Given tomorrow’s launch, I thought I’d finally publish my blog post on the Trek movies.

Here is how IMDB ranks the Star Trek films:

Star Trek (2009): 8.0
The Wrath of Khan: 7.7
First Contact: 7.5
The Voyage Home: 7.2
The Undiscovered Country: 7.1
The Search for Spock: 6.5
Generations: 6.5
The Motion Picture: 6.3
Insurrection: 6.3
Nemesis: 6.3
The Final Frontier: 5.2

You can see the divisions right away, can’t you? The users easily divide the films into three categories:

Even is we assume that the IMDB ratings have some play in them (and I would say the 2009 movie is a bit over-rated right now), most people would agree with the broad strokes of that analysis. And while I would agree with it in principle, I can’t just leave it at that. I need a couple of thousand words to say what the IMDB users are saying in 11 numerical ratings before I get into the main point of this post: a breakdown of the 2009 film in anticipation of this year’s sequel.

Here is how I rate them, from worst to best (Note: non-Trek fans should knock a point off all of my ratings.):

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier is ranked dead last on IMDB at 5.2 and deserves to be there. I rank it a 6 but that’s almost entirely because of Jerry Goldsmith’s score and the earnest efforts of the cast to make it work. But there’s no escaping that this was a bad film: poorly directed, badly plotted, upending much of the series’ mythology and simply sloppy sloppy sloppy. Agony Booth has a very long breakdown of everything this film does wrong. There are simply too many things to get into and this post is already at 2000 words.

The thing is that I think there actually was a good motion picture in here somewhere. Somewhere deep down, I grant you. But the idea of Sybok isn’t totally bad and Luckinbill tries very hard to make the character work. In fact, some of the scenes with the four leads just talking work quite well (although a bit Dr. Phil-ish for me). But the entire middle act and climax just fall apart.

Star Trek: Generations: Ranked 7th at 6.5. I give it a 6. Another Agony Booth target, I am not fond of it. It just had too many of the things that annoyed me about TNG, especially the goofy promotion scene. This is a subject for a bigger post, but I often found TNG to be a somewhat schizophrenic series. Sometimes it was incredible, especially when they let Patrick Stewart carry the show. At other times, it could be pretentious and irritating. Generations has way too much of the latter, way too little of the former.

It also annoyed my scientific sensibilities. I’m willing to let a lot slide in sci-fi movies, but not when I’m punched in the face by it. The nexus energy ribbon circles the galaxy in 75 years but takes minutes to cross a solar system. Gravitational fields change instantly in response to exploding stars. And the Enterprise is taken out by one of the most insanely stupid bits of technobabble in the history of the show (and the battle scenes reuses footage from a far superior film, The Undiscovered Country).

One other point that affects my viewing: I was only a casual viewer of TNG at the time and when I watched Generations, I felt like I was missing quite a bit. There were several aspects — Data’s emotion chip, the Klingon sisters — that only made sense to fans of the TNG show. Indeed, three of the four TNG films had the problem of feeling like an episode of the show they were charging me $7 for.

This was never the case with the old series. I had not seen Space Seed when I saw Wrath of Khan but never had that feeling of alienation. In fact, I assumed that the whole Khan thing was a Noodle Incident until my dad enlightened me.

Star Trek: Nemesis: I rank this a 6 to IMDB’s 10th ranking and 6.3. It tries very hard. And when it relies on Spiner and Stewart, it does OK. Tom Hardy does about as well as he can with a poorly written and entirely unoriginal part. Frakes’ direction is solid.

But again it feels like an episode and not a particularly good one. Data’s death, surprisingly, has almost no emotional impact. And the rip-offs of Wrath of Khan are not only obvious but make one long for the superior picture.

Star Trek: Insurrection: Ranked 9th at 6.3, I rate it a 7. This one was the third and final target for The Agony Booth. The big problem, again, is that it feels like an episode of the series, not a movie.

There are a few things that work for me, notably the romance between Picard and Anij. Again, like Final Frontier, I can look at this and see the outlines of a good movie. Frakes’ direction is fine. Stewart is his usual self. But the ridiculous villains, the nonsensical plot and the sloppy script drag this down.

(A number of people have commented that they don’t find the moral conflict compelling. Surely it justifiable to move a few hundred people to benefit millions? Oddly, I find the moral conflict equally clear — in the precise opposite direction. The planet belongs to the natives. Moving them off there, even if its benefits millions, is a big deal and a violation of their basic sovereignty.)

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock is ranked sixth at 6.5, in the middle of the pack for Trek. That’s about where it belongs. It is mostly unremarkable, serving as a bridge between movies II and IV. It has some nice character moments, some funny lines and a good action scene or two. Christopher Lloyd is a wonderful villain. But it was mostly holding the fort, moving the story along. I give it a 7, mostly for personal reasons. It’s perfectly serviceable and I used to love having it on in the background while I worked. It’s also the first Trek I really remember seeing in the theater (I have vague memories of Khan.) Plus, any time my brother and I were fighting as kids, it would end up with one of us saying, “I. Have Had. Enough of You!”

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is ranked 4th at 7.2. I’m not as high on it as most people, ranking it a 7, equivalent to the bulk of the series. I don’t have a problem with it, really. It has a good plot, some great jokes and builds itself almost entirely around the characters. I think I just got Voyaged out at some point the 80′s, having seen it way too often.

(OK, here’s an odd tangent. You know how movies and TV shows can come to be associated with certain memories? Well, anytime I think of Star Trek’s II-IV, all I can think about is Pizza Hut pepperoni pizza. We used to order pizza every sunday from whichever delivery service was having a sale. And if nothing else was on, we’d pop in a classic Trek film. Now anytime I think about them, all I can think about is greasy doughy pizza. Surprisingly, however, this has not killed my love of the films. After a while, I can block it out. Or eat some bad pizza.)

Star Trek (2009): More below. This is a tentative rating, even now.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture is ranked eighth by IMDB at 6.3, a rating that seems far too low to me. The film has its flaws: it is based heavily on episodes of the original series; it is somewhat cold in its approach; Spock starts out as a very different character; it seems to focus more on special effects than the crew.

On the other hand, it also has tremendous strengths: Roddenberry’s optimism and humanism infuses the plot without being overbearing. It has intriguing ideas by the dozen, taking the seed of “The Changeling” and expanding it to a much grander notion. I really bought into Spock’s progression back to his old self. The love story between Ilea and Decker works for me (and I really wish one of the series had run with the idea of the sexually open Deltan race). And the film is enjoyable as pure spectacle, lifted by imaginative effects and Goldsmith’s magnificent score. The director’s cut is a big improvement, shifting the emphasis from the effects to the crew.

The users rate this as being equal to Insurrection or Nemesis. I find that ridiculous. TMP is a much better, much more thoughtful, much more enjoyable film. I rate it an 8. There is much that is wrong with the film. But, in my opinion, it’s overwhelmed by what’s right with it.

Star Trek: First Contact: Ranked 3rd at 7.5, I give it an 8. It is simply excellent, mainly because it puts the emotional and dramatic weight on Spiner and Stewart, the two best actors. There are just so many good moments in this one, such good supporting characters. The scenes between Alfre Woodward and Patrick Stewart shine. The actions scenes are done with skill and the script finds its heart in the very real conflict of Picard against himself. The Borg are, once again, a terrifying enemy. If Generations and the succeeding films had Trek’s worst aspects, this one had the best.

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country is ranked 5th at 7.1 and I give it an 8. Nick Meyer saved the franchise by, once again, building a Star Trek film the right way. He took contemporary political events — the end of the Cold War — and threw it at the characters rather than the other way around. Some of the best parts of the film are the quieter character moments. And once again, we see that the action scenes become thrilling when we care about what’s going on. The final battle between two Federation ships and a cloaked Bird of Prey is one of the most tense of the series.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is ranked second by IMDB users at 7.7, second only to the recent reboot. Given IMDB’s bias toward recent movies, that means it is universally regarded as the best of the series. I agree.

I once said on Twitter that Nick Meyer, more than any other director, *got* Star Trek. He understood its rhythms and its construction. The Wrath of Khan is a basic revenge story with the serial numbers filed off. But the details — the references to classical literature, the interactions of the three leads, the Horatio Hornblower rhythm, the moral and philosophical dilemma at the heart of the climax — elevate it to a great picture. You throw in Montalban’s iconic performance and the most devastating moment in the history of the franchise and, well … I just don’t see how you can rate JJ Abrams’ light show — as good as it was — over it.

I rate it a 9. It’s the only Trek movie that I would say transcends fandom.

So, back to the 2009 reboot…

Star Trek (2009 is ranked #1 by IMDB at 8.0. I rate it as 8. It’s a good film, the best since First Contact. But I think it’s ridiculous to place it above Wrath of Kahn.

First the good: Abrams’ Star Trek is anti-matter to most of the sci-fi movies made today. It does almost everything wrong. The lens flare film festival becomes aggravating. The Enterprise is a little soulless and has the internal workings, literally, of a beer factory. The Romulan ship is another of these hideous “tack on CGI fiddly bits” junkpiles. The plot is ludicrous and the science insane. And it ends with a freshly-graduated cadet being given charge of the Federation’s flagship (a point I’ll return to in a moment).

And yet … it works. It works because the actors are good and carry the roles with conviction. It works because of its clear love for the characters. There’s a moment — a very quiet moment — after Spock kicks Kirk off the ship (I’ll pause a moment for that utterly ridiculous and out-of-character plot twist). Spock thanks McCoy for supporting him and McCoy says, “was that a thank you?” Urban’s voice, at that moment, is eerily like Deforest Kelley’s. The intonation, tone, accent and content are so dead on I was convinced it was a dub of some kind.

And that’s why I like it. The film is filled with those sort of little moments where cast, script and director make you feel like you’re seeing the whole blessed, um, enterprise, start all over again. I bought it in a way that I could not buy, say, Transformers.

You can contrast that against Tron Legacy, which does a lot right, production-wise, but does not reach the heights of Star Trek because it does so much wrong in writing and acting. You can contrast that against the whole Transformers franchise, which spends a billion bucks, works its heart out on CGI and falls on its face. Star Trek works. And it’s a delight because so little in film does.

Now for the bad. A lot has been said about JJ Abrams’ love of lens flares, so there’s little to ad. He toned it way down in the very solid Super 8, which gives me hope that he learned his lesson. The science in the film is ridiculous. I’m sure a bit more technobabble could have made it a little more coherent, but really there wasn’t much to do. Science has rarely been Trek’s strong suit.

The pacing is a bit of a problem for me, as well. The movie is very fast, very rushed and rarely takes time to let the audience soak in the moment. The death of Spock’s mother is little more than a plot point. Kirk’s uncertainties almost don’t exist. Most of the time, it doesn’t in fact feel like a Star Trek film but more like a random sci-fi movie. It only works because, occasionally, it has a moment that would be right out of Trek. Occasionally, it lets Quinto, Pine and Urban carry the moment. And when it does, it’s glorious.

One other important point that I mentioned above: I think the big rush to get Kirk in the Captain’s chair was a problem. It made little sense in the movie’s culture and plot. Again, I can see why you’d give a brilliant cadet a command, maybe. But the flagship of the fleet? Since the cast were signed for three movies, why not spread that development out over three movies? Maybe it’s because I really liked Bruce Greenwood’s Christopher Pike so much, but a much better progression, to me, would have seen:

You could have any variation on that, including keeping the Enterprise off-screen until the rousing finale of Movie 1 (as was done quite nicely in Star Trek IV). That, to me, is a more natural progression and ends the first three movies with a lead-in to either a TV series or more films.

Still, for all its flaws, the 2009 reboot is a solid picture and I’m looking forward to Into Darkness. Hopefully, the returning cast and Cumberbatch can overcome Abrams frenetic lens-flare-bedecked directing and put together another solid outing. I do think Matt Yglesias has a point: Star Trek does work a little better as TV show than it does as a movie. But with the unwillingness of TV networks to do space adventure shows any more and the general Trek fatigue out there, I think movies are all we’re going to get.

That’ll do.

Addendum: My brother and I discussed the above and one thing we agreed on was that Trek films work best when they have a little bit of a hero’s journey for the characters: when their flaws and shortcomings are exposed, they face defeat and humiliation but then find a way to overcome it — through ingenuity, courage and teamwork. The Kirk-Spock-McCoy chemistry works so well because all three characters are flawed in some way but, when they work together, are unbeatable.

Look at the best rated films and see the conflicts: Kirk fighting middle age in Khan, Picard overcoming his thirst for revenge in Contact, Spock rediscovering his human side in TMP. One of the best scenes in Khan is when Kirk has to watch Scotty’s nephew die and, in a restored scene, admit that the only reason he won was because he knew something about the ship that Khan didn’t.

Characters are what drive drama. Characters are what have alway driven Trek. Save the CGI. Give me characters overcoming their own failing and a compelling enemy and I’ll watch you do a Trek movie with hand puppets.

Star Trek 2009 had just enough character development to keep me watching. Hopefully, they will continue to build on that.

There are certain characteristics of bullshit, and there are certain characteristics of the truth. The truth tends to be specific; bullshit tends to be vague and imprecise. The truth tends to involve facts that can be checked out; bullshit is always built around things that you have no way of checking out. The truth tends to be told consistently, the same from one day to the next; bullshit changes every time it is told. Stable, responsible honest people tend to tell the truth; unstable, dishonest, unreliable people tend to bullshit. The truth is coherent and logical; bullshit is incoherent and illogical.

Almost everything I said in my Law of Expertise post could be considered a subset of that general rule. When an “expert” tells you what a great expert he is, he’s spewing vague bullshit. Real experts tend to be specific, consistent and verifiable.

However…

I think the equation has changed a bit in the Information Age. The internet has a long memory and this has forced the bullshitters to be more consistent and more specific. The result is that BS now gets debunked faster than ever. However, it has also allowed BS to assume a facade of truth that fools some people.

Think about vaccine hysteria. The lies are specific, consistent and seem to involve facts. That makes people believe it, even after thorough and unremitting debunking.

(I should note, in passing, that the MacDonald case is of particular interest to me. My dad was — and still is, as far as I know — convinced that MacDonald was an innocent man railroaded by a biased judge, a vindictive prosecutor, a slimy writer and a vengeful father-in-law. I was convinced of that myself until I read Weingarten’s post, which pointed out that there is almost no evidence to prove MacDonald’s contention that his family was murdered by a bunch of hippies and that all the extant evidence — including recently tested tissue under the wife’s fingernails — supports the prosecution case. It’s kind of rare that I disagree with my dad on something like this, but … I do. The prosecution was able to put together a scenario consistent with the evidence (although I don’t buy the amphetamines angle). The defense wasn’t.

However, while I am mostly convinced that MacDonald probably did murder his family, I’m not as sure that he should have been convicted. The crime scene was not properly secured, for one and exculpatory evidence might have been destroyed. The judge did seem biased against MacDonald. And I do think Bill James (and Megan McArdle) make a good point about prosecutions — once they focus on a suspect, they develop a tunnel vision which sees everything in light of that suspicion. James’ makes what I think is the most important point: the prosecution’s case fits together extremely well … if you assume that MacDonald was the killer.

It’s an awful case and probably one of the reasons it fascinates so many people. On the one hand, you could have an innocent man convicted of one of the most heinous crimes a man can commit. On the other hand, you have a man committing one of the most heinous crimes a man can commit, including the deliberate murder of a sleeping toddler.

In any case, you should subscribe to James’ site if you have even a mild interest in baseball. Baseball analysis is only part of what he offers.)

When Tebow was with the Broncos, he crossed me as a poor man’s Doug Flutie — a QB who lacked some essential tool (height in Flutie’s case; passing ability in Tebow’s) but nevertheless found ways to win. I was dubious that it could be sustained. But it seemed like he’d found a niche — a team with a great running game and offensive line — where his skills were useful.

When the Jets took him, I hoped they would find some creative ways to use him and Sanchez. Two QB sets, especially at the goal line; wildcat formations; using Tebow as running back who could sometimes pass. Instead, the nailed him to the bench and used him as an alternative to Sanchez. But, without the Bronco’s running game, that wasn’t going to work. And it didn’t. It’s obvious now that Tebow can never be a feature QB.

However, I have to disagree with those, like ESPN, who are saying this is the end of the road for Tebow. He’s still young, still well-liked and still has some skills that will make your jaw drop. Some team is going to sign him for publicity if nothing else.

But what I would really like to see is Tebow fall into the hands of a Belichick-like unconventional guru; someone who could use what Tebow does well (run, lead, use his instincts) without exposing what he does poorly (pass). Someone who would put in a two-QB set at the line to give defenses fits.

In an odd way, I’m reminded of Reggie Bush. This is a bit of a stretch, since Bush was heavily touted coming out of college (although, in a post that disappeared in the event horizon, I was skeptical). But he never became the stud that everyone thought he would. Oh, he was good. But until 2011, he’d never a thousand yard season. What the Dolphins seemed to figure out was that he wasn’t an MVP type who could pound out 350 carries a year and gain 2000 yards from scrimmage. But there was nothing wrong with that. He was a guy who could run 200 times, catch 40-50 passes and get 1500 yards from scrimmage. And that guy was very very useful.

Whoever picks up Tebow needs to stop squeezing him into a pocket passer hole. Tebow is not that guy and never will be. But he is a guy who could throw 50-100 passes a year, run for a thousand yards, score few touchdowns and drive opposing defenses crazy. And he’s only 25 years old.

This post, which I wrote months ago, was originally much longer and incorporated many of the points Dr. Zuk makes, in particular my belief that evolution proceeds in a haphazard random way and does not necessarily lead to some supreme state.

She also puts some science behind the principle objection I have always had: that there is unlikely to be some idyllic point X at which our diet was perfectly suited to our physiology then and forever more. We have evolved with our diet. Our diet has been evolving since we were primordial slime. Claiming that our ancestors’ diet at some time X — even making the huge assumption that we know what our ancestors ate at point X — is arbitrary. Why go back to that point? Why not go back to the time when we were primordial slime eating protozoans?

Moreover, how do we know that our ancestors were eating the right foods in the first place? That’s a gigantic assumption to make based on what we know about evolution. Isn’t it possible that their paleo diet was actually bad for them? That they only ate it because they had no choice in the matter? That our technology and diet has evolved toward something better suited to us?

All that having been said, I’m not slamming the paleo diet, per se. Some people seem to have improved their health with it and I’ve found that cutting carbs benefits me. I do think the current received wisdom of cutting fat and protein and emphasizing carbs is not nearly as supported by the science as our government likes to pretend it is. But let’s not swing the pendulum too far back and pretend that the paleo diet has more science behind it. Or that any one-size-fits-all diet is appropriate. I think the point to take away is that diet is a lot more complex and a lot less well understood than we would like.

In 1972, the year I became aware of baseball, its highest-paid player, Hank Aaron, earned $200,000 per season—the equivalent of around $1 million today. Aaron’s salary was 18 times the median household income in the United States. This year’s highest-paid player, Alex Rodriguez, stands to earn $29 million, which is 580 times the median income. (In fairness, Verlander may be a more egregious example of inequality than Rodriguez, since he pitches in the nation’s poorest big city. In the first year of his new contract, Verlander will earn $20 million—around 800 times as much as Detroit’s median household income.)
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Over the past 40 years—the period of rising economic inequality that former Slate columnist Timothy Noah called “The Great Divergence”—Americans’ incomes have not grown at all, in real dollars. But baseball players’ incomes have increased twentyfold in real dollars: the average major-league salary in 2012 was $3,213,479. The income gap between ballplayers and their fans closely resembles the rising gap between CEOs and their employees, which grew during the same period from roughly 25-to-1 to 380-to-1.

…

As baseball players accumulate plutocratic riches (Rodriguez will have earned a third of $1 billion by the time his contract expires), I find myself wondering why I’m supposed to cheer for a guy earning $27.5 million a year—he’s already a winner. When I was 11, I hero-worshipped the Tigers’ shortstop because I could imagine growing up to take his place. Obviously, that’s not going to happen now. Since my past two jobs disappeared in the Great Recession, I can’t watch a professional sporting event without thinking, Most of those guys are set for life, while I’ve been buying my own health insurance for 5 1/2 years. Paying to see a baseball game feels like paying to see a tax lawyer argue in federal court or a commodities trader work the floor of the Mercantile Exchange. They’re getting rich out there, but how am I profiting from the experience? I know we’re never going back to the days when Willie Mays lived in Harlem and sold cars in the offseason, but the market forces that have overvalued ballplayers’ skills while devaluing mine have made it impossible for me to just enjoy the damn game.

McClelland even criticizes the Seitz decision, thinking players would be better off if they were bound for life to one team. Or, actually … I don’t think he cares about the players. What seems to be damaged here is a deranged sense of economic justice.

I shouldn’t bother but … I’m in a fish-in-barrel kind of mood.

First, let’s consider the point made by honest liberal Matt Yglesias: owners will price tickets, concessions and TV for as much as they can get. There is a myth the media like to promulgate (and MLB owners like to hear) that high player salaries drive high prices for games. This is baloney. The owners will charge whatever they can. When was the last time a team dumped payroll and then cut prices? I remember when Peter Angelos was on Baltimore radio flogging this myth. Someone called up and asked if he was going to cut prices now that the Orioles had dumped all their expensive players. He didn’t have an answer.

All that free agency has done is give players a bigger piece of the pie — a pie that they actually baked since no one ever payed a plugged nickel to see an owner (and it’s not like the owners are struggling). Frankly, I wish more businesses were following their example and bumping up salaries.

A few more things to factor in: athletes are taxed at very high rates; they typically only play for a few years, if that; most of those that do reach the highest levels have pursued it with a single-minded devotion. They will have to live on those earnings for a long time. Frankly, if equity is what you’re worried about, I’d spend more time flogging the low salaries of minor league players compared to their MLB counterparts.

The Slate readers are actually pretty savvy and make many of these points in the comments. However, you do get the occasional “why do we pay teachers and fireman so little and ball players so much!” This was always my favorite argument against high player salaries because it is so obviously absurd. At any given sporting event, an average of 30,000 people show up, buying tickets and concessions. They put in a significant amount of effort and money to watch someone like Justin Verlander pitch. How many teachers teach to 30,000 students at a time? If a teacher could teach that many 162 times a year, would she not be paid like Justin Verlander? The fact is that the skills needed to teach — patience, intelligence, hard work, empathy — are thankfully common. There are literally a few million people doing it. The skills needed to fight fires or fight wars — self-sacrifice, strength, courage — are also thankfully common. The skills needed to be a Cy Young winner — while having less value in an objective sense — are much more rare.

Yes, it’s true that Justin Verlander can’t teach a class or fight a fire or do astrophysics for that matter. It’s also true that I can’t hit a curveball. So what?

But doesn’t the huge amount of money spent on sports show that we have our priorities out of whack? Shouldn’t we spend more on education that we do on baseball? Well … we do. Major league baseball made $7.5 billion last year or about $10 for all 75 million people who went to a game and considerably less for those who watched it on television. We spent approximately $800 billion on education — over $10,000 per child in public schools. The difference is the number of people into whose hands that money is concentrated — three million teachers against a thousand athletes. If our devotion to a cause is judged by the how much we spend, how much we worry, how much we argue and how many people devote decades of their lives to it, education is far, far more valued in this country than all sports combined.

So, no, I don’t think athletes are paid too much. I think they are paid what they are worth. The market has not “overvalued” ballplayers nor has it “undervalued” writers. There are maybe a few hundred people in the entire world who can play baseball at a professional level. But there are millions who could write poorly reasoned articles that drip with wealth envy.

A final thought: my enthusiasm for sports bothered me a little bit when I was younger. Surely, I thought, I shouldn’t devote so much thought to such a trivial pursuit. Is not Shakespeare worth ten pennants? I departed from that thought when I realized that one can pursue all interests: Shakespeare, astrophysics, sports and, um, blogging. But it was actually Jonathan Swift who converted me, with his compelling argument that a truly enlightened race (the Houyhnhnms) would, once they had beaten down the necessities of nature, devote themselves to the pursuit of both mental and physical excellence. Whether it is writing, playing piano, measuring stars or hitting baseballs, the pursuit of a craft, the perfection of it the pinnacle of possibility — that is what drives us as a race.

When I watch a baseball game, I see Justin Verlander throw a ball 100 mph with the right spin to make it move just enough to be almost impossible to hit. I see Albert Pujols, in a split second, decide to swing and launch the bat into the precise position to hit the ball as hard as possible. I see Austin Jackson, at the crack of the bat, take off and pursue it into the gap at just the right angle that he can spear it with his outstretched arm. Every game, I see something that should be impossible but isn’t.

Isn’t that worth $10 a head?

There is another, overlooked reason that low-income individuals are less likely to get married these days: they can’t afford to. Weddings are a form of conspicuous consumption. Couples, and their parents, are judged on everything from their attire, to the venue, to the flowers. As Zoe noted recently, the average wedding now costs around $27,000. Committed low-income couples could simply go get married at a courthouse, but settling for a low-cost wedding violates cultural expectations and announces the sorry state of your finances to immediate friends and family. It’s little surprise that many lower-income couples opt for no wedding rather than a dirt-cheap one.

Marriage has many intrinsic benefits, but the increasing cost of a wedding partially explains why, statistically speaking, married couples are better off than non-married couples. Being the type of person who has $27,000 to spare, or has parents who can foot the bill, undoubtedly increases the likelihood of success in all facets of life. If you compared households with $27,000 cars to those without any car, I imagine you’d find that owning a such a car likewise correlates with greater economic potential, physical health, and various other desirable traits.

I think this is completely wrong. Yes, the average wedding costs $27,000. But that’s not some kind of requirement. My wife and I had the means for a bigger wedding, but chose a smaller $10k affair. I’ve had friends, relatives and co-workers who had the means but chose a weddings that were under $1000. And that’s among a group of upper middle class people. For people living in poorer circumstances, big expensive weddings are not even on the radar.

One thing to notice: I’m not sure if the data sets are the same, but the last estimate I saw for the *median* wedding was was more like $15-18k. That means the average is being dragged up by mega-expensive weddings. I would love to see a distribution of the data. I suspect that a lot of cheap weddings are taking place and that the data are being driven by a big group of weddings in the $10-20k range and then a small group in the $100+ range. A wedding is the ultimate conspicuous consumption and it would only make sense it follows the same skewed distribution other consumption does.

Frankly, this point crosses me as a middle income misunderstanding of a lower income problem. I think that, if you are of low-income, the dearth of marriage-worthy men is MUCH more important. If your only spousal options stink, you’re not going to spend a red cent on a wedding.

(As a side note, our tight wedding budget was actually a good thing. We found a huge number of ways to save money. Rather than hire a professional florist, we went to a whole saler, bought tons of flowers and I spent a few days arranging them — a talent that neither I nor my wife suspected I had. We bought our cake from HEB and it was wonderful. We hired a friend’s band and they were great. We hired some high school kids to be a string orchestra for a processional and they were fine. We went with a friend of a friend for photography and got great pictures. I couldn’t sleep the night before so I went to Walmart, bought a color printer and spent the night making place cards for the tables. All told, these things cut the cost of our wedding by at least a third and probably in half. At normal prices, it would have been at least a $15k wedding, right in the heart of the bell curve. And if we’d done it in Atlanta instead of New Braunfels, it would have cost twice as much.

There’s no reason to pay $27,000 for a wedding when you can get the same bang for a LOT less buck with just a little bit of work.)

Viren Swami and Martin Tovée at the Universities of Manchester and Newcastle, respectively, look into the intricate world of why physical ideals are ideals, and in turn why they drive people beyond reason and morality in the current Archives of Sexual Behavior.

Stylistic note: this lead make it sounds like the study is unique. But I’m guessing that the Archives of Sexual Behavior have published dozens if not hundreds of articles on why physical ideals are ideals. Indeed, the abstract says as much. So why are we talking about this one in particular? Is it the best done so far? I’m going to make the case below that it isn’t even close. What we’re about see is what I call the Scientific Peter Principle: poorly designed studies usually have the most attention-getting results.

(Also, do ideals drive people beyond reason and morality? That’s an awfully loaded statement.)

The problem is primal, so the research methods are not to be outdone. 361 white British men were “taken to a quiet private location” to look at women. Not real women; 3D computer renderings. The men were allowed to rotate them 360 degrees. The only difference among the women was breast size.

The men were then asked to “make their ratings on a paper-and-pencil survey.”

Emphasis mine. “Not to be outdone”? I can think of about a dozen ways I could outdo this study.

Swami and Tovée compared the results with the men’s preferences in breast size, which showed that “men who more strongly endorsed benevolently sexist attitudes toward women, who more strongly objectified women, and who were more hostile toward women idealized a large female breast size.”

The study’s abstract, which is all I have access to, is rather stunning in its lack of humility. After noting that previous studies have been ambiguous, they boldly proclaim their results and then say:

These results were discussed in relation to feminist theories, which postulate that beauty ideals and practices in contemporary societies serve to maintain the domination of one sex over the other.

Even if we were to accept the conclusions of this article — and I don’t — it’s a long way from there to beauty ideals maintaining the domination of one sex over the other. Would you like some science with your ideology? Actually, we don’t even need to go to the abstract to see the boldly stated ideological bias. The title is: “Men’s Oppressive Beliefs Predict Their Breast Size Preferences in Women”.

So, yeah.

You probably know that I’m not going to be sympathetic to this and not just because of my distaste for ideology. In my previous post, I stated my hypothesis that the breast fetish is just like any other fetish — something that the male mind has latched onto as a way of identifying potential mates. It’s commonality is simply because of its obviousness — visible breasts are the easiest way to identify the female of our species. It’s not a social construct, per se. It is a preference that arises within a social construct. If it weren’t breasts, it would be something else (and almost always is). But the key point here is that fetishes are not really chosen. They just happen. It’s just something that, on a very primal level, the human sexual id locks onto.

Still, even without my prior assumptions and biases, we can easily see that this study, which has now been widely cited by various mainstream sites (and not just because they like to talk about breasts), has some big problems.

First, the study was of 361 men. 361 men who were willing to be taken to a “private, quiet location”. 361 whose age, employment and marital status is not exactly clear. That’s an awfully small and demographically narrow number to be drawing conclusions from.

Second, if the 3D drawing in the Atlantic article is an accurate reproduction of what they were shown, this wasn’t a reasonable test at all. I hate to break this to the authors, but the average bust size in the Western World is quite large and increasing: at least a 36C by old standards and probably larger if the lamentations of bra fitters are to be believed. This is partly rising obesity, marginally because of implants and mostly for reasons that aren’t really clear. This has had a significant effect on the landscape in that men’s perception of what constitutes a big bust has changed. Looking at the figures, even the last one didn’t really cross me as “very large”. Were these informed by some statistical survey of women’s breasts sizes? That’s one way you could improve this “not to be outdone” study.

There’s a related issue of body type. Critics of male sexuality often claim that men want big breasts on skinny bodies. Certainly, there is a subset of men who like that but most men who prefer busty women actually prefer curvy women. They like big hips and curvy backsides just as much as they like big breasts. Asking these men to look at 3-D computer models — frankly, none of which look like a real woman — is problematic at best.

(Aside: as I argued in my previous blog, male preferences are not monopolar. All things being equal, a man may prefer a woman with bigger breasts. But in the real world, things are rarely equal. He may be fine with a woman with smaller breasts if she has other features he finds attractive — enchanting eyes, a warm smile, a slender frame, beautiful hair. And — this is a critical point — if a man likes a woman, finds her interesting, enjoys her company — he will begin to see her as attractive. She will become beautiful to him. He will see the beauty in her even if there really isn’t that much to see on an objective level.

I would posit that there are very few men who date or are attracted to women entirely on bust size. Their preference in models and pornography — situations in which there is no interaction — may reflect a preference (although even then there is probably a broad range). But their behavior in real life can be wildly at variance with this. I would bet you that a significant fraction of the men who preferred “very large” breasts are dating or married to skinny women. And I would bet that some of the men who preferred “very small” breasts are dating or married to busty women. And I would further bet that they find the women in their lives attractive despite not conforming to their preferences in zombie-like computer models.)

Third, the questions. I don’t have access to the study, but here are the sample questions they provided:

Attitudes Toward Women Scale (sample prompt: ”Intoxication among women is worse than intoxication among men.”)

Hostility Towards Women Scale (sample prompt: ”I feel that many times women flirt with men just to tease them or hurt them.”)

Benevolent Sexism subscale of the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (sample prompt: “Women, as compared to men, tend to have a more refined sense of culture and good taste.”)

Whoa, really? Those are your sample prompts? Those three prompts are all judgements. You would probably find lots of women who would agree with at least a couple of those. You would probably find that a man would agree or disagree based on his emotional state (if he’s just had a bad break-up, for example). And prompt three (and many of the questions on Ambivolet Sexism Inventory from which they are taken) aren’t clearly sexist. Many of even the most blatant ones probably probe misanthropy far more than they probe misogyny specifically.**

(Another aside: the Atlantic author illustrates sexism by quoting a lawsuit in which a boss constantly commented on a co-worker’s breasts and once shook her breast as a substitute for shaking her hand. This is not the behavior of a man who likes big breasts or thinks women have a more refined sense of cultural taste. This is the behavior of a sociopath.)

But I think the real flaw is highlighted by Ann Althouse:

They were taking a science-y survey, so deference to authority and desire to be socially acceptable would be an influence along with real-world sexual preference.

…

The scientists found “men who more strongly endorsed benevolently sexist attitudes toward women, who more strongly objectified women, and who were more hostile toward women idealized a large female breast size.” Were these men really the ones who “idealized a large female breast size,” or were they simply the ones who didn’t feel as strongly compelled to moderate their opinions to conform to the perceived demands of polite society?

Exactly. I keep harping on this in the social sciences: there is a huge difference between what people think and do and what they tell a group of leering scientists that they think and do. Most people do not want to be perceived as abnormal (or sexist). This is a big problem with this study since, if I read it correctly, the men were shown all five images at the same time. This creates a very obvious social pressure that is different from if five groups of men were shown five different images separately. Hell, if I were put in a room and asked which image I liked, I might say 3 or 4 even though I would prefer 4 or 5 (and would actually prefer a real women with real physical proportions).

How would I improve this “not to be outdone” survey? First of all, I would have a lot more than 361 white British men. Second, I would show each man only one image and ask him to rate her on a scale of 1-10. Second, I would get images of real women and digitally alter them, using some statistical model based on women’s actual bust sizes. Third, I would make a second axis by having some women altered to have both bigger hips and bigger breasts and others to just have bigger breasts. Breast size and hip size are correlated, as anyone who has seen real women instead of 3-D models knows. Fourth, I would use something a little less ambiguous than these prompts. For example, I might give the men two different job applications and just change the gender and see how they rated the applicant. Or have some people enact a job situation and ask them what they thought of the woman’s behavior. Something a little more direct, at any rate.

Or I might go to the gigantic database compiled by the authors of A Billion Wicked Thoughts who gathered data from Google when men didn’t know they were being studied. The only problem is that I would probably find — as those researchers did — that men actually prefer curvy women, not just just busty ones. And that would ruin my thesis that a preference for big boobs is a results of sexism.

So, let’s sum up: a small and poorly designed study asked men to look at unrealistic images of women. They were then asked leading questions of dubious utility. And from this, we conclude that men who like big boobs are more likely to be hostile to women and that feminist theory is vindicated.

That makes me feel some hostility all right. But it’s not directed against women.

**Update: Michael Talarski alerted me that there are links to the questions in the Atlantic article. Here is the attitude toward women quiz. The other triggers a download. The questions are mostly reasonable probes of attitudes toward women (although a few are bit ambiguous). But I would be curious to see how women score on that test. And I would be especially curious to see if these attitudes correlate with actual behavior.

What jumped out at me was this, which is relevant to my perennial struggles with sleep:

Each of us has an internal clock, or, to use Roenneberg’s term, a “chronotype.” Either we’re inclined to go to bed early and wake up at dawn, in which case we’re “larks,” or we like to stay up late and get up later, which makes us “owls.” (One’s chronotype seems to be largely inherited, although Roenneberg notes, not altogether helpfully, that the “genetics are complex.”) During the week, everyone is expected to get to the office more or less at the same time—let’s say 9 a.m. This suits larks just fine. Owls know they ought to go to bed at a reasonable time, but they can’t—they’re owls. So they end up having to get up one, two, or, in extreme cases, three hours earlier than their internal clock would dictate. This is what Roenneberg refers to as “social jet lag”—each workday, owls fall asleep in one time zone and, in effect, wake up in another. By the time the week is over, they’re exhausted. They “fly back” to their internal time zone on weekends and sleep in on Saturday and Sunday. Then, on Monday, they start the process all over again.

For larks, the problem is reversed. Social life is arranged so that it’s hard to have one unless you stay out late on Friday and Saturday nights. But, even when larks have partied till 3 a.m., they can’t sleep in the following day—they’re larks. So they stagger through until Monday, when they can finally get some rest.

The moral equivalence here is staggering. First of all, the problem for “larks” is non-existent for most people. If you have a family or are past the age of 30, it’s rare to stay up partying late on weekends. But the problem for “owls” never ends. No matter what age you are, you are expected to be at work at 9 am or earlier.

The simple fact is that the larks set the rules for the rest of us. And moreover, they cast their larkness as a sign of their virtue and industry (see Franklin, Ben). Those of us who are owls are seen as lazy sluggards. And this prejudice is only strengthened by our schools, government and military setting lark schedules (an especially odious practice in schools where, as the article notes, children are biologically prone to be owls but forced to live on adult lark schedules).

But, in a way, I’m being too harsh on the larks. The problem is partially them but also our insistance, as a society, on conformity. Everyone has to go to work at the same time, everyone has to come home at the same time. This makes some sense — businesses have to be open simultaneously to interact. But we carry it to a ridiculous extreme. It manifests not just in the owl-lark problem but in the absurdity of Daylight Savings Time (it would make far more sense for businesses to adjust their hours to the season on an individual basis, rather than forcing uniformity on all of us; astronomers understand this).

I’ve said before that I don’t think Shakespeare is as subtle as some people like to pretend he is. There’s a school of thought that claims that Henry V is actually an anti-war play, especially given some of the vivid descriptions Henry gives of the horrors of war. I don’t think this is the case. Shakespeare can acknowledge the horrors of war while still making it out to be glorious. There’s a common refrain out there that war-mongers are necessarily “chicken-hawks” who do not understand the horror they contemplate. I find that attitude amusing. Some of the most aggressive warlike leaders in history were themselves veterans. They knew how awful war was. It either didn’t bother them or it pleased them.

There are a few interesting issues with some of the scenes in the play. Branagh’s film version played the comedy bit straight, which was an interesting choice. I like them better as comedy myself to balanced out Henry’s seriousness. But the final scene — in which Henry “woos” Katherine — is a bit problematic. It is played straight in Branagh’s film but I read that many consider it comical or satirical. I must admit I lean a little bit toward the latter as the scene doesn’t really work as romance for me.

Next Up: Henry VI Part 1. Probably be a while before I get to it.

Well, I was right. Here you can read about how EMR’s have encourage the use of boilerplate descriptions which leave critical information out of patient’s record. Here you can read about how it makes doctoring difficult. I’ve experience this personally, finding that doctors spend all their time screwing around with the EMR system rather than interacting with me (although this has improved in the last couple of years as doctors learn from their mistakes and save EMR maintenance until after the appointment). And here you can read about how the system are not saving money and don’t interact with each other.

Some of these problems will eventually be solved. I expect that a uniform standard will eventually be created (probably by law). Improvements in computer transcription will probably restore dictation over boilerplate for making notes. And, as I noted, doctors are quickly improving their ability to use EMR without sabotaging their interaction with the patient. In the long run, I think this will improve healthcare.

But easy-to-use systems that have a uniform standard, protect patient privacy and can correctly spell esophagogastroduodenoscopy (as I just did on the first try) are not cheap and are never going to be. This is not the solution to our healthcare woes. There is no silver bullet that is.

I would have to say that 2 Henry IV is a bit of a letdown after Part 1. Oh, it’s still very good. But it suffers a bit from “middle chapter syndrome” between the outstanding Part 1 and the epic Henry V. Some plot threads from Part 1 are wrapped up too quickly and not much groundwork is laid for the next installment.

Part 1 struck an excellent balance with the low comedy of the Falstaff scenes and the high drama of the politics. It featured an fantastic counterpart to Prince Harry in Hotspur and built to an exciting battle. Part 2 doesn’t quite balance as well, with the low comedy being a bit much and the high drama not working as well. Northumberland’s waffling and selling out of allies is dropped too early. York is never made into a great villain. The conflict is resolved hastily (and, to my mind, dishonorably). It only reaches a real high point when Henry IV is dying and immediately thereafter, as Harry assumed the mantle of leadership.

Falstaff is wonderful, although I feel he played better off Prince Hal, who was his equal in verbal gymnastics, than he does off Lively or Doll. Henry’s rejection of him is heart-breaking, although not milked the way it should be (and indeed many, including Branagh, add this missing touch in their productions of Henry V).

In any case, I’m loving the histories. Maybe it’s because Shakespeare was bound by actual events, which makes the plot more linear and less dependent on twists. Maybe it’s because it combines the best elements of comedy and tragedy instead of being hamstrung by the conventions of either. Maybe it’s just because I love history. Whatever, the case, don’t expect a long wait before my next update.

Next Up: Henry V, of course. One of my favorites.

One of the reasons I started this project was the realization that my only encounter with Falstaff was his brief (but poignant) cameo in Branagh’s Henry V. And until two days ago, my only real experience was from The Merry Wives of Windsor. Falstaff is fun in Wives, but nothing like what he is in this one. Whenever the action moved to Hotspur or Henry IV, I found myself wondering when they were going to get back to Falstaff. As noted by many, his recounting of the attack by the robbers, the way he turns the conversation when Hal reveals his own involvement, his verbal outfoxing of Quickly … all of it is pure joy. And the counterpoint of his relatively harmless shenanigans to the devastating wars of the honorable characters is unmissable.

Would this play be as good without Falstaff? Yeah, I guess. Prince Harry and Prince Hostpsur are good characters and I’m fascinated by the history. I suspect without Falstaff, we would get more of the sub rosa politics of Richard II. But it’s clearly Falstaff and Harry who elevate this play to great.

Next up: Well, I guess it’s Henry IV, Part 2. My goal is to complete the Henry tetralogy by the time I head back to the states.

Richard II, as a character, is one of the better examples of this. When the play starts out, he is king and not terribly interesting. But as he loses power (and possibly his mind) his character becomes stronger and stronger, getting some of the bet speeches in the play. His melancholy dialogues in Act III are a highlight and he dominates Act IV, talking rings around everyone else.

The thing I liked most about Richard II was that so much was sub rosa. The past conspiracy to kill Duke of Gloucester, Henry’s gradual rebellion even as he proclaims his loyalty, his evident relief at Richard’s death — these all are belied by the words that come out of the character’s mouths. Very rarely in Richard II does anyone say what they really mean; they always dance around it. And it is a demonstration of Shakespeare’s skill that I, five centuries later and having to read about the War of the Roses on Wikipedia, can grasp this, even incompletely.

Next Up: Henry IV, Part I

We see this a lot in the punditocracy, unfortunately. As Bill James said, most people use studies the way a drunk uses a lamppost — for support, not illumination. In any sufficiently advanced but difficult field of study, you will find multiple studies examining an issue. Let’s say it’s a supposed connection between watching Glee and having a heart attack. If there is, in reality, no connection between the two, you might find eight studies that show no connection, one that shows an anti-correlation and one that shows a correlation. This is fine. This is science. There are always outlier studies even if all the researchers are completely ethical and honest. The outliers fall away when your interest is the question and you look at all the evidence. But the outliers dominate the discussion from those who have an agenda.

This happens a lot in the gun debate. On both sides, really. But Mother Jones’ article is a particularly putrid example of this because that’s basically all it does: collect the cherry-picked nonsensical studies that support their anti-gun agenda. It’s quite remarkable actually; almost a clinic in how not to do research.

But here’s the one thing that really tips you off. There is one myth that Mother Jones does not debunk. It’s a myth that’s really independent of what you think of gun ownership … unless you’ve already staked part of your reputation and agenda on the myth that gun violence is increasing. In fact, all forms of violent crime have been falling for twenty years. This is, in my mind, the single most important fact in debates over crime and violence and the single most important myth to debunk.

MJ does not address this myth. They don’t even talk about it. That is a huge tell.

Myth #1: They’re coming for your guns.

Fact-check: No one knows the exact number of guns in America, but it’s clear there’s no practical way to round them all up (never mind that no one in Washington is proposing this). Yet if you fantasize about rifle-toting citizens facing down the government, you’ll rest easy knowing that America’s roughly 80 million gun owners already have the feds and cops outgunned by a factor of around 79 to 1.

Maybe we can agree that this is a myth. On the other hand, when you have an anti-gun lobby that has (1) identified an unarmed society as their goal; (2) lauded nations that have banned their guns; and (3) advocated policies like restricting bullets that would make guns effectively useless, I think it behooves us to think they have that goal in mind.

(I also find it odd that this fact is often placed side-by-side with the “you’re not going to use an AR-15 to stop an Abrams tank” response to the idea of revolution. They need to make up their minds. Are we powerless against our military? Or do we outnumber them 79 to 1?)

Myth #2: Guns don’t kill people—people kill people.

Fact-check: People with more guns tend to kill more people—with guns. The states with the highest gun ownership rates have a gun murder rate 114% higher than those with the lowest gun ownership rates. Also, gun death rates tend to be higher in states with higher rates of gun ownership. Gun death rates are generally lower in states with restrictions such as assault-weapons bans or safe-storage requirements.

Problem: they’re looking only at gun deaths. That makes sense if you, like Mother Jones, believe that guns are an evil talisman that compels people to murder. But most people would think that the goal is to prevent death Moreover, looking at gun deaths includes suicides, which comprise two-third of gun deaths. There is some evidence that banning guns would lower the suicide rate; guns have a far higher suicide success rate (on the other hand, other methods of suicide are more favored by people making suicidal gestures who don’t want to really kill themselves).

I can’t embed the graphic but when you look at the total violence rate from all methods of killing — using the same sources they link — the correlation is not nearly as strong (R^2 of .13) The trend is 0.10 for every percent. So eliminating ALL guns — even if you assume that there is no increase in criminality — would reduce the death rate to about 14.8 or basically as peaceful as Iowa with its 44% ownership rate and Rhode Island with its 13%.

What’s more, there are significant outliers. Nevada and New Mexico are more violent than you would expect based on the linear trend. Nebraska, Iowa and Minnesota have high ownership rates but relatively low levels of violence. And there is one huge outlier that shatters the graph: the District of Columbia, which has both a lower gun ownership rate and a higher crime rate than any state. DC is an unusual case, of course. Violence tends to be concentrate in cities and DC is all city. That having been said, the official DC gun ownership rate is a minuscule 5%, half that of Hawaii, mainly due to the draconian anti-gun laws they had until recently.

The other problem this point runs into — and you’re going to see this again and again — is that correlation is not causation. Maybe guns do cause violence. But you could equally argue that being in a violent area makes you more likely to buy a gun for self defense.

What would make sense here is a longitudinal study, one that looks at how violent crime rates rise or fall when gun laws are liberalized. Mother Jones ignores this because the last twenty years have seen gun laws liberalized while crime rates have plunged. That doesn’t show that liberalized gun laws prevent crime, of course. John Lott claims they do; others are more mixed. The fall in crime in multi-variate and it’s difficult to tease out the effect of one policy (least of all 50).

My point, however, is that if you’re going to argue that gun ownership puts people in danger, this is the wrong data to use.

Myth #3: An armed society is a polite society.

Fact-check: Drivers who carry guns are 44% more likely than unarmed drivers to make obscene gestures at other motorists, and 77% more likely to follow them aggressively.
• Among Texans convicted of serious crimes, those with concealed-handgun licenses were sentenced for threatening someone with a firearm 4.8 times more than those without.
• In states with Stand Your Ground and other laws making it easier to shoot in self-defense, those policies have been linked to a 7 to 10% increase in homicides.

The first study is a self-reported study of 2400 drivers. It’s odd it is invoked since it recalls one of most conspicuous and inaccurate predictions of the gun-control advocates: that conceal-carry laws would create shootouts over car accidents. They didn’t. It also conflates correlation with causation. And it is frankly a bit pointless.

For the second study, I can only see the abstract. They did note that conceal-carry holders were less likely to be convicted of crimes but that their convictions were more likely to involves sexual offenses, gun offenses and offenses involving a death. There’s a bit of flim-flammery in that sentence, however and I can’t see the article to see if it’s born out. It seems to say that while gun owners are less likely to commit crimes, their crimes are likely to be more serious. What’s missing? Usually when something is stated that way, it’s to conceal that gun owners are less likely to commit crimes involving a death, gun or sex but slightly less less likely than they are to commit other crimes.

Back in this thing called reality, the Texas Department of Public Safety studied all crimes committed in Texas and found that less than 1% were committed by conceal-carry holders. That’s compared to about 2% of all Texans who have conceal-carry. Those results reflect the reality in other states as well.

The final study is problematic. If you look at the graphs they include, it’s clear that they’re looking at noise. But they then do a statistical analysis which has 9 dependent variables and and 11 control ones. This crosses me as a massive overfitting of the problem. What they show, at most, is that stand your ground states did not have the drop in crime in 2009 and 2010 that other states did. But the data are so noisy, it’s really hard to make that conclusion, especially when they, oddly, plot it in log space to conceal just how noisy the data are. It’s frankly bad science and crosses me as cherry-picking. I feel like Mother Jones did not look for the best study of this; they look for a study that supported their conclusions, no matter how faulty it was.

As I noted above, it’s very difficult to pick out the effect of CCL’s on violent crimes rates because crime has been falling everywhere. But this issues had been addressed in far more intelligent ways than three marginal studies.

Myth #4: More good guys with guns can stop rampaging bad guys.

Fact-check: Mass shootings stopped by armed civilians in the past 30 years: 0
• Chances that a shooting at an ER involves guns taken from guards: 1 in 5

This stinks. I noted before how their claim that mass shooting were never stopped by civilians was entirely a product of their selection criteria that basically eliminated all the mass shootings that were stopped by someone armed. They also ignore the deterrent effect that guns are supposed to have. John Allen Fox’s study shows that mass shootings have been flat over the last thirty years.

The second point comes from a study of 265 incidents in emergency rooms. I hardly think that’s a representative sample of anything. It’s so obscure, I have to believe it was cherry picked. Back in reality, I found this (PDF) 2001 report from the Justice Department which interviews tens of thousands of inmates. Most of them got their guns either illegally or from a friend. The number who got them from their victims was too small to be included.

I think this a perfect demonstration of how Mother Jones selectively cites their stats. The 2001 study is linked in Myth #10 to show that most criminals get their guns in private sales. But when it comes time to figure out how many get their guns off their victims, Mother Jones does not cite the massive study that shows very few guns are obtained that way. No, they go to an obscure study of 265 ER incidents.

Myth #5: Keeping a gun at home makes you safer.

Fact-check: Owning a gun has been linked to higher risks of homicide, suicide, and accidental death by gun.
• For every time a gun is used in self-defense in the home, there are 7 assaults or murders, 11 suicide attempts, and 4 accidents involving guns in or around a home.
• 43% of homes with guns and kids have at least one unlocked firearm.
• In one experiment, one third of 8-to-12-year-old boys who found a handgun pulled the trigger.

The first stat ignores the work of Gary Kleck, whose well-cited work estimated a couple of million defensive uses of weapons every year, about five times the rate of aggressive gun violence. Even if he overestimates, he is unlikely to have done so by a factor of 30. MJ basically commits one of the classic blunders of the anti-gun faction: only counting defensive uses of weapons when someone is killed or seriously injured. A warning shot, a waving around of a gun, chambering a round as you come down the stairs — things Kleck counts — are ignored. The potential deterrent effect — criminals being unwilling to invade a house where they are likely to encounter a gun — is ignored.

These effects are asymmetric. Defensive uses of weapons are less likely to be reported. People defending themselves are, by definition, less violent than attackers and therefore less likely to fire a gun. The deterrent effect is almost impossible to measure statistically. Almost all the biases in these studies go against the “guns are never used defensively” position. Mother Jones doesn’t even acknowledge this.

The second stat is interesting but not really relevant. Accidental gun deaths are thankfully rare despite all the unlocked weapons. The study is also garbage, or at least quoting it that way is. Looking at the study, only 9% of guns were kept unlocked and loaded, which is the really dangerous situation. Moreover, “unlocked” includes not having a trigger guard. So, according to the survey, my dad was in that category because he had his unloaded guns in a closet with a keyed knob, a deadbolt and top bolt. I’m in that category even though my gun is in a safe and I have no bullets. Once again, Mother Jones has selected the study that most supports their ideology and, apparently, only read the abstract.

The third stat is garbage. This was a study of 64 boys. They were placed in an observation room and told to play. Most of them thought the gun was a toy. I’ve got news for Mother Jones: most parents do not conceal guns in their children’s playrooms and then tell them to play with anything they find. Most of them warn their kids about guns. Putting them in that kind of an environment tells you nothing. And it is belied by the thankfully low number of accidental deaths. If you combine “fact” 2 with “fact” 3, we should have accidental shootings constantly.

Myth #6: Carrying a gun for self-defense makes you safer.

Fact-check: In 2011, nearly 10 times more people were shot and killed in arguments than by civilians trying to stop a crime.
• In one survey, nearly 1% of Americans reported using guns to defend themselves or their property. However, a closer look at their claims found that more than 50% involved using guns in an aggressive manner, such as escalating an argument.
• A Philadelphia study found that the odds of an assault victim being shot were 4.5 times greater if he carried a gun. His odds of being killed were 4.2 times greater.

Mother Jones is repeating themselves by this point. The first fact simply looks at crime stats and finds that killing over arguments are ten times as likely as justifiable homicides. Once again, most defensive uses of weapons do not involve a killing. Ironically, it is the liberal anti-gun Mother Jones who have formed their self-defense ideas from movies and television. And nothing, nothing in those statistics has any relation to gun ownership or conceal-carry. There is no indication whether the guns used to kill over arguments were legally owned or not (according to the study they cite later, most of them were obtained illegally). Even the raw statistics show the transparency of the argument. In a typical year, a couple of thousand people are killed in arguments. Even if we assume these are all legal gun owners (most of them aren’t), that it less than one in a hundred thousand weapons

The second study is jaw-droppingly dubious. It involved phone interviews and an evaluation of whether the gun was used defensively or offensively, often ignoring how the victim/perpetrator viewed the incident. No one except an ideological gun control advocate would think this was scientific. Moeover, even if you take the stats seriously, that means 1.5-3 million Americans did use guns to defend themselves. I hate to tell Mother Jones, but that statistic is pretty close to what Kleck found.

The third study is incredibly noisy. The confidence interval is that gun carriers are 1-17 times more likely to be assaulted. I’m also having trouble figuring out their stats, since their raw data doesn’t indicate nearly as strong a correlation. In fact, there’s very little correlation at all. There’s *much* more obvious disparities in alcohol and illicit drug involvement.

Myth #7: Guns make women safer.

Fact-check: In 2010, nearly 6 times more women were shot by husbands, boyfriends, and ex-partners than murdered by male strangers.
• A woman’s chances of being killed by her abuser increase more than 7 times if he has access to a gun.
• One study found that women in states with higher gun ownership rates were 4.9 times more likely to be murdered by a gun than women in states with lower gun ownership rates.

The first study is irrelevant. All people are more likely to be murdered by people they know. And, in general, women are not heavily involved in organized crime or drug dealing, which correlate with homicide incidents involving strangers.

The second study doesn’t support their point and they are misquoting it. It identifies previous abuse as by far the most important risk factor for women being killed by their partners. They do find a relationship to gun ownership, although a smaller one than previous studies. But if you want to keep women from getting killed, getting them away from abusive partners is, by far, the most important factor.

The third study mainly restates the earlier point on the correlation of gun violence to gun ownership; see correlation-causation. But MJ misquotes a study again. That statistic comes from a raw comparison of the five highest-gun ownership states to the five lowest. This is an incredibly dubious way of analyzing data, especially when you consider the states:

High-gun states: Louisiana, Arkansas, West Virginia, Mississippi, Alabama
Low-gun states: Hawaii, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Delaware

I would submit that there are larger differences between those states than rates of gun ownership. I also don’t think it’s valid to measure things by comparing the most extreme elements. I would much rather trust my analysis of all 50 states.

Also of note — their data do not show that women are in any particular danger. Using the raw data from the earlier talking point, I find similar ratios for overall homicides. In fact, guns are involved in 2/3 of homicides according to the CDC. But, according to this study, they are only involved in about half of homicides where the woman is the victim. Doesn’t this suggest that guns aren’t the real problem?

And to be frank, all of these studies give me the opposite idea than Mother Jones. Women rarely own guns and rarely use them to defend themselves. Nevertheless, they can be victims. And half the time, their murder does not use a gun, but fists, knives or blunt objects. Doesn’t that indicate maybe they should own guns? That guns can be an equalizer? I don’t know. But I would suggest the question is more complicated than selectively quoting and misquoting three studies.

In any case, thousands of women disagree with these points.

Myth #8: “Vicious, violent video games” deserve more blame than guns.

I agree that this is a myth. No comment necessary.

Myth #9: More and more Americans are becoming gun owners.

I agree that this is a myth. No comment necessary.

Myth #10: We don’t need more gun laws—we just need to enforce the ones we have.

Fact-check: Weak laws and loopholes backed by the gun lobby make it easier to get guns illegally.
• Around 40% of all legal gun sales involve private sellers and don’t require background checks. 40% of prison inmates who used guns in their crimes got them this way.
• An investigation found 62% of online gun sellers were willing to sell to buyers who said they couldn’t pass a background check.
• 20% of licensed California gun dealers agreed to sell handguns to researchers posing as illegal “straw” buyers.
• The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives has not had a permanent director for 6 years, due to an NRA-backed requirement that the Senate approve nominees.

There isn’t really a math issue here (although both of the studies contacted just over a hundred gun dealers). But I would editorialize that the “gun lobby” is more than just the NRA. In fact, Congress is likely to pass laws that will address points one to three and such ideas have broad support among gun owners. But I would add that points two, three and four basically agree with the supposed Myth. Straw sales bypass existing law. Online gun sellers, if they sell to people who fail background checks, are breaking the law (although very few criminals get their guns online). The lack of an ATF director is a failure to enforce the law. How, exactly, does this disprove the myth?

Between this and the “study” on mass shootings, Mother Jones has made their bias clear. They are not really interested in the facts. They are not interested in the data. They are interested in an agenda. They are interested in portraying gun ownership as a destructive evil force in society. And no matter how far they have to dig and how much they have to twist the data, they will find the “facts” to support this position.

That’s not unusual. People do that. But at Mathematical Malpractice Watch, I see no reason to let people get away with it. I see no reason to pretend someone is a serious contributor to a debate — and MJ is considered a serious contributor to the debate — when they frankly aren’t.

At one point, I tried Herbalife. This was not something I came to of my own accord. A friend’s husband was into it on the lowest tier of their multi-level marketing. I was too young and stupid to know just how idiotic herbal supplements were, so I figured “what the hell” and jumped.

It was a big mistake. The compound contained ephedra and it caused my first incident of Premature Ventricular Contractions — a common harmless arrhythmia that nevertheless is scary as hell. Some time later I tried a prescription weight loss pill that also caused PVC’s. They went away after I stopped, mostly. I still get them occasionally, most notably right after my wedding and when I haven’t been getting enough sleep. I had a full cardio workup six years ago and everything looks fine. But I still wonder if the ephedra did any permanent damage.

The thing is that I’m not normally into that sort of thing. But it was sold to me because I wasn’t terribly familiar with high-pressure marketing techniques and certainly didn’t expect them from a friend’s husband. I’ve since … well not wised up, exactly. I’ve gotten confident enough to tell people to fuck off. In fact, high pressure sales pitches are the surest way to drive me away. When we bought our first home, I literally walked out on people who tried to get me to buy right then with “if you buy right now” incentives. The home we bought was sold in a low-pressure way. We felt — correctly as it happened — that this reflected the salesman’s confidence in his product.

I’m rambling. Let me get to the point. Part of the sales pitch I got for Herbalife went like this:

Mike, I’m telling you, I’ve investigated all kinds of supplements. I’ve looked into everything. And I’ve researched this product really thoroughly. I wouldn’t take anything I didn’t know everything about. So trust me: this is the real deal.

Standard stuff, right? But hidden within that is something I’ve come to recognize as the mark of a shyster. If someone spends an inordinate amount of time telling you, in a vague sense, how much experience they have and how much expertise they have and how they’ve really researched this and they’ve looked at everything out there, they are, to be blunt, full of shit.

This instinct has served me well. When Neal Boortz began flogging the Fair Tax, he talked about how much research had been done and how he’d looked at every plan out there (really? every plan?). That pinged my radar and I did some research and found out that the Fair Tax had giant gaping problems (documented here). When a contractor came by and gave me a pitch about how he’d tried everything and he was the best expert, I went with someone else.

And you see this constantly in the alternative medicine crowd. Sellers and promoters will constantly tell you how extensively they’ve surveyed things, how much research they’ve done, how much experience they have and, inevitably, it turns out not to be the case.

So, in my roundabout way, here is Mike’s Rule of Expertise: Experts don’t constantly reassure you of their expertise; they simply dole out facts and data.

Let cite some good examples from my blogroll: Radley Balko doesn’t talk about what an expert he is on criminal justice matters; he tells you specifically what he’s learned, seen and read. The Bad Astronomer doesn’t talk about how much experience he has in astrophysics; he points you at research and researchers who’ve done the work. Maggie McNeill doesn’t pontificate about her extensive background in the sex industry; she links every study and opinion piece she can find. Joe Posnanski doesn’t talk about how many athletes he’s interviewed or how much Bill James likes him; he crunches the numbers, gets the quotes and presents the facts.

I’ve been to hundreds of science talks. Not one has centered around the speaker’s credentials and how they’ve explored every alternate theory. They present hypothesis, data and conclusion. The best ones acknowledge their limitations and possible alternate theories. The kind of dead certainty you will encounter in, say, a homeopathy practitioner, is minimal in any good scientist and absent in the best ones.

This is how real experts do it. Experts want you to trust the facts; con men want you to trust them.

(In a related note, I, like most astronomers, rarely affix “Ph.D.” to the end of my name unless I’m applying for a grant where the credential is required. I also only refer to myself as “Dr. Siegel” when yelling at the cable company. And the only time I’m called that at work is either as part of a running gag or when being addressed formally (grant correspondence, for example; and I usually encourage them to call me Mike). This is partially because astronomers are an informal bunch. It is also related to my time at UVa, where everyone except Ed School professors and medical doctors takes the moniker of “Mr.” and “Ms.” as a sign of respect to Mr. Jefferson.

But I also I think this flows from the same skepticism of over-credentialing. A real scientist wants you to trust the data, not them. The only academics I know who use the Ph.D. suffix or the Doctor prefix are either a) pretentious; b) medical doctors, where I think it’s appropriate, and c) women or minorities in disciplines where they have trouble being taken seriously and it’s hard to begrudge them. And anyone who refers to themselves as “Dr. Smith, Ph.D.” is almost certainly full of it.)

What brought this to my frontal lobe was a re-eruption (a few months ago now) of controversy over Sex at Dawn. I find the premise of Sex at Dawn — that humans are naturally polyamorous — interesting if flawed. But what has long bothered me is the certainty with which this supposedly scientific premise is discussed. Every time I hear Christopher Ryan speak, I feel like he’s about to sell me herbal supplements. He’s not quite as bad as my friend’s now ex-husband. He actually does know some stuff. But he seems stunningly unaware of what he doesn’t know or of what facts are inconsistent with his thesis. Is he right? Dammit, if this comes down to me reading his book, I give up.

Anyway, there is some controversy over Christopher Ryan’s credentials. I took a look at his wikipedia page and this is what I found:

He received a BA in English and American literature in 1984 and an MA and Ph.D. in psychology from Saybrook University, in San Francisco, CA twenty years later. He spent the intervening decades traveling around the world, living in unexpected places working odd jobs (e.g., gutting salmon in Alaska, teaching English to prostitutes in Bangkok and self-defense to land-reform activists in Mexico, managing commercial real-estate in New York’s Diamond District, helping Spanish physicians publish their research). Drawing upon his multi-cultural experience, Ryan’s academic research focused on trying to distinguish the human from the cultural. His doctoral dissertation analyzes the prehistoric roots of human sexuality, and was guided by the psychologist, Stanley Krippner.

Ryan has guest lectured at the University of Barcelona Medical School, consulted at various hospitals, contributed to publications ranging from Behavioral and Brain Sciences (Cambridge University Press) to a textbook used in medical schools and teaching hospitals throughout Spain and Latin America and makes frequent mass media appearances. Ryan contributes to both Psychology Today and Huffington Post.[

I read that and I heard, “I’m telling you, I’ve been all over the world and met all kinds of people and read all the papers. And this polyamory thing; this is the real deal.” Maybe Ryan is right. I’ve got an 80-book backlog right now, but I’m hoping to get to his at some point. But a Wikipedia entry filled with such a wide array of credentials combined with his “I’m such an expert” public statements make me suspect the work has flaws. And what I’ve read indicates this perception is correct. If and when I get to his book, I’ll know for sure.

(I wrote the above a couple of months ago. When I went to it today, I was reminded of a recent post at Popehat that mocked a legal spammer for doing the same thing: talking himself up as some modern-day renaissance man. Ken has a lot more experience in dealing with shyster lawyers, obviously. His approach to this is different because he gets a lot of legal spamming. But the basic tenet is the same: a real hot shot lawyer doesn’t try to wow you with his credentials.)

A couple of months ago, Pew indicated that our birth rate has fallen to historical lows. More alarmingly, it’s fallen among immigrant populations, who have usually made up for the anti-reproductive attitudes of native-born Americans. This is part of a global trend of falling fertility rates that have exploded (pun intended) hysteria about overpopulation. Indeed, people are now openly worried about potential under-population:

That might sound like an outrageous claim, but it comes down to simple math. According to a 2008 IIASA report, if the world stabilizes at a total fertility rate of 1.5—where Europe is today—then by 2200 the global population will fall to half of what it is today. By 2300, it’ll barely scratch 1 billion. (The authors of the report tell me that in the years since the initial publication, some details have changed—Europe’s population is falling faster than was previously anticipated, while Africa’s birthrate is declining more slowly—but the overall outlook is the same.) Extend the trend line, and within a few dozen generations you’re talking about a global population small enough to fit in a nursing home.

I must admit that this is a concern I share. Part of it is my penchant for “end of the world with a whimper” type concerns. Part of it is my own decision to reproduce (and thus far frustrated desire to reproduce again). It may be egotistical, but I feel I have a responsibility to create future generations, especially given the lucky hand of genetic cards I was handed (good health, etc.) But I’m also interested in this as a generalized demographic issue. Are we not having enough children?

Expressing concern over this trend is thorny, as Ross Douthat found out last year. He wrote an article about it and was promptly slammed for wanting women to be barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen. But as McArdle notes:

This shouldn’t need saying, but apparently it does: those who say that this is not a real problem, just something that Douthat made up because he thinks that wives should be barricaded in the kitchen until they’ve birthed at least a basketball team, are just wrong. They’re wrong because, well, if you’ve mett Ross’s wife, you know they’re just wrong, is all. But that’s a sidenote. They’re wildly wrong about the policy side. Population decline presents us with big, big problems–ones that we have in no way figured out how to solve.

Our whole economy and social system are designed for a growing economy, and a growing population. Without future growth, savings and investment become more necessary, but less attractive. Without growth, people become less generous towards strangers and more unhappy about their own circumstances. And without the growth around which all of our modern welfare states have been structured, the modern safety nets that governments have spent the last century establishing may not be politically or economically sustainable.

If you think that population decline is going to be a net boon to society, take a long hard look at Greece. That’s what a country looks like when it becomes inevitable that the future will be poorer than the past: social breakdown, political breakdown, economic catastrophe.

You should read the entire McArdle post, but it boils down to this: a society that has no children has no future. Saying so is not sexist; it’s simply reality.

(There’s another ugly aspect of this that comes up frequently in these discussions: the racial/national component. White people are declining far faster than any other race. And various pundits have expressed concern that European countries will soon be dominated by ethnic minorities or that Israel will one day be a majority-Arab state. I really have no idea what to make of these issues. I see the point. I also see that such points have been raised historically and have often turned out to be overblown. That is, unless you think 19th century pundits were right and our country really was ruined by all the Irish and Italian immigrants who came to our shores.)

So are we doomed? Is there a solution? I have no idea but I find concerns over things projected to occur centuries in the future to be a bit dubious. Worries about underpopulation are a little more realistic than past worries about overpopulation; we’re seeing real-life negative consequences of declining fertility in Europe and, very soon, China. But there are a number of things that could change the game dramatically. Medical advances could extend reproductive age (in theory, indefinitely). We could see a Brave New World type society in which children are primarily bred in labs. The state of our population problems five hundred years ago is as murky to us as our problems would have been to Martin Luther.

The fact is that almost all doomsday scenarios — be they overpopulation, underpopulation, global warming, pollution or whatever — rely on humanity not adapting to deal with the problem. So far, we have always found a way to keep going.

Some steps have been taken to fight this trend but I’m dubious of their utility. European countries have massively expanded paternal and maternal benefits and leave. Australia is paying bonuses to women who have children. But these countries have lower reproductive rates than the cold, unhelpful United States. The problem is not financial, it’s cultural. No matter how much money or leave you give someone, that’s going to have a weak effect on their willingness to take on a life-long obligation.

No, I think the changes are going to be cultural and technological. One advance might be group families, as shown in the works of Robert Heinlein, where multiple couples can pool time and resources in the way that extended families once did. Grandparents, living longer and better than ever before, can step in to effectively be stay-at-homes for working young people. As mentioned above, fertility tech that extends the time of child-bearing into the forties or beyond is already combatting the declining fertility trend by allowing women to build a career and then have a family. Improvements in robotics might ease the crushing burden that a newborn places on a young family.

And the ultimate X-factor is space exploration, which could potentially create a baby boom that would dwarf anything that’s come before.

But that’s in the future. And there’s little government can do about it, other than stand out of the way. In the meantime, we’ll just enjoy what might be “peak human”. Right now there are more people than there have ever been and those people are richer, healthier and happier than they’ve ever been. That’s something worth celebrating, whether it is the peak before our inevitable decline or just the resting point on a journey that ends with quadrillions of us spread across the Galaxy.