Blargh Blog

Budget Deficits

2009-06-09T19:23:00.005-04:00

To go with this comment, here are the projected deficits, 2009-2019, according the the CBO's January 8, 2009 baseline projections (their last forecast before Obama took office) and their March 20, 2009 projections under Obama's budget. In yellow is the projected increase to the deficit due to the policies of Obama (and the current Congress). Forgive the ugly Excel graph.

Government Taxes

2007-09-06T19:08:00.000-04:00

The FairTax has been getting a lot of attention lately, including support from Presidential candidates Mike Huckabee and Fred Thompson. It sounded good to me when I first heard about it - I am in favor of fairness - but after hearing some more about it from responsible conservatives like Bruce Bartlett, I've realized that it does not entirely live up to its name.

Perhaps they should call it the FairerTax, since, while fairer than the ridiculous tax system that we currently have, it does not come close to the model of Pure Fairness that someone like Aristotle would have expected out of a tax system.

The most fundamental problem with the "FairTax" is that it is paying for government spending by taxing ordinary people like you and me, every time we buy anything. If the government is the one buying goods and services, then why should the America people get stuck with the bill? Shouldn't that be the government's responsibility?

Of course it should be. That is why I am promoting a new tax plan, which I call the Government Tax. The idea, in a nutshell, is this: whenever the U.S. government spends money on something, the U.S. government should have to pay for it.

The details, for my wonkier readers, look like this. The Government Tax consists of a 100% sales tax on all spending by the United States federal government, including all goods and services. When the government buys a $1 million tank, it pays an additional $1 million in taxes. When it spends $100,000 on military escorts to the President's convoy, it also has to pay the $100,000 Government Tax. The government sends out a $740 Social Security check? Then it pays the $740 tax. The math works out the same way with all of the other pens, salaries, treasury bills, and whatnot that the government pays for.

All other federal taxes, including the income tax and the payroll tax, will be eliminated under my plan. Thus, in addition to the obvious fairness benefits, the Government Tax would vastly simplify things and make tax collection far more efficient and far less distorting on the economy, since ordinary people wouldn't need to worry about the tax implications of all their decisions.

I won't bore you with all the math, but calculations similar to those performed by the brilliant minds behind the FairerTax demonstrate that the Government Tax would be sufficient to cover all existing federal spending, without any deficit or any additional revenue from other taxes. Projections also suggest that it will allow us to afford the coming budget increases for Social Security and Medicare due to our aging population (not to suggest that we don't need major changes in both of those "entitlement" programs - another iffy naming).

What do you think, readers?

What is wrong with our society?

2006-11-16T00:36:00.000-05:00

I'm usually not one to drown in my own outrage, but how can this be happening? A man murders his ex-wife and a friend of hers, but is found not guilty in trial. Then he writes a book about how he killed them, which is published by one of the premier publishing companies, and goes on television on a major network to talk about it.

O.J. Simpson is now a celebrity murderer in more ways than one. I can imagine him doing the celebrity talk show circuit, with Leno and Conan and all the rest asking him questions about the people he killed, just like they ask everyone else about their latest project, and that's interesting, what's the name of the book again? When's it coming out? Keep repeating that info, because you know this murderer is only here because he has a book to plug. (But be sure to talk in hypotheticals, because you know that makes all of this okay.)

It's times like this when all of those crazy-seeming claims about how our society is completely corrupt and falling apart start to take on an air of plausibility. Parodies and cultural criticisms cannot keep up. I can only hope that a massive boycott is coming. These appear to be the two companies to start with: Regan Books/HarperCollins and FOX. Enough people can work up their outrage over fictionalized documentaries that strike them as unfair to politicians in their preferred political party. Can the public match that outrage when an unconvicted murderer gets invited to talk about his, uh, "work" on prime time television?

Update (11/20): Canceled. Hurrah.

Easy Answers to Easy Questions

2006-11-14T21:39:00.000-05:00

Is foreign aid the solution to global poverty?

No, of course not. There isn't "a solution" to global poverty, unless you want to count the macabre (e.g. global death) or the deeply unhelpful (e.g. patience).

Alternative question #1: Can foreign aid contribute to a substantial reduction in global poverty over the short to medium term?

Yes.

Alternative question #2: Can foreign aid help put the world on a relatively stable long-term trend in reducing global poverty?

Yes.

Obviously, it matters how the foreign aid is spent. Simply throwing money at the problem won't fix anything, but many potentially productive plans for fixing things do require money.

The original question is the topic for a Garvey Fellowship essay that can win you money, if you fit the applicant qualification criteria. You probably also have to write something consistent with their description of the question:

A 2005 United Nations report called for a doubling of foreign aid to poor countries as the means to reduce poverty. Yet the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to a for-profit microloan bank and its founder, an apparent vindication of the ideas of Peter T. Bauer, Henry Hazlitt, Deepak Lal, and others. As Bauer wrote, “Development aid, far from being necessary to rescue poor societies from a vicious circle of poverty, is far more likely to keep them in that state.…Emergence from poverty requires effort, firmly established property rights, and productive investment.”

In other words, because some forms of for-profit investments can be effective at reducing global poverty, foreign aid must be completely ineffective. Airtight logic. Unbreakable logic, we might even call it, in honor of the gentleman who reasoned that, since his body was easily injured, there must be someone out there who is incapable of being injured.

Close Elections

2006-11-08T01:38:00.000-05:00

With 98% of precincts reporting in Wyoming's Congressional district, the incumbent, Barbara Cubin (R), currently has a 653 vote lead. The Lindgren method (which assumes that unreported precincts will vote the same as reported precincts in the same county) projects Cubin to finish 2 votes behind Gary Trauner (D).

Trauner fans shouldn't wait up, and neither should Cubin fans (identify yourselves and I'll link), since this one is not going to be decided tonight.

Update (2:58 AM): After corrections in the already reported precincts, Cubin has stretched her lead to 700 votes, and after correcting my projection to be based on the exact number of precincts (rather than the rounded percentage that CNN reports), she is now projected to hang on to a 26 vote lead. The nation is still waiting on those last 12 precincts from Carbon County.

Update II (11/8): Carbon County is obviously not homogenous, and with the rest of the precincts in Cubin has extended her lead to 970 votes. They aren't calling the election yet, and there might be a recount.

It's not what you say about the scandal...

2006-10-08T06:44:00.000-04:00

...it's what the scandal says about you. And as even a "frustrated GOP strategist" can see,

his party's mishandling of Foley "speaks to our inability to govern and do the right thing. It says everything about who we are as a party."

All of the bizarre things that Republicans are saying about the scandal are just making it worse.

Go-Meme Go

2006-09-21T02:33:00.000-04:00

Metapolitics Go-meme

How should politics be conducted? I've marked in my positions on the 7-point scales below. To participate yourself, simply copy this entire post (including links), and mark your choices accordingly before posting it to your own blog.

a) Liberalism - X - - - - - Radicalism (2/7)
Do the ends justify the means? Procedural liberals insist on the primacy of fair play and democratic process. Radicals care less about method, and more about getting the desired result.

b) Rationalism - - X - - - - Subjectivism (3/7)
Is there ever a "right answer" to political questions? Rationalists think that reasoned debate could, ideally, lead to consensus about the common good. Subjectivists see politics as a mere contest of wills, all rhetoric and power plays, where the goal is simply to have your individual preferences win through.

c) Direct - - - - - X - Representative Democracy (6/7)
Should power rest more with citizens or elected representatives?

d) Aggregation - - X - - - - Deliberation (3/7)
Should political decisions be reached by simply aggregating individuals' prior preferences, or by submitting reasons for deliberation and critical scrutiny?

e) Federalist - - - X - - - Globalist (4/7)
What's the most appropriate level for political decisions? Federalists favour local-level decision-making (which may vary across localities), in contrast to Globalists.

f) Libertarian - - X - - - - Authoritarian (3/7)
How much discretionary power should be allowed in politics? Libertarians favour greater (e.g. constitutional) constraints on the exercise of political power. Authoritarians (may include populists and paternalists) are the opposite.

g) Economic Left - X - - - - - Right (2/7)
How favourably do you view redistributive taxation and other typically "Left-wing" economic policies?

Track List:
1. Philosophy, et cetera
2. Kiwi Pundit
3. GeniusNZ
4. Blargh Blog
5. [Add link to your blog here]

I am Two

2006-09-02T21:41:00.000-04:00

Where were you on September 2, 2004? I was here, on the internets, for the very first time. Self, noted.

How have I changed over the years? Let's compare.

choice - then: in favor; now: in favor
democracy - then: in favor; now: in favor
family - then: in favor; now: in favor
freedom - then: in favor; now: in favor
friendship - then: in favor; now: in favor
happiness - then: in favor; now: in favor
health - then: in favor; now: in favor
incompetence - then: opposed; now: opposed
injustice - then: opposed; now: opposed
knowledge - then: in favor; now: in favor
life - then: in favor; now: in favor
murder - then: opposed; now: opposed
pie - then: in favor; now: in favor
progress - then: in favor; now: in favor
slander - then: opposed; now: opposed
slavery - then: opposed; now: opposed
strife - then: opposed; now: opposed
suffering - then: opposed; now: opposed
terrorism - then: opposed; now: opposed
torture - then: opposed; now: opposed
tyranny - then: opposed; now: opposed

Not that much, apparently.

More Moral Equivalence Nonsense from The Left

2006-08-11T17:54:00.000-04:00

Today's moral equivalence nonsense comes from a prominent Democrat Senator from Connecticut:

I'm worried that too many people, both in politics and out, don't appreciate the seriousness of the threat to American security and the evil of the enemy that faces us -- more evil or as evil as Nazism and probably more dangerous than the Soviet communists we fought during the long Cold War.

As evil as the Nazis, more dangerous than the Soviet communists, able to leap tall buildings with a single bound - it must be Superterrorist! Seriously, what is it with the Left seeing Nazis everywhere? And this is the man who they wanted to be Vice President in 2000? No wonder they lost!

The Free Republic is on the case, as always, and various lefties are spinning predictably. But this is the best they can do:

Is Ahmadinejad "more evil, or as evil" as Hitler? ... [T]he potential is there, with his holocaust denial and all that...

Hmmm, denying the Holocaust vs. comitting the Holocaust. Morally equivalent? Outside of a few depraved leftists and Islamists, I trust that most of you can figure that one out on your own.

Related:
Go Joe
Rabble Rousers

What do these people have in common?

2006-07-12T00:35:00.000-04:00

O.J. Simpson
Hannibal
Kennedy
Sergeant Slaughter
Jacques Cousteau
Speedy Gonzalez
Russell Simmons
Eliot Ness
Yoda

Answer

I wonder if this counts as one of these.

What shall we talk about?

2006-06-27T20:30:00.000-04:00

Conservatives in America claim to value small government and low taxes, but why do they talk so much about the size of America's government and America's tax rates, and so little about the other countries where taxes are much higher, and government much larger? Why do they save so much of their fury for America? When a prominent American politician has an extramarital affair, Americans talk about it endlessly, yet Americans are oddly muted when a foreign politician is caught sleeping around. Do they have some special hatred for America? Do they get some perverse pleasure out of embarrassing their country in front of the world? When the U.S. economy sinks into a recession, or even when unemployment just rises a bit, it's all over the news in America. Yet you just hear a peep when other countries have recessions, and hardly even that about the much higher rates of unemployment that are maintained throughout the world. Why is it that only America's economic woes seem to get under their skin?

In all three cases, the answer is obvious: they are ~~plagued by moral equivalence~~ Americans. Of course they're always thinking and talking and complaining about America and Americans. That's what they pay attention to. Such silly questions.

There's one version of this question, though, that strikes many people as a deep rhetorical strike. Why do liberals in America talk about the abuses that our military is committing so much more than they talk about the abuses committed against us? You hear it just about any time a liberal brings up Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo or Haditha or any of the other cases. Our enemies have done much worse! Beheadings! Targetting civilians! Take the Euston Manifesto:

The violation of basic human rights standards at Abu Ghraib, at Guantanamo, and by the practice of "rendition", must be roundly condemned [...] . But we reject the double standards by which too many on the Left today treat as the worst violations of human rights those perpetrated by the democracies, while being either silent or more muted about infractions that outstrip these by far.

Or here's Tim Sandefur:

Many very vocal critics of the war are so angry about wrongs committed (or, often, merely alleged to have been committed) by American troops and their allies—and yet are eerily quiet, or even lenient, when it comes to the beheadings, torturing, and other hideous barbarities committed by our enemies.

I'll let you fill in the third example yourself with the power of memory.

Despite the insinuations here ("treat as the worst violations", "even lenient"), these arguments are mostly just based on volume. So why do we hear so much from liberals about our government's abuses? Why talk so much about our government torturing people? Because our government is torturing people. My government is torturing people. Your government is torturing people. Doesn't that hit close to home? Doesn't it make you feel kind of dirty, like you're somehow implicated? Isn't that worth talking about? A lot? Shouldn't we keep talking about it until our government stops torturing people? And of course this doesn't just apply to torture, it also holds for killing innocents, perpetually detaining people without a trial or even any specific charges, and the rest of the abuses.

There's one other point that people sometimes raise against those who talk about the US doing these bad things: is not! (at least not outside of a few isolated incidents perpetrated by low-level individuals). Or, they make the related but more sophisticated argument: the evidence isn't really clear at this point, so we shouldn't be making these accusations against our government without all the facts.

This isn't the place to give a thorough reply to these arguments, but the short answer is that there is ample evidence of systematic abuses, with responsibility going all the way up the chain of command. And the reason why this point is relevant to our discussion is that there are lots of people out there who don't believe that our government has been committing these abuses. Of course we should be talking about it - a lot - because lots of people don't even believe it yet.

Obviously, pure volume isn't going to convince a lot of these people, which is one reason why the more sophisticated argument is relevant. There's some truth to that argument. We really do only know a fraction of the information about the abuses and alleged abuses that our government has been committing. Which is yet another reason to keep talking about the abuses (and apparent abuses) that we do know about. We have to direct attention towards the abuses we know about in order to find out about the ones that we don't know about. Our lack of information isn't just something that's happened, it's intentional. The Bush administration is trying to keep its conduct secret and free of oversight, from the American people and even from the other two branches of government. The way to get more information is to keep talking about it, and to push for investigations. Quieting down won't help you find out more.

To get back to the main thread of this post, it's worth talking about the abuses that our government is committing. And the fact that some other people are doing things that are even worse has no bearing on this. If your were in the midst of yelling at your friend for robbing some lady at knifepoint, and he pointed out that plenty of people raped and murdered and you were beeing oddly silent about them, you'd tell him to shut up, stop bringing up irrelevant things, and (to get your tirade back on track), stop robbing people.

There's a difference, though, between this example (and the examples at the top of this post), on the one hand, and the war abuses, on the other. Unlike the other abuses, which were entirely disconnected from us, the worse abuses in the war are being committed against the United States and our allies. So that does give us a reason to talk about them. And, in a different way from our government torturing people, it does hit close to home when an American soldier is beheaded. So why don't liberals talk more about the abuses being perpetrated against us and our allies?

The first thing to recognize is that this is a completely separate question from "why do liberals talk so much about American abuses?" There is little reason why talking about one would be related to talking about the other. Those who think that there is some deep relationship between the two, or that people who talk more about one than about the other must be treating American violations as if they were worse (or morally equivalent) are just confusing themselves (and many of those who listen to them).

The second thing to note is that none of the pragmatic reasons for talking about American abuses apply to abuses perpetrated against America. You don't get Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to stop beheading people by getting a bunch of Americans to shout stop beheading people, or by getting Congress to investigate the beheadings or issue resolutions against them. You get Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to stop beheading people by dropping a GBU-12 laser-guided bomb and a GBU-38 GPS-guided bomb on the house where he is meeting. In some cases there may be alternatives to bombing, but loud moral condemnation by American citizens is not going to be central to any of those alternatives.

The third response to the question, which would actually be a good first response to just about any question, is to ask: is it true? Are liberals not talking much about the bad things that various Iraqi forces are doing to Americans? A lot of the time we hear the opposite. Liberals (and the media) are always going on and on about all the bad things in Iraq - roadside bombing this, accelerating death count that, "despite this military success the attacks against us are going to continue unabated". Too much gloom, too much about sensationalist violence, not enough of the good news and the steady progress. So which is it? Or, if liberals are getting attacked from both sides (by the same people) does that mean that they must be getting things right?

I think that there is some truth to the claims that liberals don't talk all that much about the terrible things that our enemy does. At least for some specific kinds of abuses, like beheadings, and especially when compared to conservatives, you don't hear as much from liberals. Why not? I don't think that there's the same kind of unified, deep, principled reason here as there was for talking a lot about American abuses, so instead of trying to maintain the narrative thread I'll list some reasons for not talking so much about beheadings and such:

- What is there to say? Any direct response (it was wrong of him to behead that man!) just seems obvious, and any indirect response or attempt at analysis of why this was happening seems to miss the point and the emotional power of the event (and would not satisfy many of the people who criticize liberals for this, since a disturbingly large number would be convinced that you were justifying or explaining away their violence). It's unsatisfying to talk about what's wrong unless you can segue into a possible response, or at least some larger point, but beheadings or torturing of soldiers don't make a convenient jumping-off point for many solutions or larger points that liberals believe in (though they do make a nice segue into the "kill all the bastards" response).

- These are terrorists trying to attract attention by doing terrible, grisly things. Don't they want people to talk on and on about it?

- The most barbaric, most sensationalist attacks aren't representative of most of the insurgency, or the main problems that Iraq is facing. If you pay too much attention to them, you're liable to be distracted from the real difficulties of the American occupation of Iraq and the ethnic conflict within Iraq, and to think that it's just a bunch of evil maniacs who are causing trouble.

- There are a lot of things happening to Americans in Iraq that could "hit close to home" if we devoted some emotional attention to them. Indeed, too many of them for any normal human being to be engaged with more than a fraction of them. So people have to be selective. Why dwell on ones that inspire outrage, anger, and vengefulness? Those emotions aren't fun, they aren't a particularly appropriate way to honor our soldiers or our country, they aren't conducive to clearheaded thinking about the proper responses to the threats we face, and most of us already got more than our fill of them on the eleventh of September (and have them refreshed more often than necessary).

You may have noticed that some of these factors (like the one right before this, and especially the one before that) could be read as implicit criticisms of many conservatives. Well you're right. These things aren't just happening on an individual level - there's the whole political angle. And it's no coincidence that the President highlights some elements of the enemy and downplays others, highlights some bad things that they do and downplays others, highlights some of our wartime tactics and downplays others, highlights some of the enemies' beliefs and desires and downplays others. Lots of people are trying to encourage certain kinds of emotions and thinking in order to rally support for the President, the Iraq war, the President's view of the war on terror, and a more violent and dramatic approach to our military actions. They'd like to use grisly, sensationalist events like beheadings for these purposes, and dwelling on those events at length (especially in a public forum like a blog post) would play into their hands. (I've described both sides here as if they were being strategic, but they don't have to be - intuitions and emotions often turn out the same way as cool calculation. Maybe those conservatives just feel these things are worth talking about because they resonate with their worldview, and the liberals feel like they'd be talking too much like Bush and his backers.)

So the next time you hear someone make the accusation that it's somehow immoral or un-American to place more weight on American abuses than on the abuses committed against Americans, just tell them this.

Or, I suppose, you could quote them this: "My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; if wrong, to be set right."

Go Joe

2006-06-24T02:40:00.000-04:00

I share the DLC's view of the Lamont primary:

I understand that many Democrats disagree with some of the stances that Lieberman has taken, some of the arguments that he has made, and some of his decisions about what policies to support or oppose, and I accept that. What I cannot accept is the people who would act on this difference of opinion in one of the most undemocratic, intolerant, and unamerican ways possible: by voting him out of office.

Further reading:
Mark Schmitt on the path that Lieberman has taken
Hilzoy on party loyalty

Sometimes I Just Link

2006-06-23T20:51:00.000-04:00

A post that more people should read, at a blog that more people should be reading:

[T]he people demanding that English be recognized as an essential part of our culture are the same folks who call some of us elitist for snickering about the fact that our President cannot speak...say it with me...the English language. Somehow when Bush mangles this sacred part of our heritage it is not an insult to America, no, it makes him more authentically American. But when recent immigrants speak English with limited fluency, that is a threat that needs immediate remedy.

An interesting library decision and Ebonics are both woven into SteveG's argument.

BS vs. MSM, Round MGCCLXVIII

2006-06-20T01:18:00.000-04:00

Bloggers' response to this New Republic article by Christine Rosen, which criticizes Glenn Reynolds and the blogosphere in general, has been consistently negative, from what I've seen. So how can the author and the rest of the magazine react? Some options:

Since the piece is being criticized from both the left and the right, it must be fair and accurate. Praise themselves for non-partisan, clear-headed independent-mindedness.
The blogosphere rallying against their piece is a perfect example of the blogger triumphalism and "techno-utopianism" that they were criticizing. Praise themselves for coming up with a theory that is even capable of accounting for the reactions that it causes.
If the blogs are getting defensive about it then it was obviously a hard-hitting piece that struck close to home. Praise themselves for speaking truth to bloggers.
Maybe there is some truth to the criticisms, and the piece did engage in hasty overgeneralizations without a fair look at the evidence. Chastise themselves for succumbing so readily to their preconceptions.

Care to take a guess at which of the four is least likely?

Who said that Saddam Hussein was a Feminist?

2006-05-08T18:43:00.000-04:00

Ah, the sublime beauty of a self-refuting blog post. Today's example comes under the banner Saddam Wasn't a Feminist courtesy of Jim Lindgren at The Volokh Conspiracy, who could not have produced this aesthetic achievement without the fine folks at the Wall Street Journal editorial website. [Update: Jim has since ruined the elegant simplicity of yesterday's post by tacking on an update.] Jim writes:

There is an interesting article by A. Yasmine Rassam at OpinionJournal.com on how the plight of women under Saddam compares to the current efforts to whitewash that record:

The rest of his post consists of an extensive quotation from that article, with one bracketed addition that disguises its power to swallow the post whole. He quotes Rassam:

A recent report by "Global Exchange" and "Code Pink" entitled "Iraqi Women Under Siege" [available here] concluded that "the occupation of Iraq has not resulted in greater equality and freedom for women" than they had under Saddam Hussein. Published by two radical feminist anti-war groups whose primary activities include protesting military recruiting stations, organizing anti-WTO protests and sympathizing with the regimes in North Korea and Cuba, this report echoes a long line of blatant pronouncements. Hillary Clinton who once said that after liberation there were "pullbacks in the rights that [women] were given under Saddam Hussein" and Howard Dean's infamous remark that "Iraqi women were better off under Saddam Hussein."

To witness the magic of a self-refuting blog post, all you need to do is click that link hiding right there in plain sight. Once the link is clicked (and, in this case, once you have scrolled to page four), the innards of the post are exposed, and we are free to watch it prey on itself, like monsters of the deep. Let us meditate on these excerpts from Rassam's editorial (here dressed in their finest italics) and that revisionist "Global Exchange"/"Code Pink" report (here wearing bold).

Much of the anti-war propagandists' defense of Saddam as a champion of women's rights rests on his willingness to allow women to vote (for him), drive cars, own property, get an education and work. What they choose to ignore, however, is the systematic rapes, torture, beheadings, honor killings, forced fertility programs, and declining literacy rates that also characterized Saddam's regime.

Although a great deal of policy and law continued to women’s advantage when Saddam Hussein became president, his voracious appetite for dictatorial power over the entire population could not but undermine women’s gains. Women, like men, were jailed, tortured, raped, and murdered.

One torture technique favored by Saddam's henchman and his sons involved raping a detainee's mother or sister in front of him until he talked.

To extract information from dissidents, suspected dissidents, and opposition members abroad, Hussein was fond of sending them video tapes showing their female relatives raped by members of the secret police.

After the Gulf War--particularly after crushing the Shiite and Kurdish uprisings of 1991--Saddam reverted to tribal and "Islamic" traditions as a means to consolidate power. Iraqi women paid the heaviest price for his new-found piety. Many women were removed from government jobs and were not allowed to travel without the permission of a male relative.

By 1990 Hussein was courting support for his warweary regime from neighboring Islamic states and from religious and tribal leaders. Hussein’s public embrace of Islam’s moral authority changed many of the laws governing divorce, child custody, and inheritance rights so as to limit women’s rights and freedoms. Laws restricted women’s ability to travel abroad without a male relative and reintroduced single-sex education in high school.

Men were exempted from punishment for "honor" killings--killings carried out on female relatives who had supposedly "shamed" their family. An estimated 4,000 women died from honor killings in the ensuing years.

Honor killings of women who were suspected of pre-marital sex or victims of rape, thereby “dishonoring” the family name, dramatically increased after Hussein reduced the prison sentences of male perpetrators from 8 years to no more than 6 months—a punishment in any case rarely imposed.

By 2000, Iraqi women, once considered the most highly educated in the Middle East, had literacy levels of only 23%.

The GFIW stopped promoting women’s rights to work and education and focused primarily on humanitarian aid and health care. ... Impoverishment forced families to keep their female children out of school, and illiteracy soared.

Under the pretext of fighting prostitution in 2000, Saddam's Fedayeen forces beheaded 200 women "dissidents" and dumped their head on their families doorsteps for public display. These women obviously lost whatever "rights" granted to them once they got in Saddam's way.

By 2000, a militia founded by Hussein’s son, Uday, was beheading women in a campaign against prostitution.

And thus the post devoured itself.

Fade to white...

How Many Gays Marry?

2006-04-28T18:23:00.000-04:00

The Netherlands legalized same-sex marriages in April 2001, and nearly 5,000 people (almost 2% of the entire homosexual adult population) got married that very year. Marriages among same-sex couples have steadily increased since then, with over 2,300 more people getting married in each year. By the close of 2005, not even five years after the law was passed, over 16,000 gay men and lesbians were married in the Netherlands, which is estimated to be 6.3% of the entire gay population.

The data, and the methods that I used for creating the graph below, come from this report (pdf) by the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, who have a different spin on the numbers. Their graph of these same numbers (on p. 6 of the report) is designed to fit with their spin, mine with my spin. The report is currently being discussed in these two posts by Dale Carpenter at The Volokh Conspiracy. I've made some comments there, and may make more if anyone is paying attention.

Majesty and the Miracle of Life

2006-03-10T22:06:00.000-05:00

Lindsay Beyerstein reminds us of the majestic equality of the law (via Battlepanda).

Professional Sports Marred By Controversy

2006-02-22T21:52:00.000-05:00

It was bad enough when dubious officiating altered the Super Bowl, with a phantom holding call, a ticky-tack pass interference call, an questionable touchdown, a fumble ruled incomplete, an illegal block on a tackle, and other suspicious acts of officiating gave the referees an inappropriately large role in determining the winner of a game that should have been decided by the Seattle Seahawks and the Pittsburgh Steelers. Citizens and pundits responded with outrage, disappointment, and suspicion, with everyone from Aaron Schatz to T. Havas, Robert Weintraub to Jim Henley, chiming in.

But that was just a prelude to the controversy breaking in the NBA. This year's slam dunk contest brought a perfect storm of scandal, featuring visible collusion between scorers, a bizarrely long sequence of missed dunks, and a series of other embarrassments, before being capped off with one of the biggest missed calls ever to strike professional sports. Nate Robinson attempted to throw the ball off the backboard on a ridiculous jump shot alley-oop to himself, but instead he landed after doing his fancy mid-air ballhandling, and did not throw the ball at the hoop until after his foot had returned to the ground (as is clearly evident in the image below, taken from the video here). The scorers, though, treated the move as if it had been completed in midair, awarding him points for a move he did not make.

The NFL, I think, will recover from its Super Bowl disaster, just as MLB has made it back from its infamous All-Star tie. After this weekend's dunk contest, I do not know about the NBA.

Rabble Rousers

2006-02-12T01:59:00.000-05:00

The MSM is at it again. If you pay attention, you'll realize that just about everything they do can be explained by their their overwhelming hatred of George W. Bush. It was bad enough in September, when they intentionally downplayed the violence and disorder of the crowds in New Orleans in order to hide the difficulties that FEMA faced in rescuing the "victims", with the goal (as usual) of making it look like it was All Bush's Fault. This time it's worse. Much worse.

Under the guise of a defense of "free expression", liberal newspapers throughout the United States have been eagerly reprinting the offensive cartoons of Mohammed that brought much of the Islamic world to riots. Apparently they thought that the radical clerics could use a hand in distributing the cartoons to the increasingly outraged Muslim public, so they've been feeding the frenzy by emblazoning the images across the front page of their papers. In order to get another chance to tell anyone who will listen (and why is anyone still listening?) that Bush's evil wars and "occupation" are breeding hatred in the Islamic world, they're riling up the Muslim street and goading them on to violence. I don't know how they sleep at night, as mobs riot, embassies burn, and people die. As long as they can cuddle up with their It's All Bush's Fault blankies, it would appear that they sleep like babies, or at least petulant toddlers.

Updates

2006-01-23T23:48:00.000-05:00

A month ago, I wrote about a study, "Narrow-Tent Democrats and Fringe Others: The Policy Views of Social Science Professors", which purported to show that Democrats in academia have a narrower tent than Republicans in academia. My argument, which I found convincing, was that it showed nothing of the sort. The first author of that study, Dan Klein, has posted a response to criticisms from the Volokh Conspiracy comments, some of which are similar to my argument. The crux of his response: "I really don’t see anything about the 18 questions that would deflate the diversity of the Dems or puff it up for the Repubs. Think about it, very few Dems really favor free enterprise and all favor redist/welfare state/protect the weak type policies." Unsurprisingly, I remain unconvinced.

In the comments, I level a more basic criticism against their results: their methodology can't support the kinds of conclusions that they're trying to draw. Obviously, the variance of Democrats' and Republicans' responses to a set of questions depends on what questions you ask. So, if you want the variance to tell you something meaningful, you need to have some systematic way of selecting what questions to ask, and you have to be able to argue that your procedure for selecting questions is a reliable and fair way to investigate the issue that you're interested in. Klein and Stern did not have any method at all for selecting questions. They just made them up. They also did not present any evidence, beyond the variance of responses to their 18 questions, to support their claims that the amount of diversity of opinion among Democratic academics was 1) less than is desirable, or 2) a result of a "party line" or "narrow tent" which enforces conformity.

Follow the links if you're interested in reading more. (Duh.)

More recently, I posted answers to Welch's and Sandefur's questions. Welch has a summary of the responses to his questions here. I score a 7.5 out of 10 on the libertarian-like-Welch scale by his count (a 7.0 by my count), ranking 6th most libertarian-like-Welch out of 15 responders, a surprisingly high ranking given that I am not, in fact, a libertarian. The answers to Sandefur's ten questions are collected here, and he gives his take on the questions and the various answers here.

Sandefur quotes me approvingly in response to question 4 ("Precisely what (if anything) do you propose the United States do about the Iranian nuclear weapons program?"), so I should point out that I'm not entirely in agreement with what he said. After criticizing two versions of the answer "Nothing", he writes:

An infinitely more reasonable position is taken by Blargh Blog: “We should try to stop Iran from getting nukes without getting into a war with them. Give me a year and the highest level of security clearance and I might be capable of proposing precise methods.” Exactly. If we all had the right information, we would all be in a position to solve this problem. And, of course, we ought to avoid a war with Iran if it is at all possible. But we must do something. “Peace is not secured by praising its virtues,” as Churchill said. Certainly it is not secured by allowing thugs with an avowed mission of making war on free and law abiding peoples to arm themselves with nuclear weapons.

Flattering, no? Let me deflate that and emphasize my ignorance. What should we do about Iran's nuclear program? I don't know. I expect that that year of study would do me more good than that security clearance, and I should stress that might. If we had the right information, would we be able to deal with this problem? I don't know. Will it be possible to both 1) stop Iran from getting nukes and 2) not get into a war with them? I don't know. If Iran is really set on getting nukes, then it's not clear that we could stop them with anything short of war (though of course there are plenty of things we can try). If it comes down to the choice of war or Iranian nukes, I think that I'd prefer that they get the bomb. Fewer expected deaths that way, I reckon. Sandefur seems to prefer the other horn, possibly because he thinks it's likely that they'd use the nukes once they got 'em. (Of course, there's a benefit in having Iran think that we're willing to go to war to stop them from getting nuclear weapons, but I'm not in the business of creating impressions within the Iranian government.) I should also add that there may be other unpalatable horns to this "multilemma" which I might not prefer to either of the original two (like if Iran was only willing to halt its nuclear program if we paid them $1 trillion/year, indefinitely).

Again, follow the links as interested, and, if you like controversy, these other links take you through the drama that unfolded at Positive Liberty over Sandefur's questions and answers (note: I was a participant in said drama, not an observer).

20 Answers to 10 Questions

2006-01-10T03:17:00.000-05:00

Okay, now that that's behind me, on to those questions. First, the Welch ten, which are all yes/no hypotheticals intended to narrow down the overriding question "How far is too far in the War on Terror?" I'm not a pro-war libertarian (for a quick label, I'd pick something like "anti-war progressive" or "liberal opposed to the Iraq war"), but here I go anyways.

1) Should the National Security Agency or CIA have the ability to monitor domestic phone calls or e-mails without obtaining judicial approval?

No.

2) Should the government have the ability to hold an American citizen without charge, indefinitely, without access to a lawyer, if he is believed to be part of a terrorist cell?

No.

3) Can you imagine a situation in which the government would be justified in waterboarding an American citizen?

As in "well, I can imagine an evil demon..."? Then "yes". (This seems to be Sandefur's interpretation.) There even exists a possible world not all that remote from our own with a situation in which such waterboarding could be justified. But in the actual world, I am not aware of there being any situations that bear much resemblance to one where waterboarding would be justified.

4) Are there American journalists who should be investigated for possible treason? Should Sedition laws be re-introduced?

Again, there are two interpretations. If J is the set of all Americans who are journalists, and T is the set of all Americans who have done something suspicious enough to warrant an investigation for treason, then do you think that it is likely that the intersection of J and T is non-empty? This appears to be Sandefur's interpretation, and he says "Yes." Even under that interpretation I say "probably not" (since the set T is so tiny). Under the alternative interpretation, which asks whether any American journalists have done anything as journalists to warrant such an investigation, I say no. I agree with Sandefur that the answer to the second question, on Sedition laws, is "No".

5) Should the CIA be able to legally assassinate people in countries with which the U.S. is not at war?

Only with the consent of the host country, and even that may not be enough (it's the "legally" that I'm not sure about).

6) Should anti-terrorism cops be given every single law-enforcement tool available in non-terrorist cases?

Like Sandefur, I'm not sure what Welch is getting at here. Why not?

7) Should law enforcement be able to seize the property of a suspected (though not charged) American terrorist, and then sell it?

No.

8) Should the U.S. military be tasked with enforcing domestic crime?

No.

9) Should there be a national I.D. card, and should it be made available to law enforcement on demand?

"Possibly" for the first part and "No" for the second.

10) Should a higher percentage of national security-related activities and documents be made classified, and kept from the eyes of the Congress, the courts, and the public?

No.

Now, on to the ten Sandefur-based questions that the first bunch spawned. Unlike Welch, Sandefur did not organize his questions around a single overriding question, and he did not limit himself to yes/no questions, so I apologize if some of my responses seem overly abbreviated. Blame finite time and limited expertise.

1) When, if ever, is preemptive war is justified?

Right at the top, an essay question: defend a theory of preemptive war. Here's a sketch of an answer, which I'm not entirely confident in. In general, a preemptive war against a country is justified when 1) there is strong evidence that they are on the verge of attacking you or some other country worth defending, 2) their attack would cause significant damage, 3) there are no promising alternatives to preemptive war (where an alternative's promise depends on what it is, its chances of working to prevent the attack, and the chances that it will allow the country to attack before you can preempt them), and 4) your preemptive war is likely to be successful (with its success depending on factors like reducing the damage caused by the conflict and preventing countries from being conquered or destroyed).

There are other cases where violence can be justified against a country that has not initiated an attack (such as enforcing really important treaties or sanctions), but they are either not preemptive or not war.

2) When, if ever, is the United States justified in removing a foreign dictator from power?

- When the dictator is in the process of doing awful things (e.g. genocide, conquest)

- When the dictator has recently seized power against the will of the people of the country (though the US should generally not be making this determination on its own)

- When a legitimate international authority has used the proper procedures to determine that the removal is justified

I'm sure there are others.

3) Do you agree with the position—recently quoted approvingly on this blog by Dr. Kuznicki—that Islamic terrorism is not a serious threat, but a hobgoblin used by the Bush Administration to increase its authority?

This question, like asking if I believe that Dr. Kuznicki should stop beating his wife, is wrong on so many levels. Yes, terrorism is a serious threat. Yes, Bush is using terrorism to increase his authority, deflect and delegitimize criticism of policies that violate other important values, and justify actions that have little to do with reducing the threat of terrorism. No, the person who Kuznicki quoted approvingly did not deny that Islamic terrorism was a serious threat. He challenged the Bush Administration for portraying terrorism as an "extreme and unprecedented threat" of an "incomparably powerful enemy on the precipice of destroying us" which puts our civilization's "very existence ... in imminent jeopardy." No, Islamic terrorism is not that serious of a threat.

4) Precisely what (if anything) do you propose the United States do about the Iranian nuclear weapons program?

We should try to stop Iran from getting nukes without getting into a war with them. Give me a year and the highest level of security clearance and I might be capable of proposing precise methods.

5) Do you believe that the United States should defend Israel, either militarily, by the sale of arms, or in other ways (please specify)?

These questions do cover a lot of ground, don't they? I say: Yes, but not through the direct involvement of our armed forces in their conflict. As with any of our allies, we want to help them stay protected from those who would harm them. But we don't want to get too entangled with a foreign government or with a complex and controversial conflict. We can share tactics, technology, and intelligence, sell equipment (perhaps at a discount), that sort of thing. We might also threaten to retaliate against any country that attacks them. We could do something similar for any other ally, though our assistance would probably be less intensive, since our other allies are not involved in intensive conflicts.

6) Can you name a specific case in which an American dissenter, not actually affiliated with a terrorist organization, has been jailed or otherwise deprived of civil rights under the PATRIOT Act?

It is hard to cite specific cases when information about specific cases is classified, but this story suggests tens of thousands of cases that might be worth looking into.

7) Do you believe that we ought to remove American troops from Iraq immediately, regardless of the consequences to Iraqis?

No.

8) With regard to interrogation or incarceration: do you believe that infringements of religious sensitivities (e.g., mistreating the Koran) or personal sensibilities (e.g., making men wear women’s underwear on their heads) ought to be regarded as comparable with physical torture?

"Comparable"? I think that it's wrong (and counterproductive) to try to break detainees down by violating their deeply held religious, moral, or cultural values, and that such practices can damage a person just as gravely as physical torture. But 'infringing on sensitivities and sensibilities' doesn't sound like it's always so bad.

9) What, if any, legal consequences do you believe flow from a declaration of war?

IANAL.

10) Do you believe that the Bush Administration purposely manipulated intelligence information in order to persuade the Congress to authorize military intervention in Iraq?

Yes. They tried to portray the intelligence in whatever way seemed to support the invasion, rather than assessing the evidence on its merits or presenting the evidence in a way that would allow others to make that assessment.

Name Calling

2006-01-10T02:47:00.000-05:00

At Reason, Matt Welch asks ten questions of those he calls “pro-war libertarians.” He seems to really be interested in conversation, so I thought I’d offer some answers. But I’ll begin by noting that it is absolutely unwarranted to refer to us as “pro-war.” If it’s wrong to call you guys cowards and traitors, then it’s wrong to call us “pro-war.” We believe in victory, not in war, and if victory could be accomplished without war, we would be in favor of that. If Mr. Welch really is interested in understanding the other side, calling them names is not a wise course of action.

Tim Sandefur proceeds to respond to Welch's 10 questions, and returns the favor with "ten questions for the other side." For some reason I had an urge to answer their questions, but... But. But I just can't get past that first paragraph. No, it's not a parody. Read it again, with that possibility out of your mind. Apparently, nothing shows contempt and disparagement like calling someone who favors a war "pro-war". Who knew?

What's the equivalent of the label "pro-war" for someone who opposed going to war? No, silly, not that; it's obviously "traitor" or "coward". Try it out. "You traitorous bastard! How could you feel that way?" "You pro-war bastard! How could you feel that way?" See, exactly the same! Let's try some more. "There's no point talking to you - you're just a coward." Compare: "There's no point talking to you - you're just pro-war." Or, "We're trying to have an open dialogue where people who are pro-war can feel comfortable talking to those with different viewpoints." Compare: "We're trying to have an open dialogue where people who are cowards and traitors can feel comfortable talking to those with different viewpoints." They're perfect equivalents. The man has such an ear for offensiveness - those who are on the "other side" sure could learn something from him!

That's all from his negative argument, against that nasty, divisive partisan language that would caricature some people as "pro-war". Things get much better when Sandefur reaches his positive proposal: victory! It's not that so-called "pro-war" people are in favor of the war, he explains. They're in favor of winning the war. If they could win the war without fighting the war, then, believe me, they'd be in favor of that.

Wait, is that not what Sandefur meant by "victory"? Then what did he mean? Victory in the War on Terror? Of course! That is the obvious distinction between people who are sometimes referred to as "pro-war" and those who are not: one group has the controversial but firmly held belief that we should win the war on terror. It's a good thing that we have been able to escape from the muck of partisan name-calling to clarify the identities of the different sides in this debate.

Is there still a shadow of a doubt in your mind about what "victory" Sandefur is talking about? Put your mind at ease - I think I've pretty much exhausted all of the possibilities. What other opponent is there that pro-war people could want to triumph over?

Variations on a Theme

2005-12-22T18:41:00.000-05:00

1. Team Cheerios are my favorite breakfast cereal. For those who don't know, a box of Team Cheerios contains three kinds of Cheerios: regular Cheerios, frosted Cheerios, and Cheerios that are sweetened with brown sugar. Whenever I eat a bowl of Team Cheerios, I eat them up until not a single team cheerio is left. If a team cheerio falls out of the bowl, I pick it up and say "Hey, you team cheerio, you're not getting away!" and then I eat it. That's how much I love the taste of a team cheerio.

2. Stoplight peppers are my favorite salad ingredient. For those who don't know, a bag of stoplight peppers contains three kinds of bell peppers: red, yellow, and green. Whenever I get a bag of stoplight peppers, I eat them up until not a single stoplight pepper is left. If a stoplight pepper falls on the floor, I pick it up and say "Hey, you stoplight pepper, you're not getting away!" and then I serve it. That's how much I love the taste of a stoplight pepper.

3. Beanie-weenies are my favorite childhood meal. For those who don't know, a serving of beanie-weenies contains two kinds of foods, beans and cut-up hot dogs, served in a sauce. Whenever I eat a bowl of beanie-weenies, I eat them up until not a single beanie-weenie is left. If a beanie-weenie falls out of the bowl, I pick it up and say "Hey, you beanie-weenie, you're not getting away!" and then I eat it. That's how much I love the taste of a beanie-weenie.

4. Frings are my favorite side order. For those who don't know, an order of frings contains two kinds of fried foods: french fries and onion rings. Whenever I eat an order of frings, I eat them up until not a single fring is left. If a fring falls on the table, I pick it up and say "Hey, you fring, you're not getting away!" and then I eat it. That's how much I love the taste of a fring.

The question for anyone reading this post: which of the sentences sound weird and which sound okay? Are there any differences between the four cases?

From the Annals of Misleading Research

2005-12-21T21:33:00.000-05:00

Did you know that most Democrats think that the government should do stuff to help people? They support New Deal programs, and laws from the 60s and 70s, designed to protect people's health and safety (e.g. the EPA, FDA, & OSHA), provide resources to poor people (e.g. minimum wage laws, progressive taxation), and prevent discrimination (e.g. racial discrimination in hiring). In a recent survey of academics in the humanities and social sciences, the vast majority of self-identified Democrats indicated strong support for each of these policies, while self-identified Republicans had more varied views.

What conclusions can we draw from this research * ? "The left has a narrow tent."

This peculiar spin comes, not from some hackish blog, but from the authors of the study itself, right up front in the abstract, and even in the title "Narrow-Tent Democrats and Fringe Others: The Policy Views of Social Science Professors". Within the paper (pdf), Klein & Stern expand "Clearly, campus diversity does not extend to political/policy ideas and values" (p. 19). "Whereas the Republicans usually have diversity on an issue, the Democrats very often have a party line. It is clear that there is significantly more diversity under the Republican tent" (p. 43). Apparently, not being sure that you want the law to limit human-thumb levels found in meats is "centrist" (p. 20) and brings diversity to academia.

The authors also state that "across the board both groups are simply more statist than the ideal types might suggest." Among the "main results" advanced in their summary (p. 43) are "On the whole, the Democrats and Republicans are quite statist." and "Economists are measurably less statist, but most of them are still quite statist."

Their concluding paragraph is a call to greater libertarian inclusion in politics. The primary focus of their paper is the overrepresentation of the left in academia, but after finding that libertarians are as common as conservatives in academia they show no concern about the possibility that libertarians are overrepresented as well. Instead, they conclude "If freedom is a core political value, then there is something very wrong with a formulation [of American politics] that omits the ideology most aligned with that value" (p. 45).

Would you care to guess at the political ideology of the authors?

Some discussion questions:

1. Come up with a set of policy questions that would show that Republican academics have a "narrower tent" than Democrats (i.e. less variance in their levels of support). Suggested topics: taxes, religion, jurisprudence, terrorism.

2. Come up with a set of policy questions that would show that Republican academics are more statist than Democrats. Suggested topics: homosexuality, adultery, abortion, civil liberties, marijuana, conscription.

3. What are the American people's views on these eighteen questions? Are they more similar, on average, to the academic Democrats, Republicans, or libertarians (or one of the narrower groups that Klein & Stern identify through cluster analysis)? How do non-academic Democrats and Republicans compare to academics who identify with the same party? How does the distribution of Americans' views compare to the distribution of academics' views?

4. Is it a serious flaw of academia that most academics tend to support the laws and policies that currently exist in this country? If diversity of "political/policy ideas and values" is important, how do we decide which of the existing laws and policies should have a large group of opponents in academia?

5. If universities are to blame for conservatives' exclusion from academia, who is to blame for libertarians' exclusion from American politics?

6. Since when are laws regulating air and water quality anti-libertarian? Aren't libertarians the people who say that my right to produce chemicals ends where the other guy's nose begins?

HT: Cowen@MR, Zywicki@Volokh

* The paper actually has 18 different policy questions, but most of the evidence for a "narrow tent" comes from the six questions described in the opening paragraph. You can see the exact pattern of responses in their paper (p. 13-16). Here's a summary.

There are 4 policies that Democrats strongly support (about 75-90% strong support), while Republicans have varied views but lean towards support:

- OSHA workplace safety regulation
- FDA regulation of pharmaceuticals
- EPA regulation of air and water quality
- Anti-discrimination laws that apply to private parties

Here are the 4 policies that Democrats strongly support (about 75-90% strong support), while Republicans have varied views and are about neutral on average:

- Minimum wage laws
- Laws restricting gun ownership
- Redistributive aid programs and taxation
- Government run K-12 schooling

There is one policy that Republicans strongly oppose (about 75% strong opposition), while Democrats have varied views and are about neutral on average:

- Government ownership of industrial enterprises

On all of the other policy issues, both parties have varied responses. There are 4 policies where both parties lean towards support:

- Laws restricting hard drug use
- Using monetary policy to tune the economy
- Using fiscal policy to tune the economy
- Foreign aid

There is one policy where both parties lean towards opposition:

- Tariffs

There are 2 policies where both parties are about neutral on average:

- Laws restricting prostitution
- Laws restricting gambling

There are two policies that Republicans tend to support but Democrats tend to oppose:

- Tighter controls on immigration
- Use of the military for democracy promotion

Life is Funny

2005-12-07T10:37:00.000-05:00

'Holiday' Cards Ring Hollow for Some on Bushes' List

This month, as in every December since he took office, President Bush sent out cards with a generic end-of-the-year message, wishing 1.4 million of his close friends and supporters a happy "holiday season."

Christian conservatives respond. Hilarity ensues.

Two Initials Again

2005-12-03T14:41:00.000-05:00

Remember when I wondered why people who are known by two initials rather than a first name, like O.J. Simpson, so frequently have a "J" as one of those two letters? (If the answer is "no", then you can click on the link to get your very own memory of that blog post.)

Well, now some real linguists are turning their attention to a more general version of that question (and I do love generalization). What makes some pairs of letters sound good in place of a name and other pairs sound bad? Their explanation is too technical for me to follow, and they don't bring up "J" in particular (even though MJ is their example of a good nickname, and JD and DJ are the examples from Semantic Compositions). But go take a look.

(HT Neal)

War, what is it good for?

2005-11-11T23:11:00.000-05:00

A partial list:

Winning independence
Ending slavery
Stopping invasions throughout the world
Protecting enormous numbers of people from their would-be murderers
Making the world safe for liberty and democracy

Soldiers who have had to go through things that I cannot imagine going through, to do things that I cannot imagine doing, to sacrifice their physical health, their mental health, or even their lives, have fought these wars because they believed in the causes that they were fighting for. Americans owe them a tremendous amount of gratitude, as do many others around the world.

The Dependency Hypothesis

2005-11-10T12:31:00.000-05:00

People respond to incentives. That is the insight that many libertarian-types have taken and run with, seemingly analyzing everything in terms of economic rationality and the logic of the market. (This leads to eminently mockable turns of phrase, such as "Assuming choices to engage in risky sex are made rationally".)

It may be revealing, then, to look at the cases where these libertarian-types embrace some other view of human behavior. One view that shows up time and again (see recent posts by Becker, Posner, Whitman, and Wilkinson) is the generalized dependency hypothesis. This is the hypothesis that people who receive benefits from government programs like Medicaid and welfare develop generalized deficits in areas like initiative, energy, willpower, and independent decision-making, and that these generalized deficits make them less effective at dealing with situations where independent, willful action would be beneficial, such as preparing for Katrina.

It is important to clarify what this hypothesis is not saying. There's a different hypothesis about dependency that is right up the free market alley. That is the view that government programs create incentives that induce people to depend on them, rather than using them as a temporary safety net. Unreformed welfare, for instance, gave people enough money to live without working, and it increased the effective tax rate that people going from welfare to work would face (including the removed welfare benefits), so the hypothesis that people develop a dependency on welfare could be based only on the claim that people respond to incentives.

A second kind of dependence is slightly more general, dealing with a domain of life rather than a particular government program. Some government retirement savings programs, to take an example, don't require the individual to make any decisions or to become informed about how to invest. This can lead to dependency in the domain of financial investment, in that people who have been relying on the government program will not be prepared to make their own informed decisions about investments in other programs. This type of dependency requires an account of human psychology that is only slightly more complex than "people respond to incentives", to wit, "people learn from experience."

The generalized dependency hypothesis is far more ambitious empirical claim than either of these more limited claims. It is supposed to be able to account for people's decisions of all kinds (or people's inability to make independent decisions of all kinds). It applies even to rare or novel situations, like fleeing from an approaching hurricane. In order to have such generality, this hypothesis requires a much more complex view of human psychology, one with such general capacities as "initiative" or "energy", to use Becker's terms, or "will power", to use Whitman's. It is also less clear how government programs would reliably produce such dependency.

What is my view on these three kinds of dependency, dependence on a program, dependency in a domain, and generalized dependency? I am not really sure. That's why I've asked Becker and Wilkinson if they could point me to any empirical studies of generalized dependency, or any thoughtful, empirically-informed books on the subject. And that's why I'm making the same request to you, my loyal reader / transient visitor / confused googler. Are there people who have rigorously studied this generalized kind of dependency, investigating the mechanisms at work, its causes and effects, when it occurred and when it did not? Have they written anything good? I would like to read more, no matter what the ideology of the author (as long as it is someone thoughtful, not an ideologue).

I am a blogger, so I do, of course, have some views on the topic. I think that there is a lot more variability than dependency hypothesizers allow. The three kinds of dependency seem so different that it is probably unhelpful to refer to them all with the same word (that is why I focused my request on generalized dependency). The role of the government in breeding a "culture of dependency" probably varies a lot across the three kinds of dependency and across different government programs.

Dependence on particular government programs is probably relatively common, though some overstate its prevalence in cases like welfare, and it is not always such a terrible thing (perhaps "reliance" would be a more neutral term than "dependence"). It is also not limited to government programs. People come to rely on all sorts of arrangements that were intended to be temporary. Good program design can help avoid this problem, but it is often a difficulty that must be dealt with.

Dependency in a domain really should not be called "dependency" at all, I think. Often, being unable to make independent decisions in a domain is a perfectly reasonable, fine position to be in. There is just too much to learn, in too many different domains, to be able to make independent decisions everywhere. Many government regulations are designed to reduce this information burden and to give people a guide to, say, which doctors they can trust to be competent. In many cases, the government takes the role of informing people to facilitate better decisions, as by mandating nutrition information labels on food and making them include comparisons to government-devised Recommended Daily Allowances. The kind of process that Whitman warns against, where one government policy weakens their decision-making ability on another subject and makes further government regulation seem appropriate, can occur with this kind of "dependency", but that does not mean that the government should stay out of the way. For one thing, we can be careful about this kind of government expansion, and promote more government programs that keep people informed and involved. Also, this kind of expansion is not necessarily bad, as long as it doesn't stretch out too far. Finally, the benefits of the program can easily outweigh this effect when it is negative. Making beneficial programs like 401(k)'s opt-out instead of opt-in could make people less inclined to become informed about them, but the reason that this change is attractive is that many people remain uninformed about them under the current system and thus fail to take advantage of programs that would be beneficial to them.

Generalized dependency is the one that I feel like I know the least about. There are some related areas of study in psychology, like learned helplessness and the effects of expectations, which suggests that there might be some empirically viable content to the concept of generalized dependency. However, in most cases people who promote the generalized dependency hypothesis use "folk" concepts and do not seem to have much contact with relevant social science research. Whitman is an exception, but the conclusions that he draws from Roy Baumeister's research on the "self-control muscle" go far beyond the existing research. Whatever the psychological process, it is not clear that the government has enough of an influence on people's lives to create widespread, generalized dependency (except for people who are incarcerated). Possibly some government programs increase this kind of dependency (perhaps indirectly), but it is also possible that some decrease it, and that many have no effect on it. Which government programs are most likely to create this kind of dependency or to alleviate it, and how? What else, other than the government, influences the generalized dependency of a culture, and how?

These are the important questions that I have the most trouble answering, which is why I'd like to go read something that explores them. I'd prefer to read a book or a published study, since I expect that blog discussion would be relatively cursory and not tied very closely to empirical work (and anyone capable of better in a blog comment would most likely be able to recommend a study or book that was even better).

So hit me with recommendations if you can.

Rational Voting: The (Ir)relevance of Interference in Close Elections

2005-11-08T01:21:00.000-05:00

An election is supposed to be simple. Voters cast their votes, those votes get counted, and the candidate with the most votes wins. As we all know, that's not how things work out in real life. There's fraud, intimidation, overly stringent restrictions that keep voters from having their votes counted, underly stringent restrictions that allow people who aren't eligible to vote to cast votes nonetheless, imperfect vote-counting, suspect voting machinery... And if the election is close enough so that any of these factors might have made a difference, then it will probably go to court, where a few people in robes can effectively hand the election to one candidate or the other.

This is bad for a variety of reasons. It can affect the outcome of elections. The lack of transparency undermines democratic values. Questions about legitimacy can lead to outrage and partisan divisiveness. It can make citizens feel disempowered, as the judges or the fraudsters seem to be determining the result.

This last effect intersects with a common blogosphere topic: why vote? The probability that a single vote will change the outcome of an election is tiny. Contra Frank, the question is not why so many people are voting against their economic self-interest, but why anyone would vote out of economic self-interest. Anyone's economic self-interest would be much better served by staying home and using that time productively. Levitt and Dubner (of Freakonomics fame) have an article in the NY Times Magazine giving their take on why people vote if the incentives don't seem to be there. After going through the standard argument for why an election is unlikely to be decided by a single vote - your vote - and providing some historical data on Congressional elections (or should I say "election") where the margin was a single vote, Levitt and Dubner go on to claim:

But there is a more important point: the closer an election is, the more likely that its outcome will be taken out of the voters' hands - most vividly exemplified, of course, by the 2000 presidential race.

But is this true? In the Crooked Timber thread I linked to before (and before), John Quiggan argues that your impact on the outcome does not change if close elections are decided by a "tortuous litigative and bureaucratic procedure":

In a close election, no vote is decisive, but every change in the (election-night) margin changes the odds. 1000 extra votes for Gore in Florida would have made a big difference, so every vote cast in Florida made (roughly) 0.001 of that big difference.

So does the intervention of judges and so forth reduce your chances of affecting the outcome of the election? Who's right, Quiggan or Levitt + Dubner?

I gave an answer in the comments at Freakonomics: Levitt and Dubner are wrong. I'd like to defend it here with somewhat more precise reasoning.

Let's say that there are two candidates, and let x be the number of votes that are cast for the candidate you prefer minus the number of votes cast for the other candidate. We define two functions in terms of x, both based on the best guesses that you can make before the election, when you are trying to decide whether to vote:

Let p(x) be the probability that your candidate will get x votes more than the other candidate from all of the voters besides you (so p(x) excludes your vote).

Let f(x) be the probability that your candidate will win the election, given that he received x votes more than the other candidate.

What is the probability that your candidate will win? Well, for each possible pattern of voting (which is represented by a particular value of x), we want to figure out how likely it is that this will be the voting pattern (that's p(x)), and then figure out how likely your candidate will win if this is the voting pattern (that's f(x)). We multiply these together and add up the values for all possible voting patterns and the result is the sum over all integers x of p(x)f(x).

What is the probability that your vote will make the difference in the election? Well, for each possible pattern of voting for all of the other voters (which is represented by a particular value of x), we want to figure out how likely it is that your candidate will win if this is the voting pattern and you do not vote (that's f(x)), and subtract that from how likely it is that your candidate will win if that is the voting pattern and you do vote (that's f(x+1), since your candidate is getting one more vote), and as before we multiply by the likelihood that this will be the voting pattern and sum over all possible voting patterns. The result is the sum over all integers of p(x)[f(x+1)-f(x)].

There is one assumption that we are making here, and that is that all votes are equal. Your vote is not less likely to be counted than anyone else's vote. If you're doing something reckless like casting a provisional ballot then this equation vastly overstates your chances of impacting the election. If you're more conscientious than the average voter at using the voting equipment, though, the probability that your vote will make a difference in the outcome of the election is slightly larger than what you'd get from this formula.

In an ideal election, you candidate would win if x>0 and he'd lose if x≤-1. That is, f(x)=1 for all x>0 and f(x)=0 for all x≤-1. Since f(x)=f(x+1) for all values of x but two, the infinite sum over all values of x of p(x)[f(x+1)-f(x)] reduces to p(-1)[f(0)-f(-1)]+p(0)[f(1)-f(0)], which equals p(-1)[f(0)]+p(0)[1-f(0)]. Assuming that p(-1)=p(0) (that is, a one-vote loss for your candidate is just as likely as tie, not an unreasonable assumption given that your predictions of other voters' behavior can hardly make much of such fine-grained distinctions), this simplifies to p(0). So the probability that your vote will make the difference in the election is equal to the probability that the election would result in a tie without your vote, a rather intuitive result.

But what happens when things get messy? What if a candidate could win the election despite garnering fewer votes, because of the crazy electoral system? What if f(x) is not a neat step function, but some complicated, smeared out function (possibly biased, maybe even non-monotonic!)? My claim is that your impact on the election is just about the same, as long as there exist integers a and b, with b>a, such that

1. f(x) is approximately 0 when x ≤ a
2. f(x) is approximately 1 when x ≥ b
3. p(x) is approximately constant for all x where a≤x≤b

In other words, even if the election procedure is messy for close elections (where the differential between a and b is small), it is reliable once either candidate gets a large enough lead. And, the range of voting patterns where the unpredictability happens is narrow enough so that it is hard to say beforehand which of the voting patterns within that range are most likely.

More precisely, we can write these conditions in terms of three errors, e1, e2, and e3, all of which are approximately 0:

1. f(a) = e1
2. f(b) = 1-e2
3. p(min)/p = 1-e3, where p is the maximum value of p(x) for a≤x≤b and p(min) the minimum

Then the probability that your vote will change the outcome of the election is no less than p(1-e1-e2)(1-e3). If p is approximately p(0) and e1, e2, and e3 are small, then this is about the same as p(0). Usually, p will be larger than p(0), since p is the maximum of p(x) for a≤x≤b.

This formula can be derived by evaluating the infinite sum over all x of p(x)[f(x+1)-f(x)]. Since this value is always positive, the sum over all x is greater than or equal to the sum from a to b-1 of p(x)[f(x+1)-f(x)], which is greater than or equal to the sum from a to b-1 of p(min)[f(x+1)-f(x)], which equals p(min)[f(b)-f(a)], which equals p(1-e3)[1-e2-e1].

Why can we say that the errors, e1, e2, and e3, are close to 0? We can make e1 and e2 small with values of a and b that are relatively close to 0 as long as the problems with the election procedure only arise in close elections. In an election with a million voters, we can assume that, as long as one candidate has at least a few thousand votes in his favor, it is very unlikely that the other candidate will be able to steal the election away. Since we get our information about how other voters are likely to vote from polls with margins of error of plus/minus a couple of percentage points (which would give us a 95% confidence interval with a length of 50,000 in our election with a million voters), our knowledge is not fine-grained enough to distinguish the likelihood of values of x that are within a few thousand of each other, as a and b are. So p(x) will be approximately constant in that range, and p(min)/p will be close to 1.

Even if these conditions do not hold very well, your chances of impacting the election will still be close to p. If there is a lot of variation in p(x) between a and b, then (p)(1-e1-e2)(1-e3) is likely to significantly underestimate the true value of your impact, since we are using the minimum value of p(x) on that domain. Unless the procedure for determining the winning candidate was really wacky, it seems unlikely that your probable impact on the election would ever drop below something like three-fourths of p(0).

Given the uncertainty in everything else that you might want to measure (the benefit of making your candidate win, the cost of voting), the probability of a tie among the rest of the voters seems like a very good (and intuitive) estimate of the probability that your vote will be decisive in favor of your candidate. The precise procedure by which the election will be decided is much less important in influencing the rationality of voting than the other factors that determine your incentives. And there is no reason to feel disempowered when the outcome of the election is determined by judges, or bad voting machines, or ... . Angry, maybe, or outraged, or disgusted, or betrayed, or ashamed, or bemused, or frustrated, or vengeful. But not disempowered. As long as your vote was cast, it had just about as much of an expected impact as always. Not that its impact is very large.

UPDATE (11/11/05): Here are some more intuitive ways to think of this result, two from correspondents and one from me:

- In both ideal elections and real elections where judges can get involved, a few thousand votes will swing the election from one candidate to the other. The average impact of those few thousand voters is the same in both cases, and, since we can't predict vote totals precisely enough to distinguish possibilities that are within a few thousand votes of each other, the more fine-grained differences between the two cases are irrelevant. The expected impact of a single voter is the same in both cases.

- Any loss in marginal vote power attributable to "stolen elections" is counterbalanced by the gain in marginal vote power from (a) being able to push a potentially stolen election into the sure-win range and (b) being able to push a sure-loss into the potentially stolen range.

- What judges do is spread out the probability that your vote is the pivotal one, rather than concentrating it on one marginal guy.

Keeping Score in the Culture War

2005-11-03T19:08:00.000-05:00

Our country is in the midst of a culture war, we always hear, with the Christians facing off against the Godless. But what metrics do we have to keep track of who's winning and who's losing? How do we keep score, and how do we even identify meaningful battles?

Well here's one battle that matters and comes with its own convenient metric: Rick Warren v. Peter Singer. Pastor versus utilitarian. May the best man win.

Singer: I’m not living as luxurious a life as I could afford to, but I admit that I indulge my own desires more than I should. I give about 20% of what I earn to NGO’s, mostly to organizations helping the poor to live a better life. I don’t claim that this is as much as I should give. Since I started giving, about thirty years ago, I’ve gradually increased the amount I give, and I’m continuing to do so.

Warren: Kay and I became reverse tithers. When we got married 30 years ago, we began tithing 10%. Each year we would raise our tithe 1% to stretch our faith: 11% the first year, 12% the second year, 13% the third year. Every time I give, it breaks the grip of materialism in my life. Every time I give, it makes me more like Jesus. Every time I give, my heart grows bigger. And so now, we give away 90% and we live on 10%.

This round, the points go to Team Jesus.

(HT Ezra)

Burkeans are Trapped

2005-10-31T21:20:00.000-05:00

Some people are homosexual. Many of them are involved in loving, stable, committed, nurturing long-term romantic relationships with people of the same sex. Many of those same-sex couples are raising children. These are facts, and, as Dale Carpenter observes, they are not going away. Instead, the numbers are growing.

These facts put the Burkean conservative in a bind. Burkeans argue that people should be cautious about altering an extraordinarily complex system on which large numbers of people depend, as changes could undermine important aspects of the system in unanticipated ways, with disastrous effects for the people who count on the system. It is a reasonable enough concern, kept in perspective, but instead of incorporating it into a more comprehensive doctrine of prudence Burkeans tend to apply it selectively, and to take it as a decisive consideration when they choose to apply it.

In the case of marriage, the Burkean traditionalist argument that is constantly referenced is that we don't want to change the definition of marriage: Marriage = 1 Man + 1 Woman. Same sex marriage would be an unprecedented and risky change that threatens to undermine marriage and family. It would weaken society's commitment to procreation (by allowing a class of people who are biologically incapable of having children together to marry), or it would turn marriage from the norm into a choice (since homosexuals would treat marriage as something optional rather than as what is expected of them, and this attitude would spread), or it would reduce the opprobrium of adultery (since sex outside of marriage would likely be accepted by many gay married couples), or it would weaken the link between parenting and biological relationships, or it would send us down a slippery slope towards polygamy and other kinds of relationships that further threaten the marriage-based social order. What's more, conservatives who oppose same sex marriage or have some apprehensions about homosexuality might view the institution of marriage as corrupted, which would further weaken it. These are risks that we do not want to take, so we should stand pat, refusing to change the institution of marriage to allow homosexuals to marry.

People who make these arguments rarely go on to consider what it means to "stand pat." If they did, they would realize that there is no safe, conservative position that leaves things just the way they were, unthreatened by the kind of radical change that makes Burkeans nervous. The two main alternatives to same sex marriage in public discussions are civil unions and the denial of any systematic kind of legal status to same sex couples, and neither one would conserve the age-old societal institutions of marriage and family.

If same sex couples are denied any formal legal status, then they will be operating outside of the institutions that have survived the test of time in custom and in law. As Brad Plumer (and others) have observed, a whole new set of practices and institutions are going to develop. Millions of couples are going to be living together in long term romantic relationships without getting married (indeed, without any prospect of marriage), and this form of relationship may even spread to the heterosexual community. Millions of children will be raised by couples that are legally incapable of getting married, which could weaken the perceived relationship between marriage and child-rearing. Companies will increasingly grant benefits to their employees' unmarried partners, and they will likely do so whether the partner is of the same sex or the opposite sex, which would serve to reduce the importance of marriage for any couple. What's more, progressives who favor same sex marriage might view an institution that excludes homosexuals as a corrupt institution and choose opt out, which would further weaken marriage. Most of these changes are already well underway, and there is no way to reverse them without repressive, reactionary policies that drastically interfere with the lives of people who are homosexual. This is not the kind of cautious, hands-off approach that Burkean traditionalists adore, and it is probably also politically impossible. And of course it would be terribly wrong.

The other option is to create some new legal status like "civil unions" into which same sex couples can enter, which would grant them most or all of the legal rights of a married couple while denying the status of marriage which will be retained solely for opposite sex unions. On its face, this option appears the least Burkean of all. Instead of keeping the same institution - marriage - and reaching a decision about whether to count homosexuals inside or outside of its scope, they would create an entirely new institution to exist alongside marriage. The result of this compromise position is uncertain. It could stave off both the problems of same sex marriage and the problems of refusing to grant same sex couples a legal status, or it could invite both sets of problems. Civil unions are likely to be an uneasy and unstable compromise, as many homosexuals, progressives, and others will not be satisfied with a separate and unequal institution, while many conservatives who oppose same sex marriage and the "homosexual agenda" would not be happy with any government recognition of same sex relationships, especially not one that differed from marriage in name only. Civil unions are probably also the arrangement that is most vulnerable to slippery slope arguments. If same sex marriage is likely to lead to polygamy and the legitimization within the bounds of "marriage" of other undesirable kinds of relationships, then surely these alternative sorts of relationships are more likely to be recognized by law within the bounds of a lower-status kind of contract like a "civil union." There will be a tension between granting civil unions the importance, significance, and meaning of marriage, and treating them as contracts like any other; the latter view could allow other relationship arrangements to slip in (perhaps even "civil unions" for business partners or old friends), while the former view will make this development nearly as troubling as the "corruption" of marriage.

There is a segment of the population, mostly libertarian (oh, that Posner!), that thinks that the government should get out of the business of granting marriage licenses. The government's role, they say, should just be to enforce unions as contracts like any other, and to provide a minimal set of rights or benefits to partners in such a contract. Marriage is an important, significant, meaningful event, but its significance comes from the people involved, their religious tradition, their friends and relatives, and society at large, not from the government. These people essentially favor "civil unions for all." The government should get out of the marriage business and into the business of granting partnership contracts of all sorts, perhaps including polygamy, open relationships, temporary unions, etc. Some liberals have argued for this sort of view as a compromise that can grant rights to homosexual couples, give them equal status to heterosexual couples, and even present the legal change in a way that would not offend conservatives and religious people. We are elevating religious marriage, they would say, as the only true kind of marriage. The government is just dealing with civil contracts. As the Burkean conservative should be quick to recognize, it is unknown to what extent the significance, meaning, and importance of marriage would withstand this drastic change in the role of the state. Although this position may seem radical now, once an unstable two-tiered system of marriage for heterosexuals and civil unions for homosexuals developed, the sway of this libertarian argument would be likely to increase.

It seems that the Burkean conservative should be highly pessimistic about our future, no matter what way the political winds blow. Is the problem here with homosexuality? No, it is with elevating Burke's insight to the cornerstone of an entire political philosophy. Society is always changing, never more than in our recent history, and often change is drastic and unavoidable (or not worth avoiding). The opportunity for homosexuals to be open about their sexuality and to pursue relationships that can be fulfilling for them is a great achievement of our society, just as the inclusion of women and blacks as (more or less) full members of our society has been a great achievement. Prudence often does not mean focusing on everything that could go wrong and struggling to block change, but rather trying to figure out what options are open to us and to direct the coming changes into one of the most promising channels.

There is an interesting discussion to be had about the structures that marriage and family have had in our history, the recent changes to these institutions, and the forms that they may take in the future (including the places for homosexuals within those institutions). Unfortunately, we have not been having that discussion. Even the thoughtful arguments that go beyond simple slogans and knee-jerk reactions to express doubts about gay marriage only reach the inadequate level of selective Burkean conservatism.

Political Philosophy Meme

2005-10-27T02:06:00.000-04:00

Taken up from Christopher Tollefsen

Part I

1. Do you support a right to abortion, even in normal consensual situations?
2. Do you support a very robust notion of animal rights?
3. Are you a pacifist?
4. Do you consider the traditional family to be an oppressive and arbitrary institution?
5. Do you style yourself an opponent of tradition.
6. Do you consider capital punishment to be immoral?
7. Do you consider the Iraq war to be unjust?
8. Do you believe that Intelligent Design is not a reasonable scientific position?

My Answers:

1. Yes.
2. Yes, I think, though the question is too vague to be sure.
3. No.
4. No, I guess, assuming that "the traditional family" mostly means having a husband, a wife, and their kids, and does not require highly unequal gender roles which give most authority to men or place severe burdens solely on women. Also, I am assuming that denying the arbitrariness of the traditional family does not require viewing all other family arrangements as illegitimate.
5. No, that's not my style.
6. Ambivalent, and I don't think that it's all that important, but I lean towards the view that we should get rid of the death penalty for criminal trials.
7. Yes.
8. Yes.

Part II

Do you hold the following tenets?

(1) Belief in a transcendent order
(2) Affection for variety and opposition to the uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of radical systems
(3) Opposition to the idea of a "classless society"
(4) Conviction that freedom and property are closely linked
(5) Faith in custom, convention, and Burkean "prejudice"
(6) Prudence as regards social change
(7) The perfectability of man
(8) Contempt for tradition
(9) Political leveling
(10) Economic leveling

My Answers:

(1) No, at least I don't think so.
(2) Ambivalent. I don't see how this is a single tenet. Yes I have an affection for variety, but no, in many cases I am not opposed to systems that pursue certain kinds of uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims.
(3) I have no idea what this means.
(4) Sort of. In practice many important kinds of freedom require institutions of property, though many do not (freedom to think and do as you please). I also don't think that it is necessarily the case that freedom to use something requires that you have an exclusive right to it.
(5) Sort of. The beliefs, feelings, and practices that arise through social life should not be dismissed lightly, but they should be open to questioning, investigation, and change, not accepted on faith.
(6) Yes, of course. Unless "prudence" has some weird technical definition here.
(7) No.
(8) No.
(9) I have no idea what this means.
(10) Sort of. I favor efforts to improve the economic circumstances of people who are in a bad economic situation, and I would like people to be in a position where they have opportunities to succeed, but I don't take a completely level economic distribution to be a goal worth pursuing.

The first list, 1. through 8., is the Goss list. Apparently any genuine conservative must answer "no" to 1-5, though 6-8 are open to disagreement. This strikes me as an odd litmus test for conservatism, as I don't see how the five requirements represent a single coherent political philosophy. How you set the boundaries on who belongs within our moral community (farm animals? human fetuses?) does not strike me as very central to the way we deal with the rest of our society. It is good to see someone with the honesty to admit that conservatives are exclusive with respect to the views on abortion that fit inside their tent. I am surprised, though, by the claim that support for a very robust notion of animal rights is also a deal-breaker, as Goss himself seems to put fairly stringent restrictions on how we should treat animals, favoring "serious political action to reform the meat industry" (my words, his assent), since "humans should have a serious regard for animal welfare" (his words). Maybe he only considers an outright prohibition of animal-killing to count as "very robust", but if that is so then this criterion has a similar problem to the "no pacifism" restriction and other questions on which I fell on the conservative side: they only rule out people with rather extreme views. People who are skeptical about wars or traditions but do not have a blanket opposition to war or an outright opposition to tradition will probably fall outside the conservative camp, though they remain in a position to appreciate many conservative arguments.

The second list, (1) through (10) is the Kirk list, with 1-6 representing the essential tenets of conservatism and 7-10 the essential tenets of radicalism. Kirk's tenets strike me as more of a mixed bag. I should probably withhold judgment on them, since I'd need to read more by or about Kirk to even know what several of the tenets mean. One thing is clear, though: conservatism and radicalism are not an exhaustive set of alternatives. It looks like I am not a conservative according to his definition (I should hope not! (for the sake of his classification system more than for the sake of my self-image)), and I am certainly not a radical. Someone give me another set of tenets to assent to, as I'm obviously something. How about progressivism?

I've never been much of a meme-tapper, so for now I think I am content to await the coming months of discussion as Tollefsen, who tapped himself as an autonomous initiation to Right Reason, considers his positions on these issues in more detail.

Iraq now Immune to Authoritarian Dictatorship

2005-10-19T03:35:00.000-04:00

So proclaimeth the Hitch. His argument? I think, therefore it is so:

Since Iraq has no choice but to be a plural and various country, these diversities can be handled in only one of three ways: by a fascistic dictatorship of one faction over all others, by civil war leading to partition, or by federal democracy. The first option has now, I think, been demolished for all time. The second two options need not be mutually exclusive or incompatible, since one is still possible and the other is still hard, and since a great deal of damage was done to intercommunal relations (to phrase it mildly) during the decades of the fascistic expedient, and since there are neighboring countries that have an interest in supporting their own religious or ethnic clienteles within Iraq.

Well, that's a relief.

Moving the Goalposts

2005-10-10T01:38:00.000-04:00

Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio explaining what looks to be a poor crop of new Republican office-seekers in '06:

[Candidates] aren't stupid. They see the political landscape. You are asking them to make a huge personal sacrifice. It's a lot easier to make that sacrifice if you think there's a rainbow at the end.

Remember when the goal used to lie at the end of the rainbow? In today's America, it seems, the rainbow itself suffices. Ah, the soft bigotry of low expectations.

Self-referential pick-up lines

2005-10-08T11:05:00.000-04:00

"If I were to ask you for sex, would your answer be the same as the answer to this question?"

A version of this pick-up line has apparently been the title of a conference presentation, alongside such presentations as "A New Look at Falsification in Light of the Duhem-Quine Thesis" and "Ontological and Ethical Issues of Androids".

See here (or here) for an appropriate response.

The Good, The Bad, and The Empty

2005-10-05T02:21:00.000-04:00

I've never understood Kant. His take on lying, for instance, always struck me as bizarre, and not even supported by the categorical imperative. Maybe it's just my interpretation of the categorical imperative that's nonstandard, but it seems right to me.

Consider the famous case (discussed by Kant in On a Supposed Right to Lie) of the murderer at the door, looking to kill a friend of yours (who you know to be inside your house). Kant claims that, if the murderer asks you if your friend is there, and you must "answer Yea or Nay", then you have a duty to tell the truth. Why do you have to give him good information? Because you could not universalize the maxim underlying the lie you want to tell, since no one would believe you if lying was a universal law. Kant goes on to say some weird things about responsibility, but we don't need to get into that.

Kant's mistake is clearest if we think about the communication between you and the murderer as a transmission of information. If you answer honestly, then you transmit what we might call positive information - information that points him in the direction of true beliefs about where your friend is. If you're dishonest, then you transmit what we can call negative information - information that makes his beliefs further from the truth than they were before. In this case, we can think of the transmission of information as altering the subjective probability that the murderer places on your friend being in your house. Because your friend is in your house, positive information is whatever makes this probability closer to 1 and negative information whatever makes it closer to 0. If you remain silent, then you transmit zero information - the murderer's subjective probability remains unchanged.

Now, efforts to transmit negative information tend to fail the categorical imperative, whether they are outright lies (false statements) or less direct attempts to mislead. Universalizing a maxim essentially means making your decision procedure transparent to the person who you are communicating with. Once he knows the relationship between your beliefs and your utterances, there he will not be deceived by the verbal content of your utterances, as this content is irrelevant. So if your communications in this context do not reliably track the truth, he can dismiss them as bad information.

However, efforts to transmit zero information withstand universalization. All that you have to do is give the same response, regardless of what is true. No matter where your friend is, say "No, he is not here." This response is just as good as silence, since even if the murderer knows your decision procedure, and every person in the world would follow the same maxim, he cannot learn anything from your statement. Kant seems to have had an inkling that transmissions of zero information were not defeated by the categorical imperative, and to have tried to exclude these responses, which is why he ruled out silence as a possible response. However, he failed to realize that any answer could be an empty communication, as long as it is given consistently.

The categorical imperative does rule out another pattern of responding, which intially seems cleverer than the "always say no" strategy: the "always lie" strategy. If you say no when your friend is there and yes when he is not, then, if your maxim were universalized, it would be just as useful to the murderer as honesty. Your responses distinguish the two states of the world, and even though you attempt to do so in a way that transmits negative information, a murderer who knew your decision procedure could see past your utterances to recognize that you did serve as a reliable indicator of the truth. You would be like a poker player with a stupid tell: you said your cards were good when you were bluffing, and claimed to bluff whenever you had a good hand. Or, you'd be like one of those knaves who always lie in logic puzzles, and the murderer would be in a position to discover the correct solution.

To truly be clever, you need a more flexible strategy than always lying: say whatever you think will minimize the subjective probability that the murderer has for whatever state of the world in fact obtains. This puts you in a battle of wits with the murderer. You could play it safe and just try to transmit zero information, or you could try to outsmart the murderer in a way that transmits negative information. You might try to size up your opponent: If I say this, he'll think that I think that ..." If you do try to transmit negative information, though, then you run the risk of losing the battle of wits and having the murderer see through your ploy (recognize your tell) and gain positive information. However, if you're smarter than your opponent, in the murderer scenario or any other, then you're likely to succeed in transmitting negative information. Indeed, if the murderer is going through the trouble of asking you whether your friend is there, then there's a good chance that he's gullible enough to at least put some credence in your claim that your friend is not there.

When people universalize a communications maxim, they tend to do so in such a way as to rule out the possibility of succeeding through your superior cleverness, or your opponent's foolishness. Thus, it simplifies the problem to one where all parties are rational, and makes morality into a game theory problem. The right action is whatever communications strategy, pure or mixed, maximizes your expected benefits. This leads to a zero information strategy in most cases that I can think of, including the murderer at the door scenario. However, the categorical imperative really has nothing to say against the strategy of communicating information that is as negative as possible, as long as you consider the limiting case, transmitting zero information, to be among the acceptable outcomes that do not defeat your communicative intention.

There are further wrinkles. One type of transmission of negative information that can withstand the categorical imperative, when used in moderation, is mimicry of honest communication. Say that you would ask for a loan and intend to pay it back in situations X, Y, and Z. If there is a situation, W, where you want to ask for a loan but do not intend to pay it back, and if situation W is indistinguishable from situations X, Y, and Z to the potential lender, then, even after making your decision procedure transparent (i.e. universalizing), you may still be able to get away with asking for the loan in situation W. The potential lender's subjective probability that you are lying is the frequency of W divided by the total frequency of W, X, Y, and Z, and if this probability is low enough for him to be willing to take the risk then you may have lied yourself into a loan, while remaining covered by the categorical imperative.

Similarly, using a "This house protected by ABC Security" sticker as your only home security system can be allowed by the categorical imperative, as long as the cases where you would have actually installed an ABC security system are common enough, and indistinguishable from the actual case to the eyes of a potential criminal, so that potential burglars would consider your house to be too great of a risk. So, for instance, you could save on your expected home security costs without running afoul of the categorical imperative by flipping a coin and buying an ABC security system and a sticker if it comes up heads, and just putting the sticker in your window if it comes up tails. But if you let the probability drop far below .5, then your security plan would not survive universalization, and, in practice, you would be free riding on other people who shell out for the real security system.

Of course there are other decision procedures besides coin flipping, such as looking at your budget to see if you can afford an ABC security system. However, you must be sure that you are being honest with yourelf about your decision procedure (are you setting the conditions for buying a real security system only after you know that you will not meet those conditions?), because if you are just coming up with an excuse to free ride then you fail the categorical imperative. You also must succeed at mimicry if you end up transmitting negative information, although here it is OK to "free ride" and to mimic the cases where other people actually buy home security systems, rather than the cases where you would have bought a home security system, since if you had bought a home security system under different conditions others would have been able to mimic those conditions.

The right way to decide what to do under deontological morality can often be more similar to consequentialist thinking than many deontologists realize.

Related: My incomplete series on truth, knights & knaves
Richard on lying

Replacing Justice

2005-10-03T19:53:00.000-04:00

As you may or may not have heard, President Bush has nominated White House Counsel Harriet Miers for a seat on the Supreme Court of the United States. Many people have expressed concern that she shows no sign of the exceptional legal ability that a Supreme Court Justice should have, instead receiving the nomination because she is a female and she has a close relationship with the President. People on both the left and the right rate her below a replacement level Supreme Court Justice. Personally, I don't see what all the fuss is about. Whatever expertise she is lacking, she can easily make up for by surrounding herself with talented law clerks.

Everything is Politics

2005-09-29T18:22:00.000-04:00

"Getting out of politics is right wing" edition

Ann Althouse:

[T]he great artist needs to separate himself from politics and certainly to get it out of his art. I'm saying there's something right wing about doing that. .... [Bob Dylan] was getting out of politics. ... I'm calling that right wing.

Blast from the Past

2005-09-26T20:11:00.000-04:00

I don't understand all this furor about Bush appointing people without relevant experience to important leadership positions throughout the government. The important thing is that these are people of character, with integrity and a strong moral foundation. If they're a little inexperienced, they can just surround themselves with a solid team of first-rate people. Their dignified leadership plus their advisors' expertise will be the perfect combination for success, right? Heck, it might even be better to bring in an outsider to lead, rather than just giving power to the same old Washington bureaucrats.

Politics/Cleverness Quiz

2005-09-26T18:16:00.000-04:00

Via Von at Obsidian Wings, here is another one of those tests that plots your political ideology in a multidimensional space: the OkCupid! Politics Test.

Conservative? Liberal? Republican? Democrat? No matter how you vote, it's unlikely that any one of these words perfectly reflects your views. Politcal beliefs are often intuitive and personal, and no party, platform, candidate or external label can encompass them exactly.

The quiz labeled me a Democrat, a political and economic liberal, and plotted me right on top of the face of someone who appears to be Robert Redford. It also whispered sweet nothings in my ear: "You exhibit a very well-developed sense of Right and Wrong and believe in economic fairness."

What sets this political quiz apart from the rest, though, is that it gives you an opportunity for cleverness at the end.

AND FINALLY, if you could make up ONE new law and have it enforced FOREVER, by goons, what would your law be? Use your imagination, let your despotic instincts run free.

I would dictate that...

My answer:

I would dictate that... every law can be repealed; none is permanently enforceable.

Can you top that?

Experiments

2005-09-25T23:33:00.000-04:00

Beloved blogger Ezra Klein has become a member of Tapped, the highly regarded group blog of The American Prospect. One of his first posts is a takedown of a too-cute, pox-on-both-your-houses Slate article by Jacob Weisberg. The Bush Administration is looking to turn the post-Katrina rebuilding into a neocon playground, just like the post-Iraq rebuilding. Weisberg writes, not about the no-bid contracts for friends of the Administration, but about the other half of that agenda, the ambitious social-economic programs that the Republicans want to enact:

The reaction from liberals to Bush's proposed War on Bayou Poverty has been outrage that Republicans would take advantage of the tragedy to advance their ideological agenda.

...

This is precisely the wrong response. Liberals, who have failed to muster any kind of social consensus for a major federal assault on poverty since LBJ's day, should welcome conservatives as converts to the cause. They should hold back on their specific objections—some of which are valid, some of which are not—and let Bush have his way with the reconstruction. Making New Orleans a test site for conservative social policy ideas could shake out any number of ways politically. But all of us have a stake in an experiment that tells us whether conservative anti-poverty ideas, uh, work. If the conservative war on poverty succeeds, even in partial fashion, we will all be better for its success. And if it fails, we will have learned something important about how not to fight poverty.

...

Unfortunately, the conservative war on poverty in New Orleans probably won't take place in any concerted way, because Republicans and Democrats are equally terrified about what might happen. Conservatives don't necessarily want their panaceas tried out, for fear their utopia might not be so dreamy after all. Liberals don't want conservative ideas tested for a different reason. They're afraid that some of them might actually work.

Now, I like science as much as the next guy, but it appears to have slipped Weisberg's mind that millions of people's lives are at stake, and that, if Bush's "War on Bayou Poverty" doesn't quite work out, some of these people might mind. As Ezra says:

The people of New Orleans, we can only assume, will not be told they're participating in an economic version of the Tuskegee experiments; we'll just let them get buffeted about out of sheer respect for the scientific method. Testing hypotheses is much more important than a few thousand black folk.

So, I suppose that it's possible that Democrats are opposed to Bush's ambitious rebuilding policies because they don't want to be shown up by his success, but it's also possible, as Ezra observes, that their opposition "stems from a fear that it won't work, and that scores of poor people who just had their lives demolished will now be further punished by a regionally restricted Gilded Age."

How oh how can we choose between these two hypotheses? If only some clever Slate author could think up an ingenious social experiment to put them to the test! I don't care how many people's lives we have to mess with - somebody, please, just get me the answer.

But wait! Posting at Tapped 8 minutes before Ezra is the estimable Matthew Yglesias. He brings some of that typical liberal opposition to Bush's "war on poverty" - something about how Bush is rejecting "effective ways to help the poor people displaced by Katrina ... in favor of less effective ones" - but that's just irrelevant yammering that ignores the wonderful fact that Republicans are trying to do something about poverty, and the obvious implication that we should let them do whatever they want (because hey, some of it might work, and even if it doesn't that's interesting too). But Matt also has something relevant to say. It turns out that Republicans (Ronald Reagan, even) have had some anti-poverty ideas before, and some of them have actually worked: Section 8 housing, the Earned Income Tax Credit. What's been happening to those? Well, it looks like conservatives are trying to cut them. Bush is even abandoning Section 8 vouchers, a successful part of Ronald Reagan's republican war on poverty, in favor of his new experiment, a not-particualrly-conservative trailer-based anti-poverty program (which is really not so different from some old failed experiments). But liberals, those dastardly liberals, they're loving these programs and trying to expand them! Where is your fear, you silly liberals? Cower before the Republican anti-poverty successes! Run away and hide! They will destroy you! But no, instead the Republicans seem to be hiding from any government program that succeeds at reducing poverty. Government that works? How embarrassing.

If only Ezra had waited to read Matt's post before taking on Weisberg. Because my reaction to Ezra's post quickly went from "Amen!" to "Say what?" Ezra writes:

If [liberals] did not believe conservative solutions would fail, they would be conservatives. And if either group, liberals or conservatives, are so unsure of their policies that they believe antithetical programs should be applied for the experimental value of it, they should really exit the debate with all possible speed...

No, no, no! Have you no humility, no open-mindedness, no recognition of your own fallibility? The 8-minute gap, it seems, was not long enough for Ezra, as Matt's post refutes Ezra's claim before he'd even made it. No policy maker knows ahead of time exactly what will work and what won't, and sometimes effective programs come from the darndest places. Policy makers have mixed motives - on the one hand, they want to use what they see as the best policies available to help people who need them. On the other hand, they are still learning what works and what doesn't, and new theories and policy proposals are always in development. You do need to experiment, to try out new, unproven policies, in order to keep from getting stuck with the same old policies. But, as any good scientist knows, you don't experiment blindly; you use your best existing theories to test out hypotheses that have a decent chance of giving useful results. And, as any good conservative should know, whenever possible these experiments should be tried out on a small scale. That way you can see what works and what doesn't, tinker with things to make subtle improvements, and not scale them up to a point where they could do real damage until after they have a proven track record. When the stakes are high, like, say, if you're trying to help people put their lives together after a natural disaster destroys much of a major US city and causes the largest dislocation of Americans in over a century, then you might not want to reach for the policy book labeled "Speculative Ideology-Based Experiments." And when you see the President reaching for that book, then instead of sitting there with rapt attention, congratulating him just for moving, and eagerly awaiting some fresh 'sperimentin', you might be better off pointing out what we've learned from all those previous experiments. What makes you a liberal is believing in liberal goals, and believing that society's collected wisdom shows that liberals' policies are a good start at pursuing those goals.

Weisberg says that we should welcome Bush to the anti-poverty game. I'll give him a warm welcome if he shows that he'll take the game seriously, working consistently to achieve anti-poverty goals, basing his policies on the most successful experiments that society has conducted to date, developing new experiments in light of the best theories that we have to explain what works, and limiting his crazy new experiments to narrow situations where they can't cause much damage. I'm not holding my breath.

Poll

2005-09-20T23:07:00.000-04:00

How much of yesterday's pirate-like talking was used to communicate the fact that it was Talk Like a Pirate Day?

a) Less than 20%
b) 20-40%
c) 40-60%
d) 60-80%
e) More than 80%

As always, please decide on your answer before reading the comments so that they cannot influence your response.

19th Philosophers' Carni'al

2005-09-19T20:58:00.000-04:00

Arrr, they say that th' sequel be nereas good as th' original, an' so ye might imagine that by th' 6th, 8th, 14th, or 19th 'ersion o' somethin' 't wouldna e'en be worth mentionin'.

Carni'als be diffarnt, though. They's endless fun, especially if ye replace them borin' old crazy whorly rides, sugary candy, an' enticin' prizes wi' carefully reasoned philosophical argument. Gar.

Aye, and so, without further ado, I brin' ye somethin' that is worth mentionin', linkin' to, and e'en readin': Philosophers' Carni'al XIX. Aye, me parrot concurs. Go take a eyeball Hilzoy's post on explanation an' justification - she always sees thin's so clearly - and whatereelse strikes yer fancy. Aye.

Diversions

2005-09-17T17:31:00.000-04:00

One of the weakest argument in favor of going to war in Iraq was that we had to go get the terrorists who were operating inside Iraq. This argument was only plausible to people who were mistaken about what was happening in Iraq, which is why it was alluded to far more often than it was made explicitly. When claims about terrorists in Iraq were put into words, they tended to take a very limited form, specifying a few individual terrorists or even just one man, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. A war to take down Baghdad was not a good way to stop Zarqawi, as was clear then and is all the more clear now. A far more promising approach would have been to go after Zarqawi directly, and his organization Ansar al-Islam, at their camp in the northern part of Iraq that was not even under the control of the Baghdad government.

Going to war in Iraq was not a way to go after the terrorists, as a chorus of people who opposed the war have tirelessly repeated: "Iraq is a diversion from the war on terror."

What response is there for those in favor of the war?

Here's one reply: "Yes, and a diversion is just what we needed." We wanted to divert the terrorists from their war on us. They're so distracted by the fight and the chaos in Iraq that they are neglecting their operations in other parts of the world. Because we're fighting them in Iraq, they aren't able to fight us nearly as effectively in other parts of the world.

Now, there are moral responses to this argument (how could you use the Iraqis as terrorist bait?!?), but let's consider this from a tactical point of view. Who is more diverted?

The United States has a large, traditional fighting force consisting of over a hundred thousand men and women. The terrorists are a loosely linked multinational network, consisting of only a few thousand fighters. Keeping our armed forces stationed in Iraq is costing hundreds of billions of dollars, and it is draining many of the military's capabilities, including its supply of willing volunteer soldiers and its ability to be engaged elsewhere. The terrorists' decision-making is distributed, their costs are low (particularly when they are able to forage for weapons in the surrounding countryside), and small groups of them can come and go as they choose, in a matter of days. The military's comings and goings, conversely, constitute a complex and time-consuming logistical operation. Which side is likely to be more seriously diverted by war in Iraq? Which side can recover more swiftly from the distraction and, if it chooses, focus its attention elsewhere?

It is true that both sides entered the war by choice. To get the terrorists to engage us in Iraq, we had to make it a juicy enough target for them, but they still came in by choice. However, both sides do not have the option of leaving the war by choice. Although the United States could theoretically leave any time it wanted to, in reality the US is not free to go because its mission is so closely tied to the events on the ground in Iraq. The only way to leave Iraq before things have advanced to the point where there is a stable, palatable government is to concede at least partial failure and to go back home. The terrorists, however, are free to go operate elsewhere. Even if they give up in Iraq and the US gets what it wanted, they are not failures at their mission as long as they contiue to act elsewhere. If it was worth diverting the terrorists into Iraq, then they must have other ripe targets once they are undiverted. For the terrorists, exit could be an opportunity to act elsewhere, so it could come swiftly with a minimum of bad publicity for their cause, while for the United States it could be a slow, embarrassing retreat.

The final point to be made on the war in Iraq is this: the battle is not merely between the two fighting forces that entered Iraq, the United States (and its allies) on one side and the terrorists on the other. Both sides are receiving support from among the people of Iraq and others outside Iraq, recruiting and training men to serve on their side. The US is trying to train Iraqi security forces, while the terrorists are joined in their fight by various sets of insurgents. Some of the men on either side come from preexisting fighting forces, including former soldiers who now work for the security forces and former Baathists who are now insurgents. The fighting inspired others to join up, as the violence and destruction around them provided people with motivation either to join the security forces or to side with the insurgency, depending on one's interpretation of where the damage is coming from. Despite these apparent symmetries, the two sides are in very different positions. The allied forces have a much harder job. They must gather a much larger fighting force, and they must train them directly to do a very difficult job. Corruption, bad discipline, and thuggery could all seriously undermine the value of the security forces, as could the presence of traitors. The insurgents do not need to be nearly as numerous, and their decentralized nature seems to make them more resilient to the presence of "bad apples" in their midst. A diversion does not accomplish much if the "diverted" people can multiply while they are diverted, and in Iraq the terrorists seem to be in a much better recruiting position than the Americans.

A brief disclaimer "below the fold" (i.e. in the comments)

I had a birthday and nobody noticed

2005-09-15T01:12:00.000-04:00

Not even me. That's probably not a good sign.

I'm now one year and 13 days old. Note to self: remember September 2nd.

Santayana and Tomasello

2005-08-17T17:44:00.000-04:00

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

George Santayana's oft-quoted line is nearly as oft-misinterpreted, taken out of context to mean that we must learn the lessons of history so that tragedies will not be repeated. In context, it is clear that Santayana was talking about something else: progress cannot take place if we keep reinventing the wheel. The quote in context:

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted, it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience. In a second stage men are docile to events, plastic to new habits and suggestions, yet able to graft them on original instincts, which they thus bring to fuller satisfaction. This is the plane of manhood and true progress.

I've previously posted on this topic in blog comments. Now, I have something to say beyond this bit of aphoristic trivia. Namely, it looks like Santayana was on to something.

I have just started reading Michael Tomasello's The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition as part of the cogbloggroup that Chris is orchestrating. Tomasello starts his book with a puzzle: human beings were able to evolve remarkably quickly, changing from typical primates into the species that we know and love in under 6 million years (and perhaps under 2 million years or even under a quarter of a million years). Tomasello says "There is only one possible solution to this puzzle", and he does not mean divine intervention. The answer is cultural transmission: "One reasonable hypothesis, then, is that the amazing suite of cognitive skills and products displayed by modern humans is the result of some sort of species-unique mode or modes of cultural transmission." Tomasello explains, though in a less pithy and quotable way than Santayana:

The evidence that human beings do indeed have species-unique modes of cultural transmission is overwhelming. Most importantly, the cultural traditions and artifacts of human beings accumulate modifications over time in a way that those of other animal species do not, so-called cumulative cultural evolution. Basically none of the most complex human artifacts or social practices - including tool industries, symbolic communication, and social institutions - were invented once and for all at a single moment by any one individual or group of individuals. Rather, what happened was that some individual or group of individuals first invented a primitive version of the artifact or practice, and then some later user or users made a modification, an "improvement," that others then adopted perhaps without change for many generations, at which point some other individual or group of individuals made another modification, which was then learned and used by others, and so on over historical time in what has sometimes been dubbed "the ratchet effect" (Tomasello, Kruger, and Ratner, 1993). The process of cumulative cultural evolution requires not only creative invention but also, and just as importantly, faithful social transmission that can work as a ratchet to prevent slippage backward - so that the newly invented artifact or practice preserves its new and improved form at least somewhat faithfully until a further modification or improvement comes along. Perhaps surprisingly, for many animal species it is not the creative component, but rather the stabilizing ratchet component, that is the difficult feat. Thus, many nonhuman primate individuals regularly produce intelligent behavioral innovations and novelties, but then their groupmates do not engage in the kinds of social learning that would enable, over time, the cultural ratchet to do its work (Kummer and Goodall, 1985).

In other words, humans evolved the ability to learn from history, which, as Santayana suggests, is what has allowed for the flourishing of human civilization. Rather than setting civilized man apart from children and savages, however, this ability set our ancestors apart from other animals, most notably the other great apes.

I will have more to say about this as I read beyond the first half of the introduction.

Baseless Attacks

2005-08-09T05:14:00.000-04:00

Here's a terrible argument: everyone who is in favor of the war in Iraq who is physically capable of serving in the military but has not volunteered is a coward who doesn't want to get his hands dirty.

As Richard points out, there are some reasonable arguments that are roughly in the neighborhood of this baseless attack, which call on war supporters to recognize the human costs of war and provide motivation to treat troops right. It is a long way, though, from these reasonable arguments to accusations of cowardice.

Here's another terrible argument: everyone who is opposed to the war in Iraq is ignoring and appeasing terrorism.

Are there any reasonable arguments anywhere in the neighborhood of this baseless attack? I suppose that we could say that it is loosely related to a request for alternate strategies for how to deal with terrorism. It a long, long way, though, from this kind of reasonable discussion to accusations of appeasement.

If you're looking at the links, you'll notice that both terrible arguments came from a post by Timothy Sandefur of Positive Liberty entitled "Straw Men". Surprisingly, the plural does not indicate that Sandefur is exposing both of these baseless attacks for what they are. Sandefur ably tears apart the former argument when a reader tries to use a form of it against him. However, he chooses to employ a version of the latter argument himself, against that very same reader.

I'm still adjusting to Positive Liberty being a group blog, and I haven't come to any sort of global conclusion about whether this is a change for the better. I will say this, though. Jason Kuznicki would never engage in baseless attacks like that one.

Bisexuality, Or all or none?

2005-07-09T03:33:00.000-04:00

How common is bisexuality? Is everyone "a little bit gay", as I contend in the sidebar on Kantian authority? Or are there no true bisexuals, as a new study on arousal patterns suggests? Instead of reaching an informed conclusion on this issue, I feel obligated to grasp at any available argument to defend the reckless claim that I made in my crooked timber joke.

Chris at Mixing Memory performs the kind of balanced, serious, studious analysis that he feels that the study (like all scientific research) deserves, but he unwittingly supplies me with all the ammo I need to convince me that everything I've said is right on the money, and so obvious that there is something wrong with anyone who doesn't see it. As Chris writes of the study, "all males (gay, straight, or bisexual) showed physical arousal to all types of video", male-male, male-female, and female-female. Bisexuality for all! Anyone who disagrees with me must be some sort of repressed homophobe (or heterophobe).

London

2005-07-09T02:50:00.000-04:00

London may have been a strategic error for the terrorists.

Think about it. You can't spread terror to London. Londoners don’t panic. They have that British humour and the stiff upper lip (some are tired of that description, but I can’t get enough of these).

What's more, England is the bridge between the Europe and the US. Everyone sympathizes with them.

The timing makes it even worse. The attack happened when the world was united around London – newly announced home of the 2012 Olympics, host of the G-8 summit that is increasing aid to Africa.

Attacking on the seventh of July was their biggest mistake. There will be no jokes from Europeans about “what happened on the ninth of October?”, no 11-M in the home nation while Americans stick to 3/11. This attack was 7/7 for everybody.

My Country

2005-07-04T23:57:00.000-04:00

"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; if wrong, to be set right."

This twist on a famous phrase turns it from something odious (I will support wrong if my country is the one doing it) to something noble, the maxim of a true patriot who works to make sure that his country is on the side of right. In fact, it's not a novel twist on an old phrase - it's the original quotation from Senator Carl Schurz's 1872 speech. Robert Koons at Right Reason provides this Independence Day tidbit, along with a defense of patriotism properly understood. Waxing Aristotelian, he defines patriotism as a virtue that is the mean between the deficiency of neutrality and the excess of jingoism. With a defense of patriotism that even a utilitarian could love, he acknowledges that our duty to humanity is a higher aim, but argues that patriotism is consistent with, and even an aid to, the virtue of humanity: "It is not easy for us to feel strong bonds of concern for people who live far from us, with whom we share little in the way of history or culture. ... If we stifle patriotism, love of country will be replaced, not by an equally fervent love for all of humanity, but rather by a host of narrower and still more fractious loyalties." Like Peter Singer, he speaks to broadening the set of people we care about by working through intermediate steps (though he uses the metaphor of climbing a ladder rather than expanding a circle).

Matthew Yglesias makes a related point about the importance of affinity towards those with a shared history or culture, as he takes a tangent from a July 4th musing to consider the history of international relations. A sphere of peace serves modern advanced democracies well because of "hard-headed economic fact", he argues, but "the actual historical processes through which this peaceful zone has come to exist show ... that though cultural and political affinities play no formal role in the demonstration of peace's value, they seem to be integral to its realization in process."

Matt Weiner at Opiniatrety takes up the task set forth by the Senator, arguing that people should face up to the wrongs that our country has been committing in military prisons so that our policies can be righted. Attempts to hold America up to the standards of right and wrong embodied in its own ideals so that it may continue to be a force for good in the world should not be dismissed as "Anti-American screeds," though Matt and The Poor Man before him realize that some hopelessly partisan people who fail to properly understand patriotism will do just that.

Brad DeLong greets our Independence Day with a 229-year-old document that sets some limits on the true patriot's maxim "My country, right or wrong." The document's authors provide a list of wrongs that their country has committed against the some of its own citizens, and argue that when the wrongs reach this high of a level and there seems to be no way to set them right, then the proper thing to do is to leave your country and join or form a new one.

The argument is clearer in a translation of the document, linked by Jim Henley (via Semiquark) and written by H. L. Mencken, who was translating English into plain English before it was cool:

All we got to say on this proposition is this: first, you and me is as good as anybody else, and maybe a damn sight better; second, nobody ain’t got no right to take away none of our rights; third, every man has got a right to live, to come and go as he pleases, and to have a good time however he likes, so long as he don’t interfere with nobody else. That any government that don’t give a man these rights ain’t worth a damn; also, people ought to choose the kind of goverment they want themselves, and nobody else ought to have no say in the matter. That whenever any goverment don’t do this, then the people have got a right to can it and put in one that will take care of their interests. Of course, that don’t mean having a revolution every day like them South American coons and yellow-bellies and Bolsheviki, or every time some job-holder does something he ain’t got no business to do. It is better to stand a little graft, etc., than to have revolutions all the time, like them coons and Bolsheviki, and any man that wasn’t a anarchist or one of them I. W. W.’s would say the same. But when things get so bad that a man ain’t hardly got no rights at all no more, but you might almost call him a slave, then everybody ought to get together and throw the grafters out, and put in new ones who won’t carry on so high and steal so much, and then watch them. This is the proposition the people of these Colonies is up against, and they have got tired of it, and won’t stand it no more. The administration of the present King, George III, has been rotten from the start, and when anybody kicked about it he always tried to get away with it by strong-arm work.

That is my 4th of July roundup. I hope that you and America got along well on this holiday.

Batman Begins

2005-07-03T03:48:00.000-04:00

Batman Begins is better than most superhero movies - darker and more realistic - which is probably why so many people are bothering to explain what parts of the movie they found to be implausible, incoherent, or otherwise flawed.

[Mild Spoilers below, and Severe Spoilers at the other end of the link.]

A discussion at Agoraphilia includes comments on:

- the economics of intentionally causing a depression
- the economics of saving a city from a depression through philanthropy
- the coherence of the League of Shadows' efforts to save the city by destroying it
- the biochemistry of the fear-inducing toxin
- the feasibility of a microwave ray that vaporizes water without killing people directly

My view is that the movie manages to retain sufficient plausibility when dealing with the first three of these issues, while the last two fall under the "suspension of disbelief" exemption that is generally granted to technology in movies. My main concern, which you can read at Agoraphilia, is with strategic decisions by Batman and by the League of Shadows that seem designed to create drama rather than to achieve their goals.

Who Decides

2005-06-29T01:37:00.000-04:00

I left you for a month with the advice to read Hilzoy. It's good advice (you should keep reading her here), but I feel like I should be saying more. I've decided to use my first post back to score cheap political points in favor of John Kerry and against George W. Bush.

In the lead-up to tonight's big Bush speech, I kept hearing that Bush would lay out his plan for Iraq, but one thing that he would not do is change his mind. After reading the transcript of his speech (like Matt, I chose audiovisual entertainment over the live event), I'm left with three possible conclusions. After you hear my analysis, you can pick at least one:

- Bush was lying* last year, not speaking his mind
- Bush was lying* during his speech tonight, not speaking his mind
- They were lying* when they said that Bush would not change his mind

As I discussed here, during the September 30 Presidential debate, Bush took issue with Kerry's claim that "Osama bin Laden uses the invasion of Iraq in order to go out to people and say that America has declared war on Islam." Bush replied:

My opponent just said something amazing. He said Osama bin Laden uses the invasion of Iraq as an excuse to spread hatred for America. Osama bin Laden isn't going to determine how we defend ourselves.
Osama bin Laden doesn't get to decide. The American people decide.

Tonight, Oxblog (David Adesnik) describes how Bush takes a different view on bin Laden's status as an agenda-setting authority: "Bush acknowledges that some question the relevance of the war in Iraq to the war on terror. Then he quotes bin Laden to the effect that the war in Iraq is critical to the war against America. Very nice." Bush's words are:

Some wonder whether Iraq is a central front in the war on terror. Among the terrorists, there is no debate.

Here are the words of Osama bin Laden: This third world war is raging in Iraq. The whole world is watching this war. He says it will end in victory and glory or misery and humiliation.

The terrorists know that the outcome will leave them emboldened or defeated. So they are waging a campaign of murder and destruction. And there is no limit to the innocent lives they are willing to take.

I will hear no subtleties as to whether this constitutes letting bin Laden determine American policy. The point is that this is the exact same style of argumentation that he attacked Kerry for. You can now go back and draw your conclusion about why this is.

This conclude's today's cheap partisan message.

*If you think that their awareness of the situation does not live up to the designation "lying", then you may substitute in a verb of your choice indicating untruthfulness.

Read hilzoy

2005-05-22T19:19:00.000-04:00

... on how the military could be like the Catholic Church and how the component of the right wing that rails against the liberal media is as far over the edge as the componenet of the left wing that thinks that It's All About Oil. Her excellent post is based on a similarly excellent, though less concise, post by John Cole.

Good news, bad news

2005-05-16T00:56:00.000-04:00

Good news! Guantanamo Bay interrogators might not have defiled the Koran. Newsweek's evidence for this claim turns out to be sketchy. If the Koran was never flushed down the toilet, then the truth surpasses even my dejected hope that the Koran flushing was an isolated incident that the government was already dealing with responsibly.

The bad news, of course, is that the rumor is already out. Riots have happened, people have died. Given the absence of trust for the United States in much of the Muslim world, the rumor may continue to have a life of its own, just as the rumors about pig and cow oil did a century and a half ago when India did not trust Britain.

The other bad news is that all sorts of other "inappropriate interrogation tactics" are more than rumors. Terrible things have happened, some of which were an affront to the detainees' religion (like that bizarre one about the fake menstruation blood). I don't want to get into the futile task of debating how the desecration of the Holy Book compares to other "interrogation tactics" in its wrongness, but it does appear to have a particularly strong power to move people.

Speaking personally, it always sucks when a story that gets to you turns out to be an unsubstantiated rumor.

Here's a brief history of the story:

A "senior U.S. government official" told Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff that a draft of a report by the U.S. Southern Command in Miami mentioned cases of Koran flushing. Newsweek mentioned this claim in one sentence of an article. Before publishing the article, they vetted it with "a senior Pentagon official" who did not comment on that claim. Several days after the Newsweek article was published, it was translated into Arabic. Although rumors of Koran flushing had been around before, this report from a credible source sparked a variety of troubling incidents, including riots in Afghanistan which led to deaths. Since the riots, the Pentagon has denied the charge of Koran defiling and then the original source has indicated that he may have misremembered where he read about the allegations of Koran desecration. Newsweek has apologized.

Fray Tormenta

2005-05-12T20:35:00.000-04:00

In lighter, more heartwarming news, here's the story of a Mexican preist who wrestled professionally under the name Fray Tormenta in order to have enough money to take care of 80 kids at the orphanage he founded (picture of him in his wrestling mask here).

A chance encounter with a street urchin, sleeping rough under a bridge in Veracruz, moved Father Sergio to ask his superiors' permission to found an orphanage. It was denied. So he left the Scholastic Order and joined the diocese of Texcoco, where the bishop and villagers of Teotihuacan raised funds for Father Sergio's home.
But money was always running out. No child was ever turned away, even when Father Sergio had no idea where the next meal would come from.
"I became a professional wrestler because I had a cause. If it weren't for my children, there would have been no reason to fight," he explains.
...
It was easy to conceal his true identity. Mexico, he says, is a country of masks. "Whether out of fear or self-protection, we rarely present our true face to the world. Mexicans are secretive by nature. Our formality is a shield against scrutiny. We use masks all the time."

Via Liz Goss.

Oh God

2005-05-12T18:57:00.000-04:00

[UPDATE: Newsweek has backed off of their report. There is no confirmed evidence that Gitmo interrogators ever flushed the Koran down the toilet.]

Out of all of the terrible things that I read about (there is a war going on, and domestic abuses continue), only a few of them bother me so much that I find myself unable to keep sitting there and reading them. This is one of them. Juan Cole writes:

The Guardian reports that news (from Newsweek) that US soldiers desecrated the Koran--and at one point flushed pages of it down the toilet as a technique for humiliating and breaking detainees at Guantanamo--has provoked a second day of protests and then rioting in Jalalabad [Afghanistan], this time with loss of life. On Tuesday, 2000 students had demonstrated. On Wednesday, 5,000 to 10,000 university, medical and K-12 students came out, and then they went on the attack, including against US troops. Four died and 70 were injured.

Flushing pages of the Koran down the toilet as a way of breaking down detainees.

Flushing the Koran down the toilet.

I don't know how to channel anger into blog posts, so I gave it time to dissipate before writing this. I'll just share a few of the associations that I had to the news.

One, it puts all of that bullshit that we've been hearing about "people of faith" into relief. This is an attack on the detainees' religion. Not letting people put a statue of their religion's document up in the courthouse is not an attack. Can't everyone in America unite to condemn these sorts of "interrogation tactics"?

Two, it brings to mind the rebellion against the British in India that was sparked by rumors that gun cartridges were greased with pig and cow fat. This is how you set people against you. Except the Koran-flushing is worse because the religious offense was intentional. I can only hope that the Army saw this "interrogation tactic" as an awful abuse to be punished and quashed, before the publicity.

Three, it makes the claims that we shouldn't care about anti-Americanism stand out as absurd. No, it's not just a popularity contest. No, they don't just hate us for our freedoms, or because we're the superpower. America is giving people with sincere and reasonable religious beliefs reason to join anti-American riots. That should not be happening.

Hilzoy has more to say. She's taking this much more calmly, with that ironic detachment that I can usually maintain.

Overheard

2005-05-05T15:02:00.000-04:00

"5-5-5? That can't be a real day!"

Headlines

2005-04-28T02:25:00.000-04:00

House Overturns New Ethics Rule as Republican Leadership Yields

Republicans said that they had surrendered to the Democrats...

This is the start of the description of the story on the front page of the NY Times website. The substance of the story is that House Republicans have agreed to reverse the changes in the ethics rules designed to protect Tom DeLay in order to counter the perception that they have been manipulating the ethics rules to protect Tom DeLay.

Readable Philosophy

2005-04-26T14:11:00.000-04:00

Are you looking for philosophy that is accessible to someone without a lot of formal training? Look no further than this page, which expresses important philosophical ideas in a simple and easily understandable way. Standard measures of accessibility rate it as appropriate material for anyone who can read the TV guide, including children still in elementary school, and it maxes out on the scale of reading ease:

Total sentences: 954
Total words: 11,622
Average words per Sentence: 12.18
Words with 1 Syllable: 10,744
Words with 2 Syllables: 622
Words with 3 Syllables: 190
Words with 4 or more Syllables: 66
Percentage of word with three or more syllables: 2.20%
Average Syllables per Word: 1.10
Gunning Fog Index: 5.75
Flesch Reading Ease: 100.00
Flesch-Kincaid Grade: 2.18

How Blar Fell Off

2005-04-26T07:53:00.000-04:00

Here's a chart of my blog readability statistics by month, as calculated by this internet website (hat tip: everybody's doing it).

The abbreviations that I am using to try to make plain text line up in a chart are:
mth - Month
words - Total Words
wds/s - Average words per Sentence
%w>sl - Percentage of word with three or more syllables
sl/w - Average Syllables per Word
GFogI - Gunning Fog Index
FleRE - Flesch Reading Ease
FKG - Flesch-Kincaid Grade
*** see update below

mth words wds/s %w>3sl sl/w GFogI FleRE FKG
sep 14940 15.76 13.23% 1.49 11.59 65.05 8.10
oct 11438 14.65 13.29% 1.50 11.17 65.12 7.81
nov 08463 12.37 13.43% 1.50 10.32 67.38 6.93
dec 03236 07.99 13.13% 1.53 08.45 69.42 5.56
jan 04738 13.35 14.82% 1.55 11.27 62.53 7.85
feb 02002 08.17 12.49% 1.49 08.26 72.23 5.21
mar 00958 07.10 15.34% 1.54 08.98 69.64 5.31
apr 04801 13.37 14.46% 1.54 11.21 63.16 7.77
*** 00434 05.11 14.52% 1.53 07.85 71.83 4.51

The focus is meant to be on the three readability scores, but personally I find the nearly monotonic downward trend in words per month and the steadiness of the number of syllables per word to be most interesting.

The Gunning Fog Index and the Flesch-Kincaid Grade are both supposed to measure the grade level required to read the materials (higher numbers means it's more advanced), while the Flesch Reading Ease measuers how easy it is to read on a 0-100 scale, with 60-70 said to be the sweet spot (higher numbers mean it's easier to read). I'm not sure how the program deals with things like the sidebar, post titles, and posts like this one, so readability statistics should be interpreted with caution beyond the skepticism that is due to any measure of readability based on nothing more than counts of word length and sentence length.***

UPDATE 4/26, 1:30PM
*** Of course there's a way to test how these things are dealt with. I just put the url for one of my littlest posts into the program, and it spit back the numbers that I put in the line of the chart with the asterisks. It counts 434 words and 85 sentences of low grade level writing, which suggests that the sidebar is bringing down my words per sentence average and making my writing look easier than it is. I'm not going to go retabulate all the readability scores to correct for this effect. Instead, I'll just point out that there is ths bias in the scores, especially for my less prolific months. Posts like the one linked to above also bias the scores in the direction of easiness - that one gets counted as 107 sentences with only 513 words, which helps account for the December scores.

Interestingly, the syllables per word in the sidebar is still just about the same as all the monthly numbers.

We Have the Power

2005-04-22T14:53:00.000-04:00

Mark Liberman writes at Language Log:

By now you must know that if you go to amaztype™, you can see the word of your choice spelled out in letters made up of thumbnails of the publications whose titles contain it. (You can also ask to collect the works by authors rather than titles, or use thumbnails from the covers of music CDs or video/DVDs rather than books.) But now, amaztype™ zeitgeist lists for you the most popular requests.

Observing that the top 10 only have between 172 and 2529 hits each, he encourages his readers to get involved:

However, the most striking thing about this list is how small the current counts are. Look, people, more than 3,000 of you read this weblog every day*! If ten percent of you went to amaztype™ and asked for "language", it would rank higher in the amaztype™ zeitgeist than PHP does! If all of you did it, language would outrank sex...

They've done it, and right now language is ranked third with 568 hits, behind only sex (2572 hits) and fuck (1127 hits), and ahead of such stars as porn (464 hits), Harry Potter (435 hits), and cat (278 hits).

Well, readers, Liberman isn't the only one with such awesome power. In addition to searching for publications on amazon.com, as Liberman did, amaztype™ also lets you search on amazon.co.jp, amazon.co.uk, and amazon.ca. For amazon.ca, the top 9 searches (as of 22 apr, 18:30 GMT) are:

sex (15 hits)
nude (11 hits)
flash (11 hits)
language (7 hits)
gay (4 hits)
molten (3 hits)
cowboy bebop (3 hits)
art (3 hits)
jakob (3 hits)

Does anything strike you about this list? Look, people, more than 10 of you read this site every day*. If one third of you went to amaztype™ and asked for the same word on amazon.ca, it would appear in the amaztype™ zeitgeist top 10! If all of you did it, we could pass those 7 Canadians who read Language Log!

I've already tried searching for Blar and for Blargh, but apparently no authors have had the good sense to include either of those words in their title. So I decided to go with "internets". Three searches have already put it in the top 10, right behind gay (which is why I just gave you the top 9 - didn't want to spoil the surprise). I also searched twice for music by the artist Kweli (in honor of this post), and that's put him squarely on the list, ahead of one hit wonders Elvis Costello and U2 (sorry).

So if you're interested in changing the world, head over to amaztype™ and search for internets on amazon.ca. If you have any other great search words to suggest, you can leave them in the comments.

____________________

*At least, according to the number of distinct visitors that sitemeter registers on an average day. As I understand it, they count visitors in terms of distinct IP addresses within certain time windows. This is an imperfect measure, since some ways of accessing the internet may channel many users through the same apparent IP address, while in other cases, a single user may show up from different IP addresses at different times.

Algorithm

2005-04-21T06:46:00.000-04:00

The Power of Letting Computers do your Thinking for you

Beyond Blink:

John Gottman, the man who predicts with startling accuracy whether marriages will last, talks about his work and "the mathematics of love." Gottman claims:

We've now gotten to the point where not only can we predict what's going to happen to the relationship, and not only can we intervene to prevent decay of relationships for people who really want to stay together, not only can we help people who really are continually unhappy with one another, to find out why their relationship isn't working, but we're really starting to understand the whole equation of this process, of having close relationships.

Sue Halpern compares the intuitive thin-slicing that Gladwell praises to the simple rules (fast and frugal heuristics) that Gigerenzer develops and advocates and Goldberg's view of intuitions as accumulated wisdom. Goldberg writes:

But in reality, intuition is the condensation of vast prior analytic experience; it is analysis compressed and crystallized.... It is the product of analytic processes being condensed to such a degree that its internal structure may elude even the person benefiting from it.... The intuitive decision-making of an expert bypasses orderly, logical steps precisely because it is a condensation of extensive use of such orderly logical steps in the past.

Neil Levy observes how often rules beat intuitions and ponders the implications that this has for the role of expert and lay intuitions in philosophy. Here's his account of the power of Statistical Prediction Rules (SPRs):

SPRs are (relatively) simple rules that are very successful in predicting a wide range of outcomes. There are SPRs for predicting whether a past criminal will reoffend, whether a psychiatric patient is likely to be violent, whether a candidate for admission to a college or university is likely to graduate, whether an applicant for a loan is a good risk, and so on. Provided with the right data (often surprisingly little data), SPRs typically do at least as well, and often better, than human experts on these problems. In many cases, SPRs outperform the experts even when the experts are presented with more evidence than the SPR uses, and even when the expert is also provided with the prediction of the SPR. Human experts, like the rest of us, tend to believe they have a special insight into cases and people, and so will selectively depart from the SPRs when they get a gut feeling that its prediction is wrong. More often than not, it is the expert who is wrong.

Related:
Blink
Blink II

New Pope

2005-04-19T12:57:00.000-04:00

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger has become Pope Benedict XVI. (via Oxblog)

Studying Sex Differences

2005-04-07T01:50:00.000-04:00

In today's politically "correct" society, is it possible for scientists to study cognitive differences between males and females and to discuss their hypotheses in an open and intelligent public conversation? It sure looks like it.

Here's how the linked discussion has played out so far. Simon Baron-Cohen* described his theory of systemizers vs. empathizers and presented evidence for the hypothesis that fetal testosterone levels affect people's tendency to systemize or empathize, with autistics located at the extreme systemizing end of the spectrum. Replies, including comments by four Harvard social scientists (two of them female), have come from various interesting perspectives. Some of the commenters are concerned about the limited amount of evidence that Baron-Cohen presents and possible alternative explanations for his results, and some wonder how the hypothesized "increased systemizing" effect of testosterone relates to the sex hormone's other known effects (like increased confidence and aggressiveness), but I don't see anyone dismissing the idea of sex differences. It looks to me like an example of good science in progress.

* In case you're wondering, he is a first cousin of Sacha Baron-Cohen (aka Ali-G).

Blink II

2005-04-06T02:35:00.000-04:00

When I summarized Malcolm Gladwell's new hit book, Blink, back in mid-January, I promised to add some of my own thoughts on the strengths and limitations of the book and what we can take away from it. But I didn't say when. So you're getting my thoughts now.

Unless you've either read my earlier post, the book itself, or some other detailed summary of it, then large parts of this post probably won't make much sense.

Also, if you want to read more about Blink, either before or after (or, I suppose, instead of) reading my posts, then your options include the Brooks and Posner pieces and the Gladwell-Surowiecki discussion that I mentioned last time, plus these links:

- Gladwell's website, with excerpts from Blink
- Gladwell talks sports in a January interview with Jeff Merron of ESPN
- David Adesnik reviews Blink at Oxblog (in progress)

How The Mind Works

I enjoyed reading Blink, and I think that most people would too, but there are lots of enjoyable books out there. Why read Blink?

One thing that we can take away from Blink is a better understanding of how the mind works. Much of what it does is "below the surface." Many of our judgments are fast, intuitive, and associative, and we can't know how it is that we make them. We are often unable to tell directly when our judgments are really responding properly to the relevant facts and when they are not serving our purposes. People are good at coming up with reasons to explain what they think and do, but, even though we think that we are just explaining ourselves through introspection, the stories that we create about ourselves do not always correspond to our actual mental processes.

Now, you can get this lesson without reading a couple hundred pages. You could just stop by Mixing Memory or look at pretty much any other piece of writing on cognitive psychology. One advantage of Blink, though, is that its richness in examples can make this lesson start to seem intuitive to you, rather than being merely an interesting and perhaps counterintuitive fact that you remember. Since applying this lesson to your life is not a rigorous deductive process (a claim I'll defend below), this intuitive understanding of it might help you make this lesson part of your life, rather than just something that you have learned. (Of course, I have no actual evidence for Blink helping to tune people's intuitions, and there is no sense in trying to generalize from my own case, in part because I had probably already studied more cognitive science than the typical reader.)

Yay Intuitions!

Is there anything more substantial and less vague that we can take away from Blink? One thing that you can take away from the book (or the subtitle, "The Power of Thinking Without Thinking"), is that Gladwell is very positive on intuitive thinking. He thinks that people are often too deliberative. You see the same thing in his ESPN interview, where he says "I think that the worst thing about the Super Bowl is the two-week layoff. I think teams get over-coached in the second week." (Gladwell is perhaps overly positive on snap judgments in this case - methinks his intuitions are mis-tuned.)

So what's the evidence in favor of smart intuitions? One problem with judging this claim from the examples that Gladwell selects, and with the generalization-from-a-few-examples style of argumentation in general, is that it can be highly sensitive to which examples are selected. But let's completely ignore that problem.

Looking at Gladwell's examples, we get a very mixed story. Some cases (like with the kouros and the double faults) involve experts using their intuitions well, some involve experts succeeding with a blend of intuition and deliberation (like the Millennium Challenge), and some involve expert judgments that fail (like the doctors' judgments about heart attacks). Some judgment failures are due to a readily identifiable bias (like the judgments of female trombonists or tall CEOs), while others (like the heart attack judgments) are not. In some cases a computerized algorithm proved superior to human judgment (like the heart attack judgments and the marriage-stability judgments). In some cases ordinary people were able to make good intuitive judgments from a little bit of information (like college students' judgments about conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to experience), but in many cases ordinary people's intuitions were overwhelmed by irrelevant information (like when Gladwell tried to judge relationship problems).

So we can't draw any simple conclusions from these examples - nothing like "intuitions good, deliberation bad." One rough generalization that we can make is that expertise usually helps. Experts tend to have better intuitions than ordinary people. (This often isn't clear in Gladwell's book, but it's very clear in his ESPN interview: "The point of thin-slicing -- the art of making accurate predictions from very "thin-slices" of experience, is that it's something that only experts can do.") Good intuitions are not just natural instincts that automatically get things right. They are built up and improved over time.

This tells us something about learning: it's not just a matter of gaining explicit knowledge that you can give a verbal account of, it also involves training your intuitions. (Some people already knew this fact about learning, but Blink may help you understand it intuitively.)

Expertise

What is expertise? Do good intuitions simply come from spending lots of time with the subject matter, or is it necessary to have practice making similar decisions? Here again, we return to the "on the one hand, on the other hand" analysis. In some cases people make good judgments without having practice with similar decisions (like with Braden predicting double faults), but in some cases people with only familiarity do not make better judgments than naive people (like college students who assess their friends' personalities). Indeed, familiarity with a person actually seemed to hurt students' personality-assessment abilities (with respect to conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to experience). Further, in some cases, even people who do have practice making similar judgments do not seem to develop good intuitions (as with diagnosing heart attacks).

One risk of familiarity is that people develop theories which may be wrong. In the cases of doctors diagnosing heart attacks, doctors had a theory about what factors predicted heart attacks. In their theory, lifestyle factors (like smoking) were an important predictor of who was having a heart attack at that moment. They were wrong, and in all of their experience diagnosing heart attacks their judgments never became calibrated to reality. Apparently theories can make you resilient to the kind of learning that trains your intuitions.

The orchestra experts who thought that female trombonists weren't as good as the men were also under the sway of an incorrect theory, and they were influenced in a particularly subtle way. When they knew the sex of the trombonist, males actually sounded better to them. A more general bias against women probably also contributed to their judgment errors. Bias can also exist with a supporting theory. People seem biased to favor tall people over short people, as evidenced by the $789/inch salary advantage that height brings you, even though there does not seem to be much of an accompanying theory to that bias.

Familiarity and practice making judgments do not seem to be sufficient for overcoming biases and incorrect theories. It is possible that people who get a more direct feedback on the quality of their decisions will be able to calibrate better. However, the feedback that orchestra experts got from actually listening to the trombonists was not sufficient (because that experience itself was apparently corrupted), and the feedback that doctors got from their experience with people who they diagnosed as having a heart attack or not was not sufficient (perhaps because it wasn't direct enough).

Information

One of Gladwell's more useful ideas is the way he uses "information." Central to good decision-making are 1) identifying the most relevant pieces of information and 2) not being overwhelmed or led astray by irrelevant pieces of information. This insight leads directly to two ways of improving your decision-making:

- attend to the useful information and ignore the rest (like with the heart attack algorithm)

- don't even let yourself know about the irrelevant information (like the auditions behind a screen)

Although the first of these strategies seems obvious and the second often seems unnecessary, keeping them in mind and trying to apply them can help you make better decisions. There is a temptation to think that more information is always better, or at least that it cannot hurt, but you have to break free from that. You are not immune to being thrown off by irrelevant information, and it can help to remind yourself to focus on the most important pieces of information.

The biggest problem with these strategies is that it's not easy to distinguish the relevant information from the irrelevant information. As we saw from the doctors' theories about heart attacks, even years of experience doesn't necessary give you this ability.

Learning successfully does involve gaining this ability to identify what information is relevant and what is not. It is also important to come up with a way of organizing the relevant information so that you can use it. These kinds of learning can be purely intuitive and inexplicable (like Braden's intuition for double faults), or they can be catalyzed and accelerated by a (correct) theory. People like John Gottman (who can predict impending marital problems) and professional food tasters (who can distinguish jams on very specific dimensions) learn with the aid of a theory, and they develop both well-calibrated intuitions and an ability to explain these intuitions.

The Robots are Coming

Two of Gladwell's most remarkable examples, the heart attack algorithm and the divorce prediction, show the power of computers. If it's possible to come up with explicit criteria for when a judgment is correct , and if it's possible to come up with a thorough way of explicitly identifying most of the potentially relevant data that might be used in a judgment, then there's a good chance that a computer can come up with an algorithm that's better than any human at making predictions. Medical data and the outcome of heart attack or no heart attack were sufficient for the heart attack algorithm. For Gottman's relationship research, the outcome is obvious (divorce), but the data are every statement and facial expression in a conversation, and they have to be recorded on camera, observed by people, and coded into the computer. Computers are still at work (as far as I know) trying to break down the biomechanical data of a player's serving motion to match Braden's ability to predict double faults.

So why didn't Gladwell call his book Algorithm: The Power of Letting Computers do your Thinking for you ? Sure, it might not have sold as well, and he would have had to shift the balance of his examples, but don't computers really come out the winner in Blink, ahead of both intuitions and deliberation?

One answer is "yes." There is a lot of neglected work out there on purely statistical methods of decision making, and the consistent finding is that algorithms outperform human experts. Computers have an under-utilized ability to figure out what information is relevant and to organize it to make good predictions. I'll bet that there is an interesting book waiting to be written, not just about Deep Blue and Billy Beane, but about all of the improvements that we could make in important domains like healthcare (and perhaps the penal system), if we just trusted the predictive powers of algorithms that had proven their predictive ability.

A second answer is "yes, but..." Algorithms are good at picking out what data to use and how to use it, but in many cases we don't want them making decisions for us in real life. Their use is more as a learning tool, to help us come up with the right theory so that we can train our intuitions, explain our intuitions, and make better decisions. The doctors at Cook County hospital now use a simple heart attack algorithm based on the most important factors identified by a more complicated statistical analysis (although they probably could just put their patients' data in a computer and let it crank out a decision). Gottman developed an algorithm based on rigorously coded data, and he's used it to train himself to identify relationship problems by picking out the most important signs of trouble, like facial expressions that indicate contempt. Since he doesn't have to rely on all of the cameras and carefully coded data, his talent could be very useful in real life. Further, even in cases where computers can outpredict humans, there are ethical issues to consider. Computers that are good at predicting have limited usefulness.

A third answer is "no." Computers are a useful tool in some cases, but a lot of situations, especially important real-life situations, are too ill-defined, complicated, time-pressured, and unique for computer decision-making to supersede human decision-making. In the Millennium Challenge, for instance, the high-tech computer information system proved too unwieldy for use in the field, and so the intuitive expert Van Riper managed to hold his own against the amazing power of the United States military. Intuition also triumphed over careful scientific analysis in identifying the kouros as a forgery. In another situation that Gladwell describes, a firefighter had a feeling that something was wrong while in the midst of a blaze that wasn't responding to the water. He led his men out of the building, just moments before the floor that they had been standing on collapsed. These sorts of acts of intuitive virtuoso weren't a result of training by computers and they couldn't be performed by computers.

So do computers really come out the winner, ahead of both intuitions and deliberation? The best short answer I can give you is "sort of." I prefer the three paragraph answer that I just gave you, though.

Concluding Remarks

You can get a lot out of Blink, especially if you try to question it and extend it. If you've made it through both of my long blog posts, though, does that mean that diminishing marginal returns will be setting in if you go on to read the book? Or, does it mean that you'll be better prepared to process what you're reading? If you do read Blink after reading my summary and reactions, maybe you could let me know.

Related:
Blink (previous)
Algorithm (next)

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps? (Trivial baseball edition)

2005-04-04T16:28:00.000-04:00

In a 1965 game in Yankee Stadium, with the score tied, two outs in the bottom of the ninth, a runner on first and a 3-1 count on the batter, Yankee manager Johnny Keane ordered the batter to take the pitch -- even though the pitcher was sure to throw a strike rather than walk the potential winning run into scoring position at second. Why did Keane do that?

Correct Answer: Because he made a mistake.

George Will's Answer:

Because with a 3-2 count and two outs, the runner on first would be running with the pitch and could be almost certain to score on a double. Which he did.

What is mistaken about Keane's decision and Will's answer? Let's break this down into cases, assuming that we do not expect the batter does not get a better pitch to hit on a 3-2 count (because if that's what we expect, that should be Will's answer). The possible outcomes resulting from one pitch: a ball in play, a ball (or hit by pitch), a foul ball, or a strike. What happens in each of these cases if the runner is running on a 3-1 count instead of a 3-2 count?

1. Batter hits the ball in play with the batter running. Whether it turns into a hit with the runner running or an out, the count is irrelevant once the ball's in play.

2. Batter takes a ball (or gets hit by the pitch). The batter goes to first and the runner gets second base, whether the count had been 3-1 or 3-2.

3. Batter hits a foul ball. The count becomes 3-2, and the runner goes back to first base. It doesn't matter if it was 3-1 or 3-2.

4. Batter lets a strike get by him. If the count had been 3-1, then the catcher has a chance to throw the runner out at second. If he succeeds the game is over, but if he fails then the Yankees have a runner on second and the batter has a 3-2 count. If they let the count get to 3-2 before the strike is thrown, then the batter is out and the game is over.

So sending the runner and letting the batter swing away on 3-1 is a dominant alternative*. It might work out better than taking a pitch on 3-1 and then sending the runner on 3-2, and it never works out worse. Keane made a mistake, and Will repeated it on page B07 of the Washington Post.

(Hat tip Tapped.)

*Under the assumptions that the pitcher isn't any tougher on 3-1 than on 3-2, and that the batter can approach his task with a 3-1 count the same way he approaches it with a 3-2 count.

Related: A review of Chance

The Nanny State

2005-04-04T09:18:00.000-04:00

When you become unable to make medical decisions for yourself, as in a coma or a persistent vegetative state, the government should keep your body alive, no matter what desires you have expressed before in a living will or what your family considers best for you. That, at least, is the position of Eric Cohen of the Weekly Standard, who argues that the government should be tending to you and making decisions for you when you are at your most vulnerable:

But the real lesson of the Schiavo case is not that we all need living wills; it is that our dignity does not reside in our will alone, and that it is foolish to believe that the competent person I am now can establish, in advance, how I should be cared for if I become incapacitated and incompetent. The real lesson is that we are not mere creatures of the will: We still possess dignity and rights even when our capacity to make free choices is gone; and we do not possess the right to demand that others treat us as less worthy of care than we really are.

(via Kevin Drum via Andrew Sullivan)

Update 4/6: Michael Bérubé makes a similar point in a long and reasoned post that responds to Cohen's article and does much more.

Cool

2005-03-23T02:58:00.000-05:00

A new discovery in genetics: some plants can replace recently mutated genes of theirs with the version of the gene that their ancestors had a few generations ago, apparently using a backup copy of the genetic code that they store in the form of RNA. The Washington Post describes:

The newly discovered phenomenon, which resembles the caching of early versions of a computer document for viewing later, allows plants to archive copies of genes from generations ago, long assumed to be lost forever.

The biologists who made the discovery suspect that there may be a similar process in humans. It's not clear to me how the plant "decides" when to switch the gene or how it manages to make the switch in all of the relevant cells. Since the scientists have not even found the RNA templates yet, we might have to wait a few years on the details.

Carnival

2005-03-22T00:43:00.000-05:00

#XI of the Philosophers' Carnival series is waiting for you at the only official blog of Clayton Littlejohn.

Get Well Soon

2005-03-22T00:39:00.000-05:00

Dear Crooked Timber,

Get Well Soon!

Love,
Blar

Update: Yay!

OCQF

2005-03-21T04:01:00.000-05:00

Welcome to this week's edition of Out of Context Quote Fun:

We don't know why some girls have big breasts and some of them have small breasts. These are important questions — or at least jolly interesting ones — and we just don't know their answers.

— Armand Leroi, scientist at Imperial College and author of Mutants

Right Reason

2005-03-20T03:21:00.000-05:00

The new conservative blog, Right Reason, has been up a couple weeks now and I've found a few of their posts to my liking. Max Goss has a post on the value of rootedness, including how different communities help shape our identity and how rootedness within the community can make us more free in some ways. Jim Ryan has a post on the role of rules and algorithms within morality, arguing that they are much less important than people generally think and that "fine-grained analogical reasoning" ought to have a central role in moral reasoning.

The down side to Right Reason is that many of the contributors seem prone to seriously misunderstanding the left. Ryan, for instance, describes liberals as quasi-marxists who want complete egalitarianism while Rob Koons defines conservativism and liberalism in such an imbalanced way that the pacifists who were concerned that nuclear war might wipe humanity off the face of the earth were paradigmatic conservatives. Even when their claims about liberals vs. conservatives are less far-fetched, they still seem to mostly be a distraction. I am much more interested in what Goss thinks about the value of rootedness than with what he thinks about whether conservatives are more likely than those on the left to recognize its value. Overall, though, the signal-to-noise ratio is high enough to add Right Reason to my list of regular reads, and I wish them the best of luck at producing quality posts from a conservative point of view and attracting eyes to those posts.

An Exciting Development

2005-02-28T07:16:00.000-05:00

Philosophers' Carnival #10 is up at E. G., with an exciting new twist. This one is numbered with Arabic numerals rather than Roman numerals. If this promising new trend continues, it will make it easier to add, subtract, multiply, divide, and perform other arithmetical operations with the numbers of Philosophers' Carnivals. However, it will become more difficult to keep track of when the Philosophers' Carnival has surpassed the Super Bowl.

Open Thread

2005-02-27T20:18:00.000-05:00

If you have any questions, comments, requests, suggestions (about content or format), or anything else that you want to share that is not a comment on some other particular post, feel free to put it in the comments here. Or, you could email me at the hotmail account that I have under the name of this blog (blargh blog), without the space.

Hip Hop Blogs

2005-02-25T07:01:00.000-05:00

Josh Levin has a half-serious Slate piece that includes the following fun quiz: Rapper or Blogger?

1. Uggabugga
2. Mad Kane
3. Big Noyd
4. Justus League
5. Uppity Negro
6. Little Brother
7. Cold Fury
8. South Knox Bubba

(Answers are upside down on p. 54)

This little quiz, of course, is proof that rappers and bloggers were "separated at birth," which puts bloggers in good company. Others who were separated at birth from rappers include toiletries (consider "All Fresh"), entries on U.S. government terrorist watch list (consider "Black Star"), paint colors (consider "Corinthian"), and gay rights advocacy groups (consider "Stonewall"). On the list of notable separated-at-birth pairs, see also music groups and pre-1900 American political parties (consider "The Locofocos"), death metal albums and Hardy Boys novels (consider "Edge of Destruction"), and porn actors and local TV weathermen (consider "Stephen Cropper").

Despite his seemingly overwhelming evidence*, I think that Levin's claim that bloggers are just like rappers is a bit of a stretch. I mean, rappers are obviously dog people and bloggers are cat people. But his article does give me a chance to point out some of the REAL hip hop blogs. Check out this hard core template style feud (be sure to read the comments). And peep Hip Hop Blogs, who totally came up with this idea before Levin did.

Quiz Answers
Bloggers: 1, 2, 5, 7, 8
Rappers: 3, 4 (group), 6 (group)

If I were Josh, I would have included a group blog or two (maybe The Volokh Conspiracy) to balance out the rap groups.

*If I were seriously interrogating this issue, like a bonified internet journalist, then I would mention some of Levin's serious evidence. But instead I'll just fill my post with links and witty banter and leave you with these words:

Rock helped influence hip hop, hip hop helped influence the world - DJ Jazzy Jay

On behalf of the entire "Mainstream Media," Howard Fineman has surrendered to Blogonia, and Giblets, its cruel and unyielding Blogarch, accepts! ... Truly blogs are truly the ascendent masters of media discourse! - Giblets

More odometer-gazing

2005-02-17T17:53:00.000-05:00

My odometer has been clicking through an interesting range. Ever since it hit 1453, the Fall of Constantinople, I've been tracking its progression through European history. We've passed Columbus's sailing of the ocean blue (1492), Martin Luther's 95 theses (1517), and the invincible Spanish Armada (1588; warning: boats and invincibility do not go well together). Since hitting the mile mark (1609), we've made our way through various English Civil Wars and reached the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) on the continent. So many memories, and so many more coming. The Glorious Revolution! The War of Spanish Succession!

What's kept the odometer moving? Much of the credit goes to google, yahoo, altavista, et al. They've been bringing in people with searches for everything from blargh to (as I noted below) kanye west everyone wants to know what's he do if he doesn't win well I guess they'll never grammys . I've won a spot on the first page for both of those searches, and also, inexplicably, for the search pluralistic society . I've also suckered in a variety of people with Blink-related searches, like Gottman thin slices, CEO height tall bias OR advantage "57 " , and vic braden blink double faults. Naive realism brings in a steady trickle of eyeballs. Yes, a steady trickle of eyeballs. A variety of searches bring people to the Island of Truth and Lies story (which I may someday finish), including this one: truthtellers and liars puzzles from the act of creation. Perfect haircuts also attract a tiny crowd, with search terms ranging from my perfect haircut to short asymmetrical haircuts. And we can't forget about Carnies.

Here are some more winning search terms:

- zoologists

- mole right middle finger

- stick avalanche number 2 [yahoo canada]

- cult of victimhood pervades through western society

- rudolph the red nose reindeer + psychology(gay)

- Count to 132 in binary on your fingers

Related Posts: Milestones

UPDATE 2/24: Someone found this website by searching for memodome! I'm adding a "words you can use" feature to the sidebar in celebration.

Telephone Call for Mr. Gettier

2005-02-14T21:48:00.000-05:00

This weekend I called up my friend Carl*. He picked up the phone and said hello, and, recognizing his voice, I said "Hey, Carl" and asked him what was going on. It turns out that his brother Carter was staying with him, and the three of us ended up getting together and going to see a movie.

The weird thing is that Carter's voice sounds just like Carl's. I've known Carl for years (though I hadn't met Carter before), but during the evening I had to pay attention just to keep track of who was talking.

Thinking back to the phone call, I realized that I had gotten lucky. It's always embarrassing when you're talking on the phone as if you knew who you were talking to, but it turns out to be someone else with a similar-sounding voice. Fortunately, Carter wasn't the one on the phone this time, so I avoided the embarrassment.

I actually did something better than avoiding embarrassment. I stumbled on an everyday Gettier case. I had a true belief (I was talking to Carl) that was justified (I had called Carl's house and a voice like his greeted me on the phone) but it seems like luck, not knowledge. Now I feel special, like Glen must've felt when he sat in on a real-life Condorcet cycle.

So why is it that most Gettier problems that I hear about involve strange things like fake barns, robot dogs, a person hidden in his office, or beliefs about pocket change? An ordinary Gettier case could be just a telephone call away.

*I've fictionalized names and other aspects of this story just enough to give it universal appeal, rather than leaving it as merely a tale of my particular life.

West Wins

2005-02-14T14:38:00.000-05:00

Kanye West won 3 Grammys out of 10 nominations, with The College Dropout getting the Grammy for rap album and Jesus Walks taking the Grammy for rap song. I posted here on the success that Kanye's religious-minded song has received. I even left a comment last month at Passion for Fairness to see what they thought of his success (is Jesus Walks the kind of religious work that they want to see rewarded by the entertainment establishment?), but I have not received a reply.

In related news, someone came to my blog with the search term kanye west everyone wants to know what's he do if he doesn't win well I guess they'll never grammys. All I know about this is what I read in the Washington Post, which describes West's acceptance speech as follows:

Then, switching from solemn to sly: "Everybody wanted to know what I'd do if I didn't win." West lifted his trophy in the air and struck a cool pose, enjoying the suspense. "I guess we'll never know!"

Left Behind

2005-02-13T13:37:00.000-05:00

David Adesnik is reading and blogging Left Behind, the novel in which Biblical prophecy about the end of times comes true. His posts are an interesting read, for both their summary and their critique of the book.

Part II is here, and more is coming.

Update (2/14):
- Part III here
- Here Adesnik links to Fred Clark, who Adesnik describes as "a committed Christian who sees the Left Behind novels -- and even moreso, their popularity -- as serious threat to all that Christianity stands for." Clark's long and growing discussion of Left Behind is here.

A Carnival of Philosophy on the World Wide Web

2005-02-06T02:27:00.000-05:00

At Studi Galileiani, e-philosophers from around the e-globe have e-gathered for the 9th e-carnival of philosophy.

Yea!

2005-02-05T18:19:00.000-05:00

I hope this works out as well as it sounds.

Die, farm subsidies, die! The President is on a mission to take you down. He's going on the offensive and you have nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. Let's roll!

[Insert Nixon-to-China reference here]

Update: Some perspective, from people who know more than me.

Voting

2005-01-30T13:57:00.000-05:00

I've been uneasy the past day or two, hoping that things would go well in Iraq but concerned about what might happen, and constantly checking CNN.com. It looks like voting has gone fairly smoothly and turnout has been high (estimates are around 70% of registered voters). That means that there is still a chance of a decent outcome for Iraq in the next few years. I doubt that the election will have any immediate impact on the insurgency, but if voting had failed then that would have meant that there was little hope of progress. We won't really know what has resulted from this war until a couple years after the army has left Iraq, so now I guess it's back to a much less salient combination of hope and uneasiness amidst the uncertainty.

Blink

2005-01-25T01:53:00.000-05:00

Malcolm Gladwell's Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking is an interesting and easy-to-read book about snap judgments. It's chock full of intriguing examples, some of which are serious scientific research that may come across as neat little anecdotes, some of which are neat little anecdotes, and some whose true nature falls in between (perhaps as "case studies"). The book is a little light on the theory of how these intuitive judgments work, when they go right and when they go wrong, and what should be done to guard against bad intuitions while taking advantage of our abilities to make good intuitive judgments. Such discussion of theory and implications is not absent, just underdeveloped. I'll try to sketch out Gladwell's main points and some support for them (in anecdotal form), with just a few comments of my own. I'll share more of my views in future posts. (Warning: this post is full of spoilers.)

An outline of the main points:

1. Thin-slices: There is enough information present in a few variables in a brief amount of time to make powerful predictions about complex processes.
2. Intuitive Thin-slicing: In some situations, people can rapidly pick up on that information well enough to have an appropriate intuitive response.
3. Unconscious Intuitive Thin-slicing: Often, people cannot explain why they have that appropriate intuitive response.
4. Explanatory Interference: Trying to explain the reasons for their reaction can lead to worse judgments.
5. Judgment Errors: Sometimes people fail at picking up on that useful information using it to have good judgments.
6. Judgment Biases: People's intuitive responses and their deliberative judgments can have systematic and predictable biases, with unfortunate consequences.
7. Distracting Information: A common cause of judgment errors is that people are influenced by irrelevant information.
8. The Power of Situations: It is possible to influence the intuitive judgments that we make by influencing the situations that we encounter.
9. Systems that Promote Good Intuitive Judgment: Even though intuitive judgments seem beyond our control, we can try to organize the situations that we encounter in order to take advantage of our abilities to make good snap judgments and to minimize errors and biases.

1. Thin-slices: Taking a "thin slice" of a process can provide enough information to say a lot about the process, even if it is very complex.

During World War II, the Allies intercepted a lot of encrypted Morse code radio messages from the Germans. Although they hadn't broken the code, they learned to identify the individual style of each radio operator. Each individual's style was so distinctive that the interceptors could recognize which German radio operator was sending the message just from a few seconds of Morse code taps. There is some pattern that is evident in even a brief observation.

Professors also seem to have a style that is evident in even the briefest excerpt. Ratings of a teacher's effectiveness by students who had been in a class of theirs for a semester proved to be remarkably similar to the ratings given by students who only saw a 2 second videotape of the professor, with the sound turned off.
Psychologist John Gottman has found that romantic relationships have a similar kind of pattern. Gottman brings recently married couples into his lab and has them talk with each other about a topic that has become a point of contention between them while he video tapes their conversation and records some of their physiological reactions. Gottman's lab codes the data, including the positive and negative emotions that are shown in the couple's facial expressions each second and the style of interaction between the couple. From a 15 minute conversation, Gottman's lab can predict with nearly 90% accuracy whether they will still be married in 15 years. From an hour long conversation, his accuracy rises to 95%.

Thin slices, then, contain enough information, not only to identify a style or to correlate with long-term observations, but also to predict important objective facts, like whether a couple will get divorced.

2. Intuitive Thin-slicing: Sometimes, people's intuitive reactions take advantage of the abundance of information that is present in thin slices.

An alleged Ancient Greek statue of a youth, or "kouros", was brought to the Getty Museum. 14 months of scientific analysis convinced the museum that the kouros was genuine. In fact, it was a 20th century forgery. Experts in Ancient Greek art who looked at the statue were able to identify it as a fake within just a few seconds. One reported an "intuitive repulsion" to it, another said that the first word that came to mind when he saw it was "fresh."

Experts aren't the only ones who use thin-slicing well. It turns out that college students who spend 15 minutes in another student's dorm room give more accurate personality ratings of that student's conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to experience than that student's close friends.

Why is such a thin slice of college students' lives - their dorm rooms - a more informative source of many aspects of their personality than a close, personal relationship with them? Part of the issue is that people have too much information about their friends, and it's hard to sort through it all to find the relevant information. People who only see the dorm rooms don't have so much irrelevant information, and apparently they have enough relevant information because, as Navin Johnson said, "you can tell so much about a person from the way they live."

When predicting if couples will stay together, it's not necessary to exhaustively code the data and analyze it statistically. John Gottman can personally make very good predictions (Gladwell doesn't say precisely how good) just from watching a couple for a few minutes. He has learned to intuitively pick up on the most important signs of impending marital problems (contempt for each other is at the top of the list).

3. Unconscious Intuitive Thin-slicing: People are often unaware of how they make intuitive judgments.

Imagine that you have to solve this problem: two ropes are hanging vertically from the ceiling, too far apart for you to reach both at once, and you have to find ways to tie them together. One solution, which very few people come up with on their own, is to swing one rope, grab the other rope, and then catch the swinging rope. In one study, people get a subtle hint: the experimenter casually walks across the room in a way that involves brushing against one rope and making it swing slightly. Most of the people were able to pick up on the hint and identify the rope-swinging solution. However, only 1 of these people realized that they got the idea from the experimenter's brush with the rope. The rest came up with unrelated explanations of their inspiration. They had no idea of the process that led to their (successful) intuition.

Vic Braden, a highly experienced tennis coach, discovered something both remarkable and frustrating. He found that he was able to predict when a tennis player would double fault before the player's racket had even hit the ball. When he put his ability to an empirical test, he proved to be about 90% accurate. His years of tennis experience gave him the intuitive ability to see some flaw in a player's serving motion before contact with the ball. Braden's uncanny ability was somewhat disturbing to him, though, because, try as he might, he could not figure out what it was that he was picking up on.

People can do amazing things with their intuitive judgments, in highly specific areas or in everyday life, but they are often clueless about how they do it. No amount of careful introspection can unveil what is being done behind the scenes. Braden has recently hooked up with some biomechanics experts who are using advanced computer modeling to try to identify what pattern makes double faults so predictable.

4. Explanatory Interference: Thinking about how you make your intuitive judgments can prevent you from making good intuitive judgments.

Puzzles like the rope problem require some sudden insight or inspiration, and it is difficult to identify its source. In one study, people who were given a bunch of these insight problems and were told that they would have to explain how they tried to solve each problem ended up solving 30% fewer problems than people who did not have to explain their reasoning. Attempting to develop explanations of their intuitions interfered with successful intuiting and inhibited their performance.

In another study, ordinary people ranked five kinds of strawberry jams. Their rankings correlated fairly well with the ratings of expert jam-tasters (r = .55). Expert jam-tasters can explain their ratings based on very specific qualities of texture and taste that they are trained to evaluate. If ordinary people are asked to explain their reasons for their rankings, though, then the rankings that they give end up bearing almost no resemblance to the rankings of experts (r = .11). Ordinary people lack the vocabulary and the training to break the experience of tasting jam down to its component qualities, and when they try to do so they end up basing their final assessments on this information that they do not know how to use. Their gut reactions are better at identifying a good jam than their reasoned analyses.

5. Judgment Errors: Even though the information necessary for a good judgment is available in a small slice of an experience, people often fail to successfully use the right information.

Ordinary people suffered from an overload of information that was unusable to them when they tried to do a component-based ranking of jams. Gladwell experienced a similar information-overload when he watched videos of married couples and tried to predict if they would stay together based on the complex analytical model that Gottman had developed. Gladwell didn't know to focus on a few key factors, like contempt, and he lacked the experience to identify such negative emotions in real time. His predictions ended up being around chance levels.

Even experts make judgment errors because they fail to properly use the information at hand. Hospital personnel frequently have to decide whether someone who comes in with heart pain is suffering a heart attack or some more benign problem like heartburn, and they tend to take into account a variety of factors, including symptoms and risk factors like a stressful or unhealthy lifestyle. Lee Goldman developed a simple algorithm for making the same judgment, using only 4 yes/no factors relating to the ECG, unstable heart pain, blood pressure, and fluid in the lungs. At Cook County hospital, this algorithm outperformed the judgments of every health care professional both at picking out the real heart attacks and at minimizing false positives. Information that is not included in this algorithm, like the patient's lifestyle, is a negligible factor that distracts medical experts more than it informs them.

6. Judgment Biases: Judgment errors are often not random, but rather systematically and predictably biased.

Orchestras used to choose their new members in auditions where music experts watched applicants play. Classical orchestras consisted primarily of white men, and it was generally thought that women's smaller bodies made them incapable of playing stronger instruments like the trombone and that foreigners' lack of experience with Western culture kept them from truly understanding and mastering the Western music that they played. When audition practices became more controlled, so that applicants stayed anonymous behind a screen and experts only listened to their play instead of watching, orchestras rapidly diversified. Although experts who had watched women and foreigners play before had always thought that their performance was somewhat lacking, they proved to be just as capable as white men at making good music. Even though they did not set out to discriminate, the music experts' preconceived notions made their assessments sensitive to extraneous information about sex and ethnicity and inhibited their ability to identify good music.

Biases are not merely a matter of sexism and racism. Height makes a person seem more like a leader, so each inch gives a person about $789 extra in annual salary, and over 58% of CEOs of Fortune 500 Companies are more than 3 inches taller than the average man (i.e. over 6 feet tall). Gladwell argues that Warren Harding, by most accounts one of this country's worst Presidents, rose up through the levels of politics without any significant accomplishments because he looked distinguished and Presidential. Decisions like electing a President, choosing a CEO, or awarding raises and promotions are not intuitive reactions like responses to music. However, the effects of intuitive prejudices are strong enough to withstand the deliberative reasoning that decision-makers go through.

Note that there is no safety in numbers or consensus when it comes to these kinds of biases. If everyone's judgments are biased in the same way, in favor of men, or white men, or tall men, or distinguished-looking men, then the crowd will err just as the individual does.

7. Distracting Information: Many judgment errors and biases result from the influence of information that is not really relevant to the decision.

As many of the above examples demonstrate, a central part of good decision-making, intuitive or not, is using the right information, not using the wrong information, and not being overwhelmed by too much information. It can help if the decision-maker does not even have access to the irrelevant information, as in the case of orchestra auditions.

8. The Power of Situations: The way that things are presented to us can change how we respond to them.

As marketers know well, people's judgments about something depend on the circumstances. It has been found that factors like brand name, coloring, and packaging alter both people's ratings of the taste of a food product in taste tests and the amount that people are willing to spend on a product when making real consumer decisions. For instance, people will pay about 5-10 cents more for ice cream in a round container, rather than a rectangular one, and they will rate the taste of Chef Boyardee products as worse if the Chef (Hector) on the package looks more like a cartoon character.

Gladwell isn't bothered by these examples of the effects of seemingly irrelevant information in the same way that he's bothered about the discrimination against female trombone players. If people like realistic-looking Hector or round ice cream containers better, then why shouldn't the company service those preferences in addition to our preferences for food substance inside the container?

Other cases where seemingly irrelevant environmental influences matter involve priming, which alters what kinds of thoughts come to mind most easily. People who think about being a professor for 5 minutes before playing Trivial Pursuit get 13% more questions right than people who think about being a soccer hooligan. Blacks who have to identify their race on a questionnaire before taking a standardized test get significantly lower scores than those who are not asked about their race. Even subtle manipulations that unconsciously activate negative associations, like to soccer hooligans or stereotypes about African Americans, can inhibit intellectual performance.

9. Systems that Promote Good Intuitive Judgment: We should organize activities so that the circumstances in which we have to make judgments are circumstances in which we intuitively judge well.

Orchestra auditions provide a good example: if judgments are biased by the appearance of the applicant, then don't even let the judges see the applicant. Another examples comes from police work. Studies have shown that people are more likely to mistake some other object for a gun in their split-second judgments if that object is associated with a black person. Reducing the police officers' tendency to shoot people who are actually unarmed, or to harm suspects in general, does not require eliminating all prejudice from the police force. Acting more cautiously, following protocol, and avoiding car chases which get officers revved up past the point where they can think straight can all reduce problems by keeping cops out of situations where they are likely to make bad snap judgments.

As a more positive example, Gladwell describes the case of Paul Van Riper, a US military man who played the role of the leader of a rogue Middle Eastern nation in the Millennium Challenge, a quarter-billion dollar war game designed to test the latest complex information technology that the US military hoped to use to organize its overwhelming military might. Van Riper managed to surprise and seriously damage the far more sophisticated and advanced American side in the war game. Contrary to the centralized, deliberative method of decision-making that the US side employed in the war game, Van Riper organized his side in a way that allowed his generals to make intuitive decisions in the field based on their expert understanding of wartime situations and in line with their side's overall strategy.

Those are nine points from Blink, with lots of examples. I'll give more of my responses and say some more about the underlying theory in future posts. If you're interested, you can check out these other resources for more on Blink:

David Brooks - his take on the book seems about right (though his take on cognitive science as a field does not)

Gladwell has a discussion with James Surowiecki - read the author himself

Richard Posner - UPDATE 1/28: I've now read Posner's review, via the link at aldaily, so here's my mini-review of his review. Posner's overly confident reinterpretations of Gladwell's examples are hit-or-miss (and sometimes hit-and-miss, as on CEO height). His criticism of Blink's lack of theoretical depth or sophistication is in the neighborhood of truth, though far harsher than what is warranted. His complaints about Gladwell's style are simply distracting, given that tastes differ and Posner's are far from representative.

UPDATE 4/6: My long-awaited second post on Blink is finally up here.

Another linky follow-up: Algorithm.

Prisons and abuse go together like ...

2005-01-19T02:35:00.000-05:00

It may be something that you'd rather not think about, but you really should read this piece by psychologist Philip Zimbardo on situations that tend to breed awful abuse like what happened in Abu Ghraib, even when the abusers didn't seem like evil people before going into the situation. His argument becomes weak when he tries to turn it into a legal defense of the abusers, but it's much better at highlighting the systematic problems of military prisons and regular prisons within America that we should be facing. Consider this summary of his view on how we treat the prison system in America (and then go read the rest):

The bottom line is that nobody really cares what happens in prison. Nobody wants to know. Prisons are the default value of every society. We just want to dump convicts there, and let them come back and be good people. We only care about rapists and child molesters, so we want to keep track of them when they get out. For everybody else we don't want to know. We assume they go to prison, we'd like to believe they get rehabilitated, and when they come back they work in society. But from everything I know, most prisons are places that abuse prisoners, making them worse. They make them hate, make them want to get back at the injustice they've experienced.

The Wisest Show on Earth

2005-01-16T21:45:00.000-05:00

The 8th Philosophers' Carnival is now appearing at Enwe's Meta-blog.

The 7th took place while I was in semi-hibernation.

The Monty Hall Problem

2005-01-12T01:18:00.000-05:00

If you're not familiar with the Monty Hall Problem, go read about it, say, here, because if this post is successful it will spoil the problem without instilling any of the wonder, perplexity, confusion, and amazement that should result from your first exposure to the problem.

Okay? Okay.

This blog post describes a fictional scene that takes place in one of those TV producers' rooms, with lots of televisions and cool electronic equipment and comfortable chairs.

Monty Hall sits in the room with a producer of Let's Make a Deal in front of a television screen.

Producer: Look, Monty, you're having this same long exchange with the contestant on every single show, and I have some ideas about how to change it to make it better television. Take a look.

The producer starts a clip on the television screen in front of them of a previous episode of Let's Make a Deal. In the clip, Monty Hall is standing, microphone in hand, with a Contestant in front of 3 doors. The clip plays:

Monty (on the television): There are three doors here, door number 1, door number 2, and door number 3. Behind one of these doors is a prize, behind the others nothing at all. You can pick one of these doors, and if the prize is behind that door then you have won it. Otherwise, you win nothing at all. So, Contestant, which door will it be?

Contestant: I'll pick door number 1.

Monty: Door number 1? Now, before I open it, I'm going to offer you a deal. You could get what's behind the door that you've chosen, door number 1, or you could get what's behind both of the other doors. Would you rather stick with door number 1, or would you rather get both door number 2 and door number 3?

Contestant: I believe I'll switch to the two doors.

Monty: You're going with doors 2 and 3? Now, you know that behind at least one of those two doors is nothing at all. Do you still want to switch?

Contestant: Yes, I'll stick with the two doors.

Monty: In fact...

Monty's lips can be seen to mouth "tell me an empty one" as he whispers into a hidden microphone. After pausing to listen to a hidden earpiece, he continues:

Monty: ... there is nothing at all behind door number 2. Do you still want to switch?

Contestant: Yes, I'll stick with the two doors.

Monty: Look, I'll show you. Open door number 2.

Door number 2 opens, revealing that there is nothing behind it.

Monty: Do you still want to stick with doors 2 and 3?

Contestant: Yes, I'll stick with the two doors.

Monty: Well, there is nothing behind door number 2, so I'm really only giving you what's behind door number 3. Do you still want to stick with door number 3 instead of going with your original choice, door number 1?

Contestant: Yes, I'll stick with door number 3.

Monty: So, even after seeing that there's nothing behind door number 2, you want to abandon your original choice, door number 1, and take what's behind door number 3?

Contestant: Yes, I'm going with door number 3.

The producer stops the tape.

Producer: Look, I think that it's interesting how you get the contestant to change his mind, but I think that we can tighten up this exchange and make it more interesting, to both the casual viewer and the educated viewer who might comment on our show. Why don't you act out with me this little script I wrote up. You be you, I'll be a contestant.

Monty (in person): Okay, let's try it out.

Monty reads the script:

Monty (in person): There are three doors here, door number 1, door number 2, and door number 3. Behind one of these doors is a prize, behind the others nothing at all. You can pick one of these doors, and if the prize is behind that door then you have won it. Otherwise, you win nothing at all. So, Contestant, which door will it be?

Producer (as contestant): I'll pick door number 1.

Monty: Door number 1? Now, before I open it, I'm going to show you something. Door number 2...

Producer (aside to Monty): This is where they'll open door number 2 and reveal that there's nothing behind it. Sorry, go on.

Monty: ... is empty. Now, I'll offer you a deal. You could get what's behind the door that you've chosen, door number 1, or you could get what's behind door number 3. Would you rather stick with door number 1, or would you rather get both door number 2 and door number 3?

Producer (as contestant): I, I think I'll stick with my gut on this one. Door number 1.

Producer (to Monty): What do you think? We'd like to pose this one question to the contestant on every show, instead of going through the drawn-out exchange.

Monty: I like it. It's a lot snappier than what we've been doing. It works out the same, but it gets right to the point. It gets there so fast that it may be hard to follow the logic of it, but I like that too. It really puts the contestant on the spot. This is the kind of game show dilemma that I'd like to be associated with.

End Scene.

Religion in America

2004-12-27T03:27:00.000-05:00

I just don't get it.

They say you can rap about anything except for Jesus
That means guns, sex, lies, video tapes
But if I talk about God my record won't get played Huh?
Well let this take away from my spins
Which will probably take away from my ends
Then I hope this take away from my sins
And bring the day that I'm dreaming about
Next time I'm in the club everybody screaming out
Jesus Walks

Those are the words of Kanye West in his song Jesus Walks.

And what happened? The album with that song on it, The College Dropout, sold millions of copies. Then Kanye was nominated for 10 Grammys, including one for Album of the Year for College Dropout and one for Song of the Year for Jesus Walks. In other words, people really liked the song about Jesus and about religion not selling, so it has sold really well and been nominated as the best song of the year.¹ Ahh, the irony.

And then what to my wondering eyes should appear? Why, it's a petition from a part of the religious community who is complaining that the secular awards-show establishment is not going to give The Passion of The Christ the Oscar it deserves because they would never let a religious production win. Round and round we go.

¹See here for other issues surrounding Jesus Walks

Singalong

2004-12-27T03:21:00.000-05:00

Rudolph, the red-nosed reindeer
had a very shiny nose¹.
And if you ever saw him,
you would even say it glows².

All of the other reindeer
used to laugh and call him names³.
They never let poor Rudolph
join in any reindeer games⁴.

Then one foggy Christmas Eve
Santa came to say:⁵
"Rudolph with your nose so bright⁶,
won't you guide my sleigh tonight?"

Then all the reindeer loved him
as they shouted out with glee⁷,
Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer,
you'll go down in history⁸!

¹Like a light bulb.
²Like a flaslight.
³Like Pinocchio.
⁴Like Monopoly.
⁵Ho, Ho, Ho!"
⁶See note 1.
⁷"Yippee!"
⁸Like George Washington.

Hibernation

2004-12-18T04:29:00.000-05:00

You may have noticed that my post count has been down the past week or so. You can expect it to continue to be low for the next few weeks -- on account of the coming of winter and all. I'll try to make an occasional good post, but I certainly won't be at post-a-day levels.

Enjoy any celebrations that you may be having, and try to remember the upholsterers while you're celebrating. Because without them, there would be no upholstery.

A Singular Nation?

2004-12-09T02:16:00.000-05:00

Matt Weiner of Opiniatrety wonders about sports team "nations": do they get the singular or the plural? Is it...

Steeler Nation or Steelers Nation?
Raiders Nation or Raider Nation?
Eagle Nation or Eagles Nation?
49ers Nation or 49er Nation?
Ram Nation or Rams Nation?
Patriots Nation or Patriot Nation?
Red Sox Nation or Red Sox Nation?

Form your own opinions, then go see his Google-informed opinion.

Have you gone and returned? Now, you can take a look at a few examples that I found where the plural has a clear advantage:

Jets Nation (352) over Jet Nation (29)
Browns Nation (116) over Brown Nation (19)
Chiefs Nation (32) over Chief Nation (6)

Note: I included the name of the city in the searches to minimize false positives. This only significantly reduced the number of hits for 'brown nation' and 'chief nation', and evidence suggests that the cases that were left out were almost all irrelevant.

It may not be a coincidence that the plural is more common when there are many unrelated hits for the singular form. To my ear, the singular sounds weird in all three cases due to the meaning of the team's name. You need to use the plural for it to sound like you're talking about the sports team.

Related: Mini-Break Time
Irregular Tennis

Philosophers' Carnival #6

2004-12-06T05:51:00.000-05:00

The latest Philosophers' Carnival is up at Melbourne Philosopher.

Related: Philosophers' Carnival #5
Philosophers' Carnival #4

[Special: a behind-the-scenes glimpse at how Blargh Blog is made! "I'm concerned about having to come up with a clever carnival themed post every few weeks for an indefinite period of time, so with this post I'm exercising a strategic deescalation."]

What do you do when life deals you lemonade?

2004-12-06T01:02:00.000-05:00

(a multiple choice question)

a. Drink it
b. Save it
c. Sell it
d. Make lemon ice
e. Other (specify) _________________

Comparison and choice

2004-12-05T13:26:00.000-05:00

There are lots of ways to manipulate a gamble that influence whether people will choose to take a chance at it. You could frame the problem in terms of gains or losses, separate a one-part gamble into a multi-part gamble, change a loss for losing the gamble into a cost for playing the gamble, or emphasize the opportunity of getting the best possible outcome or the threat of getting the worst possible outcome. All of these manipulations change the way that a gamble is described while leaving the probabilities and the net payoffs unchanged. Even though the gambles are equivalent, people's willingness to play varies.

There's another manipulation that can get more people to gamble: changing the payoffs so that people might lose money. How does that work? Let's look at an example. Here are the original choices (pick A or B):

A: a certain gain of $2
B: a 7/36 chance of gaining $9 and a 29/36 chance of no gain

Not surprisingly, most people (67%) chose option A, which has a higher expected value than B ($2 vs $1.75) and less risk. Some people are given this alternative gamble instead:

C: a certain gain of $2
D: a 7/36 chance of gaining $9 and a 29/36 chance of losing $0.05

C is the same as A, while option D is strictly worse than B, since you're risking the loss of a nickel rather than the loss of nothing, and there's no compensating benefit. Now, the difference between the expected values of B and D is only about $0.04, so you might suspect that D wouldn't be much less attractive than B. But (if I hadn't tipped you off) would you ever have predicted that more people would choose D than B? A majority, 60%, chose D rather than C, which means that roughly 27% of people would take D but not B.

What's going on? Slovic et al. (2002), who conducted this study, explain the results in terms of evaluability. Some features are difficult to evaluate. For instance, is 20,000 entries an impressive number for a dictionary to have? How should I know? So if people get asked how much they are willing to pay for a dictionary with various features, things like whether it has a torn cover end up being more important than the number of entries that it has. But if people are given a choice between two dictionaries, one with 10,000 entries and one with 20,000 entries, then the 20,000 entries seem like a lot and people are willing to pay more for that dictionary, regardless of any superficial damage to its cover. It is not earth-shattring that, if the features are hard to evaluate, you judge one option by comparing it to the other options that you're given.

What's more interesting is that people seem to make these sorts of comparisons even when the features aren't as hard to evaluate as the 20,000 dictionary entries. For instance, in another study, people who were given a choice between a nice pen and a mug as their reward for participating in a study split pretty evenly between the two. People who were given a choice between a nice pen, a mug, and a cheap pen overwhelmingly chose the nice pen. Even though people have plenty of familiarity with pens and mugs, when that cheap pen is around to use as a standard of comparison, the nice pen starts to look a lot better. In some circles, a big deal is made out of the fact that most voting systems don't satisfy independence of irrelevant alternatives, but it turns out that even individual decisions between everyday objects are not always so independent.

Slovic et al. argue that people do the same sort of evaluation-by-comparison thing even for money. Is $9 a big prize? It doesn't look so spectacular when you're only comparing it with the $2 gain, but compared with the $0.05 loss it's a lot of money. So making the gamble strictly worse by turning no gain into a $0.05 loss actually makes it more attractive to people because the $9 gain starts to look better by comparison.

Slovic et al. study reported in:
Slovic, P, Finucane, M, Peters, E, & MacGregor, D G. (2002). Rational actors or rational fools: implications of the affect heuristic for behavioral economics. Journal of Socio-Economics, 31, 329–342.

Related:

Reasoning at Mixing Memory
Naive Realism

Milestones

2004-12-03T18:29:00.000-05:00

Pardon my odometer-gazing, but my StatCounter © has informed me that the Blargh Blog has passed two remarkable milestones.

- Millenium: If it was getting one page view a year, my blog would have had to exist for over a millenium to get this many views.

- Feet: I can no longer count the number of page loads on my hands. Using binary, I can count up to 1023 without any tricks (no half-raising a finger or crossing fingers or anything like that). Make two fists to get 0. Raising your right pinkie adds 1, raising your right ring finger adds 2, raising your right middle finger adds 4, your right index finger adds 8, ... , and your left pinkie adds 512. So you get 1023 when you raise all your fingers (that's 1,111,111,111 in binary), and any number between 0 and 1023 by raising the right combination of fingers. (Warning: use discretion when counting 4, 128, or 132 among polite company.) Now I suppose that I have to move on to my feet. If I can get my toes flexible enough to raise and lower each one independently of the others, then I could count over a million without going beyond my appendages.

A Precarious Pinnacle: The Scientific Method

2004-12-02T01:44:00.000-05:00

Sometimes people don't explore the slopes, perhaps because they seem too complicated or treacherous to risk venturing out. They might be slippery! But staying at the tippity-top, in the clouds, ignorant of the messy details below, could leave you in a particularly precarious position once you get a glimpse of the imperfect and potentially unstable ground beneath your feet. As I wrote before,

To avoid slipping down, though, people often try to remain firmly planted on the apparently flat, and thus safe, ground at the top of the slope. Often far more unstable than it appears, this ground may erode and crumble beneath your feet, sending you tumbling towards the bottom with little chance to grab a handhold on the intervening slope.

Richard Chappell helped name the phenomenon, and now he has brought up a much better case than my original example of tax rates. He quotes an article by Phil Mole, Nurturing Suspicion: what college students learn about science*, which suggests that science is a bit like laws and sausages:

What happens when students never learn about the historical development of science--when they never comprehend the significance of the scientific method? They leave their science classes with a highly idealized, intellectually impoverished view of science that is highly vulnerable to attack. When they encounter modern cultural criticisms of science in "science and society" classes, they have no larger perspective to balance against these claims. They never learned that great scientists have often been fantastically wrong and never learned about the role of bias in developing scientific theories. As a result, any evidence that scientists do have bias, or that they sometimes make mistakes, causes them to question the validity of the entire scientific enterprise. In Christopher Hitchens's memorable phrase, "utopia becomes the subconscious enabler of cynicism." If students initially learned anything about the complex social history of science, they would have some intellectual armor against the ideologically charged claims of modern science critics.

Even if the scientific process isn't always pretty, it works rather well. You just have to get down and dirty and familiarize yourself with some of the messy workings of the process in order to be inoculated against efforts to turn any instability into an avalanche. (Pardon my metaphor soup.)

*Link didn't work before but now it seems to (Updated 12/3)

Related Posts:
1. Introducing the idea of the precarious pinnacle
2. Statistical innumeracy in the press corps
3. Truth and lies: Logic puzzles vs. actual people

Extended Blogroll

2004-12-02T01:13:00.000-05:00

Political
Leftish
Matthew Yglesias as himself
Matthew Yglesias is still himself
Obsidian Wings starring Edward, Hilzoy, Sebastian Holsclaw, and Von, and Slartibartfast, and Charles Bird
Crooked Timber starring various
Political Animal starring Kevin Drum
Ezra Klein is Ezra Klein
Tapped by various
Battlepanda starring Angelica
Dadahead is the Dadahead
The Reality-Based Community featuring Mark Kleiman and colleagues
Bradford Plumer aka Brad Plumer
Democracy Arsenal starring various
Left2Right with various contributors
Michael Bérubé starring Michael Bérubé
Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal starring Brad DeLong

Rightish & Libertarianish
Agoraphilia starring Glen Whitman and Tom Bell
Unqualified Offerings with Jim Henley
The Volokh Conspiracy starring Volokh, et al.
Right Reason starring various
The Fly Bottle starring Will Wilkinson
Happiness and Public Policy also starring Will Wilkinson
Positive Liberty starring Jason Kuznicki, and now with Ed Brayton, Jonathan Rowe, and Timothy Sandefur
OxBlog starring Patrick Belton and David Adesnik

Social Scientifical
Edge* with a new host each month
Mixing Memory featuring Chris
Cognitive Science Reading Group orchestrated by Chris
Cognitive Daily by the Mungers
Happiness and Public Policy starring Will Wilkinson
Marginal Revolution starring Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok
Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal starring Brad DeLong
This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology & Economics starring Grant McCracken

Philosophical
Philosophy, et cetera starring Richard Chappell
The Ethical Werewolf featuring Neil Sinhababu
Meaning of Life TV* starring Robert Wright, et al.
Fake Barn Country starring Brown people
PEA Soup starring various
Desert Landscapes brought to you by University of Arizona
Certain Doubts starring Jon Kvanvig and friends
Orange Philosophy by the people of Syracuse University
Left2Right with various contributors
Philosophers' Carnival starring You?
Enwe's Meta-Blog by Enwe
Philosophical Weblogs* written by David Chalmers

Linguistical
Literal-Minded starring Neal Whitman
Language Log by Mark Liberman, Geoffrey Pullum, and colleagues
The Maven's Word of the Day* from the people who brought you Random House

Comical
Fafblog!! starring Fafnir, Giblets, and Medium Lobster
The Onion* as itself
The Daily Show* with Jon Stewart

Athletical
Blog Maverick starring Mark Cuban, TV's The Benefactor
Football Outsiders* starring Aaron Schatz, et al.
The Sports Economist starring Skip Sauer
Sabernomics featuring JC

Similarly Named
blarblog starring Zeke
Blaahg by S
the art of blar starring Jonelin
Blargh! © Meg Hopper
The Blarg featuring Nathan118
What the Blar starring Kylie
eweeee whoooo blar! (the emu comes crashing down) starring miichan00
Blar kat! starring Mike
Blar! starring Michelle
The Blargh starring Brooke

Possessing Excellent Taste in Blogs
age of dissent starring xpyre
Dialectic of the University of Newcastle Philosophy Club
E. G. starring David
Majikthise starring Lindsay Beyerstein
Epideixis boasting the contributions of MH, Samuel Douglas, and Rowan Blyth
Scottish Nous starring Scott Hagaman
Mixing Memory (the reading group) by Chris

More More More
Arts & Letters Daily* produced by Denis Dutton
Blog Bites

*Warning: Not a Blog!

Changings

2004-12-02T01:06:00.000-05:00

- I've added a list of recommended posts to my sidebar. If you're new to the blog, those are the ones that I'd recommend browsing through.

- I'm about to add a more comprehensive, extended blogroll, which will be linked from the sidebar. The links in my sidebar will reflect my judgment, taste, fancy, and whim. Some links may end up rotating between my extended blogroll and the sidebar in order to keep my sidebar at a reasonable length.

- Soon, I will be linking posts to related posts, posts to categories, and categories to posts. Links to categories will appear on my sidebar! A sample of things to come:

Related: A Note to Our Readers

Too Hot For TV!!!!!

2004-12-01T19:05:00.000-05:00

The networks are finally showing some discretion about what they'll air. Some things are just not acceptable for network television. The internet has no such standards, so if you'd like you can go here to see the ad that was kept off the airwaves of both NBC and CBS. From the United Church of Christ, the ad proclaims "Jesus didn't turn people away. Neither do we." "No matter who you are or where you are on life's journey, you're welcome here." NBC and CBS may want ratings and ad revenue, but they still have the basic human decenty to refuse the money of a group that wants to spread such a controversial message.

Via Josh Marshall.

Like a Rolling Stone, Rolling Stones, Top Rolling Stone List

2004-11-30T21:33:00.000-05:00

Rollin' Stone and Papa Was a Rollin' Stone also make top 500.

(via Slate)

Seeing the future

2004-11-29T16:55:00.000-05:00

I finally saw the third Harry Potter movie (Prisoner of Azkaban) this weekend. One thing that I noticed was how different the actors look from how they used to. How do they do casting for these sorts of long-term projects with child actors? Does it involve the same computer technology that is used in the creation of photos of missing children? Or something more advanced that predicts how a person's appearance and voice will change? Which use has driven technological progress?

A quick google search didn't turn up any answers. Maybe somebody out there knows something.