Kind of a Big Fake

Some cool looking data from LaCour and Green's study

By Finbarr Curtis 

In a scene from The Legend of Ron Burgundy, the journalist Brian Fantana anoints himself with a special cologne made with "bits of real panther." The cologne's pungent gasoline aroma does not shake Fantana's confidence in its seductive powers.  As he explains, "They've done studies, you know. 60% of the time, it works every time."  Fantana's data make no sense, of course, but this is beside the point.  What matters is that "they" have done "studies."

The seductive magic of studies hit the interwebs this past week when it was revealed that a graduate student named Michael LaCour faked the data in an article entitled "When Contact Changes Minds: An Experiment on Transmission of Support for Gay Equality."  The study showed that canvassers working on behalf of marriage equality could change people's minds after relatively short conversations.  The essay also compared the persuasive power of straight and gay activists, suggesting that contact with gay canvassers produced longer and more sustainable changes in political attitudes.

LaCour co-authored the article with a professor of political science named Donald Green.  While Green helped to write the study, LaCour gathered all of the data and snookered his co-author into thinking it was real.  Green was not the only one fooled.  The findings made their way to Ira Glass's This American Life, which discussed the article in a story entitled "The Incredible Rarity of Changing Your Mind." The study was appealing because it confirmed liberal ideas about the sources of social conflict: that social divisions are caused by personal prejudices that can be dispelled if only people could get to know each other.  In addition, LaCour's data assured us that people are persuadable.  The takeaway from the study is that voters might be a lot nicer and reasonable then we might have thought.

None of this necessarily means that the findings have been proven wrong.  Ironically, activists who worked to pass a recent referendum for marriage equality in Ireland used the LaCour and Green study as a template for their own political strategy.  If LaCour had not been a quantitative social scientist, he could have simply written the study without the data.  If he was delivering a TED talk or writing an op-ed column, he could have said the same thing and possibly received critical acclaim and invitations to lucrative speaking engagements.

But LaCour inhabits an academic universe in which faking data is a cardinal sin.  Some have concluded that the current scandal proves that the system worked and confirms the importance of reliable data gathering.  As David Brookman, one of two UC Berkeley graduate students who discovered to the fake data when they tried to craft a similar study, explains:

The nature of the work that we do as quantitative researchers is that you allow the data to tell you what you think the truth should be. You don’t take your views and then apply those to the data; you let the data inform your views.

Brookman's faith in data is itself an interesting datum.  The LaCour affair seems to show that data themselves aren't what persuade people.  LaCour recognized that he just needed to have some data, that if he could produce sophisticated charts, graphs, and numbers it was unlikely that anyone would check.

Kids Today

By Finbarr Curtis

During the controversy surrounding the 1995 film Kids, I remember seeing my Uncle Eamonn on television defending the movie's release.  While he wanted an R instead of an NC-17 rating, he did warn that "This movie isn't for kids." The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) gave the film an NC-17 rating because of its "explicit sex, language, drug use and violence involving children." My uncle's objection was not based on his desire to get kids to see Kids; the problem was that movie theaters would not show NC-17 films.  This amounted to de facto censorship because many people would not be able to see the film and it would fail to make any money.

One remarkable feature of this controversy is how unremarkable Kids would be today.  While its ability to shock still holds up, it now exists in a media landscape with such a proliferation of explicit sex, language, drug use, and violence that it would be hard to imagine its release making national news.

This observation seems to be at odds with a slew of recent essays that tell us that the current generation of college students are fragile, protected, and sheltered.  Judith Shapiro calls this phenomenon the "self-infantilization" of students.  Laura Kipnis worries about how students "cocooned from uncomfortable feelings" will deal with the harsh realities of the real world.  Judith Shulevitz reports that students in the past were "hardier souls" who would have resisted intrusive supervision:

Only a few of the students want stronger anti-hate-speech codes. Mostly they ask for things like mandatory training sessions and stricter enforcement of existing rules. Still, it’s disconcerting to see students clamor for a kind of intrusive supervision that would have outraged students a few generations ago. But those were hardier souls. Now students’ needs are anticipated by a small army of service professionals — mental health counselors, student-life deans and the like.

One feature of this current climate are requests for "trigger warnings" on course syllabuses.  These warnings alert students to content that could cause psychological harm.  A trigger warning is not unlike the MPAA's movie ratings.  Trigger warnings do not for the most part require material to be removed from the course; they alert students to some themes and give them the choice about whether they want to expose themselves to this content.  It is this request for an exemption that feels like a kind of de facto censorship to professors.  It offends our sense of free inquiry and the necessity of confronting difficult subject matter.

Concerns about overprotection are not all that new.  Many generations have lamented that kids today are spoiled and need to toughen up.  For this reason, I tend to be suspicious of theories about generational essences.  Such theories often draw heavily on nostalgic recollections of youth and tend to generalize about an entire era based on personal experiences.

Nevertheless, trigger warnings on college syllabuses are a novel development that asks for an explanation.  I wonder, however, whether we can do a better job of analysis than we find in jeremiads against kids today. My goal here is not to defend or criticize trigger warnings, but to try to offer some more satisfying explanation about what is going on.

It's a French Thing

We readily imagine that we are a very tolerant civilization, that we have welcomed all forms of the past, all the cultural forms foreign to us, that we welcome also behavior, language, and sexual deviations.  I wonder if this is an illusion. - Michel Foucault

By Finbarr Curtis

The proliferation of essays following the Charlie Hebdo massacre confirmed Roland Barthes's observation that "Every national shock produces a sudden flowering of written commentary."  Most rallied behind the slogan "Je suis Charlie," but some offered other views.  In this vein, I wrote something that resisted conventional wisdom.  While I supported Charlie Hebdo's right to free speech and protection from murder, I was less convinced that I needed to applaud Charlie's heroism.  Many lamented how hypersensitive, humorless Anglophone academics like me ignored the French context. As Olivier Tonneau explained, if Brits and Americans knew more we would realize that these cartoonists were precious friends and allies:

Even if their sense of humour was apparently inacceptable to English minds, please take my word for it: it fell well within the French tradition of satire – and after all was only intended for a French audience. It is only by reading or seeing it out of context that some cartoons appear as racist or islamophobic. Charlie Hebdo also continuously denounced the pledge of minorities and campaigned relentlessly for all illegal immigrants to be given permanent right of stay. I hope this helps you understand that if you belong to the radical left, you have lost precious friends and allies.

In Adam Gopnik's description, the French have a "savage tradition" of satire that would shock most American sensibilities:

The staff of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo, massacred in an act that shocked the world last week, were not the gentle daily satirists of American editorial cartooning. Nor were they anything like the ironic observers and comedians of manners most often to be found in our own beloved stable here at The New Yorker. (Though, to be sure, the covers of this magazine have startled a few readers and started a few fights.) They worked instead in a peculiarly French and savage tradition, forged in a long nineteenth-century guerrilla war between republicans and the Church and the monarchy.

These reported national disagreements recall the 1971 debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, which began as a discussion of human nature and developed into an argument about justice, inequality, and freedom. Except in this case, the parties have switched sides.  The French line up with Chomsky to defend enlightenment ideals while some Americans see freedom through the lens of discursive power.

Je ne suis pas Charlie

By Finbarr Curtis

In the wake of the recent mass murder of the contributors to Charlie Hebdo, we have been awash in calls to decry violence and affirm commitments to free speech.  These sentiments are reasonable and should be widely embraced.  But one notable feature of this discussion has been the rise of the affirmation: "Je suis Charlie." This slogan asks us not only to denounce violence, but also to sympathetically identify with the writers of Charlie Hebdo. We are asked to applaud their heroism and courage in the face of extremism.  This sympathetic identification is remarkable in that people in democratic societies do not usually need reasons not to be murdered. Furthermore, identifying with Charlie poses a challenge because the publication's cartoons gleefully traffic in bigotry. In particular, the murderers took offense at insulting portrayals of the Prophet Muhammad.

Many defend such bigotry, however, on the grounds that Charlie Hebdo was an "equal opportunity offender." These defenses have insisted that the cartoons in question were not Islamophobic because they also insulted Catholics, Jews, and everyone else. Furthermore, images that appeared to be patently racist were really just profanations of religious figures.  Whereas racism would be unacceptable to secular liberals, anti-religious invective is okay.  In this way, the label "religion" performs magical work. Comparisons between religions take disparate images and transform them into the same thing.  A caricature of the Pope becomes no different from an stereotypical image of the Prophet Muhammad.

Such magical thinking, however, forgets that the intelligent use of comparison depends upon discerning differences.  In his classic essay "In Comparison a Magic Dwells," Jonathan Z. Smith reminds us:

Comparison requires the postulation of difference as the grounds of its being interesting (rather than tautological) and a methodical manipulation of difference, a playing across the "gap" in the service of some useful end.

The apologists for Charlie Hebdo who celebrate equal opportunity offenders offer comparisons that make no difference. By accepting that anti-Catholic and anti-Islamic slights are the same thing, this rhetoric asks us to forget everything we know about European history and politics.  Rather than a form of social criticism, Charlie Hebdo's habit of offending everyone in the same way marks the absence of intelligent analysis.

Instead of speaking truth to power, equal opportunity offense erases the realities of social power. This is partly why the role of equal opportunity offender appeals disproportionately to white men. Charlie Hebdo's cartoons voiced white Frenchmen's sense that their political and aesthetic freedom was under threat by a Muslim minority. Consistent with calls for race or gender neutrality, equal opportunity offense celebrates its commitment to equality and freedom in ways that distract attention from existing social inequalities.

Newt Gingrich Does Not Want to Party Like It's 1899

Newt Gingrich, Innovator

by Finbarr Curtis

It's not clear why Newt Gingrich hates the 1890s so much.  Maybe he's still seething over the decade's proliferation of agrarian populists and urban progressives.  Maybe he has been too busy to revise speeches he wrote in the 1990s that employed a familiar rhetorical trope of attacking policies by denouncing them as a century out of date.  Whatever the sources of Gingrich's 1890s loathing, his love letter to innovative education focuses mostly on how much the schools sucked.  As he explains:

Teachers lecture, students sit and some listen. Class happens at the same time, with the same material, and at the same pace for everyone. This is an 1890s model of education -- teaching to the "average" student, rather than the individual.  In an age when most information and knowledge is transmitted digitally and is increasingly personalized—think about how Netflix, Pandora, Twitter and Facebook work— we should be able to do much better than that.

Well, I'm thinking about Netflix, Pandora, Twitter, and Facebook, and Gingrich has a point that these work nothing like education in the 1890s.  Now that I think about it, they work like no model of education anywhere at anytime because these corporations do not do the difficult work of teaching.  Some of you might object, of course, that a lot of important conversation happens in these spaces.  You could probably get pretty snarky and note that the only reason you are reading this piece right now is that you followed a facebook or twitter link posted by yours truly.  And you'd be right.  People can make all sorts of interesting uses of different media.  What Gingrich cites as worthy of emulation, however, is the most anti-intellectual quality of Netflix, Pandora, Twitter, and Facebook: the apocalyptic promise of "increasingly personalized" knowledge.  While we have access to more information than in the 1890s, our social media habits sort through all this to help us live at the center of our own mediated worlds.  By using your tastes to shape what you see, networks of surveillance and distribution bring you information in familiar narratives that confirm your biases, assumptions, and prejudices.  The leviathan is you.

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