In my view one of the most glaring indictments of the way philosophy and other humanities are taught and practiced is the senseless insistence on reading original works by the great masters. This is most apparent in the continued consumption of Plato, Hobbes, Aristotle and the like in philosophy but can be equally well be seen in the reverance for Chaucer, Shakespeare or other literary classics. To my horror this reverence for the original works is even being promoted in economics. So even though I gave a short reply in the comments at overcoming bias when this issue came up I’ve been meaning to discuss the question in more detail.

For the moment I’d like to set aside the issue of literature for another post and focus on subjects like philosophy and economics where (at least in theory) the aim is to genuinely progress towards a (more) accurate/useful understanding. Since I find it genuienly perplexing why one would ever feel the need to read the originals rather than the digested and improved material found in modern expositions as one does in math of physics I’ll quote Tyler Cowen’s justifications for returning to the original thinkers. Obviously these don’t represent every possible justification but they are the best justifications I’ve ever heard.

First though I’d like to be perfectly clear that the issue under consideration is whether there is some pedagogical benefit to reading original thinkers as opposed to modern summaries (of either the original thinker or simply the current state of the discipline). There is no accounting for taste so if you simply have some Plato fetish or like the way reading Plato makes you feel sophisticated you might find it more enjoyable to read Plato rather than more modern work just as someone else might prefer to have their philosophical arguments interspersed in Harry Potter slash. Also if your interest is in original historical research then influential works are a reasonable thing to read¹ but again the question at hand is the benefit of reading original works by great thinkers to the advancement of the discipline itself not it’s history or the practitioners feelings of sophistication. With this point clear let’s examine what Tyler Cowen has to say point by point.

1. Secondary sources are unreliable and they do not capture or understand many of the original insights. To remove it from the distant past, what I get from John Rawls or Robert Nozick is quite distinct from what I get from their distillers.

So what? The standard isn’t whether a latter distillation captures the exact content but whether it’s a more effective way to gain understanding. Reading a modern calculus book is extremely different from reading the original Newton. Newton’s notions of infinitesimals and fluxions have been excisced wholesale and replaced with the modern notions of limits and epsilon-delta proofs and that’s a huge improvement in the ability of calculus books to convey understanding.

2. Truly great thinkers require numerous distillers. Can you read just one book on Keynes? No. So you have to read a few. Shouldn’t one of these then be Keynes himself? Yes.

This presupposes the goal is to understand what Keynes thought. Keynes was a brilliant economist but he was just as human as the rest of us and some of his ideas were simply confused or poorly thought out. The benefit of later distillers is to transmit the insights while avoiding the confusions, so no, one of these shouldn’t be Keynes himself.

I mean imagine Keynes was really a highlander and was still alive and at the height of his intellectual powers. Who would it be more beneficial to read the 1936 Keynes or the 2010 Keynes who has used the intervening years to excise the confused parts of The General Theory and find more lucid explanations of the key insights? Surely it’s the 2010 Keynes who would (likely) provide the better explanation (if you disagree would you go back to his half-assembled notes? Further?). Yet surely if Keynes could improve on his own work than (as the goal is to convey economic ideas not Keynes personal beliefs) surely others could as well, especially when the benefit from the collaboration and exchange of ideas provided the academic discipline.

3. The errors of top thinkers are often more interesting and instructive than their successes. Distillers have a hard time capturing these errors and their fruitfulness.

But that’s the wrong comparison. The right comparison is whether it’s more useful to build upon the work of past greats and digest this new material including the mistakes made by those who have built upon the great thinkers of the past than to spend time digesting the errors of the past. Obviously if it was costless one would read every book on the subject but the key question question is would the time spent exploring the errors made by Keynes be better spent exploring later work that builds upon his insights.. The reason it’s so tempting to advocate reading originals is that we don’t properly take into account the opportunity costs incurred reading those originals.

Moreover, given that there is only so much time for students (or professors) to devote to learning a subject either one must give up totally on the idea of making progress or admit that it’s sometimes more effective to substitute modern materials for some works of great thinkers. Hence this argument either proves too much (progress is impossible because it’s always better to learn from the mistakes of past great thinkers) or proves nothing at all since we continuously make beneficial trade offs of replacing originals with more modern works.

4. We often read great thinkers not to learn what they understood but also to set our minds racing and to find interesting new questions. Great thinkers are usually better at supplying this service than are their distillers.

Again this assumes that the job of the distiller is to summarize the original author. A good analysis book doesn’t summarize Newton it digests his insights and presents them as part of a grander theory. Reading a modern analysis book does a much better job a posing interesting new questions than does reading Newton.[^empirial]

Moreover, I suggest this is largely a placebo effect. One is told that the reading great thinkers in the original is particularly inspiring so we search for questions to inspire us. We would probably do equally well if told that Joyce’s Ulysses conveyed deep economic questions. If you doubt this consider the stunningly large number of people who, despite not being religious, claim to derive deep moral messages and insights from the bible despite it’s blatant encouragement of genocide, rape, and every other kind of brutality imaginable.

5. Sometimes the value is in having read common sources and benefiting from the commonality per se. Great thinkers are usually more focal than any of their distillers and thus reading them is a good input for discussions with others.

OFten this is simply false as influential textbooks and articles are often just as widely read. More importantly by virtue of the novelty of their ideas original thinkers are usually lacking in clarity meaning the same work is usually interpreted in a host of different ways.. However, even if true this argues for more canonical books. In mathematics this issue is solved by the publication of various yellow books that provide a common base for everyone to use as a reference and there is no reason not to do the same for other subjects.

6. Original sources often help you challenge or reexamine your world view or intellectual ethos. Distillers very often pander to that world view, while pretending to challenge you.

Given their status as influential originals the content in these works has largely been either incorporated into your modern world view or people have developed standard objections. I know my world view (or even philosophical position) has never been threatened by the original work of an past great thinker but often it’s been shaken by a new argument or idea from a modern source.

7. Consider a simple comparison. You can read either Adam Smith’s two major books or any ten or even twenty books on him, toss in articles if you wish. It’s a no-brainer which you should choose.

Right, neither. Who the hell cares what some dude named Adam Smith thought. Given the choice between reading a modern economic textbook and any of Adam Smith’s books I know which one I would choose and it’s the same thing we always choose for undergraduates.

8. The best distillers often are original sources in their own right (and in part unreliable expositors), such as in Charles Taylor’s excellent book on Hegel.

Again the false dichotomy. Instead of trying to find out what Hegel said we should be finding out what is true (which in the case of Hegel will involve simply ignoring him).

9. Distillation works best in very exact sciences, such as physics and mathematics. If you rely on distillation for an inexact science, you will do best at capturing its exact parts. You will be left with a systematic bias, and knowledge gap, regarding its inexact parts.

So it’s only when you can’t actually go out and check whether going back to read the original works by great thinkers that it’s beneficial? That’s awful suspicious

Stepping back for a moment I would point out the fact that there are many different mutually contradictory disciplines of theology (every major world religion has one). Thus regardless of your religious views (and especially if you are an atheist) you must admit that there are academic disciplines which are totally bullshit. Now I would point out that in virtually all instances of theological study the original work of prior influential (but not prophets or otherwise supernaturally gifted) theologians is regarded as similarly important to read in the original.

Hence, we must all admit there are situations where academic disciplines are convinced of the important of reading influential past thinkers in the original despite even though it provides no actual benefit. Conversely in all those disciplines where we have reliable quantatative measurements of progress (with the obvious exception of history) returning to the original works of past great thinkers is decidedly unhelpful. Therefore at the very least anyone who wishes to claim that reading past great thinkers in the original (be it Plato, Keynes, Aristotle or whomever) has a substantial argumentative burden to meet and until they do the assumption should be against spending time doing so.

This morning a story on slashdot linked to A Mathematician’s Lament by Paul Lockhart as well as a blog post discussing the issue. This is the first time I’ve read Lockhart’s rant but little of what he said was new to anyone who has listened to any of the mathematicians vocally crusading for better mathematics education. As usual most of his piece was the same unrealistic claptrap about how if we could only show the children the joy and beauty of math all would be well. It’s a pleasant fiction to believe, and it’s seductive to think that with just one little nudge all children could discover the pleasure we take in mathematics, but it’s about as reasonable as believing everyone would love to garden, read Shakespeare or anything else if they were only exposed to it.

To be fair I was quite impressed with Lockhart’s brutally frank analysis of what currently passes for mathematical edification in K-12. Apart from teaching kids to sit still and signaling social status¹, for 95% of the class everything after multiplication (and a good bit before) is totally pointless. Go talk to some doctors (GPs), lawyers, managers, etc.. to solve a simple algebra problem (say two linear equations in two unknowns) and see just how few have the slightest clue. No one’s benefiting by making them rotely memorize some rules they promptly forget. However, the notion that if we only taught children real math they would gobble it up is simply absurd.

I remember taking a differential geometry class in college that was taught in what was (at least for me) an abominable way. No rigor, just vague comments about pictures and twisting so unsurprisingly I kept putting that homework off and gradually falling further behind. At that point understanding became nigh impossible. Just doing the problem sets made me feel frustrated, angry and perhaps a bit inferior and I’m unreasonably over confident about my mathematical abilities. Naturally one then puts them off and when you force yourself to work you just grind through the problems without any curiosity or hope of understanding the bigger picture. Psychologically you just can’t force someone to be curious and deeply thoughtful about a subject that makes them feel bad and that’s what understanding math requires. So certainly a sufficently bad teacher (who won’t follow a book) can discourage real learning but could better teaching really significantly encourage real mathematical understanding in K-12?

Sure if you somehow eliminate the social significance of mathematical ability and turned math class into a non-threatening fun activity like most HS art classes you might make some progress. That, however, is simply impossible. Nothing the teacher says can erase the knowledge that actually showing interest and talent in mathematics opens up many lucrative doors and signals intelligence. So long as the mathematically gifted are financially rewarded students (and their parents) will care about how they perform in the subject. Unlike art or literature math also has right and wrong answers and can often leave one feeling lost and frustrated so unavoidably half your student body will resent math for making them feel stupid and inferior even if they would never admit it. No matter how excellent the teacher they can do no more than try to distract the under performing students from inevitable comparisons with those who are doing better. Worse, any attempt to discourage people who dislike the subject from taking the courses will simply increase the incentive for them to camouflage themselves as someone who does like math to future schools and bosses. The problem would be a lot easier if it was just that some people weren’t smart enough.

I don’t really know what we should do about this situation. However, I suspect one reason people are so reluctant to face this possibility is that it would require us to explicitly consider how we want to trade off the benefit to the small fraction students who could benefit immensely from non-rote proof based mathematics and in turn contribute disproportionately to our economic growth against the interests of the larger number of students who are too intimidated by the subject to do anything but rote work. I think we ought to consider using programming, with it’s more video game/slot machine pace of rewards, as the means to teach logic and quantitative thought but that still doesn’t answer the math question.

So browsing the web this morning I came across this amazing blog largely focused on the author’s (apparently a philosophy grad student somewhere) continentalist approach to Godel’s incompleteness theorem. Rather than describe the content I’ll just include his last post.

Perhaps this will be my last post here? A simple reiteration of negative Platonism, situating its significance in the context of awakening from the wrong expectations performed so thoroughly and unconsciously in the second Critique.

To put it once again with maximal simplicity: The diagonal is what relates, without religious/imaginary synthesis, our mathematical/cognitive and ethical/existential lives.

We already live in both places: in consistency through calculation and consciousness, in completeness through care and the unconscious. What we suffer from, as both theoretical inadequacy and ethical alienation, is an inability to relate these in a way that makes sense and is good.

Thus it has suddenly become possible, after long stagnation, to say something rigorous and suggestive, something that opens logoi both mathematically lucid and existentially thick (again without synthesis: it’s a matter of bridges and transitions, not of sovereign unities or systems) about the fundamental Socratic question: which knowledge, which part, of knowledge, would do us any good?

At stake here is exactly what gets talked about, prephilosophically, as “the meaning of life”. It is good philosophical practice to avoid this question until one has something real to say about it, and instead, to work the problem from either side. But it is not good practice, once the relation has become clear, to remain squeamish about naming it: Idea of the Good, Diagonalization.

Note, if you read the rest of the blog it’s totally clear that he really means diagnolization in the sense of the mathematical technique employed by Godel. Moreover, he seems to genuienly understand the mathematics (Godel’s theorem is a result in a meta-system describing provability in some formalized system) so what’s going on here is surely not mathematical confusion. It’s the philosophy that’s totally fucked (I’m pretty confident now that it’s not a hoax).

However, to be fair to this blogger, he isn’t some isolated crank, but rather a participant in a ‘respectable’ philosophical tradition. Indeed, one of the famous philosophers he references, Alain Badiou is even more incoherent. While he would almost certainly quibble with the description given on wikipedia if the following is even remotely accurate he might as well be spouting gibberish.

Badiou’s use of set theory in this manner is not just illustrative or heuristic. Badiou uses the axioms of Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory to identify the relationship of being to history, Nature, the State, and God. Most significantly this use means that (as with set theory) there is a strict prohibition on self-belonging; a set cannot contain or belong to itself. Russell’s paradox famously ruled that possibility out of formal logic. (This paradox can be thought through in terms of a ‘list of lists that do not contain themselves’: if such a list does not write itself on the list the property is incomplete, as there will be one missing; if it does, it is no longer a list that does not contain itself.) So too does the axiom of foundation — or to give an alternative name the axiom of regularity — enact such a prohibition (cf. p. 190 in Being and Event). (This axiom states that all sets contain an element for which only the void [empty] set names what is common to both the set and its element.) Badiou’s philosophy draws two major implications from this prohibition. Firstly, it secures the inexistence of the ‘one’: there cannot be a grand overarching set, and thus it is fallacious to conceive of a grand cosmos, a whole Nature, or a Being of God. Badiou is therefore — against Cantor, from whom he draws heavily — staunchly atheist. However, secondly, this prohibition prompts him to introduce the event. Because, according to Badiou, the axiom of foundation ‘founds’ all sets in the void, it ties all being to the historico-social situation of the multiplicities of de-centred sets — thereby effacing the positivity of subjective action, or an entirely ‘new’ occurrence. And whilst this is acceptable ontologically, it is unacceptable, Badiou holds, philosophically. Set theory mathematics has consequently ‘pragmatically abandoned’ an area which philosophy cannot. And so, Badiou argues, there is therefore only one possibility remaining: that ontology can say nothing about the event.

For any readers familiar with set theory the part about drawing ethical maxim’s from Cohen’s method of forcing might be even more amusing. Sure, he is hardly the first continental philosopher I’ve read who should be properly regarded as a crackpot but when it’s about my subject (mathematical logic) it just makes the point all the more clearly.

Now reading this sort of BS is kinda amusing but I do have a broader point. Despite being essentially indistingushable from the sort of crank theories that pop up from physics crackpots all the time the people publishing this stuff are still seen as respectable, even acclaimed, philosophers. If philosophy wants to be a serious intellectual discipline it needs to take the same hard line that they physicists do about crackpots, even if it means tossing out entire university departments.

The physicists wouldn’t simply sit quietly and say nothing about a crank being allowed to teach physics courses, nor attend conferences or journals that treated them as respectable researchers. Moreover, were they to do so the progress of the discipline, and certainly the public understanding of physics, would be greatly harmed. My point is ultimately that it’s not enough for analytic philosophers (particularly tenured ones) to sit back and privately dismiss all this crap as rubbish. They have a positive duty to denounce these people as cranks and eliminate them from the field. Failing that they have a duty, even if it imperils funding, to demand departments be split and otherwise clearly distingush what they do from what the continental crankpots do.

To be clear not everyone one might classify as a ‘continental philosopher’ should be deemed a crank. Despite being notoriously confusing Kant surely is not. Mere error or poor writing is not enough to be a crank. However, neither the blurriness of the line or our inclinations to charity are an excuse for tolerating obviously incoherent gibberish as valid philosophy. Since it’s notoriously difficult to conclusively establish that some convoluted continental style ‘argument’ lacks any reasonable interpretation the burden should be on the person presenting the apparent gibberish to convince others they are merely really poor writers with a meaningful point.

So if you’ve listened to NPR or read a newspaper during the past year you’ve probably heard someone bemoaning the incipient failure of the newspaper industry. Today I was stunned to find an article on slashdot describing the attempts of newspapers to (more or less) collude to implement paywalls. The thinking at the newspapers seems to be that somehow the evil internet is causing a perfectly efficient well run industry to hemorrhage money by letting their customers recieve their product for too little.

Seems to me that this is the result of biased thinking from an industry reluctant to change. The internet is an amazing tool that radically increases the efficency of news delivery but increases in efficiency are always painful. Just like the printing press before it the increased efficency offered by digital delivery is going to put some people out of work.

Far from being an efficent industry when I look at the newspaper business I see an unimaginable amount of waste. The most obvious form of waste is physical printing and delivery. The overhead of running a printing press every night and distributing the paper plus the indirect costs this incurs is huge. However, even ignoring this I’m constantly amazed at the amount of duplicated effort between newspapers. The need for local physical printing has let each newspaper to employ their own movie reviewers, editors etc.. etc.. Heck, having 20+ reporters at a press conference doesn’t help journalism it just wastes money.

It’s going to be painful for newspapers. Many journalists may lose their jobs. Local papers may be reduced to merely local news but there is an awful lot of efficiency that can be gained without sacrificing any investigative journalism.

Does anyone really take this kind of article purporting to analyze why women often conflict with other women in the workplace to be a serious attempt to discern the truth? I know one can’t go very deep in 3 pages but it seems totally transparent to me that the author choose to tell an alarming then comforting sequence of little myths rather than engage in even the most cursory analysis of the issue. Sure, this is low hanging fruit as far as bad arguments go but this article managed to combine thoughtless emotional sloganism about gender interaction with total disregard for the truth and used them as a vehicle to foist her traditional stereotypes about the need for women to be nurturing and supportive on the reader. Frankly it’s one of the most sexist things I’ve ever read on the internet.

The article begins inauspisciously by hanging the whole premise of the article on a blatant fallacy. Do women preferentially bully other women? I don’t know but the study quoted in the article sure as hell doesn’t say so. What it actually says is that women report being bullied by women and men about equally often, and at about the same rate as men report being bullied by men but men report being bullied by women much less. Of course, this is exactly what one would expect to see if men were simply reluctant to admit being bullied by women. So the entire effect could be nothing more then men feeling embarrassed to admit being bullied by a woman.

As if to further refute her own hypothesis the author then informs us that women are taught they should be supporting and nurturing to each other so they feel bad treatment from other women particularly disturbing. But, hmm, wouldn’t that suggest that women are holding women up to a higher standard? Of course the author doesn’t seem to realize this would inflate the women on women bullying numbers nor that, this expectation itself might cause women to retaliate against each other for perceived failures to live up to this higher standard.

After pointlessly observing she knows some women who feel they are bullied more by women the author suddenly jumps tracks to ask why women are less likely to be perceived as leaders. Drawing up the dark cloud of discriminatory/unfair treatment she tells us that women are perceived negatively if they behave as aggressively as the men but can’t get promoted if they don’t. That, indeed, is a worthwhile question to ask but instead we get a heartwarming story about a group of female executives getting together to role-play scenarios and help them discover their political blind spots.

I’m sure that plays well to the majority of readers who (as I often am myself) are more interested in the emotional journey than thinking hard about the right answer but it should also set off a giant flashing red “DANGER” sign in anyone who has been paying attention. I mean at least skip a paragraph or two after observing how unfair it is that women can’t display the aggression men do before telling them you expect them to be more supporting and cooperative. I mean she might as well have suggested women get together every month to bake and let each other know if any of the guys aren’t getting enough of their cooking. Besides, if you are worried, as the author is, about women picking on each other because they see themselves as competing for the same female slots in the cooperation you might want to hesitate before encouraging women to see themselves as female employees. Indeed, the results on stereotype threat would seem to suggest that thinking of themselves as women encourages them to behave more like the traditional gender stereotype. So no, it may not be necessary or desirable for women to be “aware of their shared identity as women.”

As if to make sure she hammered home the point that women had better be cooperative and supportive as their gender dictates the author approvingly includes this view before the end of the article.

Televerde reversed that attitude in Perryville, Ms. Cirocco said, by encouraging women to work for a common cause, much like the environment envisioned by the Canadian researchers. “It becomes a very nurturing environment,” Ms. Cirocco said. “You have all these women who become your friends, and you are personally invested in their success. Everyone wants everyone to get out, to go on to have a good healthy life.” If the level of support found at Televerde were found elsewhere, Ms. Klaus said, it would solve a lot of problems.

I mean this stuff is right up there with (actually far worse since it’s more respectable) the worst of the perversions of evolutionary psychology used to assure the author they were inferior. It masquerades as science and analysis despite lacking anything of the kind while using hackneyed emotional ploys to convince the reader that women need to try even harder to play their traditional supportive and nurturing gender role and worst of all do so subtly enough to be reasonably successful. If people aren’t going to get outrage by this sort of piece they should stop pretending they are fighting gender stereotypes and want to move beyond traditional gender roles and just admit it’s just all about group pride. If your really worried about the culture pushing gender stereotypes onto women here you go. Outrage over this kind of article might actually accomplish something. So if you aren’t going to make a big deal about this kind of article just drop the pose. It’s in the New York Times for crying out loud.

So lately I’ve been reading a bit of Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong. While the posts on these sites are always interesting they frequently, especially at Less Wrong, seem to promote a sort of cult of rationality. Of course I too value reaching the right conclusions instead of the wrong ones and am broadly sympathetic with the goal of ameliorating the negative effects of psychological shortcuts that interfere with our utility but alot of the content on these sites seems to go much further than this. For example consider these posts by Robin Hanson and Eliezer Yudkowsky. Underlying these remarks seems to be the assumption that there is some kind of objective standard of (perfect?) rationality to which we could aspire that would somehow capture our intuitive notion of rationality as distinct from merely being lucky. While I rarely see rationality so earnestly venerated as it is on these two sites the same assumption pervades much of analytic philosophy and many puzzles and papers simply take it for granted that there is some well defined notion of rational thinking/belief(I’ll leave act rationality out of this for the moment). However, despite being an extremely useful tool in describing common situations and deciscions it’s long been my view that, when considered in full generality, rationality isn’t even a coherent concept.

To explain what I mean we first need to go back to Quine’s seminal paper Two Dogma’s of Empiricism. Even though I think Carnap clearly had the better of the argument about analyticity¹ I want to give Quine credit for pointing out to me the way in which the concepts we use depend on our background assumptions (how we model/conceptualize things) for their very coherence. Just as the concept of an equivalence class stops making sense once you start talking about non-transitive relations so too do many of our scientific and everyday notions cease to be well defined when we no longer accept the assumptions they were defined with respect to.

Stealing an example from Quine consider the Newtonian concept of kinetic energy. A good Newtonian physicist would have said that the kinetic energy is defined to be .5mv² where m is the object’s mass and v it’s velocity. However, kinetic energy is obviously also intended to be in some sense a measure of the work it would take to stop that object. Since these two notions coincide on the Newtonian picture there isn’t any problem. So long as we believe (or even use as an approximation) Newtonian physics there isn’t any question as to which is the right definition of kinetic energy. We are simultaneously committed to the concept capturing both notions. What Quine observed is that once we abandon the Newtonian conceptual framework there isn’t really any objective fact about which commitments we should honor and which we should discard. If scientists had responded to special relativity by using kinetic energy to describe the Newtonian formula and started theorizing about the conservation of Eisensteinian smenergy we couldn’t really accuse them of having made a mistake. Just as there is no right way to extend the notion of an equivalence class to non-transitive relations there often isn’t any right way to extend our scientific or everyday concepts outside of the frameworks they were conceived in.

The upshot of all this, in my view, is that our most useful concepts often presuppose certain assumptions. When these assumptions no longer hold the concepts themselves may cease to be coherent. So keeping this in mind let’s take a look at the assumptions that give rise to our concept of rationality.

Without going into too much detail I think it’s fairly safe to assume that a major (primary?) grip on (belief) rationality comes by way of postulating that people hold various beliefs where we take those beliefs to behave in some loose way like propositions. In other words we gloss over complexities like the effect of context and social situation on the views people express and simply pretend they either do or don’t believe some claim. Of course you can embelish this view a great deal and allow people to believe things in varying degrees or even take them to merely have some transitive implication relation. However, we can only stretch these concepts so far before they become unwieldy and useless, something we all implicitly recognize when we hesitate to attribute beliefs to ethnic groups, countries, or our computers.

So what? It’s hardly news that some aspects of people’s behavior won’t be well described by idealizing them as having something like beliefs. However, the point I want to press home is that rationality isn’t a property that big fleshy globs of atoms have. Rationality, is a concept grasped in terms of a certain kind of idealization about human behavior. It’s a useful concept and useful idealization but it’s still a type error to think of it as a property that applies to actual physical beings. We frequently forget this because in most contexts there is an obvious “right” way to idealize someone as an agent with certain beliefs so we talk about people having irrational beliefs and find it useful. However, it’s important to remember this shorthand only makes sense as long as this kind of idealization makes for a decent model of human behavior. Just like it’s simply confused to talk about the Newtonian kinetic energy of a particle traveling at .999c there are situations in which idealizing people as having something like belief is such a bad way to model their behavior that talking about rationality is similarly confused.

But the situation for a viewpoint independent concept of rationality applicable to real people only gets worse once you realize just how sensitive the ascription of rationality is to the way we choose to idealize the situation. Choosing to idealize a split brain patient as a single agent will yield very different judgments about his degree of rationality than idealizing his actions as the result of two seperate agents with distinct beliefs. It’s not that one of these idealizations is wrong and the other right (what could that even mean?) but just that in certain contexts one will be more useful than the other. And it’s not just split brain patients, Frued and many others have often taught that people were better modeled as the result of several competing agents or personalities. To really drive home the dependence of ascriptions of rationality on your choice of model just try to work out how you could make a principled application of the concept to a network of partial autonomous, partially integrated AIs.

My point is that it’s not just that we can’t ever be fully rational. It’s that the very notion as applied to living breathing people isn’t even coherent. Rationality is a concept that lives in an abstract idealize realm populate by agents possesing something like beliefs. It’s only applicable to real creatures insofar as this kind of idealization is useful and people largely agree on how it should be done. Step beyond that and it just doesn’t make sense anyone. I also think this realization can help alleviate some of the confusion over various paradoxes like the surprise quiz but that’s another post.

So I was pretty upset about the ridiculous idiotic populist outrage over the AIG bonuses. The last week of media coverage has only made me more angry as I listened to pundit after pundit, even those few who argued for leaving the bonuses alone, panderingly assure the public that their outrage over the bonuses was perfectly justified. Should the government have used the depressed job market to reduce AIG employee compensation of all forms when they took over? Maybe, but that doesn’t justify the outrage at paying the bonuses. Of course it’s understandable that this scandal made people so angry, the word bonuses triggers certain associations and people form a mental picture of people being patted on the back for the immoral behavior that has caused them harm. It’s the role of the media to remind us that the issue is more complex than this, that these bonuses aren’t rewards for performance but basically just another form of salary and to point out that most of the people working for AIG’s financial products division were probably perfectly moral people behaving no differently than they would have in the same situation. The media’s craven failure to offer this opposing perspective is particularly aggravating.

Still, if this amounted to nothing more than a national venting no big deal. The extent to which this seems to be motivated by a desire to see others suffer as they are would still be disgusting but that’s a sad part of human nature. Horrifyingly, however, congress really seems to be going through with this plan to levy a 70-90% tax on bonus payments to AIG employees. This law will be subject to constitutional challenge as a bill of attainder (meaning the taxpayers might get to pay for the bonuses and the lawsuits) but even if it fails to meet the constitutional qualifications to be struck down in such a fashion it surely violates the spirit of the prohibition on bills of attainder.

I mean it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the primary motivation here isn’t to save money or raise revenue for the government. If those were the motivations we would at a minimum be broadly taxing compensation at AIG. No, the public is angry at these people and wants to punish¹ them. But even if you think these people deserve to be punished the principal that we don’t punish individuals based merely on public anger is an important one. If this sort of thing passes muster there really is no way to say that taxing the principal of Bill Gate’s investments at 99% because we are pissed about the shody programming in windows is out of bounds or just because we don’t like the way he treated his wife. Ultimately when it comes to this question we have to set aside all consideration of it being taxpayer money or the unfairness of the situation. The government here isn’t acting as an investor in AIG but as the soverign. Nor does it make a difference that these bonuses haven’t been paid yet and that Bill Gates already has his money. Gates doesn’t keep a giant wad of cash in his house, he is content to let banks owe him the money just as AIG owes their employees their bonuses.

And for the love of god what could possibly motivate people to engage in this sort of dangerous punitive action when they don’t even know how most of the people who are receiving the bonuses behaved?

Many people working in the software industry seem to be coming to the conclusion that patents do more harm than good to their industry and therefore advocate abolishing software patents. The reasons they feel this way are pretty apparent. There are so many obvious¹ patents like the Eolas patent of Amazon’s one-click patent that any major piece of software is probably more likely to infringe on one than not. Something is pretty clearly wrong when people are spending more time worrying about accidentally infringing on someone’s patent than struggling with the problems the patented inventions solve. However, not all software patents are so unreasonable.

Consider google’s (well stanford’s) PageRank patent. Recognizing that one could create a useful measure of a page’s importance by summing up the importance of the pages linking to it and realizing that this could be efficiently computed using tricks from linear algebra was anything but trivial. Indeed, this kind of non-trivial application of mathematics to an ill-defined problem (return the best search) is a prototypical example of the sort of discovery that benefits from patent protection. Society can derive great benefits from these kinds of discoveries and money will lure people with the expertise to solve these problems away from pure mathematics or the sciences but without the ability to patent the discovery the financial incentives wouldn’t exist². While most software patents are more like the 1-click patent than the PageRank patent there is no shortage of real world problems that are crying out for a similarly brilliant solution.

In the face of examples like google’s PageRank patent it’s tempting to say that software patents are just dandy and the real problem is obvious patents. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Consider a hypothetical patent on the use of a LRU (least recently used) cache for texture data in a MMORPG client³. It’s certainly obvious in the sense that any decently skilled software developer would consider that solution if he was asked to solve the problem but until you actually try this design it’s not clear that an LRU cache would work. Maybe players don’t backtrack much so an LRU cache would simply waste resources on rooms the player won’t see again for awhile. At least in this example it seems clear that simply noticing that a fairly obvious approach solved the problem shouldn’t warrant a patent. The cost of actually testing out the ‘discovery’ is quite low and usually there are only a few obvious approaches to try.

However, such a rule would be totally unworkable in another industry where there might be a vast array of potential approaches that experts in the field would agree seemed promising but the cost of investigating them are quite high. For instance in the pharmaceutical industry everyone might realize that a certain large class of compounds are promising candidates to treat depression but actually evaluating each of these compounds for efficacy and safety is very costly. Incentivizing drug development requires that we let the pharmaceutical company patent their discovery that compound 5043A1 actually works to treat depression.

Ultimately I think the real problem stems from the fact that we are lumping two very different kinds of invention into the patent system. There is the first type of invention, like the google PageRank system, that represents a flash of inspiration to try something that no one else thought of and then there is the second type of invention that consists of the discovery that some potential solution really works. Ideally the patent system would protect the first kind of discovery pretty broadly but only protect the second sort of discovery in industries where it requires considerable resources to ascertain which of many potential solutions succeeds.

UPDATE: Note that my analysis only applies provided these contracts were genuine compensation packages and not deliberately created for the purpose of siphoning money from the government as some (unreliable) reports are suggesting now.

UPDATE 2: The bit about fraud seems to have been more populist BS spread by Andrew Cuomo, the New York Attorney General. It seems highly likely this was just an attempt to ride the wave of populist anger to ‘get those guys.’

Anyone who has been paying attention to the media lately will have noticed the outrage over the bonuses being paid to AIG employees, particularly employees in AIG’s financial products division. The division responsible for the deals that necessitated the government bailout. Disgustingly even relatively clearheaded individuals have jumped on this populist bandwagon and just in case we needed another lesson in the failures of democracy congress is demanding heads. People complain about the lack of transparency about the government’s response to the financial crisis but if this is how the public responds maybe they don’t deserve it.

Let’s be totally clear. This outrage is over mere terminology. No one was making a fuss about the fact that AIG employees, even those in the financial products unit, continued to be paid their salaries. Getting mad because some employee compensation is called bonuses rather than salary is about the stupidest thing imaginable. No one even looked at what these people were payed before this bonus scandal. People are mad for no other reason than the fact that wall street pays out significant chunk of it’s employee compensation in the form of bonuses. Sure, there were demands that the very top level of the company (CEO, CFO etc..) no longer be paid their huge salaries but we aren’t talking about sweatheart deals cut by a friendly board in this case but relatively standard payments on wall street to top level talent¹.

Just in case rational thought escapes you on this issue let me put this question another way. Do you think that the government should stop payment on all uncashed paychecks to AIG employees in the financial products division? Even those employees who did their job well and are needed to help unravel this mess? If not why do you think it should take away bonuses for these employees? In both cases the employee was promised certain compensation in return for certain work/performance and calling it a bonus or paycheck doesn’t change that fact. Certainly it’s totally unacceptable for the US government to void valid employment contracts made by AIG after tricking those workers into continuing to labor under them since the bailout.

More reasonably one might think that the government should have allowed AIG to lapse into bankruptcy and simply fail to honor employee compensation agreements in general, no merely the bonuses. Of course this has nothing to do with the outrage being expressed by the public and their elected officials but it’s at least coherent enough to rebut. However, this would undermine the very motivation for rescuing AIG from bankruptcy as it would have created doubt about whether AIG would make good on it’s debts. Sure, the government could have decided to guarantee some AIG debts despite the bankruptcy but that leaves everyone wondering if the government will pay off their claim or if some unpopular behavior on the part of the creditor would convince congress to leave them on the hook. Any plan that let the government pick and choose which preexisting AIG obligations they would honor would have been a disaster.

Still, whatever you think about the wisdom of the bailout of AIG at this point it would be totally unacceptable for the government to renege on these bonuses. The government choose to simply infuse capital as if they were some private investor rather than to nationalize the company now it needs to live with that choice. Trying to use it’s legislative power to eliminate these bonuses now would induce fear in other AIG creditors, reduce the government’s flexibility to infuse banks with capital, and generally do great harm to future bailout attempts. Not to mention that the cost to the taxpayers from the resulting lawsuits and our interest in keeping top talent at AIG to unravel their finances. Even assuming none of the employees due bonuses leaves in anger or can find a better offer (the best people always have offers) so long as the government still owns part of AIG every single highly paid employee will wonder if they will really get the package promised them.

What’s so particularly absurd about all of this is that all this opposition that is being generated towards future bailouts or stimulus packages as well as the potential for harm if the government really voids these contracts is happening over about 1 400th of the amount we paid to bail out AIG. It’s like lending your friend $1000 to cover his mortgage this month and then making a big fuss over the fact that he still purchased coffee for the girl he asked out the month before.

The more I see the more convinced I am that democracy is a truly awful system.

I support the movement afoot to grant the District of Columbia congressional representation but the bill Lieberman, joined by Hatch, Clinton, Kerry amoung others, introduced is patently unconstitutional. While I believe in an evolution of constitutional interpretation over time one can no more interpret the constitution to allow a representative from DC than one can interpret it to allow a 25 year old president. Given the obvious constitutional concerns the supporters of this legislation advance several arguments to justify it’s constitutionality. However, these arguments are so poor I sincerly hope such prominent individuals don’t sincerely find them compelling. It’s unfortunate but giving DC congressional representation is going to take an amendment.

If you had read only the proponents of this legislation one might think the only constitutional obstacle to this legislation was this language in Article 1 Section 2 (emphasis mine)

The House of Representatives shall be composed of members chosen every second year by the people of the several states, and the electors in each state shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the state legislature.

While one can reasonably argue that DC residents are “people of the several states” and if you strain a bit one could interpret the second clause as merely a restriction on how states may choose their representatives, not an implied restriction on who may have representatives. However, the subsequent passage devastates any hope of such an interpretation.

No person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the age of twenty five years, and been seven years a citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an inhabitant of that state in which he shall be chosen. Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.

Short of biting the bullet and saying that DC is a state, which would imply they were due a pair of senators as well, there is simply no way for the representative from DC to “be an inhabitant of that state in which he shall be chosen” since they won’t have been chosen in any state. Nor can one give any sensible interpretation of the requirement that representatives be apportioned among the several states that would permit DC to have a representative. Moreover, any theory allowing congress to use legislation to grant DC a representative would pose a fundamental threat to our electoral system. Either you interpret the formula for apportioning representatives demands DC be given one or forbids it but not both. Thus if congress has the power to either grant or deny representation to DC it must, on any logically consistent interpretation, somehow have the power to grant DC representation unconstrained by this formula. If congress can choose whether to grant DC 0 or 1 representatives then it would seem nothing prevents it from granting DC 200 representatives.

The justifications the proponents offer spend a lot of time arguing that the Framers surely didn’t intend to deny DC residents representation but that merely demonstrates a deep confusion about the role of intent in legal interpratation. The relevant question is whether the framers (original public understanding/whatever) intended the rule to apportion representatives only among the states, not whether they intended a particular consequence of that rule. If Blagojevich had signed an anti-corruption law the fact that he didn’t intended the law to be used against him wouldn’t pose any obstacle to prosecuting him under it. The only time we should look beyond this narrow kind of intentionality is when the legal rule is vague and requires additional preciscification which most assuredly isn’t the situation here. Observing that the alternate rule granting representation to the states and DC according to their population would have better served the framer’s ultimate aims is no more justifies the constitutionality of this legislation than pointing out that war veterans are often wise beyond their years would allow us to elect a 25 year old war veteran to the presidency in violation of the age requirement.

The proponents also try to use court precedents which establish congress’s power to treat DC as a state for the purposes of judicial jurisdiction or to apply other laws to the district to argue that congress has the power to grant the district a representative. This argument is so confused that it’s hard to make sense of it. The courts have ruled that the broad grant of authority the constitution explicitly grants congress over DC gives congress additional powers to pass legislation affecting DC that it’s enumerated powers might not allow with respect to the states. Thus even when the constitutional justification that congress uses to pass a law affecting the states fails congress can still fall back on this alternative authority. However, none of this gives congress the power to ignore specific constitutional restrictions when it comes to DC. Congress still can’t restrict free speech in the district and it can’t ignore the requirement that it apportion representatives among the several states.

Finally, what appears to be the best argument the proponents have is that when DC was first ceded to the federal government congress granted the citizens of that area the right to continue voting in their former congresional districts. At first blush this would seem to conflict with the argument here but on closer examination it’s apparent that no such conflict exists. The constitution merely guarantees that representatives be apportioned amoung the states according to a certain formula, if Maryland or Virgina decided to let citizens of Kentucky vote in their elections I see no obvious constitutional violation. Congress could likely, with the consent of some state, grant the district residents the right to vote for representatives in that state (but it’s unclear if they would count for the purposes of apportioning representatives) but unless you think that congress could dilute Wyoming’s votes by allowing any US citizen to vote in Wyoming elections the state could always revoke this privilege. Moreover, this would have the perverse consequence that DC residents couldn’t select another DC resident to represent them by the residency clause.

This is as clear as constitutional issues ever get. The politicians need to stop posturing and start trying to pass an amendment.