Participation Trophies For All!

Does anyone remember Kerri Strug?

A quick search for "Kerri Strug Simone Biles" shows that a whole lot of people remember her, of which this writer is fairly representative:

The culture of celebrating failure is hardly new. As I thought of Simone Biles' bailing on her teammates to "focus on her mental health", Kerri Strug was the obvious contrast, but I also remembered the "Hainan Island Incident", in which an American spy plane, crippled in a collision with a Chinese fighter, decided to . . . land on the target of its surveillance.

On the one hand, I don't want to sound judgmental. On the contrary, I totally understand how the aircrew, looking around at their full complement of sensitive intelligence-gathering apparatus and information, deciding they saw nothing worth dying for. That was roughly my attitude towards ISAF.

But this was just embarassing:

The crew of the EP-3 was released on April 11, 2001, and returned to their base at Whidbey Island via Honolulu, Hawaii, where they were subject to two days of intense debriefings, followed by a heroes' welcome.[18] The pilot, Lt. Shane Osborn, was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for "heroism and extraordinary achievement" in flight.

Likewise in the case of Miss Biles. There needs to me some space between the realization that not everyone, even on whom we place a lot of hope and expectation, will rise to meet extraordinary challenge or undertake extraordinary self-sacrifice, and pretending that the failure to so rise and undertake is somehow itself heroic. We should be able to recognize that Biles and Osborn choked, as the saying goes, as would you and I under similar circumstances. No judgment. But no praise either.

Who was doing What on January 6?

While reading this article about how government persecution of dissidents hasn't gone far and fast enough, I was struck by the headline picture:

I'm pretty sure I've seen this picture in the DSM a lot over the last 6 months without having paid it much attention -- candidly, the whole episode was embarrassing. But pausing to look at it, I'm having trouble figuring out what exactly is going on. Judging from their dress, it looks like the people on the right of the barricade are Team Capitol Police and the people on the left are Team Protestors. But then, it also looks appears TCP are trying to pull down the barricade while TP are trying vainly to hold it up. But maybe someone can explain the exact context.

And while you are at it, can anyone tell me if and where old episodes of Shawn McCaffrey's "The Weekly Sweat" podcasts are still online? DuckDucking has yielded nothing.

Criminality Distributions

Via iSteve, "The Growth, Scope, and Spatial Distribution of People with Felony Records in the United States":

"We estimate that 3 % of the total U.S. adult population and 15 % of the African American adult male population has ever been to prison; people with felony convictions account for 8 % of all adults and 33 % of the African American adult male population."

Note that given these numbers, and assuming blacks constitute 12% of the U.S. population, the non-black felony conviction rate is 4.6% (arrived at by this formula:(.08 - .33*.12)/(1 - .12)); Likewise, the non-black incarceration rate is 1.4%.

This implies that blacks are 7.2x overrepresented among felony convicts and 11x overrepresented among prisoners.

These data can be explained by a model in which anti-social behavior is normally distributed, with the black mean higher than the non-black mean and a higher threshold for incarceration than felony conviction. We are all familiar with the bell curve:

A few words of explanation: Shown are two normal distributions, each with variance one. The "Group A" mean is zero, as shown on the x-axis; the "Group B" mean is one standard deviation above the Group A mean. The left Y-axis is the probability distribution function (PDF) value. It is meaningless in itself; obtaining percentages requires integration (i.e. the area under the curve). On the right axis is the value of the ratio of the percentages of the two distributions lying above the threshold indicated on the x-axis. For fellow stats geeks, the ratio is (1 - F_B(x))/(1 - F_A(x)), where F(x) is the cumulative density function (CDF) corresponding to each PDF.

For instance, Exactly 50% of the Group A distribution falls above zero, while 84% of the group B distribution does; their ratio is .84/.5 = 1.7. 16% of the Group A distribution falls above 1, while 50% of the Group B distribution does; their ratio is 3.1. 2% of the Group A distribution falls above 2, while 16 % of the Group B distribution does; their ratio is 7. These ratios continue to climb as shown.

The ratios given by the study can be accounted for by a model of anti-social behavior where the black mean of anti-social behavior is 1.3 standard deviations of the non-black distribution above the non-black mean, whereas the non-black standard deviation is .87 of that of the non-black standard deviation:

That the black criminality distribution is narrower than the non-black distribution should not surprise us; the non-black population is by definition more heterogeneous, including Hispanics with higher rates of criminality than the white majority and Asians with lower rates. A more rigrous model would attempt to break these out separately. In the meantime, one of the implications of the narrower black distribution is that at sufficiently high thresholds we see from the graph that the ratio begins (just barely) to level off; however, this is an artifact of combining disparate populations into a non-black category.

This model is useful for predicting outcomes as reported in this Columbus Dispatch article about racial disparities in the juvenile system:

Delinquency filings in county Juvenile Court fell from 6,247 in 2010 to 2,457 in 2020, a 61% drop. The number of youths admitted to the county's juvenile detention center fell from 2,196 in 2010 to 602 in 2020, a 73% decline. . . .

In 2020, Black teens in Franklin County were two-and-a-half times more likely to be charged with a delinquency offense than white teens — in a county where less than 25% of the population is Black. . . .

In Franklin County, the detention numbers are particularly stark. Black juveniles represented 84% of the youths admitted to the county detention center in 2020. That number has grown worse since 2010, when Blacks accounted for 71% of the juveniles detained.

On average, the daily population in the county detention center in 2020 included 47 Blacks and four whites. And the median length of stay in detention — where youths are held before their cases are resolved — was 12 days for Black juveniles and three days for white juveniles. . . .

The 65 Black juveniles who were given an out-of-home placement in 2020 represented a 70% drop from 2014. But the 13 whites youths placed out-of-home last year represented an 89% drop during the same period. . . .

Based on raw numbers, Balis said, Franklin County's Juvenile Court is to be commended for the drop in out-of-home placements for Black teens. The number of such placements stood at 215 in 2014.

Here is the demographic information for Franklin County, Ohio, of which 22.9% is black and 62% is white. As is common in mainstream reporting, the article combines multiple measures; I count "delinquency filings", "charged and detained", "charged", "admitted to county detention", "detained", "daily population", and "out-of-home placement". I kind of get that journalists want to mix up their formulations for stylistic reasons, but it means that I can only guess which terms are supposed to be equivalent. But youths are "charged", where the article claims is a 2.5x black/white rate ratio, far more often than they are "detained", where there is a (47/.229)/(4/.62) = 32x black/white rate ratio, assuming that the ratios of the juvenile population is the same as the overall population, which assumption is almost certainly incorrect, but is the best data we have.

However, it is apparent that Franklin County raised the thresholds at which juveniles are both charged and detained. So it should not suprise us to see that of the two measures for which black numbers are provided in the same context for two different years, we see that the percent black of detentions climbed from 71% to 84% between 2010 and 2020, implying an increase in the black/non-black rate ratio from 8x to 18x, and the black/white ratio of out-of-home placements climbed from 1.8x (i.e. 215//(13/(1-.89)) = 215/118) in 2014 to 5x (65/13); given their percentages of the population, this implies an increase in the black/white rate ratio from 5x to 14x.

That said, these numbers don't necessarily fit the parameters developed from the nationwide conviction and incarceration data shared earlier. For instance, as you can see from the graph, the black/non-black anti-social behavior ratio of 5x occurs right around the median of the black distribution, and obviously somewhat less than half of all black youths in Franklin County received out-of-home placements in 2014. But otherwise we should expect the black/white and black/non-black rate ratios to be at least this high, and higher still as the threshold for punishment increases.

What is "Report for America"?

This article about the ethnic Nepalese from Bhutan, who (reading between the lines a bit) made themselves odious to their host country, weren't admitted back to Nepal, and therefore washed up in Ohio because Reasons, is pretty standard for the genre:

The rising anti-refugee and anti-immigrant sentiments during former President Donald Trump’s administration exacerbated the emotional strain that new Americans experienced, according to Rochelle Frounfelker, a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University’s Department of Psychiatry in Montreal, Canada.

“Having someone at the grocery store come up to them and say they should go back to where they came from affects people on a daily basis,” said Frounfelker, adding that the discriminatory rhetoric coming from politicians could be a stressor for refugees, especially given their experience of being prosecuted in their home country.

And so on and so forth. But at the end, I noticed this bit about the authress:

Yilun Cheng is a Report for America corps member and covers immigration issues for The Dispatch. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep her writing stories like this one. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation at https://bit.ly/3fNsGaZ

Does anyone have any insight into RFA's role in local media? Is it seeding ideologically vetted reporters at local papers?