Journalists: Big Numbers Are Hard!

I only saw it today, but back in August PJ Media published an article "Is America Inching Toward A Police State?" Now, it is not the purpose of this post to evaluate whether the answer to that question is yes or no. The purpose of the article is to highlight the journalistic device of "scary big numbers!"

In article after article, you see the authors refer to some "scary big number" or other, clearly with the intent to shock. Unfortunately, in almost all cases the numbers lack context and proportionality.

I don't have anything against this particular author -- I'm even sympathetic to his thesis -- but intellectual honesty compels me to ridicule his use of "scary big numbers" when such numbers are, in fact, ridiculous.

The offending example in this article is these two short paragraphs:

Whitehead said NSA personnel told him that a new facility in Utah has a computer that downloads 1 trillion bytes of information from the Internet every month.
“The new computer they have is so powerful, it can actually download the entire content of the Library of Congress in six hours,” Whitehead said.

 Wow. One trillion bytes! That's sure a scary big number! One trillion bytes, why that's ... um ... 931 gigabytes. Smaller than the typical hard drive in a home PC. Per month, that's 31 GB per day. That's maybe 150-160 Netflix movies a day. In other words, nothing compared to a typical hour in the life of the U.S. internet.

It's such an arbitrary and laughably small number, the author is almost surely missing something. The number is either wrong, or it isn't referring to what the author thinks it's referring to.

We'll probably never know, because the author didn't know enough to be critical about the scary big number.

AT&T Pointless Privacy Protection

I talked to an AT&T rep. today to add a feature to my phone. At one point, she had to get an official acknowledgment from me before she was allowed to use my account information to discuss promotional offers with me. I said to her, "It's very ironic that you have to get special permission from me just to access my account information so you can discuss my own account with me, but you don't have to get my permission to send all my call metadata to the NSA."

Right. Now that we have that cleared up.

Tautology Alert

Distractify has a pretty funny article, 39 Test Answers That Are 100% Wrong But Totally Genius At The Same Time. 

But the very first one hurts my logical brain:

The teacher's answer is just as wrong as the student's because it's a tautology.
The question is: How do you know (that the number is even)?

If you answer, as the teacher does "Because the number in the one's place is even." you have demonstrated no sign that you understand what the definition of "even" is. You might as well have said "Because I'm smart."

Let me put it another way:
Is the number 68 even or odd? Even.
How do you know the number 68 is even? Because the number in the one's place is even.
The number in the one's place is 8.
How do you know the number 8 is even? Um....

That, there is where the teacher's answer falls apart. If we're already assuming you know what "even" means, then there's no point to question 7 at all. You can't define a term by using the same term.

If you answer "because I've memorized all the even one digit numbers," that's basically as useful as saying "Because I am smart."

You have to answer "because the number (in the one's place) is divisible by two with no remainder."

The parenthetical portion is actually redundant, but I wouldn't call it wrong.

Teacher fail.

As long as I'm picking this apart: the title of the article indicates that the answers are wrong. This one isn't wrong. It's pretty much the best and most important answer possible! Smart kid!

 

This one is also not wrong. It demonstrates that the student has a far better grasp of English and logic than the teacher:

Also, not wrong. The question doesn't ask the student to define "risk," but to give an example of a risk. The student does so concisely and elegantly:

Also not wrong, assuming Frankie's not a liar (and his assertion is eminently plausible!):

For all I know, this could be absolutely correct. I bet the teacher didn't get it translated, either! I'd totally give the kid an A without even bothering to translate. A kid who goes to that much trouble to forge a plausible-looking Chinese letter is learning more than he would from doing the boring old essay question.

 

This one is a satisfaction survey and has no correct or incorrect answers:

 Ask a subjective question, expect a subjective answer. It's not like "Tony gets better at piano," is an ironclad effect. Some people just suck at piano.

 What the hell kind of picture were they looking for here? I fault the kid for not adding up his age, but we're talking, what, probably at least 110 years old here? Any kid who didn't draw a gravestone, urn or bare skeleton is delusional. At least the kid has a grasp of the spans of time under consideration.

Again, nothing wrong about this answer, as far as I can tell.

 

Sad, but not wrong:

Also not wrong. Just awesome:

 

So, by my count that's 10 out of 39 cases where distractify doesn't know what "100% wrong" means (and there was one other I was on the fence about). Maybe they should ask some of these kids.

Also, teachers, if your students outwit you, please just accept defeat gracefully. They're learning important life lessons.

A Friend For Pajama Boy

They're going to have a lot to talk about over the holidays!

Money For Nothing

Last night I got on healthcare.gov and checked out what it would cost to insure my family of five through the exchanges. More than $12,000/year for Bronze plans with family deductibles as high as $12,000

Up to $24,000 per year in out-of-pocket medical expenses before I get anything at all for my money (because the money you pay for insurance you never use is a medical expense).

The premium cost is actually less than my 2014 employer-provided insurance (which is more than my 2013 insurance, with worse benefits, because my existing plan was canceled due to Obamacare. If you like your plan....), but my employer subsidizes 80% of my premium, so I don't feel the bite so much. But the bite is still there, if I pay attention, because that 80% "subsidy" is money the company could otherwise pay me directly in salary!

It's the deductible that's radically different. Currently, my deductible is only $1,200 for the family -- a tenth of the Bronze plan deductible. A $12,000 deductible means your insurance is really catastrophic health insurance, but it's priced like comprehensive health insurance, because after the deductible it covers all sorts of ridiculous things.

Pre-Obamacare, if I could have arranged for the company's share of the premium to be paid to me and bought my own insurance, I would have. But that's not an option under the perverse, industry-warping set of tax incentives we're saddled with.

We are not a heavily medicalized family. We don't go to the doctor at the drop of a hat. We typically don't meet the $1200 deductible, no less the $12,000 dollar deductible. All I would really want is catastrophic health insurance. I'm totally good with paying out of pocket for non-catastrophic expenses -- I can manage my own money, thanks. But I am now prohibited by Obamacare from buying catastrophic insurance through the exchange because I am not under 29.

I'm so grateful that a bunch of politicians and bureaucrats in Washington know what's best for me.

That's the ultimate indignity of the nanny state -- the presumption of incompetence.

Step 1: Don't Tour North Korea

The WSJ has a video up, "Keeping Safe While Touring North Korea":

An 85-year-old American was arrested in North Korea due to his service in the Korean War. Simon Cockerell of Koryo Tours, which arranges group visits to the country, tells the WSJ's Deborah Kan what American tourists need to do to keep themselves safe.

The desire to tour North Korea should be your first warning that you suffer from serious mental health issues and have no business plopping yourself down in the middle of one of the most brutal, repressive regimes on earth to engage in tourism! Seek help.

Later: Man, having watched the video now, I'd say it's extremely disappointing, except that it's exactly what I expected. It's a self-serving propaganda pitch from a tour operator. The WSJ interviewer, Deborah Kan, declines to give him anything but softball questions that allow him to present his "nothing to see here, move along, no trouble at all" spiel.

I get angry that journalists today feel apparently no obligation to ask hard questions. She asks about instructions that tourists are given -- do's and don'ts, mostly don'ts -- but never digs down into specifics or asks about the regime's brutal repression of its citizens, the Potemkin village experience it provides to tourists and the morality of pumping tourist dollars into this ugly, ugly evil system to help it keep itself afloat.

For the Useful Idiot file: In another article on the detention, a commenter says: "I would probably agree with North Korea. I don’t think we would look kindly on a 90 year old Japanese Emperor sight seeing Pearl Harbor."

How can a statement that idiotic not want to make you pound your head against a wall? The Emperor of Japan is a ceremonial figure, recognized and honored by the U.S. government. Should he or any member of the Japanese imperial family decide to visit Pearl Harbor, they'd get the VIP treatment. As far as aging Japanese soldiers, the U.S. welcomes all Japanese citizens, is no longer seeking any Japanese war criminals and would not do this to any Japanese citizen visiting our shores.

I'm disappointed that the man, Merrill E. Newman, dutifully confessed to all crimes. I'd hope that even at 85 -- especially at 85 -- I'd have the stones to tell the North Koreans where to stuff their confession.

Human Nature As Revealed Through My Kids

There were a couple little interactions between my two youngest daughters that happened this afternoon that I thought were very revealing of human nature.

In the first, the youngest found a chess medallion that belonged to her older brother. "He won a medal for chess?" the youngest asked, excited, because she's getting interested in chess a bit.

"Not really," the older one replied. "We both got them. They're just pity prizes. Everyone who played got them."

Pity prizes. The term and my daughter's tone said it all. These kinds of "trophies" and "awards" are ridiculously common now, and they don't do anything for the kids' self-esteem (as if that were important). If anything, they're reminders of failure: "You got this because you didn't win." The kids realize this. Don't the adults think the kids realize this? Adults who come up with these idiotic "participation awards," I ask you: exactly how stupid do you think these kids are? It's pretty damn insulting that you expect them to be pleased by receiving these.

In the second interaction, we'd just gotten out the Christmas advent calendar: It's a little wooden Christmas tree with 24 drawers. Each drawer has a little ornament, and each day from Dec. 1 through Dec. 24 you're supposed to take the next ornament out of its drawer and hang it on the tree.

The youngest asserted that she wanted to hang all the ornaments right now. Her older sister was adamant that the ornaments must be hung once a day, because that's how it's supposed to be done!

"Rules! Pfft!" was pretty much the younger daughter's attitude. "I don't see a rulebook for it! There's no instructions! We can do it any way we want!"

"But that's not how it's supposed to be done!" The older sister tried to explain. One a day until Christmas.

The younger daughter showed no appreciation for the explanation. The existence of a set of codified expectations for how the advent calendar is supposed to work didn't impress her at all.

I took out a sheet of paper and wrote "ONE AT A TIME" on it in marker and set it down in front of the advent calendar. "See? Rules!" She thought that was pretty hilarious. I let her put all the ornaments on. She'll probably be more interested in putting them all away and putting them on one at a time later after she's had a chance to play with the tree for a while. Or not. As if I care. The real purpose of the tree is for the enjoyment of children: if the rules are a barrier to her enjoyment, of what use are the rules? There are plenty of times in her life when the rules must be followed. Freedom to ignore the rules is something kids also need, sometimes.

But it's interesting how two girls, raised in the same household, have very different attitudes toward rules. That interaction was characteristic of the two. The older (the fourth of five) is much more the type to like things very orderly, to think that there is a "Way Things Should Be Done." The younger isn't completely devoid of that instinct -- I think all people have it, but she is much more inclined to discard the rules when the rules get in her way. How much of that difference between the two is innate and how much due to differences in how we have parented them? My experience after five kids is that no two kids get parented exactly the same, even by the same parents at the same time. Your parenting and your interactions with your kids are influenced by their personalities, your age and experience, your life situation at the time (job, income, free time, mental health, etc.), and your natural relationship with the child, for better or worse.