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Friday, August 27, 2010
Bill James on social justice
Bill had thoughts on several social issues. What I was struck with is not that he had some good theories, but that, those theories can already be tested with actual real-life data. For example:
We don’t want to live in a paranoid country. Americans should not have to drive around in constant fear of straying across a line. If we have red-light cameras and radar cams, what’s next? Lane-straying cameras, that send you a ticket when your tire goes out of its lane? Signaling cameras, that send you a ticket when you change lanes without signaling? Who wants to live in that America?
I first went to Calgary in 1997, and they had speed-cameras. In Montreal, they recently installed red-light cameras in very few and carefully selected intersections. In Toronto, they have toll lanes, with some tracker in your car (and ostensibly, they can track your speed, though I don’t know if they do). The point is that it’s all fine and well to have an opinion as to how one million people in an area on Earth will respond to some new social order. But, we have actual working experiences of what has happened. Therefore, if you are going to advance the hypothesis, why not go all out and also present the results?
Punishing people as a way of modifying behavior is massively inefficient at best, and is very often counter-productive. The prison system manufactures as much crime as it prevents.
We’ve talked about this in the past, comparing the Finnish to Swedish to other countries prison systems. The Phillipines has some cool system where they make the prisoners perform in a YouTube music video every month. (Yes, it’s true!) The point is the same as the above: we’ve got the test cases, so present results rather than just leave it at the hypothesis and predict what could happen.
And if Justice McReynolds is excused on this count because he was merely on the wrong side of a line drawn across history, then shouldn’t it be pointed out as well that, with regard to the other attitudes that we now condemn, Justice McReynolds as well was merely on the wrong side of a line drawn across history? After all, the attitudes that Justice McReynolds had toward Jews and blacks and working women, in the time and place where he grew up, were the universal attitudes that everybody held. . .that is, everybody who counted. Everybody who was white, male, and Protestant. McReynolds’ only fault was that he held on to these attitudes after others had discarded them.
Well. . .no.
There was a very powerful exchange between Archie Bunker and Michael Stivik (All in the family… for you kids too young, you missed one of the greatest shows of all time), about how Archie’s racism was a product of how his father was, how his father would teach him things, and how Archie as a kid knew nothing else but to listen and idolize his father. It was a very powerful exchange, and if you can find it somewhere, you should watch it, as I can’t do it justice. I last saw that episode at least 20 years ago, but I still remember it.
Wouldn’t it be obviously better if they could communicate to us how hard it is actually raining? A “20” might mean that if it rained at this intensity for one hour that would result in two inches of rainfall.
Of course, it would take us a little while to learn the meaning of the terms, but if you grew up with a system like this, by the time you were an adult you would be able to just look at a rainstorm—even without a reading—and say “I’d guess we’re at about 13 IPH right now”, and
a) the observer would be very nearly right almost all of the time, and
b) the listener would know exactly what he meant.
IPH is Inches Per Hour; it’s not actually inches per hour, it’s tenths of an inch per hour, but IPH sounds better than TPH. You’d know that, too, if you grew up with the system.
I think Clay is a meteorologist, and I think SABRMatt is probably involved in it. So, I think it’s safe to say that it exists because otherwise, this is the first thing these guys would have invented. It’s probably called “mL per hour” (millilitres, not inches). After all, if you have wind speed, why not rain speed. Let me do a quick google check. Ok, the first hit on google for PRECIPITATION SPEED was this:
Present weather sensor for precipitation speed/type/intensity
The drop speed is captured with a 24-GHz-Doppler radar.
The precipitation quantity and intensity is calculated from the correlation between drop size and speed.
The type of precipitation (rain, snow, sleet, freezing rain, hail) is detected from the difference in drop speed.
Really, Bill’s objection is that it’s not part of the standard toolset of our mainstream weather people, much like OBP once was not. It’s there, it exists, now we just need a sabermetric weather movement to get it out there.
And please, mL, not inches.
They can use mL in Canada. How many Americans do you think can visualize what a mL of standing water looks like. All of us can imagine an inch.
The difference between the two is purely technical once you’re discussing it with the public, so why not go with the one that is simpler to adjust to. And if some number of years from now people want to convert to mL/hour because it’s a more precise descriptor, then fine.
Get the system adopted first, then worry about fussiness.