In fact while I have a few small quibbles I would certainly not be ashamed to have sent a similar email. Moreover, even if you thought she got the science radically wrong that hardly makes her stand out. Most members of congress are totally scientifically illiterate and a non-trivial fraction of the country believes in UFOs or rejects Darwinism so surely scientific error is not cause for public hanging. Obviously the problem was she dared to even consider the truth of the ‘wrong conclusion’ and people wonder why there isn’t an open honest dialog about race in this country.

Just to hammer the point home let me go through the email point by point. I’d hope that other academics will, regardless of how clear cut they think the scientific questions at issue are, at least publicly indicate their horror at this reaction to a mere request for compelling evidence before totally rejecting a potential explanation.

I absolutely do not rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent. I could also obviously be convinced that by controlling for the right variables, we would see that they are, in fact, as intelligent as white people under the same circumstances.

While I could only be convinced that the genetic predispositions to intelligence (to the extent this makes sense) for the two racial groups was within a certain margin of error. Ultimately what is so deeply ironic about all the accusations that Stephanie Grace doesn’t understand the science it’s the people who are insisting that science has absolutely closed the book on the issue of statistical correlations between race and intelligence who don’t understand science. If there is one thing science has taught us about genetics it’s that it’s hugely complicated and there are likely to be a huge number of different gene variants that have some effect on ultimate intelligence³. Given this massive number of different variables, many of which correlate significantly with race⁴ it’s almost absurd to think all these different variables would perfectly balance out. That’s like betting that if you flip a coin 100 times and then flip it another 100 you will get the same number of heads both times. So it’s almost certain that, in a state of perfect racial equality, one race or another would have a slightly higher expected IQ as a result of genetic factors⁵.

Of course one might reasonably insist that the standard rules of conversational implicature make it clear that Stephanie Grace isn’t just allowing for the possibility that by pure chance there are a couple more blacks with some rare congenital mental defect than whites. Obviously what she means not to rule out is the existence of certain genetic variants that correlate reasonably strongly with racial categories that will ultimately be demonstrated to grant some kind of slight increase in intelligence/improvement in brain function. Moreover, implicitly one can take her also to be saying one can’t rule out the fact that some non-trivial amount of the observed intelligence differences between races, in particular the worse results of blacks in measures of IQ, are a result of these genetic variations.

Now there are some some good scientific reasons to think that the vast majority of the observed racial gap in IQ scores, even after controlling for as much as possible, would disappear in an equitable environment. For instance the size of the lead African-American girls have over African-American boys resembles that of past ethnic groups whose average IQ scores used to lag behind the national average. So I certainly wouldn’t bet on any non-trivial fraction of the observed IQ gap turning out to be deeply genetic⁶. But our continued failure to pinpoint the exact social or cultural factors responsible and the continued intractability of questions about the relation between gender and various intellectual skills makes it totally crazy to categorically rule out this possibility⁷.

The fact is, some things are genetic. African Americans tend to have darker skin. Irish people are more likely to have red hair. (Now on to the more controversial:) Women tend to perform less well in math due at least in part to prenatal levels of testosterone, which also account for variations in mathematics performance within genders.

She isn’t pulling this out of her ass. There is some pretty suggestive evidence that testosterone does impact math/science ability (though these seem to indicate the optimal level is in the low male range). Note that all the trumpeted claims about women doing just as well on math tests as guys amount to squat since women actually do better on academic tests across the board then men.

This suggests to me that some part of intelligence is genetic, just like identical twins raised apart tend to have very similar IQs and just like I think my babies will be geniuses and beautiful individuals whether I raise them or give them to an orphanage in Nigeria. I don’t think it is that controversial of an opinion to say I think it is at least possible that African Americans are less intelligent on a genetic level, and I didn’t mean to shy away from that opinion at dinner.

Note that her phrasing here makes it pretty clear that she is simply refusing to rule out the possibility. Now I don’t know her so I have no idea if she’s a racist but this is a completely reasonable, if misunderstandable, way for someone to merely express the belief that the science hasn’t yet conclusively ruled out this possibility. Indeed it has not. It’s given us suggestive grounds to think the answer goes one way but it at this point we simply can’t hope to conclusively rule out this kind of possibility. There are just too many confounding variables and far too much complexity to achieve that level of certainty.

Despite some of the accusations obviously Stephanie is merely using Nigeria as an example of a location where children receive insufficient resources and substandard care relative to what we have available in the United States. Bizarrely some critics seem to think Stephanie is suggesting no one in Nigeria is pretty or smart when this is plainly at complete odds with the claim being made (even with poor resources people can turn out well).

I also don’t think that there are no cultural differences or that cultural differences are not likely the most important sources of disparate test scores (statistically, the measurable ones like income do account for some raw differences).

Now she goes out of her way to emphasize she isn’t rejecting the idea that the observered differences in intelligence measurements are primarly the result of environmental factors. Exactly what one would do if you were trying to express the correct view that we simply don’t have the kind of scientific evidence that would let us totally rule out, as opposed to simply judge to be unlikely, a substantial genetic effect. For the love of god what else do you want this woman to say to make it clear that she is just reasonably refusing to regard a scientific possibility as foreclosed until she is handed conclusive evidence.

I would just like some scientific data to disprove the genetic position, and it is often hard given difficult to quantify cultural aspects. One example (courtesy of Randall Kennedy) is that some people, based on crime statistics, might think African Americans are genetically more likely to be violent, since income and other statistics cannot close the racial gap. In the slavery era, however, the stereotype was of a docile, childlike, African American, and they were, in fact, responsible for very little violence (which was why the handful of rebellions seriously shook white people up). Obviously group wide rates of violence could not fluctuate so dramatically in ten generations if the cause was genetic, and so although there are no quantifiable data currently available to “explain” away the racial discrepancy in violent crimes, it must be some nongenetic cultural shift. Of course, there are pro-genetic counterarguments, but if we assume we can control for all variables in the given time periods, the form of the argument is compelling.

Ok, maybe you want her to add this just to make it extra clear she understands that bias and stereotype can in fact cause observed differences in outcome. Clearly she is outlining here what she wants to see to be convinced that the genetic hypothesis for the observed underperformance of blacks on intelligence tests is untenable. I mean how can someone possibly be engaging in the transparent racist misunderstanding of the science alleged when they are simply asking you to provide the correct scientific argument.

It’s this that gives the outraged condemnations the air of a religious inquisition. If they actually had the kind of totally conclusive scientific arguments they insist exist then presumably they’d be happy to simply share them with people like Stephanie Grace so they too are on the right page. Suspiciously not one of the condemnations I’ve seen, for all they fault Stephanie Grace for insufficient science, cite a single relevant study to rebut her supposedly absurd view. Apparently we are supposed to divine citations to the relevant work through the sheer force of our outrage.

In conclusion, I think it is bad science to disagree with a conclusion in your heart, and then try (unsuccessfully, so far at least) to find data that will confirm what you want to be true. Everyone wants someone to take 100 white infants and 100 African American ones and raise them in Disney utopia and prove once and for all that we are all equal on every dimension, or at least the really important ones like intelligence. I am merely not 100% convinced that this is the case.

Very true Stephanie. Sadly you underestimated just how vicious people can be when you draw attention to what their doing. Unlike me most people haven’t actually read enough studies about genetics and intelligence to have any reason to bet that most of the observed differences are behavioral. However, it’s extremely important to people’s worldview that this be true and vital to their self-image that they believe it to be true. Thus when you challenge that view people’s natural response is to strike out to hide their underlying insecurity and lash out at the cause of the painful mental tension.

I wish there was a facebook group to offer Stephanie support but I suppose that’s not in her best interest.

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.

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?

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.

Frankly, I’m just amazed that this has been studied. To be fair it was probably a result noticed during a more general study of the subject but it’s still amusing to think that some poor grad student’s job was to document people’s farts and collect samples. Makes me glad I’m not doing an experimental science.

On the plus side that grad student had an interesting answer when people asked what they did but I don’t know if it was a plus for getting dates. It would also make for some amusing work experience on a resume.

I wonder if they have this information up on wikipedia. This is the sort of totally useless information that is important to record and catalog. Both to protect future generations of graduate students and to settle drunken bets.

First though let me reiterate the fact that there is a genuine scientific problem of consciousness (aka experience). Unfortunately attempts to ’save’ spiritual beliefs about souls by pushing this notion into the gap left between experience and physics has encouraged most hard headed scientist types to dismiss all talk of experiences as unfounded mystical crap. However, there is nothing contradictory about believing that experiences are real (I’m directly observing this right now), governed by a scientific law just like charge or mass but not (ontologically³) reducible to mere facts about position (or wavefunction) of particles and the like. In other words it’s true that what goes on in the brain completely determines what we experience but we have to go out and do science to figure out how. I can figure out that 2+2=4 without doing experiments but figuring out what configurations of particles feel pain requires I go out and see how things work in the real world⁴.

Hopefully continued neuroscience research will eventually yield a theory telling us that if a system of particles has n units of property A and m units of property B then it will be experiencing a mixture of 25% pain and 75% boredom⁵. Even though we don’t yet know what form this theory will take the fact we are trying to explain a fundamental natural property of the universe gives us some idea of what form we should expect the theory to take (Occam’s razor applies). For instance even though back in the 16th century Gallileo couldn’t possibly dream of the form quantum mechanics would eventually take he would have been justified in assuming that the ultimate physical laws wouldn’t mention St. Bernards, i.e., it would be very odd if the TOE was of the form particles behave like X unless they are part of a St. Bernard in which case they do Y.

Therefore since feeling like something is a fundamental natural property⁶ we can assume that there will be some simple property of a system which determines whether it gives rise to an experience or not. So far no problem, we just need to find some simple property that all the things we take to have experiences (people, dogs, etc..) satisfy when having experiences but things we assume aren’t experiencing (tables, anesthetized people) don’t. The difficulty is that such a property must allow a sensical evolutionary explanation of why we are conscious and experience the world in a unified, understandable fashion.

After all it could have been (if natural law was different) that our experiential lives weren’t hooked up to our behavior/environment in any coherent fashion. The efficient design of a visual system might have been such that seeing a particular sort of diagonal line created the experience of being in a small igloo while a slightly different line made one experience being burned alive. Moreover it could have been that rather than what seems a unified conscious experience each person would give rise to a myriad unintegrated experiences some occurring at a very low level (an experience arising from the module that does first pass filtering on our vision) and others at a very high level. Short of assuming miraculous good luck (evolution just happened to hit on the design that gave us unified, coherent experiences) this means that whatever simple physical property predicts the existence of experience must be (mostly) coextensive with efficient implementation of animal executive functions (so for example it doesn’t occur in my car radio).

This leaves two options for a plausible theory of experience. Either there is some simple computational property that characterizes the processing done in (higher?) animals and any device implementing that computation has experiences or there is some simple kind of (uncommon) physical interaction that is particularly well suited to implementing animal executive function (so evolution will likely select for it in just this case). I call the first theory the “magic algorithm” theory of consciousness. Presumably there is some magical couple of pages of lisp code so that only those objects implementing this code have experiences. I find this sort of theory pretty absurd on it’s face (not to mention the empirical evidence a century of AI failure gives us) but maybe it could be swallowed if this was the only problem. The bigger problem with the magic algorithm theory is that it asks us to accept that there is a well defined notion of implementing a particular computation. Also it seems apparent that any plausible characterization will require realism about causation, i.e, in order to distinguish genuine implementation of an algorithm from happenstantial agreement we must distinguish real causation from mere accidental constant conjunction. So not only does it seem doubtful that there is a well defined notion of implementing a computation but even if there was such a definition it would require metaphysical extravagance to work and is thus disfavored.

In summary this leaves us with the conclusion that there is probably some special sort of physical interaction/state (simply defined in terms of fundamental physical laws) particularly well suited to animal executive function and it is the existence of this physical interaction which gives rise to experience. Therefore merely simulating this process on a general purpose processing unit would not produce experiences. Note I’m not arguing that there is new fundamental physics in the brain like Penrose and others would have us believe. Certainly that is one thing that would fit my criteria but there is no reason that the physical correlate of consciousness couldn’t simply defined in terms of already identified types of basic physical interaction.

Then again on some days this argument just convinces me that induction is a load of crap and the only reason our physical theories have been so successful is that we are very well evolved to predict physical facts about our environment. If we give up on the idea that experience must obey simple natural laws then everything is up in the air (literally everything about the world, as we would no longer have a good reason to believe rotting tomatoes weren’t the most likely physical substrate of our experienced lives).

I mean how many people would really feel that Stauffenberg would really have been doing a moral wrong if he had staid in the conference room with the bomb and actually made sure he killed Hitler instead of failing. You might not believe he was morally obligated to do so but surely giving your life even for a 10% greater chance of saving millions is not morally impermissable. Now true if we look at the actual PEW center study we see the question is posed in a slightly more troubling manner. It asks about suicide bombing against civilian targets for the defense of islam. But even if history doesn’t provide us with easy examples where this sort of action was acutally justified it isn’t hard to imagine ones where it would be justified. For instance suppose Hitler was clearly a civilian leader of the country (as our president and secretary of defense are) and the holocaust had been directed against muslims.

Admittedly the results of the survey are in fact somewhat disturbing given that there were a small but non-trivial percent of respondants who said that suicide bombing was ’sometimes’ or even ‘often’ justified as opposed to rarely (but when you are talking 5% and 1% respectively you have to wonder if they are just blowing off steam from a bad day, or just fucking with people. I mean hell what percentage of Australians answered ‘jedi’ for their religion on the census?). However, little of the hand wringing bothers to go beyond saying that some muslims think suicide bombing can be justified as if that was a facially absurd or immoral view.

I’m not going to take a position on whether the survey itself is disturbing or not (though it has been overblown) but let’s drop this stupid pretense that somehow suicide bombing is facially beyond the pale. Our own movies are filled with heroic suicide attacks, even bombings sometimes against targets that would technically qualify as civilian (evil corporate masterminds bankrolling assassinations and murders, drug kingpins who rely on others to implausibly poision children and so forth). The truth is that we find ‘terrorist’s’ suicide bombings so abhorrent because we view their cause as unjust, their means disproportionate and their targets largely innocent. Indeed we are right to do so but we can’t pretend we aren’t making a substantive moral claim by hiding behind a criticism of the means terrorists use. The bombing of the US barracks in Beirut wouldn’t have been ok if the truck was radio controlled instead of driven by a suicide bomber despite obviously being a military target.

Parents concerned about a girl’s weight should look not only at eating habits but also at their child’s social network, encouraging relationships with friends and enrolling kids in group activities, the researchers said.

Have these researchers never been to highschool? Do they really think that having your mother fret over your social relationships is going to help?

And as part of other anti-obesity measures, school officials should consider implementing programs to help girls build social skills, they added.

“I think schools have a lot of influence,’’ said lead author Adina R. Lemeshow, now a project analyst at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. “It’s about fostering secure and supportive social environments in which girls feel more accepted.’’

Did they read their own damn article? They reported that social status affects obesity not ’social skills.’ Not everyone can be on top of the social hierarchy. No amount of intervention by the school can change the fact that 10% of the HS will be the least popular 10% of the highschool.

The original page is here but they have probably fixed the problem by now. Then again you would have thought a big news organization like MSNBC would have had enough editors to never let this happen in the first place. I suspect someone was leaving their job and wanted to do something funny before they left. They deserve to have someone notice their work.

Of course I think most large companies are smart enough to realize this which is why tattoo advertising is nothing but an attempt to gain free press. Once the media gets tired of reporting on the people who were paid to tattoo some corporate logo on their body companies will stop paying them to do it.

Then again pride plays into it on our side just as it does theres and for the conspiracy theorists out there this is a wonderful ploy to increase support for spending on new weapons systems or sonar tests (I wonder if they were using the whale killing sonar at the time). In short this sort of story, without much more background information, tells us absolutely nothing even if it is kinda amusing.

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.

In short I think that Mearsheimer and Walt certainly ought to be blamed for foolishly adopting some silly beliefs and presenting them poorly I think just as much blame lies with their opponents for encouraging people to take this crap seriously. The fact that we tend to blame only one side not the other regardless of the causal impact of their choices is yet another deep seated human irrationality that always seems to bite us in the ass. I argue for this views at far too much length below.

Mearsheimer and Walt’s book builds on their controversial 2006 article in the London Review of Books where they criticize the influence of the “Israel Lobby” on US politics and accuse it of distorting our foreign policy to the detriment of both the US and Israel. Just as in the interview the article made a point of saying that the “Israel Lobby” included a great many non-Jews while many Jews weren’t part of it and disapproved of it’s tactics. Still, I think the article could have been worded more carefully since on a subject like this the following sentence just invites confusion.

And because Jewish voters have high turn-out rates and are concentrated in key states like California, Florida, Illinois, New York and Pennsylvania, presidential candidates go to great lengths not to antagonise them.

And this one is just as problematic.

The Lobby doesn’t want an open debate, of course, because that might lead Americans to question the level of support they provide. Accordingly, pro-Israel organisations work hard to influence the institutions that do most to shape popular opinion.

Now my overall perception from the article is that M&W are merely making (potentially false) claims about political influence. Claims that would be unremarkable if he had explained say the tendency of government aid to flow to the middle class rather than the most needy by a reference to the disproportionate political power of white suburbanites and suggesting that your opponents don’t want an open debate appears to be de rigueur in American political discourse. However, when discussing a subject like this with obvious potential for misinterpretation it is negligent not to word this more carefully. Still, poor wording is hardly a capital offense and in the interview Walt went out of his way to clarify these sorts of misconceptions, e.g., emphasizing that he didn’t view it as disloyal or even wrong to support Israel only that the policies the “Israel Lobby” supported were horribly misguided.

Now merely from a rhetorical point of view it would be bad tactics to respond to the calm reasonable sounding academic with an outraged lecture about the role of disloyalty accusations in the Soviet and Nazi genocides but when the individual your criticizing credibly denies making any such allegation at all it just plays to the (mostly false²) idea that accusations of antisemitism are being used to stop any discussion. As if this tactic wasn’t foolish enough Foxman responds to the idea of a hard right “Israel Lobby” by snapping, “Why is it their business how the American Jewish community works?” Not only is this a terrible argument (voting patterns are everyone’s business) but there is no more surefire way to convince people your covering up a dark secret than to tell them something is none of their business. Why do you think the UFO buffs simply won’t accept the fact that Area 51 is just a boring aircraft research facility?

I understand why Foxman has the reaction to M&W that he does. Obviously talking about the “Israel Lobby” and their ’sinister’ goals is a way to disparage the people who disagree with you. If you are primed to respond to the standard antisemitic slurs about Jewish disloyalty or conspiratorial power when you hear someone blaming the “Israel Lobby” using dubious evidence you are going to hear exactly what you expected to hear. Human psychology just works like that, especially about particularly emotional issues.

Unfortunately, the sort of underhanded argumentative move that M&W pull of dehumanizing the people who disagree with you by giving them an intimidating name, whether it is “Israel Lobby,” “big business,” “military industrial complex,” “agribusiness,” “the religious right,” or “liberal” is all to common. People think their ideas are obviously right and need an explanation for why other people disagree with them. Lacking my arrogance most people feel a tension between how obvious the conclusion feels to them and the idea there are a bunch of other folk like them who think the exact opposite so they resolve it by dehumanizing their opponents with a big scary name which lets them conceptualize themselves as the underdog nobly fighting the good fight. I think this is a much more plausible explanation of M&W’s motivations than any sort of antisemitic agenda.

Yes, the arguments made in M&W’s paper and presumably the ones in the book as well are extremely poor. In addition to the dubious factual claims they barely touch the substantive issue: what policy should the US take towards Israel. However, while I respect them less as a result and I wish academics would do better I’m hardly surprised. This is the same kinda of emotionally loaded but irrelevant crap one always sees in political discourse, especially when it involves Israel and Palestine. Even otherwise rational people start citing dubious historical events and making totally irrelevant arguments about who is at ‘fault’ for the current situation instead of asking what would be most likely to fix the problem. It is no more antisemitic when the anti-Israel side does it than it is anti-Muslim when hard line pro-Israeli partisans do.

Is it the case that M&W’s article and book provides aid and comfort for antisemitic elements? Well I’m sure some of them will get a kick out of reading it but it isn’t neo-Nazis feeling smug that we want to avoid it’s increased membership and I’m skeptical M&W’s work is going to aid in recruitment. It people like David Irving who let the neo-Nazi types feel that the truth is on their side but it is being suppressed by conspiracy. Moreover, by Foxman’s own theory he is just as culpable as M&W. He blames M&W for mainstreaming the concern about the “Jewish Lobby” to the point where it is being discussed on NPR but that never would have happened with the accusations of antisemitism and the like from people like him. Had the ADL and other Jewish groups reacted with a shrug and merely debunked M&W’s arguments instead of becoming outraged M&W’s article would have died the obscure death it deserved.

Even if their work was likely to encourage neo-Nazis this doesn’t mean it is any more morally culpable for them to publish it. After all we don’t think that scientists are blameworthy for not suppressing experimental results suggesting that certain gender differences have biological causes even if we later find them to have made a mistake. Yes, I think one can make the case that subjects like this require greater care and thus M&W are to be blamed for not exercising greater thought and care in both forming and presenting their views. However, any theory that holds people to a higher standard about racially sensitive subjects because of the greater risk of harm cuts both ways. If M&W are to be blamed for not questioning their emotionally laden beliefs about US policy towards Israel or not taking more care to avoid encouraging antisemitism than so too should Abraham Foxman for not questioning his assumptions about the nature and motivation of M&W’s view and especially for responding in a way that, under his own theory, aids genuine antisemites.

I think we should blame both of them but they are venial sins not reasons to shun them.

Don’t get me wrong. I think M&W’s arguments are a pile of crap. I just don’t think the responses to it have been much better nor do I think that it’s much worse than what I’ve come to expect from political dialog in this country. Mostly I agree with this post about the matter except I’m far more cynical about political discourse in general. The reason I care about the issues is that I’m bothered by the hypocritical standard about when we blame people for encouraging antisemitism. If we are really interested in what matters (stamping out antisemitism) then any behavior that can reasonably be seen to encourage antisemitism should be equally blameworthy but in practice we don’t judge blame based on actual impact but by sorting them out into sides. Of course this is hardly unique to antisemitism, it is the same reason that people are more interested in what you believe about affirmative action than why, but this was what made me think about it this morning.