On those College Rape Stats

Over at Slate Emily Yoffe argues that universities have overcorrected their campus rape policies and procedures to the point that they’re harming innocent males. And though her article is a long and engaging read, its main contribution lies in its negative critique of the statistics cited by the Obama administration.  The evidence she musters to support her “overcorrection” claim is largely unpersuasive.

College Rape Statistics

It’s been repeatedly pointed out that findings from college rape surveys vary widely. A recent Bureau of Justice study finds that female college students have a .61% chance of being raped, slightly lower than non-college females from the same age group. This probability is dramatically lower than oft-cited one in five statistic (see also the CDC findings).

 Vox recently published a good breakdown explaining why we see such disparate findings and I encourage you to read it. Worth noting is that the BoJ study does not ask about incapacitated rape, which, as other studies have found, is the most prevalent form found in colleges. Rapes are likely going underreported, which inevitably lowers the BoJ’s estimates. The BoJ report also frames its survey questions differently, only coding a response as a sexual assault if the victim identifies herself as having been assaulted. This differs from other surveys which makes coding decisions based upon legal, not victim, definitions. Whether or not this framing leads to further under-reporting is less clear cut because it speaks to epistemological  concerns (e.g. who has more epistemic authority, the victim or the researcher? Can it still be rape even if the woman does not identify herself as a victim?).

 Another difference is that the one in five statistic captures a whole host of other forms of sexual assault beyond rape as it is legally defined. The study does not actually say that college women have a 20% chance of getting raped, but rather that they’ll be victim to unwanted sexual contact. The CDC study, which uses a larger sample size and samples over 200 colleges finds the rate to be about 1 in 8.

So, yes, a college woman does not have the same likelihood of being raped as a woman in war-torn Congo. And yes, as Yoffe argues, the study making the one in five statistic has sampling issues. It also assumes that rapes are independent events, which other research has found to be problematic. The fact is these studies have what are called reliability problems: we cannot establish consistent findings.  

Part of this is due to how the survey questions are composed. But another, I think, stems from a persistent source of uncertainty in the data that a universally adopted questionnaire alone will not fix: the fact that rape victims, as victims of trauma, will not be able to (1) clearly remember the facts of the event, (2) that they will want to avoid revisiting the issue, and (3) they’ll oftentimes blame themselves or rationalize away the behavior of the perpetrator. Because of the nature of the crime, rape studies may very well be inevitably plagued by a large error term.

Given the gravity of rape, the government should commission a national study, one that standardizes survey strategies and investigates ways to overcoming the reliability problems I just described. 

Neverthefuckingless

To those of you who use this fact to underplay rape statistics: don’t. The question isn’t whether or not college rape is a problem, but how bad of a problem it is. The error I describe above is a question of how depreciated the findings are. We’re still faced with the fact that in a class of third graders anywhere between one to two of its girls will be raped ten years from now. And three to five of these girls will be sexually assaulted when they’re in college. The only question is if it’s one, two, three, four, or five.

Ok, so while the data do not suggest that we have a civil war style rape epidemic, we certainly have a rape problem. Yoffe doesn’t discount this fact. Where I’m less persuaded is in her accounts of supposedly innocent males who are victims themselves of the government’s and the university’s overcorrection to this issue.

I do not give much credence to anecdotal evidence when making inferences about overall populations. Yes, the men in her story may be getting screwed over…but then again they might not be. But even if they are, they amount to three data points. What Yoffe is essentially arguing is that the government and universities are committing type II errors: they’re finding false positives. Innocent people are suffering. It’s ironic, though, that a person who finds statistical findings questionable because of non-random sampling procedures is making inferences from a data set of three that was not randomly sampled. Her case studies may very well suffer from, uh oh, confirmation bias.

Type I and Type II errors:

 But let’s talk about our errors a bit more. Let’s imagine two scenarios: in the one, the goal is to make sure no rapist goes unpunished. On the other is to never let an innocent male be punished. The two are in tension: because some uncertainty is inevitable we’re going to have to make a tradeoff between one and the other because the uncertainty requires us to hedge in one direction over the other. To ensure that no rapist goes unpunished is inevitably opening us up to punishing too many people. But to make sure that the innocent go free requires us to hedge in favor of innocence: actual rapists will be missed. By hedging against type 1 errors, we open ourselves to making type II errors and vice versa.

The question society needs to answer is where they wish to place the weight: toward catching rapists or ensuring that the innocent roam free. This is not a question that can be answered by the statistics because it is a non-statistical question. It’s moral. Given the history of gender relations in the country, whose interests should we be protective of even at the expense of other’s? If the goal is to end rape then the necessary means may simply require a higher propensity to damn the innocent. I, for one, am on the side of ending rape.

This doesn’t seem fair, but it’s our fate. We can never be certain about the empirical world. And because we lack certainty, some people are going to get unlucky. The questions are: who and how? 

A Review of Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise: A Love Story

I’m not sure why I clicked “purchase” on my kindle. But I did. It was late. 1:00 am. Maybe 1:45, I don’t recall. My girlfriend slept next to my while I dicked around online looking for a new book to read. Warren Beatty’s Reds played a whisper above mute on the TV. Maybe John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World. The edition with an introduction by Lenin cost $8.95. But Beatty’s film probably covered the major plot points. Amazon recommended Trotsky’s The History of the Russian Revolution, though it was almost $30 in e-book form. And anyway, I could probably find a pdf of either online.

Twitter intervened. I floated from article to article. I clicked on a Breitbart story about the supposed flack ESPN insiders have thrown at Nate Silver’s 538 site. Low hit count. Little ad revenue. This reminded me that his site exists. I started reading an article about burrito rankings but didn’t finish. I googled his name. Luddite journalists write some pretty stupid shit about Nate Silver.  

At this point in the night I felt sleepy. Maybe it was time to put the kindle down. But I then remembered that Nate Silver had written a book a few years back. I found it on Amazon. It’s called The Signal and the Noise. Almost Faulknerian. My girlfriend ruffled the sheets in unconscious agitation before settling back into her deep slumber. I summarily purchased the book and began to read it.

The book has a hazy, dreamlike quality. In it Nate Silver is a journalist who travels around the country talking to experts from the fields of finance, psychology, meteorology, seismology, and computer science about why their colleagues aren’t very good at forecasting. These interviews typically serve as a framing device for the whole chapter. Each chapter covers the forecasting deficiencies found in a different field. Nate Silver then offers his own advice to the struggling natural or social scientist: think more probabilistically. Be a fox. Sniff out the truth (more on this business later).  

There are a few deviations from this formula. In one chapter Silver approves of recent advances in weather forecasting, though he laments the fact that economic incentives sometimes lead companies like the Weather Channel to fudge the facts. He notices the same dynamic when diagnosing why financial models failed to predict the 2008 crisis. Nevertheless, elsewhere in the book he firmly believes that competitive markets incentivize better forecasting. This seeming inconsistency may in fact belie Silver’s more nuanced understanding of the tensions inherent within any complex system, particularly capitalist markets, but at no point does he actually address this. So instead we’re left with markets yield the truth, accept when they don’t.

Another deviation from the book’s formula comes in the chapter about baseball. In baseball we have good forecasting because Nate Silver invented a good forecasting model. This is more or less true. Silver’s PECOTA improved upon older quant approaches in rather impressive ways. I would’ve liked Silver to have gone into more detail discussing the particulars of his model, but I sense that because it’s a popular trade publication Silver (or maybe his editor) doesn’t think his audience would understand it. Also, I doubt he’d want to reveal his special sauce because, well, capitalism.  

Early on in the book Silver morphs from a journalist into a fox. The transition is subtle, yet immediate. His nemesis (and really anyone’s) is the hedgehog. For Silver the fox-hedgehog distinction is simultaneously the most pertinent psychological fact about a person, the main cause of bad forecasting, and Dasein. The reader is given the impression that this is all settled fact.

For those who are not in the know, Isaiah Berlin discovered the fox-hedgehog distinction on an old Greek parchment. He then used it to solve the mystery of Schrodinger’s Tolstoy which stipulated that the Russian novelist existed in both ontological states at once. Because of Russell’s paradox, we know this to be impossible. According to Berlin’s solution, read first over BBC children’s radio, Tolstoy is in fact a hedgehog. Berlin is the fox.

After summarizing the concept’s history, Silver dismisses Berlin’s solution as silly because no serious thinker would force an artist into such a crude binary. Tolstoy’s being manifested according to a frequency best described by a binomial probability distribution. He most likely occupied both ontological positions simultaneously, albeit probably one more than the other.

Nevertheless, social scientists and public intellectuals do not deserve such nuanced treatment because according to Silver’s updated distribution, the likelihood that they’re a combination of both traits is zero (he goes out five decimal places). They're hedgehogs. Silver then describes the differences between foxes and hedgehogs as follows:

·         Foxes “[i]ncorporate ideas from different disciplines…regardless of their origin on the            political spectrum”. Hedgehogs “[m]ay view outsiders skeptically” (54).

·         Foxes adapt their thinking to changing facts. Hedgehogs change the facts to their pre-          existing biases.

·         Foxes are “self-critical”. They acknowledge their mistakes. Hedgehogs are “stubborn”.          They blame their mistakes on anything but themselves.

·         Foxes are “tolerant of complexity.” Hedgehogs “construct stories…that are neater and          tidier than the real world, with protagonists and villains, winners and losers, climaxes            and dénouements—and, usually, a happy ending for the home team” (58).

·         Foxes use statistics. Hedgehogs use their gut.

·         Foxes seek the truth. Hedgehogs want to be invited on Jay Leno.

This was news to me. I had never seen the fox/hedgehog distinction referenced in either my graduate level econometrics or game theory sequences. Nor was it ever invoked during research workshops. But this is easily explained if we were all hedgehogs. Perhaps social science departments should do a better job screening for us during the admissions process.

These were all, of course, sleepy thoughts. It was maybe 4:00 am now. My girlfriend sat up and said “we’re at Pando. We’re at Pando.” A fictional train station. She was sleep talking. I told her I’d be there in a moment. She said “ok” and rolled back over.

I wanted to go to sleep too, but Nate Silver’s criticisms of my former profession gnawed at me. I wasn’t quite sure what those numbers published in political science journals referred to anymore. I thought they were probability distributions. No, they most certainly were.

It occurred to me that Nate Silver might have a bit of a Clayton Bigsby complex. I looked at his Wikipedia page. My suspicion was quickly confirmed: Nate Silver’s a blind hedgehog who was raised by a family of foxes that treated him as one of their own.

Off the hook, I skimmed through a few more pages. It seemed that later on in the book he gives a bit more degreed hedging. But I didn’t let that contradict my biases.

It’s what Nate Silver would’ve wanted.

Iraq War 2: Electric Boogaloo ctd. White Person Playlist

[Geist returns from his summertime posting slumber a little disheveled, a little bleary-eyed, a little side-swiped by reality]

Comrade Obama, so it seems, gifted 9/11 with a little Bar Mitzvah present. Another Middle Eastern war. A vague, endless war. The solidification of Bush's extension of Executive privileges. More surveillance. A war economy merged with the infotainment-industrial complex.

And after a summer of ridiculously self-congratulatory outrage posturing among the Left apparently this is where the outrage ends. Because perhaps this will hasten the end of American hegemony? Is there a little bit of warped #accelerationism in us all?

Instead, unfolding events have been met with a resigned ironism, which, let's be frank, never has been the earnest Leftist's strong-suit. How can you be funny when The Cause is at stake? The revolution will not be for the tricksters.

Anywho, let's actually jump down the superficially ironic shit hole that is po-mo nihilism and celebrate the continuation of the Iraq war with the (white person) playlist that got us there the second time.

Enya, "Only Time"

   

     

Toby Keith, "Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue" 

 

   

Norah Jones, "Don't Know Why"

Evanescence, "Bring me to Life"

     

50 Cent, "In da club"

   

The Calling, "Wherever you will go"

CREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEED TIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIME

Chad Kroeger, "Hero ft. Josey Scott"

Nickelback, "How you remind me"

Vanessa Carlton, "A Thousand Miles"

Coldplay, "The Scientist"

Coldplay, "Clocks"

Linkin Park, "In the End"

Nelly, P. Diddy, Murphy Lee "Shake Ya Tail Feather"

Kylie Minogue, "Can't Get You Out of My Head"

Shakira, "Whenever, Wherever"

Kid Rock, "Picture ft. Sheryl Crow"

3 Doors Down, "When I'm Gone"

The Black Eyed Peas, "Where is the Love?"

R. Kelly, "Ignition"

Britney Spears, "Toxic"

Matchbox 20, "Unwell"

Lil Jon and The East Side Boyz, "Get Low ft. Ying Yang Twins"

Uncle Kracker, "Drift Away"

50 Cent, "21 Questions ft. Nate Dogg"

Santana and Michelle Branch, "The Game of Love"

Eminem, "Lose Yourself"

Justin Timberlake, "Cry me a river"

Missy Elliott, "Work it"

John Mayer, "Your Body is a Wonderland"

Jason Mraz, "The Remedy" 

Five for Fighting, "Superman (It's not easy)"

Alan Jackson, "Drive"

Nelly Furtado, "Turn off the light"

Dixie Chicks, "Long Time Gone"

Jewel, "Intuition"

Superstructure, out

I’m sorry, but political philosophy has been, and always will be, art

[Geist takes a bit of a stroll down memory lane. Before insulting Heideggerians]

Back in my college days, I developed what I now recognize to be an “approach” to reading political theory. I treated each political philosopher’s image of his[1] political subject as a work of art. Political philosophy was a matter of aesthetic appreciation. What I wanted to imagine and experience was human beauty.

Though I eventually achieved a somewhat respectable facility with the technical aspects of theorizing, I primarily read these texts to imagine what the experience of being a particular subject was ‘like’. What did being Aristotle’s citizen feel like? What was the texture of his everyday experiences? How did he perceive the world? And was his mode of life beautiful?

Many of us read novels for the same reason. This approach assumes that philosophers are not merely describing human beings, but creating them (though creation under the guise of description).[2] The ultimate question for me when assessing the value of a political theory was never ‘do I think this is right?’, but rather ‘do I want to make myself into this?’ Is this what I want to be?

That beauty, and not truth, could be the foundation of a political order has never been a particularly well-received notion. Plato famously casts the poets out of the Republic. Liberal political theory has long relegated aesthetic appreciation to the private realm. And fascism always stands as the guiding example of the dangers inherent in mixing art and politics, art and truth.

But we should recall that Plato only banishes the poets from the Republic after their job was done, that job being the moral education of its children. Songs and poems cultivate particular affective desires in the citizenry. The Republic itself orients our mode of experience in particular ways, ways that its citizens find to be beautiful.

Similarly, liberalism’s autonomous individual who freely makes choices is too an image of a particular mode of life, a particular way of being in the world. It’s a particular way of relating to other people and the world of “things”. When we say we agree with “liberalism” what we’re saying is that we want to experience the world in a particular way. We find that mode of engagement to be aesthetically desirable. I think conservatives, those who privilege the community over the individual and tradition over change, too are conservative for this same reason. As are democratic socialists. Communists. Anarchists. And so on.

We desire to become a particular imagining.

Which, of course, presents us with something of a problem. What we see in a pluralistic society is not, as we tend to think today, competing and differing political logics, but rather competing and differing aesthetic visions. And this is where I think liberal pluralism misunderstands the question. It proposes a meta-logic that all political logics can reasonably assent to. But these political logics are really the scaffolding upon an aesthetic foundation. They don’t provide the foundation in and of themselves.[3] What political liberalism needs instead is an over-arching meta-aesthetic that holds society together. That is, of course, if we find that vision of society to be aesthetically desirable.

In my reading, political philosophizing engages in what it was meant to deny: politics as art. But, if as I suggest, our judgment of the political subject is ultimately an aesthetic evaluation, then perhaps it’s time to accept this fact and work out what it means for our politics and our philosophizing. I think most of us can at least agree that this is an issue best not left to the Heideggerians.

---

[1] The philosopher was always a male. Yes, political philosophy is very gendered.

[2] I would agree though that there is still a discernable descriptive component to political philosophy

[3] My reading of Habermas is that he’s painfully in love with Kant.

A Farewell to the Academy - The Left's Conservatism

[Fight fire with fire, ladies. Objectify away]

I’ve spent the past few posts discussing problems with how quantitative political science is conducted.[1] It’s now time to wrap up this needlessly bloated series by discussing how the Left has lost its way.

The New Left is a conservative force. What this means is that it denies itself the intellectual resources needed to challenge the status quo and as a result lacks the capabilities to articulate a positive vision for social change. Instead, Leftist politics today is primarily an aesthetic and affective force. It’s a mark of privilege and a sign of immense cultural capital. It’s clothing. It’s internet polemics. It’s blacklisting. It’s protest as a self-expressive activity. The revolution will look quite nice on that Ikea bookshelf.

                

But this diatribe is nothing new. And many before me have noted the conservative tinge of New Left politics. But let’s talk about why it’s conservative.

The problem is simple: the New Left wrongly view critique as an end in itself as opposed to the means to ground a positive project. 

Okay, so what does this mean?

                

The world is a vast diffusion of differences and similarities. By categorizing the world in one way rather than another, we privilege some similarities and some differences over others. And how we categorize the world follows from what our goals are. We categorize humans based upon race, gender, nationality, class, et cetera. For centuries, mind and body were distinct categorizations. The soul too. We have egoists and altruists. We have what constitutes harm. These are all chosen ways to cut up the world into objects. And they have all assumed differing levels of social and political significance through time.

                

The goal of political philosophy traditionally conceived is to establish what categories should provide the foundations for our political order. For Plato, it was the proper care of the soul. For Aristotle, human flourishing. For Rawls, a particular understanding of the human being as a Kantian(ish) moral subject. Whatever they are, it is argued that certain categories provide the basis for our positive social project.

                

These categories are not proposed arbitrarily. A crucial aspect of any political philosophical project is to weed out all other competing categorizations of the world as either inadequate to the task at hand or normatively undesirable. Critique for political philosophers is the means used to determine what our foundational categories should be. And these foundational categories provide the basis for our positive social projects, our vision for what society should look like.

                

The New Left takes all categories to be necessarily arbitrary. Its goal, then, is to uncover how all the categories we take to be natural or grounded by reason are in fact the results of some humans dominating others. All categorizations follow from power relationships. They discipline and constrain us. But we tend to say otherwise. So their true origins need to be exposed.

                

Thus the primary divide between the two traditions is over whether or not all categories are arbitrary and contingent. Kant tried to show that not all were, though it’s largely agreed by both sides that he failed here. Political philosophers tend to just ignore this and assume from the start that foundational categories are at least pragmatically necessary. The New Left, however, points to how this in itself is an exercise in domination.

                

Be that as it may, by deconstructing all categories into incoherency, the New Left denies itself any platform for a coherent social vision. There are no categories that we can build upon. They’re all problematic in this view. Ironically enough, the Left is too Kantian here: they too, like Kant, think that for our categories to hold any sort of purchase, they must be shown to be grounded in reason. If not, we stand defeated. All that remains is power. All we can do now is expose power’s effects.

              

Though, perhaps not all power is equally bad. Perhaps, even, not all power is bad at all. By denying us a social vision because doing so requires the ossification of certain categories, it denies the disempowered anything to organize around and fight back with. It denies those in power the opportunity to weigh competing choices. It advocates razing the earth with no plan for what should be built instead.[2]

Our visions may reek of power’s effects but at least they’re better than what we have.

                

One problem with political philosophy throughout its history has been its need to offer final solutions.[3] Plato’s republic, Aristotle’s polity, and Rawls’s liberal society are offered as “the end state”. We should not offer final solutions. But in rejecting final solutions, we should not feel defeated. We should not decry all solutions. What we should aspire toward are temporary solutions to problems at hand. We should constantly revise our categories and our visions.

Revision implies both negative critique and positive vision. It’s both creative and destructive. No categories should be final, but neither should we be afraid to use them.

---

[1] See here and here

[2] It’s simply impractical to advocate leaving our categories in constant suspension and fluidity as many Leftists propose. Mainly because even the Leftist academic cannot epistemologically do this. No one can. What does language do? It fixes meaning. For every one category we deconstruct, we must hold 99 others constant in our head. We must objectify the world. If not, no semantic content can be conveyed at all. So deconstruction itself requires what it wishes to deny.

[3] I would include contemporary Marxish work in this category

A Farewell to the Academy - The Escapism of the Academic Left

When you separate a man from what he loves the most what you do is purge what’s unique in him. And when you purge what’s unique in him, you purge dissent. And when you purge dissent, you kill the revolution. Revolution is dissent. You don’t re-write what I write!

--Jack Reed, as played by Warren Beatty, Reds  

For anyone who’s watched Reds, what Jack Reed loves the most is not his art, or the revolution, or his wife, but the fantasy of the artist, the revolutionary, the lover. He is, to varying degrees, all of those things. But fantasy is about escaping from oneself, becoming something we cannot possibly imagine what it is. What we desire is the feeling of anticipation experienced just before the moment of transformation. The arrival of the promised escape. And we wait, for a sign, for anything really. A harbinger. We’re not sure. And then, one day, we ponder how something that never existed could possibly melt away.

Or so the high school Godot essay goes. It’s a pity we young academics oftentimes intellectualize these themes rather than reflect upon them. But then again, Beckett and, to a far lesser extent, Beatty have lived some shit. What the young academic and their high school selves lack is not intelligence, but experience. What can we know of Beckett when we’re 17? Or 25? Aren’t his condition and themes, for us, more like intellectual toys we play with but think are real? How dangerous is this? Quite, so it seems. We’re in grad school. And won’t stop bitching about it.

Our culture treats knowledge as an unmitigated good. But perhaps it’s still the case that some forms of knowledge are dangerous if held at the wrong time. What do Beckett or Proust or even Hegel impart to us at that tender age beyond the fantasy that we are on the verge of knowing some hidden truths about life and the world? The Beckettian references, the Proustian gestures, the Hegelian dialectics are nothing but accumulated cultural capital and seemingly existential comforts. One should never read Beckett and feel that he’s been mastered. But that’s all the young person can do.

It’s painfully ironic, then, that Godot and works like it have become their own sort of Godot for us: by devoting our lives to these texts and others like them we’ll one day achieve transformative knowledge. The act of reading Godot is the promise of escape.[1] And when transformative knowledge awaits, the gamble of tenure can be easily rationalized.

The life of an academic, just like the life of an activist, is a life of ritual. And ritual, as the anthropologists tell us, opens us up to transformation. In Reds Jack Reed performs all those required of the Marxist activist: the gestures, the meetings, the agitations, the speeches and polemics. Each action is thought to further prepare you for the transformation. It will purify your body and mind, make you ready. Just have faith in the rituals themselves.

Academia, like activism, is no different. It’s a mood, a collection of gestures, objects, and arguments. It’s what you wear. How you talk. The secret language you speak. The dusty book stacks. The tenor of your thoughts. The arguments as they are framed. The very problems that you consider. These all prepare us for transformation.

It would seem, then, that in leaving academia, we’re abandoning this project. That we, like Jack, have watched the fantasy melt away. But I doubt it. A constant gripe among academics in the humanities and social thought is about the stultifying nature of academic writing and argumentative conventions. Liberation from this confinement is an important and prominent theme in much of “quit lit”. But if this is the case, what’s being abandoned is not the fantasy, but the ritual. The ritual, you see, was tarnished. By modernity. By capitalism. By liberalism. It’s time for a new ritual at a new site far away from the academy. Because the academy is now wicked. It’s tainted. Its oracular properties disturbed.

It’s time, then, to found a new religion.

---

[1] It’s astounding, yet understandable, how so many supposed readers of Nietzsche fall into this trap.

Bill Simmons thinks Bosh sucks--enough to be paid like a super-star

[This morning saw Geist, our ever lovable rapscallion, get into the lowest of low-grade Twitter scuffles with Grantland’s head NBA writer, Zach Lowe. To all his little Kafkas who have no idea who that is, it’s okay. Geist will be posting on “Love, Politics, and the Left” soon]

It began with a tweet.

Which was met with a reply:

And thus ensued the following conversation:

I have a great deal of respect for Lowe. His reporting and analysis are some of the best in the business and though a bit wonky, his podcast has quickly become one of my favorites. Truth be told, I’m not sure why I included Lowe’s twitter handle in the tweet. Probably because I wanted to get a reaction from someone whose opinion I value. And Lowe surely gets shit like this all the time, so it’s commendable that he even replied to me in the first place.

That Lowe proves himself to be a company man is neither particularly surprising nor is it something I’d hold against him. If I worked for a company like ESPN I’d give a diplomatic answer and a bit of snark at the end of my replies too. And it’s worth noting that my criticism does not extend to Lowe himself who’s largely defended Bosh during the Miami years.

And it’s not like Lowe is deaf to the shit that gets hurled at Bosh, much of it from ESPN. His Bosh commentary is oftentimes framed with “hey, this dude gets a bunch of undeserved shit slung at him.”

As for the merits of my critique, it could easily be settled by looking at the numbers, which I don’t have and frankly don’t have the time to compile. It could be done though. And it could be the case that among all writers, when aggregated, there’s not much substance to my criticism. That being said, there are a few ‘analysts’ out there who have a disproportionately large soap box and who fit the description.

For instance: Lowe’s boss, Bill Simmons.

Never mind all of the inane things Simmons has said about Bosh dating back to 2010 (like saying continuously on his podcasts first that the Heat were really just the “Big Two” and more recently that the Heat are just LeBron). Here’s what Simmons wrote about Bosh on June 18^th, 2014:

Q: Gut Feeling -- have we seen the best of Chris 

Bosh?

Almost definitely. For one thing, he suddenly has 11 years, 796 regular-season games, 89 playoff games and nearly 32,000 career minutes on his NBA odometer. But once the minutes, rebounds and free throw attempts start slipping, that’s the beginning of the end for elite big guys — Bosh dropped from 39.7 MPG, 8.5 RPG and 6.7 FTA in the 2011 playoffs to 34.3 MPG, 5.6 RPG and 2.4 FTA in 2014. At the same time, his 3-point attempts climbed from 0.2 (2011) to 3.7 (2014). Basically, Bosh quietly morphed into this generation’s Sam Perkins. And look, I loved me some Sam on those mid-’90s Sonics teams; Bosh could play for another 10 years doing a rich man’s Perkins impression. But not for $20 million a year.

If taken literally, Simmons is saying that Chris Bosh isn’t worth $200 million over the next decade. But seriously, who would argue that? Maybe LeBron would be worth $20 million a year at 40, but...no, that's insane. Even for LeBron. No, Simmons is saying that Bosh isn’t worth what he once was. He’s 30 now. The decline is inevitable. For his closing jab not to be completely meaningless, Simmons must be suggesting that Bosh isn’t worth $20+ million anymore (even though he’s never actually broken $20 million in his career). Simmons continues:

The Heat didn’t lose the 2014 Finals because of their offense; they lost because their supporting cast sucked, they couldn’t defend anyone, and Wade and Bosh aren’t the same guys anymore.

Doesn’t look like Bill’s willing to give Bosh a raise.

But here’s Simmons less than one month later on his podcast, which Lowe guests (starts at 14:45):

Bosh is the one who shouldn’t take any discount whatsoever, and I agreed with your column today. It should be up to him to take less because his team has to pay Dwyane Wade like a superstar because all he means to Miami.

Here’s how Lowe’s column starts:

[I]n a time of hushed meetings and amorphous potential offers, the Rockets have transformed a thought exercise into a real thing by presenting Chris Bosh a concrete choice: take a pay cut to stay in Miami, or earn your full maximum salary over a four-year deal in Houston.

The max salary? Averaging $22 million a year. Is Bill now suggesting that Bosh is actually worth his player maximum? If we’ve seen the best of Chris Bosh, which according to Simmons was never that great, why should he be pulling in almost as much as Carmelo is demanding? Why, if all the shit Simmons has given him is to be believed, does Chris Bosh deserve a super-star’s payday?