Building a Better Echo Chamber

So a historian wrote a book on Jesus.  Fox News invited him on.  Said historian pwned said Newscorp.

I try not to write about politics anymore, but I'd like to think the Aslan/Green exchange is about something bigger than partisan politics and represents a victory for anyone who thinks of themselves as one of the good guys.

Contemporary society has become so postmodern that it is skeptical of the very idea of expertise.  When we hear an expert speaking on something, we think they're just one more salesman pushing one more product.  Salesmen have facts and figures too, yet they always seem to omit those facts that don't support their desired end.  Understandably, we've all gotten pretty cynical when someone claims to be presenting just the facts, ma'am.

What makes this three minute video so fascinating and important is that Aslan strongly asserts that we need to get over all that shit.  This is the most vigorous, concise statement I've yet seen of what I'll call The Nate Silver Lesson.  Remember when conservatives thought Nate Silver was not a witch but merely a partisan hack?  How did that work out for them?

Experts exist.  Plenty of very smart people spend their entire lives pouring through hundreds of thousands of pages of Ancient Greek, developing ridiculously complex statistical models, and doing a million other really cool things.  The best part: they do so not to get over, but because they want to do the best possible job capturing reality, in all its complexity and messiness.  They constantly ask themselves whether their biases could be compromising their ability to accurately depict reality, and they take steps to compensate for those biases.  A worldwide community vets their work, and the vast majority of its members share the same commitment to presenting the world as accurately as possible.  The resulting product that they put out is measurably more accurate than the ranting of some person who's on TV because s/he is entertaining or looks like what we think an expert should look like.

If the notion of expert seems less than robust these days, it may be due less to the failings of the experts themselves and more to the inability of society to distinguish real experts from people who can act the part and still say what the audience wants to hear, rather than the truth.

The Get Fresh Crew

I promised I would write every day.  I never promised I would post all of my writings.

I've spent the last three days working on a really neat assignment that I just handed in.  Along the way I've leaned on some pretty awesome people.  I'm lucky enough to have very good friends who were willing to double as professional contacts on extremely short notice.

Elliot Yamada, Ben Sprows, Eric Warasta, Adam Lenter, and above all Sarah Dougherty, IT'S CALLED GRATITUDE!!

I also need to shout out Amy Gershkoff and Shana Kushner, who are the eternal presidents of La Coalition de Frienfessionals.

All Questions are Good Questions

On Friday, I did the keynote address for the Connecticut Association of Student Councils' state conference.  It was a blast.  The energy from the kids gave me a tremendous boost in my stride.  As part of my day, the fantastic Todd Burlingham and I presented "Do the Math: Let X Equal Student Activities," the new presentation from the Alliance for Student of Activities.

In brief, "Do the Math" is a presentation that aims to promote the expansion of student activities at the middle school and high school levels.  Scholarly evidence of the highest quality and published in over 100 prestigious peer-reviewed journals show that student activities have an independent, statistically significant positive effect on almost any outcome you can choose.  You want a kid to have a better GPA, better test scores, better chance of graduating high school and college?  Put that kid in student activities, because student activities make all of those things happen and more.

The early stages of the presentation's history have been an unqualified success.  The presentation debuted in December of 2011, and there's a very good chance that 5,000 or more people will see it before the end of 2012.  Moreover, we're winning the hearts and minds of our audience faster than we thought possible.  In particular, principals seem to be paying attention.

The people behind "Do the Math" are mostly professional educators.  I am the lone social scientist in the group, so my role has been to translate these compelling results into terms that our audience of teachers, principals, school board members, superintendents, and policymakers can understand.  I have done a good enough job in this task for our presentation to be credible and professional, and I would stake my professional reputation that the information in the presentation is accurate.

However, I am not beyond being phased by a particularly good question about how statistics work.  After our presentation, a very nice teacher approached me  and asked what she thought was a really stupid question.  To make the point about independent effects in a setting with controls, our presentation asserts that the studies we cite create, through statistics, sets of identical twins, where everything about two people is exactly the same--same parents, same demographics, same level of achievement--except that one participates in student activities, and the other does not.

This teacher asked how statistics did that.

And I was stumped.

This Connecticut teacher, being all apologetic, asked a question about how multivariate statistical analysis actually worked, how it actually determined the size of the effect of each independent variable on the dependent variable, how we know that putting any tenth grader into student activities will result in an almost 6 percent gain in his/her scores on standardized math tests.  Keep in mind that I explain this stuff for a living.  I taught my department's methods courses and explained regression analysis more times than I can count.  Student evaluations and faculty review said I was really, really good at it.  And yet the right question at the right time threw me for a loop, at least for a few seconds.

The point to this long, only kinda focused blog entry: this statistics stuff is complicated.  Because I am immersed in stats pretty consistently, I can forget that the logic isn't intuitive.  It's a good experience for me to remember my limitations.

Also, I hope this story gives heart to the rest of the Alliance Ambassadors, who don't have the statistical training that I do.  Before our presentation this week, Todd said he was glad I was there, because the research findings confuse him.  Yet I saw Todd do an exceptional job explaining every statistical concept in the presentation.  One need not be able to explain every sophisticated nuance of statistics to understand and use them.  In Todd's case, and in the case of the rest of the trained ambassadors, they understand the notion of controls, longitudinal data, independent effects, and everything else well enough to explain them competently to educated audiences.  They may not be able to stand up at an academic conference and explain everything perfectly, but I am so proud and so impressed  by how much they have learned and are able to share.

Besides, if Todd and the rest of the Ambassadors could explain statistics as well as I could, I would have taught myself right out of a job.  It doesn't pay, but the fringe benefits are fantastic.

Lest the point of "Do the Math" get lost in this discussion of statistics, let me reiterate that we know, beyond all reasonable standard of doubt, that student activities make kids better.  Participants don't have better scores just because activities attract better students.  These things make kids smarter, more motivated, more compassionate, and whatever else you can think of, and we have empirical evidence that will withstand any standard of scholarly scrutiny.

Stress and the Future

I'm a mess with stress, though I present it with finesse.  It's a tough time.  No need to go into the details.

This stress comes from worries about the future.  However, I have no doubt that I'm going to keep eating, sleeping under a roof, and doing all the things that are critical to a healthy, full life come July 1st.  There is a zero percent chance I go hungry or homeless.

Instead, my stress comes right from my fears about my self-image.  Specifically, who am I when I'm done at Wake Forest?  How does it affect my status, how others perceive me?  I'm also worried that the next j.o. I take will keep me from doing the things that matter.

Really, the things that are causing my stress are that simple and that inconsequential.  Like, maybe Bryan doesn't need to take such a job.  Or maybe Bryan can quit such a job if he finds it is getting in the way of what matters.  He has a very good friend who did just that, and life worked out just fine for her.  As for status, whatever.  The only people who judge someone by the status of their job are jerks and...me, I guess.

And I don't think I'm a jerk.  Insert smiley face emoticon.

If you're going through a tough time, I recommend you break down what scares you.  A little honesty and introspection can show us that a lot of the fears about the future we have aren't nearly as bad as our heads make them out to be.  Everything that you really want and need is always available to you.

Ben Riggs' latest masterpiece directly influenced this post.  Make 15 minutes to read and digest it.  You'll be glad you did.

Packing Conflicts

At the end of the month, I am moving out of my apartment.  Like a responsible adult, I have already started packing.  Remember, nothing makes me feel better than feeling like a responsible adult.

Like most everything else in my life for the last year, packing leaves me profoundly conflicted.  I am excited about what is to come but terrified that I don't know what that is yet.  I am both excited and terrified this move represents a step towards a new job and possibly career.  I am excited and relieved because moving out represents another break from my soon-to-be previous employer but sad because living in this apartment has meant so much more than said employer, has opened up so many amazing doors, and has led to the creation of so many wonderful friendships.

I've reached the point where I'm pretty comfortable with who I am.  Few things that can happen to me could still rock my sense of self, although I know that something down the line will do just that at some point.  But as for now, starting down a move and job fears, all I can think of is that I've done all of this before, so I don't get too worked up about anything.  However my situation resolves itself or doesn't, there will be good and bad aspects to it.

So I think being conflicted is probably an indicator that I can see more of the whole the picture.  Not all of it by a long shot, but enough to know...something worth knowing, I guess.

All of these conflicted emotions, and all I'm doing, at least for now, is putting a lot of stuff in storage and moving up to Bull City.  Given the 95 percent chance that I eventually move out of the Triangle, I can't wait for, and can't stand the thought of, the conflict I'll feel then.

One thing I am not conflicted about: LSU has a real shot of knocking off Kentucky.  CHAOS ALWAYS CHAOS (c) Takao Yamada.

How to Publish

Many young scholars worry about how to get published.  I can't claim to be an expert on the topic, but I have had some success, and I think my advice could be helpful.  Any insight I have gained has been the process of long period of trial and error with far more failure than success.  If one person can see this post and avoid even one of my mistakes, I will count it as a win.

When you're getting ready to begin a project where the goal is to yield a publishable piece of writing in the social sciences, you should ask yourself four sets of questions.

1) How important is my central question?  To put it more precisely, do others recognize my question as important?  If not, how effective can I be in convincing them of its importance?

2) What is the quality of my data?  Do I have direct measures of the central concepts?

3) Am I able to execute the analysis and write up in the most professional possible manner?  Have I checked with peers and mentors that my methodology is the best possible way to address this topic?  Have I studied the format of articles in my target journal and replicated that format as closely as possible in my own write up?

4) How compelling are my results?  This point is related to point 1.  Will someone who reads my article think that its findings are important?

I am pretty sure that if you can nail all four of these points, the world is yours.