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Free Fernando Vina (part two)

I'm still mystified by certain aspects of Major League Baseball's drug policy.

Consider the following:

An aging pitcher is suffering from a variety of persistent injuries. They are healing slowly. He is depressed and lethargic, and anxious about his career. He goes to see his doctor. The doctor finds that the patient's testosterone count is low. He prescribes the pitcher a small dose of testosterone, as part of  his rehab. The patient is desperate, and the doctor agrees to experiment with testosterone, and see if it speeds recovery.

Questions:

1. Has the pitcher violated MLB's drug policy? As far as I can tell, yes. Testosterone is on baseball's list of banned substances.

2. Has the patient violated the law? Of course not. Testosterone is an FDA approved medication.

3. Has the doctor done anything wrong? Not at all. The doctor could also have prescribed human growth hormone, if he wanted to.  Even though HGH is not approved for injury recovery, a physician is free to prescrbe virtually any drug he/she wants to, in an off-label manner.

4. Should the doctor and the athlete feel guilty about what they've done? I don't see why. The foundation of our medical system is that physicans have broad leeway to act in the best interests of their patients, and if the physician thinks that testosterone might help the athlete he's entirely within his rights to prescribe it. The pitcher is also entitled to take every step he can to regain his health. Surely it is wrong--if not unconstitutional-- for an employer to impede an employee from receiving the best medical attention.

5. Will Major League Baseball ever find out about the pitcher's testosterone use? Not unless the pitcher tells someone. The transaction between a patient and a doctor is, of course, covered by patient confidentiality laws.

6. Does this mean that lots of professional athletes may already be using substances like testosterone--and we have no way of finding out? Of course!

7. So why did Vina and Pettitte and Bennett get in trouble? Because, presumably, they obtained their HGH without an prescription--which is illegal.

8. So wait. The league's drug policy is an attempt to prevent the use of drugs without a prescription? No. Its supposed to prevent the use of a broad class of drugs. But since the league's policies  clearly can't govern drugs prescribed legally by a physican--particuarly if they are undetectable-- it has the effect of only preventing the use of drugs obtained illegally.

9. I'm confused. Aren't there already laws in place in America preventing the use of drugs without a prescription? Yes. (And I'm confused too.)

Will someone please tell me if I've got this right?

Free Fernando Vina!

From an Associated Press press article today, on ex-major leaguer player Fernando Vina admitting to using Human Growth Hormone:

Slow to recover from knee and hamstring injuries, Vina played only 61 games for the Cardinals in 2003. He said he was under pressure from the team and himself to get back on the field, so he tried HGH.

''I tried everything rehabbing,'' Vina said. ''I came to a point that I was desperate.''

New York Yankees pitcher Andy Pettitte, also cited in the report, recently acknowledged using HGH for a similar reason -- to try to recover from a sore elbow in 2002.

Backup catcher Gary Bennett, also named by Mitchell, said he took HGH in 2003 because of a knee injury. He signed with the Los Angeles Dodgers on Monday.

At 5-foot-9, 170 pounds, Vina said he wasn't trying to bulk up -- his job was to slap the ball around and use his quickness to get on base. He said he turned to HGH hoping to get healthy.

''Was it right? No. Obviously, it was wrong,'' Vina said. ''I'm embarrassed by it.''

Can someone tell me why Vina said "obviously, it was wrong"?

Let's assume, for a moment, that what Vina said was true--that he only took HGH because he was trying to recover from an injury.  Let's assume the same of Pettitte and Bennett. I think we can also agree that there is reasonable evidence that Human Growth Hormone speeds recovery.

So what, exactly, is wrong with an athlete--someone who makes a living with their body--taking medication to speed their recovery from injury?  Is it wrong to take ibruprofen? Is it wrong to ice a sore elbow? For that matter, is it ethical or even legal for Major League Baseball--or indeed any employee or governing body--to deny an employee access to a potentially beneficial medical treatment?

The closest analogy I can think of here is to medical marijuana, which is another case where it seems difficult for some people in positions of power to understand that a drug can be used for more than one purpose.

Race and IQ, con't.

More thoughts on Eric Turkheimer's research:

The more I think about it, the more convinced I am Turkheimer's work is one of the keys to unraveling the Race-IQ debate. His argument goes something like this:

Right now, there are two conflicting pieces of evidence, each of which is seized upon by each side in the debate. On the one hand, there are twin studies. You look at twins, raised in very different adoptive families, and you find that their IQs are very similar. That suggests IQ is largely heritable, and that environment plays only a modest role.

On the other hand, there are studies showing that if a child of a very poor family, adopted at birth into a wealthy family, will have a much higher IQ than his or her siblings, or his or her parents, who remain in poverty. 

This is, obviously, not a trivial disagreement. Someone like Charles Murray, who takes the former position, uses it as explanation for why he think social programs--like Head Start--are a waste of time and money. It is also why he thinks that the gap that presently exists between white and black average IQ scores will likely persist, regardless of what kind of steps we take as a society.  Liberals, meanwhile, use the latter evidence to justify the idea of an aggressive social policy.

So who's right? Turkkeimer would say, both sides are. 

He used a very large data set--the National Collaborative Perinatal Project--and found that the relationship between socio-economic status and IQ was non-linear. Children moving from poverty to the middle class see their IQ's jump: IQ at that end of the socio-economic scale is highly sensitive to environmental improvements. But the kinds of twins studies usually relied upon by IQ  fundamentalists and that yield such high genetic effects, are much more likely to involve comparisons among middle and upper middle class environments--and that end of the scale, Turkheimer's data suggests, environment doesn't play a big role. 

In other words, the lawyer who plays Mozart in the crib for his daughter, in order to raise her IQ, is wasting his time.  But dramatically increasing the educational resources available to inner city kids makes a  lot of sense.

This, I think, helps to clarify a lot of what drives so many of us crazy about Charles Murray and his ilk. We're not disputing the importance of IQ. And we're not disputing that genes play a huge role in determining IQ. We're just saying that it's hopelessly naive to assume that the same rules apply to suburban, middle-class whites as apply to, say, urban, inner-city black families.

Correction

To my chagrin, I made an error in my New Yorker piece "None of the Above." In the "Bell Curve," Charles Murray and Richard Hernstein did not advocate a "high-tech Indian reservation" for low-IQ groups. Rather, they warned that if current welfare policies continued, we would end up having to build high-tech reservations for those with low IQs--which is a very different argument, obviously (although not, if you think about it, any less ridiculous). I regret the error. The New Yorker will be running a correction.

Race and IQ

My contribution to the (endless) Race-IQ debate is out in this week's New Yorker. You can read it here. In the meantime, the psychologist Richard Nisbett has also published a rejoinder to the James Watson-Will Saletan foolishness in Sunday's New York Times. It is--characteristically--very good, and includes this:

The hereditarians begin with the assertion that 60 percent to 80 percent of variation in I.Q. is genetically determined. However, most estimates of heritability have been based almost exclusively on studies of middle-class groups. For the poor, a group that includes a substantial proportion of minorities, heritability of I.Q. is very low, in the range of 10 percent to 20 percent, according to recent research by Eric Turkheimer at the University of Virginia. This means that for the poor, improvements in environment have great potential to bring about increases in I.Q.

I confess that I haven't read Turkheimer's research. But take a look for yourself at the paper Nisbett is refering to here.

It's very persuasive. And it would be interesting to see what, if anything, die-hard hereditarians like Charles Murray have to say in response.

Kenyan Runners

Here is an excerpt from Alexander Wolff's excellent profile of the marathoner Alberto Salazar, in a recent Sports Illustrated:

Salazar ticks off the ironic circumstances that seem to cast the U.S. as a Third World country in distance running: "As big as we are, we have fewer people to draw on. In Kenya there are probably a million schoolboys 10 to 17 years old who run 10 to 12 miles a day.  . . The average Kenyan 18-year-old has run 15,000 to 18,000 more miles in his life than the average American--and a lot of that's at altitude. They're motivated because running is a way out. Plus they don't have a lot of other sports for kids to be drawn into. Numbers are what this is all about. In Kenya there are maybe 100 runners who have hit 2:11 in the marathon--and in the U.S. maybe five. . . "

     With those figures, coaches in Kenya can train their athletes to the outer limits of endurance--up to 150 miles a week--without worrying that their pool of talent will be meaningfully depleted. Even if four out of every five runners break down, the fifth will convert that training into performance...

We've always known that running is culturally important in Kenya, in a way it isn't anywhere else in the world. But these are staggering numbers. A million 10 to 17 year olds running 10 to 12 miles a day? I'm guessing the United States doesn't have more than 5,000 or so boys in that age bracket logging that kind of mileage. 70 miles a week is an enormous amount of running--even for an adult. I ran middle distance at a nationally competitive level as a teenager, and never got close to 70 miles a week.

I know this isn't going to put the genetic argument about Kenyan running dominance to rest. But maybe it should. It's a far more parsimonious explanation. No one ever claims that Canadians are genetically superior to everyone else when it comes to hockey, or that Dominicans have a genetic advantage when it comes to baseball. We all accept the fact that those two countries succeed at those sports because they draw their elite talent from a developmental pool that is simply larger--in relative and in some cases absolute terms--that other nations. Its a numbers game.  If Kenya really has a million kids, doing that kind of mileage, then we scarcely need any other explanation for their success.

Here's the appropriate thought experiment. Imagine that every year 50 percent of all American 10 year old boys were shipped to Boulder Colorado, where they ran 50 to 70 miles a week at altitude for the next seven years. Would the United States regain control of international middle and long distance running?

Serial Killers

I'm back!

I took a little break from blogging, to work on my new book. But now it's almost finished, and I'm back in the New Yorker this week.  I should be appearing regularly in the magazine again in the New Year, and hopefully posting again fairly regularly.

Here's the link to my latest. It's about the strange business of FBI serial killer profiling.

Enron and Newspapers

Another thought on Enron, following on my New Yorker piece.

One of the big points made by Jonathan Macey and others is that the Enron scandal is an example of “receiver failure” as well as “transmitter failure”: that is, that it wasn’t just the case that the company sent misleading signals. It was also the case that those who were supposed to be listening to and interpreting those signals didn’t do their job.

The exception, of course, were newspapers. The Enron scandal was, in large part, broken by the Wall Street Journal.

This is strange, no?

We operate with the assumption, particularly in our understanding of what makes financial markets efficient, that those with the best incentives to ferret out the truth are those who are partial—that is, are directly involved in the process—and those who are economically motivated, who have money at stake. So you’d think that hedge funds, shorts, arbs, and analysts—all of whom were massively partial and economically motivated—would have been the first to see the “real” Enron.

But they weren’t. Reporters were, a group who—at least in theory—you’d think were in the least advantageous position. They aren’t partial to the proceedings. They have no money at stake. (Compared to their Wall Street counterparts, in fact, they barely make any money at all.) They aren’t (relatively speaking) as well-trained as financial intermediaries. They have to serve a general audience, which disposes them against highly technical examination. There are real limits on how much space and time they can devote to a particular story, and their rewards for doing well are almost entirely internal and professional: good reporters are rewarded, largely, by having their status elevated among other reporters. On Wall Street, seeing truth gets you a million dollar bonus. At a newspaper, it gets you a slap on the back.

We’ve spent a lot of time, post-Enron, criticizing the flaws in the investment community’s gatekeeping activities. But I think we should also recognize what the Enron case tells us about the value of newspaper journalism. Maybe, in other words, we have underestimated the value of impartial, professionally-motivated, under-paid and overworked generalists in tackling the kind of information-rich, analysis-dependent “mysteries” that the modern world throws at us.

All of which, of course, points out the irony of what’s happening in the newspaper business right now. We are dismantling the institution of newspaper journalism precisely at the moment when it seems to be of greatest social value.

Enron

My semi-defense of Enron is now out, in this weeks’ New Yorker.
   
And here is the link  to Jonathan Macey’s wonderful law review article on the Enron case, which was my inspiration for the piece.

I also have a minor challenge for aficionados of the Enron case.

Years ago, when I was at the Washington Post, one of my colleagues on the science desk—Bill Booth—called up a dozen or so Nobel Laureates in physics and asked them to explain, in plain language, the nature and significance of the Higgs Boson atomic particle. None of them could. This was at a time, mind you, when the physics community was arguing passionately for the construction of a multi-billion dollar particle accelerator to look for things like the Higgs Boson.  So it wasn’t for lack of interest. They were gung-ho for nailing the Higgs Boson. They just couldn’t explain the Higgs Boson.

Can anyone explain—in plain language—what it is Jeff Skilling and Co. did wrong?

I’m not asking for an explanation for what they did wrong as businessmen. That’s plain. They did a mountain of stupid and arrogant things. Nor is this about what Skilling and company did that was unethical or in bad faith. There’s a mountain of evidence on that too. The question is strictly a legal one: according to the way the accounting rules were written at the time, what specific transgressions were Skilling guilty of that merited twenty-four years in prison? For the sake of argument, let’s stipulate that summaries must be three sentences or less.

When I was reporting the piece, I tried to get someone to answer this question. But everything ended up very Higgs Bosonian.

Bad Stereotyping

I was in Texas and Oklahoma last week. In the course of the trip, I was in a number of situations where I had to make conversation with people I didn’t know. Looking back on those conversations, I realize that when I was talking to white, male businessmen and needed to come up something to say, I generally chose the subject of college football.

    For lack of a better word, let’s call this “conversational discrimination.” I don’t assume that every stranger I meet wants to talk about college football. But I drew an inference about my conversational partner, based on his membership in the “white-male-businessmen of Texas and Oklahoma group” and used that inference to direct my behavior. As Judge Posner reminded us, in his review of Blink, in situations where one doesn’t know a lot about an individual, it may “sensible to ascribe the group's average characteristics to each member of the group, even though one knows that many members deviate from the average.” As it turns out, my assumption was largely correct. I had lot of really great conversations about college football. (Let's be clear this was not a hardship: I'm happy to talk about college football until the cows come home).

     The reason this stereotype was so useful was that I used as much of the available information about my conversational partner as I could. The fact that I was in Texas and Oklahoma mattered a lot. I wouldn’t have assumed that I could talk about college football with a similar group of white male business types from, say, Silicon Valley. The fact that they were businessmen mattered, and not, say, graphic designers or actors. The fact that they were men and not women mattered, and I know from experience that if I’m choosing a sports topic for conversation with an black male businessman, I’ll probably guess basketball—particularly if the person I’m talking to is from the East Coast. The point is the accuracy of stereotypes is a reflection—in large part—of their specificity: the more information you can use to build a generalization, the better off you are.

     This is my third (and last) comment on the Ayres study. My first point, as those of you who have been following my thoughts on this know, is that price discrimination against black males by car salesmen is morally wrong. My second point is that it is a bad business strategy. My third—and in some ways most important point—is that its lousy stereotyping.

    Let’s go back to the study. The male and female, black and white testers who Ayres sent out to car dealerships all gave the salesmen the same set of facts. They were all roughly the same age (late twenties). They all drove the same kind of car into the lot. They all dressed neatly and conservatively. They identified themselves as college-educated professionals (sample job: systems analyst at a bank). And they said they lived in the upper-income Chicago neighborhood of Streeterville. The car salesman, then, has several pieces of data from which to create his stereotype. He has the gender, race, age, occupation, educational level, and class (or at least a class proxy) of his potential customer. And what did he do? With the black men, he zeroed in on age and race, and ignored everything else.

      In his critique of my analysis of Ayres, Judge Posner did the same thing. When he says that it may be  “sensible to ascribe the group's average characteristics to each member of the group,” the “group” he’s talking about is race. But why is Posner—like the car salesmen—so hung up about race? Wouldn’t it be just as sensible, in the case of black men, to define their “group” as the group of college-educated, upper income professionals? So too with Steve Sailer. He says that car salesman are acting rationally, based on the fact that black men—as a group—like to be seen overpaying for cars. I have made my feelings known about what I see as the motivation behind that particular comment. But let’s just focus here on its appropriateness. Why is Sailer—like Posner and Ayres’car dealers—so intent on zeroing in on what is only one of many available and relevant facts about the customer?

     The short answer to that question, I think, is that this is what racial prejudice is: it is the irrational elevation of race-based considerations over other, equally or more relevant factors.

    But let me make two other points. First, thinking of the Ayres study this way gives us, I think, some insight into the anger that continues to be felt in the African-American community over discrimination. Put yourself in the shoes of one of those black males in Ayres study. You go to college. You get a good job. You make a lot of money. You move to a posh neighborhood. And when you walk into a car dealership all of those achievemens—and what they signal about you—vanish, and the salesmen only sees  the color of your skin. Can you understand now why I’ve been hammering away on this subject?

    Second, some of the commenters to my previous posts seem to have been of the opinion that price discrimination represented a kind of shrewd, profit-maximization strategy by salesmen. Shrewd? Tell me what’s so shrewd about being given four critical facts about a potential customer, and deciding to discard three of them?