Fashion Predictions: The Return Of The Waistcoat

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What not to wear

What not to wear

You’re talking to the guy who predicted the return of the pocket square and the re-emergence of the bow-tie. So listen to this: waistcoats—vests, that is—are on their way back.

For whatever God-sent reason, men are beginning to dress well again, to don the clothing of adults. To be sure, not in great numbers or everywhere, but many gentlemen have ceased taking their cues from the poorly dressed and are rediscovering the notion of beauty. Let us encourage this trend.

Evidence? Look around. Waistcoats are on the racks of the mid-range stores already, albeit in limited supply. People are wearing them.

This unfortunately includes hipsters, who delight in discovering new ways to dress like one another, all the while congratulating themselves on uniqueness.

The hipster summer uniform is a t-shirt (“ironic”, if possible), covered by a too-small waistcoat, too-skinny jeans, sunglasses, a scruffy beard, and skimpy brimmed mass-produced fedora. The end result is a young man who looks like he was dressed by a mother who cannot accept that her baby has grown up (he hasn’t). Example #2, Example #3, Example #4 (see bullet 7).

This is distressing and worth emphasizing because, for example, just as hats were about to reassert themselves upon the pates of gentlemen, hipsters in great number latched onto the ugliest which rightly frightened the normals who said to themselves, “No way I will wear a hat if I’ll look like that.” They will now say the same about waistcoats.

But you won’t, Mr Reader, you will not look a fool, as long as you avoid buying your gear in S-Marts and the like. And if you follow a few simple rules.

What to wear

What to wear

Do not wear your waistcoat without a coat. It is not meant as an outer covering. If you wear it solo, you will either be admitting your hipsterness or you will be mistaken for a waiter. Nothing wrong with being a waiter, of course, but you do not want people telling you what they want to eat as you stroll down the sidewalk.

A waistcoat obviates the necessity of an expensive, or even well-fitting shirt. And of ironing the shirt carefully. Once you reach your destination (work, home, a party) and it becomes unbearably hot, then you can remove your coat. You will still look (mostly) dressed up.

The waistcoat can be a vest, as in shown here by Christopher McDonald (who happened to be in the paper today). (McDonald is most well know for playing “Shooter McGavin” in Happy Gilmore.)

Never, not ever, not even at the risk of hypothermia, wear a waistcoat made of denim. Unless—and this is a narrow exception—it is embroidered with your motorcycle gang’s emblem, your name is Birdshyte (a true example; a man my father hired once to assist with some drywalling), and the vest could not possibly encompass your burgeoning gut.

The fatter you are the more likely you need a waistcoat. A waistcoat covers a multitude of belly rolls. I’m thinking of Richard Griffiths (as Henry Crabbe in Pie in the Sky) or Sydney Greenstreet. Nothing is more slimming than a well-cut coat (the material below the coat’s bottom button should swoop back quickly in fat men) over a waistcoat.

Grossly fat men should keep their coats on, even when hot, because after waistcoats grow to a certain size, their backs become abbreviated, turning in some cases to bare straps, and these look silly unless they are covered.

Mmmyeah.

Mmmyeah.

The shorter you are the more likely you need a waistcoat. Look at Edward G. Robinson, whose height was generously listed as 5’5″. The stripped waistcoat adds a good two inches. (Incidentally, only one of the men in this picture would go on to become a murderer. Can waistcoats keep one from sin?)

The waistcoat need not be of the same material or pattern as the coat. Indeed, especially in the summer and when on holidays, it is better for the waistcoat to be a brighter color or even be patterned. Then again, a “three-piece” suit in which all pieces are cut from the same cloth always look sharp.

There are many other rules, such as the height of the buttons, whether to have pockets or lapels, whether to have it cut to your figure or to incorporate a drawstring, the tightness of the fit, and so forth. Of these, another day.


Health Is Not A Goal

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Light ‘em up, boys!

Regular readers will know these words from Mark Twain by heart: even so, they bear repeating:

There are people who strictly deprive themselves of each and every eatable, drinkable and smokable which has in any way acquired a shady reputation. They pay this price for health. And health is all they get for it. How strange it is. It is like paying out your whole fortune for a cow that has gone dry.

Like an obedient little citizen you have eschewed (not chewed) donuts, you never drink soda pop in measures greater than 15.9 ounces, and have you assiduously avoided even secondhand smoke. Congratulations. You almost certainly have clearer arteries, a less peccant pancreas, and pinker lungs than your disobedient neighbor who indulges. You are healthier than he.

Now what?

What will you do with your extra store of health? How will you spend it? What are you saving it for? Or aren’t you being rather self-indulgent by avoiding “every eatable, drinkable and smokable which has in any way acquired a shady reputation”?

That was the argument Socrates gave in the Phaedo (quotes either from Tredennick translation [T]; or Jowett [J]). He said the temperate are “temperate because they are intemperate [J]“. And “What about temperate people? Is it not…a sort of self-indulgence that makes them self-controlled? [T]” The temperate, or self-controlled

are afraid of losing other pleasures which they desire, so they refrain from one kind because they cannot resist the other. Although they define self-indulgence as the condition of being ruled by pleasure, it is really because they cannot resist some pleasures that they succeed in resisting others; which amounts to what I said just now—that they control themselves, in a sense, by self-indulgence. [T]

Jowett’s translation of the same passage is also helpful:

For there are pleasures which they are afraid of losing; and in their desire to keep them, they abstain from some pleasures, because they are overcome by others; and although to be conquered by pleasure is called by men intemperance, to them the conquest of pleasure consists in being conquered by pleasure. And that is what I mean by saying that, in a sense, they are made temperate through intemperance.

Now unless your desire is to pose for a health magazine, or to make a tour showing off your healthiness, or to bore your workmates with tales of your pulse rate and cholesterol number, health is not a goal. You cannot bask in health: your body is either in optimal working order directed towards some behavior, or it is in less than perfect condition. But either way, your body is meant to do something, even if the something is as simple as sitting quietly and thinking.

This is what the food police (coincidentally, a new book with same name) and folks like Nanny Bloomberg cannot understand. They have failed to recognize that not everybody is directed towards the same activities as they, or that not all want to spend their health in the same fashion.

As Socrates showed us, your temperance for smoking must be because you are saving your lungs for some other self-indulgent activity. Maybe it’s in making a spectacle of yourself wearing ugly shorts and garish tennis shoes as you “jog” down a path. Or perhaps it’s because you want to join a bubble-blowing contest. Whatever. And your avoidance of trans-fats is only because you choose to be intemperate in some other aspect. Maybe it’s fitting into a pair of skinny-legged hipster jeans. Who knows.

But these are differences in choice, and that’s all. You cannot convince a man not to smoke or to eat excessively just because it is “healthy”, for that is like trying to sell him a dry cow. If you want him to change his behavior, you must convince him that the behaviors he is forgoing outweigh those which he has embraced.


Celeste Greig Fired Over Rape Comments

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Celeste Greig

A hoard of angry abortion supporters—one wonders if there are other kinds—succeeded in removing Celeste Greig from her post as president of the state’s Republican Assembly. Greig’s thought crime? In March she said:

The percentage of pregnancies due to rape is small because it’s an act of violence, because the body is traumatized.

I wrote about this earlier in A New Row Over Pregnancy Caused by Rape at Crisis Magazine.

The spectacle of folk who ran screaming in horror from Greig resembled residents of Tokyo fleeing Godzilla. No, strike that. Godzilla is scary and should be fled (fleed?). It’s more accurate to say that the politicians who shunned Greig were like kindergartners shrieking over the belief one of their classmates had cooties.

The San Jose Mercury News reports that Aaron Park, a prominent California Republican, called Greig’s comments “embarrassing.” This flak worried that the party—The party is mother, The party is father—would suffer were it known to consort with Grieg: “You cannot put faith in someone who’s talking about the virtue of saving babies but looks like they don’t care about women who are sexually assaulted.”

That this apparatchik thought his non sequitur applicable reveals what everybody already knows: that (most) politicians care more about attaining and maintaining power than in speaking truth.

What comes of examining Greig’s comment dispassionately? Is it true or false that “The percentage of pregnancies due to rape is small because it’s an act of violence, because the body is traumatized”?

The best answer is that nobody knows, not for certain or with anything approaching certainty, whether pregnancy rates are higher, lower, or identical in women who are raped and in those who were not. There are plenty of theories, conjectures, and surmises about the subject, but little concrete knowledge. There has been no systematic or convincing collection of data and therefore no definitive study (see link above for more detail).

And then it doesn’t sound “outrageous” to suggest that a body undergoing trauma will not operate as efficiently as a body swimming in more placid waters. Surely it isn’t beyond the realm of reasonable possibility to suggest that, ceteris paribus, a woman purposely aiming for motherhood has a greater chance to conceive than a woman who was brutalized. Greig’s only real error lay in asserting this most plausible supposition was a certainty.

“Insensitive!” said the activists, a group to whom any trace of any whisper of any glimmer of any hint that abortion is morally wrong is met with squalls, squeals, spit, and specious squabbling. Unless the subject is the emotional state of a person, the charge of insensitivity is always a fallacy. I ask you to draw the obvious inference about the class of people who so eagerly and so often embrace it.

Suppose, arguendo, that the rate of conception for raped woman was higher than for similar women who were purposely trying to conceive (or where not “purposely”, but in those who took no steps to prevent conception; see the link). That is, assume Greig’s comment is false. Now what?

Does it follow that rape is therefore morally acceptable? Surely not, and only a mind deranged by passion would claim anybody would make such an inference (see the commentors at this page for examples).

Maybe it follows that abortion should more accessible if rape-conception rates were higher? Well, no. If a woman conceived other than by rape, it cannot matter to her about her abortion whether some other woman was raped. She would still have to decide whether her abortion was morally acceptable or not.

But what about a woman who was raped contemplating abortion? Again, it does not follow that because other women were raped and conceived that therefore her abortion is morally acceptable. If abortion is allowable in cases of rape-conception, it does not matter how many rape-influenced abortions there are. If abortion is morally wrong in cases rape-conception, then hers is morally wrong too, even if the rape-conception rate is high.

Logically speaking, then, and granting the wholesale slaughter of reason so common on moral questions, why the flap? Because many people find abortion agreeable in cases of rape-conception, but far fewer folk find abortion acceptable for the sake of convenience (which are the vast majority of abortions). Abortion cheerleaders worry that if rape-conception rates were low, the populace might ban abortions altogether. And that is anathema to them.


Over-Optimism In Physician Prognoses

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Poor Michael Boren lay dead at one of the ugliest places in New York City, the on-ramp to the Queensboro Bridge. Heart attack. He was only 51. He made it through just two boroughs of Sunday’s Five Boro Bike Tour before ceasing to be (materially).

Thing is, Boren’s doctor “gave him the OK to participate in the race.”

Another busted forecast.

Or rather, another plastered prognosis. Turns out doctors, like most of us, aren’t such great predictors. Human behavior is too complex for anybody to nail with anything approaching consistent accuracy. This includes experts prognosticating in their fields of expertise, too. That was the lesson of, among many others, Phil Tetlock’s Expert Political Judgment.

I was reminded of this when reading a physician’s lamentation of over-confidence, in which he pointed to a British Medical Journal paper “Extent and determinants of error in doctors’ prognoses in terminally ill patients: prospective cohort study.”

This is just one example of an endless supply. The study: “343 doctors provided survival estimates for 468 terminally ill patients at the time of hospice referral.” There are a lot of words in the paper, but it all comes down to this picture, which isn’t as good as it could be:

Don't wait to fill out that will

Don’t wait to fill out that will

The chart is backwards to custom, which would place the predicted survival days on the “x” or horizontal axis, and the observed data on the “y” or vertical axis. The chart is also on a log-log scale, which makes it difficult to appreciate the magnitude of the errors.

But, forgiving all that, let’s take a look. If the doctors gave perfect forecasts, all the dots would line up on the solid black diagonal line: the distance from this line is the error. Not too many dots on or near the line.

Put your finger in the leftmost dot at 30 days, which is one doctor’s prediction of how long his patient would survive. Drop down from that 30 to the x-axis to learn that the patient actually lived just 2 days. That’s a huge error, especially considering this is the End Of The Road, a time when families are making hard decisions.

Because of the log-log scale the errors are larger than you would think in some places. For example, look at topmost dot at just over 1000 days, which is about three years. The patient only lived a month (30 days). That’s a bigger error than the one at the far left, where the doctor said the patient would live around 400 days, but where the patient made it only to the next day (oops). The error is smaller here even though the distance to the black line is longer, because the scale is not linear.

Notice that most of the dots are on the north side of the line which means, for this group of patients and doctors, the forecasts were too much on the optimistic side; that is, the doctors said patients would live a lot longer than they actually did. You can also see a bit of cultural bias in the data: e.g., the cluster of points predicting 90 days (3 months) to live.

One problem in this study is the discrete nature of the prognoses. No doctor and no patient believes he will live precisely 90 days when given that forecast. There is some plus-or-minus which is understood, but maybe not in the same way by both parties. The doc’s window may be narrower than the patient’s, or vice versa.

Every good forecast provides an indication of its uncertainty. A prediction of “90 days plus or minus two months” is different from one which says “90 days to a year.” And of course, doctors more often give predictions in this form. The uncertainty is needed because the decisions a patient and his family makes given a forecast are vastly different than the decisions the doctor makes.

Incidentally, assessing the quality of predictions which come with uncertainty is more difficult than making simple plots like this, but the methods to do so are well understood.

And there’s more to think of. Should a physician give his patients hope by telling them they’ll live longer than he really thinks? “Buck up Mr Jones! I’ve known patients in your condition who lived for years.” Optimism is a sort of placebo, is it not? But can you tell a patient he will live “years” when you believe that patient is circling the drain? Optimism has limits, and the power of the mind (placebo effect) not omnipotent. Bad forecasts aren’t helpful to families, either.