I read this piece by Tom Chick about “that mission” in Grand Theft Auto V (SPOILER ALERT INSIDE THESE PARENTHESES: the mission where you, as Trevor, torture a man to get information about an assassination target out of him END SPOILERS) and it perplexed me. I think Chick is way over-reading the mission and is likely projecting his own views onto the game. My own opinion on that scene is that it doesn’t have anything to say and that’s made pretty clear by two facts:
1. The mission is supposed to be fun.
2. Trevor’s dialogue at the end of the scene once the federal agent leaves basically renders the entire thing logically and morally nonsensical.
This post isn’t about hockey statistics (which is likely how most of you reading this know about me) but I do think it’s relevant to that topic. I also think it’s relevant to reporting on statistics and academic work in general. As you probably know if you follow me on Twitter or read my posts at Pension Plan Puppets, I like data. I think its important to try to gain an understanding of the topics that we talk about that isn’t tainted by selective memory or other personal biases, and statistics can be a huge help in that regard. But in addition to being skeptical about our subjective memory, I also think it’s important to be skeptical of supposedly objective evidence like statistics. Data can be a useful tool in helping to understand our world, but it ought to always pass a simple test first, which is “Does the result make sense?” If the result doesn’t make sense, then we need to try to understand what’s going on beneath the numbers before we start discussing them as though they’re the truth.
A study on the prevalence of rape in some parts of Asia was published in one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals, The Lancet, this week. The study claims to show that 24% of men in the studies examined are rapists, a figure that climbs to a remarkable 59% in Papua New Guinea! This study has been widely reported in virtually all mainstream media outlets, such as The Washington Post, CBS, Bloomberg, the CBC, and Foreign Policy. No media outlet that I could find showed any skepticism about any of the things that I’m about to discuss.
Originally I figured that there wasn’t much of a point in writing about the potential for a military intervention in Syria because there were lots of other people covering the topic. Foreign Policy, for example, has done a very good job writing about Syria lately. But it strikes me that while there are lots of people discussing the possible outcomes of an intervention in Syria from a tactical standpoint, there isn’t much being done to tie it into broader historical themes. International relations history is what I got my masters degree in after all, so perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that that’s the angle I want to attack this from.
A lot of reviews of Gone Home begin by saying that the reviewer can’t tell you anything about the game without risking spoiling it for you and you should just go play it without knowing much about it because it’s the bestest. Both of those things, as it happens, are untrue. I’ll save any super-spoilery bits for a clearly marked section at the end of this post, but there’s no reason not to tell you some of the basics up front.
In Gone Home you play as a 20 year old college student named Kaitlyn who had been gallivanting around Europe and has just come home on a break from school and travel. “Home” in this case is a bit misleading though, as her family has moved into a rather large new house while Kaitlyn was overseas. As a result the house is unfamiliar to her. Upon arriving well after 1 in the morning Kaitlyn finds a note from her sister Sam telling her that she’s gone and apparently her parents are nowhere to be found either. Thankfully Sam’s voice magically appears to narrate her own story to you in drips and drabs as you explore the mysteriously vacant dwelling! From that point on you wander around the house picking up and examining objects (mostly letters that members of your family have left very conveniently strewn about) to piece together the story. Oh, and there are doors that are locked for reasons that never really make any sense, so you have to track down keys for them.
I’ve got a lot of things that I want to say about the ongoing disclosures about mass surveillance by the NSA (among other organizations), but I have one quick thought that I want to throw out there. There is something strange that happens to people as soon as you use the word “terrorism”. Any time politicians or other prominent authority figures in government want to justify some kind of over-reaching action they can just say “boogeyman” “terrorism” and immediately a startling percentage of the population becomes compliant. And I really, honestly don’t get it.
I don’t intend in any way to diminish very real acts of terror like the bombing at the Boston Marathon earlier this year or the attacks on the World Trade Center. But any honest assessment of risks in the average person’s life has to conclude that terrorism is a far smaller threat than all kinds of other things. And I don’t think people would be willing to accept things like mass surveillance or detaining people without due process in response to these other risks. Let’s look at one example. read more…
Nate Silver is in the news again, this time for his move to ESPN to start a new blog/site dedicated to statistical analysis of a broad range of subject matter (but largely sports, it would seem). This seems like as good an opportunity as any for me to write something I’ve been meaning to write for a while, which is why you can’t do what Nate Silver (and Sam Wang, etc.) does in the U.S. here in Canada. It’s one of the reasons pundits keep getting election forecasts so wrong and one reason why you should probably ignore Canada’s cheap Nate Silver rip-off, Three Hundred Eight (who, like the pollsters and pundits, has badly missed a number of recent election calls).
To explain this we need to look at what Silver and others like him do, which is basically to aggregate polls to increase the sample size of respondents. Averaging the poll results seems to create pretty good indications about who will win a given Senate seat or who will win a state in the electoral college (though as a number of people have noted, many states can be predicted using even simpler methodology like “who won this state last time”).
The problem is, there’s no way to do this in Canada. In the U.S. there are many polls to refer to at the state level, which is the relevant electoral level. But in Canada results in federal elections aren’t determined by who wins the popular vote in a given province, but rather at the local riding level. And there are few if any polls done at the riding level. This holds true for provincial elections as well. This is important because the popular vote across the country and the actual seat count never line up. The NDP have a vastly higher proportion of seats in Quebec than their popular vote share, and the same is true of the Conservatives in Saskatchewan (and so on). Because we don’t have polling data on the level that elections are decided at (the electoral district), you simply can’t do what Nate Silver does for Canadian elections. And unless someone is willing to spend an awful lot of money doing riding-by-riding polls, you’re never going to be able to.
Evgeny Morozov’s new book To Save Everything, Click Here is written primarily as a critique about two aspects of contemporary technology culture that Morozov feels are degrading our public dialogue and, as a result, our public policy. The first of the two is “Internet-centrism”, the idea that “the Internet” (Morozov always places that term in quotation marks) is some sort of monolithic entity that imparts a specific set of norms and mores on the world. For example, he criticises the claim that it is “anti-Internet” to be opposed to any form of openness; “openness” is something that is designed into systems, deliberately, by people who have reasons for wanting it to be that way. The second part of his critique is of what he calls “solutionism”; if I were to attempt to define what he means by “solutionism”, I would say it is the idea that if technology is capable of doing something, then not doing it must be a problem and technology must be necessary to fix it.
I’ve decided not to watch the Toronto Maple Leafs next year, and possibly not after that either. This may seem like a rash decision made due to anger about today’s Grabovski buy-out, but to be honest I had mostly made this decision a few months ago and I even had some version of this written in my head during this year’s playoffs. There are a couple of major reasons for this, and only one of them has to do entirely with hockey. Let’s start with the initial impetus:
I finished playing Max Payne 3 tonight. Steam tells me it took about 11 hours to do (spread out over about 2 weeks). I’m now 11 hours closer to death and have nothing positive to show for it and I’m wondering how I let that happen.
Like this blog post, Max Payne 3 starts with its ending. Unlike Max Payne 3, hopefully this blog post will end up somewhere interesting. Back to the beginning.
One of the most common responses to the kinds of mass surveillance done by the NSA is the idea that if you have nothing to hide from the government (ie. you aren’t a criminal or a terrorist) then you shouldn’t have anything to worry about and you shouldn’t mind being spied on. I’m working on a more long-form piece on the NSA surveillance, but for now I want to address that idea. Let’s say that it’s true that you really don’t think there’s any reason to be concerned about your own government constantly spying on you; even granting that, there’s no good reason to believe that the information will only ever be seen by agents of your own government.
For one thing, a large amount of this kind of work is done in part by private companies like Booz Allen and Palantir. Do you trust those private companies to have all that information about you? I think it’s much less likely that you trust them than the government, but maybe you do trust them, but there’s an even bigger question to be asked: why do you believe that the information won’t extend past them?
It took only one intelligence officer (Bradley Manning) to leak a huge trove of secret information on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars as well as a large number of secret U.S. diplomatic cables. If it only takes one soldier to release that kind of information, why would you believe the NSA/FBI/CIA’s massive surveillance databases are safe from leaking as well? And it’s not just military documents that have been leaked, as the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists somehow received a huge volume of personal financial information (only some of which they released publically) on individuals and companies hiding money in tax havens. That sensitive financial information was supposed to be secure and private as well, but it got leaked too.
Then there’s Edward Snowden, the man responsible for leaking info on U.S. and British surveillance that’s spawned an ongoing series of stories in The Guardian and elsewhere; Snowden was supposedly just a system administrator for private contractor Booz Allen, yet he was able to get access to information such as a secret court order requiring Verizon to hand over huge amounts of customer data to the NSA on a daily basis. If a simple sys admin like Snowden can get access to that kind of information about U.S. surveillance efforts, why would anyone believe that others, possibly with more nefarious intentions, couldn’t also access the NSA’s information?
Given the ongoing history of leaks and the seemingly insecure nature of so much data, I think the idea that you shouldn’t care about surveillance because you have nothing to hide from your own good, democratic government misses the mark. Even if you trust your own government to be constantly spying on you, it’s pretty plausible that the information could easily wind up in other hands. That could mean public leaks of the surveillance data or it could mean that it’s stolen and sold to some other source (such as Russia or China). Even if you’re fine with your own government collecting this data on you in theory, you should still be against it in practice because it could very easily be seen, accessed, and used by less well intentioned actors.
