Global Headlines Express | The Conversation on why humans can't predict suicide, and more than 100 killed in Mexico's election season
Global Headlines is a new QDaily column for 2018, still in trial run. As ever, it exists to help you know more.
Global Headlines is a new QDaily column for 2018, still in trial run. As ever, it exists to help you know more.
What the agenda-setters are talking about
The author is Joseph Franklin, an assistant professor of psychology at Florida State University.
This month's suicides of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain pushed people, almost against their will, toward a terrible question: how do these tragedies happen? Those close to someone who takes their own life fall into an agonizing replay, certain they missed something — "How did I not see it coming?" Franklin, who has studied suicide for the past decade, says with regret that not one suicide expert, psychologist or physician alive today can tell who will die by suicide, and that this has nothing to do with how long you have known someone or how well. All they can do is nudge the odds of a correct guess up a little.
It took scientists 50 years to agree that suicide is hard to predict. Now a new hope has appeared: machine learning. Several research groups have reported in recent years that machine learning can pick out who is suicidal and who is most likely to die by suicide, with accuracy as high as 90%. To see how that works — and why people cannot do it — you need to know something about how human thinking works, and how machine learning works.
Humans like explanations with two properties. First, an explanation should be simple, made of one thing or a few: "depression," say, neatly accounts for suicidal behavior. Second, it should be fixed — it should cover everything, or nearly everything. "Most suicides are caused by depression" is a fixed explanation. Simple, fixed explanations are intuitive and cheap; they help us survive, reproduce and get through the day.
But that habit of mind does not help us understand nature, because nature is never simple and fixed. Over the past few decades scientists have finally accepted that everything — physiology, biology, human behavior — is complicated and uncertain. To explain most things you have to combine a very large number of elements in a complicated way.
Take X+Y=1. It is indeterminate. As humans we instinctively look for the solution. But there is not one solution; there are infinitely many. And there are infinitely many values that do not satisfy the equation at all. That uncertain middle ground, between "one answer" and "anything can happen," is where people get lost — and it is exactly how nature operates.
Like everything in nature, the causes and warning signs of suicide are complicated and unstable. Hundreds of elements are linked to suicide, and predictions do worse than guesswork. People assume depression is the key trigger, but in fact only 2% of people with major depression eventually die by suicide — barely above the 1.6% rate for the United States as a whole. Which tells us we have to combine many factors before we can find causes.
A better approach is to find, somehow, an optimal combination of dozens or hundreds of factors. Machine learning can do that. It can now pull data out of electronic health records and scan hundreds of factors covering mental-health diagnoses, physical conditions, medication, demographics and patterns of doctor visits. The combination it arrives at successfully predicts 80–90% of suicides. But it is worth remembering that the machine's answer is not the only one.
And while machine learning can foresee who will die by suicide, it cannot yet say when. That problem may take years to crack. In the meantime, what we can do is look after the people around us. If you know someone who is struggling, talk to them, and point them to a suicide-prevention hotline.
24-hour newsmakers
New York State sues Trump for illegally profiting from his charitable foundation.
On Thursday — Donald Trump's 72nd birthday — New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood accused Trump and the three children who sit on his foundation's board of using the charity as a personal "checkbook," in violation of state charity law.
The suit alleges that the foundation built up assets from tax-deductible donations, and that Trump then spent them on himself, on political promotion and on personal purchases. Investigators found at least five instances of self-dealing that benefited the Trump Organization, including the settlement of a legal dispute over one of his golf clubs and the purchase of a US$10,000 portrait of Trump to hang in another one.
Trump also held a charity fundraiser in Iowa in early 2016. It was in fact a campaign event — he took part in a televised debate — and its purpose was not, as advertised, "raising money for veterans." The attorney general said Trump's aides and campaign manager at the time dictated when the money raised was paid out, how much, and to whom, in violation of state and federal law. Under New York law, a charitable foundation is in most cases barred from political activity if it wants to keep its charitable status.
The attorney general's office opened its investigation in June 2016 and ordered the foundation to stop fundraising. Trump said after the election that he would dissolve it, but Eric Schneiderman, then the attorney general, blocked him on the grounds that the investigation was still open.
Underwood is asking the foundation to pay a US$2.8 million penalty and hand over another US$1 million to other charities. The suit also seeks to dissolve the foundation and to bar Trump from serving as a director of any charity for 10 years — one year for the three children.
Trump immediately tweeted that the suit was the work of "sleazy New York Democrats," said his foundation had given away more than it took in, and claimed the case was brought only because he had refused to settle.
What else happened in the world
Host nation Russia beat Saudi Arabia 5–0 to take the first win of the World Cup in the opening match.
Sources say Trump has approved tariffs on roughly US$50 billion of Chinese imports, sharpening the trade offensive against what Washington calls China's practice of forcing American firms to hand technology to Chinese partners. When the tariffs take effect is not yet clear.
Mexico is considering US$4 billion in tariffs on American corn and soybeans if Trump escalates the tariff war further.
In Catholic Argentina, the lower house has backed a bill legalizing abortion up to 14 weeks. After 22 hours of debate, 129 lawmakers voted for it and 125 against. The bill now goes to the Senate. Abortion is currently illegal in Argentina except in cases of rape or danger to the woman's life, and a woman must petition a judge for it. President Mauricio Macri strongly opposes the bill but has said he will not veto it if both houses pass it.
A well-known journalist has been shot dead in Kashmir, India. Shujaat Bukhari edited the local paper Rising Kashmir and reported regularly for the BBC. He was shot in his car near the paper's office on the 14th and died of his wounds. Of the bodyguards with him, one was killed and one wounded. No group has claimed responsibility. In a piece he wrote for the BBC in 2016, Bukhari described what local journalists live with: "Death threats, intimidation, attacks, arrests and censorship are routine."
In a Fox News interview, when the reporter Brett Baier raised Kim Jong-un's oppression of his own people, Trump waved off Kim's human rights record: "Yeah, but so have a lot of other people done some really bad things. I mean, I could go through a lot of countries where a lot of bad things were done."
Putin has invited Kim Jong-un to Russia in September. He extended the invitation at a Thursday meeting with the North Korean official Kim Yong-nam. Putin also praised the Trump–Kim summit for easing the conflict between the two countries, saying it had pushed unappealing tactics aside and begun the search for peaceful, diplomatic answers to every dispute.
Someone said
"BREAKING NEWS! Some German guy from 100 years ago didn't happen to hold the socially acceptable views on race that modern people hold! Trash! I guess this means we have to remove every contribution he made to science?"
Reddit user caine269, commenting on the Guardian story "Einstein's private diaries reveal his xenophobia".
The Travel Diaries of Albert Einstein, just published by Princeton University Press, shows that the physicist long held up as a humanitarian held bigoted views of Asians, and of the Chinese in particular.
Einstein traveled through Asia in the 1920s. In his diaries he called the Chinese "industrious, filthy, obtuse people," prolific breeders, and wrote that "it would be a pity if they were to supplant all other races." In a later passage written to his stepdaughter in Berlin he went on: "Even those who work like horses never give the impression of conscious suffering — a herd-like nation, more like automatons than people."
Ze'ev Rosenkranz, the book's editor and assistant director of the Einstein Papers Project at Caltech, said: "A lot of the comments in there strike us as pretty unpleasant, especially what he says about the Chinese... They stand in stark contrast to his great public image as a humanitarian. Reading them, and then thinking of his public statements — 'racism is a disease of white people' — is quite a shock. They were written with his guard down; he never expected them to be published."
Einstein treated foreign races as a "threat," Rosenkranz noted, which is a defining mark of racism; and his puzzlement at "why unattractive Chinese women should hold enough attraction for Chinese men to reproduce with them" is misogyny at its most extreme. Einstein's views were common enough in his day — that is the wider social context — but progressive people with more tolerant views existed then too.
In his introduction Rosenkranz argues that it matters a great deal to ask why a man regarded as a symbol of humanity would write such xenophobic lines: "The answer to that question is particularly relevant to our world, given how much rampant hatred is going on in so many places. It seems that even Einstein sometimes had trouble recognizing himself when he looked at others."
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Last week Fernando Puron, a candidate for the Mexican Congress, was shot dead while taking a selfie with supporters — the 133rd politician killed since the campaign began. His death was caught on video.
The general election is on July 1, and Mexico is in the middle of a wave of nationwide violence with no precedent. The campaign started last September, with more than 3,400 political seats up for grabs, and the authorities cannot give candidates adequate protection — least of all candidates in small towns and the countryside. In all, 133 candidates and 8 journalists have been killed; 72% of the violence has been aimed at opposition candidates; and this month three women candidates were murdered on the same day.
The national media mostly pin political killings on the drug cartels, as though all of it belonged to the drug war. In fact these gangs usually serve as the armed wing of powerful political groups, which use them to dispose of opponents and of journalists brave enough to expose corruption.
The result is that Mexican voters arrive at the polls with less information and fewer choices every year.
Tamara Pletnyova told a Moscow radio station that with the World Cup under way and tens of thousands of foreign fans arriving, the number of single mothers may go up.
If a Russian woman wants to get pregnant, she advised, the father had better be "of the same race." "If it's another race, then it gets worse. We should leave the chance of being born to children of our own nationality. I am not a nationalist. I know those children will suffer, will be left behind by their foreign fathers, and will have only their mothers to lean on."
Even marriage to a foreign partner, she warned, can end with a woman settled abroad and unable to find her way home.
"They come to the committee and cry to me — the children were taken away, they had abortions, that sort of thing. What I want is for people in this country to marry for love, whatever their ethnicity, to build good families with real Russian citizens, live in harmony and raise children."
This is not Pletnyova's first controversial remark. In March, after female journalists accused his colleague Leonid Slutsky of sexual harassment, the parliamentary speaker Vyacheslav Volodin said that women reporters harassed by lawmakers in the legislature should think about changing jobs. Pletnyova backed him: "I would say these women reporters should behave properly and put some clothes on when they enter a state building, instead of showing their navels. If they're so frightened and so worried about being harassed, they shouldn't come."
Figures released in January showed Russia's birth rate fell another 10.7% in 2017 — the third straight year of decline.
On this day in history
June 15, 1948: People's Daily published its first issue.
June 15, 1962: The Secretariat of the Communist Party's Central Committee met to discuss fixing farm output quotas at the household level, and Deng Xiaoping produced the line, "It doesn't matter whether a cat is yellow or black, so long as it catches mice." Whichever form of production could restore and grow agriculture more easily and quickly, he argued, was the one to adopt; whichever form the peasants wanted should be made legal if it wasn't already.
June 15, 1965: The Beatles received the MBE from the Queen — the highest honor available to an ordinary British subject.
June 15, 1998: China ended the allocation of housing in kind and switched to cash-based housing allowances; new housing would in principle be sold rather than rented.
Tomorrow and the day after, in history
June 16, 1888: The Internationale was born.
June 16, 1903: Henry Ford founded his motor company.
June 16, 1932: The Lausanne Conference decided to end German war reparations.
June 17, 1967: China detonated its first hydrogen bomb.
June 17, 1972: Five men were arrested after breaking into the Democratic Party's offices in the Watergate building to plant bugs, opening the Watergate scandal and eventually forcing Nixon out.
June 17, 1980: The scientist Peng Jiamu disappeared at Lop Nur.
June 17, 2011: The UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution on human rights, sexual orientation and gender identity by 23 votes to 19, with 3 abstentions — the first time either the Human Rights Council or the General Assembly had voted through a resolution on the rights of gay people.
Cover image from Pexels
Translated from the original QDaily article. Original publication date retained.