Re: status of PL/I as a viable language

["John R. Strohm" <strohm@airmail.net>]

"Georg Bauhaus" <sb463ba@d2-hrz.uni-duisburg.de> wrote in message
news:b3u73c$7uo$1@a1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de...
> John R. Strohm <strohm@airmail.net> wrote:
> : Meanwhile, some years back, the small town of Kennesaw,
>
> it is puzzling to see that people who professionally deal with
> logic (programmers) start falling for any particular evidence supporting
> something, despite its logical incompleteness, as long as it is in favour
> of their views. On either side.

I find it amazing that an individual who allegedly deals professionally with
logic should apparently be so totally unfamiliar with the concept of
"experiment".

I will simplify it for you.

The hypothesis is that legal availability of firearms correlates positively
with violent crime rate.  This suggests that curtailing the legal
availability of firearms should, if the hypothesis is correct, reduce the
violent crime rate.

A simple analysis would reveal a questionable assumption, namely, that an
individual who is predisposed to commit a violent crime might nevertheless
obey a law that denied him the right to own a firearm, but we will neglect
that particular contradiction for the purpose of this analysis.

An experimentalist immediately realizes that it is easy to test the
hypothesis by curtailing personal firearm ownership and seeing whether the
violent crime rate goes down, as the hypothesis would predict.

This, Herr Bauhaus, is called "conducting an experiment."

We first observe that this experiment has been conducted in varying degrees
in quite a number of places in the United States.  The results of those
experiments have been UNIVERSALLY negative: in EVERY venue in which it has
been tried, the result has been an INCREASE in the violent crime rate.  It
is a trivial exercise with an almanac to verify the statistical truth that
those locales in the United States with the toughest local gun control laws
also have the HIGHEST violent crime rates.

We further observe, Herr Bauhaus, that similar experiments were conducted,
on much larger scales, national rather than local or regional, in Australia
and the United Kingdom.  Both of those trials gave the same negative
results: both nations experienced a dramatic INCREASE in their violent crime
rates.

This evidence, by itself, should be enough to indicate that the proposed
hypothesis is, at best, faulty.

However, another trial was performed, at Kennesaw.  If the hypothesis was
true, then REQUIRING all citizens of Kennesaw to own firearms SHOULD have
resulted in an immediate and statistically-significant INCREASE in the
violent crime rate.

However, when the experiment was tried, It Didn't Work Out That Way.
Kennesaw instead saw an immediate, almost heart-stopping, decrease in the
local crime rate.

It should be noted in passing that Kennesaw is not much different from other
small towns in that part of Georgia.  Before the ordinance was passed, they
all had pretty comparable demographics, populations, institutions, and crime
rates.  After the ordinance passed, only Kennesaw saw the dramatic reduction
in crime.  The first-order interpretation of the data would tend to suggest
that, in this CONTROLLED study (the other towns being, of course, the
control group), the ordinance made a difference and the result emphatically
did not support the hypothesis, but rather argued forcefully that the
hypothesis was false.

 > - Of course, one has to ask what kind of place Kennesaw is.
> One has to ask how high the percentage of social cohesion
> and homogeneity in a town like this is. From what I hear there
> is no need to force people to get a gun in parts of Los Angeles,
> however it is not particularly silent there.

Actually, it is quite difficult.  California requires a three WEEK waiting
period between purchase and delivery.  This caused significant difficulty
during the civil unrest after the Rodney King verdict: local shopkeepers who
realized there was trouble brewing, and who wished to purchase weapons to
deter rioters and looters from destroying their businesses were prevented
from doing so.  Those few shopkeepers who had a more jaundiced view of the
local animals, who already owned firearms, had no difficulty persuading the
looters to go elsewhere: it is amazing how effective the mere sight of a
weapon is in deterring a cretin.

> - One has to ask why it is--again--not seen that the Kennesaw
> success might as well have had to do with the "Hawthorne
> experiment" effect. It works in part because everyone gets
> involved, the emphasis being on getting involved, not on being
> cretin or not, and not on weapons.

The Hawthorne Effect is that both positive and negative changes in the
control variable produce the same kind of change in the controlled variable.
For a Hawthorne Effect hypothesis to be supportable in this area, BOTH
increasing AND curtailing the legal availability of firearms must have had
the SAME qualitative effect, that of either increasing or decreasing the
crime rate.  A quick review of the experimental data, however, shows that
this is most emphatically not the case, and so the Hawthorne Effect
hypothesis must be rejected.

> - One has to ask whether an average sample town is free
> of Montagus and Capulets.  And for practical purposes the
> average has to be the modus of towns of this kind, because
> otherwise it is just one sample that seems to have displayed
> some characteristics that cannot really be predicted to occur
> elsewhere, given the same requirements.

Montague-Capulet feuds have historically not been common in the United
States.

While it is true that Kennesaw is a small town of a certain character, there
are MANY such small towns of similar character in the United States.  It is,
as I have discussed above, also the case that Kennesaw is not by any stretch
of the imagination the only data point under consideration.

> - One has to assume(!) that there are no cretins in each town
> to wich this model can be ported, if it can, see above. For
> otherwise people couldn't trust each other; I guess you haven't
> missed the "trust discussion" in the USA. Imagine: Every step
> you make you will have one hand near your weapon.  - There is
> more to add, as to every one-factor-theory.  - So, ...
>
> - Facing community issues, one has to remember, how, for example,
> men and women of (protestant christian) god, with no weapons
> and a very homogeous social life
> deal with people in their community who chose to obey differing
> moral rules.  Rules which, as moral rules, are o.K. even for the
> conservative U.S. citizen but not for the chiefs in the community.
> For (an extreme) example, consider the Hutterer communities:
> At best, the "disobedient" will have to leave, banned (without any
> possesions). (Not exactly "fault tolerant social software", these
> rules.)

This is true in those limited (!) cases.  Such communities are VERY rare in
the United States, far more so than towns like Kennesaw.

> As far as drawing conclusions from this example is concerned,
> same thing as in the Kennesaw case: interesting but not near
> general enough.
>
> Certainly "Bowling for Columbine" is biased, but can you
> explain, using Kennesaw theory, why there are less killings
> per person in Canada, and why they don't lock their doors in
> Toronto, apparently?

No, I can't.  Nor am I crazy enough to assume without testing that the
examples of what works in Canada, or specifically in Toronto, are likely to
be applicable elsewhere.

That is the key point.  It is necessary to test the hypotheses in the area
of interest.  The tests that have actually been performed, in many parts of
the United States, and in Australia and the United Kingdom, seem to argue
strongly that the Kennesaw model *IS* applicable.

As an extreme example, it is for all practical purposes unlawful for a
citizen of the District of Columbia, the capital of the United States, to
possess a firearm.  It is also the case that the District of Columbia has
the highest murder rate in the United States, almost all committed with
firearms.  It is a matter of fact that the District police department is
totally and completely outgunned by the local drug gangs, and the District
chief of police admitted it on television several years ago, during a highly
lethal "turf war" between two rival gangs.

> It is almost the same as saying, Ada is The Right Programming
> Language because in a particular project, some goal had
> been achieved. Even in a largely complexity-reduced field
> such as programming, a one factor theory is just not enough,
> it is detrimental.

Not proven.  A one-factor hypothesis that CONSISTENTLY gives the same
result, when everything else is held constant, is a strong indicator of
ground truth.  A one-factor hypothesis that continues to give consistent
results when other variables are varied, or that can be calibrated for other
variables, is even stronger.  A one-factor hypothesis must fail to give
consistent results in these cases before multiple-factor hypotheses can
reasonably be considered.  (Occam's Razor is, after all, required knowledge
for programmers.)

> And, finally, and most importantly, murder doesn't require the
> murderer to have a gun, and gun owners have been murdered more
> than once.

"Statistical significance" is the important concept here.  In Japan,
gun-related crime had been almost unknown.  There was and is still murder,
but it mostly used other weapons.  It is also significant to note that gun
possession is unlawful in Japan, but gun-related crime in Japan is
increasing steadily.

The fundamental rule is this:  One experimental result is worth a thousand
theories.  When theory and experimental result conflict, the experimental
result must win.