So recently I’ve been reading “The Myth Of The Rational Voter” (which I highly recommend). Mostly the book makes a rigorous case for the intuitively obvious position that most people’s beliefs have more to do with what makes them feel good about themselves or what their friends believe than what the evidence shows. However, it also makes the simple, but profound, point that most people exercise far better judgment when they have significant value riding on the question. For instance even people who have the strong religious belief that god favors their cause and even that martyrdom brings stupendous heavenly rewards seem to reevaluate their position when they find out the other guy has the bigger army. It also explains the puzzling phenomena of religious tolerance. That is how can people who presumably think that belief the ‘true’ religion significantly increases the chance of eternal salvation abide what should be the ultimate form of child abuse, raising children in heathen religions¹. Listening to Steven Levitt (of freakonomics fame) give a talk today about how people tend to play the “dictator game” further solidified my certainty that this trade off between self image and more prosaic forms of self interest underlies most kinds of human interactions.²

Now “The Myth Of The Rational Voter” makes the case that many common political views can be explained by the fact that the social and psychological costs and benefits for espousing political beliefs far outweigh the minuscule chance that any individual will change the outcome. For instance the average liberal gains far more utility thinking of himself as racially conscious and being recognized as such by his friends for supporting affirmative action than he is likely to lose if it turns out that affirmative action harms minorities while imposing unnecessary costs on society (and vice versa for the conservative). After all his vote is extremely unlikely to change anything. Similarly the cost of seeming cold hearted and that pain of adopting a cynical view creates an incentive for people to boycott the products of low wage asian factories regardless of the evidence that this is a net harm to the very people laboring in those factories but when the prices are sufficiently lower for Chinese goods people tend to reexamine this belief.

Now if this account is true the trillion dollar question is how can we protect democracy from these sort of harmful incentives. The theory suggests what is needed is to make sure the people making the decisions have more directly at stake in the outcomes. Now the most traditional solution would be to add more layers of indirection to the system. Instead of having voters directly express their opinions on senators and presidents, thereby making policy decisions fairly responsive to public opinion, one could move to a system more like what the US founding fathers originally imagined with local elected officials voting for their constituents on national offices. While I do favor this reform it has it’s drawbacks. For one it is inherently unstable. The public wants more direct power and it is in the interest of any officials they elect to give it to them. Secondly, while being one of a small few with the power to truly decide policy does make self-image relatively less important (the consequences of your choice are now greater) it also increases the relative social and political pressures. For instance while the supreme court obviously does a lot better job deciding questions of law than the general public³ cases like Bush v. Gore suggest that the much greater dependence of their social and professional lives on strong partisans has a detrimental effect. Or alternatively that the public declarations of allegiance to one side or the other usually necessary to reach high office radically increase the costs of changing one’s mind once entering office. While an individual might only feel a bit foolish when they change their mind on a political issue someone who has achieved high office based on public affirmations of strong support for some view may feel like an out and out hypocrite.

A more radical, and likely more effective, solution would be to randomly choose some relatively small number of citizen electors. For instance instead of holding nationwide elections for president a year or two before the election we would randomly select 1000 or so registered voters from around the country and let these people choose the next president. Instead of spending massive amounts of money running campaign ads and campaigning all over the country politicians would spend the next year explaining in detail their policy views to these 1000 individuals along with the arguments and data needed to make their case. Given the much larger impact of the decision of each of these individuals they would have a greater incentive to genuinely familiarize themselves with the issues and relatively less reason to simply vote on feel good views. Of course to avoid the risk of politicians promising these voters programs targeted at their needs selection as a citizen elector would have to come along with a quite significant cash award reducing the impact of individual government programs on their lives, e.g., they would no longer have much selfish interest in bringing government jobs to their industry or region. However, this would be a relatively small cost to pay compared to current campaign budgets and it would certainly be miniscule compared to the potential increases in efficiency.

Unfortunately, I’m doubtful that the electorate would trust a system that relied so heavily on random sampling. After all most of the populace seems to strongly (and unjustifiably) believe that it would be better if everyone voted but don’t seem inclined to adopt the obvious solution of replacing voting with polling. So another solution might be to somehow create incentives for the electorate to get things right. Now obviously one can’t incentivize value questions as you can’t readily determine the right result but luckily people seem to largely agree on questions of fundamental value, at least much more than they agree on questions of efficacy. For instance their is broad agreement, despite some specific differences, on what schooling policy should aim to achieve. The debate between people favoring school choice or eliminating teaching unions and those opposing it is the efficacy of various policies in achieving these ends. Therefore one might imagine a system that proposes specific measurements of the effects of various policies and rewards those who correctly predicted those outcomes with cold hard cash. In other words we would divide voting on policies up into questions of value and questions of implementation with monetary rewards attached to correct choices on predictions about implementations.

Frankly this later solution actually seems less politically feasible and harder to implement than the former one. However, even if both of these options aren’t truly likely to be adopted hopefully someone will come up with some clever way to better align the interests of people making political decisions and the interests of the country at large that is more palatable. Certainly something must be done as it is unconscionable for us to sit here and let others suffer more than necessary just so we can have the luxury of feeling better about ourselves and not having to challenge our closely held beliefs.

Rumsfeld’s plan to become a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution has become the focus of protest. Now I think that Rumsfeld fucked up Iraq pretty badly and is thereby responsible for thousands if not millions (remember the Iraqis) of deaths. Given his popularity, especially among the left, it is no surprise that some liberals would protest this appointment. Some people would protest the fact that he was getting any job more prestigious than janitor. However, for Stanford professors to demand he not be given this appointment is an unacceptable attempt to tear down academic freedom and turn academic appointments into popularity contests.

First of all let’s make it clear that the protesters really are trying to subject academic appointments to a political test. Sure, they might raise a smoke screen about Rumsfeld not having authored many (any?) academic papers but if this was really the pivotal concern they would be demanding universities end the general practice of hiring ex-politicians as fellows. No one has given any plausible reason to believe that Rumsfeld would not have at least as much to offer the campus community in terms of real world experience in government and inside knowledge of his eventful years in government as other politicians who are offered these kinds of appointments. In other words it is as clear as day that those protesting this appointment of Rumsfeld are demanding that an otherwise valuable addition to the campus community be passed over for his political views¹.

Indeed this isn’t too far from what is being said in the petition against Rumsfeld’s appointment. A petition the New York Times says is being signed by many professors.

We view the appointment as fundamentally incompatible with the ethical values of truthfulness, tolerance, disinterested enquiry, respect for national and international laws and care for the opinions, property and lives of others to which Stanford is inalienably committed

Whoa. This is fucking nuts. Are they saying that Stanford should refuse to hire professors who argue against respecting national laws? What about academics who argue that government lie more or that the values of tolerance are overstated? Even if you actually believe that these sorts of views should disqualify one for a fellowship it’s merely a political belief that Rumsfeld is particularly at odds with these values. A good case could be made that Rumsfeld is more truthful than many of his equivalents and cares more for the property and lives of others than the protesters. He may have made a stupid mistake in invading Iraq but at least he seems to be concerned about the fate of the Iraqi people unlike many of the anti-war protesters who don’t seem to have even stopped to seriously consider what is in their interest. Ultimately what you believe about how good a defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld was is irrelevant. Rumsfeld is not advocating any anti-scientific or beyond the pale view like intelligent design or white supremacy and however strongly you might disagree with his politics or choices as defense secretary these aren’t good reasons to oppose his fellowship.

So several professors have called into the kqed show about this topic while I’ve been writing this and justified their opposition to the appointment by claiming that Donald Rumsfeld’s involvement with Abu Gharab make him a human rights violator and a violator of international law. Presumably the argument is that it would be reasounable to deny Hitler or Stalin appointments no matter what their academic credentials and it is thus reasonable to deny Donald Rumsfeld an appointment on the same grounds. This is pure sophistry to justify acting on their strong emotional reaction to Rumsfeld.

Not only is there insufficient evidence that Rumsfeld was more than negligent or cultivated an approving attitude of harsh terrorism to deny him a job even if he had personally tortured prisoners for information this still wouldn’t justify denying him the appointment. The view that it is reasonable to torture people for information when you believe it will stop more suffering than it causes is hardly beyond the academic pale and if you believe that we’ve made Iraq worse than it was in Saddam you are tacitly agreeing that sometimes human rights violations are a net positive (when they hold sectarian violence in check). The international law point is pure bullshit since there is more clear cut reason to believe Clinton violated international law with his (laudable) intervention in Bosnia than Rumsfeld did and if people really believed in this justification they would be getting out treaties and citing chapter and verse instead of using them to stand in for their vague emotional feelings on the issue.

Ultimately I’m skeptical of the idea that any views or prior actions justify denying academic appointments² but even if some views or actions are beyond the pale the mere fact that Bush was reelected just four years ago with Rumsfeld by his side is enough to show that Rumsfeld doesn’t fall into this category. You can try to play clever word games to reclassify just the people you really really don’t like fall outside the protection of academic freedom but if academic freedom is going to be worth anything it needs to offer a robust protection of divergent views and there is no robust distinction that can be drawn between Rumsfeld and other similar appointments. Ironically Rumsfeld is just going to come give some talks at Stanford, his days of causing harm are over, but the professors protesting his appointment are attacking important academic values. Does that mean that by their standard it would be fair to oppose hiring them?

I’m listening to an interview on KQED’s forum (local NPR station’s call in show) with science journalist Timothy Ferris. Apparently he just wrote a new book about amateur astronomy which I don’t doubt is well researched and accurate but as people called in he apparently felt the need to opine on time travel and quantum mechanics ’scientific’ matters and I was appalled. Since he’s also written a book called “The Whole Shebang” his misleading answers can’t be explained as mere failure to research. However, I’m inclined to think that in this case the fault lies with the physicists themselves (either for doing bad philosophy or using mislead metaphors.

It started with someone bringing up the Fermi paradox (why haven’t advanced alien civilizations contacted us yet). The host then steered the question towards whether this was an argument against time travel as well (failure to see time travelers). Timothy Ferris replied that he didn’t find it very compelling because he expects time will be lack a deck of cards so that if you go back in time of forward in time you end up in one of many possible pasts or many possible futures. While he admitted it was just his expectation he clearly conveyed the sense that it was a possibility that experts would take seriously.

I happen to think the very idea of something being time travel requires that we go back into the past not merely enter some universe that looks like the past.¹ However, let’s set this point aside. I suspect the journalist was referencing some approaches to quantum mechanics that go by the name of sum over histories or multiple histories. Possibly he meant to refer to many minds or many worlds theories. The problem is that traveling to an ‘alternate’ past doesn’t even make sense in any of them. Supposing it was true and even meaningful that we have multiple histories in this QM sense we would have multiple presents as well. What the hell would it even mean for a person, who is really a superposition, to visit one component of a prior superposition? Pure many worlds theories only really make sense² if we understand them as collapsing down to a many mind’s theory and it certainly isn’t clear what it would mean for a mind that rides atop the superposition to time travel by itself, certainly not in the sense of some dude from the future appearing.

That’s confused and I was annoyed that he said it with such apparent authority but what really got my goat was when he talked about how interesting it would be if we ended up with quantum computers since we couldn’t explain their processing power with just one universe and would have to say that they use other universes to do their computations. This is just a lie that is being pushed on the public. The fundamental laws of nature could just offer us an oracle that computer anything we wanted as fast as we want. For all we know there is some special experiment we can do that reveals the true bits of 0′ (the set of the halting problem). Worse this is certainly not anything scientists have or can test. It is purely unjustified bad philosophical speculation that misleads the public.

I’m not sure whether to be mad at the people who promote this crap or applaud the physicists for great PR. Maybe we should just adopt this for math. Push the whole confusion about Godel’s theorem a bit more and try selling the Banach-Tarski paradox as a proof that “space is an illusion.”

Bit about quantum computer

So I just heard about one of the stupidest pseudo-environmentalist public awareness campaigns on NPR’s marketplace. One of their reporters (Tess Vigeland) has decided to carry her trash around with her for two weeks. She is blogging about this experience here and challenging other people to take “Tess’ Trash Challenge” and do the same. Now if I was doing something as dumb and annoying as carrying my trash around with me I wouldn’t want to be doing it alone either but why the hell is she doing this in the first place?

Apparently this is part of a new American Public Media project called Consumed which plans to:

Is our consumer society sustainable? American Public Media takes on that question in a new special series, Consumed. We’ll follow consumerism from its origins to its dominance over the world’s economy and, arguably, its culture. And we’ll examine how, and if, it might be adapted to reduce its destructive consequence while keeping store shelves stocked.

Apparently they, along with groups like the Zero Waste Alliance, are advocating achieving “Zero Waste”¹. But for the love of god why? The answer Tess gives is distinctly unsatisfying.

Garbage critics say we’re going to run out of places to put it, and that even if we had enough space, all we’re doing is encouraging consumption. Others argue the landfill issue has been greatly improved because of technology — it’s not the old city dump anymore.

Now it may be that we have an infrastructure problem and need to spend more money building new, deeper landfills. I don’t know. But we sure as hell aren’t running out of literal space to bury trash. Tess quotes the EPA as saying we generated 245.7 million tons of municipal waste in 2005. Now it seems reasonable to suppose that after compactification this waste will have at least the density of water. That means the total amount of trash created in one year fits inside 0.26 cubic miles. Now admittedly filling a square pit that deep with trash probably poses some technical challenges but given the huge empty spaces in the american west we hardly are running out of literal space to store our waste. We aren’t even running out of literal space to store our waste without significant environmental impact. Hell all the shit we make came from somewhere so it could never be more than a problem of recompactification and containment.

In other words the trash issue is a purely economic problem. It might start to cost more to build landfills but that’s it. We just need appropriate regulations to make sure trash is disposed of in a safe fashion and we can sit back and let the price of garbage disposal take care of the problem for us. There is absolutely no reason at all to turn this into a moral crusade and the idea of the Zero Waste Alliance that this is a way to save money is absurd. Of course some increase in the amount of recycling is probably money saving but to the extent it’s economically efficient it will be incentivized by garbage fees. The fact that companies aren’t doing this for profit is strong evidence that it would cost more money than it would save. Garbage collection does not have large externalities.

So what explains the fuss? It’s yet another example of the substitution of our emotional reactions to what seems like waste for our rational judgment about consequences. This is why I hate the word sustainability so much. This word invites us to make these errors by conflating our emotional idea of leaving things the same as they were when we started and it’s supposed definition in terms of being able to continue behaving as we are now. Even the definition itself is problematic because no particular state of affairs is sustainable or unsustainable only rules for future behavior. Thus talking about whether our consumerism is unsustainable tricks people into thinking “why yes if we keep creating trash at an (exponentially) increasing rate we will run out of places to put it so it’s unsustainable and we better stop.” The problem is that this isn’t even a plausible model for our societies future behavior. The right question to ask is, “If we continue to price garbage disposal at or above the cost of creating creating landfills we will be able to continue.” The answer here is a resounding yes.

This sort of thing is why I despise most of the environmental movement (though there are many reasonable people who are part of it). There are very real environmental concerns that we need to deal with like global warming but they are economic and engineering challenges not moral judgments about our waste or consumer culture. Not only do stupid pseudo-environmental worries like this one do great harm by distracting from real issues like global warming they also help cement the idea in many people’s minds that environmentalism is just that stupid moralizing concern about wasting shit. Part of the reason so much of the right is still hostile to global warming is because the environmental movement managed to push most environmental questions out of the practical realm and into a moral one. Maybe in the past that was necessary to get results on important issues. I don’t know but this sort of shit with trash and sustainability is just garbage.

I expect this sort of thing from the BBC. I’m disappointed to see it on NPR’s marketplace of all things.

I think there is a good case for making the sale of child porn illegal and certainly the creation of child porn (by molesting actual children) should be heavily criminalized¹. However, the argument for criminalizing mere possession of child porn seems less strong. In particular I can think of a bunch of reasons off the top of my head why criminalizing child porn would increase the number of molested children. Let me summarize a few here.

1. There are documented problems with the harshness of child abuse penalties (lifelong sex offender status etc..) discouraging family members from turning in their relatives. No doubt people are going to be an order of magnitude more reluctant to send their uncle or brother to jail for merely possessing child porn (whatever the truth is they will tell themselves he doesn’t hurt anyone). If child porn was decriminalized it might encourage more people to report pedophiles they know to social services who can then provide treatment.
2. Making possession and sharing of child porn illegal radically restricts the reuse of child porn. Suppose there is X amount of child porn that has ever been made and X is more than enough to satisfy most people. If they could all access that X amount there wouldn’t be as much motivation to molest kids to make child porn. On the other hand by making it illegal we likely take a great deal of that child porn off of the internet and balkanize the rest of it encouraging more people to pay for child porn and thereby encourage others to make it.
3. Prohibiting possession of something always creates a criminal element who tries to deliver that thing. Organized crime creating child porn may harm children more than the alternative. It’s hard to rate relative badness of this sort of thing but being repeatedly molested by a criminal enterprise may be much worse than being occasionally molested by your uncle.
4. Whenever you criminalize an activity that a fair number of the perpetrators see as victimless (”I just downloaded the pics I didn’t hurt anyone”) you reduce the barrier to further crime. This is the same way that government prohibition of weed has made it a gateway drug. In the legal scheme where mere possession of child porn is a felony many people may not see it as a big leap to go from mere possession to purchasing child porn from sketchy eastern European websites. On the other hand if you make it a felony to purchase child porn but not merely to possess it you might very well do more to suppress the profit motive in abusing children.
5. I suspect that some people who like to look at child porn (or at least who would were it not a felony) are actually decent people who do believe that children shouldn’t be molested, they just happen to be turned on by it. For instance some girls both feel very strongly about protecting college girls from being taken advantage of yet also find porn that depicts it really hot. I have no reason to believe that there aren’t some people who are turned on by child porn who feel similarly. By decriminalizing mere possession you can enlist the aid of these people in tracking down the abusers who make the material.
6. Making possession of child porn a felony encourages people to be very careful about who they share it with reducing the distribution of any single image. This makes it much less likely that the child pornographer will be caught since it is less likely to make it to the police in a timely fashion.
7. Sending otherwise productive members of society to prison and especially inflicting punitive sex predator laws on them is not only a huge societal cost but makes them more likely to offend. The guy who is turned on by molesting kids but has a nice career, friends and family may very well keep his desires under control. Send him to prison for a few years because you find some child porn on his hard drive and he may very well become bitter and having little left to lose descend to actually molesting children.
8. Maybe people who would otherwise get treatment are scared of asking for help lest their child porn collections be suspected and they get sent to jail. Since therapy seems to be helpful in preventing more abuse this could be another potential avenue of harm.
9. Perhaps the release provided to pedophiles by looking at child porn makes them less likely to go out and molest. While I think this is the least likely of all these points it needs serious study not another mass media sensationalization about a correlation between the two (duh people who want to look at child porn more likely to molest kids).

Now maybe these factors all end up getting balanced out by other ones but I seriously doubt that these questions have been seriously studied. They certainly weren’t why we passed the laws against child porn. Frankly I don’t really know whether child porn laws help or hurt and given that I’m unsure I think the default state should be not to regulate speech/content. However, one can reasonably disagree with this point.

What one can’t reasonably disagree with is that we have a morally responsibility to seriously examine whether laws criminalizing child porn reduce or increase the number of children who are molested. If you are in a position to seriously influence the law (politician etc..) and you allow more children to be molested because you want to make something as disgusting as child porn illegal or just because you are too lazy to consider the arguments then your not much better (maybe worse) than a child molester yourself. At least child molesters have the small excuse of extreme psychological pressure but if you let it happen out of mere laziness you have no such excuse.

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1. By child porn I mean photographic evidence of what would be otherwise termed molestation of a child. Teens taking pics of each other or people taking candid shots of their kids getting out of their bath even if later used for sexual purpose are not what I am talking about here. Maybe other laws should cover these situations but that isn’t the subject here, nor will I address here the question of where to draw various age lines. ↩

The big novelty story in the news this week is the study that is being reported as showing that liberals’ brains are wired differently and are better able to “tolerate ambiguity and conflict” than conservatives. Of course no one should ever trust public interest science reporting like this so those of you who have access to Nature Neuroscience can find the original journal article here. While the original article is careful to say nothing that is technically wrong¹ it is almost totally without real content. In particular the original journal article throws together what are essentially two unrelated results.

The study subjected volunteers to a test which required them to quickly press a button in response to a ‘go’ stimulus (for instance a green light) but not to do so when presented with a ‘no go’ stimulus (maybe a red light) and measured their ability to avoid pressing the button when a no go stimulus was presented after they were conditioned with many go stimuluses. They verified as had previously been suspected (or even known) that performance on this test was correlated with activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). They also noted that liberals tended to perform better at this task (less frequently press the button in response to a no go stimulus) than conservatives. Of course in the absence of confounding factors this will likely mean that liberal political orientation will tend to correlate with higher activity in the ACC and the article presents this correlation rather than breaking it down into separate claims as I did.

Now the conclusion of the report that:

Taken together, our results are consistent with the view that political orientation, in part, reflects individual differences in the functioning of a general mechanism related to cognitive control and self-regulation

is technically true but then again the fact that I’m not a six foot tall intelligent spider is also consistent with that conclusion. Of course the fact that

At the behavioral level, conservatives were also more likely to make errors of commission. Although a liberal orientation was associated with better performance on the response-inhibition task examined here, conservatives would presumably perform better on tasks in which a more fixed response style is optimal.

While this might seems suggestive that liberals and conservatives attitudes might stem from (deep seated) brain differences it is such week evidence that it should barely budge one’s prior probability. No effort seems to have been done to recruit a random sample of subjects from any particular population nor was any regression run to determine if the correlation persisted once other factors were discounted. For instance at a fairly liberal college campus it might turn out that people with lots of friends are going to experience greater social pressure to call themselves liberal and that people who are quicker at go/no go tasks are also quicker whits or more socially apt. A hundred other possible correlations could explain this result. Besides, I think our prior probability that liberal and conservative viewpoints would be correlated with fairly general cognitive features should be quite high. For instance in this era I suspect that being more strongly affected by reactions of immediate sympathy would probably turn out to correlate with liberalism and it would be amazing to me if no broad cognitive feature correlated with political affiliation somehow.

Unfortunately, either do to poor wording or deliberate attempt to make boring research seem more interesting the journal article functions as the perfect template for an urban legend. The introductory statement in the journal article that said

Across dozens of behavioral studies, conservatives have been found to be more structured and persistent in their judgments and approaches to decision-making, as indicated by higher average scores on psychological measures of personal needs for order, structure and closure. Liberals, by contrast, report higher tolerance of ambiguity and complexity, and greater openness to new experiences on psychological measures.

May be technically correct but the media is unlikely to understand “higher tolerance of ambiguity and complexity” as a technical term. Indeed they didn’t saying things like

Previous psychological studies have found that conservatives tend to be more structured and persistent in their judgments whereas liberals are more open to new experiences. The latest study found those traits are not confined to political situations but also influence everyday decisions.

and

Sulloway said the results could explain why President Bush demonstrated a single-minded commitment to the Iraq war and why some people perceived Sen. John F. Kerry, the liberal Massachusetts Democrat who opposed Bush in the 2004 presidential race, as a “flip-flopper” for changing his mind about the conflict. Based on the results, he said, liberals could be expected to more readily accept new social, scientific or religious ideas.

This is just silly. We could describe the exact same thing by saying, “Conservatives are more principled than liberals.” Hell in the sense meant in the article I tend to think that tolerance of ambiguity, while pragmatically useful, is a logical flaw². Unsurprisingly the association of the pretty banal results about behavior correlation with neurological activity tended to result in the impression that whether one was liberal or conservative was the result of inherent properties. When will people learn that all behavioral differences can be traced to brain differences.

I’ve been critical of the UAW grad student union at UC Berkeley for some time. While I’m generally skeptical of the (direct)¹ benefits of unions I think there is a plausible argument for graduate student unions as well as unions in potentially hazardous working environments, professions with particularly low liquidity or those employing illegal workers². In potentially hazardous professions unions serve an important social good by mitigating the harm of many people’s irrational tendency to underestimate risks in familiar situations. Left up only to the free market I suspect that people’s desire for the immediate reward of high pay would often encourage them to accept jobs where the risk of serious injury outweighed the reward of increased pay. This is obviously not the case for grad students but there is a similar problem of hidden risk. In particular graduate study is only a worthwhile payoff if one truly receives a diploma meaning that every year spent in graduate school is effectively a deposit of resources into the university that goes uncompensated should you not graduate. Just as people’s irrational failure to take into account future risk of death can justify the otherwise inefficient mechanism of union bargaining so too can their irrational failure to take into account the risk of either not graduating or receiving poor recommendations if they don’t do excessive lab work for their mentor justify grad student unions. Somewhat counter-intuitively I take the primary benefit of unions at this stage in US history to be their role in restricting employee choice. That is by preventing employees from agreeing to certain arrangements (yes I’ll work this dangerous job for more cash or I’ll do 80 hours a week in lab for a good recommendation) they prevent employers from providing incentives that prey on human irrationality.

I recognize the benefit the UC grad student union provides for many grad students in this fashion (thankfully not truly necessary in math) and since I think TA’s here aren’t paid nearly enough I remained in the union despite a certain skepticism of it’s political policies and role in restricting differential grad student pay for different departments. However today I finally sent in an email asking to be removed from the rolls when I saw the most recent bargaining update they released. I provide the full text after the break but the section that really drove me to ask to be taken off the roles was the following:

CHILDCARE: the administration rejected our proposal to subsidize employee childcare costs though they recognized the need for a childcare program. One university spokesperson accurately characterized our proposal as “a subsidy program to enhance an [employee’s] ability to matriculate, be gainfully employed and contribute to the mission of the university.” The next day, another university representative, in rejecting our proposal, said, “The University believes that there are sufficient child care resources provided to most of the individuals that you represent, and those programs are both effective and cost effective . They provide services at a reasonable cost, recognizing the financial needs of the students.” This remark displayed an arrogant disregard for the realities of life for teaching assistants, readers, and tutors with children, who more often than not face lengthy waitlists and programs that absorb at least half of their monthly wages.

I have every reason to believe that grad student pay is a zero sum game. Every dollar the UC spends to increase child care resources is one less dollar that can be used for other sorts of graduate student support. Thus by taking the position they have the union is basically advocating for a transfer of money from my pocket to the pockets of people with families.

Now I don’t have anything against grad students who choose to raise families and I sympathize with the fact that it is very difficult to raise a child on a graduate student’s salary. However, it’s also fucking difficult to try and afford frequent plane flights across the country to maintain a long distance relationship. I’m sure it’s equally difficult to try and visit sick relatives, help with the family business or any other major life choice that requires money. Now I could see an argument that certain sorts of life choices tend to produce more utility so we should subsidize those at the expense of people who would use their money to go skiing in Vale. Yet on such a theory it should be relationships, which have a much stronger correlation with happiness than children, that should be supported and I have no doubt the number of grad students at Berkeley in long distance relationships is of the same order of magnitude as those who have children.

Now someone is undoubtedly going to say something about women running out of time to have children but I would argue that relationships, not reproduction, is the truly time sensitive concern. Very few women in grad school are anywhere near menopause and upon graduation they can still choose to reproduce but once out of grad school your ability to meet worthwhile new people plummets. Sure you could argue that once out of grad school it is very difficult for a woman to have a child without taking damage to her career but it is misleading³ to suggest this is a gender equity issue and uncompelling compared with the unconditional increased difficulty of meeting a significant other outside of school. Now I certainly agree that academia unnecessarily penalizes people with competing interests such as child care while they are young but if anything academia needlessly penalizes relationships with other academics more than it does reproduction. In other words every valid concern about fairness or individual utility that favors subsidizing childcare also favors subsidizing my plane flights to Boston as well as many other life choices.

What then about the argument that affordable childcare is needed for the child’s wellbeing? This might be a compelling argument if we were talking about a group besides grad students but while expensive child care might burden the grad student it is unlikely to cause the child to be neglected or otherwise suffer. Given the various studies suggesting that the difference merely adequate and excellent parenting makes in quantitative measures of a child’s future success is quite small this argument just doesn’t hold water for grad students. Grad students are the one group we can count on to delay having a child or rearrange their lives to make sure the kid isn’t neglected.

What then about the final argument that we need to encourage more grad student types to reproduce. I think this is the only plausible case to be made but I no longer think it is compelling. The idea that we need to encourage smart people to reproduce as some kind of selective breeding program seems to make a subtle mistake about the way natural selection works. In the long run evolution will either manage to put together the little tweaks that make grad students smart with a strong desire to reproduce or it will find a better unrelated path toward intelligence. As far as the near future I don’t see subsidies for grad student families making huge differences in the electorate but I do see social benefits accruing from discouraging academic women to reproduce. Certainly anyone who believes in the role model theory for affirmative action should think that the more we can do to discourage women from opting out of academia for children the better. In fact anyone who believes that women are somehow triked or brainwashed into taking more than their fair share of childrearing should oppose this sort of reproductive support on the grounds that it reduces the unfairness and works to eliminate the stereotypes that caused the problem.

Ultimately I was uncertain about my support for the UAW grad student union in the first place and this message finally convinced me that my membership was doing more harm than good. The university doesn’t even want to go back to the days where biology grad students could be made to work 80 hours a week but my support for the union signals my acceptance of fucked up feel good policies like prioritizing families over the childless and silly demands for equality between the summer session and the school year⁴. Since the union isn’t going to disappear all my continued membership does is help convince the union and the university these stupid policies are what the grad students want. Besides I just feel dirty being affiliated with a organization that not only makes such unjustified policy demands but also alleges “bad faith” on the part of the university for simply believing that the union’s positions aren’t correct.blah⁵

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I’m sitting here listening to general Petraeus give his report to congress and while the senate does better than the public discourse they still seem to have fallen into this simplistic ‘are we winning or losing’ narrative. Obviously it’s the senate’s job to discern the prospects for success in Iraq and pull the plug if they determine that American troops are doing more harm than good in Iraq but that’s not the same thing as saying we are likely to lose. If we pull out of Iraq precipitously the country could explode into a full fledged genocidal civil war.¹ How likely does success have to be for us to try to prevent another holocaust? If there was a 10% chance of saving the citizens of Boston from death at the hands of a rapacious bloodthirsty militia would we refuse to send in the army because it might cause a few thousand casualties?

At least the people who believe that we did the Iraqis a favor by invading have a bit of an excuse². They can say, “we did you a favor now it’s up to you,” but the rest of us can take no such comfort. We invaded Iraq and fucked up their country and it’s now our responsibility to do the best by the Iraqi people. It’s downright disgusting to hear senators telling Petraeus that Iraq is distracting from the war on terror, that it’s creating terrorists, or that it’s negatively impacting our military readiness. Is that going to be what we tell the millions of Iraqi mothers, and brothers and children when their family members are killed in a civil war. “Sorry, we needed to go fight terror. You should have managed your country better after we fucked it up.” Sure it’s frustrating to see so little progress and disheartening to think that we might have to stay there for ten years but neither of these justify risking millions of lives in a potential genocide. Saying that “the American people won’t tolerate continued lack of progress,” isn’t an excuse to let millions die.

Sure one or two Senators made the claim that our troops create more violence than they deter. That’s an important theory that ought to be seriously examined but you’ll excuse me if I don’t believe it is a justified belief when I only hear it from hardcore anti-war Senators in the middle of rants about how our military belongs at home not fighting wars for incompetent administrations. Quite obviously these politicians and their supporters have first decided to oppose the war and demand our troops come home and then looked for a justification for that view. The war might have been a horrible mistake but it’s a mistake we made and now we need to figure out the best way to mitigate the harm we caused.

As disappointed as I am in many of our Senators it’s groups like moveon.org that truly disgust me. I used to like them as an energetic democratic fund raising group and even considered donating money to them during Kerry’s candidacy but running across this advertisement today made me sick. Not only does this ad trivialize the lives of millions of Iraqis when it criticizes Petraeus for not saying, “what Americans are desperate to hear: a timetable for withdrawing all our troops.” but it also blatantly misrepresents the source documents it uses to indict Petraeus. The GAO report merely says exactly what Petraeus himself has said, that many of the political objectives the Al-Maliki government set for itself were not met. The National Intelligence Estimate also backs up Petraeus when it says that there has been “some security progress but political reconciliation elusive.” Finally the report by the Jones Commission argues that while the Iraqi police have proven ineffective the army is making progress but isn’t yet ready to take over independent operations. All statements compatible with the view that we need to stay in Iraq longer but none of them about the really important issue of what will happen when we leave. Jesus christ you are supposed to be a liberal organization where is your concern for the Iraqis? Don’t you think they deserve more than a ‘yah yah they’ll be better off without us’? Like say seriously considering whether keeping the soldiers in Iraq would save lives?

Ironically despite the constant hand wringing by many liberals about “the American Empire” it is their assault on a general called back from a war to answer primarily domestic concerns that reminds me of the worst aspects of the Roman empire. Any old country can invade and occupy another country but only an empire can so blithely play domestic politics with millions of foreign lives. This behavior makes me ashamed to be an American and a liberal. When the Bush administration placed the lives of the Iraqis second to their ideological agenda it was bad enough but for the liberals to follow them down the rabbit hole and not even seriously consider the welfare of the Iraqis is downright evil. These are real people just as worthy of moral consideration as the ones who live in Indiana no matter what milestones their government has failed to meet. Let’s step back and put aside our ideological preferences and figure out what is most likely to fix Iraq. I genuinely want to know what policy will most likely bring success in Iraq but no one else seems interested³

Each and every one of you out there has a real moral obligation to the Iraqi people not to demand a pullout (or a continued occupation) without good reason to believe it is in the Iraqi people’s best interest. If we pull out because people like you demanded it without seriously considering the consequences the blood will be on your hands.

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PEOPLE IF WE MAKE THE WRONG CHOICE MILLIONS OF PEOPLE JUST LIKE YOU MIGHT DIE, TENS OF THOUSANDS MAY BE RAPED AND TORTURED, AND MANY MORE FORCED TO FLEE AND IT’S ALL OUR FAULT. Isn’t that more important than political ideology and domestic considerations? Would it really be that hard to admit that you aren’t sure what the best policy in this complicated situation is? If you were in congress you wouldn’t bet their lives on a gut feeling without looking at the evidence so don’t demand that your congressmen bet their lives on your uninformed feeling.

UPDATE: Fixed some wording, added clarification at the bottom.

Consider a philosophical debate between two materialists over whether a virus is alive. Philosopher A advances the hypothesis that any organism capable of manipulating it’s environment to copy itself is alive. Philosopher B counters that Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” has this property as it’s induces people to produce reproductions of the work and instead argues that a being is alive only if it doesn’t require outside intervention to duplicate itself. Philosopher A counters with an example of a plant that humans have cultivated for long enough that it is now incapable of reproduction without intentional human intervention.

Now we can imagine this debate continuing as both philosophers refine their theories as to what constitutes life but no matter how long they argue in this fashion they can’t hope to reach any substantive conclusions. Why? Because they didn’t disagree about anything but word usage at the outset. As materialists they both reject the notion of some elan vital that we might add to our fundamental ontology to ‘explain’ what counts as alive and what doesn’t. As far as the virus goes they would both accept the biologists explanation as to how it reproduced they only disagree on how to label this event. Now there are certainly times it makes sense to argue about labeling but we naturally expect such debates to take a very different form. In particular when people merely disagree about how we should term something they will usually sidestep the debate eventually and simply qualify their wording. When people disagree on how in fact people are inclined to use words they tend to either shrug and move on or to start pulling out real empirical data¹. In no case where people understand themselves to be merely debating a matter of labeling would we expect them to argue about the issue for decades in reputable journals with no hint that they view themselves as debating some empirical fact about usage or pragmatic fact about what would make for good usage.

Unfortunately there seems to be no shortage of arguments in philosophy that can’t be explained as anything other than a confusion of a question of terminology as a substantive question². There are a host of examples but let me give a couple

Is formalism or fictionalism the right philosophy of math?

Now there is (arguably) a genuine substantive question as to whether mathematical Platonism is true. Is there or is there not a realm of platonic objects out there? And if you believe in a substantive notion of reference (reference facts aren’t ontologically reducible to physical/mental facts) whether or not that is what we refer to with mathematical talk. However, when we get down to debates between functionalism and fictionalism things suddenly become much more unclear.

Neither theory disagrees about what in fact mathematicians assert nor makes any fundamentally different metaphysical suppositions. Nor do the two theories compete on genuine empirical predictions. Neither theory attempts to best predict what in practice people will tend to assert about mathematics. So in what sense can there be said to be a substantive question at issue here? And if not why believe these two interpretations are in opposition to each other?.

The “Proper” Conception of Evidential Support

In formal epistemology there seems to be a great deal of ink spilt arguing over what the ‘proper’ notion of confirmation is. Now Brandon Fitelson has always (at least to my eyes) pushed for a ‘there is no fact of the matter’ resolution to many debates in this area so I wouldn’t accuse him of making this sort of mistake but this paper of his gives a nice picture of what sorts of arguments are at play in the area. In particular there seems to be a long lasting dispute as to what the ‘right’ notion of confirmation turns out to be. Is it a three place relation between evidence, theory 1 and theory 2 or is it a two place relationship between evidence and a hypothesis?

Now I would be most surprised if anyone in this debate thought confirmation was an substantive notion (but I’ve been wrong about this sort of thing before), that is that when we assert that evidence E favors hypothesis H we aren’t just asserting some fact about probabilities, models or events but actually claiming that there is some special ‘confirmation’ property in our ontology that adheres to that particular relation but not to others that we might have chosen instead to term confirmation and that. Yet if we aren’t being ontologically liberal like this it would seem that all this debate about what is the ‘right’ notion of confirmation seems silly. We can all agree on the formal consequences of each notion and just set aside the contentious terminological question³.

Is Welfare Desire Satsifaction or Utility Maximization

I mention this because it was the argument that first made me realize that many of these debates couldn’t be substantive. While many people want to add an extra ontological fact to explain morality few people are inclined to indiscriminately add ontological entities for subsidiary moral concepts like welfare yet they are perfectly happy to debate the issue as if it were substantive.

In particular many people argue about whether we maximize welfare by maximizing utility or by maximizing desire satisfaction (or something else) as if it was a separate question we resolve prior to figuring out what is morally good. However, short of proposing a new fundamental property or relation it would seem that the debate over what increases someone’s welfare is merely a terminological question.

Kripke’s Causal Theory of Reference for naturalists

I debated about including this one since some people who buy into Kripke’s theory believe it as a genuine substantial claim. That is they add extra fundamental objects to their ontology (references, meanings etc..) and make the substantial claim that somehow our intuitive explanations of words in terms of other words track these objects and that as a real ontological fact it turns out that the reference of our word is determined by it’s causal history.

However, many of the people who take these theories seriously would call themselves naturalists or physicalists and would balk at the suggestion that by endorsing Kripke’s theory they were making grandiose metaphysical claims that couldn’t possibly be explained in terms of anything physics could in principle ever discover. Presumably as a physicalist one should accept the fact that there is nothing more to speech acts than certain configurations of matter and that there is no free floating metaphysical object ‘the reference’ that exists over and above the configuration of matter. As I’ve argued before it’s absurd for a good naturalist/physicalist to have a horse in the internalist/externalist debate except insofar as one turns out to be a genuinely better empirical predictor of future events.

My thesis is that there is a strong bias towards taking mere disputes about terminology and assuming that they are substantive. Not only is it a tempting fallacy to fall into on it’s own but it also creates for a much more interesting seeming discussion. It seems much more significant to say that one is figuring out the nature of life than to admit one is merely debating what we should call “life.” In any case whatever the reason it seems that this is a common fallacy that I see in philosophical discourse and one we should guard against. There are more than enough substantive arguments to keep philosophers busy and some of these non-substantive arguments are worth having as well but which arguments we take to be persuasive will be very different once we understand it is merely a terminological debate. Importantly once we accept that many of our debates are merely terminological we can no longer assume that there is any tension between things like internalism and externalism or different measures of confirmation.

As an aside I think this is in some sense the issue between Carnap and Quine over the nature of analyticity but that’s something for another post.

CLARIFICATION: I don’t want to claim that these debates couldn’t be rendered substantive. Really all I want to claim is that they are not naively substantive questions so using a standard of argumentation suited to this assumption is in error. I don’t mean to say that we need to abandon these questions only that we should figure out what we are trying to say and what it would take to establish our claim before we try to argue for one side or another.

Also I’m not convinced that any particular philosopher is making this error. It often seems that when I talk to any given philosopher about the matter they have some complex alternative interpretation of the claims at issue that either recognizes them as not substantive or renders them so through some non-obvious interpretation. It’s entirely possible that this is merely a process error but at the very least something is wrong when people adopt the form of a substantive argument for notions that don’t seem like they could be substantive without giving an indication as to what way it is (non-obviously) substantive (least different people think they are debating different questions). What I really want to do hear is not so much to advance my particular theory as to what is going wrong but to call attention to the fact that something seems really out of wack (or have someone give me a satisfactory explanation as to why it is not).

Over the past week there has been an explosion of outrage against President Bush’s plan to cap State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). This program is intended to help states fund insurance for poor children and enrollment was originally restricted to double the federal poverty line. However, the Bush and Clinton administrations issued waivers allowing states to be reimbursed for coverage of more children (up to at least 3.5 times the poverty line). In Bush’s most recent budget he proposed requiring that states enroll 95% of children below twice the poverty line before they can enroll children above 2.5 times times the poverty line.

As one might have guessed there has been an onslaught of editorials and letters to the editor acusing Bush of pandering to the insurance industry, putting a narrow ideology over the health of our children and otherwise just being an all around bad guy who doesn’t care about our kids. Despite my distaste for fox news they had the only story I found that explained the administration’s position that this is really an attempt by the states to get “the federal government to bear the brunt of expanded health coverage and then call it progress.”

Now I tend to favor something like national health care¹ and I agree and sympathize with the point that, “people are fed up with a system full of potholes and twists and turns in coverage along with control issues that make patients mere pawns in the game.” However, SCHIP is hardly a universal solution that gets rid of potholes and twists and hopefully no one is dumb enough to try and expand a stop-gap solution for poor kids to everyone instead of implementing a well architected nationwide plan². Yes it’s wonderful that there has been “a heartwarming drop in the number of uninsured children,” and I don’t think we ought to reverse this trend but none of this shows that the feds ought to pay for some states to insure higher income children.

In this case at least the Bush administration is totally correct. Nothing prevents states from choosing to insure children above 2.5 times the federal poverty line and unlike a true national solution to the health care problem I can’t make out any economies of scale that would make this more efficient on the federal level. I might feel better about this program if it was poor states that were receiving the wavers to extend the federal program but it is states like New York, New Jersey and California who seem particularly eager to extend the coverage to higher incomes. These states argue that cost of living varies by area so children who should really count as poor may be well above the federal poverty line. That may be true but those states where the cost of living is high are also those states with the most money.

Now I think one could criticize the choice of 95 as the percentage of children below twice the poverty line who must be enrolled before the feds will chip in for insured children about 2.5 times the poverty line but at least this policy strongly incentivizes states to guarantee that poor children are actually covered. The fact that 30% of those eligible are not enrolled may show that 95% is an unrealistic goal but it also makes a strong case for conditioning greater support for better off kids on greater enrollment of the poor. I’m open to the argument that congress should extend this program to 3 or 4 times the poverty line for every state who enrolls some (perhaps more reasonable) target percent of the most needy children if only to incentivize the more reluctant states to provide this benefit. However, cutting off an exception program whose primary effect seems to be to transferring money from poor states to rich ones hardly makes one a monster.

Basically I find it really annoying when politicians use this kind of save the children rhetoric to disguise their own unwillingness to do the same. If Bush’s goes through the states could just raise their own damn taxes and fund it if they really think it is important. Spitzer in particular will show himself to be a huge hypocrite if he doesn’t have the balls to suggest the state pay for this insurance after his rhetoric against Bush. I’m already pretty annoyed at him for linking Bush’s failure to spend on this insurance policy to the war. Bush may have been totally fucking incompetent about getting us into war but we are their now and his belief that pulling out now would just make things worse is hardly unreasonable. Spitzer may disagree with Bush about the wisdom of staying in Iraq but suggesting Bush is being extra unreasonable because he thinks that hundreds of thousands (maybe millions) of Iraqi lives are more important than insuring some more kids in the states annoys me. In any case whatever you think about the particular arguments here it’s pretty obvious that this sort of ‘Save The Children’ rhetoric is hardly a good way to decide policy.

The more I see in politics the more I think those studies (can’t remember where I read them) suggesting that the benefits of government aid flow primarily to the middle class are right on the money. I mean there is a fuckton more we could do for the genuinely poor kids and those potential programs trade off against money we might spend on these less poor children but which one are people clamoring for? God I hate democracy.