Nothin' Matters and What if it Did?

On gay rights and biological determinism

2012-01-31T13:05:00.001-05:00

I guess I missed the memo but it seems that it's now verboten to suggest that humans have any sort of choice at all in terms of the gender of the person(s) with whom they like to have sex. I say this because apparently Cynthia Nixon got into hot water for saying that she had chosen to take up an intimate relationship with a woman. (link). I think I understand the reasoning for it -- some might worry that the notion that gender preference might not be strictly biological will invite suggestions that "pray the gay away" therapy might work and/or that instead of society making room for gay people we can instead just get homosexuals to choose a different orientation. Also, if it's strictly biological, the story seems to go, it's more obviously unfair to deny them the rights and means to live the same sort of life that straight people have.

I think the obvious problem here, that both sides seem happy to ignore, is that almost all preferences we have involve a complicated mixture of biological and environmental factors. I recall learning or reading that sexual preference may well be more of a spectrum than a simple on/off switch, i.e., while some people may be heavily inclined to be straight or gay, there are lots of people in between that might be more or less interested in having sex with person of the same or different genders. But this is obvious, isn't it? Don't lots of people who eventually settle into a gay or straight lifestyle experiment in their youth w/ differing preferences. Are we saying that all those people were simply violating their biological destiny? We believe, I assume, that there's a strong biological component that influences other features that we find attractive, but we wouldn't be surprised to learn that a person who had previously preferred buxom blondes or tall women was now choosing to spend more time with short slender brunettes.

That aside, I also think it's worth thinking about why the extent to which homosexuality is fully biologically determined matters so much with respect to the civil rights issues. Consider that there's probably a strong biological component in whatever the makeup is of a person who becomes a psychopathic killer. But if we were to establish that that was the case, it wouldn't follow that society has some sort of duty to accommodate them in this compulsion. OTOH, many of our civil rights have no biological basis. We believe that people should be free to say what they want, believe what they want, and worship as they wish. The basis for this isn't the belief that beliefs and utterances and religious practice are all biologically determined. I think the civil rights story is a pretty simple one, we don't have the right to do whatever our biology compels or inclines us to do, we base civil rights on considerations of the fact that there's much inherent utility in maximizing liberty especially on matters that have little or no effect on the rest of society. Why does the fight for gay rights have to be depend on any more, or something other, than that? It's ironic that the civil rights movement which spent so many years arguing, implicitly or explicitly, that biology is not destiny, now finds itself vehemently insisting that is.

On the SOPA protests

2012-01-19T11:08:00.001-05:00

There was something heartening and encouraging about the SOPA/PIPA protests yesterday. It's good to see that grass roots political action is possible, the extent to which the internet facilitates it and the fact that it might actually even have an effect. And I agree that both bills are troubling, an attempt to kill a gnat w/ a hammer and possibly missing the gnat. That said, it's also a bit troubling to compare the outpouring of response when people are threatened with the possibility of harsh action on copyright infringement to people reactions idly to the desecration or dismissal of so many other civil liberties. Illegal wiretapping? shrug. Execution of US citizens? whatever. Participate in wars w/o congressional approval? yawn Give companies ability to sue to shut down websites that infringe on copyright? HOLD IT RIGHT THERE, MISTER!!! Frustratingly, this action may say less about our eagerness to participate in democracy and a lot more about our desire for short term gratification.

On downplaying corpse desecration

2012-01-15T19:22:00.002-05:00

Regarding, the four marines videotaped urinating on the bodies of Taliban fighters, I don't disagree with those who point out it that it seems to actually rank relatively low on the list of transgressions that US troops have committed in the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns. Furthermore, I agree with those noting that it's odd to strain at corpse desecration while swallowing the camel of torture. What I don't agree with is the implied conclusion that we should be making less of a big deal about this. Why not conclude instead that we should have been making a bigger deal of the heretofore downplayed atrocities?

But there's another argument making the rounds that bothers me even more. Bill Maher and others are making an attempt to downplay the seriousness of the offense on the grounds that it's being committed against bad people. According to the likes of Maher and Loesch, it's not really such a terrible thing to urinate on the corpses of Taliban fighters because the Taliban are such odious people and/or have committed such odious offenses. This argument is one of the popular arguments that have been used for all sorts of egregious violations of civil liberties and international law since the "war on terror" (and, of course, most wars throughout history) has commenced. It's the argument that some people are so despicable and so unlike us that we can drop the ordinary rules and laws that distinguish civilized societies from beasts in the forest or the characters in Lord of the Flies. In fact, the argument when applied to corpse desecration is even more brutish as there's no further utilitarian appeal to justify the actions, as is often the case with attempts to justify torture, just plain vengeance and blood lust. Just as free speech means little unless it protects the most objectionable speech, these laws and protections mean something only if they actually do protect respect for those we're ordinarily least inclined to protect.

Update: I tweeted this post and Bill Maher responded and clarified that he didn't claim it was acceptable, just that the US has done far worse things that bothered him more. Fair enough, and in this post I didn't say he claimed it was perfectly acceptable, that was only in my tweet. Nonetheless, while Maher didn't exactly say it was perfectly okay, he was very dismissive of the incident w/ a "shit happens" (when agreeing with Rob Reimer), noted that it's "like a TD dance" and pointed out that they may have been honor rapists so he didn't care much, which is all pretty much indistinguishable from saying it was acceptable from where I'm sitting.

oh, eh, can you see ....

2011-12-22T08:40:00.000-05:00

Their crappy musicians dominate the pop charts with their bland mindless music (link), its citizens cockily believe they live in the "greatest country in the world" (link), nationalistic logos (link, link, link, link) and a quest for world dominance pervade its sports culture, and, most telling of all, one has to cross the border in order to experience real winter weather. Clearly, Canada is the new USA.

Singular issue disappointment?

2011-12-18T15:01:00.000-05:00

George Clooney recently asserted that he's "disillusioned by the people who are disillusioned by Obama" and that "Democrats eat their own. Democrats find singular issues and go, ‘Well, I didn’t get everything I wanted.’" In my opinion the Clooney quote reflects a key flaw in American politics, i.e., the assumption that we should value party loyalty above all else. That aside, I've jotted down some concerns and disappointment with the Obama presidency just to dispel the notion that, for many who are disappointed, it's simply because of a "singular issue". Obama's administration:

approved indefinite detention without due process for terrorism suspects, including American citizens on US soil, despite the apparent Constitutional overreach, and failed to provide an alternative to the Military Commissions Act as he'd promised. (update: Mother Jones claims that it doesn't, in fact, authorize indefinite detention of US citizens.)
failed to close Guantanamo.
cynically ignored pleas to increase the debt ceiling last year in 2010 when the Democrats still had congressional control, thereby giving the GOP the power to threaten government shutdown and push through more draconian cuts while toeing the line on tax increase.
introduced a health care bill that implemented a conservative ideal, lacked a public option and came out for public consideration only after first consulting big pharma and the health care insurance industry.
kills US citizens without due process.
has regularly invoked state secrets to evade justice and terminate lawsuits, (or here or here), despite promises to the contrary made during Obama's campaign.
terminated warantless wiretapping lawsuits.
failed to investigate Bush administration abuses and appeared to push the Justice department to not do so.
violated obligation to consult with or inform Congress about participating militarily in the invasion/uprising of Libya.
has failed to make any sort of progress or adequate effort on dealing with the housing and foreclosure crisis. Further, he'd promised to implement cramdown provision, i.e., allow judges to reduce principal, but that hasn't happened.
had promised to repeal Bush era tax cuts for the wealthy and restore phaseout of exemptions and personalized deductions for the wealthy, still not done.
failed to make progress on cap and trade legislation and has been largely a huge disappointment in terms of environmental protection.
failed to pursue any sort of significant prosecution for the devastating and avoidable 2007-09 financial crisis.

(See politifact for a long list of broken promises, if you're still feeling all hopey and changey.)

On Hitchens

2011-12-16T09:08:00.002-05:00

I'm sorry to hear of the passing of Christopher Hitchens. There are a number of good obits, including one from David Frum, that do a good job of celebrating the man and describing what he accomplished. I'm happy to acknowledge that in terms of writing skill he was in a league with the likes of George Orwell, as his glowing New Statesman obit contends. But Hitchens's legacy will always be stained, in my eyes, by his outspoken support of the Iraq war and the responsibility he bears for contributing to the "clash of civilizations" rhetoric and perspective in which responding militarily to the attacks began to trump all else.

Hitchens's writings, including his set of "discussions" with Noam Chomsky, from those weird post 9-11 months are worth another read today. I think Hitchens correctly called out Chomsky and some others on their inclination to rationalize the Sept. 11 attacks. (link to the set of exchanges between him and Chomsky: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) But it's also interesting and useful to read his farewell article from The Nation today. In it he declares, as if it's a sort of reductio ad absurdum, that, "I have come to realize that the magazine itself takes a side in this argument, and is becoming the voice and the echo chamber of those who truly believe that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden." I'm not sure that that is an accurate portrayal of The Nation at the time, but if so aren't we at least somewhat inclined to say, "well, bully for them"? In the hindsight that a decade's perspective, trillions of additional dollars in debt, an efficiently executed assassination in Pakistan and legislation like the troubling National Defence Authorization Act affords us, isn't it hard to deny that The Nation was right to worry that the actions being put in place by Ashcroft et al might well present a deeper threat to the American way of life than anything OBL could ever hope to summon up?

Update: interesting anecdote with a similar conclusion: link

Louis CK

2011-12-15T08:11:00.000-05:00

Louis CK decided to self produce, release and distribute his latest video for $5/copy. He released the video last Sunday, December 10, and has thus far sold 110 000 copies. So far he has earned less than he would have if he just had some big company produce the video, and, obviously he has put far more effort into it than he would have had he just had a big company produce it, but, the advantage is that he was able to sell the video for a lot less money, users would have had to purchase an "encrypted and regionally restricted video of limited value, and they would have owned your private information for their own use". He made decent money, and he still owns the rights to the material.

This should be the value add of the internet, i.e., elimination of the middleman in terms of distribution. And CK's experience should be encouraging for all artists. When you don't treat your customer as an adversary and offer quality things to them at a reasonable price, people will pay real money for digital content on the internet even if those things would be cheaper/free via bittorrent or by grabbing a copy from a friend.

Update: Write up in the Globe and Mail

Oh, Fox

2011-12-14T12:10:00.000-05:00

I stumbled across this little Fox News gem this morning: "Team Obama's Immigration Hypocrisy". The article contends that there's a contradiction between the Justice Department opposing state laws requiring police to demand proof of legal presence and the State Department encouraging police to ensure that foreign nationals be granted consular access upon being arrested. The author contends that Justice Department objections to things like the Arizona immigration law imply that the State Department must abandon efforts at Vienna convention compliance when it comes to the arrest and detainment of foreign nationals. "If it [the Obama administration] ... truly believes... that authorities should not be checking the citizenship status of local lawbreakers, than the State Department should withdraw its 'Consular Notification and Access' manual, and stop telling local police officers to comply with the Vienna Convention by checking the citizenship status of criminals".

But this objection completely paves over the differences between legal and illegal presence and citizenship. The majority of non-US citizens in the US are here legally; as such there's all the difference in the world between inquiring into citizenship status and requesting proof of legal residence. I'm regularly asked about my citizenship status and I never interpret this as a question about whether or not I'm in the country legally. The objection also incorrectly conflates what is being asked of the police in these two instances. In the first case it's a requirement to insist on proof of legal presence, whereas in the second it's an attempt to ensure that persons be given the means to avail themselves of their rights under international law. The State Department isn't requiring police to demand proof of citizenship. Conflating the state immigration laws with the State Department efforts is like arguing that offering a guest a snack or a meal is no different from tying him down and force feeding him. The State Department is trying to ensure that non-citizens have an opportunity to contact their embassy, i.e., upholding fundamental legal rights. State immigration laws in practice and intent are something quite quite different.

Silberman on the health reform law

2011-11-18T08:17:00.001-05:00

Earlier this month a federal judge, Laurence Silberman, ruled in favour of the Obama health reform law. Notable here, though, was that one of the judges, in a 2-1 decision, was a Republican (Reagan) appointee and a fairly well known as a staunch conservative. He makes the point that health care is somewhat unique in terms of things bought and sold in the marketplace:

It suffices for this case to recognize, as noted earlier, that the health insurance market is a rather unique one, both because virtually everyone will enter or affect it, and because the uninsured inflict a disproportionate harm on the rest of the market as a result of their later consumption of health care services.

It's an important point, a point that's consistent with the evidence that the US spends far more on health care and receives far less. It's not in our interests to simply let the markets have their say when it comes to health care, because those decisions affect society quite profoundly. It's a lesson most of the world learned some time ago, it's just sensible to divorce health care from the rest of the market. That's why staunch conservatives in Canada or Europe have no problem also supporting universal health care.

David Brooks on Penn State

2011-11-18T08:05:00.001-05:00

David Brooks wrote an article this week accusing those of us who condemned Joe Paterno et al at PSU of a hypocrisy of sorts. Brooks points out that people often fail to meet their moral obligations, fail to help people who need help and ignore situations in which someone is clearly being victimized. He makes a couple of interesting claim. The first is an argument that our indignation is based on a belief that we'd do better:

First came the atrocity, then came the vanity. The atrocity is what Jerry Sandusky has been accused of doing at Penn State. The vanity is the outraged reaction of a zillion commentators over the past week, whose indignation is based on the assumption that if they had been in Joe Paterno’s shoes, or assistant coach Mike McQueary’s shoes, they would have behaved better. They would have taken action and stopped any sexual assaults.

But this is an odd claim, isn't it? Why must our indignation be based on a belief or assumption that we'd have done better? Moral indignation isn't based on the assumption that we would have behaved better, it is based on an observation that someone failed to meet a clear moral obligation and didn't when the repercussions for doing so were very high. It's possible to separate out the moral indignation from claims that we'd have done much better, those are different things. It's odd, in my mind, to suggest that we have no right to be troubled by significant moral failings unless we can establish conclusively that we'd have done better were we in the same position. Moral indignation should be a function of what we believe the moral obligations to be, not data about the extent to which those obligations are met.

Brooks makes a second claim that this reaction is because of a failure to have a sense of our own sinfulness and shortcomings:

In centuries past, people built moral systems that acknowledged this weakness. These systems emphasized our sinfulness. They reminded people of the evil within themselves. Life was seen as an inner struggle against the selfish forces inside. These vocabularies made people aware of how their weaknesses manifested themselves and how to exercise discipline over them. These systems gave people categories with which to process savagery and scripts to follow when they confronted it. They helped people make moral judgments and hold people responsible amidst our frailties.

But we’re not Puritans anymore. We live in a society oriented around our inner wonderfulness. So when something atrocious happens, people look for some artificial, outside force that must have caused it — like the culture of college football, or some other favorite bogey.

This allegation of failure to recognize personal evil and shortcomings isn't consistent, though, with the facts that we've observed in this case. In fact, people did hold these people responsible. Rather than seeking reasons to be gracious and forgiving, people put the blame squarely on the participants and those who failed to report him. I'm not sure why those facts call for bemoaning the loss of the good old days when people knew everyone was rotten. There's been no attempt at all to deny human rottenness here, on the contrary. No need to pine for the days when we were all self-loathing Calvinists.

Canada gets nastier

2011-10-19T11:45:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, someone pointed me to a recent G & M article observing that Canada is becoming, well, in the words of the article, a lot less like Ken Dryden and a lot more like Don Cherry. I found this interesting because I'd read/viewed a couple of things in the last few days that had me thinking along the same lines.

1) The first item was a blog post by Tasha Kheiriddin argues that much of the blame for the "present crisis" lies with "the 99%". She argues that "when people think it’s perfectly OK to take out mortgages they can’t afford, ... , you reap what you sow." And there follows the obligatory tale of how she pulled herself up by her bootstraps so screw all those greedy lazy people who could make it work if only they'd try. Ultimately, according to her, everyone is equally responsible for our present crisis. The criticism is flawed for a few reasons, let me note a couple. For one thing, it misrepresents the mortgage crisis. Yes, by definition almost, many people took on bad mortgages, but to present this as a reflection of pure greed or indolence or stupidity completely ignores the context. As a matter of fact, it was the actions of the banks that created a huge price bubble, a bubble that was downplayed by many experts including Greenspan and every mortgage broker in the country. People were regularly being reminded that housing prices were historically incredibly sound. It was the price bubble, not simple greed or stupidity that caused people to take on bad loans. People were led to believe that housing was becoming increasingly unaffordable and were willing to grasp at straws because of concern that they'd lose the opportunity forever as house prices continued to appreciate and that they were likely to be able to soon refinance on better terms. This is exactly the BS that mortgage brokers and realtors throughout the country were pushing, backed up by a plethora of financial experts. This isn't to deny personal responsibility; but to present this as simple greed or thoughtlessness is to completely ignore what was going on. Secondly, the crisis in which we find ourselves isn't just a simple matter of greed by everyone. In fact, the point that these people are making is that wealth has dangerously accumulated at the top and that this doesn't bode well for economic recovery or deficit reduction unless we implement fundamental changes. Truisms about everyone being greedy completely miss the point. If "the 99%" stopped being greedy it would do nothing to fix anything, it might actually hurt things insofar as it would result in less economic activity.

2) The second item that left me concerned about the tone of debate was a CBC "interview" of an OWS participant, Chris Hedges, by CBC's Kevin O'Leary. In it O'Leary says to, the very articulate and coherent, Hedges, "Listen, don’t take this the wrong way, but you sound like a left-wing nutbar." and then later quibbling with Hedges over whether he'd said 'nutcase' or 'nutbar'. To be fair, Hedges denounced "corporations" in general when he apparently actually meant investment banks, so there was some confusion but nonetheless, is this really what journalism on the CBC has come to?

(Parenthetically, I observe that Hedges gives credit to Canada for maintaining regulations on the banks, a point frequently made. Canada also regularly gets credit for the Herculean deficit elimination effort they mounted in the 90s. Both those things happened under Liberal governments, it's too bad they've been reduced to a tiny shadow of their former selves.)

Carlin and the American Dream

2011-10-11T08:23:00.000-04:00

George Carlin's 2005 classic on the American Dream ("you have to be asleep to believe it") has been making the rounds again recently. In it he rails against the fact that the country and the politicians are bought and sold by the big corporations. It's a (very depressing) comedy routine so his case is overstated, or at the very least I'd like to conclude something other than his complete despair, but it's also easy to find ample evidence of the way the moneyed are able to exert influence that significantly undermines real democracy and reform. Here are two recent examples:

1) The Montgomery County Council recently considered a resolution asking Council to spend less on wars and more on social programs. This is hardly a controversial position. Polls show, for example, that a majority of Americans believe the US should not be involved in Afghanistan. The Council was prepared to support the motion 5-4. But for some mysterious reason, after LockMart, as we affectionately refer to them in these parts, began talking with county officials, the resolution was withdrawn for "lack of support".

2) Another example involves my home and native land. It seems Trans-Canada has been using lobbyists to get close to State Department officials who have been cheerleading their efforts to get approval for a pipeline from the tar sands deep into the US, possibly circumventing environmental regulation scrutiny, and helping them find loopholes to avoid public scrutiny over attempts to make the line exceed usual pressure constraints. In the end, their money and lobbyists have given them far more access to the public officials who make the decisions than the pipelines opponents have had.

A more glaring example, of course, was the health care legislation that this administration pushed through. The efforts to appease the medical insurance and pharmaceutical lobby first ensured a result that was far less effective than it might have been had we simply found a workable compromise between intelligent liberals and conservatives unimpeded by corporate interests.

(note also his prescience wrt Social Security)

Hitler comparison?

2011-10-04T11:57:00.002-04:00

I'm not inclined to shed any tears for Hank Williams, Jr. losing his ESPN gig, but it irks me a little that most news reports are claiming that he compared Obama to Hitler or even that he was saying Obama was like Hitler. If one watches the interview (link), (which will also confirm that Williams, Jr. is a bit weird and creepy and not very articulate), what he says is that Obama golfing with Boehner is like Hitler golfing with Netanyahu. That's not a great comparison, but it in no interesting way says that Obama is comparable to Hitler or like Hitler. If I were to say that hot is to cold as black is to white, or as sweet is to salty it would be odd for anyone to infer that I was claiming heat is like sweetness or comparable to sweetness except insofar as both have opposites. What Williams, Jr. did was completely different than the sort of actual Hitler comparisons that we've observed at Tea Party rallies in which Obama was portrayed with a Hitler moustache or some such.

The Tar Sands

2011-08-31T21:36:00.001-04:00

There have been various protests about the proposed pipeline into the US from the Alberta tar sands. The protests, I suspect, have little to do with concerns about the pipeline and much to do with concerns about the environmental degradation that results from the oil extraction process in the tar sands. That's a legitimate concern. We're morally culpable when our purchases support immoral practices. For example, it's wrong, even illegal, to buy products that have been stolen, especially to the extent that we know the object in question is stolen.

Yet I've read two articles ("Open Up Canada’s Oil Lifeline" and "Top NASA climate scientist arrested at White House") in which the following argument is made: "The Canadians will develop this product and sell it with or without us as trading partners." and "... officials maintained that even if the U.S. refuses the pipeline, Canada will just sell their oil elsewhere". But how can these facts have any bearing on the objection that the oil is produced in an unethical fashion? If a shoe company exploited child labour, clearly it would remain illegitimate to buy shoes from them if we discovered that a market for the shoes existed even if we didn't buy the shoes. If I know that X is doing something unethical when producing Y, and I buy Y or facilitate the production of Y, I'm a participant in the unethical action and morally blameworthy. That seems like an obvious ethical truism, but apparently it bears repeating.

Update: David Frum produces another variant on the "well, it won't do any good" argument: link.

On Grade Redistribution and FoxNews

2011-08-20T05:59:00.004-04:00

This article: "College Students in Favor of Wealth Distribution Are Asked to Pass Their Grade Points to Other Students" seems to be generating far more discussion than it should. The article is about a student, Oliver Darcy, who is proposing that students with high GPAs contribute their GPA to students who are struggling. Of course, most people find the suggestion absurd. I believe that the way the argument is supposed to works is that since it's absurd to consider redistributing the grades that we earned it follows that it's also absurd to share the money we've earned.

But the problem is that he's making a category error. The absurdity of the grade redistribution suggestion doesn't lie in the fact that it's absurd to redress inequities, it resides in the fact that it's conceptually incoherent to "redistribute" a metric to something that the metric doesn't actually measure. A grade is a measure of the quality of work that an agent has done, it's meaningless to ask someone to share part of that metric with someone else who hasn't done that work. It would be like asking someone who is 6'5" to give some of the 6'5" measurement to people who are 5'6" or like finding out that my car got 50 mpg on the way to work this morning and then asking me to share some of that number with people who drive less fuel efficient cars. In both cases we don't even understand what it would mean to assent to such a "redistribution". I can't share the metric, or the value of the metric in some particular instance, as a metric is not a resource. Of course, I can, in some instances, share the things that the metric measured or that which caused the metric to register a high value. I could devote some time to helping struggling students, I could offer a ride to work to people who own gas-gazzling cars, those are coherent suggestions. If Darcy had gone around campus asking gifted students to offer time to help struggling students so that they might improve their grades, that wouldn't have struck anyone as absurd since it doesn't involve a fundamental category error. Of course, then he would have missed his chance to be on FoxNews.

Tea Party and the Credit Rating downgrade

2011-08-07T21:13:00.002-04:00

I watched some of the discussions from the talking heads this morning wrt the decrease of the US credit rating and I've read some crap from the TP trying to blame the downgrade on Obama's "lack of a plan" (see McCain on "meet the press" this morning). Not sure why anyone would buy that for even a second. S&P made it pretty clear that the problems with the political process were the cause. Read the press releases and listen to what David Beers of S&P said when asked what the key thing was that drove them to announce the downgrade: "Our observations about the political process for much of this year and the extraordinary difficulty that the parties have had to come up with this agreement and come to a consensus...." (link) Note that it's not debt level, it's the political process that motivated the downgrade.

Tea Party Theology and Economics

2011-07-31T20:51:00.001-04:00

There was an interesting article in today's WaPo about the Tea Party and the challenges that John Boehner faces in working with them. I found a short story at the end of the article telling. It describes a meeting at a chapel of three South Carolina Tea Party Republican congressmen:

At one point, Duncan said, Mulvaney picked up a Bible and read a verse from Proverbs 22: “The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender.”

“It’s telling me to really be bold, to really fight for structural changes,” Duncan said.

“Mulvaney snapped the Bible closed. And I said, ‘Guys, that’s all I need to see,’ ” Duncan said. “Tim said, ‘Yep.’ And we stood up and walked out.”

I found it fascinating. It's one thing to be engaging economists from the Chicago school of economics in discussions over Laffer curves and the like, at least we're all presupposing relevance of data and empiricism. But how does one reason with and negotiate with men who reject context and economic theory and reality in favour of simplistic readings of 14 word aphorisms written a few thousand years ago. "That's all I need to see". Pretty much says it all. I guess maybe the Democrats need to just dig into the book of Proverbs to fight back on this one. Personally, this reminds me of Prov 26.9.

Tea Party and the Shock Doctrine

2011-07-31T20:48:00.000-04:00

I was reading John Boehner's description of Tea Party objectives recently. Consider the following from an interview with John Boehner:

Speaking on conservative radio host Laura Ingraham’s show this morning, Boehner agreed that failing to raise the limit before the deadline would be devastating, and said the “chaos” plan won’t work when asked by Ingraham what’s motivating the recalcitrant Republicans:

BOEHNER: Well, first they want more. And my goodness, I want more too. And secondly, a lot of them believe that if we get past August the second and we have enough chaos, we could force the Senate and the White House to accept a balanced budget amendment. I’m not sure that that — I don’t think that that strategy works. Because I think the closer we get to August the second, frankly, the less leverage we have vis a vis our colleagues in the Senate and the White House. (source)

The objective is nothing less than to deliberately cause "chaos" in order to manufacture a means of forcing their views on an American public held hostage. One Tweeter that I follow claimed that this is terrorism. Setting aside what should and shouldn't count as terrorism, it does strike me that the strategy that they've laid out clearly follows the shock doctrine as described by Naomi Klein. From the Wikipedia article, "The book argues that the free market policies of ... Milton Friedman have risen to prominence in some countries because they were pushed through while the citizens were reacting to disasters or upheavals. It is implied that some man-made crises, such as the Falklands war, may have been created with the intention of being able to push through these unpopular reforms in their wake." And what do we have here? A completely contrived crisis with the intention of pushing through unpopular reforms. The big difference here is that the perpetrators are telegraphing their passes, letting us know that they're quite intentionally creating a crisis, telling us why they're doing so and what they hope to thereby accomplish and yet we still seem largely unable to respond. In TP democracy, it's not the will of the people that guides government policy, [poll: 19% want spending cuts only, (markup link)] it's the positions of those willing and able to break things and then hold the citizenry hostage.

Franken and Minnery and Focus on the Family

2011-07-23T08:14:00.002-04:00

Much to the delight of many of us, Al Franken "eviscerated" a Focus on the Family representative, Tom Minnery, during the recent hearings on repealing the Defense of Marriage Act. Minnery's testimony included this line: "children living with their own married biological or adoptive mothers and fathers were generally healthier and happier". Franken points out that the study he used to justify these claims is making claims about nuclear families and the definition they use of "nuclear family" does not exclude gay married couples. To quote from the study, "A nuclear family consists of one or more children living with two parents who are married to one another and are each biological or adoptive parents to all children in the family."

But the study, is entitled "Family Structure and Children’s Health in the United States: Findings From the National Health Interview Survey, 2001–2007" and included data gathered in the US from 2001-2007, as the title suggests. In that time period, only one state in the US, Massachusetts, allowed gay marriage and that state only allowed it since 2004. So, while the strict definition of "nuclear family" as defined in the study may include any family that had married parents, in fact, the data collected really must almost entirely involve nuclear families that include a married mother and father. In that sense, Minnery's claims are legitimate even if he wasn't explicitly quoting the study's definition of "nuclear family". Insofar as it makes claims about nuclear families, it's, in fact, making claims about families consisting of one or more children living with two opposite-sex parents who are married to one another and are each biological or adoptive parents to all children in the family, because, with a tiny exception, the only people who could be married during the time period under consideration were opposite sex couples.

Of course, Minnery wants us to conclude that same-sex marriage is undesirable based on the data and I doubt the data allows us to draw such an inference. In fact, there's good evidence to the contrary. See, for example, "US National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study: Psychological Adjustment of 17-Year-Old Adolescents" which showed "According to their mothers’ reports, the 17-year-old daughters and sons of lesbian mothers were rated significantly higher in social, school/academic, and total competence and significantly lower in social problems, rule-breaking, aggressive, and externalizing problem behavior than their age-matched counterparts in Achenbach’s normative sample of American youth". So Minnery is almost certainly wrong about the undesirable family ramifications of same sex marriage. He may even be a bigot, I don't know. But I don't think it's fair, at all, to suggest that he completely misrepresented or lied about what one could conclude from the study in question.

Wisdom of Markets

2011-06-23T11:11:00.004-04:00

I tweeted on this this morning and probably it came out trollish, but I'm somewhat genuinely puzzled by the fact that conservatives proclaim deep faith in the wisdom of markets and yet, completely contrary to what the market is alleging, conservatives are also trying to stir up deep panic about the US debt. If the markets, the wise, omniscient markets, are shrugging off such concerns, why aren't conservatives? Not that it's such a starting claim, but if forced to hypothesize, I'd say it's evidence that this "panic" about the debt has lots to do with politics and very little to do with economics.

On the "he was only joking" defense

2011-06-22T06:55:00.005-04:00

Louis CK defended Tracy Morgan's anti-gay ranting last week, noting that his own comedy routine includes a potentially offensive joke trivializing and justifying rape. He argues, among other things, that Morgan wasn't serious, he was just joking around.

I think good comedy is often comedy that will say things that shock or that involve some departure from norms. But that doesn't mean, I don't think, that comedians have carte blanche, that there's no accountability for what they say because they're comedians and these are jokes and none of it is true. If comedy routines were nothing but fiction reflecting nothing of actual beliefs, they'd cease being funny. Comedians are funny insofar as they speak the truth or point to something that is true. They make us laugh because they are speaking the truth clearly and bluntly, or saying things that we'd never dare say but sympathize with to some extent, or because they say things that are obviously false but, as such, thereby illuminate something that is true. This is the huge difference between Louis CK's rape joke and Morgan's "kill my gay son" joke. In the case of CK, the rape joke is obviously absurd and thereby illuminates the stupidity of a rape mindset, i.e, the notion that somehow one's desire for sex trumps another's personal security. But Morgan wasn't articulating a position that was obviously false and funny because it illuminated the absurdity of the position he was articulating, it seemed to those in the room that he was being quite serious. It also failed because it didn't have a ring of truth, it wasn't a dark place but one that we'd also been to. We didn't think, "yeah, i'd never say it out loud, but I'd want to kill my son too if he were gay and started talking effeminately." Rather, we, or most of us, I think, thought, "wow, that's really terrible and disgusting and sad, and if that's your dark place, you need serious help."

In any event, here's a good interview with CK: link. And here's a great discussion of it from Ta-Nehisi Coates: link, which makes, I think, similar points to the ones I'm making. And finally, here's a discussion of whether CK really should get away with a rape joke: link.

A review of Google Music

2011-06-16T22:21:00.001-04:00

I asked for a tryout for the Google Music Beta and just recently received my invite. I really like the basic idea of the system, i.e., storing music on "the cloud" rather than on your laptop or on some external hard drive or a stack of CDs filled with mp3s in your basement, and then going through the transfer process with a new computer, etc. Google Music also doesn't require syncing a phone and computer and music player as one has to do when using Itunes on an iPod or Iphone and on a computer.

Another nice feature is that they offer a nice selection of free tunes as well, if desired.

However, the initial description isn't completely forthright, and feels like a bait and switch. The earliest description had led me to believe that I'd simply be able to store my music as mp3s and download them to any device I wanted and use any software that I wanted. However, it seems that that's not the case. Rather, one can download to other devices but they have to be Android devices, and, unsurprisingly, I guess, there's a limit to the number of devices. One can also download to a computer, i.e., laptop or desktop, but it seems that on your laptop only the Google musicplayer can be used to play the downloaded music. So, it seems that Google Music commits users to Google software or a Google OS. As such, insofar as one doesn't want to make a lifelong commitment to using Google products, it offers no solution at all as a storage medium, I'll still have to store all my MP3s on a hard drive somewhere. I guess they're not being evil, but they're no better than Apple's nearly useless proprietary music software and formatting.

(oh, and one other odd glitch, gtalk won't display the current song title when one is playing music with the Google music player.)

San Francisco Circumcision Ban

2011-05-31T11:03:00.004-04:00

San Francisco is going to put a circumcision ban on the ballot in November. Unlike other recent cases of gov't meddling in San Francisco, e.g., the "happy meal" restrictions, I think this is a sensible law to consider. It's the kind of situation in which the government really can play a useful protective role in a potentially physically abusive situation. It's hard to think of circumcision as abuse mostly because it's so common, but given the intense pain that it causes and the lack of any clear medical justification, a very strong case can be made that it is, in fact, abusive. Of course, some would argue that there are medical benefits associated with circumcision, but, as noted in the linked article, these data are unclear and not adequate to have resulted in medical associations recommending it.

Sometimes there are good health reasons for circumcision but the actual bill provides for medical exceptions: "A surgical operation is not a violation of this section if the operation is necessary to the physical health of the person on whom it is performed because of a clear, compelling, and immediate medical need with no less-destructive alternative treatment available, and is performed by a person licensed in the place of its performance as a medical practitioner"

Some will object that this violates freedom of religion. But it's hard to take such arguments seriously. We don't allow other kinds of abusive actions in the name of freedom of religion. Nobody gets to cane their children and point to Bible passages about sparing the rod and spoiling the child. Religious freedom doesn't trump freedom of children to be kept free of intense unnecessary pain. We don't let religious practice trump child welfare considerations in the case of female circumcision.

I'm not sure that the ban is a good idea, but I think that whether or not it's a good idea turns on the question of whether or not clear medical benefits exist, not the fact that it's common or that it's an important religious practice. Without the existence of demonstrable medical benefits, those factors should only motivate the need to protect children from well-meaning parents who might have their sons circumcised for the wrong reason.

Conservatives and Relativism

2011-05-25T23:31:00.002-04:00

I remember that conservatives used to portray liberals as peddlers of relativism. But it seems to me that conservatives have become much less staunch defenders of objective truth, resting content with their own version of relativism. A few examples that I've recently encountered: (1) It's interesting to observe O'Reilly in his 2007 interview with Dawkins. O'Reilly doesn't attempt to offer any evidence for his religious beliefs simply "because they help him as a person" and "they're true for me". Dawkins takes him to task for his nambly pambly milquetoast relativism (starts around 2:20). (2) I was struck by a similar impression in reading the article "Transgender Clownfish Controversy". A conservative organization objects to the teaching of the possibility of more than two genders as this "does not represent the values of the majority of families in Oakland" as if the truth and facts and what we're to teach are defined by parental values rather than objective facts. I suppose it has all gone downhill ever since the Bush administration plunged into Marxist "reality construction" with their infamous "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality" (see this old post)

Ben Stein's Elitism Defence of Strauss Kahn

2011-05-19T10:39:00.005-04:00

Ben Stein has written what I think is a really atrocious call for "perspective" on the Strauss-Kahn case, "Presumed Innocent Anyone". Despite the title, it's not an article about a failure to presume legal innocence, it's just a set of odd attempts to cast aspersions on the allegations in the case based, it appears, on the fact that Strauss-Kahn is rich and powerful and his accuser is a hotel maid. Most of his points are laughable but I'll pick out a few of my favourites:

1) "Can anyone tell me any economists who have been convicted of violent sex crimes? Can anyone tell me of any heads of nonprofit international economic entities who have ever been charged and convicted of violent sexual crimes?" He's likely innocent because he's an economist or because he's head of the IMF. By the same argument, I suppose, we needn't have bothered attempting to prosecute OJ Simpson (can anyone tell me of any sports broadcasters who'd been charged and convicted of violent murders?) or Martha Stewart (can anyone tell me of any home decorating gurus convicted of insider trading) or the Menendez brothers (can anyone tell me of any wealthy suburban kids who'd been charged and convicted of violent patricide and matricide?)

2) "The prosecutors say that Mr. Strauss-Kahn "forced" the complainant to have oral and other sex with him. How? Did he have a gun? Did he have a knife? He's a short fat old man. " Given the account of the struggling that went on and the fact that this is alleged to have occurred in a large suite, this point doesn't make much sense. But note that he's 62, not 82, and 5'7", about 3" taller than the average US female, and his pictures suggest he's not obese or anything, but quite burly. We know nothing of the size of this maid, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that she weighed less and was shorter. Also, note that the charge is attempted rape, not rape, due, in part by the account given to the fact that the maid was partially successful in fighting him off.

3) "People accuse other people of crimes all of the time. What do we know about the complainant besides that she is a hotel maid? I love and admire hotel maids. They have incredibly hard jobs and they do them uncomplainingly. I am sure she is a fine woman. On the other hand, I have had hotel maids that were complete lunatics, stealing airline tickets from me, stealing money from me, throwing away important papers, stealing medications from me. How do we know that this woman's word was good enough to put Mr. Strauss-Kahn straight into a horrific jail?" We should likely ignore her, or give him some super duper benefit of the doubt, because she's a maid and there have been instances of maids behaving poorly? I would add that history is replete with examples of rich, powerful people behaving poorly, but I don't think that this constitutes extra evidence of Strauss Kahn's guilt, any more than examples of hotel maids, other than the accuser, behaving poorly gives good reasons to think him innocent.

4) But then Ben Stein stops with all the subtlety and lays his cards on the table, this is not a case of rape it's really a case of the poor unjustly attacking the rich. How do we know this? Because news articles have mentioned that Strauss Kahn was staying in a $3000/night hotel room. "In what possible way is the price of the hotel room relevant except in every way: this is a case about the hatred of the have-nots for the haves, and that's what it's all about." (emphasis added)

ETA: Jon Stewart comments on same.

2011 Canada Election Results under AV

2011-05-07T23:44:00.004-04:00

A few weeks ago, I tried to do some analysis of how the outcome of the 2008 election might have changed under alternative vote. Today I ran the same process using data from the 2011 election (I used preliminary results where the verified results weren't yet ready) and voter second choice data (see slide 5 in the gallery section) from a slight more recent survey than the one I used in the 2008 analysis. The Procedure and Politics blog did a similar analysis recently, I'm rerunning the most recently updated numbers using the script developed earlier.

Here were the results in this updated simulation. See the earlier 2008 analysis for a description of the methodology.

Party	Original	In AV Sim	% Seats won	% Seats AV	Popular Vote
Conservatives	166	144	0.54	0.47	0.4
NDP	103	114	0.33	0.37	0.31
Lib	34	48	0.11	0.16	0.19
BQ	4	1	0.01	0.003	0.06
Green	1	1	0.003	0.003	0.04

In this scenario, the Conservatives do not attain a majority, they get 22 fewer seats, (I'm reading slightly different reports on final numbers of seats so there may be a different of a seat or two based on validated final results). The Liberals pick up 14 and the NDP picks up 11. The BQ drops down to a single seat. Also note that while the percentage of seats won more closely mirrors popular vote for the three largest parties in the AV case, that's not true for the BQ, their seat percentage more closely ties with popular vote in FPTP. This is a good reminder that AV isn't necessarily of much utility to some smaller fringe parties with heavily concentrated support in relatively diverse ridings.

The ridings that changed in the calculations I ran:

District Number	Name	Winning Party	Recalculated
10004	Labrador	Consv	Lib
12009	South Shore--St. Margaret's	Consv	NDP
13007	Moncton--Riverview--Dieppe	Consv	Lib
24002	Ahuntsic	BQ	NDP
24036	Lotbinière--Chutes-de-la-Chaudière	Consv	NDP
24054	Bas-Richelieu--Nicolet--Becancour	BQ	NDP
24055	Richmond--Arthabaska	BQ	NDP
24075	Westmount--Ville-Marie	Lib	NDP
35006	Bramalea--Gore--Malton	Consv	NDP
35016	Don Valley East	Consv	Lib
35017	Don Valley West	Consv	Lib
35022	Etobicoke Centre	Consv	Lib
35023	Etobicoke--Lakeshore	Consv	Lib
35039	Kitchener--Waterloo	Consv	Lib
35043	London North Centre	Consv	Lib
35048	Mississauga East--Cooksville	Consv	Lib
35057	Nipissing--Timiskaming	Consv	Lib
35072	Pickering--Scarborough East	Consv	Lib
35079	Sault Ste. Marie	Consv	NDP
35081	Scarborough Centre	Consv	Lib
35100	Willowdale	Consv	Lib
46005	Elmwood--Transcona	Consv	NDP
46014	Winnipeg South Centre	Consv	Lib
47005	Palliser	Consv	NDP
59031	Vancouver Island North	Consv	NDP
60001	Yukon	Consv	Lib

Data is available here: link (see the "WithAV" tab for the numbers w/ the changes)

A proposed criterion for what counts as semantic in the Semantic Web

2011-05-01T12:44:00.004-04:00

Last year Richard MacManus introduced the Modigliani test as a "semantic web tipping point". His argument was, "The tipping point for the long-awaited Semantic Web may be when you can query a set of data about someone not too famous, and get a long list of structured results in return." This would represent significant progress in the implementation of semantic web technology and, to be sure, structured data would be very helpful in realizing an effective implementation of the semantic web. Being able to integrate this information from disparate sources is exactly the sort of thing that the implementation of the semantic web is supposed to help us realize.

However, this example as a semantic web tipping point gives pause because realizing it doesn't, to my mind, necessarily require too much in terms of semantics. Similarly, many alleged examples of semantic search leave me unsatisfied. Consider a recent discussion entitled "Exploring the Semantics of Yahoo Direct Search" -- the discussion points to the categorization of results and the ability to auto-complete queries and/or hint at the results they might produce. But none of these things seem particularly semantic or at least not necessarily semantic.

Of course, "semantics" is notoriously vague and under-specified in the context of semantic web and semantic search discussions. It certainly doesn't mean the same thing as what we're discussing when we consider, say, the semantics of first order logic. Rather, it usually means something vaguer like implementing the concepts that tokens denote rather than the tokens themselves in search and in representation. But even given this vague notion, I think that there's a relatively clear criterion, (one that, I might add, many extant alleged semantic search and semantic web implementations fail to meet), that will allow us to pass over the linked data vs. RDF debate and jump to the very crux of the matter with respect to semantics. I propose that a representation and query system is semantic to the extent that it's able to identify correct or useful query responses despite the fact that some terms in the query or salient query disjunct are not present in the response. That, to my mind, is a fair and interesting test of the extent to which the system is implementing the concepts that tokens represent rather than just the tokens themselves.

The condition is, I realize, neither necessary nor completely sufficient* to establish the presence of the implementation of semantics, but it is a fairly strong and reliable indicator. It's difficult to realize this condition without being able to do some reasoning about the concepts in the query. As such, I would suggest there are really a series of "tipping points" or at least types of queries and responses that realize this condition that would suggest we're well on the way to realizing a truly semantic web. Here's a set of example queries, or query types, and the kinds of results they'd need to meet the criterion.

Synonyms: To my mind, the simplest search implementation that would meet the criterion and have a legitimate claim at implementing semantics is any system that will recognize synonyms. Simple implementation of synonyms is implemented in Google already at present. Synonym recognition doesn't require extensive understanding of meaning but it does require some sort of semantic model for supplementing search. An example, searches for 'car parts' that return results containing phrases like 'automotive parts' or 'auto parts'.
Subclass: Search engine users have high expectations of search engines in terms of natural language understanding. Yet tend to be very forgiving of the fact that state of the art search engines are for the most part completely incapable of doing any sort of subtype reasoning, although natural language questions do involve this. Why shouldn't we expect a query on, say, "graph traversal algorithm AND scripting language" to be able to identify documents discussing a depth first search algorithm written in perl? Querying over subtypes is a far better test for the implementation semantics and has the potential to make the querying system far more powerful as an information retrieval tool. Simple examples include queries such as 'heart disease drug' and getting results withouth 'heart disease' or "drug" but containing instead, for example, 'Myocardial infarction' and "aspirin". Or we might imagine queries for 'vegetable side dishes for poultry' returning documents lacking those terms but returning references to green bean casserole recipes to accompany turkey. Of course, it's worth noting that such semantic search tools exist already and don't require the maturity of the more formal semantic web to be realized. Consider for example, a search for 'heart disease drug' in Search Medica or a search for 'meat with vegetables' in Yummly.
Instances: We can also imagine a search system that allowed us to search 'NHL team bankruptcy' and returning documents about, say, the Buffalo Sabres financial plight of some years ago even if the document failed to contain the phrase 'NHL team', i.e., based on recognition that 'Buffalo Sabres' is an instance of NHL team. Or, why shouldn't we expect a search tool to allow us to query "SCOTUS judges Harvard" and be able to retrieve documents containing references to Harvard and particular SCOTUS judges?
Another useful kind of subsumption reasoning is the recognition of parthood. This would be particularly useful for queries referring to geographical entities, e.g., in travel queries, "find airports in Northeastern USA". Other examples include a search for 'baseball teams in Southern United States' that recognized that references to, say, Alabama, are relevant or queries on 'cancer treatment in Canada' that recognized references to British Columbia as potentially salient.
Negation reasoning: Another particularly useful test for semantics is the ability to do actual conceptual negation in a query. For example, I often like to search for soup recipes that don't include meat. However, searches for 'soup NOT meat', typically only return references without "meat", but again it would be most useful if they also left out "chicken", "beef" etc.
Common sense/rule following: In a recent article about the ITA Software acquisition, a Google VP, Jeff Huber, asked "How cool would it be if you could type ‘flights to somewhere sunny for under $500 in May’ into Google and get not just a set of links but also flight times, fares and a link to sites where you can actually buy tickets quickly and easily?" This, I would argue, is an excellent "tipping point" query for the semantic web. While linked data is required for such a query, it wouldn't be sufficient. Recognizing which locations satisfied 'somewhere sunny' would indeed be indicative that the system is implementing semantics.

There are, of course, lots of improvements to be realized in search that don't meet the criterion I've spelled out. Improvements in ranking and categorizing and search suggestion and result extraction may, in fact, be of as much utility as improvements that implement these kinds of semantics. I just wish we'd stop using "semantics" for any kind of addition of structured data to documents or results.

*To the sufficiency question, there are some query response systems that meet the criterion I propose but which fail to be "semantic" in any reasonable sense of the term. As mentioned, stemming variants wrt the query probably aren't good examples. Nor are search tools that allow us to constrain dates and values, e.g., a Craigslist search that allows one to specify a maximum price (or age) or a newspaper archive search allowing me to constrain dates. Any satisfaction of the criterion that is realized almost solely via arithmetic, probably doesn't.

On Blocked Shots

2011-04-21T08:27:00.000-04:00

In the NHL a big deal is often made about blocked shots. After watching the Caps nearly lose Brooks Laich to injury last night I wondered again why teams put such emphasis on them. For one thing, players lack the padding to safely block such shots so they regularly incur injury from doing so. Secondly, the shots blocked are typically low percentage outside shots. Thirdly, the player takes himself out of the play when going down to block a shot. A number of times in the NYR-Washington series I've seen a player simply skate around a player who had gone down to block a shot. (These people aren't Bobby Orr in terms of their ability to spring up after blocking a shot.) Since the NHL records this stat, I used it to do a Pearson correlation calculation between the total shots a team had blocked and points accumulated during the season:

NYI	1387	73
TOR	1323	85
PHI	1317	106
NYR	1301	93
ATL	1292	80
MTL	1272	96
WSH	1257	107
TBL	1249	103
ANA	1248	99
EDM	1219	62
CGY	1209	94
DAL	1204	95
CAR	1203	91
COL	1176	68
BOS	1172	103
BUF	1168	96
CHI	1144	97
SJS	1141	105
MIN	1129	86
FLA	1125	72
OTT	1115	74
CBJ	1114	81
STL	1099	87
PIT	1082	106
VAN	1071	117
PHX	1056	99
LAK	1032	98
NSH	1007	99
DET	917	104
NJD	875	81

Unsurprisingly, to my mind, total blocked shots doesn't track at all with point scoring success, the Pearson correlation number is actually negative, -.1428. Of course, this isn't definitive proof of its ineffectiveness, no one claimed it was a key to the game and maybe the stat gathering is bad or maybe some teams block only key shots while other teams do a lot of ineffective shot blocking. Nonetheless, it remains difficult for me to see why people think this is a laudable thing for a hockey player to do.

Tax Increases

2011-04-19T13:46:00.001-04:00

Almost half Tea Partiers want to increase taxes on those earning over $250K/year. More than 60% of independents do, and 75% of self declared moderates. Why in the world are the Democrats not doing a better job holding the GOP's feet to the fire on their insane "we'll fix the deficit w/o tax increases" position. This could be a no-brainer political win for them one would think. My assumption is that they're afraid to put corporate donations at risk.

ETA: Another poll in the same vein: 80%+ dislike Ryan's medicare plan.

AV Voting in Canada?

2011-04-19T06:53:00.002-04:00

A recent post in "On Procedure and Politics" pondered the effects of AV voting in Canada. I was intrigued by the possibility and tried to run a simulation, using data from the '08 election and 2nd choice preferences as stated in a poll as discussed in an article linked in the aforementioned post.

Simulation:
Using the stated second choice preferences from the survey, I attempted to roughly simulate an AV election in the following way:

For each riding result, consider the percentage of vote received, PVR, of the party with the most votes. If PVR >= 50%, stop and go on to the next party. If PVR < 50%, move to the next step.
Of all the candidates in the riding remaining for consideration, identify the candidate, C, with lowest percentage of votes
Redistribute the votes of C according to the poll preferences in the survey. For example, if the candidate with the fewest votes represents the NDP, we'd give 56% of their votes to the Liberal candidate if the Liberals have a candidate remaining in the riding, because 56% of NDP voters identified the Liberals as their second choice in the poll. If a particular party in the preference list of C's party has already been removed from the list or didn't run a candidate, redistribute that party's share of C's vote according to the preferences for that party. For example, if the party/candidate with the lowest total is the NDP, 9% of their votes should go to the BQ. But if there is no BQ candidate or the BQ had been removed from consideration, we redistribute that 9% according to BQ preferences.
Remove C from the list of candidates in the riding.
Recalculate total votes, T. If 21% of NDP voters don't have a second choice, we remove those votes from the total.
Identify the party with the most votes after the redistribution, determine their PVR, given their new vote total and the total votes. If their PVR is >= 50%, we're done, otherwise repeat the aforementioned process but with C removed from the list of candidates. Continue until we have a party with a PVR >= 50%.

Here are the results under that scenario (in the spreadsheet, ridings in which the AV implementation results in a change in the winning party have a "1" in the "Changed" category).

	Original:	New:
Cons	143	131
Lib	77	92
BQ	49	42
NDP	37	41
Ind	2	2

Note that the Conservatives lose a number of seats, enough so that a Liberal + BQ or Liberal + NDP coalition exceeds the Conservative seat total. Also noteworthy, neither the Conservatives nor the BQ pick up seats in this scenario. This is because relatively few people select them as their second choice. Here is a list of ridings in which the winning party changed.

Province	Riding	Winning Party	Recalculated Winner
New Brunswick	Saint John	Cons	Lib
Nova Scotia	West Nova	Cons	Lib
Nunavut	Nunavut	Cons	Lib
Ontario	Kitchener Centre	Cons	Lib
Ontario	Kitchener--Waterloo	Cons	Lib
Ontario	London West	Cons	Lib
Ontario	Mississauga--Erindale	Cons	Lib
Ontario	Oak Ridges--Markham	Cons	Lib
PEC	Egmont	Cons	Lib
Quebec	Ahuntsic	BQ	Lib
Quebec	Brome--Missisquoi	BQ	Lib
Quebec	Haute-Gaspesie…	BQ	Lib
Quebec	Jeanne-Le Ber	BQ	Lib
Quebec	Laval	BQ	Lib
Quebec	Saint-Lambert	BQ	Lib
British Columbia	Surrey North	Cons	NDP
Nova Scotia	South Shore--St. Margaret's	Cons	NDP
Quebec	Gatineau	BQ	NDP
Saskatchewan	Saskatoon--Rosetown--Biggar	Cons	NDP

The data can be found at link. See the "assumption2" tab. Also, the script is easy to rerun using different assumptions about second choices and the like, so I'd be happy to try other variations in second choices, etc.

Responsibility to vs. Responsibility For

2011-04-16T10:10:00.005-04:00

Chuck Grassley posted a tweet yesterday claiming, "Reports of Gaddafi using Cluster bombs Nato'stimidity to stop means "blood on" Nato hand for every legles kiod. That is what clusters do". This tweet: "@ChuckGrassley By that reasoning, there's blood on your hands for each murder in DC on a night you failed to have been out crime fighting." was my clumsy attempt to respond in fewer than 141 characters. This post is my attempt to clarify what I was trying to say.

Grassley's contention that NATO has blood on their hands if kids are hurt by Gaddafi cluster bombs seems to assume the following principle: "If an agent fails to take steps to prevent an event that they may have been able to prevent, they are morally responsible for that event." I think that it's widely accepted that moral agents have an obligation to take steps to prevent undesirable events from occurring. I think the extent of one's obligation is determined by a number of factors including the need to respect autonomy of other agents, the relative costs of interceding, the anticipated negative utility of the negative action in which one is considering intervening and the likelihood of the intervention's success. (This is the sort of analysis Peter Singer alludes to, pointing out that obviously we have a strong obligation to intercede when, say, we can save a child from drowning by sacrificing our shoes.) I don't want to subject Libyan intervention to this sort of analysis here, I simply want to note that there is, in my opinion, a very important difference that Grassley may be paving over here. Even if one can make a case that an agent has an obligation, even a strong one, to prevent X, shouldn't we distinguish between being morally responsible for X and failing to prevent X? Arguably, one can't be morally responsible for X unless one has played a fairly direct causal role in X. That's not to say one isn't morally blameworthy for failing to prevent X, but I think it remains useful to distinguish between an obligation to prevent X and being responsible for it. This distinction does, admittedly, get a bit blurry when the obligation to intercede is extremely obvious. If I won't sacrifice my shoes to rescue a drowning child, it doesn't seem odd to suggest that I'm responsible for her death to some important extent, but I think here we're simply confusing the strong responsibility to intercede with the responsibility for the death.

The Debt Ceiling

2011-04-13T12:23:00.003-04:00

Over on Yglesias this morning there's what appears to be a reasonable suggestion regarding the debt ceiling debate:

As long as we’re taking hostages, I don’t see what’s stopping Democratic Senators—who, after all, constitute a majority—from starting to talk about what concessions they’re planning to demand in exchange for a debt ceiling increase.

That would be the ideal negotiating framework. White House demands clean debt ceiling increase, House majority demands big spending cuts, Senate majority demands partial repeal of Bush tax cuts, and we all compromise on just doing the damn debt increase.

But there's a simple reason it won't work. One side, or one vocal and demanding subset of one side, doesn't really care if the debt ceiling is raised, just as they were eager to see the government shutdown. Trying to negotiate in this context is like playing a game of chicken against a suicidal guy with a car accident obsession; you can't assume he shares your interest in avoiding a wreck if at all possible.

The Curious Case of the Toys at Meadow Lane Park

2011-04-11T07:52:00.003-04:00

There's a park near our house that is filled with lots of plastic outdoor toys, many of them quite expensive to buy new. The interesting phenomenon is that they're just left there, and don't seem to get stolen, or if they do get stolen, the rate of new arrivals appears to far exceed the rate of departing toys.

This fascinates me. I like to interpret it as evidence that communities can share without turning greedy, and even a hopeful sign that private property isn't as integral to a functioning society as we typically assume. But my panglossian take on this has suffered a blow recently. I've talked to some who deem the park's trove of toys an eyesore and argue that it's just become a de facto refuse dump for those unwilling to dispose of their old unused toys properly. I don't think it's quite as bad as all that, such toys aren't so hard to get rid of, we've had some and put them by the side of the road and had them snapped up quickly, i.e., people are perfectly happy to take such toys if they're offered up. So, I'd like to think that it really is a positive indicator of human decency and willingness to share.

Congressional Approval

2011-03-23T07:50:00.002-04:00

I'm having a hard time making sense of the question as to whether or not Obama's recent military actions wrt Libya are constitutional. Many, like Kucinich, are arguing that they're clearly not. But it's not completely obvious to me, although the resolution of the question requires some legal analysis that I'm admittedly not qualified to carry out. An alleged justification for the action resides in the UN Participation Act, Title 22, Section 7, § 287d. Use of armed forces; limitations: "The President shall not be deemed to require the authorization of the Congress to make available to the Security Council on its call in order to take action under article 42 of said Charter and pursuant to such special agreement or agreements the armed forces, facilities, or assistance provided for therein".

The question is whether the reference to " special agreement or agreements " is a reference to an Article 43 agreement, a situation which hasn't taken place under the UN. If it does, then to take action without congressional approval exists only if an Article 42 agreement occurs within the context of an Article 43 agreement. This is the argument, I believe, of Michael Lind. But, John Whitehouse over at Jenkins' Ear blog, argues: "There are some who see an art. 43 agreement as a necessary precedent to an art. 42 action. This does not make sense by either law – why would you ever have art. 42 if you needed an art. 43 agreement with each state having to refer to constitutional processes? And if you need a an art. 43 agreement for art. 42 to take place, then Section 287d makes almost no sense. – Why would Article 43 agreements need Congressional authorization if Article 42 agreements (which specifically refer to forces) do not? It makes no sense at all." (they link to this, as well, which I haven't read, as an argument that an article 43 agreement is required precondition for an article 42.) (Also see, this blog.)

I'm not entirely sure who is right here. I don't think that the morality of the action rests on whether or not he has Congressional approval. Honestly, I see congressional approval as a mere formality. I don't think any of us seriously think that Congress would reject the proposal were they to put it to a vote. Obviously, even if Congress approves it, it doesn't follow that the action in Libya is prudent or the right thing to do. And Obama himself had been unequivocal about his belief that he would need congressional approval to take military action unless an immediate threat existed. It puzzles me a bit why he didn't just go ahead and get Congressional approval, frankly, but for reasons above, I'm not sure to what extent the legal obligation existed. Clarifications welcomed.

Health Care Access

2011-03-19T10:11:00.002-04:00

An Ontario woman with breast cancer was recently controversially denied treatment with Herceptin. (link to a comment from the woman affected.) Herceptin is very expensive and because her cancer was caught early and the tumour is small, it's not clear the treatment will be very effective in treatment or in preventing recurrence. I'm not going to try to argue the medical issues involved in this recent case, except to say that if the G & M is wrong about this case, the general point still stands, i.e., that any health care system has to draw lines and balance costs with potential returns. I should also note that the Canadian system, from what I've experienced and understood, is far less niggardly than the US insurance payers and respectful of what doctors deem to be the right treatment options. The sense I have in the US, unlike in Canada, is that doctors are fighting with the insurance companies to get the right treatment options. But there's a key difference between the US and Canadian system: if a treatment is refused in the US, one still has the option of paying for the treatment if s/he believe it's what s/he needs.

The lack of such an option underscores a key and, I believe, somewhat unique characteristic of the Canadian health care distribution system, and that's the fact that this woman has no recourse to avail herself of this treatment, within Canada, after the insurer has declined to cover it. Regardless of what we think about allowing those willing to pay to jump the queue for services, this seems to be a different issue. In this case the government has simply refused her a place in the queue. In that situation, shouldn't the woman be allowed to access the treatment if she's willing to pay for it and take her place in the queue? (Admittedly, insofar as need as prescribed by the system defines the queue, it's not entirely clear where that place should be, but surely that can be determined.) The Canadian system has proven to be a very effective means of justly distributing high quality health care at lower costs, but when it actually prevents a person from getting a treatment that a person believes s/he needs, hasn't it crossed the line from being just a distribution system? Proponents of universal health care argue, rightly, I think, that access to health care is a fundamental right. But that has to cut both ways, ensuring access to quality care for all citizens, but also not denying access to those pursuing what they deem to be their best interests in terms of maintaining or restoring health and willing to pay the financial costs for it.

Another Chernobyl?

2011-03-13T20:21:00.007-04:00

I've been closely following reports of threats posed to and by Japan's nuclear power plant since the earthquake. There seems to be much concern that the Japan nuclear power plant situation will turn into another Chernobyl: "US experts fear 'Chernobyl-like' crisis for Japan" and here's a more "technical" description of the potential problem (source): "Without cooling water, there is a real chance of a meltdown of the reactor core that could result in a large release of radiation. Usually in case of a failure of the main cooling system, an 'emergency core cooling system' would extinguish the nuclear chain reaction by dousing the rods with water treated with boron. This element has a high affinity for the neutrons ejected from split uranium atoms, which are responsible for most of the steam-producing heat transfer." Ed Markey has also taken this opportunity to argue that this demonstrates that nuclear power poses grave threats of a Chernobyl type disaster.to the US. Now while the situation with these reactors may be grave, it's important to note key differences with Chernobyl.

Some of Japan's reactors are old but they're also of a different sort, light water reactors, than Chernobyl's Reactor 4. As Naoto Sekimura notes in an al jazeera article, "No Chernobyl is possible at a light water reactor. Loss of coolant means a temperature rise, but it also will stop the reaction." That's because in a light water reactor, the coolant water also plays the role of "neutron moderator". A neutron moderator, counterintuitively given its name, facilitates the nuclear chain reaction because it slows fast neutrons thereby turning them into thermal neutrons that perpetuate the chain reactions of nuclear fission. So, when the coolant gets too hot, it actually acts as its own release valve because the water density decreases, meaning it loses its effectiveness at "moderating" the neutron speed, i.e., losing its ability to turn fast neutrons into thermal neutrons. As that happens, the radioactivity is decreased because the moderator or the effectiveness of the moderator is undermined. So, the very material that's used to do the cooling, also actually facilitates the chain reactions, losing one helps to prevent the other, a very elegant deadman's switch of sorts. Compare this to Chernobyl in which the moderator actually ignited. This isn't the only way in which Chernobyl and the Japanese plants differ, Chernobyl also had no containment mechanism, so the radioactivity simply dissipated into the air.

None of this is to argue that nuclear power plants are completely safe and foolproof, but I do think it's important to factor this important difference in when evaluating the likelihood that a Chernobyl will unfold in Japan or is likely or plausible in the US.

Don't Volunteer in Haiti?

2011-03-01T07:52:00.002-05:00

Last month Catherine Porter wrote an article arguing that people shouldn't do volunteer work in Haiti. And, in particular, they shouldn't go to help with orphans. I'm always pleased to have good excuses for not doing the altruistic things I wouldn't have done anyway, but I'm not sure I'm convinced by her reasoning here. Regarding volunteering, the author argues that volunteers take away jobs from Haitians and "children who make and break repeated connections with revolving volunteers are at an 'increased risk of developing disorganized attachments, thus affecting their socio-psychological development and long-term well-being.'"

Consider the first argument first, that volunteering takes job opportunities from Haitians. This assumes a lot of things. First, it assumes that the volunteers are doing jobs Haitians are also amply qualified to do. The author admits that, for example, neurosurgeons are an exception, but there may be a lot of volunteer work that is an exception. She points out that sometimes volunteers do work for which they wouldn't be qualified in , say, Canada. Well, I also find that objectionable, but it doesn't follow that people shouldn't volunteer in Haiti. but why not simply argue that they should make sure they're volunteering to do things for which there are no or few Haitians qualified or available and for which they are adequately qualified?

But another issue here is that even if there are people in Haiti qualified to do the work, it doesn't follow that one is taking a job from them by volunteering. If there are no agents who are willing/able to pay Haitians to do the work for which one is volunteering, then one isn't taking a potential job from Haitians. If I go to Haiti to reshingle a building in Haiti because nobody is able to afford to hire Haitians to do the work, then I'm not taking work away from Haitians, I'm just fixing a roof that might have otherwise gone unrepaired.

Finally, this naive advise to avoid volunteering overlooks the fact that volunteer work might contribute infrastructure that could facilitate job opportunities and economic growth. For example, suppose a group goes to Haiti and builds a school or paves a road or puts a well in the ground. Suddenly resources are in place such that teachers might start working, goods might start moving or people could start growing vegetables or using the water for mixing mortar and building homes.

And what of the "orphan tourism". Well, I really don't know enough about psychology and human development to comment authoritatively here. I'll also acknowledge that it's clearly the case that making efforts to get full time foster parents in place is the most desirable objective. But I am a little skeptical if the suggestion is that it's better to do nothing at all for abandoned orphans than to help them for only a couple of weeks.

What's Really Wrong with SEO?

2011-02-26T23:31:00.005-05:00

I have little sympathy for companies who've been doing SEO and are now finding it not working and I find it most surprising that people are objecting to Google's recent changes. So here I try to spell it out in the most elementary terms what is wrong in principle with SEO as a practice.

Writing content to improve your search engine rank is like teaching to the test. It's letting that which is supposed to be measured, the quality of your webpage, be shaped by the metric, its position in search results pages, rather than the qualities the metric is designed to measure. Good metrics should be indicators of success, but that can be undermined when there is a focus solely on the metric at the expense of that which the metric is supposed to measure. If your scores are improving as you pursue the real objective, e.g., good authoritative content or clear understanding of the subject material, that's very likely as it should be. And if you're successfully chasing the objective and the metrics don't reflect it, possibly so much the worse for the metric.

But one should never make the metric itself the primary goal. The reasons should be obvious. One may very well end up over-fitting to the metric and gaining "improvements" because one has keyed in on secondary or indirect or ephemeral, but easily quantified, features of the quality under consideration. As the metric becomes better understood by those being measured, those indirect features are then purposefully exaggerated and, as a result, no longer act as reliable indicators of what they once indicated. Consider link text, the feature that Google used to use so heavily. At one time it was a great indicator of popularity. But as soon as people realized that Google perceived it as an indicator of popularity, they started using it to create the impression of popularity and it ended up becoming a far less reliable indicator. Of course, Google had to change the extent to which they relied on it to measure popularity. This is inevitable when everyone attempts to game Google. And we shouldn't be surprised or complain when Google changes their measurement tools in response to a change in the characteristics that they're trying to measure.

As an example of what I'm talking about, I read this objection to Google's attempt to penalize content farms. The author lists some methods of SEO:

* Research keywords
* Select keywords that have existing traffic
* Write pages based on those keywords
* Publish pages
* Get those pages ranked against those keywords

S/he goes on to ask, "How is this different to what a Content Farm does? So, if Content Farm pages are undesirable, so too is SEO content?" (apparently "content farm" is worthy of capitalization!) Can you imagine the great writers of history using anything like these techniques for writing high quality material? These aren't strategies indicative of someone trying to write useful, relevant, clear content; they're strategies for people trying to be manipulative, advertisers or propagandists. Insofar as people prefer not to get advertisements or propaganda in their search results, Google is right to penalize these methods. Rather than whining, people should go back to thinking about how to write web pages people want to read and let Google worry about ranking them.

Remember when Reich wasn't Radical?

2011-02-25T07:50:00.008-05:00

Robert Reich has put up a couple of posts recently on the wealth inequalities in the US and what they mean for the US budget. (An aside, the Mother Jones graphs are telling but nothing, to my mind, is a more bracing summary of the situation than the fact that the 400 richest Americans have nearly as much combined wealth as the cumulative wealth of the bottom 50%.)

The first post discusses the extent to which changes in income distribution have affected Social Security and how it's just untrue that Social Security contributes to the deficit. In 1983 a Greenspan commission tried to fix Social Security by implementing a plan whereby the ceiling, the point after which wages don't require a SS contribute, would continue to grow gradually, "the ceiling was set so the Social Security payroll tax would hit 90 percent of all wages covered by Social Security." However, the wage inequalities have been such that the current ceiling of 106,800 covers only 84% of all wages. To get it back up to the 90% level we'd have to increase it $180 000! That would be an easy fix for SS and seems a small price to pay for those benefiting from the wealth inequality, but as Reich notes, this is apparently unacceptable in the present climate.

The second post is a bit less wonkish, simply noting the BS that the Republicans are serving up with respect to our economic travails and the Democrats' collective lack of willingness to call them on it. The "Republican message is bloated government is responsible for the lousy economy that most people continue to experience. Cut the bloat and jobs and wages will return." Of course, the GOP assumptions are highly questionable, as even Goldman Sachs acknowledges. But the problem, Reich notes, is that the GOP is now allowed to get away with this stuff. We don't hear the Democrats or Obama talking about the obscene inequities in income distribution or dispelling the myth that government is responsible for the economic difficulties we're facing. Instead, Reich observes, the Democrats simply counter with "We agree but you’re going too far. Government employees should give up some more wages and benefits but don’t take away their bargaining rights. ... Non-defense discretionary spending should be cut but don’t cut so much." I admit that I've been pulled into this game too. It's yet another example of the GOP strategy to pull everything hard to the right and then make even conservative positions look left wing. They've played it marvellously in Wisconsin. Roll back union benefits? To hell with that, we'll take away their collective bargaining power too. Suddenly the left is fighting just to retain collective bargaining and we've sold the unions down the river on their compensation packages, unquestioningly buying into the myth that they're egregiously overcompensated, even while we blithely accept ludicrous executive compensation packages as a natural and even desirable part of capitalism.

What's interesting and alarming is the extent to which Reich's positions are now radical, far outside the extant political mainstream. Recall that it was only two administrations ago that Reich held a position in the Cabinet. We've come a long way, baby.

Tea Party comes to Washington to fight for liberty?

2011-02-09T07:23:00.004-05:00

There's a story in this morning's WaPo about the Tea Party allying with Democrats to help defeat an extension of the Patriot Act. One reads that it was "a vote that served as the first small uprising of the party's tea-party bloc." I was pleasantly surprised initially. My impression of the Tea Party has been that they're more of an ultra-conservative group of xenophobes than a group seriously interested or concerned about liberty. Tea Party activists, for example, came out in strong support of the Arizona immigration crackdown, real libertarians aren't inclined to have much truck with opposing immigration. It would be nice if the Tea Partiers were actually taking civil liberties seriously, if they were more Ron Paul-like and less Sarah Palin/Michelle Bachmanm-esque, I'd be less inclined to think the Tea Party was bad for America.

In any event, my hopes were quickly dashed when I dug into the numbers a bit. This alleged pro-liberty Tea Party uprising was exaggerated significantly by the Post. Of 111 congressmen that the Tea Party had endorsed, 96 (86%) voted in favour of the Patriot Act extension, only 12 (11%) voted against and three didn't vote. Yeah, sure, that's some uprising.

More on sodium thiopental

2011-02-02T11:21:00.002-05:00

Ah, some more curious moral reasoning regarding Hospira's refusal to continue manufacturing sodium thiopental, (see earlier comments). Charles Lane objects to the discontinuation of its production because (i) there are legitimate anaesthetic uses of the drug and (ii) "I suppose European restrictions on thiopental might be justifiable if they save a lot of lives on Death Row. They probably won't."

Consider the second point first. Lane seems to be contending that it's justifiable to refuse to contribute to an objectionable moral act only if you have good reason to think that your refusal to participate will prevent the act from occurring. It's okay (required?) to contribute to morally objcectionable acts if it's reasonable to think that your contribution to the act is relatively easy to replicate or replace. Suppose I'm producing some drug that turns out to be highly effective for date rape and is, in fact, often used for that purpose. Suppose further that for that reason I stop producing it. Well, according to Lane I'm not justified in doing so because, after all, if people don't have my drug they can always use booze or roofies or something to accomplish the same goal.

Let's also consider the objection that there are legitimate uses of sodium thiopental and let's assume that that's true. Where does the moral compulsion here lie -- on the producer of the drug or on the ones intentionally using the drug for unintended purposes? Suppose, again, that I'm producing a drug that can be used for date rape but also has legitimate uses. Suppose you are in control of distributing the drug and I ask you not to sell it to people who tell you that they're planning to use it for date rape. Suppose, you refuse this request. And suppose that because of your unwillingness to provide this assurance, I refuse to continue to produce it. Who is to blame here for the fact that some are unable to use the drug for its intended end, those who who refused to produce it because of the reasonable belief that it will be misused or those who refused to use it for its intended purpose?

Execution Drug

2011-01-22T12:30:00.001-05:00

There's a story in this morning's WaPo that the company, Hospira, that makes sodium thiopental, the drug of choice for lethal injection in the US, has decided that they will stop manufacturing it. Hey, good for them, a refreshing example of a company doing the right thing and acting ethically in spite of government pressure rather than because of government pressure. Right?

Well, okay, it's not quite that simple. It seems that the final push for this came when the company went to move its production facility from the US to Italy and the Italian government demanded evidence the "company ensure the drug would be used only for medical purposes". Realizing they couldn't give such guarantees so long as the US was using it to perform executions, the company stopped making it. But this wasn't simply a case of the company doing what the Italian government asked of it. It had made its objections to the use of the drug clear in a March 2010 letter written to the Ohio correctional facilities in which they expressed their wishes that the product not be used for executions, it always could have resumed or maintained production of the drug in the US.

But what I found interesting is the objections that "some blasted another country's interference in the U.S. criminal justice system". It's unclear to me how another country is interfering in the US criminal justice system. By my reading, they're insisting that the company not actively contribute to executions by providing drugs used in this act. It's a bit of a leap to call that "interfering". Refusing to knowingly contribute to carrying out a morally objectionable action is not, at all, the same thing as interfering in the carrying out of the action.

Debt Worries

2011-01-21T10:12:00.007-05:00

Arguments about why we don't need to worry about the fact that China holds so much of the US debt re reminiscent of the old Mutually Assured Destruction arguments about the USSR. The arguments in the case of China are something like, "sure, China could badly hurt the US economy, but they'd hurt themselves in the process". The arguments are reasonable, but they both make the troublesome assumption of rational behaviour on the part of the counterpart. It may be reasonable to assume rationality, but one would rather not be in a position such that the nation's well-being depends on that rationality. But more notable here is the fact that we're talking about something well short of total destruction. in the debt case China could conceivably convince itself that the damage the US would incur is far more substantial than that which China would incur should they decide to use their US debt holdings to hurt the US. Should that be the case, China might deem it reasonable to take the hit. Incurring deep losses in order to impose deeper ones on your enemy is a fairly common practice in warfare.

2nd Amendment Reductio?

2011-01-19T10:27:00.005-05:00

I read an interesting story this morning about a man in Massachusetts, of all places. To summarize, some loon commented on the Tucson shooting saying, among a few other things, "1 down and 534 to go" and for that reason had his gun license revoked. But couldn't we argue that this in violation of the man's second amendment rights if one insists that the second amendment guarantees an individual's right to bear arms? The whole point of the second Amendment if we're to believe defender's of the "individual right to bear arms" interpretation is that each individual may (should?) be carrying what amounts to an implicit threat to do harm to members of the government should they decide that they don't like what the government is doing. Surely, the Second Amendment means nothing at all if it allows for the government to remove the arms should they gain any sort of evidence that the individual is considering acting on that threat.

I think this illustrate an odd tension in the Second Amendment as interpreted by the likes of the NRA. It's presented as a tool provided to individuals to help facilitate the overthrow of tyranny, but then we also seem to say, "but if we ever get a hint that you might actually be planning to use the right for its intended purpose,we'll take it away immediately". And, of course, that makes perfect sense, we wouldn't expect the government to sit idly by whilst people plot and threaten to do government members harm. But doesn't that suggest a fundamental flaw in the individual right to bear arms interpretation of the 2nd Amendment? Why would you grant someone the means to accomplish X but insist that you reserve the right to take away the means should they ever indicate a plan to use it for its intended purpose? Isn't that a bit like distributing fire extinguishers with the understanding that they'll all malfunction in smoky or warm conditions?

How I learned to stop worrying and love the HOV lane violators

2011-01-15T15:44:00.002-05:00

I'm always inclined to feel moral outrage towards people illegitimately using the high occupancy vehicle (HOV)/car pool lanes on the freeway, i.e., those failing to have 2 or 3 occupants in their car (or failing to drive a Prius or motorcycle or other local variants, etc). But, if they use the HOV lanes when overall traffic is heavy while HOV lane traffic is light, they're decreasing the traffic load in the non-HOV lanes while also not impeding traffic flow in the HOV lane(s). So, they're doing the non-HOV traffic a favour while failing to hurt the car poolers. Of course, the natural concern is that the system would fail if everyone were to behave as they were behaving. Indeed it would; but if the system is enforced with fines, our anger and disdain is not required to function as the disincentive to using HOV lanes -- the fines can stand in and probably accomplish it more effectively. Insofar as the fines succeed in keeping the number of HOV violators low, we actually owe those violators gratitude. They're improving overall traffic flow at no cost to us. So, cheerio, Escalade driver cruising alone in the HOV lane at 5 pm, I apologize for that obscene gesture I made yesterday.

WTF, Arizona

2011-01-08T13:55:00.000-05:00

I often find myself defending the Canadian healthcare system to misinformed Americans. But, to be fair, Canadians are often also misinformed about the American healthcare system, the largest misnomer being that poor people in the US have no access to any sort of medical care and are just left to die on the streets should they become ill. That perception is not entirely fair because emergency rooms are obligated to provide care regardless of ability to pay (although recipients of such care will be obligated to pay for it it) and the Medicaid program exists for very poor people. But, it seems that the Canadian impression of the draconian nature of the US system is becoming increasingly accurate. Two people have died recently in Arizona for reasons that can be traced back to the state's decision to have its Medicaid program stop funding transplants for non-relatives. The state will save about $3-4 million by cutting this program and it will probably affect about 100 people. We don't know details about the second person affected, but the first man was only 37 years old.

I acknowledge that containing health care costs will likely require declining to perform any and all medical treatments. I just find it mind boggling that we make a person's wealth, rather than life expectancy, cost and likelihood of success, a main criterion for making those kinds of assessment.

On the Ethics of Outing

2010-12-22T11:38:00.011-05:00

Apparently there's been some recent rumbles about outing Lindsey Graham. Graham has been an opponent of things like repealing DADT, gay adoption, gay marriage and has supported constitutional amendments to prevent gay marriage. I don't know whether or not it's true that Graham is gay, but I think the question of outing someone like Graham raises an interesting moral issue.

There's a pretty strong utilitarian case that can be made for the outing. As a legislator Graham was taking steps to severely restrict the rights of gay people. Some would argue that if an action is within the law and helps to stop such injustices, the justification is obvious. Would we have paused in revealing that a legislator had, say, had a child out of wedlock if that act was all that stood in the way of successful passage of civil rights legislation? Nonetheless, there's something unseemly about blackmail even if the blackmailing is done to bring about positive ends. So, I think that we stand on much firmer moral ground if we can show that the information is information that the voters deserved to know all along or at the very least, is information the person shouldn't have assumed would be protected by ordinary privacy considerations.

So to what extent is privacy deserved or reasonably expected in this matter? Arguably, sexual orientation is relevant to voters if that legislator is going to be making decisions about gay rights related legislation. That's not to say only gay people people are qualified to legislate on gay rights but it help voters determine something of the background of the legislator that may help them to make assessments. We wouldn't contend that the fact that someone was a teacher is irrelevant if we anticipated their being called on to vote on education legislation. We presumably wouldn't think a person's ethnicity irrelevant and out of bounds if we anticipated their voting on immigration legislation. Why should a person's sexual orientation be out of bounds if they're going to be voting on gay rights legislation? Politicians often proudly parade their families when they're campaigning because they clearly believe that that component of their private life is relevant to voters and they're okay with it. Candidates typically reveal a great deal about themselves and a great deal is also revealed about them, what makes one's sexuality so special that it should be off the table? I'm not suggesting candidates should release lists of lovers, but it's not obvious that one's sexual orientation so obviously should be off the table when so much about a candidate isn't.

Over and above the question of whether a person's sexual orientation is something voters have a reasonable expectation to inquire into, there's another question about what this sort of situation reveals about Graham's character, i.e., does it reveal a duplicitous or hypocritical nature? Presumably such moral failings, if present, are relevant to voters because they speak to character and trustworthiness. To many, a gay legislator's failure to support gay rights legislation is obvious hypocrisy, I'm willing to be a bit more charitable. There isn't a logical contradiction, I suppose, in embracing homosexuality and opposing gays in the military or gay marriage. It would be an odd position to take but I suppose it is possible; one might make the arguments that conservatives often try to make, i.e., it's all about semantics and troop cohesion. I don't find those defensible positions, but I'll acknowledge that if one sincerely holds them it's possible to take those positions, be gay and not be a hypocrite. It's more problematic, though, to my mind, to try to argue that preventing homosexuals from adopting is permissible. It's hard to understand such a ban as emanating from anything other than a view that being a homosexual is wrong and that to expose a child to gay people is to jeopardize their wellbeing. So, insofar as a homosexual person opposes adoption by homosexuals, I believe that s/he reveals himself as a hypocrite. And, I'd argue that blatant hypocrisy is something that voters deserve to know about.

There's also an extent to which we all believe that public figures insofar as they voluntarily took up public life have given up some of their rights to privacy. People get incensed about outing gay people, but they don't seem to get nearly as incensed about the media releasing all kinds of other information about people's private lives. There's a gossip section in the Washington Post that discusses where politicians and actors eat dinner in DC, what they ordered, whom they went to dinner with and even how much they tipped or what it cost. Those certainly are facts about people's personal lives that are truly irrelevant to what they're doing as legislators but we don't hear people complaining that such privacy violations are unacceptable. We eat it up when Eliot Spitzer gets caught with a prostitute or John Edwards gets caught in a hotel late at night. So why are people so much more inclined to find gay outing unacceptable? I wonder if this inclination to believe that homosexuality warrants special privacy considerations also suggests an inclination to view it as more shameful than some of these other acts. I can't imagine people becoming upset with someone "outing" someone as being straight. It would be unlikely that such revelations would be met with angry rebukes that whether or not the person is inclined to sleep with members of the opposite sex is his/her business alone. Perhaps the portrayal of this kind of outing as a terribly vindictive or cruel act serves to perpetuate the view that being gay is very shameful and closet worthy.

Just to be clear here, I'm not arguing that the sexual orientation of everyone is everyone else's business. I'm arguing that it may be everyone's business if the person in question has deliberately chosen to be a public figure who will be casting votes on the matter. I should also clarify that when I speak of outing in the above, I refer to the act of revealing someone's sexual orientation. I think that all people, even public figures, have a right to privacy when it comes to particular details about their sex life. Of course, that right to privacy isn't absolute, and the privacy about such matters might be reconsidered if they reveal the person to be lying in some other area of his/her life.

Be Careful What You Wish For, GOP

2010-12-13T20:59:00.007-05:00

So, it seems we're indeed getting the conflicting judgements on the constitutionality of the new health care plan's individual mandate as many anticipated. Today, a Virginia judge ruled the mandate unconstitutional.

I thought that people long ago stopped thinking that only those things explicitly spelled out in the constitution are things the government is allowed to do. I wish we could all, conservatives included, just acknowledge this instead of engaging in ridiculous Commerce Clause and highway funding subterfuge. But let's set that aside.

The important thing about the individual mandate, to my mind, is that at worst this is a tax but at best, if you're a tax and government hating conservative, it's something far less intrusive. If it's a tax, it's hard to argue that the government lacks the authority to impose it. But let's suppose it isn't a tax, let's suppose we can draw some clear and distinct line between a requirement to fund government and having the gov't obligate a citizen to purchase a service, as state governments often do in the case of auto insurance.

Insofar as it isn't a tax, because it's requiring us to buy a service on the free market rather than fund a government program, conservatives should, IMO, think long and hard about opposing it. There's a good reason that this kind of plan was once the darling of conservatives -- it leaves the door wide open for market forces. Presumably the government could have gone a far more radical route, just make medicare wide open or effectively wide open. In that case, we could have had real discussions about socialism, but what we probably couldn't have had is an objection based on concerns about the constitutionality of the plan. We'd have funded it with taxes and it's hard to see what case could be made to block it. Obama has opened up the door to a constitutional challenge only because he's too moderate, not because he's too liberal or the plan is too intrusive, but only because the plan isn't obtrusive enough. But what conservatives should know, should they manage to win this case, is they've forced the hands of proponents of health care reform. The only workable solution to the cost problem, should an objection like this ultimately succeed, would then have to be one in which the government is involved far more directly so that the funding for the program will pass muster as a tax. (Although, I must say that I can't imagine the SCOTUS holding up a ruling like this if only for the reasons mentioned, i.e., it seems the lesser of two "evils" in which the greater already clearly passes constitutional muster.)

ETA: Ezra Klein makes the same argument that I do! And see this October article to which he links.

You Keep Using that Word ...

2010-12-11T13:07:00.009-05:00

"Liberal" has been a dirty word in America for some time. But the actual meaning of the term seems to keep shifting rightward while politicians continue to struggle to avoid being tagged with it. Consider an example from a blog posting published in the paper edition of Friday's Washington Post.

Jennifer Rubin observes that the Democratic Party of Virginia had the audacity to choose , in her terms, an "ultra-liberal" to lead the state party despite the results of the midterm elections. Apparently, this was a sign that the Democratic Party didn't get it; the clear message of the midterms was that America will have no truck with the Democratic Party's liberal ways. Setting aside the question of whether the midterm results indicate a rightward trend (and the deep disdain I hold for political agents who shape policy and pick candidates by identifying the easiest road to victory), I was fascinated by the choice of the term "ultra liberal" to describe Brian Moran. Why is Moran an ultra liberal? Does he want to nationalize the banks, mandate a 30 hour work week, institute single payer healthcare, establish a national day care program, increase welfare spending, legalize drugs? Well, actually, turns out this "ultra liberal" has twice won a "Friend of Business" award from the Fairfax County Chamber of Commerce, hardly a bastion of Marxism, and is a gun rights advocate. Furthermore, he is, at best, ambivalent about gay marriage.

Nevertheless, Rubin calls him an ultra liberal because he opposes off-shore drilling and supports organized labour. (Despite the BP oil spill this summer, opposition to offshore drilling is now a hallmark of radical leftism?) So that's all it take then, if you don't think unions are evil and that oil companies should be allowed to drill wherever they please, then you're not just a liberal, you're an "ultra liberal".

I wish that I had the time and energy to better document this attempt to marginalize as radical leftism any and all positions that don't toe the shifting conservative party line. This is less ballsy than the GOP's frequent use of "socialism" to describe a health care plan that was remarkaby similar to that championed by prominent conservatives in the not too distant past, but pretty remarkable nonetheless. Small wonder that people that people scarcely bat an eye when people describe the NYT or CNN or even the Washington Post as liberal. Language evolves, of course, but the question of how we're using "liberal" is particularly important because there seems to be some consensus on both sides of the aisle that it denotes the boundaries of what counts as reasonable policy and debate.

ETA: As further evidence of how far we've moved to the right and how the meaning of "liberal" has changed, consider the various progressive policies that Richard Nixon implemented or pursued. (For example, this is a decent outline: link) Or try googling "Nixon more liberal than Obama"

On the Incoherence of Blaming God (h/t Anselm)

2010-11-30T09:55:00.002-05:00

Last weekend a Buffalo Bill called out God when he muffed an easy catch. I was amused by this twist on the typical, "thank God for the victory". This is "God has let me down". But it did lead me to consider attempts to blame God and/or question God's wisdom and, along the lines of the old ontological argument for God's existence, I came to the conclusion that such attempts are incoherent. Here's why: blaming God or contemplating doing so is to consider the possibility that God has acted incorrectly, i.e., is imperfect and is responsible for some imperfection, Imp1. In modal terms, it's to consider a world, Wi, in which Imp1 has occurred and in which God is responsible for Imp1. But God is, by definition, perfect and so incapable of acting imperfectly, i.e., there is no world in which God has acted imperfectly. So, either Wi doesn't exist or the agent responsible for Imp1 in Wi is some agent other than God. Any attempts to blame God must fail as there can be no world Wi in which God is responsible for an imperfection.

Of course, we're inclined here to respond, "but of course we can consider the possibility of blaming God, just as we can consider the possibility of blaming any moral agent". What this response overlooks is that God is unlike other moral agents insofar as perfection is part of the very essence of God, i.e., God is perfect not just as a contingency, because God has failed to make any mistakes, but because being perfect is a property that God has by definition of 'God'. This is not an argument that blaming God is a moral or theological failing, but it's a conceptual or semantic error insofar as it requires assuming that A could do X when the very definition of A entails that X is impossible.

Matthew 23:24

2010-11-24T07:42:00.019-05:00

I'm not a fan of the new TSA policies regarding body scans. I remember when people used to joke about the possibility of TSA eventually just having everyone fly naked but recent events reveal how difficult it can be to parody the DHS or TSA. So, I'm pleased to see that there is a line that the the populace is willing to draw when it comes to exchanging freedom for security, but I have two thoughts.

First, this whole thing would actually be rather easy to fix. The answer is image distortion and the fix has been proposed (and, oddly, rejected) already. Why not just fix it? Secondly, where were these proponents of liberty and fighters for human dignity when people were being humiliated at Abu Ghraib, when prisoners were being waterboarded, in response to warrantless wiretapping, when it came time to respond to indefinite detention, when execution (w/o trial) orders for US citizens (not to mention foreigners) were being written? Maybe it reflects America's puritan roots or something but why do body scanning images and pat downs around one's privates trigger a populist uprising when people have been largely silent in the face of far more significant assaults on dignity and freedom? I suppose it's not that surprising that people really only care about their own liberty and dignity, not the general principles, but here's hoping we retain some of the indignation and refusal to take it any more when it's someone else's freedom at stake and when they stand to lose even more than an economy class ticket to Omaha.

ETA: In retrospect, I think that this post probably goes too far in trivializing the extent to which the TSA may be violating civil rights. I think the potential for abuse here is fairly significant, that significant abuses may have occurred and the fact that this kind of privacy violation may become so incredibly common place is very worrisome.This video helped to convince me that TSA violations are *not* simply at one relatively innocuous end of: a spectrum of civil rights violation. Rather, that this kind of thing can happen to such a person in such a circumstance but may instead serve to devalue privacy at a fundamental level: http://is.gd/hT2xo

Bush on free market ideology

2010-11-17T10:34:00.004-05:00

Bush's recent memoirs contain more discussion of his decision to intervene dramatically in the markets in the face of the economic crisis facing the nation in 2008. Bush comments: "It flew against all my instincts. But it was necessary to pull the country out of the panic. I decided that the only way to preserve the free market in the long run was to intervene in the short run." He also says, "The lesson there is that I had to set aside an ideology." It strikes me that Bush is playing a little fast and loose with his ideology here, wanting to recognize that he'd done the right thing without acknowledging that insofar as it was the right thing it refutes the ideology. He doesn't get to just set aside his ideology and pick it up again, untarnished, when the dust has settled.

Sometimes people set aside principle or ideology or fundamental beliefs because there's a competing interest at stake. I might believe it's wrong to eat meat but set aside that principle when I'm visiting someone's home or when I'm starving, but in those cases, I'm setting aside the principle in favor of a competing interest, e.g., being respectful of my hosts or believing that my life trumps the life of a chicken. However, something very different is going on in Bush's case.

The ideology that free market proponents embrace involves a claim that markets work best when the government leaves them alone; that is the beauty of the invisible hand doctrine. But if Bush is recognizing that the market system would have failed profoundly without intervention, that seems not so much a momentary abandoning of a principle for the sake of some other pragmatic consideration, it's a recognition that the ideology itself is just simply incorrect. In fact, economies don't work best when government leaves them alone, sometimes they'll fail spectacularly when you leave them alone. So, again, I think Bush and other people who will simultaneously advocate for free market ideology and TARP-style interventions owe us a clearer account of the economic ideology they embrace. They've acknowledged , I'd contend, that free market principles are wrong. This isn't a "setting aside", it's the recognition of a profound and fundamental flaw. In the face of such evidence, it's incoherent to simply pick up the ideology and resume.

This is more like a football coach claiming that the West Coast offense is the very best offense but abandoning that offense whenever playing a team with a good defense or whenever falling behind by two or more TDs, claiming, "I had to stop playing that offense or we'd get too far behind and it's hard to use the West Coast offense when you're far behind. You see, the only way to save the West Coast offense was to not use the West Coast offense." That would be an incoherent claim as would be carrying on with the pro-West Coast offense ideology. A more coherent observation would be "The West Coast offense is very effective for some situations and in others it isn't -- here are places and times in which it's imprudent to rely on it."

Bush and Torture

2010-11-10T10:45:00.002-05:00

Apparently GWB's memoirs include an acknowledgement that he okayed torture and attempts to justify it by claiming that it saves lives, British lives in particular. It also appears that the British are taking some exception to that claim. Setting aside the intriguing question of whether he's acknowledging war crimes, this points to something that's always bothered me about the torture debate, i.e., the fact that so much of it seems to hinge on the question of whether or not it's effective. Imagine someone proposing, oh, i don't know, something crazy like having poor people eat their children and trying to demonstrate that that would bring down poverty rates and/or dependence on government welfare programs. Surely, we'd reject the argument as absurd, not because we're skeptical about whether or not it would actually bring down poverty rates or welfare dependence, but because the proposed solution is an affront to human decency and a violation of fundamental human rights.

No Voting = No Right to Complain ???

2010-11-03T07:37:00.001-04:00

At election time I often hear people assert, "If you don't vote, you don't have any right to complain". I find this a bit bizarre. Suppose someone were having a dinner party and before the dinner party they sent around an email saying, "Please indicate whether you'd prefer spaghetti or lasagna". Further suppose that it really mattered nothing to me, or that I forgot to respond or that the email went to my junk folder or whatever. Now if I then arrived at the dinner party and got a plate of spaghetti that was disgusting and inedible, surely my failure to have voiced a preference of lasagna over spaghetti doesn't compel me to simply eat the disgusting plate of food while those who had actually stated a preference would be in a position from which to legitimately object . That argument would make no sense to me. Similarly, the "no vote, no complain" argument, that just seems utterly arbitrary to me.

Payrolls and Baseball Success

2010-10-27T22:31:00.004-04:00

There's been a lot of buzz about the teams in this year's World Series because each has a relatively small payroll. Given the recent success of other low payroll teams, it's interesting to consider how strongly correlated payroll size and team success are. To get a quick sense, I took the Pearson r number for 2010 total team payroll and 2010 total regular season wins. In the case of payroll and wins, the number was a relatively small .35. Compare that to a value of .66 when one considers total wins and average age, or .38 when one correlates total wins with the age of the oldest player on the team. In other words, someone using only the age of the oldest player on the team to predict success in 2010 would have been more successful than someone who used payroll size. (Data sources: payroll: http://baseball.about.com/od/newsrumors/a/2010baseballteampayrolls.htm, age data: http://espn.go.com/mlb/stats/rosters/_/sort/null/order/false, win totals: http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/standings/?tcid=mm_mlb_standings)

ETA: Data and calculations link

Hitchens's Wager (Pascal's Wager Revisited)

2010-10-15T23:11:00.006-04:00

I've been reading about some of the recent debates that Christopher Hitchens has been having or will be having with people like his brother and Tony Blair. Apparently the debate or discussion focus has shifted from a direct question about God's existence to the practical effects of religious belief. I'm not sure if the debate is supposed to have anything to do with the question of God's existence, but let's suppose, for the sake of argument that it does.

If it does, one might contend that it's an odd claim, i.e., whether or not a belief X has good practical effects isn't what should inform whether or not we believe it. We should believe X based on whether or not we have evidence for X. If I believe that my wife is cheating on me that may end up having negative practical effects that could harm our marriage, but nonetheless, I should base my belief in this matter on the evidence that I have, not the effects that I want to see. Similarly, can one actually choose whether or not to have a belief based on anything other than evidence? For example, it seems that I can't choose whether or not to believe that Ottawa is the capital of Canada, it's just something about which I have knowledge based on evidence. You can offer me $1000 if I'll stop believing it, but I'll only be able to pretend I don't believe it, I won't actually be able to stop believing it.

However, it's worth thinking about American pragmatism in this regard. Pragmatism sees belief as something other than just the degree of psychological certainty we have with respect to some proposition based on some reliable epistemic process. Rather, belief can be a matter of the will. It's not unreasonable, according to pragmatists, to choose to believe X even if we don't feel certain about it. William James gives the mountain pass example. A climber is caught in the mountains and must get down before night fall. He doubts his ability to jump a chasm but convinces himself that it's possible, despite a lack of evidence and in choosing that belief actually manages to give himself the requisite confidence to make the jump. Bas van Fraassen is a voluntarist with respect to belief contending that one can choose to believe X over Y even if one doesn't feel as certain about X as they feel about Y. Of course, this all hearkens back to Pascal's Wager. Pascal famously argued that even if you don't feel very confident in God's existence, you should choose to believe in God anyway because there's not much to lose in so believing and much to gain if you actually do believe. Decision theory shows us the way. Pascal assures that we can simply act as if we find the belief compelling and it will become compelling. But the key is that we choose what to believe, not because of the evidence we have at hand but because of the positive benefits of holding the belief.

So, now let's consider Hitchens's discussions of the effects of religious belief. We might actually consider this as reworking of the decision theoretic data that's factored into Pascal's wager. In fact, if religious belief has a significantly detrimental effect overall and if, in fact, the probability of an afterlife is very small (although one might contend if the overall benefit is infinite, because one would live forever, than it can become almost vanishingly small and still be reasonable, but let's set that aside), then the wager comes out the other way. If the effects of believing aren't negligible, then belief itself, in the absence of solid data for or against may well compel us to reject the belief rather than accept it.

On Self Esteem and Coaching

2010-09-26T22:03:00.006-04:00

Today and yesterday I attended a hockey coaching clinic. It was mostly an excellent course, but things deteriorated badly at the end of the day when the presenter gave a presentation on "self esteem and positive coaching". It began with a caricature of the nasty old coach who berates his players loudly and angrily in full view of everyone. As the presenter noted, we'd object to this kind of behaviour from our boss, so it's odd that we'd do it to children or allow people to do it to our children. Fair enough, but the presenter then argued that unlike the nasty coach, we should each strive to be a "self esteem" focused coach (SEFC). SEFC is a man or woman who identifies something positive each of his players have done in every single game, and finds encouraging things to say at all times, even when his team is losing by a huge amount, by reminding them that the point is not to win but to have fun.

I've spent a fair amount of time watching and participating in kids' sports and I've met a few SEFC; they usually bug me. I tried, not very successfully, to explain what bothers me about SEFC by mumbling something about kids being good at detecting bullshit and that this kind of false praise can backfire and trivialize. (This was met with loud murmurs of disagreement steered at me and various anecdotes about nasty coaches or beloved coaches that always found time for a positive word for the kids. ) Here's what I wish I had said, "The SEFC disrespects the game, the truth and the players." Here's why:

The SEFC disrespects truth: If most everything, including the most trivial accomplishment or act, is praiseworthy, then how do we distinguish between the truly remarkable and the expected, required and mundane? Or worse, what of praising something simply because we want the kids to feel good, not because the act is praiseworthy? Praise inflation is like monetary inflation because it devalues our words and praise. To put it another way, the SEFC, insofar as s/he is focused solely on using his/her words to make kids kids feel good, spews bullshit, and as Harry Frankfurt argued, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.
The SEFC disrespects children: The assumption that kids are tender flowers that require contrived compliments regardless of whether or not they've been successful or done anything praiseworthy is extremely patronizing.
The SEFC disrespects the game: Insisting that having fun is distinct from winning a game and fully independent of success in the game trivlalizes what the kids are doing. Imagine going to work and finding that something you'd been working on was irrevocably destroyed but then having someone try to cheer you by telling you that the project was a joke and hadn't meant anything to anyone in the first place -- it was just busy work that they'd had you working on to keep you amused. If we think results don't matter at all, that only feelings of pleasure somehow unrelated to whether one has won or lost, why enroll kids in sports in the first place, why not just take them on picnics or to the movies?

Religion and Politics

2010-09-22T07:52:00.005-04:00

There was a good article, "A religious test all our political candidates should take", in last Sunday's Washington Post about, essentially, religious bias or the potential for it in politics. The article noted that John F. Kennedy's famous speech about his Catholicism helped to push the view that a person's religious beliefs are politically irrelevant. However, this notion of religion being a private matter changed at some point. Politicians in the US, it's very atypical elsewhere, I believe, wear their religion on their sleeve and we've come to expect candidates for office to give us some sort of "testimony". An atheist would be very unlikely to gain office in the US, so the US electorate expects politicians to embrace a traditional, from a US perspective, religion and politicians like to use their religion to gain political points.

The article contends that while it may be tempting to go back to relegating religion to the private sector, that that may not be prudent. As a matter of fact, one's religion has profound implications for one's views on morality, the government's role in enforcing it, and authority. So, rather than letting the candidates simply make pietistic feel good statements about his/her religion, we need to be asking candidates how they would resolve possible tensions between the dictates of their religion and their church and their rights and responsibilities as leaders.

I would add, and perhaps it's implicitly stated in the article, religion has the further potential to have profound implications on a person's views of ontology and epistemology as well. In fact, if a person is serious about his/her religion it will have a profound effect on their actions in the political realms even when there is no explicit conflict between church dogma and legislation. For example, one's views on the acceptability, or non-acceptability, of divine revelation as a legitimate means of coming to have knowledge might affect one's views on the breadth of the school curriculum. One's interpretations of Christ's demands to love one's enemies might affect one's perspective on foreign policy and willingness to launch attacks. Or the flip side might be that one's views that all non-Christians (non-Muslims), are doomed to hell and/or that this life is nothing but a painful precursor to an eternity of bliss may also affect one's willingness to attack another nation. One's views that Christ's return to earth is imminent might affect one's willingness to implement long term environmental policy requiring short term pain. If one's religion postulates a lower role or traditional role for women, one might be less likely to pursue Equality in the Workplace legislation. So, not only should we concern ourselves about explicit points of conflict but we should also try to understand how religion might affect the politician's entire worldview and the policies s/he might enforce.

Religious convictions are convictions on matters that are of fundamental importance. (In fact, I'd contend that we all hold religious beliefs of some sort, insofar as assumptions, even working assumptions, about the nature of humankind, whether we're alone in the universe, whether there's a higher power, legitimate means of coming to knowledge, on the sorts of things that exist, are all, in some sense religious beliefs, insofar as they're profoundly important and usually embraced with a measure of faith. ) In America, however, we've sort of come to the worst of all possible worlds. We don't ignore religion in political discourse, but we allow it to operate only at the level of platitudes. As the article suggests, if religion really means something , let's ask hard questions about what it means. These fundamental convictions may very well mean something important and candidates owe us an account of what they think they mean when the rubber hits the road. Now, I also think that for very many politicians religion isn't operating at a profound metaphysical level, their religious practice is more or less a social activity and/or a comforting set of rites and rituals. Nonetheless, if that's the only role it's serving, candidates should be clear about that.

Terry Jones

2010-09-10T06:46:00.000-04:00

When I read about and when I see this Terry Jones book-burning Quran guy I'm impressed with a sense that he's like a classic internet troll. Yet despite all that we've learned from internet discussion boards we're feeding this guy rich tasty food like calls from the Secretary of Defense and non-stop media coverage as if he mattered and weren't some obscure mindless pastor of a tiny fundamentalist church. If anyone thinks this kind of attention will put an end to anti-Muslim hysteria, they haven't learned a thing from the internet.

Football Musings

2010-06-13T08:31:00.003-04:00

I've been watching a bit of World Cup this weekend. I know it's denigrated by many Americans, but I've come to enjoy the aesthetics of the game and I appreciate the athleticism involved. It helps, perhaps, that I coached my son's soccer teams for a couple of seasons.

One thing that I observe, possibly because of my ignorance, is the relative paucity of data in soccer. Sports like baseball, (American) football and basketball, in descending order, are discretizable into distinct units of play. And especially in baseball, each of those units have a very crisp set of data that can be collected regarding that event. Ice hockey is more like soccer insofar as it involves more continuous play, and less frequent scoring as compared to basketball. But play recommences with a faceoff each time, wich a measurable outcome, and the fact that there's much more scoring and many more shots on goal, and the relative frequency of power playes, means that there are many more data that allow us to analyze the effectiveness of players and teams. Soccer is different, I suspect. It's not as easy to quantify the effectiveness of particular players, and, indeed, the relatively large number of ties means that it may be more difficult to even quantify the effectiveness and potential of particular teams too. I believe that that makes it harder to predict success and failure as well. It would be interesting to compare the accuracy of expert predictions in sports like baseball and (american) football to the accuracy of soccer predictions. Does the alleged paucity of data cash itself out in terms of decreased insight into what will happen?

I wonder, though, if this characteristic of soccer helps to explain why it has never achieved the same level of popularity in the US. Appreciating soccer is more like appreciating art and Americans, well North Americans, have always been a little more Philistine-like in this regard.

Lost

2010-05-25T10:29:00.006-04:00

I've tried to write a few words about what I found disappointing about the finale and, in some sense, the entire final season of Lost.   To me, the show appealed as a piece of science fiction, a mystery and a quirky "things aren't really as they appear" narrative along the lines of the Twilight Zone. It wasn't, originally, about the characters or relationships. Note that the writers were actually going to kill off Jack in the second episode. The show took great delight in having beloved characters die without warning. This wasn't Brothers and Sisters or Friends. So, I felt disappointed in the authors retreating to that storyline in the end.

I think that what distinguishes good science fiction from fairy tales and silly flights of fancy, is that good science fiction will tell a compelling and complicated but always consistent story about a state of affairs in which the laws of nature differ from ours or which may or may not be true in our world. The good science fiction explores how those deviations from reality explain the kinds of things that go on in the sci fi world. Good science fiction doesn't require suspension of disbelief once you've understood and accepted the fundamental differences between our world and the sci fi world under consideration. So in good science fiction, obligations to give or allow for compelling and reasonable explanations remain. Lost appeared to be doing that for some time, exploring a world which didn't necessarily differ radically from the real world and in which the strange departures would make sense as we learned more about the basic differences between our world and Lost world.

Secondly, it also worked as a mystery and as a quirky "nothing is as it appears" story. Of course, mysteries are interesting exactly insofar as they invite us to read/watch/listen along as potential clues are offered up and we simultaneously test our own ability to extract and reconstruct the data to explain the strange goings on.   A mystery isn't fun to read if the mystery can't be explained with the information that has been shared with the audience along the way.

Somewhere along the way, Lost pulled a bait and switch. It gave up on being a compelling mystery/sci fi story and turned it into a story about relationships and people finding happiness. The writers thumbed their noses at those of us interested in what had seemed to be a compelling and fascinating mystery involving science and metaphysics. After throwing out all kinds of mysteries and situations requiring explanation, it just gave up and said, "Oh yeah, we were just telling a story about people" and relationships.   The mysterious island, well, it's still mysterious and the final episode has some implausible hokum in which the island can be turned on or off with some wine-stopper like plug, less compelling or interesting than the fairy tales one might read to a four year old. For some reason, the writers assumed instead that what viewers would care about would be mawkish, inexplicable and irrelevant reunions of people who'd already died. As one commenter put it,

They [writers] couldn’t have proved them [those who argued that the ending would be a big cop out] more right if they’d had Jesus and Krishna themselves make an appearance on the island and tell Jack that, “everyone will go to a warm, lovely place that they made together to be together to remember that they were together somewhere for some reason, because that’s what people have been wasting their time for six years to find out.”

I feel as if I were reading a fascinating mystery novel in which lots of strange things happen and along the way various protagonists die only to have the book end by ignoring the obvious questions that the mystery had raised and instead telling some silly story about all the characters getting together in heaven and being really happy about seeing each other. Any one of Jimmy Kimmel's endings would have been better.

Tea Party and pick and choose freedom

2010-05-21T07:36:00.017-04:00

Leonard Pitts wrote an article a little while ago about a poll of Tea Party participants and argued that the "poll offers strong evidence that, contrary to the denials of tea party enthusiasts, President Obama's race plays a big role in their outrage. Indeed, researchers found a significant correlation between racial resentment and tea party zeal." Pitts argues that their alleged concerns over taxation and deficits and socialism are as appropriately or more appropriately made at either of the two Bush presidencies and that this fact and the poll respondents' views on racial questions suggest that what's really at issue here are concerns about race. I've seen other similar arguments which note that what concerns people is not just Obama's race but the fact that homosexuals and Latinos have made significant strides in this administration.   But those arguments overlook, I think, the fact that GWB's administration elevated people like Colin Powell, Condi Rice and Alberto Gonzalez to very high positions of power. So, I've tried to keep sort of an open mind here.

Nonetheless, recent events give further pause. If you were pro-freedom and pro-markets, wouldn't you be pro-immigration, e.g., like super libertarian, Bryan Caplan. (see, for example, link 1 or link 2). But even if you're not pro-immigration, at the very least if you're a Tea Partier, you're opposed to big government, right? You don't want the government to be able to pull people over and demand papers, that kind of stuff happens only in totalitarian regimes that scoff at the notion of individual liberty.   But the Arizona Tea Party called people to action to support this immigration bill. (link 2) The Tea Party, or an important Tea Party member, also insists that driver's license tests should be English only.

There's a strange notion of freedom operating here, no worries about government overstepping power when it's going to start going around asking for ID papers or forcing you to speak English to get a driver's license. In light of these clarifications on what kind of curious notion of freedom the Tea Party supports, I find Rand Paul's objections to the 1964 Civil Rights Act particularly jarring. The Tea Party will not only let these other assaults on freedom go but even encourages them and yet draws a line, or at least Paul does, at standing up for the rights of business owners to refuse to serve black people or draws a line by sticking up for rights of employers to refuse to make accommodation for people with disabilities (Paul also disagrees with the Americans with Disabilities Act).    So, it's not wholesale freedom that the Tea Party supports, not a freedom for disabled people to access the workplace or freedom of all people to be able to access the same services as white people, or even a freedom from demands for papers, it's a more limited notion of freedom, a freedom for the rich and empowered to continue doing whatever they want, the freedom to maintain the status quo however unfair or unjust it may be. Screw their ad hoc notion of freedom and bigotry wrapped in talk of patriotism, I think Pitts may be on to something.

Goldman Sachs

2010-04-29T09:59:00.000-04:00

As I tweeted this morning, the more I read about what Goldman Sachs was doing wrt to mortgage backed securities and Greek debt, and for an excellent breakdown of the Greece situation I recommend abomvubuso's post last March, the more I think that the best analogy for their behavior is the 1919 Chicago White Sox. We have a group of people ostensibly doing their best to win a game, (present a viable product, hold legitimate debt), while involving them in situations such that it's in their better interest to lose at the game (see the housing market and/or Greece fail). Don't buy the crap that this is just a matter of hedging bets. Hedging a bet is taking steps not to overexpose yourself, it's most certainly not pretending to be pursuing objective A while it's actually in your interests that you fail at A. That's not hedging a bet, the word for that is 'fraud'. (Oh, and as I also tweeted, the big difference between the Black Sox and GS is that the Black Sox became pariahs, GS's stock is rebounding nicely.)

Tea Party-surprised at the surprise

2010-04-18T19:38:00.008-04:00

I've been a bit surprised at some of the surprised reaction to a recent poll revealing the kind of people that make up much of the Tea Party movement. It seems some have been working under the assumption that Tea Partiers are all illiterate Kentucky hillbillies and were surprised to learn that the "18 percent of Americans who identify themselves as Tea Party supporters tend to be Republican, white, male, married and older than 45" , are more educated than the general public and "are more likely than the general public to say their personal financial situation is fairly good or very good". I suppose that proves one shouldn't make hasty generalizations from a couple of really hilarious Daily Show clips.

But, why would anyone be surprised that an ultra conservative "movement" is made up of the most conservative people in the country — well to do, white, old Republican male heterosexuals? It stands to reason that the group fighting change the hardest is made up of those in the most advantaged group in society. (Incidentally, I'm also not very surprised to learn that Tea Partiers are more likely than the general public, and Republicans, to say that too much has been made of the problems facing black people.)

What also surprises me is that some seem to be interpreting this information about who makes up this "movement" as a reason to take it more seriously. Doesn't it suggest just the opposite, i.e., effectively dispelling the notion that the Tea Partiers reflect the voice of "the common people"? That a bunch of old rich white straight male conservatives are willing to fight tooth and nail — and aren't above enlisting Fox News demagoguery to do so — against change and economic justice isn't a reformation or a revolution or even a populist movement, it's nothing more or less than business as usual.

Update: Note, for example, how Rush is trying to portray the Tea Party movement: first time that "common average ordinary everyday citizens" have "risen up" "since the Civil War", i.e., a narrative of "the people are rising up," rather than the more accurate "the elites who've always held power will do whatever they have to do to retain control".

Individual Mandate Penalties

2010-04-01T10:26:00.005-04:00

Austin Frakt argues that the penalty for not buying health insurance under the Affordable Care Act is not too low, as some, including me, have argued. The problem, of course, is that if we disallow the practice of rejecting or penalizing people with pre-existing conditions the amount these people will pay for their insurance won't actually reflect the risk of payout they present to the insurance company. To compensate, people with less risk will have to overpay given the amount of risk of payout they present to the insurance company. So, being greedy people as we are, why would anyone overpay like this? Well, that's where the penalty comes in. (The other fact, of course, is that those without insurance are getting a free ride insofar as emergency rooms are still obligated to treat them, so it's only fair that they pay some kind of penalty to reflect this free ride.)

But, my concern is that the penalty might not be adequately high. Health insurance in the US is so expensive that a $600 penalty is small beans compared to the cost of a year of coverage. So I worry that low risk people won't buy insurance leaving a smaller pool of people sharing a heavily disproportionate amount of the costs. Nonetheless, based on coverage and penalty rates in Massachusetts, Frakt argues that the penalties under ACA are adequate. He may well be right and if he's right, I wonder why. There are a few possible explanations:

a) The $600 is greater than or equal to the amount that they're, effectively, overpaying. I don't think that's the case, but would need more data. And, of course, the more people that participate in the plan, the closer this comes to the actual overpayment. (And, yes, arguably, insofar as any comparable health care insurance will have to compensate for the effective subsidy for pre-existing conditions, the person is not really overpaying at all, i.e., one is really only overpaying if they could have received the same good or service elsewhere for a lower price. )
b) People actually tend to be slightly irrational consumers. The typical consumer would rather overpay by X and get some real value in return than pay a penalty of Y and get nothing in return even if X is more than Y. In the former case, it feels less like we're just wasting our money.
c) Another explanation, one that I prefer, is that people simply perceive it as a fair obligation despite the fact that they recognize they're overpaying. They willingly take on the overpriced insurance just as many people willingly pay taxes despite realizing that the direct benefit they receive from the tax is less than the amount they pay out. But insofar as this is true, the penalty could work against us. There's a discussion in Freakonomics about a day care that experimented with charging a small penalty to parents who showed up late. The effect of the penalty was to increase tardiness. The reason is that people perceived the penalty as simply a, quite affordable, fee for extra babysitting and no longer felt a moral obligation to show up on time.

On Individual Mandates

2010-03-23T21:47:00.000-04:00

It's interesting, and perfectly sensible really, that conservatives, recently and in the early 90s were in favour of an individual mandate. After all, what's better if you're a conservative, a tax to fund health care or a mandate to buy it and thereby ensure the market continues to play a central role in delivery of health care? And really, I don't understand how a mandate to buy insurance would be unconstitutional when income taxes or a requirement to register for the draft aren't.

Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention and Prosecution Act

2010-03-17T19:49:00.001-04:00

Glenn Greenwald discusses the "Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention and Prosecution Act" today. As Greenwald notes:

It's probably the single most extremist, tyrannical and dangerous bill introduced in the Senate in the last several decades, far beyond the horrific, habeas-abolishing Military Commissions Act. It literally empowers the President to imprison anyone he wants in his sole discretion by simply decreeing them a Terrorist suspect -- including American citizens arrested on U.S. soil. (Link to relevant passage from the bill.)

This is a great example of what bothers me about the increasingly spineless Republican party and much of modern day conservatism. The GOP will scream bloody murder about rights and freedom when it comes to something as innocuous, IMO, as mandated health insurance while at the same time giving away the most fundamental rights of the American people. (And what happened to McCain? He wasn't always this evil? Maybe he sold his soul to get the nomination in '08.)

Olympic Metrics

2010-02-26T10:48:00.004-05:00

I don't mind using medal counts as a metric for Olympic success, and I fully acknowledge that Canada badly failed in their "Own the Podium" campaign, but I think that the heavy focus on medal counts misses a lot of information. Clearly a fourth place finish is far superior to a fortieth place finish but we don't see that in medal counts. Another problem: sports like hockey or curling award only two medals, while most others, like short track speed skating, award large batches of them. If country A has an excellent hockey program, at best it's rewarded with two medals, if country B has an excellent short track speed skating program it can result in 8 or 10, but it doesn't seem to follow that country B is 4 or 5 times better at winter sports than is country A. I've thought of a few other simple metrics that would help communicate additional information.

a) Average percentile or ordinal/athlete: Take the average of the sum of the ordinal of the finish of all participants from a given country. Or if that would bias too heavily to sports with fewer participants, use percentiles. DNF or DQ count as one place lower than the last qualified finisher.

b) Average percentile or ordinal/event: Same as (a), except that we factor in breadth of participation so that breadth of qualification and participation is factored in. If a country has no participant in an event, we count that as a last place finish. If a country has two or more participants in an event, we take the average of their ordinals or percentiles.

c) Sport counts rather than medal counts: Given a metric for success in an event, e.g., best percentiles or most medals, we then identify a finish/sport. That number is then used to measure overall success. So, for example, a country finishes with two golds in hockey, they get 1st in hockey. They finish with 4 medals in short track but another country has 5 (with some weighting for ordinal, of course), they get second in short track, etc.

I don't think these need replace medal counts, but I think they'd be useful supplementary metrics. Next step, calculate these for the 2010 Games. (Don't hold your breath.)

Short tournaments

2010-02-19T07:01:00.001-05:00

Short tournaments are notoriously bad for choosing the best team. I read an article a few months ago on the likelihood that a soccer game will select the best team and the fact of the matter is that a single game isn't a very good experiment. (short summary) In light of this I've been thinking about the optimal setup for a very short tournament of the sort necessitated by the Winter Olympics, assuming we want the tournament to be maximally likely to "choose" the best team. The article considered, among other things, intransitivity as an indicator of the effectiveness as a game, i.e., if Team A beats Team B which beats Team C which beats Team A then we have an intransitivity. A lot of intransitivity suggests the games aren't very good at selecting winners.

I suspect the intransitivity will be lower in hockey, not because the games are better experiments but because the difference in relative ability is much greater between teams. But, there are also tiers of skill levels, I suspect. If we consider games between the top 5 or 6 teams in the tournament I suspect we'd see close scores and fairly high intransitivity. So, in a good tournament, I think the thing to do is to have early knockout of bad teams and allow for more games between the really good teams. I don't suspect that the best way to set up the tournament is to have a long round robin (3 games/team) after which zero teams are eliminated. If Norway loses 8-0 to Canada, they should immediately move to a consolation pool, the US shouldn't then be forced to waste time playing this team. But this tournament eliminates zero teams after the round robin, although they do give the top four teams a bye through one of the playoff rounds. It will have Russia and the US and Canada wasting a lot of time, three games, on potentially far lesser skilled teams and then move to single elimination games in the playoffs. I think it's a very poorly designed setup if our goal is to be able to crown the truly best team.

x-posted to blogspot.

Who am I, the word allah?

2010-01-12T07:11:00.001-05:00

Yesterday I read an article about Sarah Palin believing that her selection as VP candidate was part of God's plan. What caught my eye was the claim, by chief McCain strategist Steve Schmidt, that she was "very calm -- nonplussed". I find 'nonplussed' an odd clarification of 'very calm', given the meaning of 'nonplus' as "to cause to be at a loss as to what to say, think, or do : perplex". I suspect that he was making the not uncommon error of using 'nonplussed' to mean 'unrattled' or 'unfazed', but I'd expect a bit better from a chief strategist of a presidential candidate for the GOP.

I also read a post about the word 'Allah' in the NYT blog section yesterday. It was interesting and informative, but what I found puzzling was its failure to distinguish between use and mention. In a couple of instances the author used the expression 'word Allah' without indicating clearly he was talking about the actual string of characters, with quotes or italicization, as opposed to the concept 'Allah' denotes. Stated thusly, without single quotes or italics, a reasonable interepretation is to think 'word Allah' refers to a god of words, or something, e.g., Who are you to tell me how to use this word, the word Allah? Again, people often fail to make the distinction clear, but in an article/blog about word usage in the NYT written by a Pulitzer Prize winner, I'd expect a higher standard. And the errors are still there today, maybe I'm missing something?

Another NPR WTF moment

2010-01-06T11:23:00.001-05:00

On the way in to work this morning I heard a discussion on the radio of some similarities between the movie Avatar and the popular song Tik Tok by Kesha. It was an interesting discussion of the two works as consisting mostly of a "mashup" of various pop cultural references and genres, etc. I don't know whether that's true, but what did strike me was a comment about the song. The reporter says "This is not a good song in my opinion but it sounds enough like a good pop song so that you can't quite tell the difference".

It reminds me of an illustration Raymond Smullyan once used to illustrate the verification principle. He writes about a concert pianist who used to note that the difference between European and American critics was that European critics would write things like "he played too slowly during this part of the piece", etc., while American critics would write things like, "he didn't play with enough moonshine". (Sorry, don't have a reference handy.) What in the world could it be for a song to sound like a good song but fail to be a good song for reasons that one cannot perceive?

2009-12-26T10:26:00.002-05:00

Health care reform finally making it, but there's not much to cheer about in the bill, unless you own insurance stocks. I appreciate the fact that it's finally going to do away with this draconian denial of coverage because of pre-existing conditions, one of the key things that I was hoping to see come out of this bill and something I'm very relieved to see put into place. Also, it puts in place some very significant subsidies for health insurance. But what I don't see it doing is anything about the high and ever increasing costs of health care. We see in this bill, I think, the continuation of the worst of all possible worlds. No public option that might allow us to see a powerful government insurance entity that could negotiate better pricing nor do we see any innovation that could result in true competition and price drops from that effect.

Player Effectiveness Measures

2009-12-18T06:54:00.003-05:00

I think I've argued here before that hockey needs to undergo a sabermetrification of sorts, an analysis of the metrics that we use to determine how effective a player is being in particular situations, how well a team is doing as compared to earlier teams, how effective the power play unit is, etc. I've recently discovered On Goal Analysis, a site with an associated blog, that apparently shares my interest. Recently they've undertaken to design a metric that measure overall effectiveness. This metric works by measuring the number of points scored per shift and the number of "defensive actions" per shift.

I think the intent is laudable, but it's not clear to me that this is a better metric than the old fashioned +/- metric that simply calculates the difference between the number of even strength goals scored while you were on the ice and the number scored against your team. After all, not all defensive actions are equal. Some hits are light or result in the hitter falling out of the play, some blocked shots weren't headed for the net or fervent shot blockers may also have a tendency to screen their goaltenders. Similarly, not all shifts are equal. Some players spend more time on power plays, others on penalty kills. Some teams favour longer shifts, other short shifts. And considering only points scored per shift overlooks the offensive actions that can lead to goals but not count as points or "defensive actions". At the very least, I'd have liked to have seen this changed to points/defensive action/minute played, but even then we're ignoring power plays. The old +/- effectively addresses all these things without overly favouring power play units and hurting penalty kill units. Presumably, if your defensive actions are effective, the long term result is fewer goals scored against you. Show me a man with a high 'defensive action/shift' and a lousy +/- and I'll show you a poor hitter or shot blocker.

So, I like the old +/-, the main disadvantage being that it's not very effective at measuring player power play and penalty kill contribution. But here's a way to do that: for each player measure the power play goals/per power play minute played (or net goals, subtracting shorthanded goals) and number of goals scored against/per penalty kill minute. Then compare that to the team average. Is the player a positive or negative contributor to these situations?

Lieberman

2009-12-18T06:19:00.002-05:00

I loathe Joe Lieberman. With memories of his cheerleading for the Iraq war and Dick Rumsfeld fresh in my mind, I now have to sit back and watch while this political no-mind, ignoring the wishes of his constituents, undermines health care reform out of spite. For, apparently this Medicare extension that his conscience allegedly requires him to reject is very similar to something he himself argued for just a few months ago, may before his insurance company supporters let him know that they didn't like it. But this process does give us some insight into how Lieberman's political mind works, from this article:

And he said he was particularly troubled by the overly enthusiastic reaction to the proposal by some liberals, including Representative Anthony Weiner, Democrat of New York, who champions a fully government-run health care system.

I guess that's one way to avoid thought and analysis. Wait to learn where an ideological opponent stands and then take the opposite view, may not always be sensible, but it may be a route to consistency, assuming your opponent is consistent, and it beats thinking.

(I agree with Glenn Greenwald that the Obama WhiteHouse has been intentionally feckless and/or subservient to the health care lobby on this issue as well, just wanted to point out why I find Lieberman so particularly contemptible.)

A Lesson ...

2009-12-16T06:43:00.001-05:00

Remember when Canada was the "greatest country in the world"? In a few short years it has fallen from that to "thuggish petro state" and international environmental laughingstock. Let this be a lesson to anyone inclined to vote for conservatives.

What??

2009-12-10T10:56:00.000-05:00

From an article entitled "Obama defends US wars as he accepts peace prize":

"President Barack Obama entered the pantheon of Nobel Peace Prize winners Thursday ... delivering a robust defense of war ..."

Fortunately for Obama, nobody reads anymore or we'd be all over him about Orwellian doublespeak.

Food, Inc.

2009-12-07T19:25:00.002-05:00

I watched the documentary Food, Inc. last night. I thought it was really excellent, managing to pull together a number of important issues including Monsanto's patents on plant species, intimidation practices, domination of the food market by only four companies, the centrality of corn in the food industry and its role in the prevalence of dangerous e coli, ridiculous libel laws, impotence of the USDA, corn subsidies, treatment of animals and meat packing plant conditions. I highly recommend it.

It brought to mind another issue that wasn't directly addressed in the movie but is connected to those issues, namely, the use of artificial bovine growth hormone, rBGH, to increase milk production in dairy cows. In some places, presumably under pressure from scummy corporations like Monsanto, states are considering or have passed legislation to ban the practice of labeling milk that is not taken from cows that have been given artificial growth hormone to increase milk production. In other words, they don't want consumers to be able to know whether or not their milk has come from rBGH treated cows. Europe, Canada, Japan and New Zealand ban the use of rBGH, but in the US not only is it legal but they're seeking to prevent us from knowing on which milk it has been used. The argument is that milk from cows so treated is indistinguishable from milk from cows that didn't receive it. Setting aside the fact that claims that rBGH milk has no ill effect on human health are probably just untrue, what galls me about this is the fact that it displays absolutely no concern for the animals. I refuse to drink rBGH milk not, primarily, because I'm worried about its effects on my health, but because of my concern about effects on the cow, i.e., increased mastitis and lameness and decreased fertility.

2009-11-30T10:50:00.003-05:00

This "climategate" thing has been pissing me off. Partly because the scientists from whom the emails were stolen were being political, stupid and imprudent, but mostly because it's being used, entirely predictably, to quickly jump to the wrong conclusions. I'm trying, sometimes unsuccessfully, to avoid getting into discussions about it. People who care about the truth and the science and hadn't made up their minds beforehand are able to figure out that this is not nearly as nefarious as skeptics are attempting to spin it. My impression is that those claiming that these emails are a disproof of AGW are not those inclined to take the science seriously or those who already made up their minds long ago. It's hard to find any evidence against AGW in this controversy. So I'm trying to avoid the debate in much the same way that I avoid the "birther" debate or the evolution debate. But in the meantime, the Northwest Passage is now passable, we're rapidly losing sea ice and temperatures increase and we keep twiddling our thumbs and feeling reassured because Matt Drudge laughs when global warming press conferences occur during a snow storm. I can't disprove determined scepticism so for my own peace of mind I'm going to try to leave it alone. But my favorite objection has been the one about the "politicization of science". That climate change sceptics can say this with a straight face is remarkable.

The Stupak Amendment

2009-11-19T07:54:00.003-05:00

I haven't been following the discussion on the Stupak amendment very carefully, so I may have missed some subtleties, but I'm a bit confused by claims I've encountered that it somehow violates a woman's right to choose. Surely acknowledging or establishing the right to do X isn't accompanied by an obligation to have access to X paid for by the government, i.e., by taxpayers for whom X violates their ethical principles. People opposed to drug laws or alcohol prohibition aren't arguing that the government has an obligation to provide drugs or alcohol for its citizens, are they? If I don't believe the government should forbid the eating of meat, does it follow somehow that I should also believe my tax dollars should go towards subsidizing cattle farms?

Preventing Mass Murders

2009-11-06T22:45:00.011-05:00

Whenever these Columbine/Austin clock tower/Ft. Hood sorts of events occur, the media orchestrates displays of handwringing and bewilderment about what went wrong and consternation about how we might prevent such things from happening in the future. But isn't the solution, although not easily implemented, fairly obvious? I believe that most of these nutbars who shoot up restaurants or army bases or schools or office buildings before taking their own lives, directly or by "death by cop", wouldn't bother to do so if they knew that despite the horrific actions they'd die in relative obscurity.

If I'm right, this imposes an obligation on the news media and news consumers to stop providing that which motivates the actions of these killers, i.e., fame. News media should just stop reporting the details about these kinds of killers. They could report the crimes but leave out the killer's name and details about the killer's personal life, focusing instead on the nature of the crime and the victims. Other than local media that may have family members of the killer in its audience, how is it in the public interest to learn the details of the private lives of these killers? In discussing these people ad nauseam is the media doing anything other than suggesting to those who are leading failed insignificant lives, that this route at least offers them an opportunity to matter and be noticed?

The obligation also falls on the news consumers. We should stop seeking out and paying attention to such details and perhaps also join together to boycott news organizations that publish those names and details and the companies that sponsor them.

I'm not suggesting a legal ban, but a voluntary ethical code, based on the same kinds of principles that prevent news media from explaining how to build bombs or leaving out certain details of crimes or failing to publicize the names of the victims of some crimes. This information wouldn't have to be top secret, it should remain available to people. Psychology researchers and criminologists, for example, should continue to access it. But if people actually had to go to police information sources and the media failed to broadcast it, I suspect that the main motivation for these crimes would be eliminated.

Off-Year Elections

2009-11-04T10:48:00.001-05:00

It's hard to know what last night's election results portend for the Democratic or Republican party. On the one hand, we see Virginia going, very heavily, Republican, on the other, the Democrats won a seat in NY that had been Republican since the Bronze Age. I won't try to interpret these results in terms of what voters think of the Obama administration, possible to spin it either way, I suppose, but I think it is notable that both losers, in VA and in NY-23, seemed to have made a point of distancing themselves from their party. Deeds is a very right wing Democrat and purposefully distanced himself from Obama, and Scozzafava is fairly left wing, relative to Republicans, and ultimately endorsed the Democratic candidate.

So, what are we to make of these things? I suppose the simple lesson is that one ignores one's base at one's peril. Triangulation only goes so far; cynical attempts to grab the swing voters can backfire. Truth be told, I was, in an odd way, pleased to see the third party candidate come as close as he did in NY-23. Not, of course, because he was such a right winger, but because it showed that politics haven't become a matter of simply "supporting one's team", that principles and ideas still matter to some voters.

Tangentially, I think it is notable that the WaPo endorsed Creigh Deeds shortly before the election. At that time polls showed Deeds behind but not 18 points behind. It makes one wonder what a newspaper endorsement is worth these days. This certainly didn't give much evidence that it helps.

Spinning the Semantic Web.

2009-11-02T00:02:00.009-05:00

Last week I attended the International Semantic Web (SW) Conference, ISWC 2009. The semantic web project is one that has interested me for a long time because it would be a large scale knowledge representation implementation and because it involves standardizing languages and approaches for doing so. But the semantic web has been taking its sweet time in catching on. Interestingly, I attended a few sessions of the ISWC in 2002 or 2003 and Tim Berners Lee claimed that we were just on the cusp of having it catch on and that it was picking up speed just the way the web originally did. I think that now, in 2009, some momentum is finally beginning to gather. dbpedia is a SW version of, essentially, Wikipedia and there is a way to query it using the SW query language, SPARQL, and the NY Times is "semantic webifying" itself, but the SW has not caught on at nearly the same speed as the web did and I think it is useful to ask why. Some of my thoughts:

a) There has been a tendency to make the semantic web a much harder problem than it needed to be. Last week's conference was full of discussions of generating the inferential closure of hundred of millions of triples (assertions), sophisticated model theory discussions and SPARQL extensions. A new OWL 2.0 spec was released that included n-ary quanitifiers. Those are important questions and issues for knowledge representation, but they're not, I would claim, the things to be focusing on when attempting to get the SW implemented on a wide scale. (A good but abstruse example: Last week I found myself in a discussion over a claim that a many-sorted first order logic implementation of uncertainty representation was preferable over a pure second-order because completeness and compactness were important features of a web reasoning language. Well, completeness and compactness are important features of a logic in the very purest sense of the word 'logic', i.e., in the sense of keeping logic contentless, but not really necessary for a knowledge representation language in such a heavily applied environment. Many argue that SOL is an appropriate foundation for arithmetic and set theory, surely the internet is not quite as pure as those domains.) RSS implemented simple RDF at one point, but even that proved too complex for full implementation, so why are people worried about packing inference into SPARQL and getting n-ary quantifiers into OWL? Any traction the SW is seeing is in FOAF and linked data, it hasn't been for want of n-ary quantifiers that the SW has been mostly unrealized. Linked data focuses on the relatively simple task of linking data and far less on sophisticated ontologies and knowledge representation issues. This gets to the heart of the reason why the SW has been slow to catch on. The utility of the web was obvious to people who didn't have computer science degrees; the SW, not so much.

b) Querying the semantic web is difficult. The standard query language for the SW is SPARQL, but from my experience, even relatively intelligent web searchers, doctors and the like, are barely capable of using quotes or boolean operators correctly, why do we think they'll be able to run complex SQL queries requiring complicated URL UIDs? SPARQL is useful for sophisticated users deeply familiar with the knowledge representation language and ontology that has been implemented, it would likely be much harder to use it for discovery, a key task in much web usage. And yet those involved in "spinning" the SW seem unwilling to give this problem much consideration.

c) The development has been very top down. See (a). The players in the SW are well known and the group is relatively small. We're getting standards passed down for problems that don't yet exist instead of going to the grass roots and trying to solve problems as they arise. Even the venue was evidence of this. The conference was ridiculously expensive and took place at some remote Marriott, completely inaccessible by public transit. Hardly screams "grass roots" or "user input". Tellingly, I heard lots of talk of the need to go out and "spread the word" and "encourage people to use it' or join "meet ups", etc. Or questions about how I get "people to take more interest in the semantic web". People will get interested when we show them it's useful, let's worry more about that and less about methods of popularization reminiscent of an evangelical church.

d) I'm still of the impression that the SW's original sin was to insist that the URL become the means of designating reference. I think it leads to ontological confusion. We use such strings both to point to pages about X and to refer to X itself, not completely unlike using some string to denote me and the apartment in which I happen to be living at some point in time. It's handy and solves what could have been a complicated UID problem but I wonder if it makes the proposed solution seem harder than it needs to be. There has been discussion of this issue amongst those doing the implementing and I wonder if the ontological fuzziness here ends up making the SW fuzzier than it needed to have been.

Anyway, I think the SW will catch on and is catching on, but I think it could have been happening much more quickly if people had mainly concerned themselves with making it useful and workable and less with exploiting it as a funding tool for interesting but ancillary AI problems.

Noble gesture?

2009-09-25T19:17:00.008-04:00

A story about a kid who stops at the 2-yard line rather than score another touchdown against some down on their luck school is being widely advertised on Yahoo. The breathless writing makes it clear that we're supposed to regard this kid, and the team, as some modern day hero[es]. It was a "noble gesture" even, according to the title! Near the story was a pointer to a different, but similarly themed, story about a kid with Down Syndrome who is brought into a football game late, when the game is out of reach, and given the ball and allowed, by the opposing team, to run it in for a TD.

Whenever I hear about these alleged "noble" gestures, or teams catching hell for scoring too many pts in a game, I always think there are lots of things more disrespectful than running up the score against someone or not letting a kid with Down Syndrome inaccurately believe that he's able to score a touchdown. At least in those cases one respects his/her opponent to take them seriously. More disrespectful, IMO, is being the kind of patronizing person who holds his/her opponent in such low regard that he'd condescendingly stop at the two yard line rather than bother to score. Or another example, perhaps, being the kind of person who would make a fool out of someone by creating a farce in which he's led to believe he's scored a legitimate TD when in fact he hasn't and everyone around him knows it.

Market based health care dilemma

2009-09-17T22:11:00.004-04:00

Here's a dilemma I've been thinking about after yet another health care discussion (YAHCD) and some recent commentary from David Frum

As is well known, the US doesn't match up well with other nations in comparisons regarding some fairly basic health indicators, e.g., life expectancy, infant mortality, etc. See the report linked in this post. When faced with this fact, defenders of the current US health care system have been known to argue along these lines: "There are a lot of contributors to these factors in addition to medical care. Things like diet, lifestyle, environment, etc. all play a factor." Many then go on to argue that Americans have worse diets and more sedentary lifestyles than much of the world. So, suppose we accept that. Doesn't this fact actually undermine an important arguments against socialized medicine, i.e., the moral hazard argument? If people aren't forced to pay the costs of their health care, they lose an incentive to be healthy and avoid the need to access expensive health care. But, in fact, nobody pays more for their health care than Americans do and yet this moral hazard has no positive effect on their willingness to remain healthy and avoid the need for health care.

Holder's investigation

2009-09-01T08:12:00.002-04:00

Some people, the president and the 08 Republican nominee for president included, keep asserting that with respect to allegations of torture during the Bush administration, we should "look forward, not back". And Holder's announcement that he intended to investigate regardless generated concerns that such an investigation could hurt morale and effectiveness of the CIA.

It's hard for me to understand how these constitute effective arguments. The first suggestion is just utterly silly. First, it seems that it could be applied to any criminal investigation, all crimes have occurred in the past and yet we go back to investigate them. But it's much more dangerous in this particular case, the question of whether or not the US endorsed and/or participated in torture and whether or not the country is willing to take a stand and indicate whether or not that was permissible goes to the very heart of what the country's principles are. How can the country "move forward" while those questions remain unaddressed?

As to the CIA morale argument, well, of course, criminal investigations hurt morale at any organizations, but surely if this is a legitimate argument, then we've effectively given the CIA carte blanche. Prosecution for any criminal wrongdoing will require investigation. Any investigation will hurt morale at the CIA, so if the general principle is "Never hurt morale at the CIA", it follows that we can never prosecute any criminal wrongdoing at the CIA, so the CIA is free to do whatever they'd like.

Cash For Clunkers seems a little Clunky to me

2009-08-07T15:31:00.001-04:00

I don't doubt at all that Cash For Clunkers has a stimulative effect on the economy. I'm far more sceptical about claims that it has a positive environmental impact.

Consider the environmental impact of producing a new car, let's call that amount EIP. Suppose that we can expect a car to last Y years, then the environmental impact of producing (EIP) a car is EIP/Y for each year it's on the road. If I have an old car that I might have driven for, say, three more years but which I retire early, then I have to replace my old car but the EIP of my old car has already been paid. It's paid if it lasts for a week or a century (the longer a car lasts, the less its EIP/year). So the total EIP is a fixed amount and we might even say that, in effect, the EIP/year goes up if I take the car off the road early.

Now consider the new car that I buy3 years earlier than I would have. That is a brand new cost of 3*(EIP/Y), a cost we wouldn't have had to pay had we kept my old car on the road for three more years. Now, further suppose that I drive 12000 miles/year and my new car gets 22 mpg while my old one got 17. With my new car, I'd have to buy 1636 gallons of fuel vs. 2117 with my old car. Let's call the environmental impact of burning a gallon of gas, EIGG. Is it obvious that 3*(EIP/Y) < 481*EIGG? If it's not, we incur an environmental loss from the C for C program here. (And what if the buyer uses the program to gain a 2 mpg improvement?)

The Future of Journalism???

2009-08-04T06:45:00.009-04:00

Some time ago I wrote out some thoughts on what might be done to save the newspaper, essentially a coming together of newspapers in sort of a cable TV model, i.e., where one pays for access to any and all of the sources, and where revenue is split according to proportion of page clicks. Since then I've realized that I'm not alone in making this suggestion. For instance, David Simon has been arguing for the newspapers to do essentially the same thing and lobbying to get an antitrust exemption exactly for these purposes. Personally, I like the idea because it retains newspapers in something like the function, if not the same form, we have now, i.e., a relatively independent group beholden to no one doing the kind of job that we once envisioned newspapers doing.

On the other side, we have, well, a lot of people. A lot of people oppose efforts at walling off content, and, relatedly, of obligating news aggregators to cough up fees. I've been following King Kauffman, who used to write a brilliant sports column for Salon, and Katherine Mieszkowski's blog: The Future of Journalism. They've been fairly critical of the David Simons and even the Ian Shapiras (who recently complained that Gawker was stealing his content). But, I'd think and sometimes even comment, what in the world do we propose in their stead? Are bloggers ever going to provide the kind of painstaking journalism which Simon has described? Will amateur bloggers ever break a Watergate? Well, I was assured, you're assuming they'd be amateurs, maybe they'll be paid, this is America, we're full of ingenuity, we'll find a way to monetize. Don't worry.

Ah, yes, well, apparently they've found it. According to a tweet from Kauffman and an article in their blog, the "future of journalism" may very well be what is described in this article: "From a Texas Small Town and a Bedding Company, the Future of Journalism, Marketing, or Both". The article discusses a corporate sponsored blog, in which some former journalist is now paid by Carpenter Company to write about Stephenville, TX. Yup, that's the future of journalism, that's why we can all laugh at David Simon and say's he's just being paranoid and standing in the way of progress. We've found a way to monetize. We can now safety let the newspapers die. Good riddance ya bums and don't let the door hit you on the way out But what about independence of the press? Oh, don't worry, the article assures us, "Dan's free to chronicle small town life as he sees fit. So he roams Stephenville, capturing residents' hopes and dreams and idiosyncrasies and taking literal and figurative snapshots" Yeah, sure he's free. And I'm sure the town can look forward to his hard-edged articles on, for example, how questionable corporate practices at the town's largest employer affects the residents of Stephenville. Mieskowski bizarrely dismisses this kind of potential conflict as Hollywood fantasy, "But this is real life." Um, yeah, you got me there.

You thought GE telling Olbermann to shutup was bad? You ain't seen nothing yet.

Papa Bear on life expectancy

2009-08-02T21:21:00.002-04:00

In this clip Bill O'Reilly claims that the reason life expectancy is higher in Canada is because the US has 10 times as many people resulting in ten times as many deaths and crimes, etc. I try to be charitable, I've misspoken lots of time, momentarily misunderstood a metric or a stat when presented with it in the heat of discussion, and as such, probably made a stupid remark or asked a dumb question. But this is uttered by a "talking head", a man whose job it is to analyze, discuss and elaborate on the issues of the day. He's ostensibly doing an analysis of health care systems and it's a prepared bit, not an off the cuff reaction to someone calling in. Life expectancy, for better or worse, is a very simple metric frequently used in comparing health systems. There cannot be any excuse for coming on the air and pretending to speak intelligently on an issue while failing to grasp such a simple idea. Try as one might to be charitable, it's hard to conclude anything other than the man is a complete moron, a blowhard who cares nothing for truth, only winning arguments. Yet tens of millions of people listen to him and form opinion based on what he's saying, a man so fucking stupid and/or pig-headed that he doesn't even understand, or bother to try to understand how to interpret life expectancy metrics. This is the man playing a key role in helping Americans form opinions in the health care debate. Sometimes I think my head will explode.

health care and the free market

2009-07-25T21:28:00.003-04:00

Krugman's recent blog explains why free market principles just don't work well when it come to health care distribution. He's essentially summarizing an important paper Kenneth Arrow wrote way back in 1963, "Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Health Care". To summarize his summary, there are two key factors that make health care very different than things that the free market might be able to distribute more efficiently:

a) health care is completely unlike most good or services because it's largely unpredictable when we'll need it and when we do need it, it is very expensive. Hence, it requires some kind of insurance and consumer choice becomes largely a non-factor. (and insurance companies are not out to get you effective coverage but to minimize costs)
b) health care is far too complicated to allow us to do things that can make us effective agents in the marketplace, you can't rely on experience or comparison shopping.

I'd rant on about this but Krugman does a great job of summing up the situation in my opinion: "There are a number of successful health-care systems, at least as measured by pretty good care much cheaper than here, and they are quite different from each other. There are, however, no examples of successful health care based on the principles of the free market, for one simple reason: in health care, the free market just doesn’t work. And people who say that the market is the answer are flying in the face of both theory and overwhelming evidence."

Democrats' House Healthcare Bill

2009-07-16T09:43:00.003-04:00

I haven't read the Dem's house bill on healthcare or even read much commentary, but with that caveat I will say that I'm pretty sure that imposing heavier burdens on businesses in terms of providing health care insurance, as this bill is apparently doing, really can't be the way to go. Health care costs are already severely undermining the ability of US companies to compete in the global marketplace. Compromise is often a laudable thing, but in the case of the US healthcare system, I think it's so badly broken that we really need to start over from scratch. My solution, of course, would be to implement a universal single payer system, I think the data shows that this is very efficient and effective. To see how this translates into global competitiveness one need only research the competitive advantage that Canadian car plants are afforded, as compared to their US counterparts, by the fact that they don't have to buy healthcare for each worker. But, even if my solution isn't the solution ultimately implemented, I'd argue that going further down the road of employer provided healthcare deepens the long term problem.

(And I apologize for sounding like a pro-business blowhard. I'm not a huge fan of globalization and in general, arguments about cutting benefits because the global marketplace demands it are unconvincing to me. But in this case I think the global marketplace is effectively underscoring a huge inefficiency in the US marketplace, an inefficiency that we ignore at our peril.)

Challenge problems

2009-07-07T19:35:00.002-04:00

Apparently a team has reached the threshold in the Netflix contest to improve quality of viewer suggestions by 10% (for a $1 million prize!):

http://www.netflixprize.com//leaderboard

A blog on the process here:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/and-the-winner-of-the-1-million-netflix-prize-probably-is/

(and, somewhat tangentially, a nice "SVD/LSI [a method often used for recommendation systems] for dummies" article here: http://www.igvita.com/2007/01/15/svd-recommendation-system-in-ruby/ (including an implementation in Ruby as the URL suggests) )

This "bounty" system of development seems to be proving very effective and relatively inexpensive. See also the DARPA Grand Challenge effort that managed to produce an effective driverless vehicle system for a tiny, tiny fraction of what a full blown traditional DARPA program would have cost, assuming a traditional program would have managed to do it at all. My claim: This provides evidence that in a post-industrial society, and maybe in all, a gift economy is superior to a market economy for purposes of providing innovation, people valuing prestige and satisfaction of solving challenges even more highly than material gain. (While the prizes here are, prima facie, substantial, the actual reward to participants is likely far, far less than they'd have received in typical market production scenarios even if they were just being paid for their time. If one considers, for example, what a DARPA program would have paid for the person hours that the winning team alone would have cost in the Grand Challenge, I imagine it would have far exceeded the prize money actually paid out.)

Deficit Fears

2009-06-14T09:40:00.004-04:00

Robert Reich wonders why the great debt scare has returned and hints that conservative deficit hawks in Obama's inner circle are to blame:

Is it possible that among the President’s top economic advisors and top ranking members the Fed are people who agree more with conservative Republicans and Wall Streeters on this issue than with the President? Is it conceivable that they are quietly encouraging the Debt Scare even in traditionally liberal precincts, in order to reduce support in the Democratic base for what Obama wants to accomplish? Hmmm.

I wonder if Reich has let ideology get ahead of him. I'm no deficit hawk, and I embrace the fundamental tenets of Keynesian economics, and have no knee jerk opposition to government spending as necessarily inefficient. However, I think there are real reasons to worry about the deficit here, reasons that have nothing to do with Conservative conspiracies. As a matter of fact, there is a real issue over how this debt is going to be financed. The markets recently showed an unwillingness to keep on buying T-bills forever, the yield on the 10 year t-note took a big jump as inflation worries mounted, for good reason. In addition to a mounting deficit, significant questions over the solvency of Medicaid and Social Security remain. It's not so much that deficit spending is inherently bad, but it becomes bad and worrisome when we don't know how much that deficit spending is going to cost us and when our ability to repay the accumulating debt becomes increasingly unclear.

All this said, attempts by Republicans to make political hay out of this by painting the Obama administration as irresponsible profligate spenders, when their fiscal policies (and lack thereof), contributed so heavily to the current debt and economic situation is some of the astounding cynical political maneuvering I've ever witnessed.

Sotomayor

2009-05-30T08:08:00.005-04:00

I've become mildly intrigued by Sotomayor's claim that "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life." I haven't been able to find the broader context (update, see this link) for that speech, but it suggests to me that she's invoking standpoint theory. As such, I resent Obama's attempt to brush this off with a "I'm sure she would have restated it" as if it were nothing more than a flippant remark rather than recognizing it as the rather important epistemological claim it may very well be.

It's also easy to understand why Obama's opponents would try to spin this into an accusation of racism, but that accusation is also to completely overlook, probably intentionally, what the claim is actually saying. If she's claiming that the experiences that a Latina woman has, presumably as an outsider of sorts, can in fact lend her insights and objectivity that many white males will lack, in virtue of their insider status, than that doesn't equate to racism, (although racism could well have contributed to the state of affairs giving Latina women outsider status). Her claim is a claim about the insight that experience lends, and neither implies nor follows from "a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race" (the M-W definition of racism.)

I wish we could have a real conversation about Sotomayor's rather bold and noteworthy claim without dismissively sweeping it under the rug or going into politically motivated histrionics about racism.

Dick is on the rise

2009-05-23T07:12:00.001-04:00

Dick Cheney continues his somewhat remarkable process of agressively attacking Obama with his dueling banjo response to Obama's national security speech on Thursday. This leaves me a little perplexed because I've been largely disappointed in the extent to which Obama's national security policies, despite his lofty rhetoric, has mostly matched that of the Bush administration and at least some people on the right and on the left seem to share this view.

So, beyond symboic gestures, like closing Gitmo, Cheney's substantive policy criticisms of Obama seem to boil down to issues over torture, whether to do it or whether to release memos discussing it. (I won't bother to expressing my concerns about torture any further but it's worth noting that the war on terror advocates who've had the balls to try it out, Mancow and Hitchens, have both unequivocally ceded that it is torture and, essentially called 'bullshit' on Cheney's "advanced interrogation techniques" euphemism. Secondly, there is evidence that torture was used for establishing ties between al qaida and Iraq more than it was used to keep America safe are increasing.)

Cynically, I continue to wonder whether this is less about Cheney trying to keep America safe and more about the GOP having a strategy so that they'll be able to say "we told you so" should any future attacks occur.

Wolfram Alpha

2009-05-16T20:08:00.006-04:00

I played with Wolfram Alpha a bit this morning. So far it mostly seems like a nice web service front end on Mathematica, example link1 and link2, and a good source for straightforward kinds of information lookup, e.g., facts on a city, travel, (but it won't disambiguate 'seattle washington' as a potential query on travel b/w Seattle and D.C.) company information and the like.

It did rather poorly on the following:

April Wine discography
Why are there ants in my sink drain?
wine to serve with tofu
kurt godel mental illness
toyota sales U.S. 2004 (this 'related input to try' was amusing though, interpreting 'sales' and 'toyota' as places)

To be fair, I've been evaluating it by posing questions in the same way that I'd posed them to Google. (with the exception of the mathematical queries). Unfortunately, I think that our experiences with Google shape our expectations and the way we test these new tools, we basically expect to be able to write natural language inputs. I think that if end users would be willing to open their minds a bit in terms of the way they submit input to a search/knowledge tool, the potential effectiveness would increase significantly and developers could spend more time on developing intelligent apps rather than solving the really really hard problem of understanding natural language input. I think about this frequently because the company I work for develop tools that are designed to exploit semantic search. We index documents using a knowledge base of concepts that gather synonyms and relations between those concepts. As a result we can understand, for example, that documents about aortic regurgitation are relevant to queries on 'heart valve disorder'. It's clear to me that our tools could be exploited so much more effectively if people would be able/ willing to use simple semantic relationships and variables in their queries. (Imagine being able to specify queries asking explicitly and fairly directly for, for example, articles about types of heart disease written by people affiliated with universities in the southwestern u.s. or the stock indices for stock markets located in Eastern Europe). But we're constrained, greatly IMO, by the fact that people expect / demand to use search engines only with natural language queries. It's like the rest of the world could be developing sophisticated robots capable of having sophisticated conversation in French, but we insist that we'll only use English when testing it.

UPDATE: BTW, should have mentioned, the 13 min. intro video is a good place to start (before experimenting) if you really want to have a sense of how to test it.

On Freedom and Quality of Life

2009-05-13T07:49:00.013-04:00

Famously, something that often frustrates people in political discussions is the fact that political discussion tends to end up being much more like supporting one's favourite hockey team than a dispassionate inquiry into the best way for a government to operate, i.e., people care less about what their favoured party does than they care that it be successful and continue to hold power.

But less partisan political aficionados are often guilty of the sin of a priori politics. By this I mean the inclination to defend a political system or methodology without regard for its actual success or effectiveness in practice. In defending a political ideology I think we should be clear as to whether we're defending it because we view it as the best means to some other ends, in which case we need an account of what those ends are, or whether the fundamental principles are so important that we'd defend them regardless of their effectiveness in practice. So, for example, if I'm devoted to socialist libertarianism, what would it take to convince me that the system didn't work in practice? If we were to implement it and it resulted in a 80% drop in economic productivity and a 10 year decrease in lifespan would I continue to defend it because I think its basic principles are essential for a fair system, or would I acknowledge that part of the reason I embraced the system is because I thought it would result in greater equity with a relatively small drop in productivity and quality of life?

So, I think it's important to have a clear understanding of the political principles one holds but also the effect one thinks that such principles should allow us to achieve. What would have to be the case for us to give us those beliefs, that ideology? The point of all this is that I like looking for data that can be used to help evaluate such systems, while being painfully aware of the fact that political theory is particularly susceptible to the indeterminacy of theories problem.

So, all that said, I was interested recently when someone posted a link to a paper, "Freedom in the 50 States", that attempted to quantify the level of freedom in each of the U.S. states. If we could really measure such a thing we could consider some other factors and see how or whether they benefit by increased or decreased government control so for starters I looked at correlations for some of these scores, while remaining agnostic about the quality of the metrics being used. (I also acknowledge that the level of variance between states for many of these variables is likely far smaller than it would be between countries, so if we're really interested in drawing conclusions it would be more useful to consider that.) In any event, here's what I came up with.

Observations:
There is a small --> medium negative correlation between increased freedom and average income levels.
I believe that crime rate is a factor in state livability so some of the correlation there is explained by that.
Not unexpectedly, there is a fairly large negative correlation between poverty levels and health level scoring.
There is no correlation between livability and the various freedom scores, nor between the violent crime rate and the freedom scores.
Other thoughts or observations?

Sources
Person Fdm. Score	Source
Econ. Fdm. Score	Source
Overall Fdm. Score	Source
Amer. health Rank	Source
Percent < Pov. Level (07)	Source
Income/capita (07)	Source
Violent Crime Rate	Source
State Livability	Source
Middle School test Score	Source

Miraculous, really?

2009-04-30T08:35:00.004-04:00

"Head Coach Bruce Boudreau raises his fists in triumph as the Capitals complete a miraculous comeback from a 3-1 series deficit." (emphasis added)

I think the WaPo is setting the bar on miracles a bit low here. The Caps were ranked no. 2 in their conference, Rangers 7th. If two teams are equally matched, there's a 1 in 8 chance that the team behind 3-1 will come back to win, and here we can argue that they weren't equally matched, Caps were better. Historically, 9% of teams behind 3-1 have come back to win the series. So, I'd say this comeback is about as miraculous as seeing three red cards come up on the flop in a game of Texas Hold 'em or flipping heads three times in a row. But I guess "as the Capitals complete a mildly surprising comeback ..." isn't very compelling copy.

The Torture Memos

2009-04-18T21:59:00.002-04:00

I had mixed feelings this week when the Obama administration took the bold step of releasing the Bush administration secret torture memos. Link.

On the one hand, I think it's more or less clear that releasing the memos is a positive step toward openness and resolution. We can get some verification and clarification of what had long been rumored, we can get clear on the attempted justifications, etc. (Some are arguing that it was a bad idea to make these procedures public because they worked. I've written before (sept. '06, jan. '05) what I think about these arguments so I'll leave that alone now.)

But, while I'm pleased that the memos have been released I've become increasingly troubled by Obama's decision and commitment not to prosecute any of these people. Here's some of what Obama said to explain why he didn't want to pursue prosecution of those who participated.

But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past. Our national greatness is embedded in America’s ability to right its course in concert with our core values, and to move forward with confidence. That is why we must resist the forces that divide us, and instead come together on behalf of our common future.

There are a number of things I find objectionable here. (And, I refer interested readers to Keith Olbermann's commentary and a post by Chris Floyd that probably do a nicer job of articulating some of these concerns.) Let me try to spell out in three interrelated points.

1) The principle that "nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past" seems to undermine a cornerstone of our system of justice, i.e., that crime cannot go unpunished. As Floyd notes "And cannot every criminal on the face of the earth now claim the Obama defense: 'Surely, your honor, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past. So let's forget the fact that I (raped/murdered/robbed/tortured), and move forward, shall we?' "

2) Anyone suspicious that the rules in the U.S. are only for the "little people"; that big finance and big auto and big brother can get away with flouting the rules, now has more basis for their concerns. If we contend that our government is above the law, that their illegal activity won't be prosecuted for whatever reasons, don't we undermine respect for the rule of law? Juxtapose this with recent data about the high incarceration rates in this country, particularly amongst African Americans and it suddenly becomes very difficult to argue that we don't have two sets of rules in this country.

3) Finally I'd like to further consider a point that Olbermann and Floyd have made, i.e., the concern that this response appears to appeal to the Nuremberg defense, i.e., the assumption that flouting the law is permissible when one is "simply following orders". It's useful to consider the reasons that we've rejected this defense. The Nuremberg defense suggests a very disturbing position on the role of law and the obligations of citizens. Laws, in this view, seem to be nothing more than manifestations of what the powerful want us to do. If, as I'd argue, laws implement and instantiate abstract principles of just practice, principles that we're all, qua humans and citizens, obligated to follow, then no dispensation from the powerful can override them. The Nuremberg defense is legitimate only if we assume that we're in a system in which laws are nothing more than rules and constraints put forward by 'the man", obligations created by and therefore retractable by those in power. If that's what we believe, then it's reasonable to allow that the government is allowed to make exceptions whenever it sees fit and the Nuremberg defense is a legitimate one. In the Nuremberg defense scenario, citizens are guilty if and only if they fail to do what the government tells them to do, there is no law beyond a base will to power. But we reject Nuremberg defenses if we hold that all people are citizens and all are obligated to follow the general principles of justice, rather than the pragmatic procedures decided on in secret by a small group of powerful men.

2009-04-13T22:47:00.003-04:00

I'm sure I've ranted about this before, but I think hockey badly needs a "sabermetrification", i.e, a move to refine and take their stats more seriously. Here's an example from something I've been seeing lately. There's some talk that the Washington Capitals have set records for most points, most wins and most home wins in a season. But the problem is that the original records were set by the 1985-86 Capitals team. That team played at a time at which there was no shootout or regular season overtime, games tied at the end of regulation just ended with each team gaining a point. Also, that team played only 80 games, not 82 as they play today. Today, games ending in ties in regulation are 3 point games, a consolation point going to the loser, that wasn't the case in 85-86. So the teams now have more opportunities for wins and there are more points that can be won in a game. It's silly to just compare their records straight up. It's like comparing prices without adjusting for inflation.

It wouldn't be that hard to get a fair comparison, we'd just need to normalize the points. The most accurate way to normalize is to subtract all pts. gained in OT or SO (win or loss) and then give the Caps exactly one pt. for each game that ended in a tie in regulation. I don't have those numbers handy, an approximation is to drop the pts. gained in OT losses. So, this year's Caps have 96 "normalized" pts. after dropping the 8 pts they gained in OT losses. To finish with a comparable record they'd have to get 110 "normalized" pts. (they have 2 extra games, take the percentage of possible pts. the 85-86 team, won, .66875, and multiply by 82). But this year's team has only 3 games left. Or we could normalize the 85-86 records, perhaps most simply by assuming they'd have received a win in half their ties had they gone to a tiebreaker. This would give the 85-86 team 111 points in 80 games, which pro-rates to 114 in 82. So, IMO, the old record is safe.

What was Boudreau's, Caps coach, response when asked if these format changes rendered the record less impressive? "You're going to have detractors anywhere you go when it comes to records. Everyone is going to want to put asterisks and things beside people's names. But in today's era, everything has changed. Everything has gotten bigger, faster, stronger, quicker. There was no salary cap in the '80s, either. There could have been a huge discrepancy. Everything evens out in the long run."

Hmm, I have no idea why the speed or strength of today's player is relevant. That today's players are faster and stronger doesn't change the fact that they give out more points and chances for wins today.

2009-03-29T08:48:00.001-04:00

People have been getting all upset with Obama for not getting on board with marijuana decriminalization. Fair enough, I suppose. I think that drug use for the most part should be an individual choice and that the government shouldn't be wasting money on the war on drugs but instead regulating and taxing it. Okay, fine.

But, I wish people would get their facts straight when making this argument. I've read a number of things in the blogosphere attacking Obama because, after all, "pot is harmless." This line of argument troubles me because, well, it's just untrue and paves over a large number of issues of which people should be aware before engaging. For starters, and the one that's most concerned me, marijuana use is strongly linked with schizophrenia and other mental illnesses. (One can read "Cannabis use and risk of psychotic or affective mental health outcomes: a systematic review". It surveys a large number of studies from over the years.)

As noted, I don't think the government should make every dangerous thing illegal, I'm no fan of the nanny state, so my support for legalization has nothing to do with my views on the safety of using it. But I wish people would do a bit of research before blithely proclaiming marijuana use harmless or safe or, my favourite, "no worse than cigarettes". Yeah, right.