Month: September 2010

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

I'd like to respond to your post on "Ladies Nights," specifically your comment "[w]hat if a club owner wanted to attract more white patrons by offering them a special discount?"

The situation is inherently different.  The goal of ladies nights is not really to attract more female customers, but to attract more male customers (who will pay full price) looking to go to bars with more female customers (for whom they will buy full-priced drinks).  While we would rightly disapprove of a bar owner's catering to those who want to be around more (or exclusively) white people, I have no objection to proprietors catering to those men who are looking for a favorable female:male ratio.

Obviously the ultimate goal of letting ladies drink for less is to lure men who will pay more, and that men as a whole will benefit from having more potential dates at the bar. Thus, Ladies Night seems like a win-win-win for all parties involved – women, men, and the club owners. But it also seems like the legal standing is dubious prima facie; New York law clearly states that "different prices for the same service is gender discrimination." In my understanding, the law is less interested in intentions and means-to-ends than whether a standard is applied equally to everyone. (For a more detailed look at how New York and various other states have addressed the legality of Ladies Night, go here.)

I don't think adding race into the mix is totally a red herring. What if a club believed that attracting more white women would bring in more men (regardless of race) to their establishment, so it held a "White Ladies Night" with discounted drinks based on race? Non-white women could still come, and buy drinks, but just at a different price, and many of them would still get free drinks from all the extra men attracted to the club (presuming that not all of the men were only interested in white women).  A counterargument could be that many non-white women lose out in the situation, thus breaking the win-win-win arrangement. But normal Ladies Night also have individuals who don't benefit: men with girlfriends or wives, gay men, or tag-along men not looking to pick up anyone.

Anyway, bottom line: Isn't there another way that clubs could attract more women, and thus men, without using such a simplistic and ethically ambiguous standard as gender? For instance, what if clubs put a special discount on certain kinds of drinks that women, on average, primarily drink? Few men will want to openly consume cosmos, apple martinis, or margaritas, particularly if they're displayed in a colorful and ornate fashion. (But of course they aren't barred from doing so if they don't adhere to stereotypes or just really want that discount.) A Dish reader has another suggestion:

The bars got it all wrong by offering discounts to women in order to lure them. The problem is a disparity between the genders in attendance. Why not offer half price on the second drink to those who are buying for another regardless of gender?  This should up attendance.

Perhaps, although friends could just buy drinks back and forth. Any other nudge-like ideas?

by Conor Friedersdorf

A reader writes:

I thought about responding to this subject before, but once I read the prep school bit, I absolutely had to. I grew up in Exeter, NH. My mother taught at the Academy. It was certainly expected that I would go — and I did for two years, until my family moved (and we couldn't afford the boarding fees). Then I went to Harvard. While my mother didn't attend an Ivy, (or one of the 7 sisters) starting with her father, my family has attended an Ivy (usually Harvard) every generation back to 1650. Before that, we can trace three generations who attended Cambridge.

I'm in my fifth year at Harvard. I recently had a meeting with my advisor and when discussing grad schools, I said I preferred Oxford or Cambridge, but like Trinity's program too. His response? "Trinity's definite — you could get a scholarship for sure. But if you want Oxford, we can make Oxford happen."

I *almost* feel bad about how easy it's been. Being an Exonian, even if I didn't graduate from there, Harvard was the next logical step. Oxford makes sense after than — and then probably Harvard Law, but maybe Columbia Law for a little variance. The point is, this is just the way things are once you've broken into the establishment. Yes, it's also easy to mess up — look at Meg Whitman's sons, failure absolutely does happen — but when you know the benefits that an Ivy background provides, that you'll never really have to struggle for placement at the next university, that a BigLaw job isn't going to be hard to get, as long as I keep up my end of the deal and keep a high GPA. Why would I, or any other Ivy grad or prep school kid, want the deal to change?

On a side note — St. Paul's, really? If you can't go to Exeter or Andover, Groton is definitely next best, though Milton probably has the strongest alumni network.

by Conor Friedersdorf

by Conor Friedersdorf

Into Thin Air starts as follows:

Straddling the top of the world, one foot in Tibet and the other in Nepal, I cleared the ice from my oxygen mask, hunched a shoulder against the wind, and stared absently at the vast sweep of earth below. I understood on some dim, detached level that it was a spectacular sight. I'd been fantasizing about this moment, and the release of emotion that would accompany it, for many months. But now that I was finally here, standing on the summit of Mount Everest, I just couldn't summon the energy to care.

It just gets more riveting.

by Conor Friedersdorf

The reader writes:

As an epidemiology doctoral student, I'm constantly amazed by the ways in which people misunderstand, misconstrue, and overestimate the available evidence on health-related topics. Few things touch as many aspects of our lives as intimately as health, and yet we consistently see high percentages of individuals making use of therapies with little or no value, sometimes at great expense to both their health and their pocketbooks. We have around 300 years of statistical and epidemiological methods for evaluating health effects, and despite controversy at the periphery, these methods work. Not only that, they're the only methods that do.

The question of how to behave in the absence of evidence is an open one; how to behave with evidence of absence is not. It's hard to begrudge the desperate family for seeking unproven cancer treatments, but as a society we need to think about how we value false hope, and whether or not we can discourage those hopes in the first place, rather than humoring them or crushing them after they take hold (neither of which are appealing choices).

And so a handful of rules & suggestions for the ill and ill-informed on how differentiate between absence of evidence and evidence of absence:

1. Ancient wisdom is the weakest possible form of plausibility. Given what we know about our extensive irrationality, it isn't hard to imagine a therapy existing for thousands of years because it plays on our biases but doesn't do anything.

2. "Scientific" does not apply to the act of cherry-picking desirable outcomes from among many, many contradictory examples. In the absence of large, diverse, double-blinded randomized trials, we have to look at the totality of evidence from different sources using different methods.

3. Recognize that our ability to evaluate evidence is colored by our level of personal investment. Wishin' and hopin' has never changed a p-value nor shifted a confidence interval. We could all take a page from Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, and try appealing to the "impartial observer" within and without. Don't wait until you have cancer to engage in the health arena. Teach yourself some science and statistics and form opinions now, before you have a diagnosis.

4. There is no such thing as "alternative medicine", only "alternatives to medicine". Once something has been proven efficacious, it simply becomes medicine. Physicians are desperate for treatments, and researchers are desperate for high-impact studies; if a treatment was ripe for the picking, you can bet your ass there'd be a stampede to demonstrate its effectiveness.

5. Always beware of "individualized" therapies. These may be crucially important in years to come, but only in very circumscribed areas (personal genomics). Charlatans have always appealed to our vanity; remember that often the more personally tailored a treatment becomes, the farther it deviates from accepted standards of treatment.

5a. And walk the other way when you hear the claim that a treatment is too individualized to be evaluated by randomized trials. This is often the post hoc cry of those who had a hand in designing the trial in the first place.

6. Don't put your faith in experts, but do conditionally trust them (trust, but verify). The more information we have, the harder it is to evaluate and synthesize it. There are more and more great resources whose sole purpose is to evaluate the evidence on complex topics; while these may not answer your questions, they are an essential starting point.

by Chris Bodenner

Tim Heffernan joins the debate:

I am not sure why [Poulos] thinks it's better to have our people rather than our robots do our killing — because it's more honorable? Produces fewer civilian deaths? Both are reasonable and both are debatable, but I won't speak for him and instead hope he will explain. In any case, to me the reason to prefer human to robotic war is a cold and brutal one: because it brings war home to the citizenry in the form of the dead and wounded, and the citizenry may then be less likely to support future wars except out of clear necessity. I don't like the logic of that argument and cannot defend it morally, but the distancing of civilians from their wars is a serious matter that both I and the Department of Defense have been concerned about for a long time, albeit for totally opposing reasons.

Dominic Tierney observes:

Rami Khouri, a scholar and editor based in Beirut, described how the Lebanese viewed the Israeli drones in the 2006 war in Lebanon: "the enemy is using machines to fight from afar. Your defiance in the face of it shows your heroism, your humanity…The average person sees it as just another sign of coldhearted, cruel Israelis and Americans, who are also cowards because they send out machines to fight us." America's population is as frightened as the lion from the Wizard of Oz. And its robots are as heartless as the tin man. Americans will not face death, whereas its enemies embrace it. In anti-American circles, the suicide terrorist may look like a brave rebel resisting the evil Galactic Empire.

by Zoe Pollock

Chef Frederick Nesbit caters to an under-served clientele. He began Cannabis Catering after his friend's diabetic mother was diagnosed with cancer.

I would bring back edibles [from the dispensary], but they're so high in high-fructose corn syrup that she was high off sugar rather than being medicated.

by Zoe Pollock

Scott Horton reports on the burgeoning democracy in the Kyrgyz Republic, after a revolution broke out in early April:

“We are witnessing the process of ‘lumpenizatsiya,’” one former president of the Kyrgyz bar, who had been aggressively critical of each of the prior governments, told me. When I asked what he meant by this curiously Marxist coinage, he explained, “It’s the process whereby the reins of government are seized by waves of people who are progressively less educated, less capable, and more brutish. Threats and intimidation take the place of moral suasion and law. Clan loyalties take the place of a sense of duty to the state.” In other words, a Hobbesian vision of the state in meltdown.

In a series of meetings in the former offices of parliament, now used as the headquarters of the government, I quickly got a sense of what he meant. Waiting for an appointment, I listened to one senior member of the government speaking in heated, animated terms with another—the topic, it turned out, was whether one man’s follower would be appointed as the principal of a secondary school in a remote village, replacing a career educator. “I already took his payment,” one said. “But he doesn’t know how to run a school,” came the rejoinder. Similar conversations, picked up in telephone intercepts, surfaced in YouTube segments (sometimes with polished English subtitles) that reverberated around the country. The nation’s civil-service postings seemed to be for sale to the highest bidder.

But one friend told me, “Look at the bright side: this petty corruption seems largely driven by democracy!”