Comments on: Posner and Becker Comedy Gold

By: Brian

Brian — Wed, 08 Dec 2004 20:22:54 +0000

Whatever else, this discussion has brought great clarity to the concept of crooked timber.

By: A Scott Crawford

A Scott Crawford — Wed, 08 Dec 2004 00:12:12 +0000

Regarding “preventive” war. While agreeing that the cost-benefit analysis arguments are not clear to me, the legal question is worth asking and debating. 1. The US has a tricky legal issue under question regarding the Constituionality of an Established Military, period. Let us not misuse or confuse the term “war” as it relates to the US Constition. The authority to declare war is supposed to reside wholly in the Legislative Branch, a qualification that has been circumvented over time, but especially post-WWII, when the collapse of the old colonial Empires and the cold war required an established military. The trick was to use vague and questionable Treaty Organizations, like NATO and the UN SC to allow the US Executive to wage war without explicit Congressional authority to do so. This created two (or more) legal definitions of “war” in the US. The first, “formal” war, declared by Congress. The second, “executive” war, based on the retention by the Executive branch of (limited) War Powers to honor Treaty obligations, control the established Military, and to try and fill the void created by the utter failure of the previous International system. (“cold” war or “law enforcement” war have their own supporters as well). It surprises me that no one seems to bother to note that the idea of “preemptive war” is an oxymoron. What we are really talking about is the legal extent of Executive Authority to justify using War Powers on the grounds of possible external threats, and without first securing the Constitional authority to do so from Congress or under the aegis of Treaty obligation. We have allowed Congress to surrender it’s appropriate authority to declare “war” to a greater extent than many Americans think wise. We have gotten into the habit of allowing the US Executive, under the guise of Treaty, War Powers, the UN, NATO, and etc. to assume the power and legitimacy to wantonly use the military to engage in acts that most reasonable people would consider acts of war (i.e. bombing other Countries). This is not a vice particular to the Bush administration, as it’s worth noting that the previous administration engaged in acts of war in many more instances and often with less merit. Regardless, let’s not confuse “Executive War Powers”, with Consititional “Declarations of War”, as we’re only debating the former. This is the basis of the legal debate. What are the appropriate limits and conditions vis a vis Executive War Powers? Both the Right and Left have their respective ‘pet’ uses for the US military that neither would dare submit for a formal Congressional declaration of war. And for all the Blair bashing over sending UK troops to Iraq by the British intelligencia, it’d be wise for his critics to remember the word, “Suez”, prior to judging him too harshly.

By: Doctor Slack

Doctor Slack — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 19:03:58 +0000

It could be that Posner is a closet Dungeons and Dragons enthusiast. At this point in the post: Suppose there is a probability of .5 that the adversary will attack at some future time . . .[inflicting] a cost on the victim of 100, so that the expected cost of the attack is 50 (100 x .5) . . . I half expected him to speculate about what would happen if the victim has a +2 Shield of Missile Defense, reducing the cost of the attack by 5-20.

By: nic

nic — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 09:49:49 +0000

“All true; but reading the skeptical literature, I am reminded of the debates in the 1960s over the effects of cigarette smoking on human health. ” Hahaha… There, Posner supports my theory, preventive war is exactly like bans on smoking! and on gas emissions! hurrah. I feel vindicated. Hoax, or madness, does it even matter? There’s people who take him seriously anyway. That’s what’s so fascinating…

By: Jackmormon

Jackmormon — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 02:45:46 +0000

The Medium Lobster has responded to Posner’s blog, calculating that a preventive attack on the moon is clearly justified.

By: pedro

pedro — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 02:07:25 +0000

Thomas, The inclusion and exclusion of the probabilities of certain events—notwithstanding the difficulties of estimating them—is certainly quite telling. How is it that the plausible effects of advocating a policy of preemption become null events for the purposes of the analysis? In the case of global warming, cost/benefit analyses certainly take into account the effects of environmental regulations on the economy. How is it that the possible deleterious effects of pursuing a particular policy in response to the threat of terrorism are deemed unworthy of ‘rational’, probabilistic analsis?

By: Deb Frisch

Deb Frisch — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 01:48:15 +0000

I agree that the probability it’s a hoax is very high. It’s kind of fitting – a fake blog by a fake-Nobel prize winner. I’ve analyzed Posner’s pontifications on my blog. Ineed to eat some Wheaties before trying to plow through Becker’s prose.

By: Thomas

Thomas — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 01:13:59 +0000

And wait til Kieran reads this one: Asteroid collisions? I anticipate teasing comments asking me whether I’m also worried about invasions of aliens from other galaxies. (I’m not.) In fact the probability of a catastrophic asteroid collision, while small, has a greater expected cost than the $4 million that is all that NASA is spending a year to map NEOs (dangerous near-earth objects, i.e., asteroids whose orbits intersect the earth’s orbit. For a good discussion, see the report of the Task Force commissioned by the U.K.’s minister for science. It was less than a century ago that an asteroid a mere 60 meters or so in diameter exploded over Siberia with the force of a hydrogen bomb. Fortunately, the only casualties, so far as anyone knows, were the local reindeer. Maybe the next asteroid will explode above Los Angeles, sparing the reindeer. Of course that’s unlikely; cities occupy a minute fraction of the earth’s surface. But a slightly larger asteroid, wherever it landed, could inflict tens or even hundreds of millions of casualties from tsunamis, fire storms, shock waves, and dense clouds of debris that could block photosynthesis and even trigger catastrophic global warming. _____ That’ll keep Kieran posting for days, I’m sure.

By: Thomas

Thomas — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 01:10:46 +0000

Judge Posner, on global warming (posted originally at Lessig’s): “Good comments, and mostly supportive though some skeptical along the lines of climate models are complex, climate science is uncertain, the experts may be wrong. All true; but reading the skeptical literature, I am reminded of the debates in the 1960s over the effects of cigarette smoking on human health. The evidence for serious ill effects was already very strong, but there were skeptics, some financed by the tobacco industry, who said such things as: the evidence is statistical, the mechanism by which nicotine and tars cause changes in lung tissue, etc. is not well understood, and in short we can’t be certain that there are these effects—the implication being that we should do nothing. Similar points are made today, often by energy companies or persons in their pay, and similarly insinuating that, given uncertainty, we should do nothing. “That is a non sequitur. We rarely have the luxury of being able to act on certainties; you’d be a fool if, credibly informed that unless you had an operation to repair an aneurysm you had a 99 percent chance of dying within a week, you responded that you only act when you’re certain. In my last posting, I speculated that a 1 percent chance of criminal punishment might deter certain copyright violations, and I didn’t mean that only the irrational would be deterred. “What would be irrational would be to conclude, from the fact that a minority of scientists deride global warming fears, that we should ignore the problem. Indeed, if you look at their grounds for skepticism, you may become more alarmed about global warming rather than less so. Because what you will learn is that their skepticism is based mainly on the existence of profound uncertainties about climate, and those uncertainties cut both ways and by doing so imply added rather than diminished risk. For example, skeptics point out that in the earth’s prehistory there have been periods (one roughly 10,000 years ago) in which the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere spiked, even though cavemen didn’t drive SUVs. Yes, and if one of those non-human-induced spikes coincided with our human-induced spiking, we’ll be in real trouble. “I mentioned in passing, in the preceding posting, risk aversion. If you would rather pay $100 certain than run a 1 percent risk of a $9,999 loss, even though the expected cost of such a risk is only $99.99, then you’re risk averse (think of the $100 as an insurance premium). The greater the variance in possible outcomes, the more upset the risk averse are likely to be. The more uncertainty there is about climate, the greater the variance in possible consequences of increasing the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (and of other greenhouse gases, such as methane, which is even more heat-retentive than carbon dioxide, and is being released into the atmosphere in increased quantity because of the melting of the Alaskan and Siberian permafrost—and you can see what a dangerous feedback effect is possible as more methane in the atmosphere raises surface temperatures which melts more permafrost releasing more methane…). So people who are risk averse, and that is most of us when we are facing potential disaster on the scale that global warming might inflict, will not be reassured by people who ground their global warming skepticism in nothing solider than a reminder that other things besides human activity affect climate; those other things seem as likely to exacerbate the effects of human activity as to offset them. _______ Good thing Kieran hasn’t seen this. I’d expect no end of sputtering. You know, all that “rational, objective and well-specified calculation” (he even uses numbers, not just words!). Just rhetoric.

By: ogmb

ogmb — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 23:51:35 +0000

I hope people realise this was never my working theory. I take it most people assumed preventive facetiousness. Justifiable preventive facetiousness.

By: Ottnott

Ottnott — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 23:41:42 +0000

Suppose the world has options other than (A) attack and (B) defend? Too crazy to even imagine? In Posnerspeak: suppose that the probablility that an adversary will attack at some future time is 0.5 +0.3, -0.4999. Suppose that with additional expense of 0.0000002 we can more accurately determine that the probability is 0.01 +0.01, -0.01?

By: Kieran Healy

Kieran Healy — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 23:35:46 +0000

my working theory is that the blog >is an elaborate hoax I hope people realise this was never my working theory.

By: mg

mg — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 23:05:50 +0000

Of course there’s a way. Posner’s U of Chicago site lists an email address to which you could write and ask. Or else just give him a phone call.

By: John Hempton

John Hempton — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 23:00:04 +0000

I guess you are right. The historic revisionism is too strong. But why is it not news that it is a hoax yet. JH

By: Tobias

Tobias — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 22:47:25 +0000

>my working theory is that the blog >is an elaborate hoax Well, I went and asked Lawrence Lessig on his blog. Here’s his reply in the comment thread: “Good question how you establish the authenticity in this space, but the fact is that I volunteered to register the site and have it set up and help with basic administration.” Short of explicitly stating it’s real, yet I have the impression, he’s implying it and just regretting that there’s no way to prove the authenticity at this point.