Being Human

First, a new twist on a story that our legal desk covered back in February: at the annual Ig Nobel awards ceremony earlier tonight, the Prize for Literature was awarded to the Garda Síochána na hÉireann (i.e. the Irish Police Force) for the 50 or more speeding tickets they've issued in the name "Prawo Jazdy", Polish for "driver's license."

And as if that wasn't enough onomastic excitement, the 2009 Ig Nobel Prize for Veterinary Medicine was awarded for work reported in Bertenshaw, C. and Rowlinson, P., Exploring Stock Managers' Perceptions of the Human-Animal Relationship on Dairy Farms and an Association with Milk Production, Anthrozoos: A Multidisciplinary Journal of The Interactions of People and Animals 22:1, pp. 59-69, 2009. Specifically, Dr. Bertenshaw and Dr. Rowlinson share the prize for their demonstration that (and here I quote from the article's abstract): "On farms where cows were called by name, milk yield was 258 liters higher than on farms where this was not the case (p < 0.001)."

Yet all this groundbreaking research leaves me with more questions than answers. What is the causal direction behind the correlation? And if my cow produced 238 liters too little milk, would I admit to the researchers the names I used for her? And how much milk can an Irish policeman get from a speeding Polish cow?

Social Studies
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Mark Liberman has been writing about the persistent misinterpretation of claims about statistical differences between groups with respect to some property — misinterpretations in which these differences (often small ones) are understood as general (and essential) differences between the groups. A little while ago, Mark suggested that reporting the differences by means of generic plurals ("Asians have a more collectivist mentality than Europeans do") promotes misunderstanding and proposed that such generic language be avoided.

In comments, Mark noted that changing the language of popular science reporting is not by itself going to fix an inclination to essentialist thinking (which is all over the place), though it might be a step in the right direction.

Mark looked at groups X and Y with respect to property P, focussing on statistical differences between X and Y. Let's say that members of X tend to have P to a greater degree than members of Y. Then there's a statistical association (perhaps a very weak one) between X and P. And most people have as much trouble understanding statistical association as they do statistical differences. Here, the characteristic error in reasoning is treating the association as invariant: all Xs have P (and no non-Xs do). Again, the error is all over the place, often showing up in objections to claims of statistical association. As in the following case from a September 30 NYT story "Dementia Risk Seen in Players In N.F.L. Study" by Alan Schwarz.

The story begins with a report of an apparent statistical association:

A study commissioned by the National Football League reports that Alzheimer's disease or similar memory-related diseases appear to have been diagnosed in the league's former players vastly more often than in the national population — including a rate of 19 times the normal rate for men ages 30 through 49.

Now, the study has a variety of shortcomings, and the association can't be taken as demonstrated. but for the moment let's take things at face value.

What especially interests me in the story (though I have a long-standing interest in dementia and related conditions) is the reaction of NFL spokesman Greg Aiello, who

said in an e-mail message that the study did not diagnose dementia, that it was subject to shortcomings of telephone surveys and that "there are thousands of retired players who do not have memory problems."

"Memory disorders affect many people who never played football or other sports," Mr. Aiello said.

Aiello's response addresses (and rejects) claims not made in the report: that all retired players have memory problems (all Xs have P), and that no other people have memory problems (no non-Xs have P). That is, Aiello chose to treat the association as invariant, when that was clearly not what the report said. I don't see how the reporter could have averted this misunderstanding by more careful wording.

Such misunderstandings — occasioning objections much like Aiello's — arise even when claims are not couched as statistical associations. Quantified statements like "many Xs have P" will do, eliciting objections like "but I'm an X and don't have P". People reason like this all the time, and that's why there are Critical Thinking courses.

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Andrew Gelman at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, commenting on my posts about a Dilbert cartoon that skewers "the vacuous way managers talk", asks "What is a 'manager' anyway?"

My only comment here is not on the Bayesian inference but rather on the idea that "managers" are dweeby Dilbert characters who talk using management jargon. I was thinking about it, and I realized that I'm a manager. I manage projects, hire people, etc. But of course I don't usually think of myself as a "manager" since that's considered a bad thing to be.

For another example, Liberman considers a "spokesperson for a manufacturer of sex toys" as a manager. I don't know what this person does, but I wouldn't usually think of a spokesperson as a manager at all.

The LL posts in question were "Moving low-hanging fruit forward at the end of the day", 9/26/2009;  "Memetic dynamics of summative cliches", 9/26/2009; "'At the end of the day' not management-speak", 9/26/2009; "Another nail in the ATEOTD=manager coffin", 9/28/2009; and "Memetic dynamics of low-hanging fruit", 9/30/2009.

And Andrew's comment is very much to the point.

In the original post on Scott Adams' strip, I used scare quotes in referring to "a despised minority, in this case 'managers'"; and in a later post, I referred to "the hypothesis that it's especially likely to be used by 'managers', however we define that much-maligned class".  Those phrases were meant as a note to myself to come back to this curious phenomenon of anti-managerial prejudice — but Andrew beat me to it.

I should start with a confession: like Andrew, I'm a manager. I've been one at least since 1980 or so, when I became a group supervisor at Bell Labs; and when I became a department head there, in 1987,  it was no longer possible to look the other way.   At my first "three-level meeting" — involving department heads and their bosses and their bosses' bosses — Brian Kernighan looked across the conference table to me and said "Welcome to the land of the brain-dead". The fact that I left industry for academia didn't save me: the organizations that I now (at least nominally) manage employ several times as many people as the Linguistics Research Department at Bell Labs did.

I suppose that as long as there have been hierarchies, bosses have sometimes been feared, resented, and disliked.  But I think it's a new phenomenon that in large areas of modern culture, managers are stereotypically regarded as stupid.  Andrew Gelman's employees surely don't think that he's stupid, and I hope that most of mine don't think I'm stupid either. But Brian's little joke reflected a now-widely-shared concern that the role of manager, like the role of parent, inevitably causes a sort of tragic cluelessness, in which you become the object of all of your own earlier upward-facing attitudes.

This is mixed up with a different idea, namely that official pronouncements are likely to be bland and even empty. This might mean that the people who craft them are actually especially crafty, but  the idea that corporate statements tend toward vacuity seems to  reinforce the idea that leaders are empty-headed.

[It's for that reason that I was disposed to accept corporate spokespersons as "managers" in the Dilbertian sense — well, that and the fact that otherwise there would otherwise have been no examples at all in the 400-million-word COCA database of "managers" using the cliche under study.  And the sex-toy company spokesperson whose quote I accepted as a possible example of manager-speak actually was a "senior buyer" — check out the original article here.]

However we decide to define "manager", this group is certainly now the object of a complex of negative stereotypes. When and how did this start?

I don't know, and I welcome suggestions.  These attitudes may be connected to the antique European aristocratic disdain for those who are "in trade", and to the (I think related) modern intellectual disdain for the world of business.  These attitudes seem to have been imported from the intelligentsia into  industry through the medium of engineers and especially programmers, who (at least at lower levels) maintain a very different culture from the "suits" in finance, marketing, product planning, and so on.

The word manager has been around for a long time, with something close to its current meaning. With the gloss "A person who organizes, directs, or plots something; a person who regulates or deploys resources", the OED gives citations from around 1600 onwards:

1598 J. FLORIO Worlde of Wordes, A manager, a handler. 1598 SHAKESPEARE Loves Labours Lost I. ii. 173 Adue Valoure, rust Rapier, be still Drum, for your manager is in loue. 1600Midsummer Night's Dream V. i. 35 Where is our vsuall manager Of mirth? What Reuels are in hand? SHAKESPEARE

In the slightly more specific sense of  "A person who manages (a department of) a business, organization, institution, etc.; a person with an executive or supervisory function within an organization, etc.", the citations start about a century later:

1682 A. WOOD Life 22 Nov., The Duke of York hath gained the point as to the penny post against Docuray the manager of it. 1705 J. ADDISON Remarks Italy 443 The Manager opens his Sluce every Night, and distributes the Water into what Quarters of the Town he pleases. 1740 S. RICHARDSON Pamela II. 341 Said he, I think that little Kentish Purchase wants a Manager.

But none of the early citations in the OED, nor the quotes that I find in LION, seem to reflect the modern Dilbertian managerial stereotype.  That stereotype clearly predates Dilbert — but when did it arise? and where did it come from?

In this context, we have to return to Andrew's question: What is a manager, anyhow?  By now, I suppose that the Dilbert empire employs a certain number of people, whom Scott Adams in some sense manages — does he thereby consider himself a "manager" in the relevant sense?

The fuzzy referential boundaries of the managerial stereotype, it seems to me, are a characteristic of social stereotypes in general. This is related to the "some of my best friends are Xs" excuse, and all the other excuses that shift the range of the prejudice away from apparent counterexamples.

[Update — John Cowan's post at Recycled Knowledge, "Why are PHBs stupid?", offers interesting and sensible answers to the questions under discussion.]

Stephen Colbert did a brilliantly funny piece on his show the other night, tackling the introduction of 'snus' to the USA, tobacco pouches that fit under the lip, and the increasing placebo effect, a topic which we discussed recently.

Colbert tries the snus pouches on the programme, which, I have to say, seem remarkably uninviting, and riffs on the health benefits of sugar pills with plenty of laughs.

Link to Stephen Colbert clip (thanks Veronica!)

One of the most powerful pieces in the one-man exhibition of Chen Wen Ling now showing at Joy Gallery in Beijing 798 Art Zone is blandly entitled "What You See Might Not Be Real" in English, but the Chinese title is the raw and raunchy "FANG4PI4″ 放屁 ("emit gas, break wind, flatulate, crepitate, i.e., fart [v.]"). Perhaps the artist didn't want to offend the linguistic sensitivities of potential foreign customers, but I must say that I much prefer to translate the title of the piece directly as "Fart," or, with a bit of license, as "Bull Fart" because the atomic cloud depicted by the artist is coming out of the anus of an enormous bovine.

[This view comes from a story at Business Insider (Joe Weisenthal,  "Finally! Madoff Gets What He Deserves", 9/29/2009); other perspectives are available at ML Art Source and TPM.]

What we see in this impressive sculpture is a horned Bernie Madoff pinned against the wall by the rocket-propelled bull. Just from looking at the whole ensemble, it's pretty obvious what Chen is trying to tell us, but by entitling the piece "FANG4PI4," he invokes additional levels of scorn that are inherent in that term when applied to the words of others. Several of the blogs that have shown this piece claim that as slang FANG4PI4 implies "bluff" or "lie." Actually, it is more accurate to say that it means "talk nonsense," the idea being that one is comparing the words coming out of the mouth of one's opponent to a stream of farts.

Now, if one wishes to increase one's contempt for what one's opponent is saying, one may style his / her words as GOU3PI4 狗屁 ("dog fart"), as in this ringing denunciation: NI3 FANG4 GOU3PI4! (lit. "You are emitting dog farts!" = "What you say is nonsense / bullshit!"), although GOU3PI4 ("dog fart[s]!") shouted loudly by itself gets the message across clearly enough. This is an old expression that may be found as early as 1750 in the Qing Dynasty novel Rulin waishi (The Scholars). If you want to emphasize that what your opponent is saying is not only bullshit but is also completely incoherent, you may declare that it is GOU3PI4 BU4TONG1 ("dog fart not pass through").

If your adversary still does not give in to your withering denunciations, you may embellish them as follows (I shall only give a few of the possible varieties):

FANG4 GOU3CHOU4PI4 ("emit stinking dog fart[s]")

FANG4 NI3 MA1 DE 4PI4 ("emit 'your mother's' fart[s]")

FANG4 NI3 MA1 DE GOU3CHOU4PI4 ("emit your mother's stinking dog fart[s]")

However, one must be careful when one gets into the territory of "your mother's" whatever, since such characterizations are considered to be extremely vulgar and, as often as not, fighting words. We all remember the "Grass Mud Horse" phenomenon from earlier this year, and a lot more could be said about this most offensive of imprecations.

As for "bull," that is NIU2 牛, although I did mention in an early January post that "Happy NIU2 Year" was the most popular STM New Year's greeting in China this year, I have not yet found the time to explore the full range of nuances of NIU2 in current usage ("balls, guts, spunk, awesome, formidable," and so forth). Particularly when combined with "B," viz., 牛B (often written as NB), then we begin to combine all of the androgenic qualities of NIU2 with the estrogenous implications of what "mother's" refers to, resulting in an explosive combination. To do full justice to this aspect of NIU2 would require a modest (or perhaps I should say "immodest") treatise, one that I have not yet found the opportunity to compose. Someday.

[Hat tip to Benjamin Zimmer.]

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I've happened upon an interesting snippet from the regular Nature "100 years ago" feature concerning a 1907 debate on whether insanity was really increasing or whether it just seemed that way due to changes in diagnosis and treatment methods.

It made me smile because it is almost exactly the same argument that is being had now about whether cases of autism are genuinely increasing or whether this just reflects changes in diagnosis and treatment methods:

Notwithstanding the much improved statistics recently issued by the Lunacy Commissioners, thoroughly satisfactory materials are still wanting for solving the question whether the prevalence of insanity is or is not increasing. The importance of the problem... imparts special interest to a paper by Mr. Noel A. Humphreys on the alleged increase of insanity... This paper shows in a striking manner the value of scientific statistics in checking crude figures.

The author expresses a decided opinion that there is no absolute proof of actual increase of occurring insanity in England and Wales, and that the continued increase in the number and proportion of the registered and certified insane is due to changes in the degree and nature of mental unsoundness for which asylum treatment is considered necessary, and to the marked decline in the rate of discharge (including deaths) from asylums.

From Nature 18 July 1907.

Link to Nature "100 years ago" snippet.
Link to Wikipedia page on epidemiology of autism.

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The Scientific American Mind blog Mind Matters has a fantastic article on the links between love and creativity and how just thinking of a romantic relationship can have an immediate effect on creative thinking.

The piece covers several studies which have shown that love or the concept of love promotes a 'big picture' thinking style while thinking of a quick shag seems to do the reverse:

The clever experiments demonstrated that love makes us think differently in that it triggers global processing, which in turn promotes creative thinking and interferes with analytic thinking. Thinking about sex, however, has the opposite effect: it triggers local processing, which in turn promotes analytic thinking and interferes with creativity.

Why does love make us think more globally? The researchers suggest that romantic love induces a long-term perspective, whereas sexual desire induces a short-term perspective. This is because love typically entails wishes and goals of prolonged attachment with a person, whereas sexual desire is typically focused on engaging in sexual activities in the "here and now". Consistent with this idea, when the researchers asked people to imagine a romantic date or a casual sex encounter, they found that those who imagined dates imagined them as occurring farther into the future than those who imagined casual sex...

A global processing style promotes creative thinking because it helps raise remote and uncommon associations.

Clearly there is a happy medium to be found here, and I have to say, "would you like me to balance your processing styles?" has the makings of a great chat-up line.

Link to Does Falling in Love Make Us More Creative? (via Frontal Cortex)

Commenting on a post about Dilbert's take on "the vacuous way managers speak", Garrett Wollman wrote:

I remember, or at least think I do, when "low-hanging fruit" was not yet vacant managerese. Is there any epidemiological data to suggest when this transition occurred?

I'm not convinced that "low-hanging fruit" is accurately described as "vacant managerese" even now. But let's leave that point aside while we consider the epidemiological data on the rise of this cliche among all classes of users, which suggests an index case in the late 1980s, with the main contagion starting in the mid 1990s:

This graph is based on data from the New York Times archive, and is derived from the counts in the following table, which tracks occurrences of "low-hanging fruit" and four other cliches, namely "easy pickings", "shooting fish in a barrel", "easy as pie", and "a piece of cake":

TIME LHF EPick SFB EPie PCake 1981-1985 0 23 4 11 72 1986-1990 2 17 11 6 90 1991-1995 4 33 15 5 67 1996-2000 34 34 21 12 84 2001-2005 74 32 16 7 78 2006-2009 78 14 17 5 41

In order to correct for possible changes in number of words indexed per time-period, I've added up the counts for the four other cliches, and graphed the ratio of "low-hanging fruit" to that sum. Obviously, in this case, a graph of the raw LHF counts would show a similar pattern.

Garrett added:

I also remembered when other geeks recommended Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point to me, which now seems to be exclusively marketed to management types who understand it not.

The "marketing types" here at Penn are Wharton students, whose level of technical understanding is second to few, I think.  (Though I certainly recall from my years in industry that developers viewed "marketing types" as being an especially clueless subspecies of "suits", less actively evil than finance types, but stupider.  I'm sure that the feelings were reciprocated, mutatis mutandis.)

But in any case, since Gladwell's book was published in 2000, well into the spread of the LHF epidemic, I don't think that he deserves either any blame or any credit for the process.  Another clue to his innocence is the fact that the string "low-hanging fruit" (with or without the hyphen) doesn't occur anywhere in the book. (Nor, for  that matter, does "at the end of the day"…)

[Note — the OED's earliest citation is

1990 N.Y. Times 16 Aug. D1/3 We've picked all the *low-hanging fruit when it comes to fuel efficiency.

That's indeed the earliest citation in the NYT's archive. It's not hard to back that up by a bit, e.g. Brenton Schlender, "Some U.S. Makers of Semiconductors Are More Optimistic", WSJ 2/17/1987:

I expect that (figurative) examples can be found from several years earlier — the phrase in its literal meaning, of course, goes back hundreds of years. The earliest literal use I've found is from Adam Bede, 1859:

He could see there was a large basket at the end of the row: Hetty would not be far off, and Adam already felt as if she were looking at him. Yet when he turned the corner she was standing with her back towards him, and stooping to gather the low-hanging fruit. Strange that she had not heard him coming! perhaps it was because she was making the leaves rustle. She started when she became conscious that some one was near—started so violently that she dropped the basin with the currants in it, and then, when she saw it was Adam, she turned from pale to deep red. That blush made his heart beat with a new happiness. Hetty had never blushed at seeing him before.

But I think it would be surprising if there weren't earlier examples as well.]

[Update — Jesse Sheidlower sent in an earlier use as an explicit simile:

1968 P. J. Kavanaugh in _Guardian_ 12 July 6/3 His work is so appealing to me that I feel almost bashful praising it… He is gentle and stoic and simple, his rare images are picked aptly, easily, like low-hanging fruit, and though he appears to move short distances slowly he really moves far and fast.

Jesse's find suggests looking for even earlier active similes and metaphors, perhaps with slightly different wording, and indeed there are many. Thus Wilfred Scawen Blunt, Griselda (1914):

57   For we, in truth, were no wise company,
58   Men strong and joyous, keen of hand and eye,
59   And shrewd for pleasure, but whose subtlest wit
60   Was still to jest at life while using it,
61   And jest at love, as at a fruit low hung
62   To all men's lips, no matter whence it sprung.

Or George MacDonald, To Any Friend (1893):

9   At home, no rich fruit, hanging low,
10      Have I for Love to pull;
11   Only unripe things that must grow
12      Till Autumn's maund be full!

Or Dora Sigerson, My Darling (1893):

5   Oh, Life came over the meadows,
6      And the song of her coming was sweet;
7   The streams leaped joy-mad down the mountains,
8      Flowers bloomed 'neath her dawning feet.
9   The trees bent their branches fruit-laden,
10      So low as her soft hands' hold;
11   And the harvest rose up like an army
12      Of kings in their harness of gold.

Or Edmund Gosse, VIllanelle I (1879):

1   Wouldst thou not be content to die
2      When low-hung fruit is hardly clinging,
3   And golden Autumn passes by?

Or Herman Melville, Clarel (1876):

3919   Estranged, estranged: can friend prove so?
3920   Aloft, aloof, a frigid sign:
3921   How far removed, thou Tree divine,
3922   Whose tender fruit did reach so low—
3923   Love apples of New-Paradise!

OrAaron Hill (died 1750), Sareph and Hamar:

42      Refresh'd by sleep, he rose serene and gay,
43      And walk'd abroad to see the breaking day,
44   With dawning lustre, thro' the boughs, in trembling sallies play.
45      Where-e'er he pass'd, the golden fruit hung low
46      And dancing, wanton, bow'd to court his hand,
47      Proud of the native charms they had to show;

Or  Charles Goodall, To Mr. R. Smith of King 's Colledge in Cambridge (1689):

33   The barren Tree can in the Desarts spread,
34   And threaten Heaven with its luxurious head:
35   Whilst others low, and laden with their Fruit,
36   With bended Branches touch their very root.

Or Henry Reynolds' 1628 translation of Torquato Tasso's Aminta:

Being but a Lad, so young as yet scarse able
To reach the fruit from the low-hanging boughes
Of new growne trees; Inward I grew to bee
With a young mayde, fullest of loue and sweetnesse,
That ere display'd pure gold tresse to the winde;

In fact, you could say that LHF was a poetic cliche long before it came to be a cliche associated with any other group. And I wouldn't be surprised to find the metaphor in Homer, or the Bible.]

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A fascinating study just published in the medical journal Pain examined the side-effects reported by patients taking placebos in clinical trials to test migraine drugs. It found that side-effects from placebo were almost as common as from the actual drug, but most interestingly, were specific to side-effects you would expected from the comparison medication.

In other words, the side-effects you get from a sugar pill in a study on anticonvulsant drugs closely resemble side-effects you get from anticonvulsants and are different from the side-effects you get from a sugar pill in a study on pain killers, which more closely resemble pain killer side-effects.

The researchers, led by neuroscientist Martina Amanzio, looked at trials for three type of migraine drugs: NSAIDs (like aspirin), triptans that work on the serotonin system, and anticonvulsant drugs more often used to treat epilepsy.

Side-effects from placebo are known as the nocebo effect and just the combined list of side-effects from the placebo groups in this study is surprising enough:

abdominal pain, anorexia or/and weight loss, attention difficulties, burning or/and flushing, chest discomfort, chills, diarrhea, dizziness, dry mouth, dyspepsia, fatigue, heaviness, injection side reaction, insomnia, language difficulties, memory difficulties, nasal signs and symptoms, nausea, numbness, paresthesia or/and tingling, pharyngitis, somnolence or/and drowsiness, stinging or/and pressure sensation, taste disturbance, tinnitus, upper respiratory tract infection, vomiting, weakness

It turns out that when placebo was being compared to an anticonvulsant, side-effects more common in these drugs - like fatigue, reduced appetite, sleepiness and tingling sensations - were more common in the placebo. In contrast, stomach upsets and dry mouth were more common in the placebo group when the comparison was with NSAID painkillers, which more often cause these symptoms themselves.

One explanation may be that before taking part in a clinical trial, patients are informed of the possible side-effects that the active drug may cause, regardless of whether they are going to be given placebo or the actual medication.

Information on the possible side-effects will be specific to the real medication, and, as we know that expectation plays a big part in the placebo effect, it is probably also shaping the nocebo effect and leading to the production of symptoms through expectancy.

Link to PubMed entry for study.

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