Solutions to the sock dilemma

 Socks are lost in the washing machine or dryer, resulting in "orphan" (or more accurately, "twinless") socks.  We need to come up with some solutions. 

1. Buy 30 pairs of identical socks.  Some socks will be lost, but your socks will always match.  At a certain point, buy more socks identical to the first set of 30, or begin again with a different color or pattern. This solution is expensive but irrefutable.   

2. Wear socks that do not match. Make that your personal style. "Life is too short to make your socks match." If your socks do happen to match on any given day, that is fine too. Nobody will complain, in my experience.    

3. Wear no socks. 

4.  Continue your current pattern of losing socks, but decide not to care about loss of socks. Discard twinless socks, or keep them as dishrags. Whatever...   

5. Continue your pattern of losing socks, but continue, also, your laments for the loss of socks. Realize that your complaints about the loss of socks fulfills a psychological need, scratches an itch otherwise unscratchable.   

6. Worry about other stuff.  The problem will disappear because it is not very important. 

7. Place socks in a laundry bag with zipper before doing laundry. An elegant but dull solution. This is the one I have ultimately chosen, despite being tempted at times by solutions 2 and 3.     

Opioids

From the New York Review of Books:  

"He is skeptical of the 'opioid crisis' (his quotation marks): he believes levels of addiction are exaggerated and sensationalized, and mortality rates inflated by compounding deaths caused by opioids alone with the far larger number of deaths in which alcohol or other sedatives are also involved."

What would you say?  I'm not doubting addicts might use other drugs, including alcohol, at the same time as they use opioids. But these seems to imply that we should only count as opioid deaths those caused only by opioids. How many die from sedatives alone, unless they are trying to kill themselves? Alcohol is a big killer, mostly through accidents and disease, so I'm not discounting that. What you would want to look for is change, how many more people die when you introduce something new into the mix.  

As in the case of other allegations of "moral panic," we have to look at what proportionate vs. "sensationalized" responses might be. To me, the number of about 50,000 annual opioid deaths seems large compared with about 1,000 police shootings, for example. We could say BLM is exaggerated and sensationalized,  by that logic. We have way more black people dying of opioids than the police, and many more white people too. By a weird trick of racism, there have often been more white addicts because doctors wouldn't prescribe as many pills for blacks.    

The fallacy of the one-sided bet

The fallacy of the one-side bet is the presentation of something with very small odds as though it were more or less a 50/50 proposition, with evidence for and against that one would have to weigh. So suppose you thought there were only two colors, red and black, and were trying to calculate the odds of a card turning up red or black. But this deck of cards has a million colors. Once you get locked on the binary opposition, then you are tricked into a particular way of thinking, looking at lottery tickets as though they were coin tosses.  

One example Andrew gives is the idea of "opportunity cost" in economics. Sure, everything has an opportunity cost, because doing something, or spending money on something, means not doing something else, or not spending the money elsewhere. But since the other things I could be doing instead of what I am doing now are infinite, how do we conceptualize what I am giving up? I'm not sure if this is what he means by the idea that opportunity cost is a fallacy, but this is what I have always thought of the concept.  

Mugging

 Stuart Hall made a famous argument that public and institutional response to mugging was a "moral panic." So called "muggings" were increasing at a slower rate than in the years immediately before, so the response had to be disproportionate to the problem, hence a panic.

 Yet Waddington points out this is a fallacy. Even though the rate of increase was slowing, this increase came on the heels of a substantial increase and thus led to a higher overall rate in ultimate terms. 

For example, if I gain weight at 10% a year, and then slow my weight gain to 5%, I am still getting fatter. Maybe I hit the point of obesity after a year of only gaining 5%. You could argue that my overweight panic should have started earlier, maybe, but you can't point to the 5% rate as being an improvement over 10%. It's simply things getting worse, but at a slower rate.  It's also 5% of a higher overall number, so it is more in quantitative terms. So 5% of current weight in 8 lbs. 15 years ago it would have been 5 lbs.   

I just think people are bad at thinking.  I was discussing this last night with some friends, who were trying to figure out why conservatives are bad at thinking. Well, I think we are bad at thinking too, just not in ways obvious to ourselves.  

Suppose

Suppose you wanted to call attention to an issue. You'd want to define the statistics up for that particular problem. One way of doing so is to expand the definition. So take these examples.

hunger vs. food insecurity

If you are serious about hunger, then you might want to define the issue in terms of "food insecurity." That encompasses many more people, not just those are suffering from famine conditions, but malnourished people or those who might have to skip meals. Some of these food insecure people might be overweight, in fact.

"at risk"

By defining a population as "at risk," then you are expanding from people who are actually suffering from whatever it is, to those who are at risk of doing so.

Racism & Sexism

By defining racism in structural terms, we find that every white person becomes a racist just by benefiting from racism.

Now this might sound like a right-wing post, and that is not my intention, but the expansion of definitions has some unintended consequences. One of these is to muddy the waters by definitional elasticity (forgive the mixed metaphor.).  Another is to trivialize real problem by throwing disparate phenomena in the same sack. Suppose we had a statistic that included both bank robbery and jaywalking, and said that "90% of respondents reported that they had robbed a bank or jaywalked in the past two years." That might be true, but you'd want to have mechanism for sorting out those two categories. Or if you asked: "Have you ever stolen money or a ballpoint pen from a bank?"

If we no longer distinguish between serious and less serious instances of the problem, then it becomes too difficult to treat the more serious offenses with the degree of seriousness that they deserve. So if we are really after bank robbers, then it makes sense to not have an expanded version of bank robbery, that also includes stealing the pen for the bank when you fill out your deposit slip.

Second marriages

I read an article pointing out that second marriages are more likely to end in divorce than first marriages. The presentation seemed puzzling to me, because it doesn't quite account for one crucial fact.

If you are already divorced, then your second marriage is automatically less likely to end in divorce than your first.  In other words, the idea of a second marriage only arises for someone whose first has already ended. If the first ended in divorce (not death of the spouse), then the second marriage by definition has a better than zero chance of not ending that way.  So instead of thinking you have a 60% chance of divorcing, vs. a 50% for a first marriage, the person marrying a second time might compare that 60% to the 100% certainty that their first marriage has already ended.

What the story didn't account for, then, was that people still married happily to their first spouse were not the ones contemplating marrying again.