Gnash Equilibrium

Understanding the Zimmerman verdict

2013-07-27T21:57:00.002-04:00

An awful lot has been written and said about the Zimmerman verdict since my last post. Some of that has added to our understanding of Florida law, racial bias, and other factors that may have played a role, and some of it has muddled the issues. I've tried to understand what happened as best I could, and in this post I'll try to sort out what the best arguments are, what we know, and what we don't know.

Let's start where I left off. I mentioned that 2006 and 2011 court cases changed the burden of proof in self-defense cases in Florida, and that they made Florida unusual because the prosecution now has to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the defendant did not act in self-defense. This statement has been challenged. Eugene Volokh claims that all states except Ohio have the same rules for burden of proof as Florida. That is incorrect according to a criminal defense lawyer from Wisconsin and to lawyers.com, but Florida may not be that unusual, either:

The burden of going forward with a case varies in different jurisdictions. For example, in New York, the defendant has to prove an affirmative defense by a preponderance of the evidence. Compare this with Massachusetts where, after the defendant has satisfactorily raised an affirmative defense, the prosecution must disprove it beyond a reasonable doubt.

The source for Volokh's claim seems to be a self-help book for those who plan to use the self-defense defense (which is, conceptually, rather creepy and oxymoronic), which does not give serious thought to the burden of proof:

This is of more concern to your lawyer than it is to you, so you won't see it discussed extensively in this book. But we mention it because it's something that you will eventually wonder about while studying the subject of self-defense. In all states except Ohio, the state has the burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant did not act in self-defense.

It is interesting—and troubling—that it is hard to find this information about state laws. But perhaps it doesn't matter so much what the rules for burden of proof are. We hear a lot of strange stories about jury verdicts in Florida, and I don't recall any similar stories from Massachusetts, which seems to have similar rules. After all, juries don't learn the rules by studying law, but from the instructions that the judge gives them. The details of jury instructions matter a lot.

Speaking of the jury instructions, many people have claimed that "stand your ground" (SYG) did play a major role after all: although the defense didn't make it a SYG case, the wording of the jury instructions was crucially influenced by SYG. This does not seem persuasive to me. The defense cited a pre-SYG court case during the negotiations about the jury instructions, and that seemed to influence the judge (and thus the instructions, and thus the jury) in an important way. Jonathan Turley explains in more detail why SYG had little or nothing to do with the verdict. What I find interesting, however, is the "lesser crime" part of the instructions, where the jury is instructed what it would need to convict Zimmerman of manslaughter.

To prove the crime of Manslaughter, the State must prove the following two elements beyond a reasonable doubt:

Trayvon Martin is dead.

George Zimmerman intentionally committed an act or acts that caused the death of Trayvon Martin.

George Zimmerman cannot be guilty of manslaughter by committing a merely negligent act or if the killing was either justifiable or excusable homicide

(Emphasis mine.) But this is how the relevant Florida statute defines manslaughter:

(1) The killing of a human being by the act, procurement, or culpable negligence of another, without lawful justification according to the provisions of chapter 776 and in cases in which such killing shall not be excusable homicide or murder, according to the provisions of this chapter, is manslaughter, a felony of the second degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082, s. 775.083, or s. 775.084.

Note the absence of "culpable negligence" in the jury instructions and the explicit instruction that finding of "mere negligence" is not sufficient for a manslaughter conviction. This, in my opinion, is the main reason Zimmerman is free.

There is a well-documented history of revisions to the "culpable negligence" instructions in Florida case law, but I see nothing in that report about omitting such instructions completely. Once negligence was excluded as a possible basis for manslaughter, it is not surprising that the jury couldn't reconcile what they thought Zimmerman did with the elements of the crime as explained in the instructions, especially given the evidence actually shown in the trial. On the other hand, based on the infamous Juror B37's spilling of the beans and the later counter-spilling by Juror B29, it seems that several jurors at least believed Zimmerman had acted recklessly and may well have found him "culpably negligent" if that possibility had been presented to them.

There were several factors that contributed to the verdict: Florida laws are crazy, the prosecution overreached (murder was pretty much impossible to prove under Florida law) and then handled the case poorly (from jury selection to introducing the self-defense claim to ineptly selecting evidence to introduce), but most importantly, the judge's instructions to the jury favored the defendant by way of two significant omissions: they did not mention initiating the confrontation as an exception to self-defense or culpable negligence as a basis for manslaughter.

The possibility that the jury instructions are responsible for the verdict reveals a flaw in the US legal system. In the US, it is (as far as I know) not possible for the state to appeal a "not guilty" verdict. Although the defendant can appeal a guilty verdict on grounds that the judge's instructions to the jury were prejudicial against him or her, a symmetric appeal is not available to the prosecution. I understand and agree that asymmetry is necessary in criminal trials since the stakes are fundamentally asymmetric. The burden of proof is one area where asymmetry is obviously necessary. Asymmetry is also obviously warranted with regard to appeals based on ineffective counsel: it would be ridiculous for the state to appeal because its prosecutor did a lousy job. But it is by no means clear that the judge's conduct of the trial is an area that calls for a one-sided availability of appeal.

Zimmerman, self-defense, Florida law, and negligent pundits

2013-07-14T11:23:00.003-04:00

First, the obvious and sensible: If an armed person (a civilian, not a police officer in the course of duty) pursues another and ends up killing them, that's at least manslaughter. The pursuit is the initiation of any conflict that may arise, so it is against every logic and moral intuition that the pursuer could be entitled to a claim of self-defense.

We are told, however, that there is something weird about the law in Florida regarding self-defense, and that the jury acted properly within that strange law when it acquitted George Zimmerman. But no article I've seen so far has stated properly what it is that is strange about Florida.

You hear a lot of people, mostly casual observers, blaming Florida's "stand your ground" (SYG) law. SYG is a sick and warped self-defense doctrine that removes the duty to retreat, which is normally part of the concept of self-defense. But SYG was not invoked in the Zimmerman trial. It's a bad law, but irrelevant for this case.

More careful pundits get closer to the real issue, but still miss the mark. They tell us the prosecution failed to prove beyond reasonable doubt that Zimmerman did not act in self-defense. They tell us, correctly, that it has to do with the peculiar institution that is Florida law. Here is Cohen:

But this curious result says as much about Florida's judicial and legislative sensibilities as it does about Zimmerman's conduct that night. This verdict would not have occurred in every state. It might not even have occurred in any other state. But it occurred here, a tragic confluence that leaves a young man's untimely death unrequited under state law. Don't like it? Lobby to change Florida's laws.

And here is Coates:

6.) I think the message of this episode is unfortunate. By Florida law, in any violent confrontation ending in a disputed act of lethal self-defense, without eye-witnesses, the advantage goes to the living.

That all rings true, but the explanations do not add up. Self-defense is an affirmative defense, which means it is not incumbent on the prosecution to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the defendant did not act in self-defense. The burden of proof, albeit with a lower standard (generally preponderance of the evidence, or "clear and convincing", depending on the jurisdiction), is on the defendant.

The fact that Zimmerman shot Martin was never disputed, and Zimmerman's 911 call is clear evidence that Zimmerman started pursuing Martin without Martin doing anything to him (or even being aware of his existence). I don't know about murder, but the prima facie case for manslaughter (which the judge instructed the jury to consider as an alternative verdict) is complete right there. The prosecution has no burden, under standard rules, to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that self-defense does not apply.

But, it turns out, the rules in Florida—or some part of it—are anything but standard, and that that goes back to a 2006 court case, Murray v. State:

Six years ago in Murray v. State, 937 So.2d 277, 279 (Fla. 4th Dist. 2006), the Fourth District Court of Appeal in Florida ruled that once a defendant in a criminal case has introduced proof that he acted in self-defense the jury is entitled to consider the defense, and the jury may not convict the defendant unless it finds beyond a reasonable that he did not act in self-defense.

(Bolded emphasis mine.) And now what makes this relevant to the Zimmerman trial:

Last year the Fifth District Court of Appeal quoted this language from Murray and followed the same rule in the case of Montijo v. State, 61 So.3d 424 (Fla. 5th Dist, 2011). (...) Seminole County, where Trayvon Martin was killed, is in the is in the Fifth Appellate District, (sic) so the rule in Montijo is controlling unless and until the law is changed.

That's what's rotten in the state of Florida! The nature of self-defense as an affirmative defense has been turned on its head by activist judges. In effect, in Florida (or rather, its 4th and 5th Appellate Districts, but the article also points to a proposed law change that would affect the entire state), self-defense has been turned into an ordinary defense.

It would have been nice if the pundits who have written about the verdict did their homework and explained this key fact to us.

A Catholic in an Atheist's Body?

2013-03-02T15:24:00.000-05:00

I really like Roger Ebert. He may not be the most insightful movie critic around (in fact, the most insightful reviews are often written by amateurs because they have the luxury of writing only when they really have something to say), but he has a consistency of taste that usually allows me to infer from his review whether I would like the movie, even when I predict I would disagree with him. He is also a prolific humanist writer: both his reviews and other writing generally promotes humanist values and a sense of decency. Besides, I admire how he has kept his vigorous productivity despite his illness and disfigurement.

But I really don't know what to think about his recent blog post, "How I am a Roman Catholic". I think he is terribly confused, and his persuasive writing spreads the confusion to his readers.

The centerpiece of confusion is the following statement:

I consider myself Catholic, lock, stock and barrel, with this technical loophole: I cannot believe in God. I refuse to call myself a atheist however, because that indicates too great a certainty about the unknowable.

Sorry, but this makes no sense. If you don't believe in God (or gods), you are an atheist. That is by definition. "I don't believe in God" and "I am an atheist" are factual statements with exactly the same meaning. You cannot claim that one is true and the other false. The "certainty" argument is a fallacy of which, I am sure, Ebert is well aware. (And yes, I am aware that he said "I cannot" rather than "I don't" believe in God. But the former implies the latter.)

A commenter suggested that he should perhaps call himself a "secular Catholic" or "cultural Catholic" like some people call themselves secular Jews or cultural Jews. I agree, but I also know people who call themselves Jewish atheists and even some Catholic atheists, and that makes complete sense because they acknowledge their cultural background and the default religious milieu in reference to which they developed their atheistic views. There are various ways in which one can embrace one's cultural background (which often includes religion) as well as one's unbelief in the supernatural.

That said, I think Ebert's article is worth reading, precisely because it honestly lays bare the mind of a religiously confused modern, liberal, humanistic person. His confusion is, I suspect, fairly typical among educated people in today's Western civilization. Many people I like and respect are probably similar to Ebert in this respect, and I can also use an occasional reminder to examine what I believe and why. Even the most comfortable atheists among us developed amidst all kinds of religious influences.

But, let anyone speak honestly for long enough, and they'll end up saying something really troubling. Here is where Ebert's confusion becomes harmful:

Birth control? Here I subscribe to an unofficial "double" loophole often applied in practice by Catholics faced with perplexing choices: Do that which results in the greater good and the lesser evil. I support freedom of choice. My choice is to not support abortion, except in cases of a clear-cut choice between the lives of the mother and child. A child conceived through incest or rape is innocent and deserves the right to be born.

Be careful not to step on the shards of the broken logic here, it could be really painful. I didn't know Ebert had such strongly Roman Catholic views on abortion, and I am surprised, given his generally liberal positions. And he seems to try to reconcile it with his liberalism. His language about choice, though unclear, suggests that he is speaking of his personal belief, but that he does not want to impose it on others. However, that makes sense only when a woman says it. A woman can hold the position "I would not choose an abortion, but others can make the choice for themselves." For a man to say that is obviously ridiculous. A man cannot consistently have a personal view on abortion distinct from a public policy position. Sure, a man can be a hypocrite and choose a laxer standard for his family or people of his social status than for the rest of the society (Remember Dan Quayle's "I would trust my daughter's choice"?), but it simply makes no sense for a man to have a personal opposition to abortion that he is not imposing on others.

So the confusion is not just about semantics. It is also about ethics and liberty. As religious confusion often turns out to be.

Is Happiness a Warm Gun?

2013-02-23T12:34:00.002-05:00

This is the text (slightly edited and with added links) of the talk on gun violence and gun control I gave at the Northern Virginia Ethical Society on February 10, 2013.

On Jan 8, 2011, US Representative Gabrielle Giffords was holding a constituent meeting at a supermarket in a suburb of Tucson, when Jared Laughner drew a 9mm Glock pistol with a high-capacity magazine, shot Giffords in the head, and proceeded to shoot at other people gathered. Six people died, including a federal judge and a 9-year-old girl, and 13 more were injured.

Fast-forward a year and a half. On July 20, 2012, James Holmes shot 70 people, 12 of whom fatally, in a movie theater in Aurora, CO. He used several firearms, which he had purchased within two months before the shooting.

Fast-forward a few more months. On Dec 14, 2012, Adam Lanza shot his gun-enthusiast mother to death in their home in Newtown, CT, then, using her semi-automatic rifle, shot his way into Sandy Hook elementary school, where he killed 20 first-grade students and 6 teachers and other employees before shooting himself when the police arrived.

Besides Aurora and Newtown, last year there were 5 more shootings in public places with 4 or more victims, which is the FBI criterion for mass killing. 70 people died in these incidents, including 5 of the 7 shooters, and 68 more were injured. This makes 2012 the year with the most mass shootings, most fatalities from mass shootings, and most total victims from mass shootings, in recent US history. The Newtown massacre was particularly shocking since most of the victims were 6 or 7 years old. Suddenly, the issues of gun violence and gun control, which had been on a political back burner for some years, leaped into the forefront of the public debate.

Mass shootings are scary. Imagine facing a madman armed with a rapid-fire weapon (or several of those), intent on killing as many people as possible. And anyone can be a victim, anytime. Keeping away from dangerous places or activities doesn't help: mass shootings have occurred in schools, workplaces, places of worship, shopping malls, theaters.

And yet, those incidents are extremely rare. Even in an outlier year like 2012, well under 1% of firearm homicides in the US resulted from mass shootings, and less than 1 in 4 million Americans died in those events. Averaged over the last 15 years—a period that includes Columbine and Virginia Tech and Fort Hood and Aurora and Newtown—the average death toll from mass shootings was 22 per year. About five times more people are killed by lightning. And on an average *day*, more than 30 people are killed with guns (and about twice as many kill themselves).

School shootings are the subset of gun violence that scares people the most. Columbine was shocking, but it was still teenagers killing teenagers, something not completely unfathomable. But Newtown, where an adult was killing children, triggered our deepest fears, much like the similar massacre in Dunblane, Scotland, in 1996. Suddenly people on both sides of the gun control issue feel there is a crisis and we have to do something about it, and the proposed things to do range from reasonable (like better background checks and banning high-capacity magazines) to dubious (like putting armed guards in every school) to bizarre (like arming teachers) to pathologically insane (like training children to rush a shooter).

But one tragedy doesn't make a crisis. Schools are safe. Very safe, at least as far as lethal violence is concerned. About as many high-school students die playing football as are killed in school, whether in a mass shooting or in an individually targeted homicide (including non-gun-related ones). More elementary-school students die riding their school bus—and even more as pedestrians hit by a school bus—than are killed by guns or other violent means. Schools have also gotten safer over time. In the 1992-93 school year, 34 K-12 students were killed in school; in the last decade, the annual average has been about half of that. And that's out of about 55 million students.

Rep. Donna Edwards said on ABC's "This Week" that “since Columbine, there have been 181 of these school shootings.” This information comes from a fact sheet on the Brady Campaign web site. FactCheck.org called it an "exaggeration". I often criticize fact-checking outlets for nitpicking liberals' statements to appear fair and balanced, but this time I fully agree with the characterization. Most school shootings on the list actually happened outside school, typically either after school or after a sports game. Most were non-fatal. Some were suicides. Some were teachers shooting principals. Also, the list includes shootings at colleges and universities. Yes, those are also schools, but a college campus is much more open than a high school, and "on-campus" events cover 24 hours a day. When I was a student at the U of C, somebody unconnected with the university was killed at the gas station next to the building where I lived. I think that was part of the campus, so that would probably be included on the list if it went back to 1990 or so.

So, schools are safe, but, as I said, more than 30 Americans are killed with guns on an average day—about 11,000 people every year.

There are good and bad news about our murder rate. The good news is that it has been declining. It is about one-half what it was at its peak in 1980s and early 90s, and about as low as it has been at any time in the last 50 years. The bad news is that it is still much higher than in any other highly developed country. Our murder rate is 4 times higher than the OECD average, and no other rich country has even half the US murder rate. The disparity in gun murders is even greater. Switzerland, in second place, has 1/4 the US gun murder rate, and some countries, like Japan, hardly have any gun murders.

Why is the US murder rate so high? Opinions differ, but relative to other developed countries, the US has more poverty, more organized crime, a culture generally supportive of violence, and, most significantly, much more firearms.

Poverty increases the incentive to engage in crime in general. Aggressive policy of prohibition, like the so-called War on Drugs, generates organized crime activity. It is hard to deny that the US has a culture of violence, from the kinds of sports popular here to the fact that killing someone was the most popular thing our President did in his first term. But nothing makes us as different from other countries as the extremely high rate of gun ownership. There are about 300 million firearms in the US, almost one per person. No country comes even close.

What you typically hear from NRA or libertarians is the cliché that "guns don't kill people, people kill people." But, in the real world, it is very easy to kill someone with a gun and quite difficult without. So the argument that someone who wants to kill would find other means if he didn't have a gun is complete hogwash. Also, the vast majority of homicides are not deeply premeditated and planned, but typically occur in gang wars, during robberies and other crimes, or in bursts of anger. If available weapons were limited to knives, baseball bats, and fists, fatalities would obviously be far lower.

International comparisons support this very strongly. Countries culturally most similar to the US - Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand - all have homicide rates between 1/4 and 1/3 of the US rate. But if you look only at non-gun homicides, they are all at about 2/3 of the US rate. So, without guns, we still have more homicides, but not egregiously more. But gun murders increase predictably with gun ownership rates: Australia has about twice the rate of the UK, Canada 3-4 times the Australian rate, and US 5-6 times the Canadian rate.

Somehow, Switzerland has become a fashionable example among gun advocates. They argue that Switzerland has even more guns than the US—their government mandates that every household have a gun!—yet their murder rate is among the lowest in the world. So there, that kills all your gun control arguments! Except that everything in their story is false. Switzerland indeed has a relatively high rate of firearm ownership, but it is still only about half the US rate. Because of their traditional concept of national defense, almost all adult men are considered military reservists and typically keep their military guns at home. Not surprisingly, those guns are highly regulated. But it is also notable that Switzerland has the second-highest rate of gun homicides in the developed world, about 1/4 of the US rate. It is true that the total homicide rate in Switzerland is still low, but it is significantly higher than in the neighboring Austria, probably culturally the most similar country.

Another argument against gun control is that private gun ownership is the source of liberty. Beside the obvious fact that countries with very low gun ownership, like England or Israel, or even near-zero ownership like Japan, are hardly dictatorships, it is also notable that Saudi Arabia, one of the most despotic regimes, has a higher gun ownership rate than any liberal democracy other than US and Switzerland. On the other hand, the people of Tunisia recently successfully overthrew a dictatorship despite having virtually no privately-owned firearms. There is empirically no correlation at all between liberty and gun ownership.

The guns-liberty connection might be a benign myth if it existed only in the heads of Cato Institute scholars. Unfortunately, it may be one of the most dangerous pro-gun ideas around. More and more people seem to believe either that the US government will become tyrannical and they will need guns to defend themselves from tyranny, or that the government will collapse and they'll need guns to survive in the ensuing anarchy, communist takeover, or whatnot. This has allegedly been a major shift in the mainstream gun culture in the US. Until some 30 years ago, a typical NRA member was a hunter, while people stockpiling military-style weapons for apocalyptic scenarios were a fringe, perhaps living in isolated places in Idaho. But in the last 2-3 decades, the fringe has become mainstream. Such people can now be found among seemingly normal, middle-class, suburban types. Nancy Lanza, the Newtown shooter's mother and his first victim, was apparently one.

How those people believe they could fight tyranny with their guns is hard to understand. The US military has more power than the rest of the world combined. If somehow the US government became a tyrannical regime that would turn even a fraction of that power on its own people, what could some amateurs with guns do against it? Perhaps more seriously disturbing is that they even think it likely that the US could turn into a tyranny against which taking up arms would be justified. Actions those people contemplate would be considered treason or terrorism were they ever to take them. But this is an increasingly influential strain of gun advocates, and apparently the dominant group in the NRA leadership.

Considerably more rational than owning guns for defense against a tyrannical government is owning them for protection against criminals. Nevertheless, it is mainly based on myths and delusions. Statistically, a gun kept at home is by far the most likely to kill or injure its owner or a member of the owner's family. Killing in self-defense is in fact exceedingly rare. In a year, less than 100 civilians kill defending themselves or someone else from an attack, and about 60 of those self-defense killings are with guns. Killing a spouse is over 10 times more common, as are deaths from firearm accidents. People even murder their children and parents more often than they kill in self-defense. Not to mention that people overall shoot themselves almost twice as often as anyone else.

Of course, the most relevant statistic is not how many times people kill in self-defense, but how many crimes are averted by confronting the criminal with a gun. The protective function is served most successfully if no one is shot. Unfortunately, such data aren't available, partly because pro-gun activists successfully lobbied Congress to forbid CDC to conduct any research in gun violence. But it is hard to imagine that there are so many cases of successful (and justified) protection by merely brandishing a gun to outweigh the risks of gun ownership for most people.

That said, not everybody is "most people". When Sam Harris wrote that he owns a gun for self-protection and that he regularly practices shooting, some commentators ridiculed him for living in an NRA fantasy world. However, Sam Harris is a public figure whom many people—particularly many fanatics—hate, and who regularly receives death threats. If I were Sam Harris, I would probably own a gun. At least, I would seriously consider it. And if someone owns a gun, the responsible thing is to regularly practice using it, as a gun in unskilled hands is a danger in a 360 degree angle. Although I suspect that Harris has a bit too much confidence in his skills, judgment, and safety precautions, criticizing his decisions based on general-population statistics is about as ludicrous as the NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre's insistence that the President's children are exposed to the same risks as anyone else and need the same level of protection.

As the wisdom of keeping guns for self-protection needs to be questioned, so does the ethics of it. When is it OK to use a gun? Many actions that pass as self-defense in the US would be illegal in other countries. The majority of Americans seem to think it is OK to shoot an intruder in the house. But is it? Is it morally permissible to shoot a burglar? Suppose breaks into your house to steal a TV, thinking nobody is home. Say the TV is worth $1,000. Almost no one would say it is morally permissible to kill somebody to gain $1,000; why then would it be OK to do it to prevent a loss of $1,000? The argument obviously extends to any amount. Is it permissible to threaten to shoot? I would certainly question the wisdom of making such threats without at least some willingness to follow through.

A pro-gun argument would be that the mere awareness that many people have guns deters criminals and that it is one of the main reasons few home intrusions occur when families are at home. But the flip side is that the prospect of facing an armed homeowner is an incentive for a burglar to carry a gun. Additionally, guns are attractive targets for burglars, as there is a steady demand for them on the black market. Again, data are lacking, but I suspect that more guns are stolen from households than are used by those households in deterrence of crime.

Another self-defense myth is that guns are women's friends, as they level the playing field, enabling women to defend themselves from the naturally stronger men. Well, sorry ladies, but men kill their wives or girlfriends 4-5 times more often than women kill their husbands or boyfriends, and generally, about half of those murders, regardless of sex, are committed with a gun. As for self-defense, men kill in self-defense with a gun 10 times more often than women (and without a gun, just 3 times more). A woman somewhere in the US shoots someone to death in self-defense about once every 2 months. It's that rare.

We can debunk myths and present facts, but it's hard to make anyone change their mind. There do seem to be two tribes, the gun people and the non-gun people. In a recent article in The New Republic, Walter Kirn tried to explain how a gun person feels about guns and why. Josh Marshall, the publisher of Talking Points Memo, articulated the feelings of non-gun people. They seem to agree that growing up with guns has a lot to do with liking guns later in life. While the personal stories are interesting, I am not sure that generalizations are useful. Nevertheless, some people really like guns, and some are uncomfortable even at the sight of one. Any reasonable public debate needs to take this reality into account.

In this classification, I am a non-gun person, and I fit in the narrative as I generally did not grow up around guns. I shot a firearm on two occasions in my life. The last time when I was 15, as every 10th grader in the country where I grew up had to learn to shoot a military rifle. I later avoided military service, so that was also the end of my training. The time before that was when I was 5 or 6 and I pulled the trigger of my grandfather's hunting rifle that was stored in a rack in his home. It turned out to be loaded and it shot into the ceiling. Adults were in the other room and were scared to death until they saw me uninjured. Now my grandfather was a doctor and a very smart man, and he often told other hunters how important it was to keep guns safely… except he didn't quite follow his own advice. That taught me to be skeptical about everyone who says they are perfectly safe with their guns.

Acknowledging that there are gun people and non-gun people, what to do about guns? There seems to be a consensus that we must do something… but what?

It was recently reported that over 90% of Americans support universal background checks for gun sales. Of course this is commonsense: who would want to allow criminals and lunatics to buy guns. But I suspect the consensus will quickly melt away when a specific proposal is made. It is easy to support the general idea, but what exactly should be checked, and what should make someone ineligible to buy a gun? A conviction for a violent felony, I suppose, is a fairly non-controversial disqualifier. But what about someone who's been in jail for marijuana possession? That doesn't strike me as a valid reason to be considered dangerous and, no, "it would have flagged Jared Loughner" is not a good counter-argument. And what about psychiatric records? What conditions should make one ineligible to own a gun? In what circumstances should psychiatric records be available to the background check? There are privacy concerns. There are concerns about discouraging people from getting psychiatric help. It is complicated. And if we let every jurisdiction experiment with its own criteria, background checks will be easily gamed by buying guns where the standards are lax. For the system to be effective, it has to be uniform, one-size-fits-all, with all the inflexibility and unfairness that necessarily goes with it.

Mental illness is a particularly sensitive issue in this context. Most mass shooters were mentally ill or have shown signs of possible mental illness. But, through a common fallacy, that creates a public perception that mentally ill people are especially dangerous. However, mentally ill people are statistically no more likely to be violent than the general population. Of course, some mentally ill individuals are dangerous, and some mental disorders are more likely to make the person dangerous than others. But generalizations are dangerous and one has carefully weigh potential violation of privacy of millions just because a small number of people actually pose a danger.

There is no doubt that our mental health system is performing poorly, and too many people who need help are not getting it. Improving mental health would probably reduce the number of mass shootings, and a proper treatment of substance abuse would reduce other crime and homicides that go with it. But seeing a potential mass murderer in every person with a mental illness is not a constructive approach.

Banning so-called assault weapons is another popular proposal: a majority of Americans support it, although it has little chance of being enacted. We already had such a ban, but it expired. The rational is clear. A semi-automatic weapon with a large-capacity magazine enables killing a lot of people before having to reload. Nobody needs a weapon like that for hunting or self-protection, but that's what mass shooters often use. If perfectly enforced, such a ban would reduce the fatalities from mass shootings. But it would be hard to enforce and any such law with a realistic chance of passing would not touch some very dangerous weapons, such as the pistol used by Loughner. In fact, handguns, which kill by far the most people, would be very difficult to ban, especially after the recent Supreme Court decisions.

Putting an armed guard in every school is a bad NRA idea that the Obama administration appears somewhat willing to consider. Not only would it be expensive, but in every school there would be an armed, likely authoritarian-minded, person with nothing to do. That seems like the recipe for trouble. Besides, some schools, particularly in high-crime areas, already have armed police or guards. Given how safe the schools already are, it is hard to imagine any benefit from putting more guards in schools. Besides, would an armed guard have stopped Adam Lanza? I think the most likely outcome would be a dead guard.

Better enforcement of existing laws would help. Too many people pass existing background checks who clearly shouldn't, and too many gun dealers are willing to sell against the rules, or "lose" parts of their inventory. Guns are sold at gun shows with no background checks at all. Getting serious about enforcement and closing loopholes would be fairly uncontroversial.

To me, it would make sense to treat guns the way we treat cars. They should be registered and one shouldn't be able to sell them, lose them, or abandon them, without notifying authorities. And people should be required to pass safety courses before being licensed to handle a gun. I don't think this would infringe on anybody's right to own a gun, but the NRA keeps fighting against such requirements and I haven't heard of serious attempts to enact them at the federal level.

In the end, every proposal politicians are currently fighting about would at best chip away a few murders at the margin. But if we were really serious about reducing our homicide rate, we would first end the War on Drugs and switch to prevention and treatment of addiction. Then we would focus on reducing poverty. And finally, we would drastically reduce the number of handguns. But those things are difficult and unpopular, so I don't think we'll see any of them in the foreseeable future.

And, of course, we should work on making our culture less violent. But that goes beyond even difficult policy.

Women and Children First: The Calculus of Culpability

2012-12-18T21:52:00.000-05:00

In the wake of the Newtown, CT school shooting, philosopher Russell Blackford asked why news reports emphasized the number of children killed, rather than the total number of victims, as if adult lives were worth less than children's lives.

This question really probes our ethical and emphatic priorities. On one hand, few people would disagree that lives of adults are intrinsically as precious as lives of children. Even those who think in terms of years of potential life lost could not conclude there is much difference, on that basis, between a loss of a child and a young adult such as a teacher in her 20s. On the other hand, most people, including me, have a markedly stronger visceral reaction to a murder of a child than to a similarly executed murder of an adult. My moral intuition tells me that the murderer of a child is more culpable. Why?

One could try rationalizing the difference in terms of the loss suffered by the survivors. For most people, it is more painful to lose a child than to a parent or a sibling. That is probably an adaptation to our mortal nature: everyone dies, and the best we can hope for is that deaths will follow the sequence of generations. However, this explanation does not work for several reasons. First, although adults are generally well-adapted to accept the death of their aging parents, a parent's early death can still be a terrible loss for a child of a certain age (old enough to understand death, but too young to be emotionally detached from the parent), so a strict hierarchy of grief is far from clear. Second, hearing of a death of a child is not any less heart-rending if we also learn that the child was an orphan whom nobody loved and thus nobody is grieving. If anything, that additional information may sadden us more. And third, an introspection into my reactions convinces me that a strong revulsion at the act of killing a child comes before, and is independent of, any thoughts of how horrible it must be for their parents. I am quite sure my moral calculus in this case is driven by outrage (anger) rather than empathy, and I suspect this is common, perhaps nearly universal.

My theory is that our moral calculus of culpability is driven by fundamental notions of fairness, that it is evolutionarily conditioned, and that it is ill-adapted to the modern world with a fundamentally changed technology of killing.

Before we had guns, or even bows and arrows, killing another person generally required overpowering them in close contact. For millions of years, it meant using bare hands (and feet, and teeth), then maybe sticks or stones, and in the last few tens of thousands of years also axes and spears. But, basically, to kill someone, you had to fight them and win the fight. You had to be stronger than them.

Or you could catch them asleep and kill them when they couldn't defend themselves. But that's unfair, by a universal human (and broader) standard of fairness, and thus universally condemned. While killing in a fight may feel more or less justified, killing someone in their sleep carries a strong presumption of a cowardly murder. Fairness requires that the victim has a chance at defense, and that, in turn, requires a reasonable balance of strength. I believe this describes pretty well the moral sentiments of primitive humans regarding violence within their community (tribe), but outside of one's immediate family (where some different rules may apply).

Now, men are naturally physically stronger than women, and adults are both much stronger and smarter (more experienced and cunning) than children, which means that a man attacking a woman, or an adult attacking a child, is a fundamentally unfair act, somewhat akin to a man attacking a sleeping man. Thus the human sense of fairness ranks an attack on a woman as more wicked (or at least more cowardly) than an attack on a man, and an attack on a child even worse.

It would follow that killing a child is worse than killing a woman, which is worse than killing an unarmed man, which is worse than killing a man with an axe. And this is consistent with the prevailing moral sentiments of today: it is usually considered OK to kill an enemy soldier, but not OK to kill a civilian, even worse to kill a civilian woman, and worst of all to kill a child.

(A reverse calculus may apply to perpetrators. For example, Judith kills Holofernes while he is defenseless, in a drunken stupor, escapes alive, and is celebrated as a heroine. Could a man get away with it? Male mythical heroes who kill by deception usually don't kill a sleeping enemy, and often have to pay with their lives.)

Modern weapons (and poisons), however, make this moral calculus dubious. Bodily strength has little to do with the capability of modern humans to kill, or to defend themselves. A small woman with a gun can easily kill the strongest man. Or she can lace his drink with cyanide. Either way, his muscles provide no defense and he is objectively in no better position to avoid death than a child. Therefore, in any situation involving an armed killer and an unarmed (or armed, but unprepared) victim, the victim's strength, or sex and age on which the strength largely depends, is irrelevant for the fairness of the situation, and hence, by the logic of fairness established earlier, for the culpability of the killer.

But, as is often the case, our moral sentiments have difficulty adapting to the world dominated by technology.

Secession ranking

2012-11-24T11:38:00.001-05:00

This season, secession is in fashion. But which states are the most fashionable, or should I say secessionable? I compiled the total number of signatures for the secession of each state on the White House petition site, and divided them by population. (There are multiple petitions for some state; in those cases, I added up the signatures on all petitions.) You can see the results by clicking here, but briefly: the top-ranked states are Alaska, North Dakota and Wyoming, while the bottom-ranked are California, Massachusetts and Maryland.

Keep in mind that the signatures for each state (if serious) represent the people from the state that want to secede from the United States, plus the number of people in other states who want the state to go away.

Why I will not vote for Obama, but you should

2012-11-04T01:07:00.000-04:00

That is, you should if you live in a swing state.

EDIT (A little over 4 years later): Although I still think my arguments in this post were valid, I eventually came to regret ever having voted for third-party candidates, because I contributed to giving too much legitimacy to such choices. I would not do that again.

If I had the power to pick the President for the next four years, it would be an easy decision: Obama is much better than Romney. There are two reasons this is a clear and important choice.

First, there is likely to be at least one vacancy on the Supreme Court in the next four years, and the most likely Justice to retire is Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a 79-year old double cancer survivor. If Romney got a chance to replace her with a movement conservative, that would complete the right-wing takeover of the court. On any ideological issue, the moderates (there really are no liberals on the court) would need the support of both Kennedy and Roberts to prevail. That would almost never happen. There may be other vacancies: by the end of the next presidential term, Justices Scalia and Kennedy will be 80, and Justice Breyer 78. The difference (and consequences for the country) between Obama picking Scalia's successor and Romney picking Breyer's is enormous. Given that Supreme Court justices typically serve about 30 years, this issue alone normally trumps everything else and compels choosing any Democrat over any Republican.

This time, however, there is a second issue of at least equal importance and long-lasting consequences: the implementation of health care reform. The ACA, though imperfect, was the most consequential piece of progressive legislation in about 40 years, but only if it survives and is properly implemented. I don't think it would be repealed if Romney became President; that would require the Senate to go along, and Republicans won't have a Senate majority until at least 2015, when all the popular provisions of the ACA will go in effect and the public will become strongly opposed to repeal. But an administration that's lukewarm on its implementation, combined with the House that defunds it, can turn a decent health insurance system (as envisioned in the law) into a dysfunctional one, which would eventually necessitate major changes. For the reform, which will enable almost all legal residents of the US to have health insurance, to succeed, it is essential to keep Obama in office for four more years.

There are many other reasons to favor Obama, of course. In fact, I can't think of a single issue on which Romney would be better than Obama. But the reality is that the candidates don't differ significantly on foreign policy, and the President really doesn't have a lot of influence on the economy, especially when it is not in crisis. I do think a Romney presidency would increase the risk of a major war (e.g., with Iran), mainly because his current foreign policy team is dominated by neocons left over from G. W. Bush, and neither Romney nor Ryan have any foreign policy or military experience. So, that's probably the third most important reason to keep Romney out of power. And I could go on and on.

But I don't have the power to pick the President. I live in a very blue state, which will overwhelmingly vote for Obama. If the election in my state were so close that my vote had a theoretical chance of affecting the outcome, the Republican candidate would be winning in a landslide nationally. In other words, my vote in the presidential election is worth exactly zero.

However, the fact that my vote is guaranteed to be inconsequential for the outcome of the election also means I have the luxury to vote my conscience and my personal preference. Since I find Obama too conservative and too belligerent, I personally prefer to vote for somebody who stands for more social justice and less war. Therefore, I will vote for Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate.

I don't know a lot about Dr. Stein, other than what is on her web page. She is considerably to the left of Obama, and I agree with her on more issues than with Obama, although there is no candidate with whom I agree on all issues. I am pretty sure she would be ineffective as President - she is too much an outsider - but that's irrelevant since she won't be one. She is the only candidate on the ballot in my state that represents the left opposition to the current government, and that is what I want my vote to symbolically support.

I would not come to the same conclusion if I lived in a state that could potentially be pivotal in this election. I would definitely vote for Obama if I lived in Ohio, Virginia, Colorado, Iowa, Wisconsin, Nevada, New Hampshire, Florida, or North Carolina. I would probably also decline to tempt fate if I lived in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota, Oregon, or even New Mexico. It's not only that there would be some minute chance that my vote could decide the election. That chance is really too small to take into serious consideration. It's more that voting is, by its nature, a collective act, and although I am not a Kantian by any stretch of imagination, in this case I do feel that my action should conform to what I want everyone else to do. In my state, I am pretty sure that if everyone voted for the candidate they prefer in their heart, Obama would still win. Just like in Texas, Romney would still win. But in states where the race is close, minor party candidates could affect the outcome if voters did not behave strategically. That's why voters in those states ought to view the election strictly as a choice between the two major party candidates. (But I'd be happy if every voter whose preferences are Johnson > Romney > Obama or Goode > Romney > Obama voted from the heart rather than strategically narrowing the choice.)

Told you so (charitable giving edition)

2012-10-18T21:22:00.002-04:00

Nice to see a debunking of the myth that conservatives give more to charity. But I called Brooks's BS five years ago.

The GRIMS should contemplate the meaning of "I"

2012-10-13T20:31:00.000-04:00

What possesses about half of American voters that will make them vote for Mitt Romney for President?

The Grim is an omen of doom in Harry Potter*

I want to understand it because the idea is as foreign to me as taking a pin to a fair, popping every child's balloon, and then swallowing the pin. It also feels equally mean and self-destructive. So I tried to boil it down to a short list of simple reasons why people vote for Romney (or Republican in general). I contend that every Republican voter is driven by at least one of five factors, which can be summarized in an acronym: GRIMS.

G is for greed, R is for racism, M is for misogyny, S is for stupidity. (Where is I? Don't be impatient; I'll give it a special treatment at the end.)

Greed is an obvious factor. For wealthy voters, it is, by most measures, individually rational. If you earn more than about $200,000 per year, or have a multi-million-dollar estate to leave to your heirs, you (or your heirs) will likely be able to consume more goodies if Republicans run the country. If your income is in millions or your estate in tens of millions (or more), you will certainly be significantly richer under Republicans. I may consider you selfish or narrow-minded, but I can't really blame you for voting your purse. I could point to billionaires who vote Democratic—who are willing to bear a personal cost for a better society—but it's your vote and you could do much worse than voting based on your personal material interest. After all, you are in the one percent, maybe two, hardly a group that decides elections. (If you are not wealthy, this paragraph is not about you. If you think it is, please skip to the letter S.)

Racism is an obvious factor in this presidential election and in the last one, but it is almost as important when both candidates are of the same race (whatever that means). Many voters are attracted to the Republican opposition to various social programs. At first, this appears puzzling because polls regularly show that people generally support social programs, and not just "earned benefits" like Social Security, but also "welfare" programs like Medicaid. However, digging deeper leads to a discovery that many people like those programs for "people like me", but think that "those other people" tend to abuse them. The "other" are, of course, those of different race or ethnicity, or immigrants (but mostly those of different race or ethnicity).

Misogyny: what is generally manifested as abortion policy is really all about equal rights for women. (Note that opposition to abortion and opposition to equal pay are correlated.) If you are personally morally opposed to abortion, there is no reason for you to want to use state power to impose your moral views on others. Plenty of such people are pro-choice and many of them vote for Democrats. If you truly believe abortion is murder, I can see why you'd want to outlaw it, but the moment you say you'd allow exceptions for rape or incest, you have admitted you don't believe that abortion is murder at all. Since those who oppose the rape/incest exception are generally considered extreme even by most Republicans, I will not discuss them here, as people on the extremes of the political spectrum don't decide elections unless the election is so close that the turnout of core partisan voters is critical. But my main question is why the election is close in the first place. That's not because of the 10-15% who truly believe that abortion is murder. All other so called "pro-life" voters really want to put women "in their place" and shame them for being sexual at all. If you are anti-abortion, but actively involved in distributing free contraceptives and contraception (not just abstinence) advice, then what I said does not apply to you. All other "pro-lifers", shame on you and don't complain.

Stupidity is, of course, a factor in most people's decisions, and I don't deny that a lot of people vote Democratic for stupid reasons as well. But this post is about why people vote Republican. Denying evolution or climate change are two stupid ideas adopted and promoted by the Republican Party. (Romney doesn't subscribe to either, AFAIK, but he'll still win the deniers' vote overwhelmingly, for reasons discussed later, under "I".) The idea that tax cuts for the rich trickle down and benefit everyone, or that one day you'll be rich and will benefit from those tax cuts, is stupid wishful thinking. Believing that Obama is a socialist who is destroying America's businesses and burdening most people with excessive taxes and regulations is stupid. Ditto for believing that Obamacare is a government takeover of health care that will introduce death panels and force you to lose the insurance you have. Same for believing that Obama is weak in foreign policy, that he apologizes for American values or that he is hostile to Israel. And, of course, ditto for the idea that he is a Kenyan-born Muslim, but that really belongs under the letter R. The list goes on and on, but you get the picture.

I skipped the middle of the acronym, but now it's time to go back to the letter I. Initially, I meant it to stand for ignorance, as I wanted to separate it from stupidity. Technically, ignorance is a state of being uninformed or misinformed, and thus can be remedied by supplying information, while stupidity is an inability to think properly, absorb information, and form reasonable conclusions, and can rarely be helped. Strictly speaking, most of the examples I listed under stupidity are evidence of ignorance, and not necessarily of stupidity. However, I am not convinced that the distinction is meaningful here. The facts are easily accessible to everyone. More than that: most of them are hard to escape from. Schools teach evolution. Your pay stub lists the tax withholding. Obama's birth certificate has been published everywhere. Everybody has seen these things. People aren't really ignorant of the facts. What they are is willfully ignorant, and that's broadly in the realm of stupidity, or perhaps delusion. In any case, it is a personal, rather than circumstantial, shortcoming. So I decided to leave ignorance out of the list. Plus, there is a more compelling "I" word there.

Another reason I looked for a different word is that the list so far fails to explain too many voters. Although I can comfortably say that practically every Republican in Congress today, and every Republican who ran for President in this cycle, with a possible exception of Huntsman (Gary Johnson is incredibly stupid on economic policy), exhibits at least one of the four characteristics discussed so far, not every Republican voter does. First, there are reasonable conservative thinkers whom I read regularly. Although some of them have been ostracized by the institutional Right, and others have tried to keep out of politics, I suspect that most of them will, in the end, hold their noses and vote for Romney (and probably for the down-ticket Republicans as well, unless those are some extreme Tea Partiers). I also know enough people who have expressed preference for Romney, but whom I can't place in any of the four groups, based on what I know (or think I know) about them.

Really, the core topic of this post is how to explain Romney voters who are not idiots. Everything else is not all that interesting. Of course the stupid misogynist racists will vote Republican, as will the dirty rich. Dog bites man.

So here we go: I stands for identity. Politics is tribal, and most people identify with a group. Often that means identifying with a party. It is hard for a "lifelong Republican" to break with his party, even if he thinks the party has changed so much that he hardly belongs in it. For some people, it is hard to support a candidate opposed by the vast majority of their friends and family. And this feeling of loyalty to the tribe gets internalized and takes root—not least because tribe membership is partly explained by the individual's psychological makeup.

Oh, good. That means I can be comfortable around those Romney voters and not feel compelled to put them in a "greedy", "racist", "misogynist" or "stupid" drawer. They just identify with their tribe, it's practically like being of different ethnicity or religious persuasion. And it's not like our tribes are in a bloody war. It's OK.

Well, sort of. I don't hate people for belonging to that tribe. But, honestly, I don't hate people for being stupid, or (as you must have noticed above) even for being greedy. (Racism and misogyny are more serious offenses. No guarantees there.) It's not about hate. Nobody will get in a fist fight. However, I am not sure this tribal identity thing is more benign than "ignorance" would have been in its place, or than stupidity is. Plus, it may be a root cause for other items on the list.

I mentioned that willful ignorance is more like stupidity. But no one wills one's own stupidity. Why do people will their own ignorance? Because it is beneficial for them to do so. There is a hackneyed (but true) saying that it is hard to teach a man something if his salary depends on not knowing it. It is similar with non-material incentives. Learning is uncomfortable if it contradicts one's religious dogma, challenges one's values, or distances one from one's tribe. To avoid that discomfort, people close their eyes and ears and refuse to learn, or they find alternative sources of more convenient "facts". As a result, they end up ignorant, stupid, or delusional. That may be puzzling to others, as the same individuals may be evidently knowledgeable, smart and sane in other areas. Their compartmentalized stupidity is an outgrowth of their tribal identity.

This is nothing new. It is a long-standing standard explanation for smart people who believe in weird things. It probably comes up most often as an explanation of a smart, educated person who denies evolution. But it extends far beyond religious dogma. It is the main driver of politics, and is the main reason that the political discourse is generally idiotic.

So this is a challenge for my Republican friends: think about whether you really like the tribe you identify with. Think about the fact that you couldn't win any national election without some unsavory groups (the racists). Think about the party tenets that are demonstrably false. Think about the lies and bullshit your politicians say, and need to say. Yeah, I know that all politicians lie, but come on, your party is an order of magnitude worse.

And, when you've thought about it, ask yourself: Is this the "I" that describes me?

* Image by Cliff Wright. Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/glasgow_and_west/8008247.stm

Causes of Romney bounce

2012-10-12T20:45:00.000-04:00

I believe the polls, but I don't believe that Romney gained 4-5% based on the debate alone. That just doesn't happen, especially not in an election with so few undecided voters. I think it is a mistake to attribute all the movement to a single cause, as if there were no other events in the last week.

Last week's debate was Wednesday night, and there was another important event Friday morning: the jobs report. So, my hypothesis is that some of the Romney bounce is due to the jobs report.

Now you think I'm nuts. The jobs report was exceptionally good, and thus presumably favorable to the incumbent. Also, didn't I just in the last post explain that it didn't matter? Am I changing my positions like Romney?

Oh, but what I explained was that the substance of the report —the facts reported—couldn't matter for the polls. But there was another event associated with the report: Republicans started spreading conspiracy theories about it, and the media treated those conspiracy theories as if they were respectable ideas. What would be the expected effect on a "low-information" voter? A suspicion that Obama is the new Nixon, of course!

So I think that the irresponsibility of the media in giving free advertising space to the nuts has been a factor in the Romney bounce, and I would guess that it may account for up to half of it.

The poll movements are consistent with my hypothesis: first came a bounce, then it appeared to fade, but then it increased again and stabilized. This can, of course, be a coincidence, as those daily movements were well within the range of normal statistical fluctuations. But at least they provide a prima facie case for two causes, separated by a couple of days.

Cooking the numbers: a half-baked idea

2012-10-10T21:38:00.000-04:00

Many have commented on the Republican conspiracy theories about BLS cooking the September employment numbers to help Obama's reelection. Enough has been said about how preposterous those theories are and how irresponsible the media have been in covering them as if they deserved some respect. I have nothing to add to that, but I am puzzled that I haven't seen anyone ask an obvious question:

How do those people think embellished statistics would help a candidate in an election?

Seriously. Do you know any person who would decide for whom to vote, or whether to vote, based on the published unemployment rate? Can you imagine somebody thinking, "I wasn't going to vote for Obama when the unemployment rate was 8.1%. But wow, the unemployment rate is 7.8% now, and by golly, I'm voting to reelect the President!"?

OK, there may be two or three Aspergians nationwide who are so much into economic data that oher shethey set a voting decision rule based on such statistics. But, if such people exist, I bet they live in DC anyway (working for the government or some think tank), and DC's electoral votes are already spoken for.

Other than that hypothetical and vanishingly small demographic, no voter thinks that way. Most voters don't even know what the unemployment rate is, and those who know couldn't care less.

Of course, people care about the economy. But they don't care about abstractions. They care about how they are doing, and how their friends and relatives are doing. They react to what they experience. If you are unemployed, and the unemployment rate declines from 8% to 6%, did you somehow become less unemployed? Nothing has changed for you. Things did change for a lot of other people, and they are now more likely to reelect the current officials. That's why job numbers matter for the election. But they don't matter to any individual voter.

That's why you don't see a bounce for Obama in the polls after the good economic news, unlike the day before, when his advantage diminished because of the poor debate performance. But the debate—however irrelevant in substance—was news to every individual. By contrast, the employment numbers were news in the aggregate, but not to individuals. Nobody's experience of the economy changed with the publication of those numbers.

That is not to say that those job numbers are not reflected in the polls. Of course they are—in polls conducted in September. Think about it: if more people became employed in September, more people liked the current administration in September. Incidentally, Obama's poll numbers did improve in September, although we'll never know how much of that was due to the improving economy, how much to the energized Democratic Convention, and how much to Romney's gaffes and the "47%" recording. But, whatever the effect of the economy, it was there in the polls long before it was in the published data.

And this is generally true: economic statistics are lagging indicators of voters' opinions, because they are published with a delay and voters form opinions based on their experiences immediately. To put it another way: the polls predict the economic data, not the other way around.

So how would making up job numbers help reelect the President? In the immortal words of South Park's underpants gnomes:

Cook the numbers
?????
Second term!!!

The idea that this could work is crazy—even more crazy than the blind, rabid partisanship that transforms otherwise sane people into paranoid conspiracy theorists.

Haidting on reason

2012-09-30T01:19:00.000-04:00

Last Sunday, I attended an oddly irritating talk. The speaker was smart and articulate and I am sure I would agree with her on 90% of randomly chosen social, political, or philosophical issues. The presentation was effective and well done. The topic was certainly important—how to talk with people who disagree with us. And yet, there was so much wrong with it, I felt the need to emerge from blogging hibernation just to respond to it. (I have invited the speaker to visit this blog and comment, so I may not go back to hibernation.)

The talk was largely based on Jonathan Haidt's new book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. So I should begin with a disclosure: I dislike Haidt. Although I haven't read his new book, I have followed his writing for years, and have consistently found him to be a member of the most annoying of tribes, the Self-Hating Liberals.

Don't get me wrong: Haidt is worth reading. His analysis of happiness and morality draws on recent research in various disciplines, including neuroscience, and almost everybody will learn a lot from it. He writes well and his arguments often challenge the conventional wisdom. Engaging in a debate with him requires clear and disciplined thinking. But the converse holds as well: clear and disciplined thinking requires engaging in a debate with Haidt, because his most prominent arguments are ultimately destructive.

Haidt got a lot of press a few years ago, when he—a declared atheist—defended religion's contribution to people's happiness. I think it was somewhat unfortunate for his own opus, as most of his ideas are not as inchoate, but he never seemed to object to earning much of his relative celebrity status due to this particular idea, so I must assume that he thinks of it as representative enough of his work. Now he has written a book in which he—a declared liberal—defends the conservative values as an integral part of the "moral matrix" our species has evolved with.

There is a pattern here: Haidt distinguishes himself by asking questions of the type "What if we are wrong?", where "we" are those with whom he identifies through fundamental viewpoints: atheists, secularists, liberals. This is, of course, fine in principle, even desirable, but if one builds a career on those questions, one's success becomes dependent on the challenge actually showing the prevailing views wrong. Merely casting doubt does not make you a famous iconoclast; for that, you must break something.

But Haidt doesn't want atheists and liberals to lose arguments. He still reaffirms his atheism and his liberal values. So he shifts focus from the question of who is right to the one of why people hold the views they hold. He wants to study morality scientifically, dispassionately. That's great, but is has a side-effect: it leads to moral relativism. Haidt is not comfortable with that:

I hope you'll accept that as a purely descriptive statement. You can still reject the three binding foundations normatively—that is, you can still insist that ingroup, authority, and purity refer to ancient and dangerous psychological systems that underlie fascism, racism, and homophobia, and you can still claim that liberals are right to reject those foundations and build their moral systems using primarily the harm/care and fairness/reciprocity foundations.

But this discomfort muddles the argument. It becomes less and less clear what the goal is. We should consider that we may be wrong... But we can still believe we are right... But we should understand those who are ~~wrong~~ different... Maybe we are wrong in the way we interact with them... Can one go down this path and remain coherent?

For those unfamiliar with Haidt's work, I suggest this essay and the responses to it as a good introduction. (The quotation above is from it.) The flaws in Haidt's essay are pointed out very well by Sam Harris, PZ Myers, and Marc Hauser, but they all miss an important point—that Haidt uncritically relies on biased sources—which I pointed out in this blog. (Note that Brooks has since solidified his hack credentials, as he has become the president of the AEI.)

As I said, I haven't read Haidt's new book, so I cannot criticize it directly. What I will criticize is the speaker's representation of it. I believe, however, that it is a fair representation, based on earlier articles that I have read, and which were clearly stages of the road to The Righteous Mind. An example is here. Again, read the responses, too; I particularly like those by Sam Harris (again!) and Roger Schank.

But on to last Sunday's talk. Its frame was a question: How do you talk with your "nut job" relatives, friends, or associates? Yes, we all have people we care about (or at least need to keep constructive working relationships with) who hold (or, worse, spill) ideas that are crazy, ludicrous, idiotic, or of some other similar kind. How can we have a conversation with them?

The speaker identified two major errors that derail such conversations. One, in our "toxic culture", we surround ourselves with those who think alike, and in our minds dehumanize The Other, those with whom we disagree. Two, we overestimate the role of rationality and falsely believe that our values have a rational basis, when in fact we use reason to justify our moral views we have already formed based primarily on emotions. The latter is illustrated by Haidt's metaphor of the rider and the elephant: the rider (the rational functions of our mind) thinks he is in charge, but the elephant (the irrational) is far more powerful.

To avoid these errors, we need to understand human morality: it is rooted in emotions, which give rise to six basic moral values: caring, liberty, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity. Those six values form what Haidt calls the moral matrix. (As I understand, that concept is the main new idea in The Righteous Mind.) According to Haidt's research, liberals mainly care about the first three of those values, while conservatives care about all of them.

The speaker concluded with guidelines for better conversation with "the nut jobs":

Find the humanity in each other. Stop thinking about them as crazy.
Put aside right and wrong. (This includes facts!) Start by making a connection.
Understand their values and speak to them. Listen. Don't stereotype them or assume they think X because they are conservatives (or liberals, etc.)
Don't fall into cynicism (resignation? pessimism?). Do something!
Get out of your box. Speak with people of different opinions. Get out from behind your computer!

After the talk, there was some opportunity for response from the audience. My elephant wanted to talk for an hour, but that would have been rude and against the rules, so I limited myself to expressing disagreement over equating thinking of somebody as mentally ill and dehumanizing that person. Mentally ill people are no less human than the rest. I do think that calling Tea Partiers "crazy" may sometimes be a comparison offensive to the crazy folk, but that's a different issue. I also believe that conservatism will one day be understood as related to conditions currently classified as psychiatric disorders. But anyone who sees the "crazy" people (of any kind) as less than human has a problem more acute than how to speak with ideological opponents.

So what are my other problems with the talk? My guess is that at this point, having read the summary of the talk, but not having heard my objections, most readers think it was perfectly fine. OK, there are some details I haven't mentioned yet, but let's go over the main points first.

My first problem with the talk as a whole parallels a problem I have with Haidt: it is not clear what the goal is. Are we trying to persuade the "nut job relative" we are talking with? Or contribute to the political success of "our" candidate? Or be a better person, not act like a jerk, have better relationships? The speaker mentioned all of the above, so I guess that would be her answer, but those are distinct goals and I am not sure they are always compatible. Certainly the strategy in achieving them ought to be different. Political persuasion usually benefits from some degree of deception, while I would think that honesty is a crucial part of being a good person.

Moreover, I would be close to answering that question with "none of the above". I discuss political issues often, but I don't usually expect to change people's views or influence elections, and I don't think the style of the conversation has much to do with me becoming a better or worse person. I like to test my own views by exposing them and defending them in a debate. It helps me grow, which may be akin to becoming a better person. Hopefully, it helps the other person grow, too, if they are willing to use the opportunity. I also believe that reason has an intrinsic value, and it is reason I want to triumph in a debate. If I happen to be on its side, that's an added benefit, but being right after a debate is the next best thing—and when you add the value of learning, it may be the best outcome.

A direct consequence is that I enjoy serious discussions with people who hold different views and can articulate good arguments in support of those views. If their arguments are poor, I see a serious discussion as a waste of time. Mocking their views becomes much more attractive. It may not be nice, but humor and satire have an intrinsic value, too. Or, if practical considerations preclude that (say, you would offend someone you need to work with), then it is best to avoid talking about contentious issues with them, period.

The second fundamental problem I have with the talk is that it promotes relativism. Not only moral relativism, but even the relativism of facts. I've already mentioned how Haidt ends up stepping into relativism and being uncomfortable with it. The speaker may feel similarly, as she unambiguously identified with one side of the political spectrum. So she seems to carry this relativism half-way down several diverging paths.

One is the idea that facts don't really matter to people if they challenge their views. Yes, this is important if your goal is political persuasion. But nothing in this talk, or in Haidt's work, is particularly useful for political strategy. If you want to get your favorite people elected and your preferred policies enacted, the book you should read is Moral Politics by George Lakoff. You won't learn much about neuroscience research from it, but you will understand how to connect with a conservative (or liberal) audience. Lakoff's explanation of two political camps based on two models of moral values ("strict father" and "nurturing parent") is far more parsimonious than Haidt's six-dimensional moral matrix.

This path also leads to a cliff. In an attempt to convince us how little people care about facts, the speaker tried to demonstrate that "we" reject inconvenient facts just like the "nut jobs" do. Pox on both houses! Both sides do it! Of course, that is my biggest pet peeve. I am happier listening to five ultraconservative nut jobs than to one liberal who keeps saying "both sides do it". So the speaker asked:

When you hear a study that confirms your views, do you ask "What methods did they use? What was that person's background?"

I don't know what irked me more: that she asked that, assuming the answer was obvious (and negative), or that the audience laughed, signaling acceptance of the assumption. But the assumption is preposterous: my answer is clearly "yes". I even yelled from my seat: "Some of us do!" If that was uncivilized, so be it.

Ironically, in another part of the talk, the speaker advised against assuming what other people think:

If there's anything that drives me more nuts than being told I'm wrong, it's being told "Well, you think…" (...) Don't tell me what I think because you're stereotyping me."

Guess what? You told me what I think, and you assumed wrong. I always scrutinize studies, regardless of which side their results support. A meta-study once showed that the majority of papers published in top-tear medical journals are wrong. I am not aware of a similar meta-study in social sciences, but I would bet the results would be even worse. There are a lot of bad studies; there is even more bad journalistic reporting about studies. You should always be skeptical. "Constant vigilance!" as Mad-Eye Moody would say.

Now, being skeptical toward all studies is one thing; thinking that both sides cheat equally is quite another. Note, for example, that Paul Krugman often shows the models and reasoning behind his positions in his blog. His critics, not so much. There is a reason that the saying "facts have a well-known liberal bias" has become a cliché.

(At one point the speaker showed a slide juxtaposing the photos of Ann Coulter and Michael Moore. That was so wrong I wanted to throw eggs. When a conservative does that to me, it is a conversation stopper: the parallel is crazy; if you don't see it, you don't live on the same planet as me.)

Another path to relativism is inherent in the idea of understanding each other's values and finding commonalities instead of thinking of the other as mentally deficient. This is fine, but Haidt's own work shows that it is completely illogical as an advice to liberals. Namely, if there are six fundamental values, and liberals care about three of them, while conservatives care about all six, then the commonalities lie in the three values liberals care about. Conservatives need to understand that only those three are universal values. Don't tell me to look for commonalities in things we don't have in common! In fact, I abhore the values of authority and sanctity. (Loyalty sounds ambivalent: usually good in the private sphere, but bad in the public sphere. But as I've seen Haidt denoting it "ingroup/loyalty", I suppose I'd abhore it, too, if I saw the full definition.) Those "values" are harmful and destructive. Haidt acknowledges that, as I've pointed out. So why should we try to connect with them rather than fight against them? On the other hand, conservatives already care about liberal values, so they should focus on what we have in common and shut up about the rest.

That was tongue-in-cheek, of course. I cheated, by pretending that I accept Haidt's moral matrix. In fact, I find it highly suspect. Liberty? Makes me wonder if he has ever discussed liberty with a conservative. Because the word means very different things to liberals and to conservatives. Ditto for fairness. I don't know, if I read the book, maybe I would find the substance of the moral matrix concept convincing. But, at the very least, Haidt chose unfortunate terms, which do not contribute to a better understanding between liberals and conservatives.

Related to "commonalities" is the advice to speak to the others' values. There were some good examples (although I'd say in each case the victory facilitated by this strategy was minor), but also an example I detested. It was about the environment, and the thesis was that it is the area in which secular people can understand sanctity. Well, this secular person (and liberal, and environmentalist) does not! Please do not ascribe New Age nonsense to me. Please follow your own advice and don't tell me I think X because I am liberal. There is nothing sacred about nature. I just want my descendants to have decent lives, for which they'll need a livable environment. As for appealing to the sanctity of Creation to get the Evangelicals to size down their SUVs and reduce dumping chemicals on their lawns, that's fine if it works, but be aware that it's deception. I have no problem with that; I'll take Machiavelli over Kant anytime. Just don't deceive yourself that you are connecting when you are in fact manipulating.

Yet another path to relativism was short, but steep. Part of advice #2 ("put aside right and wrong") was not to say "You are wrong!" when someone gives you, in speaker's words, "facts you completely disagree with". Ugh. Facts are true or false. My agreement with them is irrelevant. And there is no hope of reaching any kind of understanding if we don't agree on facts. While this may be a good tactical advice for political persuasion, it is a bad advice for true understanding. One thing I agree with, though. I don't say "You are wrong!" Rather, I say "That's not true." It is good to keep disagreement from becoming personal. I try to follow that principle knowing full well that most people won't notice the difference. They'll hear it as "You are a liar!" Nevertheless, let the error be theirs!

I do not mean to imply that the speaker holds a post-modern, relativist view of factual truth. I did not get that impression at all. The message I got was primarily that facts don't convince people, and that's fair. But it's only true in a limited sense. If someone is convinced that Obama is a foreign-born Muslim, there may be no way to disabuse them of that nonsense, but five years from now it will be irrelevant, so insisting on facts now may be a waste of time. But if someone believes the world is 6,000 years old and it will end in our lifetime, that necessarily shapes their views of ethics and policy, and that will not change when someone else is in the White House.

In discussing my two fundamental problems with the talk (incoherence of goals and promotion of relativism), I touched on a lot of its specific points. I'll finish by addressing three more specific claims, which I recognize as versions of oft-stated, but poorly supported chunks of conventional wisdom. (I am not going to quote exactly, but I believe I am paraphrasing fairly.)

Our culture has become toxic because we surround ourselves with people who think alike. This is evident in political polarization by counties or ZIP codes. I don't buy this. The fact is that our political parties have become more aligned with ideology (which may be good or bad, but at least it makes sense) and with urban and near-suburban vs. exurban and rural interests. So it is probably true that voting patterns within ZIP codes have become more homogeneous. (I haven't seen data on that, but I find the claim plausible.) But it says nothing about people intentionally segregating by ideology. You can't jump to that conclusion from voting data, and I doubt there are good ZIP-level repeated surveys of ideological positions. Even if ideological segregation were increasing, would that make the society more "toxic" (in the sense of dehumanizing "others", i.e., tribal)? While I can trace the logic of ideological segregation leading to equating belonging to a community with belonging to an ideology or party, and that leading to reinforcing tribalism, it seems like a stretch, especially in a highly mobile society like ours. Finally, is our culture more toxic than it used to be? I'd say the general trend is quite the opposite. We have become less racist, less homophobic, less distrusting of people with different religious backgrounds, more respectful of people with disabilities, etc. True, we are witnessing an explosion of racism disguised as conservative politics in response to the election of the first black president, but I don't think it can reverse the long-term trends, as evidenced by the fact that virtually all culprits feel a need to disguise their bigotry.

Read and watch the other side's media. You don't have to watch Fox News or listen to Rush Limbaugh; maybe start with George Will. But stop reading just things that reinforce our own beliefs. We need to understand what the argument is on the other side and where they're coming from. This is partly terrible advice and partly just doesn't make any sense. Let's start with things that make no sense. A clear implication is that we are watching "our side's media". But that beast doesn't exist. There is no mainstream liberally-biased media, with the exception of a few prime-time shows on MSNBC, and their bias generally stops at the choice of topics and questions. How many examples can you cite of Rachel Maddow telling lies on her show? (I don't watch any of it, so my question is not rhetorical. But I bet the answer would be very short.) In fact, the only media I listen to is the other side's media. I listen to NPR on my commute—Morning Edition on the way to work, Marketplace on the way home—and every day I hear some right-wing crap. Yes, most of it is crap because there are no good right-wing arguments. And the ones aired on NPR are probably as good as they get.

(OK, I occasionally switch to Democracy Now! in the morning, if I happen to be driving between 8 and 9. They report the facts, unlike other news programs, and then occasionally blame the facts on Global Capitalism, which I guess makes them left-wing. So again, how many times did you hear Amy Goodman lie? Not to mention that few liberals I know ever listen to that program.)

First of all, if you want to understand anything, you have to stop watching all mainstream news programs. You can read the New York Times, preferably supplemented with some foreign news sources. And you need to read a variety of blogs and follow the discussions among them. But if you are a liberal Democrat and hope to find the argument on the other side, you'll be disappointed. There is no quality argument that can reasonably be associated with "the other side". Reasoned conservatives have generally been ostracized by the Republican Party, so they are really in no-man's land. Reading them may be intellectually satisfying, but it won't give you any insight about "your nut job relatives" because I guarantee that your nut job relatives don't get their ideas from, say, Bruce Bartlett.

It's bad advice to read nonsense and try to understand it. At best, you'll waste your time; at worst, your health will suffer. You may as well try to attend fundamentalist sermons and try to understand where they are coming from. If you are not very good at spotting bullshit, you can use it for training, but that's all it can be good for.

I can foresee responses saying that this is too blunt or not constructive because it is just calling those people crazy or stupid. Well, yes, I wasn't the one proposing that we shouldn't. Or at least their arguments. I do believe many right-wing writers are sane and intelligent. They'll just write whatever works to establish them as conservative pundits.

Which brings us to George Will. George Fucking Will!? You gotta be kidding me. Nobody should read that dishonest piece of shit, ever. When did he write anything other than lies and manipulation? And how would reading him be constructive? If you took him as representative of conservative thought, what could you conclude other than that conservatives are lying assholes? (One exception is when Will writes about people with disabilities. Then he can show some empathy, respect, and decency. That is because he has a son with with a disability. I don't know if this makes him less bad or even worse.)

Anyone objecting to these characterizations, I challenge you to provide examples to the contrary.

And the last myth: We need to get out from behind our computers. If we tell a story with a human face from our side, it won't be from behind the computer. Oh, I guess that invalidates this entire post, as I obviously wrote it from behind my computer. It also contradicts the advice to read conservative pundits; guess where they write their columns. Seriously, abstaining from any one mode of communication, let alone the most pervasive one, will not help anyone get their message across. Sure, communication on the Internet includes idiotic flame wars and posting comments on articles that get thousands of comments that no one sane reads. But writing a blog and judiciously posting comments on blogs is a way to reach a much wider audience than most people can realistically hope to reach face-to-face. Same holds for message boards. Even Facebook is useful, if nothing else, to avoid repeating the same thing dozens of times to people who may or may not want to hear it. In fact, as soon as I publish this post, I will mention it on Facebook. It will be the fastest and least intrusive way to invite the people who may be the most interested in reading it.

Catching up with the Oscars

2012-07-08T13:33:00.000-04:00

It's hardly timely to talk about the Oscars in July, but I finally saw all of this year's Best Picture nominees, and that is an unusual accomplishment for me. Last time it happened ten years ago, and there were only five nominees then. So I have to give my two cents, even if they are only worth one by now.
Last year seems to have been a pretty good one for movies. I loved four of the nominated films, and there may be others that should have made the list. For example, I haven't seen The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo yet, but, if the critics are right that it is at least not much worse than the Swedish version, it may make my top five.
A more curious feature of this year's list of nominees is how many common themes some of them share. The Artist and Hugo are tributes to old silent movies. Hugo and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (EL&IC) are about unique boys obsessively searching for a message from their tragically deceased fathers. The Artist and Midnight in Paris are tributes to the 1920s (and Hugo straddles that decade, in a sense), with the American Woody Allen taking us to Paris as the literary and artistic capital of the world of that time, and the Frenchman Michel Hazanavicius taking us to Hollywood, the movie capital of the world (and then again, American Martin Scorsese reminding us that, before Hollywood existed, it was Paris where the movies were born).
As Hugo's and Oskar's (in EL&IC) relationships with their fathers are left unfinished by the fathers' untimely deaths, so is Matt King's (George Clooney) relationship with his wife in The Descendants, and he, too, searches for clues from the past, sometimes obsessively. War Horse completes the list of movies set in the early 20th century, and The Help and The Tree of Life add two more to a more general theme of revisiting a decade of that century.
Finally, fatherhood is a strong theme running through several nominated films—Moneyball, The Tree of Life (oddly, Brad Pitt plays the father in both), The Descendants, EL&IC, and, to a lesser extent, Hugo and War Horse. Mothers, on the other hand, are downplayed: they are long deceased (Hugo) or brain dead (The Descendants) or being uninteresting to the plot as a non-antagonistic antagonist (Moneyball) or very passive (The Tree of Life, admittedly in the spirit of the 1950s) or the least developed character (EL&IC). In The Help, no white woman knows how to be a mother. Only in War Horse is the mother an active, strong character with some depth.
On to the rankings and thoughts about individual movies:
9. The Tree of Life. It is often said that people either hate or love this film, but I do neither. At least, its cinematography is beautiful enough that it kept me watching to the end. However, it is not a movie; rather, it is a very long PowerPoint presentation, occasionally interrupted by fragments of a movie. And those fragments, while making sense on their own, never connect with the most dramatic event, which remains only implied and not contemporaneous with any other part of the story. An unusual movie-watching experience, and interesting enough to discuss, but not a movie I'd recommend.
8. The Help. This one had a lot of potential: the actors are great and the story is excellent... that is, excellent as pure fiction. But, in historical context, I find it utterly unbelievable that a story like this would end as it does—relatively well, without major harm to any of the protagonists or their families. Overall, it paints a naively rosy picture of the segregated South. This is probably how a young urban person of the 2010s imagines the end of the Jim Crow era, but it ain't the real thing and, in the end, it feels like a fairy tale. If you want to rectify history, do it brazenly and kill Hitler, as Tarantino did in Inglourius Basterds. Don't just make us feel good about the otherwise plausible setting.
7. Moneyball. A big step up from the bottom two—I actually liked this one a lot. That I am not a baseball fan is an understatement; I don't even understand baseball. But the movie is not so much about baseball as it is about effecting change in established, often ossified, organizations. In that respect, it reminded me of Searching for Bobby Fischer, which wasn't about chess, but about challenges of raising talented children. Parenting is a side story here, but important for defining Billy Beane as a human being, and it is nice to see in a movie that busy, divorced, imperfect fathers can love their children, too. This is a Brad Pitt you'd much rather have as your father than the 1950s family man in The Tree of Life.
6. War Horse. A challenge to rank, as most other nominees are human character dramas for adults, and this one is unabashedly an older kids' or "young adults'" tale, a combination of a horse biography (reminiscent of Black Beauty) and a coming-of-age story. The movie is very well made, as you would expect from Spielberg. The story is good, even if it doesn't feel very original. The amazing coincidences are par for the genre, although the timeline is rather strained, as the thoroughbred seems to have somehow survived about 3 years of pulling German artillery. Maybe American moviemakers forgot how long World War I was for those who fought in it from the beginning?
5. The Descendants. A really nice human story about a family whose ties are deeper and stronger than its dysfunction. The protagonist, an imperfect man surrounded by slightly more imperfect people, tries to do the right thing for his family, business, and the intersection of the two. Does he succeed? The movie gets enough under the skin of each character that, in the end, I didn't think that was a relevant question to ask. A minor gripe: I didn't care for the narration-heavy beginning.
4. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. I give five star to each of the top four, so maybe on a different day I might have ranked this movie even higher. It was the most pleasant surprise of the bunch: I knew very little about it beforehand, and I loved it. 14-year-old Thomas Horn is excellent as Oskar Schell, a boy who may or may not have Asperger's—he is just different enough to be interesting, but not so different as to make it difficult for a typical viewer to identify and empathize with him. It is part of his personality to never stop searching and asking questions. Sometimes he is afraid to ask, or to do things he needs to get the opportunity to ask, but he finds ways to ask anyway. Oh, and by no means is Oskar the only interesting character in the movie, but it would be hard to say much more without revealing some spoilers.
3. Midnight in Paris. Woody Allen's creative genius is not showing any signs of aging, even though he has become too old to play his protagonists and has to cast younger actors to play, well, him. (I never knew Owen Wilson was such a good actor—he completely transformed into a younger Woody Allen.) The idea of making a movie about a writer hopping in time to the 1920s and back, and meeting his literary idols, appears exceedingly silly when described in so few words, but, incredibly enough, it works perfectly... like a painting by Salvador Dalì (who appears in the movie, played by Adrien Brody).
2. Hugo. A masterpiece of cinematography; I watched it twice, on two consecutive days, because it was so visually rich that one viewing wasn't enough to absorb it all. It had all the magic of the first Harry Potter movie, but with a darker and more mysterious air of a Philip Pullman story. (An automaton in search of a heart is reminiscent of Pullman's Count Karlstein.) And that's before it even gets to the early movies, which are the main reason Scorsese made this film. Asa Butterfield was so good as Hugo that I'm looking forward to Ender's Game primarily to see his performance as Ender.
1. The Artist. The best picture doesn't always win the Best Picture, but this time it did. Michel Hazanavicius is probably bat-shit crazy, as that is the only way one could get the idea to make a silent, black-and-white, 4:3 aspect ratio, movie in 2011. He is also a genius, as the product of his madness is a great movie. It is entertaining, dramatic, plays by the rules of the genre and time in which it is set, all the while breaking the rules of the medium, playing with sounds and silence, reminding us that we are watching a silent movie just when we get into it so much that we forget. He even makes great use of the narrow format, emphasizing vertical direction, for example in the symbolic stairway scene when George, on his way down, bumps into Peppy, on her way up. And before you protest that the symbolism is too obvious and thus with little merit, remember: this is the 1920s!

A Brief History of Gnash Equilibrium

2012-05-27T19:36:00.000-04:00

I am hoping to revive this blog in the near future, so for any new readers, here is a selection of old posts. Let's start with politics; after all, it's the dust out of which blogosphere was created. I haven't written much since the last presidential election, so the political posts are mostly from 2008:

I told you so, back when the crisis started. (Be sure to follow the link in the post, too. And all links in all blog posts. Blog posts are often meaningless out of context.) Unfortunately, Obama has broken the wrong promises.

I was a big Obama fan in 2008 and most of my posts reflected that. But my loyalty is to principles and truth, not to any candidate. So I occasionally defended McCain and attacked Obama. Ironically, the latter was one of the most visited posts on this blog.

Nobody has ever won an election by attracting only smart voters. Politicians need stupid people.

Tell me if you think I am a closeted Republican. :)

I still hope this was a correct assessment, but I am not so sure anymore. :(

And how would you expect a numbers and trivia guy to cover a presidential election?

After the election: sadly, still true, 3 years later.

It is often hard to tell the difference between real-life politics and satire. So a selection of my satirical posts should come right after politics:

Election Jeopardy!

Fun with Republican candidates... in 2008 (and they weren't any better this time around).

Barack Obama stole my puppy. Or worse.

My comment on Al Gore's Nobel Prize.

Remember the "Celeb" ad? I translated it to plain English.

I am an economist and actuary, so I often write about economics:

A brief history of income tax rates.

Why I am not a Mankiwite.

I also write about math, numbers, and numeracy:

The forgotten Eleventh Commandment (more useful than the first ten).

How risky is it to swim outside when a storm is approaching? Not that I'd recommend it, but I still don't know.

I like facts to be true:

One of my pet peeves: historical revisionism. In any context.

And I value freedom of religion, and freedom from religion:

The most bipartisan fun in America: bashing atheists.

Challenging the lazy conventional ethics of abortion.

When the Right doesn't like public prayer.

Update: Some links were messed up. I think I fixed them all.

Don't mess with Texas!

2011-07-16T11:09:00.000-04:00

“If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it ought to be good enough for the children of Texas.”
—Ma Ferguson, 29th Governor of Texas (possibly apocryphal)

“Being able to own things that are your own is one of the things that makes America unique.”
—Rick Perry, 47th Governor of Texas (for real)

Where do they find these people?

Gallup asks a stupid question

2011-07-16T00:18:00.003-04:00

If they asked me, how the hell would I know what they mean by "spending cuts" and "tax increases"? They don't specify the baseline (status quo). Is letting the Bush tax cuts expire a "tax increase"? Is not doing another "doc fix" (or doing a partial one) a "spending cut"? Asking such a vague question almost guarantees that everyone who understands it will refuse to answer, and hence only those who don't know what they are talking about will participate in the survey. Maybe that explains the scary answers given.

A lot more people say they prefer spending cuts than tax increases. That's crazy by any interpretation, but it is even worse if people tend to understand those terms the way I think they do, which is that anything that causes taxes to go up from where they are today is a tax increase (i.e., it doesn't matter that the Bush tax cuts are scheduled to expire; when they go up, it's a tax increase). In that case, even equal shares of tax increases and spending cuts would require radically shrinking the government.

And only 11% of respondents prefer mostly or exclusively tax increases. Heck, only 20% of Democrats prefer mostly or exclusively tax increases. We have found the enemy, and it is us.

Why did liberals give the Second Amendment away?

2010-05-24T22:31:00.006-04:00

Unfortunately, most liberals are wusses. They let conservatives interpret and own the Second Amendment. So when Scalia made up the individual right to own firearms for the purpose of self-defense (an outstanding example of true judicial activism), liberals had only milquetoast counter-arguments. When Elena Kagan faces the Senate Judiciary Committee, she will make a generic statement that she supports the Second Amendment, without challenging Scalia's interpretation. Democratic politicians do it all the time, even if they really do not believe in any of the reasoning in Heller.

That makes liberals look like an unprincipled bunch, cherry-picking the Constitution. In fact, they are stupidly squandering the opportunity to take the high ground in every respect.

Scalia's interpretation makes no sense. There can't be a right to own all weapons - I bet Scalia would not support Heller's right to keep nuclear bombs in his home - so where do you draw the line? If handguns must be allowed, can bazookas be banned? Probably, but that is just as arbitrary as saying that swords must be allowed, but guns can be banned. There is no principled way to determine the limits of this "right".

By contrast, the interpretation that makes complete sense is that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to serve in the military. That is what "to bear arms" means. People don't "bear arms" when they go hunting; that is not, and never has been, the idiomatic use of that phrase. This interpretation fits well in the context. It makes the "well-regulated militia" reference relevant, and the right recognized by the amendment meaningfully curbs a practice that was common in the 18th century, to limit military service (or officer ranks) to upper classes.

This interpretation was politically meaningful in the 18th century, and it is politically meaningful now. It makes it unconstitutional to deny the right of military service to homosexuals. (That it is currently denied only to those homosexuals who do not hide their sexual orientation does not change anything. A whole class of citizens is excluded, it's just that the government is limited in the ways it can ascertain membership in that class.)

Why is no politician using this argument? Where are the liberal jurists or law professors arguing for this view? I googled gay military "second amendment" and the top hit that combined the terms in this sense (and the sixth hit overall - the top five were not relevant) was a comment on a blog. Kudos to ober from albany ny for comment #9 here:

The second amendment of the US Constitution says "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." If this is true, that we have a right to bear arms, then how can the government stop its citizens from joining the military? It seems to me that gays have a right to join the club. And the second amendment guarantees a person's right to join the military. If the military is not open to all of the country's people, then that might allow factions to gain control of it. A country whose military is dominated by one group may turn on the others: Can tyranny be far behind?

That's right. Notice the inanity of the reply by one Capt, USMCR:

There is no right to join the military. There's a duty to serve, but not a right to serve. If you can't see well enough to shoot - is it a civil rights issue? Should we tell the Marine Corps that the policy/slogan "every Marine is a rifleman" is a civil-rights violation? The right to bear arms, n the other hand, belongs to all citizens, whether members of the military or not. The 2nd amendment's militia isn't the military - it's a hypothetical draft of every able-bodied man - assumed to have acquired competence with a rifle on his own in the woods. I just hope that my legally blind neighbor sticks to knives and baseball bats.

That's just silly. Freedom of expression does not mean that an illiterate person is entitled to have an op-ed published in New York Times. Marriage and reproductive rights do not mean that the most repulsive guy in the world can force some woman to marry him and bear his children. And equality of rights in education does not mean that those who cannot pass first grade are entitled to finish college. Of course competence is required, but exclusion of a whole class unrelated to ability is clearly forbidden in all analogous situations.

O. J. Simpson got his book title all wrong

2009-08-20T14:06:00.003-04:00

He should have taken a lesson from Tom Ridge and called it I Considered Not Doing It.

Bill Maher at his best

2009-08-14T11:17:00.001-04:00

...golf, hamburgers, and religion are all things that are incredibly bad for the environment.

You said the T-word! Tee-hee-hee-hee!

2009-08-13T11:58:00.003-04:00

On any normal day, Brendan Nyhan is worth reading. But this was silly. Yes, Pearlstein's word choice was sloppy, for reasons explained by Yglesias, but Nyhan is making a mountain out of a molehill. He is actually counter-productive, as he accuses a bunch of people of joining in the smear based on their endorsement of Pearlstein's article. But Pearlstein's article is indeed very good, with the exception of those two words. One shouldn't get so stuck on those two words to discard the rest of the article. And I wonder what Nyhan would have said if Pearlstein had characterized the Republicans correctly.

Preview of future Investors' Business Daily editorials

2009-08-12T09:59:00.002-04:00

Stephen Hawking is a tough act to follow, but they may try some of the following:

Mikhail Gorbachev wouldn't have had a chance in the USSR; if he had tried his reforms there, he would have been sent to the Gulag.

If LBJ had ever been elected President in his own right, maybe he would have had some credibility for the policies he pushed.

The Beatles would never had become famous if they had tried to compose their own songs; they probably had no creative talent at all.

If New Yorkers ever experienced a terrorist attack, they wouldn't be such unpatriotic latte-sipping liberals.

If Mark Twain had ever traveled to the Mississippi river, he wouldn't have written such unrealistic nonsense about it and the people living around it.

If Martin Luther King, Jr. had grown up in the South, he'd never had gotten the education to become a minister.

If Charles Darwin had seen the Galapagos islands, he would have realized that only the Almighty God could have designed the beaks of all those finches.

(P.S. IBD has now "corrected" the editorial. That's futile; such idiocy is incorrigible and eternal.)

Why is the press like a sheep behind a wheel?

2009-08-12T09:38:00.002-04:00

When a traffic lane is closed, there is always some asshole who doesn't merge in an orderly way, but keeps driving in the emptied lane until it really ends, and then butts in. When that happens, I am not mad at the asshole, but at the sheep that lets him in. Looks like Dean Baker shares my sentiment, with a slight modification: the assholes are politicians and the sheep are the journalists.

PolitiFact is full of shit (Krugman-bashing edition)

2009-08-11T14:09:00.002-04:00

It looks like in this country you can't tell the truth without being called a liar by the so-called fact-checkers. Here PolitiFact blasts Paul Krugman. The quote they put in the title is

During the 2005 fight over Social Security, "there were noisy demonstrations — but they were outside the events,” and opponents were “not disruptive — crowds booed lines they didn’t like, but that was about it."

Paul Krugman on Wednesday, August 5th, 2009 in a blog posting.

This is already a bit of a straw man. It would appear, from that quote alone, that Krugman denied that Social Security reform protesters ever behaved in a disorderly manner. When they expand the quote in the main text of the article, it becomes considerably more nuanced:

In an Aug. 5 blog posting, liberal New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote:

“Indeed, activists made trouble in 2005 by asking congressmen tough questions about policy. Activists are making trouble now by shouting congressmen down so they can’t be heard. It’s exactly the same thing, right?”

He continued, “Seriously, I’ve been searching through news reports on the Social Security town halls, and I can’t find any examples of the kind of behavior we’re seeing now. Yes, there were noisy demonstrations — but they were outside the events. That was even true during the first month or two, when Republicans actually tried having open town halls. Congressmen were very upset by the reception they received, but not, at least according to any of the reports I can find, because opponents were disruptive — crowds booed lines they didn’t like, but that was about it.

“After that, the events were open only to demonstrated loyalists; you may recall the people arrested at a Bush Social Security event in Denver for the crime of … not being Bush supporters.

“So please, no false equivalences. The campaign against Social Security privatization was energetic and no doubt rude, but did not involve intimidation and disruption.”

(Emphasis mine.) So Krugman readily acknowledges that the 2005 campaign was "rude". His main point, though, is comparison between the 2005 and 2009 protests, and he claims they are not similar. He says he couldn't find, in 2005, "any examples of the kind of behavior we’re seeing now." And what kind of behavior is that? "Intimidation and disruption", Krugman says. For the examples of such behavior now, see here and here and here and here and here. (All of those are events that happened, and were reported, before Krugman wrote his blog post.)

Well, PolitiFact's verdict is that Krugman's statements are FALSE:

We conclude that while some of the recent conservative protests — such as ones at town halls in Tampa, Little Rock, Ark., Houston, Philadelphia, and Green Bay, Wis.— may have been angrier and more widespread than the ones in 2005, it would be incorrect to suggest, as Krugman does, that the noisy demonstrations against Bush's policies were only taking place outside the events or that disruptions were limited to the occasional boo.

Is this even arguably grounds for the "False" verdict? PolitiFact's "Truth-O-Meter" has a total of six readings: True, Mostly True, Half True, Barely True, False, and Pants On Fire. The last one is reserved for stuff like this, but even some quite nutty claims are merely deemed False. So "False" is supposed to mean really, you know, false.

For Krugman's post to be False by those same standards, it would seem necessary to find that the protesters' behavior in 2005 was indeed similar to what we see now - that the Social Security protesters also intimidated speakers and disrupted meetings. But look what PolitiFact says:

It is true that there’s nothing in the clips from 2005 about burning members of Congress in effigy or the use of devils’ horns. But Woodhouse’s group employed 28-foot gorillas, duck suits, plates of hot waffles and sheet cakes as props, according to an Aug. 13, 2005, report in the Albuquerque Tribune.

They "forgot" to mention Nazi symbols, but they appear to agree with Krugman about intimidation - unless duck suits are considered equivalent to imagery of lynching and Nazis.

And let's see what evidence PolitiFact cites in support of the verdict. Among their examples, I could find only one journalistic report that amounts to out-of-control unruly behavior and disruption of a meeting, and it is not clear that it was solely the protesters' responsibility:

— A session sponsored by Rep. Chris Chocola, R-Ind., in South Bend, at the downtown branch of the St. Joseph County Public Library “was a raucous affair, with many of the 100 or so people who attended shouting questions and insults, talking over each other and still bubbling with questions when it was all over.

“One gentleman was so angry when Chocola indicated the hour-long session was coming to an end and wouldn't be extended that he walked out.”

(South Bend Tribune , Feb. 27, 2005)

But even here, the disruption was far from complete. People were "bubbling with questions" and the gentleman was angry because he didn't get his turn to ask a question. That indicates that, while the meeting was raucous, there was active conversation to the end. It's quite a stretch to compare that report with current demonstrations.

Other examples border on ridiculous. Someone was being smartalecky to Rick Santorum:

“Santorum asked the audience what would happen in 2008. The response he wanted was that the oldest baby boomers would turn 62 and be eligible for early retirement.

“What he got instead, shouted out by an unfriendly voice, was: ‘George Bush will leave office!’

Well, that surely made Baby Jesus cry. In other examples, John Shadegg "encountered scattered heckling, boos and hisses" (emphasis mine; I assume the folks at PolitiFact know the meaning of "scattered"), some guy wrote a letter to Enterprise-Record of Chico, Calif., complaining that he witnessed "rude, disrespectful behavior" (Wait! Isn't that what Krugman acknowledged anyway?), and, in PolitiFact's words, "some stories noted the meetings were civil." Wow. After reading all that, I'll have nightmares of people in duck suits chasing me down and killing me with waffles.

But, of course, in case you aren't convinced that Krugman is a liar,

in all likelihood, there were many, many events that did not result in news coverage we could find. So we can't say whether there were protests or shouting matches.

And, since we can't say, Krugman should shut up, too. Even if what he says is true, how dare he hurt the feelings of those frail little Republican politicians?

Still, the protests inside and outside town halls, even if they were not universal, clearly rattled Republican leaders. On March 17, 2005, USA Today reported:

“Shaken by raucous protests at open ‘town hall’-style meetings last month, House Republican Conference Chairwoman Deborah Pryce of Ohio and other GOP leaders are urging lawmakers to hold lower-profile events this time.

Poor, unfortunate souls. And bad, bad Paul Krugman!

Double-dog-dare you to define my -ism

2009-08-10T10:34:00.002-04:00

Arnold Kling wrote a silly little post about progressivism, or rather an idiot's misconception of progressivism. It makes no sense at all: What are "unfettered free markets"? Who are the "technocrats"? What is "optimal"? Such lazy indulgence in empty words deserves no attention.

But then Tyler Cowen took it a step further. He claims he tried to "cast progressivism in the best possible light". He probably did honestly try; he seems like an honest and often lucid thinker. Certainly one of the most lucid thinker of the "right" blogosphere these days. But is he lucid enough for this task? His points seem lame and inaccurate. For example:

1. There exists a better way and that is shown by the very successful polities of northwestern Europe and near-Europe. We know that way can work, even if it is sometimes hard to implement.

You've got to be kidding me. This is the first point of an ideology you are "trying to cast in the best possible light"? A better way for what? "There's a better way" is not basis for an ideology; depending on how you are disposed to interpret those generic words, it is either a truism (of course there is a better way for everything - we humans are imperfect) or mere nagging. And the rest of the two sentences suggests that progressivism is all about imitating "northwestern Europe" (a geographically-challenged characterization?), so why is it then not called "northwesterneuropeism"? Or how about:

4. The needs of the neediest ought to be our top priority, as variations in the well-being of other individuals are usually small by comparison, at least in the United States.

Um, "the needs of the neediest ought to be our top priority" is utilitarianism, which is compatible with progressivism, but by no means synonymous with it. That's something Tyler ought to know (and does know, but he is either too lazy or unable to come up with more precise wording). Or how about:

9. State and local governments are fundamentally to be mistrusted (recall segregation) and thus we should transfer more power to the federal government, which tends to be bluntly and grossly egalitarian, when it manages to be egalitarian at all. That is OK.

Oh, so progressivism is anti-federalism! ("Anti-federalism" is what the "founding fathers" called "federalism", but never mind.) Except it isn't - it's just that, for as long as the US has existed, anti-progressives have touted their fictional concept of "states' rights" whenever it has suited them, which is whenever the federal government happened to be more progressive than the states, which is probably roughly half the time. Whenever it doesn't suit them, those same people conveniently forget "states' rights". By the fallacy that there have to be two equal sides to each issue, progressives, who have no analogous fictional concept, are perceived as "anti-states' rights", whatever the hell that would mean.

Tristero says this is complete bullshit. That may be a bit too harsh, but, obviously, I agree it is not an intellectual exercise Cowen should be proud of. Tristero is also miffed that Yglesias took the bait, and it does seem that Yglesias bent over backwards to "cast libertarianism in the best possible light":

I think libertarianism is best understood as a kind of esoteric doctrine. There’s strong evidence to believe that people who overestimate their own efficacy in life wind up doing better than those with more accurate perceptions. It follows that it’s strongly desirable for society to be organized so as to bolster myths of meritocracy.

I understand that Yglesias is not necessarily endorsing any of this, but merely ascribing it to libertarianism, but the second sentence is written as a statement of fact, so either Matt agrees that it is true, or he is saying that the foundation of libertarianism is simply false. Now I hope he means the latter, but then, if that is the best possible light in which to cast libertarianism, why even bother? He could have said it more concisely as "garbage in, garbage out". Maybe libertarianism should be called GIGOism? But in case Matt actually believes the factual claim to be true, he may be demonstrating poor deductive reasoning.

As far as I know, there is evidence that the most successful people are more likely than average people to be prone to overestimating their own efficacy. However, that does not mean that the converse holds. People who overestimate their abilities may, in effect, be gambling in life, ending up disproportionately at both ends of the outcomes distribution. They will then tend to be overrepresented among the winners as well as among the losers. By observing that most winners are cocky, we learn nothing about the average effect of cockiness. Concluding that cockiness is useful on average is the same fallacy that critics of Larry Summers use to falsely accuse him of stating that men are smarter than women.

But there is an advantage of Yglesias' writing on any topic: he has smart readers, and some of them contribute sensible comments. Thus Keith M Ellis:

A more accurate version of libertarian theory is that it is based upon an idiosyncratic view of inherent (and arguably metaphysical) individual human rights that is strongly oriented to property rights and is extremely American in historical origin and flavor. Sitting atop this view of individual rights—which itself is sufficient and requires no utilitarian elaboration—is a whole bunch of utilitarian justification for a libertarian sociopolitical organization built around the notions that said organization results in the greatest overall material and psychological benefit.

This theoretical basis has three great weaknesses: first, the notion of inherent individual rights is eminently contestable. Second, the almost exclusive emphasis on individual property rights is idiosyncratic and myopic. Third, the utilitarian arguments for the benefits of the resulting sociopolitical organization are extraordinarily simplistic and are as often as not disproved by empirical fact.

In practice, libertarianism is a political philosophy which emphasizes the notion of virtue in selfishness and has as its historical genesis the exceptional American experience. As such, it appeals mostly to white American males who are moderately above-average in intelligence, economically secure, independently-minded, and prefer simplistic theoretical constructs for making political and moral decisions. It validates their own affluence/privilege not by group affiliation, but by inherent individual merit; and it likewise superficially validates the poverty and lack of privilege of others not on the basis of group affiliation, but inherent fault. In this it mimics a meritocratic view, which allows the libertarian to congratulate himself on his lack of bigotry; but, in fact, it is a facade behind which his true bigotry hides.

Or Duncan Kinder:

The problem with libertarianism is that they tend to conflate liberty with possession of property.

This made sense 200 years ago, when owning a small farm or business meant that you were secure in the means of your livelihood. (...) However, due to economic shifts since then, owning property does not mean you therefore are secure in the means to your livelihood. Indeed, large property holders such as medical insurers are very much in the business of interfering with others’ means to their livelihood.

This means that libertarianism now is, in practice, a misguided and often cranky ideal.

Keith M Ellis also says something that especially resonates with me:

I write as someone who thought of himself as a libertarian in my late teens (a self-identification which quickly ended once I met actual, active libertarians)

I'll give Keith the final word:

American libertarianism could have foregone all its academic intellectuals and it would still be largely what it has become with them. Libertarianism is not an intellectual movement, it is a cultural movement. Libertarianism is essentially: individualism, good; property, good; commerce, good; government, bad. It’s a historically/sociologically related set of sentiments.

Next Governor of California?

2009-08-07T10:21:00.001-04:00

Vladimir Putin!