"Does Society Encourage Genital Assault Against Men?"

Dr. Helen asked that question in this column from last year. She said:

[N]o one notices or cares about violence against men’s genitals, except to poke fun of those men who are kicked or hit in the balls. People even make fun of men whose penises are severed, as in the case of John Wayne Bobbitt. . . . I often see shows where a man is kicked in the groin and this is often depicted as funny or “no big deal.” Imagine the uproar if a women were punched in the breast on a television show. It is unthinkable.

Now that another one of those stories is in the news, people are going to be talking about genital assault in a way that would be unimaginable if the gender roles were reversed. Why is that?

How to give a compliment that sticks around

Back in college, a friend of mine who was studying theatre mentioned that when he would see a play, he'd make a point afterwards to compliment the actors on details about their performance, instead of just saying, "Great show!" or "Good job!" By expressing an original thought, you demonstrate your sincerity. And your feedback is more likely to be remembered.

Here are a couple compliments I've recently gotten from friends, which will stick with me because of their originality:

"I wish I could put your sense of reason in a bottle and serve it to people."

"Never have I seen someone so opinionated try so hard to diffuse his own opinions."

It took me a while to be sure the latter comment was even a compliment.

Is the death penalty "racist"?

The New York Times printed an op-ed yesterday with the headline:

Death Penalty, Still Racist and Arbitrary.

The piece begins:

LAST week was the 35th anniversary of the return of the American death penalty. It remains as racist and as random as ever.

Several years after the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, a University of Iowa law professor, David C. Baldus (who died last month), along with two colleagues, published a study examining more than 2,000 homicides that took place in Georgia beginning in 1972. They found that black defendants were 1.7 times more likely to receive the death penalty than white defendants and that murderers of white victims were 4.3 times more likely to be sentenced to death than those who killed blacks.

I don't think there's much question about that latter point. But the biggest concern about whether the death penalty is racist would not seem to be about the race of the homicide victim.

Rather, when people call the death penalty "racist," the suggestion is that a defendant who's black is more likely to be executed than a defendant who's white, if all factors other than race are essentially the same.

Is that true?

The New York Times itself published an article (in 2008) that took a much more balanced and fact-based look at this issue:

About 1,100 people have been executed in the United States in the last three decades. Harris County, Tex., which includes Houston, accounts for more than 100 of those executions. . . .

A new study to be published in The Houston Law Review this fall has found two sorts of racial disparities in the administration of the death penalty there, one commonplace and one surprising.

The unexceptional finding is that defendants who kill whites are more likely to be sentenced to death than those who kill blacks. More than 20 studies around the nation have come to similar conclusions.

But the new study also detected a more straightforward disparity. It found that the race of the defendant by itself plays a major role in explaining who is sentenced to death.

It has never been conclusively proven that, all else being equal, blacks are more likely to be sentenced to death than whites in the three decades since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. Many experts, including some opposed to the death penalty, have said that evidence of that sort of direct discrimination is spotty and equivocal.

But the author of the new study, Scott Phillips, a professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Denver, found a robust relationship between race and the likelihood of being sentenced to death even after the race of the victim and other factors were held constant.

His statistics have profound implications. For every 100 black defendants and 100 white defendants indicted for capital murder in Harris County, Professor Phillips found that an average of 12 white defendants and 17 black ones would be sent to death row. In other words, Professor Phillips wrote, “five black defendants would be sentenced to the ultimate sanction because of race.”

Scott Durfee, the general counsel for the Harris County district attorney’s office, rejected Professor Phillips’s conclusions and said that district attorneys there had long taken steps to insulate themselves from knowing the race of defendants and victims as they decided whether to seek the death penalty.

“To the extent Professor Phillips indicates otherwise, all we can say is that you would have to look at each individual case,” Mr. Durfee said. “If you do that, I’m fairly sure that you would see that the decision was rational and reasonable.”

Indeed, the raw numbers support Mr. Durfee.

John B. Holmes Jr., the district attorney in the years Professor Phillips studied, 1992 to 1999, asked for the death sentence against 27 percent of the white defendants, 25 percent of the Hispanic defendants and 25 percent of the black defendants.

I agree with Durfee's statement that you'd need to look at the merits of each case. Phillips did purport to do exactly that, as the Times explained:

Professor Phillips said that the numbers suggesting evenhandedness in seeking the death penalty did not tell the whole story. Once the kinds of murders committed by black defendants were taken into consideration — terrible, to be sure, but on average less heinous, less apt to involve vulnerable victims and brutality, and less often committed by an adult — “the bar appears to have been set lower for pursuing death against black defendants,” Professor Phillips concluded.

Professor Phillips wrote about percentages and not particular cases, but his data suggest that black defendants were overrepresented in cases involving shootings during robberies, while white defendants were more likely to have committed murders during rapes and kidnappings and to have beaten, stabbed or choked their victims.

When the nature of the crime is taken into account, Professor Phillips wrote, “the odds of a death trial are 1.75 times higher against black defendants than white defendants.” Harris County juries corrected for that disparity to an extent, so that the odds of a death sentence for black defendants after trial dropped to 1.49.

Jon Sorensen, a professor of justice studies at Prairie View A&M University in Texas, said he was suspicious of Professor Phillips’s methodology.

“It’s bizarre,” Professor Sorensen said. “It starts out with no evidence of racism. Then he controls for stuff.”

Moreover, Professor Sorensen said, Professor Phillips failed to take account of other significant factors, including the socioeconomic status of the victims.

Again, I just don't know see how you could ever draw a firm conclusion about any of this without looking at the specifics of each case. And even if any researcher had time to do that, they'd need to apply their personal opinions to weigh how bad the different crimes were. But there's no reason to trust even the most fastidious and impartial researcher to do this, since they could only make these judgments by looking at a cold, paper record of a case. A judge and jury in each case are uniquely well-positioned to make judgments about whether a defendant is guilty and how bad the defendant's specific actions were. You can never fully step into the judge's or jury's shoes.

As one example, we're told that black defendants are more likely than white defendants to kill during "robberies." That might sound like a relatively drab category of crime, in contrast with the white defendants, who are described in a way that sounds viscerally reprehensible: they "were more likely to have committed murders during rapes and kidnappings and to have beaten, stabbed or choked their victims." But one could easily imagine a robbery being quite brutal. Off-hand, I have no idea if "robberies" are generally worse than, say "kidnappings."

And remember, the severity of a crime is just one of many factors that can be relevant in sentencing. As the Houston Chronicle reported in a 2010 article about another research paper by Phillips:

District Attorney Pat Lykos, who has been in office for little more than a year, declined to comment on Phillips' conclusions about the past administration. She said under her leadership, a victim's race or ethnicity or education level would play no part in determining whether to seek the death penalty against an accused killer.

If the slain victim was single, that also would not play a role in the decision, but if the victim was married, the impact of the death on their family would be considered, Lykos said. If the victim had a criminal record and whether that was considered would depend on the facts surrounding their death, she said.

Factors that are considered in whether to seek the death penalty, Lykos said, include the victim's age and vulnerability, the number of victims killed, the brutality of the offense, whether the accused killer and victim had any prior relationship, the defendant's criminal record and life history, and the effect the crime had on society.

The 2008 article shows that the New York Times is capable of setting a high standard for itself in conveying these nuances about the limits of our ability to make a sweeping judgment about thousands of unique cases. Yesterday's op-ed shows that the Times is willing to let this complexity get simplified and filtered.

Aphorisms on the limits of knowledge by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

From his recent book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms:

It is much harder to write a book review for a book you've read than for a book you haven't read. . . . (49)

Today, we mostly face the choice between those who write clearly about a subject they don't understand and those who write poorly about a subject they don't understand. . . . (50)

Most info-Web-media-newspaper types have a hard time swallowing the idea that knowledge is reached (mostly) by removing junk from people's heads. (58)

(Taleb is probably best known for his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, and he's also written highly technical works on human error — for instance, this paper on the error rates of error rates.)

Egg producers and the Humane Society of the United States . . .

. . . have stopped their "squawking."

"'The industry moving from saying anything goes to saying there should be legal limits at the federal level is an enormous difference.'"

Why are powerful men so likely to cheat on their wives?

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, on Huffington Post, argues:

The biggest mistake we make in determining why powerful men cheat is to believe they're looking for sex. If it's sex they're after they have wives who can cater to their needs. No, these men are looking for something else entirely: validation. Men cheat not out of a sense of entitlement but out of a sense of insecurity. . . .

What makes men slowly climb the ladder of success is a desire to prove they're a somebody. They want to be and feel important. . . . It is not the promise of their potential that drives them, but the fear of being a nonentity. . . .

And that's why these men turn to women to make them feel good about themselves. They want to feel desirable. They seek to silence the inner voices that taunt them as to their own insignificance. Because of its power, sex has a unique capacity to make insecure men feel -- however fleetingly -- like they're special. Having women desire them makes them feel desirable.

Amy Alkon (the "Advice Goddess") says: "Oh, please." Rabbi Boteach "doesn't get it":

They take sex because it's there, in variety, because they can. Because it would be fun to have a little strange, and the little strange is right there bending over sweeping up a broken glass, and seems willing, and Maria is nowhere to be seen. . . .

Regarding the evolved male preference for sexual variety, as the late Margo Wilson and her husband and partner Martin Daly pointed out: Sperm are cheap; eggs are expensive.

I don't see why there needs to be a polarized debate about whether men commit adultery because they want sex. Of course they want sex. But even if Alkon's evolutionary-psychology explanation is right, that alone isn't a reason to dismiss other explanations like Rabbi Boteach's.

Robert Wright explained why in his book The Moral Animal. First, here's his explanation of why men (more than women) become increasingly likely to cheat as they get older and more successful:

As a marriage progresses, the temptation to desert should—in the average case—shift toward the man. The reason isn't, as people sometimes assume, that the Darwinian costs of marital breakup are greater for the woman. True, if she has a young child and her marriage dissolves, that child may suffer—whether because she can't find a husband willing to commit to a woman with another man's child, or because she finds one who neglects or mistreats the child. But, in Darwinian terms, this cost is borne equally by the deserting husband; the child who thus suffers is his child too, after all.

The big difference between men and women comes, rather, on the benefits side of the desertion ledger. What can each partner gain from a breakup in the way of future reproductive payoff? The husband can, in principle, find an eighteen-year-old woman with twenty-five years of reproduction ahead. The wife . . . cannot possibly find a mate who will give her twenty-five years worth of reproductive potential. This difference in outside opportunity is negligible at first, when both husband and wife are young. But as they age, it grows. . . .

A poor, low-status husband may not have a chance to desert and may, indeed, provide his wife with reason to desert, especially if she has no children and can thus find another mate readily. A husband who rises in status and wealth, on the other hand, will thus strengthen his incentive to desert while weakening his wife's. (87)

Now, here's Wright on why the ev-psych explanation isn't mutually exclusive with other psychological explanations:

Objections to this sort of analysis are predictable: "But people leave marriages for emotional reasons. They don't add up the number of their children and pull out their calculators. Men are driven away by dull, nagging wives, or by the profound soul-searching of a mid-life crisis. Women are driven out by abusive or indifferent husbands, or lured away by a sensitive, caring man."

All true. But . . . emotions are just evolution's executioners. Beneath all the thoughts and feelings and temperamental differences that marriage counselors spend their time sensitively assessing are the stratagems of the genes—cold, hard equations composed of simple variables: social status, age of spouse, number of children, their ages, outside opportunities, and so on. Is the wife really duller and more nagging than she was twenty years ago? Possibly, but it's also possible that the husband's tolerance for nagging has dropped now that she's forty-five and has no reproductive future. And the promotion he just got which has already drawn some admiring glances from a young woman at work, hasn't helped. (88)

Ronald Reagan on foreign policy

Was he a "dove"?