Metrics to evaluate a Presidency

Gender equality: reduction in male female differences in lifespan, deaths on the job, % victory in custody disputes, % in prison, % in college, % in medical school, % in law school, and eliminating any gender favoritism in college sexual harassment complaint adjudication.

So what's your problem?

That a bunch of people are deliberately misinterpreting what ArisC wrote in order to make snarky points about how People These Days are too nice to women and not nice enough to men. I think that sort of discussion is better conducted more straightforwardly, and I am rather bored of the way that every. single. time anyone on LW says anything suggesting what fir want of a better term I'll call progressive social values, someone comes along to display their oh-so-brave contrarianism by boldly sticking up for the idea that maybe Social Justice Has Gone Too Far and men are the truly oppressed ones / the only real race problem is that black people are less intelligent and no one is willing to say so / etc., etc., etc. There are places where it takes real courage to say that sort of thing, but if LW was ever one of them it was a long time ago, and it really isn't necessary to turn every discussion that touches on these issues into a whataboutthemenz-fest.

(I would say the exact same thing if every time anyone mentioned a problem faced particularly by men, or white people, or whoever, they got jumped on by a bunch of people saying "how dare you say that when women / black people / whoever have it worse?". That is ... not a problem LW has right now.)

[...] what you really mean by "gender equality" [...]

I don't mean anything by "gender equality"; as I said elsewhere in the thread, it's not a phrase I use. The question is what ArisC meant by it.

And no, my impression is not that he meant that women are "more equal". Rather, (1) traditionally women have had it worse than men, so (2) "gender equality" and similar phrases have mostly been about fixing that problem, and (3) I'm guessing that in Aris's opinion, as also in mine, women still on balance have it worse than men, so (4) it's reasonable (or would be in an environment where anything resembling the principle of charity is applied in political discussions) to continue to use such terms to point specifically at ways in which women have it worse and we might want to fix that.

(I have no objection at all if someone chooses to use "gender equality" to mean something more like what it literally says, or for that matter to use it for a discussion of ways in which men have it worse. But that's not what happened here; what happened is that someone used it the other way, and several people came along and pretended they thought he meant something else.)

note: topic text was originally different, and included a recently-elected president's name; which would've ranked on google for related-keywords. Below is unedited comment, asking for that name not to be included

Since "Downvoting temporarily disabled", I would like to express a very, very strong disapproval of this topic being discussed on lesswrong. Rationale:

1, Politics is the mindkiller

2, It attracts the sort of people who would like to discuss these sorts of things, at the expense of those (including myself), who do not; specifically, by ranking for relevant keywords on Google (with lesswrong's reputation)

3, There exists almost the entirety of the rest of the Internet to discuss these issues, including rationality-related groups, forums, and mailing lists

4, For a specific case study, we just had a CFAR-alumni discussion group blown up by a topic similar to this, which got 100s++ replies, with no measurable convergence; which strongly implies that no, actually, we do not have a collective-intelligence / social tooling to tackle these issues yet.

For this reason, I -along with all upvoters of this comment- would like to ask for an Admin intervention, specifically by either deleting this post, or modifying it to "Metrics to evaluate a president"; that is, talking about general evaluation criterias, instead of ranking for T-related keywords.

Large difference in estimated competence even when plenty of other information available; plausible differences in competence are mostly not large. Largest differences I've heard of from actual scientific investigations are about one standard deviation, for "mental rotation" tasks; most are smaller and they go in both directions. So for most tasks, and still more for most jobs (since a job typically involves multiple diverse tasks), I would expect average sex differences to be well under one standard deviation. Now suppose a nontrivial amount of relevant information is available (e.g., examination results); away from the extreme tails of the ability distribution this will make knowing the person's sex substantially less informative. End result: in most cases of this sort, discovering whether someone is male or female makes a very small difference to any rational estimate of their competence given the other available information.

This could break down (1) looking at extreme tails of the distribution, especially if as commonly suggested there are substantial sex differences in variance (though I seem to recall hearing it claimed that most of the "men are more variable" finding comes specifically from men having more catastrophic failures rather than from the distribution being generally wider), or (2) in cases where there's a really big typical difference between male and female (physical strength might be an example).

Yes, but by the same standard, all metrics are interesting to the extent they are causal to happiness!

best metric, one of the very few that are easy to meawsure:

WALL LENGTH

... and who paid for it ;-)

Note: a few people have pointed out that the president is restrained by senators and congressmen etc - I realise that; but if we are willing to admit that presidents do have some effect in society, we should be prepared to measure them.

If I go to a homeopath and get better afterwards, I could use the metric of my health to measure that the homeopath is great at helping me.

While you might not reason that way in the domain of medicine and see the error if I frame that example this way, you want to reason this way in the political domain. You want to measure the quality of a presidency by looking at one run of the presidency.

Establishing causality is hard. Given that politics is the mind killer, this kind of poor reasoning often comes up in political discussions.

If you are generally looking for metrics, take a look at https://goodcountry.org/index/overall-rankings .

[...] principle of charity [...] the most rational interpretation of what someone said, even if you're pretty sure he meant something dumber.

"Most rational" and "most literal" are not the same thing.

A better metric for gender equality

Oh, I dunno. I don't think it's a particularly sensible thing to try to evaluate a president on after four years. These things change slowly, and their effects propagate slowly. We could maybe measure, e.g., whether the Trump administration itself is biased against women when hiring, but gender equality in society at large? There's not that much Trump can do about it, and any effects he might have will take a long time to show up and be very difficult to disentangle from other causes.

But the sort of thing you could do is: take a selection of jobs; look at men and women in those jobs and try to pair up men and women who are comparable in various plausbly-relevant respects (e.g., similar IQ, similar number of years' experience, same hours worked, etc.), and compare their pay. The matching process should minimize the impact of any actual differences in ability (note: this might not work well for very "extreme" cases, so e.g. I wouldn't recommend it for assessing putative biases in theoretical physics, but it should be OK elsewhere). It's important to control for full-time versus part-time because it's known that women are much more likely to work part time. (That could itself be the result of discrimination of some kind, but best to leave that aside for now.)

A small difference wouldn't necessarily indicate anything bad; there are all sorts of non-prejudicial mechanisms that could make men's and women's pay not come out exactly equal. But big differences would be cause for concern, and if the differences are not small then movement towards equality would probably indicate reduction in bias.

That addresses just one aspect of gender equality, of course. Some others would be really hard to measure. (E.g., women sometimes complain that they aren't taken as seriously as men; e.g., they say something and get ignored and then a man in the same meeting repeats the exact same thing they said and everyone listens. Maybe this is a real effect, but I wouldn't want to try to measure it accurately -- but if it is real, it could be a big deal.)

Although I don't think ArisC had inequalities going "the other way" in mind, I think some of them would be good to measure and to try (with the usual caveats about small differences) to get more equal. For instance, men don't live as long as women; it would be great to make male lifespans more like female ones. But most likely this is mostly biological and improving it would be a medical, not a social, problem. For another instance, James alluded to the gap in college attendance: more boys than girls leave the educational system early. That might be the result of some sort of social messed-up-ness (e.g., it might come from overcorrecting for discrimination against girls), and if so it would be good to fix it.

So basically [...]

Nope.

I don't think anybody is claiming to be particularly courageous here.

The bit about courage is my attempt at figuring out some of the mental processes that lead people to behave that way. I could of course be wrong.

I'm not sure why equality is being treated as a terminal goal

I don't think it really is. It's just a convenient shorthand. I can't speak for ArisC, but I would certainly not welcome (e.g.) equalizing incarceration rates of men and women by framing a lot of women for crimes they never committed and throwing them in jail, or equalizing how often men and women are victims of rape by raping lots of men.

So what's an example? Preferably one that's not justified by psychological differences.

Women are much more often victims of rape and other sexual assault than men.

There is good evidence that in many contexts women are viewed as less competent than men simply on account of being female. (E.g., you take a job application, make two versions of it differing only in the forename, and send it off, and consistently you find that the "male" version is regarded more favourably than the "female".) Now, if in fact women are less competent than men on average in the fields where this sort of experiment has been done, some effect of this kind could be justified on rational grounds; but the size of the effect seems to be too large to be credibly explained by any plausible size of actual ability difference.

Jesus Christ. This is beyond derailed. For what it's worth, gjm is right, people are either purposefully misrepresenting what I wrote (in which case they are pedantic and juvenile) or they didn't understand what I meant (in which case, you know, go out and interact with people outside your bubble).

And anyway - the reason I want to measure progress towards closing the gap where women have it worse is so that I can fairly evaluate feminist arguments about Trump in 4 years time. If in 4 years time it turns out that women earn more than men across the board, that >50% of governors are women and that women are CEOs of like 80% of the Fortune 500, you will be able to say "rhetoric aside, it looks like Trump actually helped women".

Going for "aha! Trump improved men's lot in these fields where they were disadvantaged" will only increase polarisation. Maybe worth tracking, in the name of truth and science; but again, not what I was going for.

can you give an example of a better metric?

A better metric of what than what?

James was being extremely charitable.

Deliberately taking someone to mean something you are pretty sure they didn't mean -- which I'm not sure whether James in particular was doing, but others in this discussion certainly have been -- is not "extremely charitable", it is rude.

It means things like not giving preferential treatment to one sex or gender over another when there isn't an actual reason for doing so, and finding ways to reduce disadvantages faced by one sex or gender even if they are (incidental) consequences of real differences.

gjm already stated what he meant by gender equality quite clearly. I see no justification for putting words in his mouth.

I was trying to be funny so at least in this case, yes.

This is not at all easy to do, for multiple reasons, and probably not great content for LW because we will probably be attempting to reinvent a lot of wheels from political science and economics.

It might make a good topic review post if someone goes and does a literature review on the subject.

Are you really looking for metrics to evaluate Donald Trump as president or for metrics to evaluate any president? The title says the first; I think we actually want the second.

I think it's really difficult -- the important things a president can influence are all affected by lots of other factors too. Consider e.g. "Obamacare"; for good or ill, the healthcare reform Obama was actually able to get done was (for better or worse) strongly influenced by what congressional Republicans were willing to do, and of course its actual overall effect is liable to be somewhat affected by the incoming administration's commitment to destroying it. So it could (if not dismantled) be a huge success only because the Republicans blocked a bunch of much worse options Obama would have preferred. Or a huge failure only because the Republicans blocked a bunch of much better options he would have preferred. Or anywhere in between.

Trump, on the other hand, may reasonably expect the House and the Senate to be on his side for at least two years, and probably longer unless the first two years make him unpopular enough to have really big effects on the next round of congressional elections. (In the Senate, there are 26 D and only 8 R up for re-election or replacement.) But "on his side" doesn't mean "their actions are mere consequences of his".

Depends on your values. You might think free trade is causal to world peace. Or causal to world development and avoidance of XRisk. Or reduction in non-war suffering.

If you only look at the american economy you miss the other stuff.

Coming up with criteria and metrics on the economy is pretty easy

I think it can be quite hard to do this in the context of evaluating a presidency. For example while you could look at GDP, unemployment, etc. it can be hard to determine if the president had much impact on those numbers.

Does anyone know if there have been efforts to quantify the impact of a president on the economy? I would imagine that most of the change is due to randomness/external factors.

Education

This is another tricky one, in that we might need to wait more than 4 years to see the results for a lot of metrics.

It sort of seems like you have to decide what constitutes 'success' in your eyes. Going by what you've listed, I doubt you'll think that he's a success.

I'm a supporter. For me, I'd settle for:

1: Don't attack Syria 2: Sign the stuff that Congress passes as long as we have a Rep majority. 3: Appoint conservative justices to the SC if he gets the chance.

Bonus: 1: Make the countries that President Obama called 'free riders' start paying up. This seems like a passion of Trumps, he's been talking about it for 30 years. I'm moderately hopeful here, but realistic enough to know that this is probably a stretch.

Aren't we already using the hand size metric?

Agreed.

I apologize for assuming you meant something semi-reasonable by what you wrote, I will refrain from making that assumption in the future.

Okay, let's go into "talking to a 5yo mode". We have these facts: a) the vast majority of people use "gender inequality" to refer to the fact that women are disadvantaged. b) terms like this are defined by common usage. c) since common usage means "women are disadvantaged", the reasonable think to do is that when a random person utters the phrase, they refer to that. Whether women are in fact disadvantaged doesn't matter. What matters is what information I was trying to convey. I used a common phrase. It's not rocket science.

And why would this be obviously desirable? I didn't say it would be. I said it would mean feminists would have to admit Trump did well by women.

So "women are more equal than men" it is. I have not done an extensive analysis to see in which fields men are disadvantaged and in which fields women are, then weighted them by importance to determine what's the fact here. I assume that neither have you. So to be overly aggressive with people who believe in the common knowledge that women are disadvantaged (again, even if that isn't so), is not productive. It's pedantic, juvenile. It doesn't achieve anything. If you just want to shout "MEN ARE OPPRESSED!!!", fine. Don't be surprised when no-one takes you seriously.

I don't see why it makes any less sense than gender equality in general.

I didn't say it does. (LW has no shortage of people objecting to "gender equality in general". I'm offering a bit of metacontrarianism here.)

If you look at the evidence, as opposed to the squid ink being thrown around to make things "controversial", it's about as well supported as most of the others.

So, just to be clear, are you saying it is well supported or it isn't? It seems to me that it is but there may be a pile of evidence I'm not familiar with.

(What I hope you and James_Miller aren't saying: "Lots of people think there should be gender equality, so let's propose measuring something that everyone knows isn't equal just to poke them in the eye".)

Obviously congress is also going to be doing things at the same time as Trump and might well have more of an effect on these measures than him personally. If there is a Democrat congress in two years time then could we perhaps try to isolate Trump's contribution by comparing between the two time periods?

I'm concerned about Trump's potential effect on the economy. Effects on employment and pay are also worth evaluating.

Subthread for metrics to evaluate the metrics.