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Jens 'n' Frens
Idle thoughts of a relatively libertarian Republican in Cambridge, MA, and whomever he invites. Mostly political.
"A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures."
-- Daniel Webster
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Saturday, April 26, 2003 :::
I visited the MIT science/humanities library today. I was recognized by a young woman who had, it seems, seen Dean at a ballroom-dance thing at the University of Chicago last fall. Apparently Indian, thin, about 5'8" -- Sanita, or something pronounced like it, but she wasn't sure she'd actually exchanged names with you.
::: posted by Steven at 9:42 PM
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Friday, April 25, 2003 :::
Quoth Clayton Cramer: (link from Volokh)
What's interesting is that the Mormon Church (still supporting polygamy at the time) gave women the right to vote in 1870, and it was Congress that took it away in 1887, as part of an anti-polygamy law. The Mormon Church apparently didn't think that women voting would be a problem for polygamy.
An interesting bit of trivia.
::: posted by Steven at 3:34 PM
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There seems to be in some quarters some lack of appreciation that the responses both to global terrorism and to SARS are not intended to be to scale with what has happened, but with what could well happen if left unchecked. That SARS has killed only a few hundred people in a period of time when many times that have died in car accidents is material insofar as car accidents are contagious and have room to spread. It certainly seems that if no precautions were taken, this illness would be passed around and kill many people; it's contagious enough that it seems reasonable to suppose that, if it didn't disrupt travel plans at all, a large fraction of the world population would be exposed. I'm not Canadian, and I'm not bearing some of the costs here, but I think it's probably a good idea to take significant steps to keep this thing contained as best we can, certainly until we understand it better.
::: posted by dWj at 2:39 PM
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The Wall Street Journal reports in an editorial, "[A]s the Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis observes, Iraqis will also see any American refusal to mete out justice not as mercy but as weakness." I'm curious as to whether they would view American complicity in the new Iraqi regime meting out this justice as sufficient strength, while possibly also being less "humiliating" and perhaps even helping to legitimize the new regime.
::: posted by dWj at 1:15 PM
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I pointed to a Derb column touching on evolution a couple days ago. He's caught some hell from creationists, and has some follow-up entries on the Corner. (See that entry and the one immediately above it.)
::: posted by Steven at 12:52 PM
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I know all the names on the Kitchen Cabinet birthday list today. That almost never happens.
::: posted by Steven at 12:09 PM
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Because I'm a theorist, but more because I like to quibble, I'd like to say something about Kate Malcolm's Criticism of Pure Reason (point (1)). I'd like to suggest when numbers (data) are important, and when they are less so.I do think there is something useful to discussing the issues in the abstract separately from the data because the data will tend to be fuzzy and we will generally have a changing best guess as to what the figures are. So it helps to have a well-developed epistemology separate from that, so we at least know what we're looking for from the numbers. On a slightly different but related note, I find a lot of discussions in which someone asserts, in one way or another, that anyone who doesn't have the entire solution to the problem worked out in detail has nothing to contribute to the discussion. (Often this takes the form of suggesting that one is out of line to point out a problem to which one lacks a solution.) This, of course, is garbage; the best role of discussion is that we each contribute something and end up with a nice, tasty stone soup. Now, it's not that I didn't sleep well last night, though I guess I really didn't, and it should very much be conceded that the point of the epistemology is that it should bear some connection to reality, which it lacks as long as no data are plugged in. My complaint about a lot of theoretical physicists wasn't so much that they had no data, nor even that their theories were unfalsifiable by currently feasible experiments, so much as that they didn't seem to care. (This was worse in the eighties, when Sheldon Glashow was driven to suggest that string theory be confined to math department and schools of divinity.) If anyone actually does something with my framework, then, I hope they trouble themselves to get the best data they can find, but I also think it's worth discussing framework issues and even getting agreement on them first, partly to keep parochial interpretations from creeping into any data once acquired.
::: posted by dWj at 10:15 AM
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Thursday, April 24, 2003 :::
I just got back from meeting over drinks with a few members of the Harvard Law School Target-Shooting Club, including Sasha Volokh, after they elected their new officers (their web site has already been updated). I was the only non-law-student joining. It occured to me on my way home that if there exists a creature dorkier than the Law Student Groupie, I don't know of it.
::: posted by Steven at 9:57 PM
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The TV reports that we have Tariq Aziz.
::: posted by dWj at 5:12 PM
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Jay Nordlinger's reaction to the most recent John Kerry story (it's Nordlinger's first segment) was pretty much the same as mine. Except I didn't feel sorry for Kerry. I wonder sometimes whether Ms. Heinz isn't really a closet conservative who married Kerry to destroy his chances at the presidency.
::: posted by Steven at 1:27 PM
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I heard a lot of talk-radio the other day, and read blogs quite a bit, and I have to say, I'm really surprised this Santorum thing took off the way it did. Are people surprised that Santorum is a social conservative? I knew that, and not because he told me in a secret conversation -- he hasn't been hiding it.
And do people really think a slippery-slope argument is untenable here? It's not like the lawyers for the homosexuals in the case argued that, well, the 37th Amendment to the US Constitution reads "no state shall enforce a law against sodomy." The arguments being made are based on fairly abstract common-law concepts of privacy and police powers (legal concepts, BTW, which I don't have much of a grasp on -- not that this will stop me from spouting off about them). These concepts could apply here, but they're pretty vague. I'm not saying it's unreasonable to argue that they do apply in this case and wouldn't apply to, say, concensual incest. But I certainly can't see why people are gambling-at-Rick's shocked that someone thinks they might.
I'm a lot more libertarian than Santorum is (and, as I said, I could have told you this a week ago), but I find it a lot more surprising that people are talking about this than that Santorum said what he did.
::: posted by Steven at 12:00 PM
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Taranto reports:
Presidential candidate John Kerry says he'll make a campaign issue of Republican plans to spend $200 million to re-elect President Bush. The Massachusetts senator says, as the Boston Globe puts it, that such spending "would confirm the party as the handmaiden to the wealthiest Americans."
I believe the response to that is, "That's all of our donors' contributions combined, Senator." Kerry married into nearly three times that.This is one of the most common perspective errors that drives me the most nuts; it's the comparison of numbers that scale with the U.S. population with those that don't. $200 million only sounds like a lot of money because it would be a lot of money in the hands of one person, as it is with the Senator. From 2% of the U.S. population, that's less than $40 a person. As I say, we see this mistake in many other contexts: when one person dies of something in this country every day, that means it's pretty damn rare, but it won't be spun that way.
::: posted by dWj at 11:19 AM
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Wednesday, April 23, 2003 :::
Lily Malcolm worries her pretty little head about the religious and the secular, particularly as they relate to views of the sexes.The story I was given by a woman who promised to submit to her husband was that his promise to always love her was equally onerous. Me, I'm looking for a woman whom loving won't be so onerous.
::: posted by dWj at 6:03 PM
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I haven't heard it remarked much that one of the benefits to the war in Iraq is that we get to test our toys and give practice to our boys. As other threats present themselves in the future, we may be better able to respond to them because of this airing out.
I have heard much made about "Iraqi Freedom", from our government for starters. As my brother linked to earlier, we may have saved more lives during the war than we cost, at least on the civilian front.
I present these together because my heart is reluctant to allow their use as arguments for war, much as my brain is confident they should be part of any comprehensive cost/benefit analysis. That we save and free Iraqis I do count against any humanitarian concerns, but the apparent net humanitarian benefit to the Iraqis I can't count as more than zero.
I don't know why this is. It's probably in part a libertarian, "mind our own business" kind of impulse; that woman getting beaten next door, that's her and her husband's business, not mine. (My impulse to heckle my own views as I express them is something else that mistifies me.) Similarly, while the second sentence of my first paragraph does something to soften my opposition, I can't actually bring myself to support practicing beating up people so we'll be better at beating up people in the future.
I wonder whether this makes sense in terms of risk-aversion. One of the reasons for libertarianism is that people generally have a better idea what they want than anyone else does, even (especially?) experts. This suggests that perceived effects on other people should be somewhat discounted in my own calculations. Practice and testing, that's intangible and hard to measure. This is at least as much rationalization as it is argument, though.
::: posted by dWj at 3:09 PM
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At some point I want to start a discussion of society-scale extortion — when do we acquiesce, when do we ignore it, when do we fight back? Do we care about justice or just pragmatism?
North Korea is the obvious contemporary instance of this question being raised, but we have domestic issues of which this is a component as well. If a community riots, is it a good idea to pour resources into that community, particularly if we thereby neglect other wheels which have similar problems but don't squeak? (The existence of such another community weighs more heavily on the moral side, I think, than the practical side.) Suppose the complaints aren't legitimate — do we pour in resources just to shut 'em up?
::: posted by dWj at 11:59 AM
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Let me start by conceding that Kate Malcolm is absolutely right when she says that the antidote to spun numbers is "push the numbers further". That allowed, a (possibly) theoretical question for her:
Suppose black students, for whatever combination of reasons, are being lost in the third grade. By the time they make it through college they are hopelessly (I mean that at least almost literally for our supposition here) worse prepared than white students (ignoring the technicolors as unnecessarily complicating). (Er, I use "technicolors" to mean people who aren't black or white. I hope that's clear.) There are no "diamonds in the rough" here; if they perform to the best of their abilities in whatever new environment, the white students will, as a group, outperform the black students as a group.
The question, then, is whether we let in a black student who will genuinely do worse than a white student we're passing over. (Clearly, whatever's happening in the third grade should be addressed; if we know exactly what to do, that solves this problem fifteen years from now. Consider that the question is asked of now, or that we don't know what to do in the third grade.)
My feeling is that continuing unfairness created by society should be halted, but that, for unfairness that was previously suffered, from a practical standpoint it doesn't matter whether it was a matter of society failing to educate the children or lowering their self-esteem, or whether it was nature endowing some (black and white) children with more intelligence than other (black and white) children. We make the most of what we have.
If unfairness is inflicted by individuals on individuals, restitution (as possible) and/or punishment is appropriate; individuals can be deterred. A society can not be deterred by itself, restraining itself from creating unfairness in fear of retribution by its future self. Compensation strikes us as morally valuable, but, if we stand back, makes no more sense for a caused tragedy than one of nature. (Steve, you have my David Friedman book; can you find me a quote in there, something about torts being a poor way to try to implement insurance?)
Following Kate's example, I'll reiterate that what we really need here, back in the real world, are more data. Are we losing black children in the third grade? If so, what do we do about it? (Something similar to what we should do about bullying?) Is that the only place the problem is taking place? Either way, though, my question is one that I think needs to be addressed. The most troubling thing to me about systematic variation of outcomes is not the variation of outcomes per se — some students will always do better than others, and I decline for the moment to be troubled even by a correlation, in and of itself, with race — but that does strongly suggest that there is something feasable that could be done to improve black students to the current white levels, and that we've missed opportunities to raise acheivement does bother me.
::: posted by dWj at 11:59 AM
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Incidentally, John Malkovitch was on local TV being interviewed the other night. I think he's quite smart, though I'm not quite sure. He generally feels that news should be followed less closely and history more closely; what we get out of the news on a day-to-day basis is both factually less reliable than what we can get out of books and has been more severely alleviated of its context. Also, he disputes the notion that stage acting needs to be exaggerated; if a play is well-written, he says, you shouldn't need to see the details of a person's face to know how s/he's reacting.
::: posted by dWj at 11:59 AM
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Some interesting things at NRO yesterday:
- Mark Krikorian thinks we shouldn't allow non-citizen permanent residents to serve in the military. I hadn't realized that we do. Last month, Colby Cosh suggested that we develop a whole foreign legion, an idea I rather like.
- Derb writes about whether Bush believes in evolution, and whether you should care.
- Peter Kirsanow, whom you might remember for his difficulty in getting seated at the US Commission on Civil Rights, asks whether racial preference programs are likely to be finite in duration.
Which reminds me, the official transcript of arguments before the Supreme Court in the UMich case are available. (Link from Discriminations)
::: posted by Steven at 1:16 AM
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Tuesday, April 22, 2003 :::
I've speculated on whether the rate of civilian deaths in Iraq went up or down when the war started. Here's an estimate suggesting the latter.
And here the Instapundit points out where said estimate comes up short.
::: posted by Steven at 10:46 PM
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If you're in the mood for a rant about the possibility of a WNBA player's strike...
Players have no business saying the word "strike." It's ridiculous to even think about it in regard to the end of the collective bargaining agreement that will expire in September. And yet Sonja Henning, president of the WNBA players association, actually said of a recent talk with about 100 players, "We discussed the idea of getting comfortable with a strike."
Then I hope they also discussed the idea of getting comfortable with going back to playing professionally only overseas. WNBA players, you have NO leverage, OK? You're being subsidized by a big business that thinks one day you'll pay off pretty decently as an investment
Actually, I'm not sure even of that. I think they hope at least to break even some day, and only recoup the rest of their investment in goodwill.
::: posted by Steven at 4:26 PM
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Would the Chinese government please knock it off? Link from the KC.
::: posted by dWj at 12:54 PM
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Some time after my friends went to Amsterdam, I asked of what Orange William was. William was of Orange, France, near Avignon (or less near Marseille, if you prefer). His family largely ruled the area through much of the middle of the millenium, before it was more or less fully acquired by France, whereupon a deal was struck allowing the family to keep the arms and the name, if not the power that traditionally came with the title.
I still don't know where Orange got its name, though. Help with that continues to be appreciated.
::: posted by dWj at 11:32 AM
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In chapter 6 of the book Flu by Gina Kolata, she recounts the story of the legal liability difficulties that beset a program in 1976 to vaccinate a large portion of the population against swine flu. Insurance companies refused to insure the manufacturers for liability; part of the trouble was a 1974 lawsuit, Reyes v. Wyeth Laboratories, Inc., in which a child contracted polio after getting a vaccine.Neustadt and Fineberg, in their postmortem on the swine flu affair, tartly summed up what the Reyes case meant to vaccine manufacturers. The courts had ruled that Wyeth had failed to adequately warn of its vaccine's dangers. "Never mind that the company had included in cartons for shipment a printed form which did contain adequate warning. Never mind that experts had testified at trial that this particular case was not vaccine-related. Wyeth would pay (and did). The suffering was real and Wyeth had the only deep pocket available."
I may reread Volokh before getting too indiscriminate with the blockquotes, but Dr. Hans H. Neumann, who was director of preventive medicine at the New Haven Department of Health, explained the problem in a letter to The New York Times. He wrote that if Americans have flu shots in the numbers predicted, as many as 2,300 will have strokes and 7,000 will have heart attacks within two days of being immunized. "Why? Because that is the number statistically expected, flu shots or no flu shots," he wrote. "Yet can one expect a person who received a flu shot at noon and who that same night had a stroke not to associate somehow the two in his mind? Post hoc, ergo propter hoc," he added. Medical professionals in the program declined to vaccinate residents of one nursing home because they averaged a death every two days, and it was inevitable that one would be blamed on the immunization. Ultimately the vaccine was, in fact, linked to a syndrome that was poorly defined; while it's generally thought that the link was real, it is also clear that its observance was amplified by a tendency to diagnose it when the patient had recently received the vaccine, and to diagnose something else (or leave it undiagnosed) when the patient had not.
::: posted by dWj at 11:30 AM
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Monday, April 21, 2003 :::
FOXNews reports that the Supreme Court will hear a case United States v. Patane that revisits Miranda and Dickerson. And here's Scalia's dissent from the latter.
::: posted by dWj at 3:42 PM
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George Will writes a piece on process. He also argues for tort reform, but more about how not to get it.
::: posted by dWj at 2:20 PM
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Incidentally, results from the Boston Marathon are ineligible for world record-books. In order to qualify for a world record, a marathon has to conform to certain parameters -- the start and finish lines have to be within a certain elevation distance of each other, and a certain horizontal distance of each other (to prevent records from being gravity- or wind-assisted). The Boston Marathon starts at least 20 miles from it's finish -- it's essentially west to east all the way -- and I assume it violates the elevation requirements as well.
Anyway, if you know of an other major marathon that doesn't count, let me know.
::: posted by Steven at 2:09 PM
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The Boston Marathon is today, of course. The front-runners are almost done.
Comedian Will Farrell is running.
"It is great to be here and to have clothes on," Ferrell said in Hopkinton [the town where the marathon starts].
If you want context, read the story.
::: posted by Steven at 2:03 PM
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Eugene Volokh has an interesting entry about the law of Fisking.
::: posted by Steven at 1:52 PM
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Sunday, April 20, 2003 :::
A couple of researchers did a study on the impact of self-esteem on performance: (Link from Joanne Jacobs, whom I found through the Bitch Girls, whom I found somewhere.)
The pair had asked a professor to send weekly e-mail messages to students of his who had done poorly on their first exam for the class. Each missive included a review question. In addition, one-third of the students, chosen at random, also received a message -- advice to study, for example -- suggesting that how well they did in the course was under their own control. The other third received the review question plus a "You're too smart to get a D!" pep talk aimed at raising their self-esteem, which everyone knows boosts academic performance.
Oops.
Compared with the other e-mail recipients, the D and F students who got the self-esteem injection performed notably worse on later tests.
If they verified whether the messages designed to enhance self-esteem actually did so, the story doesn't say. That said, I can't say I'm surprised by those results. As George Will once said, "dispelling 'self-esteem' is often a prerequisite for self-improvement."
There's some more interesting stuff in that study, though, such as:
O[ne solid link] does seem to exist between higher self-esteem and performance. The higher your opinion of yourself, the more likely you are to persist in the face of failure. It is left as an exercise for the reader to decide whether this is a desirable character trait. Sometimes, isn't it better to just cut and run?
Like almost everything, it can be taken too far, but I'd have to say persistence is generally a good thing.
Self-esteem proponents have also fallen into the trap of taking people at their word. People high in self-esteem report that they're more likable and have better relationships than do those with low self-esteem. But "this is true mainly in their own minds," says Prof. Baumeister, a psychology professor at Florida State University, Tallahassee. Objective measures typically find the opposite, undercutting the claim that high self-esteem brings superior social skills.
Pitfalls of overconfidence are well-known in my field. In other fields, it's been ascertained that the least competent people tend to rate themselves higher than do the mediocre, and often higher than the best.
Incidentally, doesn't Google rock? I remembered having seen that George Will column and those studies back when they were relatively current, and I was able to find them without much trouble several years later. How cool is that?
::: posted by Steven at 3:44 AM
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If you're a Christian (western-style), happy Easter. If you're an Orthodox Christian, happy Palm Sunday. If you're a Jew, happy Passover. If you're in Massachusetts or Maine, happy Patriot's Day Eve. If you're a socialist, it's Hitler's Birthday -- go have some appropriately tyrannical celebration, somewhere away from me.
And Happy Spring (northern hemisphere) -- it's 40 degrees outside. Or it will be, once it starts warming up for the day.
::: posted by Steven at 1:51 AM
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