The League of Ordinary Gentlemen

Clarifications on a comment culture

2012-02-26T15:17:19Z

In the handful of years this site has been active, we’ve banned four users and a couple dozen IP addresses. Trolls are persistent and take on many identities. It requires some work to ban them completely. This is one reason we do it very rarely, despite some fly-by-commenters’ assertions to the contrary.

I feel the need once again, as the roster of writers and commenters has grown, to outline not just a comment policy but our vision for what a comment culture ought to be like.

First, a few clarifications on what we expect from writers and commenters.

Deleting comments should be a last resort. Frankly, unless it is a banned commenter or someone issuing personal threats I would prefer that either Mark, Jason, Tod, or myself is emailed about the issue prior to any deletion.

Comment threads should not be closed without editorial approval. I don’t think we’ve ever specified this before but I could be wrong. The reason is simple: this is a community. Commenters are as integral a part of this community as the writers – indeed, many of the writers here were once (and remain) commenters. Shutting down comment threads without good reason is disrespectful to the community, even if it is unintentionally so. We had to shut down comments on one of Mark’s posts recently due to a serious troll problem that was escalating. Before that I can’t recall the last time I was aware of such an action. It’s been a while.

I know that this may sound tyrannical, but as writers here you really don’t have a final say on how a thread shapes out. Writers can and should police their threads by jumping in to stop thread-jackings (when appropriate and when time permits) but they should not delete comments or shut down threads unless they have good cause and have gone through the correct channels. If you have any doubt, ask me. You can also contact other admins here: Mark, Jason, or Tod. We have a pretty flat corporate culture at the League, but a hierarchy does exist to keep the peace.

Commenters need to police themselves as well. There has been an ongoing conflict between certain commenters and writers here and frankly I think that’s part of building a community. People have to hash these things out as best they can. But let’s be respectful to other authors and commenters also. Thread-jacking and making discussion after discussion a meta-conversation about this person or that person ends up muddying up important topics and can be frustrating for a writer who has spent time and energy putting a post together. I realize that this is unavoidable to some degree. I have no intention of doing anything about this sort of squabbling. But please consider the unintended consequences.

The vision for a comment culture that I have is not merely a civil combox. It’s an organically self-ordered system built on stable and predictable rules: very few bans, very few comment deletions, etc. To achieve this a certain voluntary order needs to be achieved by all participants, coupled with a certain subtle yet very real level of authority on the part of admins. Hence the few rules we do have are rules we need to live by. We do very little to actively interfere, but we can only maintain that if all the expectations of self-ordering are met.

(P.S. On sub-blogs the rules change depending on the blog, though it is my hope that most sub-blogs model their comment policy after the front page.)

I don’t mean this to be finger-pointing at anyone in particular, though I know some will feel that way. Rather I think we’ve been too vague for too long and our attempts to communicate have not been enough. If there are any questions, please fire them off in the comments. If I’m forgetting anything or if you disagree with any of this please say so.

(P.P.S. I’m starting to tinker with a couple ideas for a site redesign bringing the whole thing up to speed with our modern, high-tech, tablet and mobile world. We’ll see.)

My Year of Guns

2012-02-26T08:29:22Z

The first time I shot a gun, I got a black eye for my troubles.

My father, who was the consummate outdoorsman, had taken me to a shooting range so that he could properly sight a new rifle, and had brought along his .22 K-Hornet so that I might get my first taste shooting a gun. I don’t remember having ever asked to go shooting with him, or even really having had the desire. But my father took me anyway.

Having arrived at the range, I quickly decided that shooting was unbearably dull. I was eight years old, and had all the patience one might expect of a boy that age. If you have ever sat and watched someone sight a rifle, there is surprisingly little to see. Most of the craft is subtle, and done with a slow steady hand that looks not entirely unlike someone sitting still.

After my father had completed perfecting the new rifle’s sights to his aim, he checked his groupings and then pulled out the K Hornet. Like many old school gun enthusiasts, he was a stickler on both gun safety and etiquette. He spent some time explaining to me exactly how to hold the rifle, how unlike a shot gun you let a rifle lean into your shoulder rather than the other way around. I pretended to listen, then picked the rifle up and – holding the butt of it right in front of my face – pulled the trigger. The recoil that hit me square in the cheek was as hard as I had ever been hit by anything and I ended up on the ground, dropping the K Hornet. For weeks, half of my face was an ever-changing sea of browns, greens and deep plum as the bruise shifted through it’s various stages.

I had never really had an urge to shoot a firearm prior to going out with my dad that day. Or perhaps to be more accurate, I had never had the urge to shoot a real gun. I had several toy guns, all of which I would imagine were phasers from Star Trek despite their lacking the cool grip that came down from the center of the barrel the way Kirk and Spock’s weapons did. I liked playing with them, but I knew that firing a real gun meant that I would have to do it with my father. When I was eight I was still vaguely afraid of him. He was both a workaholic and the family disciplinarian; being a child that liked to press boundaries meant that most of the times when he was home I was being disciplined. (Not really, in retrospect. But that was the way it seemed to me at the time.) Because he valued gun safety so highly, there was a firm rule in our house that you could not point toy guns at anyone, which for an eight-year-old boy made them fairly useless. Because of this I never took them out when he was home, or if I did I would make sure that my friends and I played Star Trek, cops and robbers or army men far away from the house. So the idea of playing with real guns, in a grown up way with my father, held zero appeal.

After shooting the K Hornet, though, I decided that I wanted more. But I wanted more without any supervision.

____________________________________

I knew that my father’s rifles and shotguns were locked in the garage, and were therefore quite literally untouchable. But I was also pretty sure he owned pistols, and I knew they were not locked up in the garage. I spent time, here and there, slipping into my parent’s bedroom and closet when I was sure I wouldn’t be caught trying to see if I could find them. I might have spent a total of twenty minutes, broken up over a two-week period of time (I was really afraid of being caught, so I limited my searches to just a minute or so) before I found the revolver. It was in his sock and underwear drawer, along with two Playboy magazines.Being eight the Playboys held no interest for me, though a couple of years later I can still recall the sheer joy of remembering they were there. Finding the revolver, on the other hand, was like finding a pirate’s buried treasure.

I waited to take it out until the next week when my parents were out to dinner and my sister was left to babysit me. At some point when she was caught up in a TV show I went into my parent’s bedroom, got the revolver, and went into the back yard.

It didn’t take long to figure out how to open the gun, and to see that there were no bullets in the chamber. After that, I snapped it back into working order, aimed at the fence and squeezed the trigger. I remember being surprised by the force of the hammer coming down, and by how loud the sound of an empty gun being fired was. I squeezed two more times, and again felt the impossibly loud snap of metal striking metal. Then I slipped the revolver under my shirt in case my sister was wandering about, and holding it there, went back inside and put it back in my father’s drawer.

Guns are known for their ability to make those that wield them feel powerful, or safe, or dangerous. But what I remember feeling that day was adult. In my mind I had just done this very adult thing, and what’s more had done it entirely by myself. Firing a gun by one’s self had just gone from something that only adults did to something that only grownups and I did.

I never went back for the revolver after that day. I didn’t tell anyone what I had done, not even my friends. Keeping this secret to myself was, I was sure, what a man would do.

____________________________________

My father was one of two gun enthusiasts on our block. The other was Mr. Rice.

The Rice’s lived several houses down. Robbie was my age, and his sister Annie was two years younger. His parents were each, in retrospect, unusually attractive. Mr. Rice was tan, mustachioed and worked out with weights before doing so was a common thing for adults. Mrs. Rice was blond, slender, and on the weekends walked around the neighborhood in a bikini top and hot pants, a cigarette in one hand and a glass of Cold Duck in the other, striking up conversations with the neighborhood dads as they tended to their lawns. My mother hated her.

“Hey, she’s not so bad, She’s really quite friendly,” my father would say when my mother would make an icy comment about Mrs. Rice. “You should get to know her.” I was eight years old and so had no idea why my mother didn’t like Mrs. Rice, but even I knew my father was only digging whatever hole he was in that much deeper.

I, for my part, could not stand Robbie. My dislike of him was visceral and immediate upon meeting him; he clearly felt the same way about me. He was smaller than I was and so gave me wide berth, but he liked bullying the kids on the block who were smaller. Sometimes he’d just walk up to a younger kid and punch them. Sometimes he’d punch them in the face, which was considered against the rules where I grew up unless someone had either stolen your money or your bicycle. The only time we ever played together was if there was an activity that all the kids were doing, like paying baseball or elephant tag. But even then, if we could avoid it we didn’t talk to one another.

Mr. Rice was a gun enthusiast, but one of a different feather than my father. For one thing, Mr. Rice did not hunt and wasn’t an outdoorsman. He collected military weapons and on Veteran’s Day dressed up in a Marine uniform that he bought at a military supply store, as he himself had not served. He liked to work on his guns in his garage with the door open. If you walked by their driveway on a Saturday or Sunday, you’d see him cleaning them while listening to a large Ham radio that picked up the fire and police channels. If there was a big fire, or if the police were called to a crime in progress, he’d collect the family in the Rice station wagon and drive to the address where the authorities were being called and watch events unfold.

I remember when I was about seven, we were playing pickle in the street when Mr. Rice drove up in what would be his pride and joy for the rest of the years we were his neighbors. It was a green army surplus jeep with a small flat bed trailer in tow. On the trailer was a mounted .50 caliber machine gun. (Actually, as it turned out, it was more of a representation of a .50 caliber machine gun. It had no firing pin, the turret was welded stationary, and if you looked down the barrel you could see that after a few inched it was filled with cement.) It was the coolest thing I had ever seen in real life, and I was disappointed to learn that excepting for celebrating the 4th of July, Memorial Day, Veterans Day and Christmas, the machine gun would be kept hidden under a chained heavy canvas tarp.

In a neighborhood filled with a lot of oddballs, the Rice’s might have been the oddest. Aside from all of their quirky eccentricities there was always something off about them, but being eight I never bothered to wonder what it was exactly that was off. It wouldn’t be till I was a bit older that I would finally start noticing the bruises that would often appear on the faces and arms of Mrs. Rice or the kids; it would be a lot of years past that before I would really understand the story those bruises told.

When I was eight, however, all I really knew was that I didn’t like any of them. That and I was completely terrified of Mr. Rice, even before the afternoon he pulled his gun on me, and pressed the barrel to my temple.

It was maybe six months after I had briefly engaged in my tete a tete with my father’s revolver in my back yard. All of us kids had been playing baseball in the street, but it was a scorching hot day in our Southern California desert town, and we were looking for an excuse to quit when Robbie Rice invited us all to play assassin with his new toy guns.

These guns were pretty common back then, and I’m sure most people will remember them even if they didn’t own them. They were plastic pistols with a spring-loaded projector built in. It’s “bullets” were small, grooved red soft-rubber darts with suction cups on the end. They came with a paper target that you could shoot at. Part of the idea was that the suction cups would stick to the target, similar to darts on a dartboard, and you could compete to see who got the highest score. Of course, they never stuck to the target – or anything else for that matter. They just lightly bounced off what ever they hit. Robbie had gotten a set of twelve of these toy guns for his birthday. We divided them up, each taking five “bullets,” and then scattered as Robbie counted to ten. Once the countdown was up, it was to be an every-man-for-himself killing spree.

We’d been playing for a while as the heat took it’s toll, until it devolved into twelve kids arguing about who really hit or missed who. We were all gathered in the Rice’s garage trying to hammer out some kind of rules that didn’t rely on the honor system that was so clearly failing, when Robbie’s little sister Annie walked in and stared us all down.

“No one,” she announced seriously, “had better shoot me. I’m not playing!”

As she stood there glaring at us, everyone stopped talking, and a long pause just froze up everybody. And then, without even thinking, I raised my pistol and shot her from across the garage. I can’t even begin to say what I was thinking. The rubber dart arced across the garage at a laughingly slow speed. It hit her, lightly, right in the center of her forehead… and stuck there. I couldn’t decide which was more surprising: that I had actually shot her right after she told me not to, that I’d hit her right where I’d wanted to from across the entire garage, or that the damn suction cup had actually stuck to something. The silence continued for another few seconds; then, as they rubber dart finally fell to the ground, Annie threw back her head and started wailing. I knew I was in trouble, and all I could think of was that I had to make sure that my dad never found out that I had shot a girl – a girl! - with a toy gun. But before I could reach Annie to grovel for her silence and forgiveness she was gone, running into the house.

I’m sure one of us said something at that point, but I can’t remember who spoke or what was said. What I do remember was that a few minutes after Annie disappeared indoors Mr. Rice burst into the garage, Annie in tow.

“Which one!” It was more of a shout than a question. Annie pointed to me, here eyes still wet with fury. Mr. Rice walked over, grabbed me by the hair, and marched me over to his work bench. “Come here!” he barked at Annie.

As Annie stood next to me, Mr. Rice let go of my hair, and grabbed my wrists, holding both behind my back with just one of his hands. He used his other hand to open wooden drawer on his work bench, and fished out a pistol. I had no idea what kind of pistol it was, but unlike my father’s revolver it was all black; in his hand it looked sleek and light.

“Are you watching?” His voice dripped with both anger and contempt, and his breath smelled like old beer bottles. I was about to answer when I realized that he was still talking to Annie. For just a moment I thought that it was Annie who was getting in trouble for something, not me. But before clearer thinking could dislodge that thought by itself, the gun swung up and the muzzled was pressed hard against my temple.

“Is this where he shot you?”

Annie nodded.

“Then this is where you shoot him.” He was till barking out his words. He handed the gun to Annie, who pointed it at my forehead. My head was still spinning, numb to what was happening, when I heard the hard click of metal striking metal. Annie had pulled the trigger, and the gun was of course empty. My panicked brain was just starting to get up to speed on everything that was happening, when Mr. Rice said, “Again.”

Another click sounded, and then another, and another, and then my numbness just washed away in a torrent of despair. “I’m sorry,” I choked out between sobs, “I’m so sorry.” And I really was. Being eight years old, the gravity of what Mr. RIce was doing – the immensity of the lines being crossed – were lost on me. All I felt was a deep and burning shame for having betrayed my father when I pulled the trigger on Annie.

Mr. Rice turned me around and looked at me for the first time – ever, I think.

“Are you ever going to shoot a girl again?” he asked. I shook my head as I looked at the floor, too ashamed to meet his gaze. “I’d like to think that I don’t have to tell your parents what happened today. Do you want me to tell your parents?”

I shook my head again, this time much harder and with much more conviction. “God no, please don’t tell my father” was what I would have said if I could have gotten the words out.

“OK. Lesson learned. Now stop crying and start acting like a man.” And he was gone.

I was an adult out of college before I ever told my parents what happened. For a long time I was just afraid to tell them. For a long time after that it seemed like no big deal – just one of many crazy stories about our crazy neighbors from our crazy old neighborhood we moved away from when I was fifteen.

When I did finally tell my parents my mom said, “You should have come and told us, Tod.”

My dad just looked hard at the wall for a while, and finally with a voice that sounded like he was weighing just how hard it would be to track down Mr. Rice after all those years said, “Maybe it’s best that you didn’t.”

That year, the year I was eight, was the only time in my life that I’ve ever felt emotional reactions to guns. I’ve handled them since, of course. As a young man I used to go out and shoot both trap and skeet with my dad. I got really good at it, actually. (When my kids ask what trap is like, I tell them it’s like playing a video game, only louder and you get to go outdoors.) But even when I shot regularly my shotgun was just a tool, to be treated with respect out of concerns for safety – much like the cleaver in my kitchen. But that year of being eight, guns grabbed my emotions by the throat. They quickly and easily seduced me into thinking I was finally an adult, and they just as quickly and easily brought me crashing down to childish vulnerability.

Today I’m as old as my dad was back then – older, actually – and I have two boys of my own. Sometimes they express an interest in learning how to shoot; someday, I’m going to teach them.

But I choose not to keep guns in my house until they are grown men themselves.

Sunday Blognado: Metablognado!

2012-02-26T05:57:01Z

Today I want to do a round-up of my blognado experience.

First, allow me to explain the origin of the name. There was a short-lived TV series called The Middleman. It was perhaps the geekiest show ever, it was glorious. During the back half of its only season a running joke developed where one character would refer to something as being “a ___nado”, leading another character to ask ”You mean a tornado made of ____?” Thus the term blognado proves I am the nerdiest person in the world.

So what did I learn from this experience? For one thing, I should blog more. Despite how much work went into some of these posts (3 hours in one case), it was good to get back into it. Many of the topics were things I wanted to talk about at some point, and by committing to at least 5 posts I gave myself the impetus to actually write them. So lesson 1 – do more things.

Based on the comments at least, the biggest hit of the blognado was the tax post on Tuesday. I was a little curious as to how that one would be received because most of it seemed too straightforward to merit much attention. This is an occupational hazard of expertise – you underestimate the gap between what you know and what everyone else knows. Since tax policy isn’t even something I’m specialised in, I should think I could do similar post son other topics that could provide even more detail. So lesson 2 – more policy blogging.

The third thing I leaned, al though I kinda knew this already, is that we have a great community here. That ta xpost in particualr spawned side conversations that were post-wrothy int heir own right. So lesson 3 is to thank the commenters – Thanks’s commenters!

And that’s it for blognado. Perhaps when I next take time off work I’ll look at running another blognado. Thanks for reading.

The 14th Amendment vs. Plato

2012-02-26T14:46:22Z

Did the ratification of the 14th Amendment in the 19th century abolish “traditional” morality in the 21st? Yes, says a growing body of judicial review.

District Judge Jeffrey White’s opinion in Golinski v. United States Office of Personnel Mgmt. came in on Friday. Since his orders for oral arguments last December were restricted to 1993′s Defense of Marriage Act, there was little surprise nationally when on Friday he duly torpedoed it.

There will be much analysis in the coming months as the case gets kicked upstairs to the higher court levels. I personally chafe at one of Judge White’s devices, in short, taking the loudest and least temperate social and Biblical arguments by some of its proponents in the Congress as “proof” that DOMA’s purpose is at heart unsupportable under “heightened scrutiny.” [See page 25 of the opinion.]

It’s true those arguments were made, intemperately and sometimes loudly. However, the Defense of Marriage Act passed by a bipartisan vote of and 342-67 in the House, and unamended, DOMA passed the U.S. Senate, unamended, on September 10, 1996, by a vote of 85-14.

Regardless of what some members of Congress may have said during the debates, Judge White cannot know what was in the head of everyone in such a large majority. Surely not all of them were irrational haters.

Nor is it necessarily true that a judge can or should overturn just based on his best guess of what’s in their heads. The Bible is increasingly used as a disqualifier as the authority for any “rational basis” for a law, and we’ll stipulate that that one’s a train that has left the station. The Bible is the antithesis of “rationality.”

So in 1993, there was a lengthy charade in Romer vs. Evans, that the argument that “all sexualities are not created equal” doesn’t require a Biblical or religious foundation. Kind of like Inherit the Wind, Plato was brought in as an expert witness for the defense, that a reasonable person might not see all sexualities as equal. After all, who’s more reasonable than Plato?

A fascinating account is here from Daniel Mendelsohn, who doesn’t appear to be quite on Plato’s side.

Of course, in Romer, Plato lost, or at least his relevance as a non-religious authority on reason was not enough to swing the day.

However, since the legislators could have had Plato and not the Bible in mind when they overwhelmingly passed the Defense of Marriage Act, it’s not up to a judge’s review to say they didn’t. Because it’s not cut-and-dried—most of the time, our reasons for thinking this or that aren’t quite defined or articulable, and are often a blend of thoughts, habits and sentiments. There are many things in the Bible that even the most committed believer doesn’t endorse whole-heartedly, like

And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard.
And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear. [Deuteronomy 21]

Well, if we stone all our drunk kids, we’re not going to have many of us left. Just the Mormons and the Muslims.

But will publicly stated agreement with Biblical morality be used as a weapon by judges against duly enacted laws? There is a drift in that direction. It’s uncertain if it’ll hold, and so far it’s more dicta than foundation for Judge White and Judge Vaughn Walker’s related approach to California Proposition 8.

Fourteenth Amendment debates are among the least interesting to me: few of us deny that the 14th means whatever a Supreme Court majority says it does, until it changes its mind. On the macro level, it seems absurd that the ratifiers of the Fourteenth Amendment ever suspected they were changing the Constitution to require the abolition of traditional morality. That the Bible no longer would have any moral authority could have been guessed by a clever prognosticator; that Plato is no longer reasonable could not have been divined by the greatest of prophets.

_____________________________________
—UPDATE, LATE SATURDAY NIGHT: After spending my evening returning the courtesy of everybody’s good faith replies, I realize how much trouble I get into by not responding in a timely fashion.

Sometimes 200 replies behind me sleepin’ back, almost 100 before noon o’clock!

I don’t want to insult anyone, or have them think I’m dodging. And so, thx to all who have written in. Comments are now closed until me achin’ self is up to returning the courtesy of yr replies.

Thx to all, and to all a good night. I have a life and have to get back to it. Best to all, Tom

Dear Governor: I Am Well Qualified For This Position

2012-02-25T19:21:00Z

At Outside the Beltway, Doug Mataconis points us to a governmental job for which the regular consumption of alcoholic beverages is not only not a problem, but a job requirement. Almost makes me want to move to Utah.

Roleplaying, Policymaking and Game Masters….

2012-02-25T10:15:41Z

Hello dear readers. Having taken a detour into state formation in fantasy worlds, I’m now going to bring fantasy into policy making. Perhaps a week or so ago, I noticed that Sully brought up an article that suggested policy-makers should regularly play some sort of roleplaying game. In this context “roleplaying game” of course, means an actual Pen and Paper style experience. You have to sit down, pretend you’re someone else and deal with a scenario set by a referee (a “dungeonmaster” in D&D parlance). The not so secret fact here might be that real policy makers and policy makers in training at policy schools already do extensively involve themselves in roleplaying.

As League readers are aware, I am currently an “all but internship” (ABI?) masters degree candidate at a public policy school. While we are given different names for our assignments, in the end almost all of them are some sort of roleplaying. Some are more explicit than others. There are actual “simulations” or “case challenges” where we’re given a scenario, precise roles and unfolding situations. Others are implied. We write memos pretending to be members of the state department or a NGO, we do case analysis on real datasets to present our take on a problem and we make research proposals that might have an impact if carried out in detail in the real world. All of this is to say that yes, “playing” in a roleplaying game is essentially what policy makers do. (And one might argue is why I got into the field to begin with.)

Let’s unpack this argument a bit. In the real world, policy makers are often not the most direct decision makers. For the most part, analysts serve to gather data, unpack arguments then present them, preferably in one (or at most two!) page memos to our principals. We work within circles of decision making that privilege the ability to think in the shoes of whoever we are working with. Lobbyists may use financial incentives often, but these are buttressed by persuasive arguments that are thought out from the perspective of the lawmaker. Consultants must take the role of the group they are advising. Legislative aides, law clerks, and bureaucrats must all consider how their arguments will stand within the context of the organization they work for. In addition to this, of course, are actual explicit simulation exercises where scenarios are tested for responses. The State Department and the Department of Defense both regularly use simulations as part of their policy-making toolset.

A lot of what policymakers do is learned on the fly. In many respects even public policy schools are a form of improvisation. The data and facts you learn aren’t as important as the methods. In short, the goal of policy training is to teach you “how to think” not what to know. Now some fields and types of data require actually handling them to learn how to think in that language. Econometrics, geographic information systems, or even how history relates to policy can be helped by classroom experiences, because they often provide much greater context and breadth than we’d get on the job. The question then becomes, why isn’t this applied more broadly to scenario building and simulations?

The “Crisis Simulation” is something of a capstone for global policy students at the LBJ School. As part of our required curriculum, it’s meant to test the skills gained in two years at the school. Unfortunately the broad range of our specializations (ranging from security, law, diplomacy, to international finance and development) make running such a simulation in a rewarding manner for all participants difficult. When I took this simulation last spring, I was dissatisfied with the nature of the actual simulation, and the fact that the actual development of our own scenario came as a bit of an afterthought.

A quick scan of other schools’ course offerings suggest a similar trend. While courses might offer simulations as part of the course, or as part of a specific security curriculum (the former at the Kennedy School, the latter at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service), they don’t really go beyond the narrow scope of that specific specialty or into conceptualizing developing these games beyond that level. In short, while there’s an actual study of war-games or business based crisis-management, they’re compartmentalized. If we should be taught how to think, perhaps thinking like a cosmic gamemaster might be a good idea.

Imagine if you will, a world in which D&D only sold class specific or setting specific DM guides, but not the actual Dungeon Master’s Guide. In many respects that’s the state of simulations and policymaking today.

We’re taught how to play, but not how to DM. A more integrated method of simulation and scenario development might be something to consider.

Saturday Blognado: Taxes and Welfare

2012-02-25T05:26:32Z

This post is something of a coda to my Tuesday post on taxes, this time taken from the other direction.

The most common objection to welfare system is that it discourages work, leading to protracted welfare dependency. This can indeed happen, and through a similar mechanism to one of the reasons that the laffer curve eventually bends downward. Pretty much every benefit in the Western world is abated as your income increases, by which I mean it is partially (or in some cases totally) withdrawn as your income rises. A benefit structured in this way lowers a person’s average tax rate (to negative numbers in some case), but increases their marginal tax rate (for every extra dollar they earn, they lose a few cents in taxes but more cents in lost welfare. In extreme cases a household receiving many different benefits can end up with an effective marginal tax rate of greater than 100%. It should come as no surprise if people in such circumstances don’t try very hard to improve their circumstances since very extra dollar they earn is making it harder to make ends meet. Even before you hit the 100% mark things become problematic – how hard would you work to improve your income when you’re only getting 10-20 cents on the dollar? Some of the highest marginal tax rates accrue to people on low incomes thanks to the way welfare is structured, poverty is persistent not because of laziness but in large part because people are rationally reacting to their circumstances.

So how to fix this? There are two major solutions, with varied ideological appeal. One option is to make beenfits less generous, which makes the effect they have on incentives less powerful. The othe ris to make beenfits abate more slowly, which means you end up helping more people who don’t actually need help, increasing the cost of the programme.

This phenomenon is also what led Milton Friedman to propose the Negative Income Tax, which in it’s most common form is a combined tax and welfare system that combines a flat income tax with a universal deduction so everyone would pay (for example) 33% of their income in taxes, less $10,000. If you earned $100,000 you would pay $100,000 * 0.33 – 10,000 = $23,000 for an average tax rate of 33%. If you earned $30,000 you would pay no tax at all, and if earned nothing at all the government would pay you $10,000. A system like this could replace unemployment, social security and most other benefits, it spreads the disincentives of taxation evenly across the income spectrum and it would eliminate the need for welfare offices entirely. The downside is large though – it is expensive to run (carrying on my example from above multiply $10,000 by the number of adult sin the United States, and you’ll see what I mean). Still I, and a lot of economists, think it would be a worthwhile approach to look into. Ultimately the improved incentives could improve the lives of the poor immensely, why promoting independence, a combination that should appeal to left and right.

Peer disagreement: Why it matters and what the proper response to it is.

2012-02-25T04:18:11Z

By request from Stillwater and Rose, here is a post on the epistemology of peer disagreement. Being the kind of lazy sod that I am in my deepest of hearts, I realised that since I had already had done a good discussion of the various views previously, I’ll just reproduce that discussion more or less intact. The context of the discussion below is me arguing that under widespread disagreement any reasonable view about the proper response to peer disagreement will require us to severely moderate our views. I argue that this would be the case even if the proper response to individual peer disagreement is not necessarily to moderate judgement.

Before we proceed with the discussion. I would like to elaborate what I mean by peer disagreement. Peer disagreement basically is what happens when two or more epistemic peers disagree. Widespread peer disagreement is wha happens when many epistemic peers disagree with many people on both sides of the issue. Defining what counts as an epistemic peer is slightly tougher as many different philosophers have used different notions of peerhood. The most stringent notion of peerhood is one in which two people count as epistemic peers only if they share the same evidence and have the same attitude towards the evidence. i.e. they draw the same kinds of connections and relations etc. A looser notion of peerhood is about two people who are equally competent when it comes to a particular question or set of questions. We can obviously see that the latter notion is wider than the former and includes the former as well. Two people could still be equally competent in a field of enquiry even if they don’t share the same evidence or don’t have the same attitude towards the evidence that they do have. Of course two people who have the same evidence and the same attitude towards it have to be equally competent. Below in the excerpt, I have examined three different views: the equal weight view, Kelly’s total evidence view and Enoch’s first-person inescapability view.

One of the key assumptions that motivates the problem of peer disagreement is the uniqueness thesis. The uniqueness thesis basically says that for any proposition P and set of evidence E, there is only one credence level C about P which is most epistemically appropriate. Obviously, if more than one credence was appropriate, then people could unproblematically reasonably disagree as long as their disagreement was limited to those appropriate credences. Of course, given the uniqueness thesis, what this still allows that people with different evidence (and priors) may permissibly have different levels of confidence in P. The uniqueness thesis also allows that evidence may be misleading. i.e. it may really be the case that P, but the body of evidence E is such that E indicates not-P. Credence levels range from 0 which indicates complete disbelief to 0.5 which is perfect agnosticism to 1 which is complete belief. So, it might be that the state of the evidence is such that we cannot say one way or another about P. In that case we should be agnostic about P. None of what I’ve said here indicates that we will know what that best credence level is, only that it exists. It may still be the case that a matter may be very difficult to assess and that some connections may be difficult to see. However, even if difficult to see, those connections are still there. The basic idea working here is that there is no fundamentally indeterminate piece of evidence. Any particular piece of evidence in its appropriate context evidences a particular conclusion by some determinate amount whether or not we can know what that amount is. Let us move on to a discussion of the various views.

In order to say that we should moderate judgement [under widespread peer disagreement], we don’t need to say that we should moderate judgement under individual peer disagreement. While that would certainly help, it is not necessary. To see why, I will try to reconstruct what the best response to the equal weight view is and try to show that it still recommends moderating our views under widespread disagreement.

Here, I will use Thomas Kelly’s total evidence view[1] as the most reasonable alternative to the equal weight view. The equal weight view is the view that when I find that someone who has exactly the same evidence that I do, and is equally as good as I am at assessing the evidence, but comes to a different conclusion about a particular proposition than I do, we should both moderate our views until we agree. Equal weight theorists suppose that this result is stable even when we weaken our notion of peerhood to one in which someone is a peer if he is as likely as I am to get the answer correct. This looser notion of peerhood says nothing about whether we both possess the same evidence or have the same attitude with regards to the evidence that we do have. If I have evidence that you don’t have and symmetrically you have evidence that I don’t, then, the fact of our disagreement is a fact about the relevance of our “personal evidence” to our relative conclusions. i.e. the fact that you arrive at a conclusion H reflects some part of the evidence that you do in fact possess and the fact that I arrived at not-H reflects some aspects of my evidence. The equal weight theorist could then argue that we should therefore suspend judgement until we have acquired the other person’s evidence and then made a re-evaluation. If, on the other hand, I have all the evidence that you have, as well as more, then I am in a better epistemic position than you and need not and indeed should not defer to you. But, in that case, I may not necessarily count you as a peer. Similarly, we could be peers and still evaluate the evidence in a different way. In that case, the flaws that I have in my reasoning need not be the flaws that are present in your reasoning. However, given that there are flaws in my reasoning (which I may at present be unable to identify), I should moderate my own judgement.

Kelly notes, however, that here is a problem with the equal weight view. The equal weight view presumes that the fact of disagreement swamps other kinds of facts. Kelly notes correctly that the fact of disagreement cannot constitute first order evidence against a proposition. Rather, the fact of disagreement constitutes a higher order evidence and instead bears on the strength and nature of our first order evidence. So, when I find that a peer disagrees with me, all that disagreement does is call into question the strength of the first order evidence with respect to the conclusion. However, this is not conclusive. It is possible that my peer could be wrong. And the mere fact that he is wrong on this one instance does not demote him from peerhood. There is nothing that prevents someone who usually very reliable from drawing unreasonable conclusions from the given evidence every once in a while. However, Kelly notes that disagreement even in such a case is still evidence even though it is misleading evidence. However, this higher order evidence need not undermine totally the confidence I have on the strength of my evidence. The reason for this is very simple. Kelly says that the views we can reasonably draw from our evidence is constrained by what we can reasonably believe about our evidence. However, if we have anything to say about our evidence at all, surely the actual state of the evidence is to play a part in it. The degree to which disagreement ought to affect our judgement about a particular case really depends on the strength of our own first order evidence. If my evidence for the proposition I hold is indeed strong, then it follows that there is unlikely to be reasonable evidence against the conclusion and the less that peer disagreement should move me. The weaker my evidence is, the greater the possibility that someone can disagree and have reasonable evidence to back him up. There are of course some cases where our primary evidence may be sufficiently weak that we are able to conceive of sufficient counter arguments that would give us reason to completely suspend judgement. But this need not happen in every case of peer disagreement. Of course, if you find that many of your peers disagree with you, then, the likelihood of your initial evidential assessment being correct decreases, or at least it does so in most cases. The question of whether there are any exceptions will be explored later. Nevertheless, in most cases, whenever you find that you are in a distinct minority among your peers, it is often the case that you should moderate your views significantly.

The result above may not work for other alternatives to the equal weight view. I will briefly take a small detour to look at David Enoch’s view and try to show why it is if not unreasonable, far more problematic than Kelly’s view. Roughly speaking, if Enoch’s view is right, then even under widespread disagreement, people need not significantly moderate their views[2]. Enoch’s argument, roughly, is that the equal weight view relies on treating the dissenting parties as truth measuring devices or truthometers. However, Enoch argues that it is impossible to treat ourselves as truthometers since we cannot escape the first person perspective. Enoch says that given that ought implies can, we need not treat ourselves as truthometers. Enoch draws a distinction between two types of responses to impossible goals. One type of response is to discard the goal as anything inherently worthy of pursuit. The other is to pursue the goal and try to approach the ideal as far as we can. He supposes that the issue of treating ourselves as truthometers fits the former approach. However he does not argue for this. The lack of any argument for why we should not simply try to treat ourselves as truthometers as far as possible implies that at the least we should be agnostic about whether to treat ourselves as truthometers as far as we can. However, the initial reasons for treating ourselves as truthometers presumably still exist: The endorsement of a proposition P by an extremely reliable epistemic agent is indicative of the truth of P and the similar rejection of q is likewise indicative of q’s falsity. Enoch’s reply to the equal weight view, therefore, fails.

Where Enoch goes wrong is in his embrace of epistemic permissiveness. Despite his initial setup where he sets aside epistemic permissiveness and endorses the uniqueness thesis for the purposes of the paper, his argument amounts to a rejection of positive justification[3] as a goal on the grounds of impossibility. The distinction that Enoch may be failing to appreciate is that whereas it is understandable that people will use the reasons that they do possess, they are not necessarily justified in doing so. So, even if Enoch criticises Kelly’s view because it doesn’t give people who face peer-disagreement advice on what to do, this is not a problem for Kelly’s view. That’s because Kelly’s view is not a decision procedure, but an account of epistemic rightness. The above remarks are admittedly insufficient to do full justice to Enoch’s argument which is more complicated than I have detailed. Nevertheless, the above remarks are intended to suggest very roughly that Enoch’s thesis is at best incomplete and that Kelly’s views are the best way to go.

Leaving aside Enoch’s view, let us take for granted that Kelly’s view is mostly correct and return to the possible counter example to Kelly’s Total Evidence view. Richard Fumerton raises a possible counter example to moderating your beliefs when confronted with peer disagreement[4]. Fumerton brings up the case of the Monty hall problem.[5] Fumerton says that prior to explanation, even though most people would disagree with him as to what the optimal strategy is, he says that he should stick to his guns even if most of his colleagues whom he considers to be peers disagree with him. The reason for this is because he knows that he is privy to an argument which he knows that he has assessed correctly, which if he were to tell his colleagues would also convince them. There is an intuitive plausibility about Fumerton’s case, and could provide a possible counter-example to Kelly’s view if Kelly’s view could not accommodate the intuition. Fortunately, this is not the case. Note that in Fumerton’s case, the first order evidence is so strong that it is just inconceivable that anyone, once presented with the evidence could reasonably disagree.

The possible counter-example is relevant for a very important reason. Kelly’s argument pre-supposes that evidence is shared. However, the type of peerhood we pre-supposed is not as strong as Kelly’s. It does not require evidence to be shared. However, the strength of Kelly’s view does not rely on the actual existence of peer disagreement, but rather on the possibility that someone could reasonably provide a counter argument/ evidence against your position. According to Kelly, the real threat comes from the possibility of reasonable disagreement. The possibility of reasonable disagreement indicates that the evidence may not be as strong as initially thought. The presence of actual peer disagreement is just dispositive about the possibility of such disagreement existing.

Thus far, we have shown that Kelly’s view is better than Enoch’s view. However, we have yet to show that Kelly’s view is better than the equal weight view. To recap, the equal weight view says that the fact of peer disagreement necessarily swamps other kinds of evidence. Enoch’s view says that our first person perspective necessarily swamps the fact of peer disagreement. Kelly’s view basically is that which kind of evidence dominates depends on the relative strength of each kind of evidence. If the initial primary evidence is very weak, then the fact of peer disagreement is evidence that it is weak and should appropriately weaken our confidence in that assertion. Kelly’s point is not that epistemic peers can reasonably disagree, rather it is that the situation is asymmetric. The person who has worse first order evidence should moderate his judgement more than the person with better first order evidence. This does not necessarily yield a practical guide as it may be difficult in practice to assess the strength of one’s first order evidence. However, that is not a problem for the view. It is not a practical guide, just an account of what is the epistemically right thing to do.

The problem with the equal weight view is that it cannot really account for why the fact of disagreement swamps the other evidence. The equal weight theorist argues that to still consider our initial evidence is to double count it. This is not true. To make the charge of double counting stick, it must be the case that the conclusion that your peer draws from the evidence is just as reasonable as the conclusion that you draw. Of course, this is not necessarily true. Just because someone is your peer and is generally speaking as reasonable and as competent as you are, it does not follow that on any one particular case, his conclusions from the evidence are as reasonable as yours are. It might be that his are more reasonable, or that yours are, or that neither yours nor your peer’s are. Of course as more and more peers disagree with you, the possibility that all of them are being less reasonable than you on this one case decreases.

Is the question of peer disagreement anything more than an abstract problem? Certainly! First of all, settling the question of the proper response to peer disagreement helps us answer the question of how to respond to disagreement with people who are experts and with people who are relative ignoramuses in a particular field. Another question has to do with how to deal with disagreement in a number of investigative communities like juries, electorates, scientific communities and philosophical communities. For example there seems to be a conundrum raised in the context of voting in a democracy.

[1]Thomas Kelly, Peer Disagreement and Higher Order Evidence, Chapter 6, disagreement, edited by Richard Feldman and Ted A. Warfield, Oxford University Press, 2010

[2] David Enoch, Not a truthometer: Taking oneself seriously (but not too seriously) in cases of peer disagreement, Mind Vol 119.476.October 2010

[3] I am drawing on the distinction Sinott-Armstrong makes with regards to permissive and positive justification in his book Moral Scepticisms, Oxford University press, 2006, pp65-66

[4] Richard Fumerton, You can’t trust a philosopher, Chapter 5, disagreement, edited by Richard Feldman and Ted A. Warfield, Oxford University Press, 2010

[5] The Monty Hall problem is set up the following way. There are three doors, of which behind one there is a large monetary reward and behind two, nothing. The contestant does not know which door the money is behind. The gameshow host who knows what is behind each door, asks him to pick a door and then tell him which door was picked. Once the contestant has picked the door, the host proceeds to open a door not picked by the contestant and which is also empty. The host then asks the contestant whether he wants to switch. While the intuitive answer is that it doesn’t matter, the correct strategy is to always switch. The reasoning proceeds as follows. If you originally picked an empty room, switching will give you the money. If you already picked the door with the money, then switching will give you an empty room. Since the probability of initially picking an empty room is higher than picking the room with the money, switching will give you a higher chance of getting the money. In fact you double your chances of winning by switching.

The Retroactive Table of Contents : February 17 – 24

2012-02-25T04:30:16Z

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Starting this week, we will be introducing a new feature here at the League: the Retroactive Table of Contents Subscription. If you wish, each Friday or Saturday we will send you via email a list of the topics and posts of the week. It’s a way for those of you with actual lives to keep up to date with the quality writing and conversations here at LoOG.

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A sample of what the mailer will look like is up after the break. And with that, on with what you might have missed at the League this week:

Headline of the Week: Parenting by Class

Mike Dwyer took a look at Lauara McKenna’s latest article in the Atlantic on parenting, as well as a study by Annette Lareau on the same. To what degree is our increased hands-on approach to raising kids a boon, and to what degree are we just making more fragile adults-to-be?

Big Theme of the Week : The Abortion Issue

With last weeks passing of Virginia’s mandatory ultrasound bill, the big topic at the league was the litmus test that is the abortion issue.

Will Truman charted the statistics of where abortions are being performed throughout the United States, and tried to deduce what those number might mean.

Mike tried to see if there was anything we could do to reduce the number of abortions while retaining our current laws, and was pretty pleased how our commenters treated such a volitile subject.

Tod Kelly pretty much hated the Virginia ulrtasound law, but was not sure that it qualified as “rape.”

Government, Politics and Foreign Affairs

Elias Isquith explained to Jay Cost that just because the Republican Party is scary does not necessarily mean that it is being haunted by the ghost of George McGovern.

Scott Payne would have blogged more often this week, but he’s still waiting his turn to video chat with President Obama.

Guest author Dan Miller asked that we focus on the demand and not the supply of campaign financing.

All James K wants is a two-fold solution to campaign finance reform. Actually, a different GOP wouldn’t hurt, either. But that’s all he needs. Oh, and less government corruption! But that’s it. Oh, wait, tell a lie – he’d also like a whole new tax code. But really, it just these few small things.

Nob Akimoto fiddled with Snyder’s Myths of Empire theory to see how it might apply to China, and then said “good riddence” to Pat Buchanan.

Now that the Stolen Valor Act is official, all of us are really hoping that Jaybird’s claim to be a medal of honor recipient is on the up and up.

Culture, Arts & Personal Essays

Murali plucked at the tension between the radicalism that lies in Christianity’s roots and the conservatism that drives it’s practice over time.

David Ryan wished we might have done more with the internet, caught an employee laying down on the job, and thought a bit more about what women are for.

Tom Van Dyke was appalled by JFK’s answer to that last question.

Nob found a ray of hope in this world of despair, inspired by a George Takei musical. (Yeah, you read that right.) He also traveled to the Middle Earth to do a little political blogging.

Those of you that believe that if there’s one thing you can have faith is real in this world of lies, it’s the good name Burt Likko? Yeah, about that… Also, he’s concerned about the way all these liberal judges are destroying our freedoms be allowing all these freedoms.

Jason Kuznicki continues to stand under out under our window and beautifully translate the poetry of Edmond Rostand. (Why Boegiboe is crouching in the bushes next to him whispering, I really couldn’t say.)

Will realized that 1984 is right around the corner, and it’s all totally your fault.

And we’re starting to think think Mike may overcompensating.

Where Gentlemen Go

2012-02-24T18:29:37Z

The Manliest Town in America

*ahem*

The endorsements just keep coming.