Short Posts 11/1/19. The Strongest Twitter Voices in Politics, Amazon as a Firm-Market Hybrid, And News About Women

1.  A new study tells us something I have long suspected:

For years now, Twitter has been an important platform for disseminating news and sharing opinions about U.S. politics, and 22% of U.S. adults say they use the platform. But the Twitter conversation about national politics among U.S. adult users is driven by a small number of prolific political tweeters. These users make up just 6% of all U.S. adults with public accounts on the site, but they account for 73% of tweets from American adults that mention national politics.

Sites like Twitter can feel deceptively giant, as if by reading there one is communing with the universe, or at least a sizable chunk of it.  But that is not true.   Because following is based on choice, the opinions and news we get to read on Twitter are unlikely to be representative of everyone in the United States, let alone in the world.  They are not even representative of all people who share our political views, say (if that's how we picked whom to follow).

This is why I am always annoyed when I read "Twitter erupts,"  unless I am told how many million retweets some tweet got.

I have written about this before,  because I believe that not understanding the specific way in which Twitter is limited can be dangerous.  It could lead us to believe that relatively rare views are widespread ones and so on.

The above quote addresses a related issue, i.e., that a relatively small number of tweeters exerts lots of power on Twitter.  And not only are the most prolific political tweeters relatively few, they are also more likely to be found in the extreme tails of the distribution of political views:

These tweeters are more polarized in terms of their ideological self-identification than those who tweet about the topic less often. Some 55% of prolific political tweeters identify as very liberal or very conservative, based on an 11-point measure of ideology where scores of 0 (most conservative) to 2 are defined as very conservative, and scores on the other end of the scale (8-10) are defined as very liberal. Among nonpolitical tweeters, 28% choose these more polarized options.

There's nothing inherently wrong in any of this, as long as we remember that our Twitter sources might not give us the most common views on various issues, even if they are the most common ones in our feeds.

2.  Amazon's recent troubles with the poor quality of the products that some of its  third-party sellers provide made me think about the fascinating mutant* nature of such giants as Amazon, eBay, Airbnb, Uber and so on.  Are they markets or are they firms or are they both at the same time?

The answer matters for deciding what their legal status and general responsibilities should be. As examples, should Uber drivers be treated as employees or subcontractors of the Uber firm or as independent entrepreneurs operating in the Uber marketplace?  Much hinges on the answer to that question.  Likewise, the consumer complaints about the poor quality of some foodstuffs sent through Amazon raise questions about the proper assignment of responsibility:

CNBC scanned the site’s Grocery & Gourmet category, finding customer complaints about expired hot sauce, beef jerky, granola bars, baby formula and baby food, as well as six-month-old Goldfish crackers and a 360-pack of coffee creamer that arrived with a “rancid smell.” A data analytics firm that specializes in the Amazon Marketplace recently analyzed the site’s 100 best-selling food products for CNBC and found that at least 40% of sellers had more than five customer complaints about expired goods.
Closeout sales and liquidation warehouses can be a hotbed for expired food that ends up on Amazon. In 2017, when Starbucks announced it was shuttering its Teavana locations, many sellers purchased discounted tea-related merchandise from the stores and resold it on Amazon. Today, you can find Teavana products such as rock sugar and fruit teas listed on Amazon even though they were discontinued two years ago.

...

An Amazon seller, who has sold sugar, spices and other food products on the site for the past nine years, told CNBC that Amazon didn’t respond to numerous inquiries about the out-of-date Teavana products.
Representatives from Nestle, which owns the rights to sell Starbucks coffee and tea, including Teavana, declined to comment. An Amazon spokesperson told CNBC that products sold on the site, including those marked not for resale, must comply with laws and Amazon policies. Third-party sellers are required to provide Amazon with an expiration date if they’re selling an item meant for consumption and must guarantee the item has a remaining shelf life of 90 days.
Whether that Amazon policy is effective is a big question, says food-safety experts.
“There’s no indication of how well that policy is enforced,” said Thomas Gremillion, director of food policy at advocacy group Consumer Federation of America.

3.  Finally, some news about women:

- Two female astronauts conducted the first all-female space walk in October, though they were not the first women to walk in space.  Fifteen women and 213 men have walked in space.

- A new survey of surgical residents suggests that female physicians experience more sexual harassment, sex discrimination and verbal harassment than male physicians:

While mistreatment was a problem for both genders, with about half of respondents reporting some form of inappropriate behavior during their training, women reported far more of it. Among other findings, 65% of all female respondents reported gender discrimination, compared to 10% of all male respondents; 13% of women reported discrimination based on pregnancy or parental status, compared to 3% of men; and 20% of women reported sexual harassment, compared to 4% of men.

The authors of the report on the survey also suggest that these findings may account for the somewhat higher burnout rates female surgical residents report.

Added later:  Some British female politicians are also leaving because of harassment and threats they receive, largely via social media.  One example:

Liberal Democrat MP Heidi Allen also wrote in a letter on Tuesday that she would be standing down ahead of the election because she is "exhausted by the invasion into my privacy and the nastiness and intimidation that has become commonplace."

"Nobody in any job should have to put up with threats, aggressive emails, being shouted at in the street, sworn at on social media, or have to install panic alarms at home."

Women and/or minorities are the particular targets of threats:

Earlier this year, London Metropolitan Police chief Cressida Dick told a parliamentary committee that officers had seen a "very considerable rise" in the number of threats received by MPs and that statistics showed crimes had doubled from 151 in 2017 to 341 in 2018.

Those targeted disproportionately are women and BAME (Black, Asian and minority ethnic) MPs -- across the political spectrum. Among those abused the most is Labour's Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott, who was the UK's first female black lawmaker.

I so wanted such reports to be something from the distant past by now, sigh.  It feels as if they might be becoming more common.  It's particularly worrying if threats disproportionately aimed at women end up silencing women and stopping their participation in politics.  That is, after all, their goal.

- Salma Hayek, 53, shows off her curves in makeup-free bikini pic: 'You haven't aged a day'  I added this bit of news because Google News believes that I would be interested in such news items (grr).  I believe Hayek is an actor, right?  And she is presumably very beautiful and looks far younger than her age, and for some reason I'm supposed to want to learn what her fans think of her.

It's all harmless on one level, of course, and I don't really care except for the time I waste on it.  But it's not an article describing her acting technique, her most famous roles, her plans for future roles and so on.  In that sense it trivialises her work. 













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*  I tried to think of examples of these market-firm hybrids from the past.  The only one I came up with was those weekend flea-markets, often organized in empty warehouses or deserted race tracks by private individuals or their companies.  The organizers are creating a marketplace (a physical presence in this case), but that is also their business.

The birth of the Internet has made such hybrids much more common and infinitely more powerful.  I'm not at all sure that either economic theory or laws governing corporations have kept up with that development.

Men Are Waffles, Women Pancakes. From The Series: "Stories From The Essentialist World".

A recent HuffPost article discusses a 2018 workshop aiming at teaching executive women how to thrive in a corporate environment.  The story is hilarious and made me think that the 1950s want their workshop back.  But then in some ways we are not now terribly removed from the 1950s dogma on women' supposed essential nature as a definition of what a woman is.

Anyway, this bit, about the teachings of that workshop, is absolutely delicious:

When women speak, they shouldn’t be shrill. Clothing must flatter, but short skirts are a no-no. After all, “sexuality scrambles the mind.” Women should look healthy and fit, with a “good haircut” and “manicured nails.”
These were just a few pieces of advice that around 30 female executives at Ernst & Young received at a training held in the accounting giant’s gleaming new office in Hoboken, New Jersey, in June 2018.

“You have to offer your thoughts in a benign way,” Jane said, recalling the seminar. “You have to be the perfect Stepford wife.” It felt like they were being turned into someone who is “super-smiley, who never confronts anyone,” she said.
“You have to be the stereotype of what a woman is,” Jane said. Like the worksheet described it, she added.
Attendees were even told that women’s brains are 6% to 11% smaller than men’s, Jane said. She wasn’t sure why they were told this, nor is it clear from the presentation. Women’s brains absorb information like pancakes soak up syrup so it’s hard for them to focus, the attendees were told. Men’s brains are more like waffles. They’re better able to focus because the information collects in each little waffle square.

Bolds, they are mine.

Don't you just love that?  It made me think what my brain might be.  I think a French crepe.  Nothing soaks into it the way I make it, unless I want something to soak into it.  Amaretto, say. 

What's fascinating about that view of humans as various foodstuffs is that I can trace the long and drunken path it has taken from some initial extremely iffy research, over-interpreted in a biased manner, and then popularized with even more errors and leaps of imagination baked into it.  That final result, then, was poured, like maple syrup, into the skull-box of the presenter at that 2018 workshop*.

It's an odd workshop which begins by trying to make the participants lose all self-confidence and self-esteem, but that's the kind of workshop for working women you get if you believe in the most extreme form of essentialist gender norms.  Those cannot be influenced at all, of course, so the best the little lady sprats can do is to gently swim around the guy sharks,without making any waves while avoiding their direct routes and grabbing whatever crumbs might be left behind**.

To be fair, Ernst&Young, the company in which the workshop was held, has now distanced itself from its basic tenets and has canceled future similar workshops.  Better ideas about how corporate culture can be influenced to make women and men both thrive can be found in this Harvard Business Review article.

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* This phenomenon is not uncommon.  John Maynard Keynes:

“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back” 

And this is the main reason why researchers should be held to high standards of objectivity and modesty about the reach of their results.

**  I adore mixing my metaphors (waffles and fishes), possibly because of that soggy brain.