What Happened Today: January 11, 2023

FAA fails big; Stop saying field; Founding editor Jacob Siegel responds; Wilfred Reilly on partisanship in everything

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The Big Story

At least 6,700 flights were delayed and another 1,000 canceled on Wednesday morning due to a critical computer system failure. The largest disruption to the airline system in two decades came after a breakdown in the Federal Aviation Administration’s NOTAM system, which provides essential aviation data needed by airports to operate. Officials had initially believed they could keep flights in the air by relying on a redundant NOTAM system backup, until they realized the data within the backup was corrupted. Airports were slowly resuming service on Wednesday, but major delays are expected to continue throughout the week.

Dismissing the possibility of a cyberattack, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told CNN, “We have to understand how this could have happened in the first place. Why the usual redundancies that would stop it from being that disruptive did not stop it from being disruptive this time.” Well, yes, that’s obviously what we need to understand. Unlike Southwest Airlines’ recent meltdown, caused by bad weather and a software scheduling glitch during peak holiday travel, the transportation system itself was the source of the problem this time—an increasingly common problem as the United States’ withering critical infrastructure continues to undermine the stability of daily life.

With alarming frequency, the United States’ most significant systems have revealed their vulnerability in recent years. Hundreds of people were killed during a 2021 winter power outage in Texas; a 41% spike in water prices over the past five years has made water unaffordable to 14 million American households; at least $30 billion in repairs are required for Amtrak’s beleaguered and often delayed passenger rail system; more than a third of all public schools are conducting classes in portable structures because of overcrowding; a water main break occurs once every two minutes across the nation; and supply chains, which remain dependent on shipments from China for vital antibiotics and other drugs, struggle to deliver medicine and equipment in emergencies.

Read More: https://triblive.com/local/pittsburgh-international-airport-passengers-dealing-with-flood-of-flight-cancellations-delays/

In the Back Pages: How Political Bias Explains Everything

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The Rest

→ Weeks of violent protests in Peru boiled over on Monday when 17 people were killed in the deadliest day yet since demonstrators first took to the streets objecting to the detainment of former president Pedro Castillo. Castillo was arrested by Peru’s new government in December after drawing international condemnation for his attempted dissolution of Congress ahead of his own impeachment. The new president, Dina Boularte, and Prime Minister Alberto Otárola earned a confidence vote from Congress on Tuesday, which is required by the constitution after a new prime minister assumes office. But the new administration has struggled to tame the widespread violence as protestors call for Castillo’s freedom. Castillo was a political unknown when he took the prime ministership in 2021 with wide support across the country’s rural districts, rocking the political establishment in Lima.

→ Great news from the University of Southern California: Its Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work successfully advanced the fight against white supremacy on Monday by banning use of the word field and replacing it with the word practicum. “This change supports anti-racist social work practice,” the school said in a statement. Though not widely or even narrowly considered a word associated with anything racist, field, which derives from the Old English folde, meaning “earth” or “land,” could in fact “be considered anti-Black or anti-immigrant … [because] phrases such as ‘going into the field’ or field work may have connotations for descendants of slavery and immigrant workers that are not benign.” Maybe now you’ll remember the School of Social Work for its brave stance against dangerous language and not for its former dean of two decades, Marilyn Flynn, who pled guilty for federal bribery charges in 2018 after she helped launder $100,000 from a local politician’s campaign through the university to a nonprofit mental health clinic run by the politician’s son. Or, as we like to say in 2023 American, practicum corruptus.

→ Rupert Murdoch, the 91-year-old media mogul, appears to be laying the groundwork for the reunification of News Corp and Fox Corporation under the reign of Rebekah Brooks. When she was the head of News International overseeing several of Murdoch’s tabloid papers, Brooks and others were embroiled in a scandal for widespread phone hacking and bribes to the police to obtain dirt on celebrities and public figures in 2011. An old Murdoch ally, Brooks took the fall by resigning from her post. Following the scandal, Murdoch broke his business in two, with print publications under News Corp and entertainment and TV properties moved to 21 Century Fox. Now, the long-simmering merger of the entities looks to be nearing completion, according to reporting this week by The Daily Beast.

→ More heavy rain and flooding was expected to hit Northern California on Wednesday after weeks of storms across the state have claimed at least 17 lives. More weather events with heavy rain were expected over the next week as well, which could lead to more intense flooding as sewer systems and heavily saturated soil are already inundated with record levels of water. “Everything is wet. Everything is saturated. Everything is at a breaking point, and there is more rain coming,” Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis told CNN. Already this week, there were roughly 200 reports of mudslides and flooding across the central and southern sections of the state, and 34,000 residents have had to flee their homes. Though the punishing rainfall will at least be a boon for California’s depleted reservoirs, that’s not a help to everyone. “It’s great living on the river. It’s not so great living in the river,” one Santa Cruz resident told local news station KGO. “There’s a big difference.”

→ Quote of the Day:

They may be cute and cuddly, but not here in farm country. They’re a vermin and a nuisance.

That’s Dean Fisher, state representative for Iowa, getting riled up over the raccoon infestation that’s causing havoc all across Hawkeye farms and suburban communities. Adapting to the plethora of accessible food sources popping up in new housing developments and business districts around the Midwest, the raccoons have supplemented their already robust diet of row crops and wildly expanded their ranks. Now Iowa residents and politicians are pushing the Department of Natural Resources to allow for year-round raccoon hunting and more lenient trapping regulations to prevent what for some farmers amounts to thousands of dollars in lost crops and property damage. Weighing up to 20 pounds, the crafty bandit-masked vermin make use of humanlike paws and a dearth of natural predators, fur hunters included, which have largely given up on raccoon pelts since the furs that once fetched $40 in the 1970s are worth less than $3 today.

→ Mikaela Shiffrin can’t stop winning. The 27-year-old American alpine skier has already picked up 82 victories on the World Cup tour and is widely expected to soon overtake the world record of 86 titles notched by Swedish champion Ingemar Stenmark in the 1980s. But those in the sport say that if she stays healthy, she could finish with a triple-digit tally before she retires. “When she stays hungry, she can reach … I don’t know, 100 or more,” Marlies Raich, the former women’s slalom titan, said on Tuesday ahead of a race in Austria.

→ About 1,500 aspiring actors turned up at a casting call for a new drama series called Sacred, allegedly for a program set to run on Peacock, NBC’s streaming platform. The problem? It was all news to NBC, which never had a deal with Sacred’s creator, Pensacola native Elrico Tunstall. Drumming up excitement for the show on a live social media video ahead of the audition, Tunstall and his team made much of their decision to go with Peacock as their choice of platform amid stiff competition. But NBC repeatedly told reporters they’ve never heard of it. In hindsight, this clears up some of Tunstall’s comments to WEAR News: “Our show is in the pipeline to actually be put in their streaming platform coming up soon,” Tunstall said, but “for anybody out there that wants to call NBC, email NBC, text NBC, inbox NBC—don’t do that.”

→ Map of the Day:

From around the end of the 10th century to the beginning of the 17th, your average Medieval English resident could still use the word field without raising eyebrows and also pay their rent in eels. As the map shows, anywhere from 13,000 to 539,000 eels were used in a given century to satisfy renter debts to English landlords. A project from scholar John Wyatt Greenlee based on findings by researchers at University of Hull, the map offers amazing transactional detail, like the 2,500 eels that went to Bishop Odo of Bayeux in Atherstone in 1086, and the 4,300 eel bounty picked up by the Earl of Gloucester in 1315. 

→ Siegel responds to Salty:

Thank you for the comment, Salty. Yes, of course, the videotape in Infinite Jest. Why didn’t I think of that? I’m glad you asked about the lack of links. Most news websites include multiple links in a single story, whereas The Scroll often runs multiple stories without a single link. Why is that? The first reason is that we don’t think they’re necessary. If you were reading these same items in a printed newspaper, you wouldn’t expect a link or feel there was something missing without one. That system seemed to work pretty well in the heyday of American journalism. Littering news reports with hyperlinks confers a false authority in a media landscape that has lost trust with readers. There were so many links in the initial stories calling the Hunter Biden laptop reports Russian disinformation, there was hardly any room left for the state-approved fact checks. Beyond that, links are not just overused, they are ugly and parasitic, constantly pulling a reader’s attention away from the matter at hand. They also undergird the hyper-inequality of the digital economy. (Link architecture is a product of Ted Nelson’s network theories from the 1960s that laid the groundwork for HTML. The connection between hyperlinks and digital monopolies is that unidirectional flows of data correspond to unidirectional (upward) flows of wealth. But that’s a story for another day…)

The Scroll’s motto is “We read the internet so you don’t have to.” And part of what makes the internet so draining and tedious to read is the links. I’ll note here that in the thousands of comments and emails The Scroll has received since it launched in 2021, to my count, only three people, including you, have asked us to add more links. So I wouldn’t expect to see us start linking every stray reference or mention of another news source, but for loyal readers, we’re happy to provide them on request.

Here’s the Forbes article you asked for: https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2022/12/16/zoho-desk--redefining-the-customer-experience-with-ai/

And the Vice article: https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkp45y/reddit-stories-tiktok

Thanks for reading,

Jacob Siegel

Founding editor, The Scroll

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

How Stanford Failed the Academic Freedom Test by Jay Bhattacharya

For America’s new clerisy, scientific debate is a danger to be suppressed

The New Flavors of Israel by Flora Tsapovsky

Recent immigrants from Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus are changing what’s on the menu—from cafes to bars

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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How Political Bias Explains Everything

Experts make judgements based on political attitudes that impact their reliability

By Wilfred Reilly

According to the dogmas that currently rule America’s elite institutions, the single most important fact about any individual is their racial and gender identity. This quasi-religious belief results in conflict between the new identity-based framework and the older ideal that people are rational actors capable of arriving at an objective truth, independent of their personal background. But both of these views are wrong according to the Attitudinal Model, a paradigm that is popular in Political Science but widely ignored outside that discipline. Though it is not well known, the model almost perfectly explains the current “crisis of experts,” without resorting to the gaslighting and moral panics that so many “experts” have used to deny or explain away their failures.

Simply put, the Attitudinal Model is the codified idea that political preferences, especially when combined with a few other variables, generally predict how individuals will behave. The concept was first introduced by the Political Scientists Jeff Segal and Harold Spaeth, in their 1993 book The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model. Segal and Spaeth assert that the notion that decisions by leaders capable of independent action, a category that includes SCOTUS Justices, “are objective, dispassionate, and impartial [is] obviously belied by the facts.” Clearly, “different courts and different judges do not decide the same issue the same way,” and even decisions from the same court are invariably larded with concurrences, dissenting opinions, and so forth. A key point these authors make is that there will generally be enough respected precedent cases available on all sides in a major legal matter – or enough potential variables available in the context of an academic model – that anyone intelligent could find “no dearth…to support their assertions.”

What, then, determines leadership-level decisions? Personal attitudes, albeit somewhat constrained by individual rules and norms. “Decisions of the Court are based on the facts of the case in light of the ideologies, attitudes, and values of the Justices,” Segal and Spaeth write. The authors test this claim empirically – that is why the book is famous – and find that the position of individual judicial decision-makers on a standard (-1 to 1) scale measuring personal conservatism/liberalism predicts roughly 80% (.79) of all of their votes. Across a set of prominent death penalty cases, the political-ideology metric – that is, a measure of the individual justices’ ideological leaning compiled from their past voting behavior, “newspaper editorials,” and “off-bench speeches and writings” – predicted the behavior of every SCOTUS Justice in 19 out of 23 situations.

Attitudinally driven behavior among leaders stretches far beyond Supreme Court Justices or appellate court judges. Segal and Spaeth also find that ideology is a near total predictor of executive branch nominations of judges: 87% of all Supreme Court nominees (126/145 at the time of writing) have come from the sitting President’s party. In theory, we might like to believe that a president selects the judge they believe is most qualified for a position, but in practice we know that they simply pick the person whose political attitudes are closest to their own. This trend dates back to the very beginning of the United States, apparently: George Washington at one point nominated 11 highly partisan Federalists for the bench in a row.

Indeed, partisanship is a better predictor of being an elite judicial nominee than is “being a qualified judge,” as determined by past judicial service and players like the American Bar Association. Only 91 of the 145 Supreme Court nominees – 73% of Republicans and 48% of Democratic picks – met the American Bar Association's standard, Segal and Spaeth write. Similarly, basic ideological variables predict 95% of the Yes/No votes of Senators deciding whether or not to confirm these Presidential judicial nominees. Within the court system, the Attitudinal Model is measurably predictive beyond a few top benches: Segal and Spaeth note very early on that the model “will fully predict other courts to the extent the environment of those approximates that Supreme Court.”

The largely undisputed fact that ideology shapes the behavior of solo leaders matters because of the extreme trend toward siloing in modern upper-middle class life. Within my field—the academic social sciences—a 2006 survey found that about 18% of all faculty members identified as Marxists, another 24% as Radicals, and 20-21% as Activists. In contrast, perhaps 5% of American soft-scientists are conservatives. In an environment this politically slanted, the odds are good that many shifts of focus attributed to new theory or empirical data – and indeed many overall social science conclusions – are largely the products of ideology.

What are some examples of such conclusions? For decades, academics believed that authoritarianism was an almost exclusively conservative trait. The idea dates back to Frankfurt School scholar Theodor Adorno’s book The Authoritarian Personality, and dozens of studies have “confirmed” it over the years. However, in 2021, skilled Emory PhD student Thomas Costello noticed something simple but key: tools used to measure authoritarianism tend to be ‘designed from the left,’ and to focus on social problems which a right-winger would be more likely to oppose.

A typical survey question might read: “How important do you feel it is that American society harshly control (Communists)?” Costello realized that scholars could as easily frame nearly identical items from the other direction, asking – hypothetically – about the need to crack down on “Insurrectionists” or “anti-maskers.” His published article, containing a left-wing authoritarianism scale more complex than what I have described here, but based on similar principles, was just published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. It now appears likely that left-wing authoritarianism is one of the more common forms of authoritarianism.

Then there is “racial resentment.” For decades now, many political scientists have argued that citizens giving affirmative answers to questions like “Most Black people who receive money from welfare programs could get along without it if they tried (Yes or No)?” or “Italian, Irish, and Jewish ethnicities overcame prejudice and worked their way up – do you think Black people should do the same without any special favors?” provide a meaningful measure of the subtle racism that supposedly pervades American society. However, in recent years, skeptical scholars have begun administering the same Racial Resentment Scales to minority Americans – most of whom score quite high on metrics of racial pride, and obviously almost none of whom are conventional bigots.

Results have been telling. According to a recent survey sponsored by the Kaiser Family Foundation and CNN, 42% of Black respondents believe “lack of motivation and willingness to work hard” is a “major cause” of hardships within the Black community, compared to 32% of white respondents who believe so. 61% of Black respondents, meanwhile, believe that “Breakup of the African American Family” was a “major cause” of those hardships, compared to roughly 55% of white respondents. Still another study, by Riley Carney and Ryan Enos, found rates of agreement with the provocative questions on the Racial Resentment Scale did not change at all when lower-income or immigrant-origin white groups (i.e. Lithuanians) were substituted in for Black people. Dislike of affirmative action and welfare, it seems, correlates with conservatism and traditionalism across all groups, rather than with white racism.

In a thousand subtle ways, ideological bias can not only shape whole disciplines and domains of knowledge, but it can also weaponize scholarship against reality. To provide one example from my field: while the large numerical majority of police shooting victims in the U.S. are Caucasian, black Americans are disproportionately likely to be shot by cops. We make up 13-14% of the U.S. population, and roughly 25% of those fatally shot by law enforcement personnel in a typical year. However – and far fewer citizens know this – the Black violent crime rate is almost exactly 2.5 times the White violent crime rate, and any adjustment for this or for the racial difference in police encounter rate eliminates the discrepancy.

But many leftist academics have begun to argue that the crime rate disparity is simply itself more evidence of racism. Dr. Ibram Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist and a professor at American University, famously contends that any gap in performance between large groups must be due to systemic bias somewhere, and there are points that can be made about (say) differential enforcement of the United States’ drug laws. Though badly flawed, as I have noted elsewhere, nevertheless these arguments are widely accepted. And, whether a particular scholar concludes that patterns of American police violence are racist or not might well depend on whether or not she believes these claims and so excludes differential crime rates from her models as a predictor variable.

In this environment, a smart skeptic would expect that “solo leaders” in academia and the media will behave in much the same fashion as those sitting in the courts. Rather than presenting impartial empirical evidence, research results will often strongly reflect the ideological priors of those producing the research. Taking the very simple ‘crime rates’ example given above, in a situation where the vast majority of academic Sociologists lean to the political left, we would expect a comparable percentage of researchers to drop the crime-differential variable from their equations and thus conclude that American police operate in a racially biased fashion.

Let’s say that 90% of conservatives and Libertarians believe in a Paradigm X (“Most policing is fair and non-biased”), while 90% of leftists believe in Paradigm Y (“All Western institutions are corrupt”), we would expect 87.3% of Sociologists (.97 x .9) to believe in Paradigm Y and to reason forward from it. As the examples and data given above indicate, considerable evidence exists that essentially this is true.

But there is a bright spot to the discovery of entrenched ideological bias in academia. We can actually use attitudinal analysis to determine, with some accuracy, which ideas are truly bad. Citizens are frequently told that “the majority of the scholars in (Z) field” support one thing or another – with “gender affirming care” for minors being a recent example – and that hoi polloi should not question the expert consensus. However, from an attitudinal perspective, whether such opinion majorities are relevant depends heavily upon the ideological priors of the experts in question. If field Z leans 85% to the left, and 90% of American leftists support transgender surgeries for minors, but only 60% of the .85 leftist pool of experts does, this actually indicates that gender affirming care is probably a terrible idea: those most aware of the potential risks of the procedure are far more opposed to it than ideological peers with less empirical “inside information.”

Interestingly, something like this just occurred in the real world. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recently drew headlines after publicly re-affirming support for gender surgeries and hormone treatments for teenagers. However, the very left-leaning organization did so only after a hotly contested vote on an opposing resolution (“Addressing Alternatives to the Use of Hormone Therapies for Gender Dysphoric Youth”), which received 57 public endorsements from AAP members during the very brief period leading up to the referendum. Whatever their own politics may be, the nation’s leading academic pediatricians are by no means as actually unified on this issue as MSNBC makes them sound.

More broadly, a technique that could be used to develop a general Attitudinal Adjustment for field-specific bias is as follows: simply determine (1) the L/R ideological breakdown of a particular academic field or sector, (2) the level of support for Thing A within that sector, and (3) the level of support for Thing A across all of the L/R ideological groups in society. This allows the calculation of (4): what level of support for Thing A would almost certainly look like if the field ideologically matched society as a whole. Overall, we can probably say that popular niche ideas (“Defund and disarm the police”) that would be roundly rejected by any group that resembles the actual population are likely to be bad ones – and that ideas which are more often rejected than one would expect, even by partisan but experienced experts, are very likely to be bad ones.

But, in any case – while we’re calculating percentages – recall that there is a 100% chance that the output of any field at any time heavily reflects the ideological tastes of the very human people who make it up. We should recognize this, try to shift ideological monocultutres at the extremes, and never ignore reality.