Retaking the political middle

As many of us have railed and ranted against in the past few years, both the Democratic and Republican parties have gone extreme.  The right has gone right and the left has gone left.  The middle is largely absent.  This has really hurt our country’s ability to get anything done.  It seriously risks our prosperity, and moreso the prosperity of the next generations.

I read an article last week with an interesting thought. (For the life of me, I can’t find it.  If anyone saw it, please let me know so I can add the link.).  If things go on the way they are trending, it will get worse before it gets better. The demographic changes – growth of minorities who typically vote Democratic – will keep the Dems in the White House.  Gerrymandering and population density in rural areas and the South will keep the GOP controlling Congress.  So we will have gridlock forever going forward.

The one opportunity is if one of the parties retakes the middle.  This doesn’t mean going after Independents.  Research suggests that most people who register as Independents consistently hold either conservative or liberal opinions, they just don’t want to be affiliated with a party they don’t believe in.  On the other hand, moderates are people of any party who hold middle of the road policy positions.  Research here shows that they come from all parties as well as unaffiliated voters.

The author (of the article I can’t find) thinks that only one party can do this.  Because both parties force themselves to disagree on everything, even when they traditionally agree (e.g. Mitt Romney invented Obamacare), the first one who retakes the middle will force the other party to go more extreme, not less. So the first party to retake the middle could control government decades.

The author thinks that the Dems have a better chance to do this.  Not because they are better, but ironically because they are so dysfunctional.  The left has not been able to scare the bejeezus out of incumbents from being “primaried” like the Tea Party has done to the GOP middle.

For myself, I would vote for whichever party shifts the party platform to the middle.  Especially if it forces the other one to be more extreme. 

A public database of workplace injuries

The U.S. Department of Labor has plans to create a publicly available database of workplace safety incidents for large corporations.  The idea is that adding this kind of public visibility for injuries and illnesses will encourage companies to develop more effective safety programs and will raise the public visibility for the 3 million workers a year who are hurt or sickened.  If companies do a really good job, they can use this as a benefit by promoting their safety record in a more publicly credible way. 

Companies have legitimate concerns because data is often misused by advocates and by people who don’t understand statistical validity and reliability.  They might compare the safety records of companies in different industries, with different workforces, and come to erroneous conclusions. There are a slew of information processing heuristics that I have blogged about at length that would lead company advocates to underappreciate the problems and safety advocates to overappreciate the problems.

The trick then comes down to how the database user interface is designed.  With data from 500,000 companies available, accurate and fair comparisons will be available in most cases.  The interface should be designed to highlight these rather than to allow full flexibility to surf and mine the data to get whatever the user wants.  This is different from the approach taken for many database projects, but may be a better way to go in this case, both politically and in recognition of human nature. 

One way of achieving this would be to use a derived industry-specific metric.  Weighted and adjusted rates are common in public health, economics, and many other domains.  For example, a company with a 1.3 for injuries could indicate that they have 30% more injuries or 0.3 standard deviations more or whatever, compared to a carefully matched set of other companies.  Once the political minefield of developing the weighting and adjusting statistics has been waded through, it might be reasonable to presume that the rates will be used accurately or if not could easily be disputed. 

Of course, organizations will still try to game the system.  That is also human nature.  There will be underreporting incentives targeted directly at employees.  There will be coding schemes that minimize the apparent severity of injuries that are reported.  But if this is done across the board, it could be that the weighting and adjusting process will cancel these all out and we can compare companies within an industry, industries across the economy, and individual companies over time.  This benefit is too much to give up on. 

How oversimplified, media-created memes become accepted facts.

The problems in the Middle East are not because of colonial border-drawing: How oversimplified, media-created memes become accepted facts.

This is one of my societal pet peeves.  It is a practical reality that most of us get our knowledge of the world from the media.   We were not all history majors in college.  We don’t read the original scholarly analyses that research world history.  And we have enough going on in our lives to become experts in various problems around the world, even the important ones.  So when a variety of news media all say the same thing, we tend to believe it.  This makes total sense and is a good thing as long as the media are responsible in wielding this great power. 

But they are not.

For my entire life, I have heard over and over again that one of the leading causes of sectarian violence in the Middle East is because the colonial powers drew these nice straight lines that cut through ethnic regions, putting some Kurds in Turkey, some in Syria, and some in Iraq.  Iraq was part Kurd, part Sunni, and part Shia.  If they had just drawn the borders to put each group into its own country, much of the violence over the past half-century could have been avoided.

But it turns out, this is such as oversimplification as to be virtually false.  Why are the Alawites (of Bashar al Assad) in power in Syria despite being from the minority?  It was a very smart way for the French colonialists to maintain power during the time they wanted to remain colonialists.  If the group you prop up is the smallest, they have a great motivation to keep you as colonial overlords.  If not, they lose all of that great power.  But because they are small, they need to use some harsh and often violent methods to keep order.  This sets the stage for sectarian violence once the colonialists leave.  France leaves the Alawites in power and the majority Sunnis are ready to take back power and in many cases exact revenge for genuine atrocities.  It is not because of the borders.  The same thing happened in Lebanon and elsewhere.  The Soviet Union did this when creating their Central Asian republics.  Africa too.

Second, the borders that the colonial powers drew were not completely arbitrary after all.  Many of them followed borders that had existed for centuries – through the Ottoman Empire and in some cases centuries early.  They didn’t just draw straight lines because they wanted to save ink on the maps.  Another argument is that they should have let the people who lived there set their own borders.  That is what they tried in the Balkans and we know how that turned out. 

Recently, the Atlantic had a good article on this.  I heard a story on NPR recently that made some of the same points.  These are what opened my eyes.  But since most of us get our news from Jon Stewart (who got it wrong), and the broadcast nightly news (who frequently get it wrong), most of us have it wrong too. 

Hacking an election through Twitter

You have probably seen with the new kind of ticker that the cable news networks have become fond of showing on the bottom of the screen.  It used to be news headlines.  Now it is their live Twitter feed.  I wonder what this says about the famous firewall between the content and the business sides of the news media.  The headlines had real value.  The Twitter feeds get better ratings.  They stimulate the social impulses that we all have in the depths of our primitive brains.  On the other hand, the news headlines feed the modern analytical, knowledge-seeking brain – which is quick to fatigue and get bored. Knowledge is hard.  Gossip is juicy. 

This has not only taken over the ticker.  Many news shows now have a segment dedicated to reporting on what is trending on Twitter.  Twitter trends, instead of just quantifying what is being talked about, have become the subject of the discussion itself.

So why am I bringing this up today?  I heard about a very subtle but insidious trick that has been used to rig elections in places such as Russia and Mexico.  These could easily be used here as well. 

Let’s say we are in the run-up to an important election.  At some point, the media is bound to report on which candidate is trending higher on Twitter.  There was even a recent study that found Twitter volume was a better predictor of the winner of elections than the official polls are.  In the cases that were uncovered (and probably many that went uncovered), Twitter bots were programmed to post random (but human-sounding) tweets about one candidate.  This is not too hard.  You could but random constructions together in the form of “I liked what Joe said about taxes/education/guns/healthcare/etc. today/last night/yesterday/etc.”   All kinds of combinations works and when you only have 140 characters you don’t expect much detail anyway.  Thousands of these get sent out from hundreds of fake accounts.  At first, just the people following the candidate’s hashtag see them.   But when the media picks up on it, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.  The media tells the world (or at least the voting region) that Joe is skyrocketing on Twitter.  The subconscious desire to find agreement with our social group makes us all give Joe a second look.  “Hey, maybe he is better than I thought !!”  This isn’t going to get a crazy radical elected, but it could certainly change the election by 5-10%, which is the margin of most contested elections. 

The same tactic has been used to overload a Congressional office.  If your local Representative gets 10,000 tweets/emails/Facebook posts all in favor of one policy or another, he/she is going to think twice about voting against it.  They all seem to be coming from different accounts, even if they are all bots.  If he/she wants to get re-elected, well, you know the rest.  

This doesn’t just bother me in the way that user experience problems do. This scares me.  We already have enough losers in government.  This could make it much worse. 

Religious parties in a democracy

Ok, I am revealing a little bit of my inner geek here, but the way I learn about the world is not Time Magazine or the Washington Post like most people, but rather by reading the geopolitical intelligence reports from Stratfor (the same place many US Presidents turn) and to research journals like Democratization.  These sources tend to be a lot more comprehensive, objective, penetrating.  But a lot harder to read because they are long and use lots of scholarly language. 

The latest of Democratization was a special issue that brought together a series of papers from some of the leading experts around the world on religious political parties.  The researchers are all from different places and so they have very different ideas (hence the more objective perspective you get when you read them all). 

The impetus for the collection was the Arab Spring and how the different Muslim Brotherhood parties are handling their newfound power in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, etc.  For example, why did the Muslim Brotherhood in Tunisia put together a broad, pluralistic coalition while the Egyptian Brotherhood decided to become the autocrat they replaced? Is it because of the way the party had been treated over the last few decades by the former leadership/society?  Or because of the values of the society itself?  Or socio-economic differences?  Or was it due to differences in the parties?  The extremity of their religious views?  Their conservative/progressive political stance independent of their religion?  How connected they are to the military? If they were a minority part of a governing coalition in the past (and got a taste of governance)?  If they have a nationalistic ideology? 

It is really hard to do valid research in this area because there are no control groups.  Do these studies used a case study method and looked all over the world (I was shocked by how many religious parties there are around the world), including India, Northern Ireland, Italy, Chile, Turkey, Israel as well as the Arab Spring examples.  It is really the questions that they raised that I found interesting:

·         What would you think of a party that has extreme religious views but believes in pluralistic governance (compared to the moderately religious party that wants total control)?

·         What about a party with a great deal of support from the general population but dominates the military and favors a militaristic foreign policy?

·         What about a party that wants to force the whole country to follow its religious laws and practices, but those laws and practices happen to be very open and tolerant (allows same sex marriage, feeds the hungry, etc)?

More questions than answers, but I found this to be really good food for thought.

The Zimmerman verdict is about the threshold of evidence, not racism in America

I was going to hold back because everyone seems to be so emotional about the Zimmerman verdict.  But I have to present this, because it is a completely different perspective on this case. 

This is what struck me from this whole fiasco.  Both groups, the passionate individuals demonstrating in support of Treyvon Martin and who were so sure that George Zimmerman should have been convicted of Murder One and the equally passionate individuals demonstrating that Zimmerman was the victim of overzealous prosecution, were making the SAME BIG MISTAKE.

We live in a legal system based on a standard of reasonable doubt based on the evidence presented in court.  How many of us were in that court?  Were you?  I wasn't.  Neither were any of the people demonstrating - from either side. 

What does this tell us?  It doesn't tell us if the verdict was correct or not.  But it does tell us that NO ONE - Not the people on one side or the people on the other side - NO ONE can say that the verdict should have gone one way or the other.  Not you and not me.  Because we didn't see the evidence that was presented in court.  And so we can't say if that evidence meets the standard of convincing a jury of 12 U.S. citizens beyond a reasonable doubt that he was guilty of a strict legal definition of murder or manslaughter as explained to them in court. 

We can read the judge's instructions to the jury, and we can even read transcripts of the testimony at some point.  But we can't put ourselves in the place of the jury who were required to look into the eyes of the few witnesses and determine whether they were convincing or not.  Beyond a reasonable doubt.

My heart tells me the George Zimmerman went way over what he should have.  He was a neighborhood watch member who was pretending to be a cop.  He was looking for trouble.  He should not have been there in the first place.  He should not have gone after Treyvon.  And he definitely should not have shot his weapon.  This is a great example of why we need stronger gun laws.  But I also think that there are a gazillion scenarios in which the testimony would not reach the standard of reasonable doubt, even if he really was guilty of murder in the absolute sense.  I can also imagine scenarios in which it would have.  But since I was not in the courtroom, I don't know either way.  And neither do you.  And neither do any of the people demonstrating.

So I think it is great if they are demonstrating for something productive.  Perhaps they could demonstrate for programs to get better race relations.  Or to mandate better training for neighborhood watch volunteers.  Or for more volunteering in one's community.  But death threats to Robert Zimmerman (George's brother)?  Or even the people who are so sure that Zimmerman should have been found guilty and the verdict is just another example of institutionalized racism in the US.   This is ridiculous.

Law enforcement and fishing expeditions

This is a big overreach by US law enforcement. Collecting an arrestee's DNA to confirm his or her identity makes sense. So does comparing it to a limited set of cold cases if there is evidence linking the arrestee to those crimes. But comparing it to a set of all DNA from all cold cases is a violation of the 4th Amendment if I ever saw one. Isn't that the point? Isn't that why we have a pejorative term called "fishing expedition"? What makes this scary is that you might look similar to a suspect, get picked up for questioning even when you have done nothing, and then your DNA gets taken, submitted to the database, and then linked to a crime from 20 years ago. And you might not even have done THAT crime either, your DNA might have coicidentally been in the room where the crime happened. A bank ATM where a hold up occurred, a hotel room where a rape occurred. And then you get dragged through the mud again - Your name tarnished for nothing. Your reputation possibly ruined forever because people will always wonder. This is just WRONG!!!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/supreme-court-upholds-maryland-law-says-police-may-take-dna-samples-from-arrestees/2013/06/03/0b619ade-cc5a-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html