary. This is called the hedonic pricing model, which identifies price factors according to the premise that price is determined both by internal characteristics of the good being sold and external factors affecting it. When someone is looking to buy a house to live in, they’re not only looking at characteristics of the property itself (solar panels, faucets, condition), but the surrounding neighborhood (crime rate, schools, pollution). (Hargrave, 2011) Your community may be beautiful and green, but if it’s perceived as a crime-riddle hovel (see Bijlmer), no one but the most desperate will move there.

Aesthetics are key to convincing people to live in a particular area. “People move to Los Angeles… to live in the middle of a park,” said a Dutch visitor to Joe Edmiston, Executive Director of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy. “They want a lawn in front, a recreation area in the backyard, and trees surrounding them, between them and the street; where I come from we call that a park.” (2012) This is what the suburbs provide many new homeowners and which is why it is far more appealing than closeness to work, size of floor plan, or other functional considerations. Having a place to play is important to parents of young children, and having the “park” be on the third floor of one of Le Corbusier’s designs does not allow for the safety that parents are looking for. It may be functional and efficient, but it is perceived as unsafe, and without those considerations first, your project will become an utter failure.

Bibliography

Edmiston, Ed. LA Densification Must Offer Suburban-like Amenities – Green Spaces and Places. The Planning Report. September 28, 2012. https://www.planningreport.com/2012/09/28/edmiston-la-densification-must-offer-suburban-amenities-green-spaces-and-places

Fishman, Robert. Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century : Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier. New York: Basic Books, 1977.

Hargrave, Marshall. Hedonic Pricing: Definition, How the Model Is Used, and Example. Investopedia. April 05, 2021. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/hedonicpricing.asp

Reactionary Architecture

Context: I’m currently taking a class on public planning and this post is actually one of my homework assignments. However, I liked my answers so much I thought I’d share. So enjoy!

Max Weber once wrote that “Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards. It takes both passion and perspective. Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth – that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible. But to do that a man must be a leader, and not only a leader but a hero as well, in a very sober sense of the word.” (1919) Reactionary movements are exciting and enthusiastic because they show the world as we want to see it, not as it is. However, “to seek for the look of things as a primary purpose or as the main drama is apt to make nothing but trouble.” (Jacobs, 1961)

Pi de Brujin was one of those planners who embraced the reactionary Modernist movement of Le Cite Radieuse, Le Corbusier’s vision of a utopian city that was environmentally friendly (green spaces), used little land (because of high-rise apartment blocks, and most importantly, were cheap (using concrete). Amsterdam created an entire new community called “Bijlmermeer,” and for seven years, worked to create this new utopian community. Although the community was created as intended, the expected infrastructure did not follow. Construction was delayed on the new metro line. One dirt road led to the community. There was a shopping area, but no shops moved in, which meant residents travelled far to get essentials. Eventually, the middle class Amsterdamers failed to take up the units, and were eventually taken up by the poor, recent Surinam immigrants, and the neighborhood became a ghetto. (Mingle, 2018) Often people would simply break in and squat in the empty apartments, which meant that the association responsible for maintenance didn’t have enough money to keep up repairs. Vandalism was rampant and drug use (especially heroin) was common. (ibid)

The intent was good; post-war Amsterdam was crowded, expensive, and polluted. The planners considered economic, environmental, and equitable considerations when planning the housing. However, de Brujin thought that middle-class families want to live in high-rise apartment complexes instead of single-family homes… or more likely, would have no choice. “Unsuccessful city areas are areas which lack this kind of intricate mutual support” (Jacobs, 1961) and by trying to force unrelated people into a mold you want to fit, rather than how they want to live, your project is inevitably doomed to failure.  

Bibliography

Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Knopf Doubleday Group. 1961.

Mingle, Katie. Bijlmer (City of the Future, Part 1). 99 Percent Invisible. February 20, 2018. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/bijlmer-city-future-part-1/

Weber, Max. Politics as a Vocation. Konigl-Bibliothek Berlin. 1919.

Does Transportation Need a Revolution?

Context: I’m currently taking a class on public planning and this post is actually one of my homework assignments. However, I liked my answers so much I thought I’d share. So enjoy!

It’s easy to split every issue into a dichotomy; bikes versus cars, sustainability versus sprawl, good versus evil. When your job is to literally change the shape the earth, even on the smaller scale of cities, that desire to do good and make the world a better place is overwhelming. However, nothing is that simple. “In short, the planner must reconcile not two, but at least three conflicting interests: to “grow” the economy, distribute this growth fairly, and in the process not degrade the ecosystem.” (Campbell, 1996) Transportation is designed to get people from point A to point B; the greatest demand is to get people to work. So mass transit is usually designed to help people to get from the suburbs to the central business district (CBD). Except what happens is your job is not in the CBD? What if people’s choices in where to live are not balanced by distance to work but rather distance to entertainment, schools, or family?

Which is why “community development planners typically work in neighbourhoods (sic) where the housing is substandard, where crime, property abandonment and low-quality retail and recreational options curtail day-to-day social and economic functions and interactions, where few people have meaningful or well-remunerated work, and where marginalization and lack of recognition limit people’s capability to flourish as political subjects.” (Wolf-Powers, 2014) When we remove the economic difficulties, suddenly making a social equitable and environmentally friendly neighborhood becomes far easier! It also helps that many of these residents are already using public transit, because of the expense of car ownership, to make it easier for people to use what you already want them to use.

But what about convincing the middle and upper class? Take what is happening in my hometown; a real estate development called Culdesac Tempe. It is located right along the light rail, makes ample use of rideshares and car-sharing services, but “personal cars are not allowed…” because it “does not have to devote any space to parking, creating ‘ample open space for a large dog park and pool.’” (Budin, 2003) This 700 unit apartment complex broke ground in 2019. As of today (January 2024), it still hasn’t opened completely. Only 114 units have been opened, with another 174 to open by the end of 2025. (Boudway, 2023) It has been sitting as an unfinished hulk along one of the most highly development parts of the city. Why the delay? Part of it is the cost. Rents start at $1420 for a one-bedroom and $3000 for a three bedroom. Only 400 of the nearly 10,000 people interested have put down a $100 refundable deposit. (ibid) The other part is city ordinances which still demand parking minimums for all new construction, which as anyone who tries to build in Tempe will tell you, getting exemptions from their planning department is a bear.

That is why “clean slate” projects are far easier to push forward instead of novel renovations of existing framework. As Scott Campbell (1996) explains, “planners will not always be able, on their own, to represent and balance social, economic, and environmental interests simultaneously.” You have trade off one goal for another. So you can build affordable low-cost housing with access to public transit, but you can’t build it in the middle of the most expensive real-estate. You can build environmentally sound, less car use neighborhoods, but it will cost an arm and a leg. Planners have to choose their goals and stop thinking they’re saving the world.

Bibliography

Boudway, Ira. This Development Wants Residents to Ditch Their Cars. In Phoenix. Bloomberg. July 31, 2023. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-07-31/how-a-car-free-community-in-phoenix-defeated-parking-minimums

Budin, Jeremiah. This futuristic neighborhood is ‘banning’ cars for all residents — but it’s offering them a thought-provoking deal in return. The Cool Down. October 16, 2003. https://www.yahoo.com/news/neighborhood-banning-cars-residents-offering-111500286.html

Campbell, Scott. Green Cities, Growing Cities, Just Cities? Urban Planning and the Contradictions of Sustainable Development. Journal of the American Planning Association. 62, 3. Summer 1996.

Wolf-Powers, Laura. Understanding community development in a “theory of action” framework: Norms, markets, justice. Planning Theory & Practice. 15, 2. Pp. 202-219. 2014

“The 11 Principles Require No Proof”

An acquaintance of mine put this up as their motto and left me utterly confused. Which 11 principles? Of What? Why do they require no proof? A motto that represents who you are does you little good if you have to explain it. Then it occurred to me – principles never require proof.

To help you out – because it took me days for me to figure out – these are the eleven principles of Burning Man. But wait, Marcus, there are only ten principles! I’d reply, “Good for checking the link.” And when you said, “What link?” I’d answer, “Get out of here, you frickin’ hipster!” 🙂 The eleventh principle is “consent,” which I have to agree with, because if you don’t consent to the principles in the first place, none of the other ten mean a darn.

The reason the principles require no proof is because they’re principles. If they required proof, they’d be called theories or commandments. Principle means “something to aspire to,” because my definition, we haven’t achieved that principle yet. Burning Man is a voluntary gathering. Several thousand people head off into the desert for a week to live a life of peace, love, and understanding. Here is where the principles fall apart. Peace, love, and understanding is only possible because this is a vacation and you brought in enough beer and steaks to share in case your neighbor ran out. If we ran into week two or three, and you keep having to gift your neighbor the food they need, then doesn’t this run into violating radical self-reliance? Even the organizers had to create their own police force… we don’t call it that, but given enough people, a government is necessary. Because to paraphrase Jimmy Madison, “men aren’t angels.”

It’s good to have principles, it’s great if everyone shares them, but don’t expect them to always work. Always expect that someone will try to game the system and prepare to deal with or expel them from your company. Which is why having it as a motto rubs me the wrong way. You’re saying that you believe in these things, that it is a template for how we should all live, but by saying “they require no proof” is to say they are self-evident. “Certain inalienable rights” is a concept and I believe should be self-evident, but many warlords around the world today have no trouble taking your life, your liberty, and care nothing about your happiness, just your obedience.

Which is why I really prefer this page that explains the 11 principles, because it explains in its “pro tips” the problems with the principles. The writers wouldn’t phrase it that way, but in helping out new burners with radical self-reliance: “There will be no water, no food vendors, and no merch. The only amenity provided will be portapotties.“ It is self-evident that 50,000 people create a lot of waste and it has to go somewhere. So the money you pay to get into the event goes to supporting another principle, Leave No Trace. Think about that for a second: these principled people don’t expect people to bag their own poop. Why not? Because nothing in their lives has prepared for them for that experience. Having to go to that level of self-reliance might limit their ability to follow the rest.

TJ and the other writers of the Declaration of Independence can only crib Montesquieu and talk about self-evident rights in a time in which the basics of civilization are established. Same with these – no one thinks about where or how their toilet flushes; it just does. So although it’s good to have principles, it’s not good to forget that they are established on a weak foundation. So to quote another of the founding fathers…

“I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.”

John Adams

The mistake many people make is that because I sing, war shouldn’t exist. No – they build on top of each other. You can’t be free to study painting unless your country is not under threat of attack. We’ve had plenty of examples of that recently. So what is comes down to principles should never forget that they only exist because we live in safety, have laws, and can enforce them. That way you have the principles for those who choose to violate them.

Which is why my family’s motto is “Never Unprepared.” Yeah, it’s a little wordy. but I think it works better.

20,000 Years Ago, You’re Minding Your Own Business, When…

I listen to a lot of podcasts, and my extension, a lot of commercials. Today I got hit up for the Happiness Lab podcast, which is a… help you through of dealing with climate change anxiety. Oh, baby, did you find the WRONG audience.

Now most people when faced with being advertised for something they would never (in a million years) buy, would just laugh it off and go on. Except I can’t. Not because I’m neurotic or better than you, but because it’s the only ad playing. Over and over and over again, I hear how a chipper woman in an older soprano voice says “climate change causes us to feel sad, angry, and hopeless.” I can agree with hopeless, but since I went to public school at the beginning of the “global warming is going to destroy us all” phase, I’m not particularly sad or angry. I put it in the same category as “war in South Sudan” or “someone got shot in Baltimore.” Vague disappointment… and then I move on with my day.

I’m going to dissect this 30-second ad, because it infuriates me so much. Then some guy comes on next to say, “if you haven’t cried… about the climate, then you really haven’t experienced it.” Doesn’t that say a lot there? It should be one of those things that is obvious, it is preeminent, it should be affecting your life every day. Why are trying to convince me I should be sad?! Do I think climate change is real? Sure. Do I think it’s man-made? Probably. Do I think we should do something about it? Not at the cost of affecting my life in a measurable way. Because climate change is not affecting my life in any measurable way. So I don’t worry about it.

Thankfully, Dr. Laurie Santos (the soprano from before) has the answer and she’s created a “special season” just for this. So… apparently this is the schtick to get people to listen to her “you don’t have to be sad” talk for those who are too cheap to go to therapy. The same guy (apparently a leading scientist) comes back on saying that climate change affected our ancestors on the African savanna, but didn’t have the same mental triggers as it does now. Gee – is that because they were focused on more important things like, “I need to find enough berries to keep walking” or “all the game has moved to the river valleys, I should follow them.”

Doesn’t that tell you everything you need to know about climate change? To quote Battlestar Galactica, “All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.” Our ancestors left the fruited plains of the Sahara because it was becoming a desert, and there was no internal combustion engine to cause it. They came to the Nile, the Indus, the Yangtze because it suddenly became a lot hotter and they needed to survive. Civilization followed, because when you shove a lot of people in a smaller space, you have to get along… even if the answer to that is, “I’ve got a big stick and my friends got big sticks, so listen up.”

Don’t worry, Dr. Santos has the answers. There are little things you can do to save the planet “while still travelling, shopping, and yes, enjoying those steak dinners.” (blink) Ah… what?

The entire reason you’re drawn to this podcast is because climate change is stressing you out. You want to know how you can save the Earth. You’ve done enough research (or had it indoctrinated into you) that cows kick out methane, which is a greenhouse gas. The best thing as a planet that we can do is to stop eating beef, pork, and maybe less chicken and go veggie. “But wait, Dr. Santos, I think beef tastes great! I’m not going to give that up!”

That’s okay, because a more clueless sounding woman comes on to say, “I’m going to order a steak, I’m definitely going to have a glass of wine. Instead of feeling guilty about that, I’m going to max out my pleasure here, and then in our daily lives,” having more of these low impact changes. (blink) Right… so what you’re telling me instead is that you’re really not that upset about climate change, but you’ve been told you should be, so I’ll just say that I’m making “low impact changes,” and feel virtuous and less stress. Right… without changing our g-d thing in your life! (sigh)

As the podcast ad finishes, I realizes, “Oh, that’s who this podcast is for.” It’s for “wine and steak for dinner” lady. The college-educated leftie who’s finally making money and wants to go to the Bahamas. But wait, doesn’t burning airplane fuel ruin the environment? Doesn’t the Bahamas have to import this wine on a diesel-belching boat? Bwaaa, never mind, I’ll just sort my trash into recyclables when I get home. It’s the “carbon offset” fallacy that smart people fall into. I know I should recycle my feces, but I think my neighbors might object to the smell.

This podcast is doing exactly what they say they’re doing – making you feel better about not saving the world. Their audience doesn’t really care about saving the Earth, but they believe they should be, so they’re guilty about it. I think like Alcoholics Anonymous, if they just admit that they don’t really care about climate change, they’ll feel freer and less stressed.

Ah, I feel better anyway. I haven’t written a blog post in a while, but I really needed to get that off my chest. I should write here more often – hope you enjoy it.

Gamers Divided Will Never Be United

While riding the bus, I was playing my stupid solitaire game, and a commercial for another game comes on. I couldn’t help but notice most of them end in the gamer failing, with the challenge, “Could you do better?” Who does that speak to?

Because what it doesn’t appeal to is me. I’m playing a casual game – solitaire – it has a small challenge level and is designed for people like me who just want to be amused while waiting for something else. Which reminded me that applies to all my games: I prefer the sandbox, world building games with a little bit of challenge to keep me going.

But the “casual gamer” is not who these ads are focused to… which is odd, considering these ARE casual games they’re promoting. I think the disconnect is because the marketers are “competitive gamers;” those who fail at a level and say to themselves, “Oh hell no you don’t! I’m going to sit at this level for another hour to get past you!” Whereas in the rare time I sit down to Tour of Battlefield IV: Special Ops, I might get killed at the level three times before I say, “Let me go check on my Minecraft realm.”

I prefer cooperative games where I can build a civilization that lasts. But I don’t want a huge learning curve to accomplish that, regardless of how cool the game is. Look at Sid Meyer’s Civilization. You start out with a limited number of choices (one or two units, four or five technologies to research) and whole lot of nothingness to explore. Minecraft does the same technique; you chop down a tree, you build tools, then you can chop other stuff, then get better tools and more tech… yadda yadda.

But when Civilization V became VI, they forgot that rule. They combined religion, cultural advancement, and attitudes into one GIANT screen full of options. And you had to do this right off the bat, along with units and tech. And I have no idea what any of this does or why I should care or how I can improve this. So guess what? I play Civ 5 and I haven’t touched Civ 6 since. They listened to the challenge gamers, not the “builders.” In Minecraft, they have goals and challenges and dungeons that appeal to people who want to “win the game.” (And you can, apparently.) But me and my friends are builders–skeletons are (necessary) annoyances, but it encourages us to build defenses, keep the things that threaten our perfect blue buildings from being destroyed. (Trust me, creative mode–without monsters–is boring as hell.) You can still enjoy the game without the challenges.

The joy I get from extra options–or challenges–only come with playing them again. “Oh, let’s see if I can stay on this one island and still dominate the world.” OR “I wonder if I can build an automated chicken farm.” NOT Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock, where if you can’t figure out how to defeat the Cylons in Scenario 2, “Oh, well, guess you got to try it again.” Linear storylines bore the crap out of me. If I wanted that, I could read a book. I don’t care how cool the graphics are… which is why I still play Empire Deluxe, a thirty-year-old game. Okay, it’s the newer version, but the graphics are still pure-1993 VGA screens–I want the simplicity with more options. That’s true with Google’s design over Bing / Yahoo, that’s true with my games.

But I may be the minority; let me know your favorites in the comments below.

I Wouldn’t Cry At Her Funeral

My neighbor died recently. She was eighty-something widow, mother of two sons, and several grandkids. I didn’t know much beyond that because she was crazy, raving b#&$h.

I recently looked back at one of my posts which talked about discovering people dead in their houses years after they died. Our neighbor Michelle had a stroke and somehow notified the ambulance hours after it happened. She lived alone, went out once a day at 3 pm, watered her plants in the backyard, got in her car, and came back at 4 pm (I’m guessing grocery shopping). She checked her mail occasionally, but otherwise, I didn’t see her.

Frankly, that was fine with me. I hadn’t talked to her in years. In fact, I deliberately went out of my way NOT to talk to her. Our neighborly relationship started off okay; saying hi while passing, mentioning when something was broken. However, it was obvious she was a person who focused on the negative. When I was smoking my pipe in my backyard, she asked me if I could smoke it on the other side. I obliged. But when I was smoking while working on my laptop, she came out and starting watering her plants. She decided to splash me with her hose… with my $2000 laptop on me!

To quote Bugs Bunny, “You realize, this means war.” This lead to escalation between us – passing insults, dumping crap on her windshield – eventually this led to me shouting at her which led to my wife shouting at her. After that, we just agreed, “Screw her. We don’t need her in our life. I smoked on the other side of the backyard and never talked to her again. If we had to communicate to her for some reason, we called her son. Interestingly enough, he came over to our house, introduced himself, and gave us his number… you got the impression he knew who his mother was.

We saw the ambulance; my wife found out from her son she had a stroke. We prayed for her recovery–even though I hated her–but she didn’t make it and died a week later. We didn’t ask to attend her funeral; frankly, I think the neighborhood is a better place without her. I think she had been waiting to die for decades.

I try not to hate anybody, but sometimes, someone just rubs you the wrong way. Michelle was not a person who got along to get along; as far as I could tell, she didn’t talk to anyone outside her family. Certainly no one else visited, apart from repairmen. She could have easily been someone whose body wouldn’t have been discovered for two weeks.

In our neighborhood, there was also one house that was always shuttered up. I mean metal shutters over the windows, signs to tell everyone to stay out, and so many security cameras that it was overkill. It had been that way since we moved in seven years ago. My theory was that it was a snowbird who got too old to travel back and forth (like my grandparents), but never got around to selling it. He must have died because they just recently renovated it and make it really amazing looking. Did his neighbors ever wonder if there was a mummified body in Mr. Paranoid’s house?

My point? Make your platitude your attitude! No… wait, ah, what about “Life is chaos, be kind?” There’s so much hate or reason to be angry in the world – it costs you nothing to be polite. Then maybe people will come to your funeral; maybe people will wonder where you are.

Statistics Ad Absurdum

In the 1970s, orchestras began using blind auditions, playing behind a screen so the jury that cannot see them. As a result, the number of women in orchestras increased five fold… except they didn’t. That “fact” was vastly exaggerated.

Memory is a funny thing – the first factoid you hear often sticks and becomes truth, whether not it’s disproven later. What amazes me is how often that “fact” gets blown out of proportion. Take the “blind audition” story; I had never heard this until I took our DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) training at work.

Side note: My workplace does this training right. Compared to the horror stories I’ve heard, they’re not trying to shove a political agenda, or punish you for being white… just ways to be civil to each other. The only part that is “dicey” is the gender expression and identity section, but to be fair, we’re all trying to figure that out. How are we supposed to teach it?

So I’ve gone through this training around ten times–not because I was being punished, but because I work in the department that trains this. So I was asked to “produce” this class (handle the technical problems for this online class) as a favor for another trainer. Therefore, I’ve seen the video where they mention the “blind audition” research as an example of gender bias about ten times. This time, I decided to fact-check this.

The research was called “Orchestrating Impartiality: The Impact of ‘Blind’ Auditions on Female Musicians” by Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse, originally published in the September 2000 issue of the American Economic Review. You can read the original study here, but I’ll warn you, it’s 27 pages long. Even I didn’t feel like going through all of it, so if you feel like going through Andrew Gelman’s blog about it, he lays out the stats pretty well in a shorter form. The point is that they looked at nine different orchestras (the “Big Five” and four regional ones) and compared their hiring rates across fifty years of data, then saw how that changed when blind auditions were added. The end result? On p. 737 of the original study, before blind auditions, women were hired 10 percent of the time; after, 35 percent. So there was an increase… but certainly NOT five fold!

What I found more interesting–and Gelman doesn’t mention–is that the paper is 65 pages long. But wait, Marcus, you just said it was 27 pages long? The research is… the other half of the document is the 741 times (!) this article has been cited in other research. As someone who has written many, many research papers, this might explain the exaggeration. When you’re just referencing the results (like I’m doing now) in your own paper, you simplify. You don’t mention that the research found women were 25 percent higher to get to the next round of auditions, not hired. I didn’t mention it either… to make a point. When you simply copy the stats to make your point, it’s much easier to exaggerate.

So 25 percent becomes 35 percent, becomes fifty percent, becomes fivefold. Why? This is the telephone game writ large. Original research is read by other researcher and used in their research, which is read by a journalist who writes an article, which is read by a DEI trainer who decides to use it in a class. Along the way, it’s easy to forget the exact number. Or because 25 percent isn’t dramatic enough, you say 50 percent, although I’d prefer to believe that was simply the writer not going back to confirm their facts. Because people want to have hard facts to support your empirical view, that women tend to get hired less than men, and a slight increase doesn’t quite make your point, does it?

Now the research didn’t cover the numbers of applicants, rather they focused on the proportion, because “symphony orchestras do not vary much in size and have virtually identical numbers and types of jobs.” (p. 717) They don’t hire that many people per year. It did mention that almost all harpists are women and that the New York Philharmonic (as of 2000) had 35 percent women. Is it possible that less women are going into those jobs? After all, women only comprise of 3.4% of all construction trades. Now is that because, like higher math or construction fields, you have to deal with a lot of pricks who hit on you or say “girls can’t do X?” Quite possibly. Music majors were the biggest pricks I ever met in college; my theory is that the less jobs available in your career, the more competitive they have to be. Female nurses comprise of 75% of the workforce, elementary school teachers has a higher gender bias towards women.

Is it possible that different genders are favor different types of work? That working nights as a violinist is not conducive to women who want to have kids? Or am I exaggerating? 🙂 Let me know in the comments below.

Do I Care Who John Galt Is?

I just watched a very snarky video about Ayn Rand and how her writing still affects the modern GOP. As a Libertarian who has (gasp!) never read any of her works, I can say that she is both right–and wrong–at the same time.

The video was from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, which I really love, despite Oliver representing a very left-wing stance that I completely disagree with. However, he provides well-researched and interesting topics that really get me thinking. In Oliver’s opinion, Ayn Rand’s “Objectivism” is a glorification of selfishness which shows the true nature of those who like her writings, conveniently ignoring the facts that she was pro-choice, thought President Reagan was worthless, and thought Native Americans should have no rights.

Objectivism is based on the idea that human knowledge and values are objective: they exist and are determined by the nature of reality, to be discovered by one’s mind, and are not created by the thoughts one has. Now Wikipedia goes into great and soaring detail on what that means, and frankly, I have trouble understanding even this high-level view. However, I do remember that Ayn Rand stated that you either agreed with her completely or not at all, so frankly, I don’t bother learning objectivist epistemology.

That being said, as much as Oliver and his team snarked the hell out of Rand for being selfish, I have to ask… “How much do you actually care about other people?” This is my main objection to modern liberal thought; they talk a great game about saving the world, saving these people, raising up these things… but when it comes down it, they actually do very little. Rand is pointing out that if you get out of your own damn way with silly little things like morals and government interference, you can achieve greatness. If you need help to accomplish this, you are dependent and therefore subject to what rules that help comes with.

Interestingly enough, this is very similar to what Friedrich Nietzsche said. That to become the best you can be, to be a “Superman,” you need to get beyond good and evil and create your morals based on your most inner most desires. Unlike Rand, I have read Nietzsche and find him nigh impossible to get through. Why his philosophy spread at all was because an editor took out the end of every chapter (where the really profound stuff is) of all his books and published it as an abridged version. The rest is just Fred bitching about how stupid all the other philosophers are for not getting this simple premise… that he only reveals at the end of the chapter.

I like both of these philosophies, even though I don’t follow either of them. (Oh, and by the way, neither did Rand or Nietzsche.) Because I believe like the movie Wall Street (1987) taught us, “Greed is Good.” I believe man is inherently selfish; that’s important for survival as a person and a species. However, this is where you add in some Tanya (Jewish mysticism) or Buddhism or Taoism; it’s important to be selfish, BUT you need to balance it with selflessness. From a practical perspective, if you support those around you, they’re more like to support you in the future, because they understand the need to have help in the lean times. Similarly, if you give away all your money to the poor, but now you have to live on the street, you’ve done neither the poor or yourself any good. You have given the poor only temporary relief, while preventing yourself from providing for them in future. The greatest good, and greatest feeling of reward, is when you balance the two impulses. Then you can be monetarily successful and rich in good deeds.

John Galt actually gives the heroes of Atlas Shrugged hints on how to be successful and to reach the promised land. So even Rand’s characters couldn’t do it alone. But as I said, I’ve never read her works, so I could be ridiculously simplifying things. Maybe one of you have read it and can clarify it for me? Please put it in the comments below.