Month: November 2014

Political Brutes

Justin E. H. Smith argues that humans “are not the only political animals”:

There are overwhelming empirical data revealing, to anyone who is willing to look, complex social organization across the animal kingdom, including collective deliberation, division of labor, ritualized conflict resolution, and other forms of behavior that, when identified in human society, are deemed political without hesitation. We know that elephants plan elaborate raids on human settlements to recover the remains of their slaughtered loved ones. We know that in ant colonies the appearance of elaborate systems of task-allocation is related directly to the size of the colony: just as in human society, the more individual members of the society, the more we may expect to find social differentiation. Thanks to the primatologist Frans De Waal’s popular work, we are now slowly warming up to the idea that there is such a thing, at least, as “chimpanzee politics.” …

[T]here is another way of understanding animals as political that even the most defiant human-exceptionalist cannot dispute:

not as separated out into their own discrete political societies, each according to its kind, but rather as part of a single, global political formation that includes, notably but not exclusively, human beings. Some recent political philosophy, in fact, is starting to approach its subject from just such a trans-species perspective. In their groundbreaking 2011 book, Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights, Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka argue compellingly that animal rights theory has been limited to the extent that it has emphasized only negative rights of animals, a category that is conceived as universal and without any distinctions of moral significance within it. They argue instead that theorists would do well to focus on relational obligations that human beings come to have to animals that figure in different ways in human society. For them, nonhuman animals belong to the polis, too.

Update from a reader:

I came across this item regarding animal politics. Several species seem to make decisions by voting. A couple examples:

Red deer

The red deer of Eurasia live in large herds, spending lots of time either grazing or lying down to ruminate. Some deer are ready to move on before others are, and scientists have noticed that herds only move when 60 percent of the adults stand up — essentially voting with their feet. Even if a dominant individual is more experienced and makes fewer mistakes than its underlings, herds typically favor democratic decisions over autocratic ones.

A major reason for this, according to research by biologists Larissa Conradt and Timothy Roper, is that groups are less impulsive: “Democratic decisions are more beneficial primarily because they tend to produce less extreme decisions, rather than because each individual has an influence on the decision per se.”

African buffalo

Similar to red deer, African buffalo are herd herbivores that often make group decisions about when and where to move. In the 1990s, researchers realized that what initially looked like “mundane stretching” is actually a type of “voting behavior,” in which females indicate their travel preferences by standing up, staring in one direction and then lying back down.

“Only adult females vote, and females participate regardless of their social status within the herd,” biologist David Sloan Wilson wrote in a 1997 study. “When the average direction of gaze is compared with the subsequent movement of the herd, the average deviation is only three degrees, which is well within measurement error. On days in which cows differ sharply in their direction of gaze, the herd tends to split and graze in separate patches for the night.”

Facebook Gets Out The Vote

Facebook Voting

Dara Lind explains the power of Facebook’s digital voting sticker (seen above):

Facebook offered the “I Voted” sticker to most of its users in 2010 — but not all of them. A few hundred thousand users just didn’t see any sticker at all, and a few hundred thousand more got the sticker but no information about whether their friends had clicked it.

It turns out that people were a little more likely to vote — and definitely more likely to tell Facebook they’d voted — if they saw their friends had voted too. Eighteen percent of people who didn’t see a list of friends who’d voted clicked on the “I Voted” sticker; 20 percent of people who did see the list of friends clicked on it. And users who saw both the sticker and the list of friends were slightly more likely (about 0.6 percent) to actually go to the polls than users who didn’t see anything.

Robin Meyer is concerned:

Facebook can already figure out so much about us: our politics, our income, our sexual orientation—even when we’re about to fall in love. As Zittrain wrote earlier this year, the company could easily combine that tranche of data with selective deployment of its “I Voted” button and tilt an election. Just make certain populations more likely to see the button, and, ta-da: modification managed.

And Facebook, frankly, may be altering elections already. Social networks skewyoung and female: two reliably progressive-leaning demographics. Even if Facebook distributed the button equally to its users, it might still bring more liberal users to the polls than conservative ones.

But Alex Fitzpatrick thinks “conservatives have little to fear from Facebook”:

While Facebook, born on college campuses, was once the domain of the young and likely left-leaning voter, its demographics have been changing rapidly year-over-year as more parents and grandparents log on to the service to swap family photos and catch up with long-lost friends. (Indeed, parents signing up for Facebook is probably a reason some teens are fleeing to alternative platforms hidden away from their guardians’ watchful eyes.) Facebook use is definitely still more common among the young, but its user base is getting older by the year. Pew found at the end of 2013 that Facebook “usage among seniors has increased significantly in the last year,” for example, and it’s safe to assume that trend has continued through 2014. Pew’s numbers also show Facebook use cuts across several other demographic factors, like race and urbanites/suburbanites/rural adults. And Aaron Smith, a senior researcher at Pew, said in a July presentation that there are few partisan differences regarding Facebook use.

Ultimately, Facebook is now so ubiquitous that if it does what it promises to do Tuesday — show the “I Voted” sticker to nearly every voting age American — it shouldn’t bring out one side’s voters more than the other’s.

Marriage Equality Update

“Showed Significant Improvement, Still Incomplete”

That’s the grade Douthat tentatively gives the GOP’s performance this year:

Keep in mind that Republicans in 2014 have not merely been trying to outdo Mitt Romney’s (or John McCain’s) presidential effort; they’ve also been trying to outdo their own not-especially-impressive Senate efforts from 2010 and 2012, in which bad candidates and weak messaging and poor turnout operations handed a number of winnable seats to the Democrats. …

[I]f the polls hold, and the Republicans mostly win the states they should win and pick off a couple that seemed like reaches six months ago, then the G.O.P. will have accomplished something it conspicuously failed to do in the last few election cycles: The party will have run a mostly error-free campaign, with good or good-enough candidates and strategies (especially Gardner’s run in Colorado), that doesn’t effectively gift-wrap control of the Senate for the Democrats. And while Republicans will obviously need to clearer a higher bar in 2016, it will still be reasonable to call that kind of outcome progress for the party — a necessary, if obviously not sufficient, step toward being a majority coalition once again.

The Plight Of The Yazidis Still Isn’t Over, Ctd

A group of Iraqi Yazidi leaders came to Washington last week to meet with officials and plead for assistance in protecting their people and lands from a renewed assault by ISIS. Josh Rogin caught up with the visiting dignitaries and listened to what they had to say:

“Our hostages, children, women, and girls, between 4,000 and 5,000 of them, have been captured by ISIS and sent to other areas. We need help to rescue these hostages,” said Sameer Karto Babasheikh, the son of the Yazidi Supreme Religious Council leader. “In Mosul, they opened a market to sell Yazidi girls. Some of them ended up in Fallujah, some of them were taken to Saudi Arabia and Raqqa in Syria.”

On the mountain, between 6,000 and 7,000 civilians and between 2,000 and 3,000 Yazidi fighters are still trapped and struggling to stay alive, cut off from any supply routes, the Yazidi leaders said. Since the airstrikes trailed off to a trickle in October, ISIS has taken over the five remaining Yazidi towns near Mount Sinjar, killing hundreds of civilians and abducting hundreds more. Even the humanitarian airdrops have halted. The Iraqi government provided two helicopters to deliver aid, but they are old and fly only once or twice a week, Babasheikh said.

Reporting from Dohuk, Alice Su confirms that “there remains no open path for civilians to get out, or for aid to get in”, while the Yazidis blame the Kurdish Peshmerga for abandoning them:

Humanitarian agencies are ready to aid Sinjar as soon as military action opens a way. Around Zumar, for example, a town north of Mosul just recaptured from the Islamic State on Oct. 25, organizations like the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the Danish Refugee Council (DRC) are already hard at work. “People in these risky areas are much more in need,” said ICRC spokesperson Dabbakeh Saleh. “They have been totally cut off from the rest of the world.”

A Peshmerga-led effort to liberate Sinjar would represent a reversal from the situation in August, when their retreat left the Yazidis exposed to the assault by the Islamic State. “There is no doubt that the Peshmerga not only did not fight in Sinjar, but they also did not evacuate people or tell the towns that IS had arrived in the south of the mountain,” said Iraq-based researcher Christine van den Toorn. “It was total abandonment.”

Previous Dish on the Yazidis here.

(Video: ISIS militants chat and joke about buying and selling Yazidi slaves on “slave market day”. Via Joel Wing.)

The Goldilocks Principle Of Grading, Ctd

A reader advances a great idea for the thread on grade inflation:

I teach upper-division cell biology at a major research university with more than 200 students a year, many of them desperately hoping to get into medical or dental school. It doesn’t matter what type of grades we give; they all want the highest possible so they can get into professional school.

The only thing that I believe will limit grade inflation is if the median score was reported along with every class grade (and the all important cumulative GPA would be reported along with the cumulative median GPA of the student’s classes). So while an A- might sound like a great GPA, if the student’s median GPA was an A- it would be very clear that this was just an average student. One might hope that students would actually seek out classes with lower median grades since otherwise they would have no chance to actually excel, and at a minimum, it would take pressure off those of us who teach and are trying to resist pressures to inflate our grades since we could fairly point out that it was in the students best interest to not have an absurdly high median GPA.

A few more readers chime in:

In an ideal world, intellectual mastery would matter more than grades. In such a world, the smart students would flock to the toughest professors. Unfortunately, that’s not the world we live in. Students live by the grade and die by the grade. As aren’t taken as exceptional but are expected.

Take me, for example. I was at my college on scholarship, so if my GPA fell below 3.5, I would be placed on academic probation. If it fell below 3.25, I would lose my scholarship and not be able to afford to go to school anymore. And this was on the lenient side. It’s nothing compared to the expectations for those going on to law school or trying to get into Ph.D programs.

Another protests that students actually don’t punish hard graders with harsh reviews:

It’s an academic myth that giving fewer As results in lower marks. I taught in a math department for years, and my grade distribution in my classes was pretty close to a normal distribution centered on 78 percent. Yet my evaluations were consistently among the highest in my college. The research literature backs me up. Consider this study, in which data from 50,000 undergraduate courses was analyzed:

After controlling for learning outcomes, expected grades generally did not affect student evaluations. In fact, contrary to what some faculty think, courses in natural sciences with expected grades of A were rated lower, not higher. Courses were rated lower when they were rated as either difficult or too elementary. Courses rated at the “just right” level received the highest evaluations.

Please help combat this myth!

Update from a reader:

In response to your reader’s proposal that students’ grades in a class be measured against the median so that everyone involved can accurately measure a student’s “achievement” in terms of positive or negative deviation from that median: Yikes!

It may be true that students are obsessed with grades as a path to scholarships and acceptance to graduate schools. But it’s not clear at all that professors or colleges should bend to that obsession either by further quantifying grades. Let grades be the problem of graduate schools trying to sort students or students trying to compete with each other. Our primary goal is teaching, and we need to ask ourselves whether grade inflation is a problem that interferes with that goal. In my experience, it’s not, but the obsession over grading is. We ought to think of ways we might limit that obsession rather than feeding into it.

How To Watch Tonight’s Results

Adjusted Lead

The Upshot will adjust vote tallies in real time:

More sophisticated analysts interpret leads through the lens of the outstanding votes. “There’s a lot of votes left to be counted in heavily Democratic Cuyahoga County,” Jeff Greenfield said on CNN in 2004. “Remember, some of the votes outstanding are down here in Marion County where Obama is winning,” John King said on the same network in 2008.

This year, The Upshot will aim to let you be your own John King. In about a dozen of the closest Senate races, we, like many others, will track the leads reported by The Associated Press. But we will also adjust those leads based on what we know about where the votes have come from. Our adjusted leads will be based solely on current and historical returns. They will not use data from exit polls, or any forecasts from Senate models. You’ll be able to find a link to the tracker on The Times’s midterm page and The Upshot’s home page.

Nate Cohn also has an extremely helpful primer on how the votes will come in in various states. On the Colorado race:

Our first real sense of where the night is heading might come just after 9 p.m., when the polls close in Colorado. Many counties will quickly count a significant number of mail-in votes, and these ballots will be fairly representative of the overall count. If one side is going to win by a few points, we could have a good idea by 10. But if you are thinking you’ll be able to go to bed then, put the pillow away. When the race in Colorado looks to be within one or two points, the networks might not even dare make a call until the next day. Despite the state’s fast start, just 80 percent of the vote was counted by midnight in 2012, and only 90 percent by 6 a.m. In 2010, Senator Michael Bennet’s 1.4-point victory wasn’t called until the next day.

And on Iowa:

The single most dramatic contest of the night might be Iowa. The first returns will disproportionately include Democratic-leaning early ballots, and Bruce Braley could hold a lead for hours even if Joni Ernst goes on to win by a slight margin. Eighty percent of the vote won’t be counted until midnight; a projection probably won’t come earlier unless Ms. Ernst wins by a clear margin.

Beware The Early Exit Polls

Ed Morrissey calls them “worthless”:

Exit polling data gets collected all day long to find the eventual turnout model for elections, especially in demographics such as age, gender, ethnicity, affiliation, etc. That data only becomes valid when it is fully compiled. Partial data sets for exit polling do not provide predictive outcomes because the turnout models can change significantly during the day, perhaps especially because of early voting. That is exactly what happened in 2004, when media outlets used non-predictive data in predictive ways, and while the data sets were still being compiled.

That isn’t to say that completed exit polls are meaningless. The networks will use the data in part to plug into their election models in order to call races — but that takes place while the results of actual voting are being published, after the polls have closed.

Nate Cohn chips in his two cents on exit polls:

They’re not designed to measure the results perfectly or measure the composition of the electorate. I find myself surprised by how just how accurate the exit poll figures can be, despite the obvious issues with the raw responses and the inability to weight to population targets. Unfortunately, most analysts and reporters jump on the surprising, outlying, newsworthy findings. Often, those figures are the ones most likely to be wrong.

Dana Lind identifies another problem with exit polls, their “tendency to oversample a particular kind of voter of color — the kind who lives in majority-white areas”:

Even though the public doesn’t know exactly how the exit poll chooses where to go, it’s possible to make some educated guesses. The exit poll is trying to predict the margin of victory for one candidate over another across the state. So when it decides which polling places to put interviewers outside of, it’s reasonable to assume that it’s choosing lots of swing precincts — precincts that are harder to predict and likely to affect the outcome. Those are going to be largely white precincts. …

Here’s why this is a problem: the voters of color pollsters run into in majority-white precincts might not be representative of the voters of color across the state. In particular, according to Latino Decisions, voters of color living among whites are “more assimilated, better educated, higher income, and more conservative than other minority voters.”

Raising The Minimum Wage In Red States

Efforts to do so look likely to succeed:

Four states have minimum-wage increases on the ballot on Tuesday, an occasion that’s notable for two reasons. All four states — Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska and South Dakota — lean conservative, meaning that the debate over low wages and income inequality has spread beyond reliably blue parts of the country. And should these four measures pass, as they’re all expected to, a majority of states in the U.S. will soon have higher wage floors than the federal minimum.

Danielle Kurtzleben puts these initiatives in context:

As the Wall Street Journal has noted, all 10 proposed minimum wage measures on state ballots since 2002 have passed. That’s remarkable because the minimum wage is a divisive partisan issue.

When the CBO in February released a report saying that a nationwide $10.10 minimum wage would lead to a decline of around 500,000 workers, conservatives pounced and liberals went on the defensive. But despite these apparent partisan divides in the US, Republican voters aren’t entirely against minimum wage hikes. While Democrats tend to broadly support a higher wage, Republicans don’t always disagree — indeed, they’re roughly evenly split.

Ben Casselman reviews the economic debate over the minimum wage:

Economists are divided over whether these efforts are a good idea. In aworking paper released Monday, David Neumark, J.M. Ian Salas and William Wascher fired the latest salvo in a long–running battle over the effects of raising the minimum wage. Neumark, his coathors and their allies argue raising the minimum wage leads to lost jobs; their opponents, including University of Massachusetts economist Arindrajit Dube, argue the impact on employment is minimal. A 2008 meta-study looked at 64 minimum-wage analyses and concluded that they generally found little to no impact on employment. A poll of leading economists last year found them nearly evenly divided on the question of whether a $9-an-hour minimum wage would “make it noticeably harder for low-skilled workers to find employment.”

Josh Barro compares the different measures:

The proposals differ in their particulars. Alaska would set its minimum wage the highest, with a gradual rise to $9.75 by 2016. Nebraska would go to $9 in 2016, South Dakota to $8.50 in 2015 and Arkansas to $8.50 by 2017. In Alaska and South Dakota, the minimum wage would continue to rise in line with price inflation in following years, which makes an enormous difference in the long term.

And Reihan wonders how the minimum wage hikes will play out in each state:

[W]hile the discussion of the minimum wage referendums have largely focused on what these states have in common — they’re relatively politically conservative — it hasn’t focused on the fact that among them, Arkansas is unusually poor and that its adult population has an unusually low average skill level. The consequences of a substantial increase in the local wage floor will likely have different consequences in Arkansas, in light of its history of deprivation and isolation, and where higher consumer prices associated with rising compensation costs will have more bite due to its low income levels, than in Alaska, which is considerably more affluent. And while both Nebraska and South Dakota had unemployment rates of 3.6 percent as of August, unemployment in both Alaska (6.8 percent) and Arkansas (6.3 percent) is fairly high. I can’t help but think that Arkansas is making a mistake. But better that Arkansas is making a state-level decision that, as inflation and productivity growth proceeds apace, will be less binding than new federal legislation, which will be less responsive to its particular conditions.