There’s something right about the argument Edlin et al are making; it being rational for you to vote does require a degree of altruism. But I think their model (a) makes some fairly heroic assumptions, and more importantly (b) doesn’t explain why so many people in America should go vote today. Below the fold I give a slightly different reason for voting, one that applies in all 50 American states. The short version is that you should vote today because it increases your chances of getting a good outcome next time.

For purely selfish people, voting is a bizarre act. You spend a lot of time, energy and (in some cases) money for a vanishingly small chance at improving your lot in life. If you’re an altruist, as Edlin et al point out, it is a little more rational. You spend a lot of time, energy and money for a vanishingly small chance at improving the lot in life of billions of people. Provided you give enough weight to the utility of others, perhaps this could be rational.

But it isn’t clear that it is. It depends on how vanishingly small the chance of making a difference is. Some people are in states where the probability that they are the marginal vote is literally one in billions. (New York and Utah are examples of this.) Many of those people live in states where the probability that their state is the marginal state is also rather high. The probability of being the marginal vote in a marginal state is, for most people, very small. So the model suggested only gives you a reason to vote in close elections.

Indeed, Andrew Gelman in a post about last year’s local elections says that he didn’t vote because the races weren’t close. I think there’s a reason to vote even in races that aren’t that close, and where you don’t give any positive probability to being the marginal vote. (In the currently popular lingo in philosophy, your probability that you are the marginal vote may be vague over an interval including zero.)

Voting is a lot like playing an n-player Prisoners Dilemma with the other people who (loosely speaking) share the values that underlie your vote. I’m taking values to be defined loosely enough here that it includes most people who vote the same way you do. You’d prefer that all of you vote to all of you not voting. Given turnout rates in the U.S., that’s pretty much always the difference between winning and losing. But conditional on what the other people will almost certainly do, you’d prefer to not vote than to vote. And so would everyone else. We have a Prisoners Dilemma here, and the rational thing to do in a Prisoners Dilemma is to not cooperate.

Note that we can’t get out of the Prisoners Dilemma merely by assuming altruism. As Simon Blackburn pointed out a while ago (“Practical Tortoise Raising”, Mind 1995), as long as there are any divergences in preferences, even altruists will be in Prisoners Dilemma situations from time to time. And perfect convergence in preferences is a crazy assumption. So real-life Prisoners Dilemmas for moderate altruists are possible. And I think elections are such possibilities.

But wait! There is more than one election. If any election is a Prisoners Dilemma, then a series of elections over time is a repeated Prisoners Dilemma. And one of the things we know for sure is that in repeated 2 player Prisoners Dilemma, the rational thing to do is to cooperate. That’s true even though the short-term benefits from non-cooperation clearly outweigh the benefits of cooperation. So all we need to do is to show that n player Prisoners Dilemmas are the same, and we’ll have an argument for the rationality of voting.

This last step isn’t completely obvious. In the 2 person case, cooperation is required at turn t because otherwise the other player will have a bad attitude towards you, and hence not cooperate at turn t+1. But in the n-player case, few people will know that you haven’t voted, and fewer still will have their future behaviour effected by this. This isn’t quite true for parents of impressionable children, or perhaps for friends of people who are apathetic/economists, but we might worry it is true of a lot of people.

But there may be another effect of voting. It might be that the probability that others like you will vote in the next election is a more-or-less continuous function of the number of people like you who vote in this election. This doesn’t seem too implausible actually. If we imagine Democrats having received tens of millions fewer votes in 2000 and 2004, then it is hard to imagine the level of support and work for Democrats in this cycle that there actually are. If you imagine the prior Democratic vote being a little closer to actuality, but still down, it is easy to imagine support and enthusiasm levels this time being down.

If I were being more careful here, I’d try to work out the marginal efficiency of voting at producing future votes. That is, the marginal difference that an extra vote for your team in this election makes to the expected number of votes your team gets in subsequent elections. I suspect it is well over 1. That’s because dropping a party’s support by a lot, say 10,000,000 in a US context, feels like it could be so demoralisingly bad that the party struggles to recover. But this would need a lot more work. It is certainly easy to come up with not completely crazy looking mathematical models where the efficiency is over 2. If everyone like you is a little demoralised by your not voting, even if it’s just a very little bit, that could easily translate into votes lost next time.

Moreover, that effect need not be localised. It’s pretty unlikely that New York will be a swing state any time soon. It’s unlikely that it will be close, and conditional on it being close, it’s unlikely that the national race will be close. But cross-voter incentives can work across state lines. People pay attention to what the national popular vote number is, and it effects their marginal disposition to vote/campaign for candidates that you like. So a vote in New York now may translate into benefits in swing states (which probably means the Mountain West) in the future.

So I think there’s a reason for rational altruists to vote, even when they know they won’t be the marginal vote. They are signaling to like-minded voters that they will vote, and that’s crucial for sustained success. This isn’t an alternative to Edlin et al’s model. In fact I think they are right that someone with no other-related preferences shouldn’t vote, even given the dynamic effects of voting described here. But I think the dynamic effects (a) make the case for voting considerably stronger, and (b) explain why it is rational to vote even in states that won’t be close, and won’t be swing states if they are close.

In any case, I don’t think any readers of this blog have no other-related preferences. You should all go vote, as a signal to everyone else that you’re voters. Take my advice, and you’ll thank me in 2012. You really are voting for America’s future; if I’m right most people in the country are largely voting for America’s electoral future.

Now I think this is all a good thing. Voting is a good thing, and a healthy democracy requires a decent turnout of voters, so doing our little bit to help democracy is being on the side of the good. It’s not exactly related to the courses we’re teaching, but spending 45 seconds before class is officially scheduled to start encouraging voter registration, or putting voter registration ads on course management software as Rutgers has done, seems far from an abuse of official positions.

Still, voting isn’t the only good thing in the world. It seems to me that voting in the upcoming election for Obama/Biden over McCain/Palin is pretty close to a moral requirement. (For those who are eligible to so vote. I of course won’t be voting for Obama, because that would be illegal, and undemocratic.) But it seems it would be seriously wrong for either Rutgers, or for me, to use our positions of authority to promote voting for Obama. And I think this isn’t a particularly controversial position.

But it’s a little hard to say just exactly why it’s OK for Rutgers (and me) to do what we’re doing, and not do what we’re not doing. Below the fold I have a few thoughts on this question.

We are actually helping Obama.
It’s worth noting that there’s a degree of bad faith in all of this. We don’t think that we should be advocating Obama’s election. But we all know that encouraging more college students to vote will, on net, boost Obama’s vote totals. Indeed, given the possibility of a backlash against explicit advocacy of Obama, actively encouraging voter registration might be the best thing we can do in the circumstances for Obama. So if it’s OK to encourage registration, but not to encourage voting for Obama, this can hardly be on narrowly consequentialist grounds.

This generalises to state entities
If the state of New Jersey spent millions of dollars advocating for Obama’s election, that would seem like a violation of some plausible democratic principles. Part of what it is to have free and fair elections is to minimise the advantage the incumbent party has merely by virtue of being the incumbent. Elections where the incumbents use their position to tilt the electoral results are not free and fair elections, and hence not fully democratic.

To be sure, this kind of thing goes on all the time in America. It’s a commonplace observation that Obama’s chances are much better than they would be were there not so many Democratic administrations in swing states. To a non-American observer this suggests something very unhealthy with the state of American democracy, but perhaps that can be something best fixed at a later date. In any case, even the most corrupt states don’t normally advertise directly for one candidate using state resources, and that’s a good thing.

Since Rutgers is a state university, it seems rules that apply to the state should apply to Rutgers. And since I’m at the head of a class in virtue of my position in Rutgers, those rules should apply to me too. So that looks like a good reason that partisan advocacy in a classroom is out of bounds.

It even suggests a reason why partisan advocacy is different to voter registration work. It is a legitimate state interest to have as many people as possible (legally) voting. So it is legitimate for the state to try to have as many people as possible registered to vote. If the state went about this by, say, blanket advertising registration promotions on TV channels whose demographics had a pronounced partisan bent (e.g. young black women, or old white men) that would be bad. But if the state encourages everyone to vote in a non-discriminatory manner, that’s a good activity. And it’s good even if, as is actually the case, the newly registered can be expected to favour one candidate.

Since neither Rutgers nor I are trying to channel our message exclusively to Democrats, it seems we aren’t doing anything wrong in encouraging registration. Of course, our only possible audience (or at least our only possible audience as state actors) is college students, who are a fairly pro-Obama demographic group. But I don’t think this is any worse than the general position the state finds itself in when doing voter registration.

It’s not all about the state
I’m not sure that can be all the story. If my friends at Princeton ran pro-Obama ads before class started, that would seem to be an abuse of authority as well, even though they aren’t state actors.

I don’t have a good story here to match my intuitions however. If an individual Princeton professor uses her position to promote Obama, she might be guilty of misusing the authority that Princeton gave her. But if Princeton as an institution decided it was supporting Obama, and explicitly authorised professors to make pro-Obama speeches before class, I would still think that’s a bad thing. Universities aren’t the kind of institutions that should be in the partisan business. But I don’t really know why I think that’s a bad thing, and maybe I’m just being too squeamish about politics here.

Are elections different to referenda?
I don’t think it’s undemocratic for the state to take sides in referenda. That is, I don’t think that the state openly supporting one side in a referendum is as undemocratic as supporting one party in an election. (This is subject to two provisos. First, the referendum can’t be a quasi-election; for instance a referendum to postpone the next due election. Second, it would be undemocratic for the state to support one side if there were legitimately passed laws saying they shouldn’t do just this. Assume those conditions are not met.)

So, assuming this is legal, it isn’t obvious to me that it would be wrong for the state of California to campaign against the referendum attempting to overturn its own marriage laws. In fact, given that the laws are morally preferable to the alternative proposed by the referendum, it might be morally wrong for the state to not campaign against it. And if the state does this, the argument above suggests that any professor who wishes should be allowed to make anti-referendum speeches in class, the way I’ve had students make pro-registration speeches.

I’m not sure I quite buy that conclusion. But my intuitions about the wrongness of taking sides on a referenda are nowhere near as strong as my intuitions about the wrongness of taking sides on an election. And the arguments here seem to support that.

But none of this is very decisive. I’d be very interested to hear everyone else’s opinion.

In the lower 48 states of the US, there are four time zones, dividing the country up into roughly equal areas from east to west. In the early years of the country pretty much all of its population lived in the two easternmost time zones, the Eastern and the Central. (Actually in the very early years there probably weren’t such things as time zones, but the people lived in what are now the Eastern and Central time zones.) Even today, if this information is correct, about 77% of the population live in those two time zones. So you might expect that the Democratic Party would have taken a fair time to have someone run on its Presidential ticket who was either born outside those time zones, or lived outside those time zones.

The first Democratic candidate (for either President or Vice-President) to be born outside the two easternmost time zones was Adlai Stevenson (1952, 1956), who was born in Los Angeles. Barring a major surprise, Barack Obama will be the second.

The first Democratic candidate (for either President or Vice-President) to be living outside those two time zones when they are nominated is, I believe, yet to be determined, because there haven’t been any yet. (If I’m wrong about this, I’ll be embarrassed, and a lot of what follows will be mistaken. But I don’t see any Westerners on this list apart from Lane, who shouldn’t really count as a Democrat[1].)

Since the two easternmost time zones extend as far as Mitchell, South Dakota, (home of George McGovern) and Mission, Texas (hometown of Lloyd Bentsen), I perhaps shouldn’t call this an east coast bias, but it is shocking just how eastern the party’s Presidential tickets have been.

In contrast, there has been someone from the Mountain or Pacific time zone on the Republican ticket in 15 of the last 21 elections, covering 9 separate candidates. So it’s not like there hasn’t been any chance to run western candidates on a national ticket.[2]

Now the Democratic party does look a lot more western nowadays than it did a while ago. Currently the speaker of the House is from the west, as was the last Democratic speaker, and as is the Senate majority leader. And the Democratic national convention this year will be in Colorado.

And obviously this geographic fact (if it is indeed a fact) about previous nominees isn’t the most interesting demographic generalisation one can make about all previous Democratic candidates for President or Vice-President. And if it is broken this year, it won’t be the most interesting generalisation to topple. But it would (ceteris paribus) be nice to see a party that has for over two centuries exclusively run whites from the eastern half of the country, not do so this time around.

Of course, in all but one case the party has exclusively run white men from the eastern half of the country. So the best candidates for breaking down demographic barriers might be Janet Napolitano or Patty Murray. But it’s hard to believe that either of them will be the candidate at this stage, with no pre-announcement hype at all. (Not that either would be bad picks, either as candidates or as Vice-Presidents.) So that leaves us with Schweitzer as the great western hope.

[1] In 1860 the ticket of Stephen Douglas (IL) and Herschel Johnson (GA) was nominated by the Democratic National Convention. But this was only after several Southern delegates had walked out of the convention. Those Southern delegates reconvened and nominated John Breckinridge and, crucially for our purposes, Joseph Lane (OR) to run. And that ticket carried several southern states, ending up second in the electoral vote. But it is hard to count that as the Democratic ticket, when there was a properly nominated Democratic ticket. More details here.

[2] The candidates are Hoover (CA-1932, 1936), McNary (OR-1940), Warren (CA-1948), Nixon (CA-1952, 1956, 1960, 1968, 1972), Goldwater (AZ-1964), Reagan (CA-1980, 1984), Cheney (WY-2000, 2004), McCain (AZ-2008). Hoover and Cheney are somewhat borderline cases, because they were each born back east, and when they ran were associated with DC as much as anywhere. But I believe in each case they can be properly identified with the state I’ve marked here. Note that Jack Kemp (1996) was born in California, but was a New York congressman, and clearly ran as a New Yorker, so he’s not on the list.

Those polls suggest that if we just look state by state at which candidate is likely to win, we see Obama and Clinton both narrowly ahead of McCain, with the differences between their performances well within any margin of error. That seems right, though by that measure I’d put Clinton a little ahead, and they put Obama ahead.

But the polls also suggest that if we look at two more important measures, Obama is (according to just this poll) a much stronger candidate. He has a higher expected electoral vote and, more importantly, a much higher win probability. Darryl at Hominid Views produced one model that suggests this, though I suspect his numbers make both Obama and Clinton look more likely to win than they really are. So below I detail a model that I think is a little more realistic. (It’s still a very stylised model, and I’d be interested in knowing from people who do this kind of modelling well what changes might be made to make it better.)

I’m only interested here in modelling what the SurveyUSA poll tells us. So even when it throws up antecedently improbable results (Obama up in North Dakota! Obama losing in New Jersey!) I’m going to take this data at face value.

The model I’m using takes McCain’s percentage lead in a given state to be a random variable whose probability distribution is given by a normal distribution with the mean being his lead in the SurveyUSA poll, and standard deviation 10. That gives the following expected electoral vote totals.

• Obama 299 – McCain 239
• Clinton 279 – McCain 259

Obama’s lead is three times Clinton’s. I then ran a Monte Carlo simulation where in each round each state’s McCain lead was calculated independently as a random draw from that distribution. (Possibly it would have made more sense to not have these be completely independent.) In those simulations, Obama beat McCain 78% of the time, and Clinton beat McCain 63% of the time. I ran 10,000 simulations, which is plenty to remove sampling error, though obviously not modelling error.

Obama’s big advantage is that he locks down more Democratic leaning states, and competes in Republican leaning states. So if we think state-by-state, Clinton looks to be as electable as Obama. But it’s not likely that everything that’s likely to happen will happen. It is very likely that there will be surprises. And if Obama’s the candidate, those surprises are more likely to be happy surprises for Democrats. With Clinton, they are more likely to be unpleasant surprises.

Update: I realise I ended this post without saying clearly what the fallacy I was referring to at the top was. It’s the fallacy of inferring from the fact that each of a bunch of things is likely to be the case that it is likely that they’ll all be the case. As I say in the last paragraph, that isn’t generally right. Given enough events, it’s likely that some of them will turn out in unlikely ways. That’s generally important to remember, even if one thinks that the best ways to model this insight are somewhat spuriously precise.

• Massachusetts (Boston)
• New Mexico (Albuquerque)
• California (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Sacramento)
• New Jersey (Trenton, Elizabeth, Bayonne, Patterson)

Note that New Mexico is the only state other than New Hampshire where Obama has lost despite leading in pre-election polling. It’s true that in New Jersey Obama was supported by some prominent local officials, including the Mayor of Newark. But my impression from talking to some people who know New Jersey well is that the vast majority of local officials (including a large number in Newark itself) were supporting Clinton.

On the other hand, Obama’s best performances, especially his best performances relative to polls, have come in states where he has some crucial endorsements. These include

• Georgia (Atlanta)
• Connecticut (New Haven)
• Virginia (Richmond, Norfolk, Alexandria, Roanoke, Charlottesville)
• D.C. (Washington)
• Maryland (Baltimore)
• Wisconsin (Milwaukee, Madison)

The only state that really doesn’t fit this pattern is Missouri, where Clinton lost badly (and crucially) in St Louis despite being endorsed by the mayor. Still, on the whole it seems like endorsements from major mayors is worth several points compared to pre-election polling.

When I first started thinking about this, I thought it would be an indicator that Clinton would start to comeback on March 4th, because she had some crucial endorsements in upcoming states, including the mayors of Philadelphia and Providence. But two things happened in the last two days that make that judgment less clear.

First, Obama was endorsed by the mayor of Cleveland. Now both Clinton (Akron, Canton, Parma, Toledo) and Obama (Cleveland, Columbus, Youngstown) have solid local support. If Obama can put up a huge win in delegate rich Cleveland, that will make it hard for Clinton to have the massive win she really needs in Ohio to get back in the game.

Second, Clinton now seems to have alienated the mayor of Providence. I assume mayoral endorsements matter not because of their persuasive powers, but because mayor’s have a GOTV machine that they can put to work on their candidate’s behalf. If Mayor Cicilline is unhappy enough to simply not work hard for Clinton, it will make Rhode Island a much closer state. Though it should be noted that Cicilline’s political opponents in Providence are, as far as I can tell, politically similar to the groups who supported Clinton heavily in Massachusetts. So maybe she’ll have enough residual support to win Rhode Island anyway, but without the game-changing margin that a huge win could have produced.

Still, combined with Obama’s endorsement by the mayor of Austin, it’s getting harder to see where Clinton is going to stage her comeback.

Lists of endorsements are largely taken from Wikipedia for Clinton and Obama, with extra help from Raising Kaine and 13th Floor.

A central tenet of his proposal is that ” No insurance companies will be allowed to discriminate because of a previous bout with cancer or some other pre-existing illness.” You literally cannot have that rule without some mechanism forcing everyone to buy in, as the healthy will stay out. … A mandate is not how you cover everyone, it’s how you force insurers to cover everyone, and discriminate against no one.

I don’t know what the force of that ‘cannot’ is supposed to be, but I know it isn’t historical impossibility. Australia for several decades did just the thing Ezra thinks that you can’t do. It had community rating of health insurance, and it didn’t have health insurance mandates. This was true of the periods 1953-1975, and again from 1981-1984. At other times it had compulsory universal basic health insurance. The system wasn’t perfect, bringing in compulsory public health insurance was a very good thing, but it wasn’t as bad as anything I’ve seen in America, and nor was it somehow an impossibility.

The argument for mandates is basically that without them you have adverse selection effects. I don’t particularly think those will be huge. In Australia we still had insurance levels of 70-80. That was with a pretty good level of public provision of emergency care, so you didn’t have to worry about needing health insurance if you were in a car wreck. And it was with a system of GPs where (at the time) the uninsured were charged about as much for a doctor’s visit as I now pay in my co-pay. Had the health options for the uninsured then in Australia been as bad as they are now in America, a huge percentage of people would have been insured. As it was, the system still more or less worked, at least compared to anything the U.S. has seen.

Even if there were adverse selection effects, it isn’t clear what the downside will be. Ezra links to this 3 page Urban Institute report that comes out for mandates, and seems to say the downsides are that we’ll need more government financing. I think anyone who thinks we’ll get a better U.S. health system without some extra government financing is basically living in a fairy tale, so I’m not at all sure why this is a problem. Perhaps mandates are supposed to be politically easier to sell than tax rises, but this seems nonsensical. Given the hideously unbalanced state of the U.S. tax system, we can quite justly have tax raises that cost the vast majority of people not one penny. It’s impossible to have health care mandates that do that.

Of course, without some form of subsidy for insurers, a few insurers will probably fail. Again, I’m not sure that this should be a problem, given the appalling state of the U.S. health insurance industry.

What’s quite irritating about this whole debate is that several writers (most notably Paul Krugman) have been insisting that Obama’s credentials as a progressive are somehow undermined because he doesn’t favour penalising people who decline to buy health insurance. I seem to recall a few years ago John Howard running on a policy of penalising people who decline to buy health insurance. We didn’t think this was a particularly progressive policy when he did it. (Though to be fair to Howard, his penalties only kicked in for people earning significantly above average earnings.) And we didn’t think it was a sign of creeping conservatism in the Labor Party that they opposed it. Quite the opposite; it was caving to Howard’s policies that was the sign of creeping conservatism. We thought, quite accurately, that what Howard was doing was trying to undermine public (i.e. universal) health insurance by propping up private (i.e. partial) health insurance. To see a candidate be smeared as a conservative for not being enough like John Howard, well it’s a bit galling.

Now some may say that there are differences between the Clinton mandate plan and the Howard mandate plan, differences that are big enough to make one plan the paradigm of progressive thought and the other a clearly anti-progressive plan. Personally I think the differences aren’t huge. Both plans let people fulfill their mandated duties by buying into a government plan. Perhaps Clinton’s government-run insurer will be preferable to Medibank Private, but we’ll have to see how that pans out. Both plans have some steps for making it affordable for low-income people. Though in this respect Howard’s plan, which didn’t apply to low-income people, was clearly preferable. Perhaps the penalties will be fairer in Clinton’s plan than Howard’s, though since Howard’s penalty was an extra 1c on the tax rate, it’s hard to imagine that Clinton will suggest a more progressive penalty. Anything not income-tied would clearly be much less progressive.

Obviously Howard was proposing this mandate in a different context to the current American system. But the Clinton/Obama debate is taking place in a different context to the current American system. Both suggest making a range of changes to health insurance, with community rating being the key. The big question is whether we should make all those changes, or make them all and fine people who don’t buy in. I think adding the fines is no better than what Howard did, and I opposed that at the time (and still do), as did many people from the left, so I oppose the Clinton mandates. I could be convinced that there are deep reasons to support the mandates, but I doubt I could be convinced that it is the lefty thing to do. That wouldn’t be John Howard’s style.

Guiliani: 0.277/0.294; 0.285/0.289; 0.220/0.224.
Romney: 0.243/0.253; 0.230/0.245; 0.296/0.305.
Huckabee: 0.106/0.121; 0.094/0.095; 0.140/0.149.
McCain: 0.200/0.212; 0.227/0.232; 0.231/0.232.
Thompson: 0.012/0.029; 0.024/0.029; 0.038/0.043.
Paul*: 0.060/0.068; 0.071/0.075; 0.058/0.065.

Note that for IEM, the Paul quote is actually a rest of field quote, so you’d expect it to be a little above the other Paul quotes not a little below. And obviously there is only so much you can gain out of the Iowa markets, since they only allow you to play with $500. But I’m still struck by this divergence between the different markets. I’m reasonably confident that if we looked around at other betting markets we’d find an even greater divergence.

And perhaps this goes without saying, but I’d think most of the good arguments for taking betting markets seriously as a predictive device make assumptions that entail there aren’t arbitrage possibilities of this size. That’s to say, whatever the potential benefits of predictive markets, there is little reason to believe they are realised in the betting markets on the Republican primary.

Assuming that whatever we are measuring can be observed only in the interval between times t_begin and t_end, if there is nothing special about t_now, we expect t_now to be located randomly in this interval.

As Monton and Kierland note, we can use this to argue that the probability that

t_future is between a and b times t_past

is 1/ ( a + 1) – 1 / ( b + 1), where t_past is the past duration of the event in question, and t_future is its future duration. Most discussion of this has focussed on the case where a = b = 39. But I think the more interesting, or at least easy to interpret, case is where a = 0 and b = 1. In this case we get the result that the probability of the entity in question lasting longer into the future than its current life-span is 1/2.

As a rule I tend to be very hostile to these attempts to get precise probabilities from very little data. I have a short argument against Gott’s Copernican formula below. (Against the general version, not for any particular values of a and b.) But first I want to try a little mockery. I’d like to know anyone who would like to take any of the following bets.

Wikipedia’s History of the Internet dates the founding of the World Wide Web to around the early 1990s, so it is 15 or so years old. Gott’s formula would say that it less than 50/50 that it will survive until around 2025. I’ll take that bet if anyone is offering.

The iPhone has been around for about 3 weeks at this time of writing. Again, Gott’s formula would suggest that it is 50/50 that it will last for more than 3 weeks from now. Again, I’ll take that bet!

Finally, it has been about 100 years since there were over 4,000,000 people on the Australian continent. I’m unlikely to be around long enough to see whether there still will be more than 4,000,000 in 100 years time, but I’m a lot more than 50/50 confident that there will be. I will most likely be around in 10 years to see whether there are more than 4,000,000 people there in 11 years time. Gott’s formula says that the probability of that is around 0.9. I’m a little more optimistic than that, to say the least.

Anyway, enough mockery, here is the argument. Consider any two plays, A and B, that have been running for x and y weeks respectively, with x > y. And consider the following three events.

E1 = Play A is running
E2 = Play B is running
E3 = Plays A and B are both running

Note that E3 has been ongoing for y, just like E2. The Copernican formula tells us that at some time z in the future, the probabilities of these three events are

Pr(E1 at z) = x / (x + z)
Pr(E2 at z) = y / (y + z)
Pr(E3 at z) = y / (y + z)

Now let’s try and work out the conditional probability that A will still be running at z, given that B is running at z. That is, Pr(E1 at z | E2 at z). It is

Pr(E1 at z & E2 at z) / Pr(E2 at z)
= Pr(E3 at z) / Pr(E2 at z)
= (y / (y + z)) / (y / (y + z))
= 1

So using the Copernican formula, we can deduce that the conditional probability of A still running at z given that B is still running at z is 1. And that’s given only the information that z is in the future, and that A has been running at B. That is, to say the least, an absurd result. So I’m sure there is something deeply mistaken with the Copernican formula.

I’m tempted to think that if you put a paper up on the web, that’s to put it in the public domain, and it’s no more appropriate to place a citation restriction on such a paper than it is on a paper published in a print journal. I’m even tempted to think that conference presentations can be freely cited; i.e.that I shouldn’t have to seek Xs permission to refer in one of my papers to the presentation X gave.

The particular issue here is what to do about papers that the author posts and says at the top “Please don’t quote or cite”. (You occasionally see ‘don’t circulate’ as well, which is a little odd.) I’m not sure how common these notes are outside philosophy, but they are pretty common on philosophy papers posted on people’s websites. Now on the one hand, there is something to be said for following people’s requests like this.

On the other hand, as Ross notes, the requests can lead to annoying situation. One kind of case is where the reader notices an important generalisation of the paper’s argument. Another case is where the conclusion of the paper supplies the missing premise in an interesting argument the reader is developing. Either way, the reader is in a bit of a bind.

I think the main thing to say about these situations is that writers shouldn’t put such requests on their papers.

When you circulate a paper, either informally or by publishing it somewhere, two kinds of good things can happen. First, good things can happen to you, either by people offering you suggestions for how to improve the paper, or increasing their opinion of you because it is such a good paper. Second, good things can happen to the profession, because your paper helps advance the field in certain ways. Given the dynamic nature of research work, that advance consists largely in improvements that we see in other papers that cite the work. Now if you circulate a paper but bar citation of it, you’re basically getting the good consequences for you, without allowing there to be good consequences for the field. (Or, at the very least, you are getting the good consequences now while delaying the good consequences for the field.) This seems, to put it mildly, unjustifiably selfish, and it’s very hard to see a moral justification for it.

It’s also hard to see what exactly the costs of being cited are. It would be annoying to have a journal publish an article critiquing yours before yours came out. But unless you are rather famous, and the paper has already become quite well known, journals aren’t going to publish such articles.

A better reason perhaps might be that if mistakes in the paper are spotted, you want the chance to fix the paper before it goes into print. But other people citing the paper doesn’t prevent that. There isn’t any obligation on you to publish the first version of a paper you post to a website. So if you say p, and someone else writes something that shows you are wrong, but you can say p’ instead which does just as well in the context of the paper, you of course can say just that. It might be a little odd for the citer if your published paper doesn’t make the mistake that they cited it for, but that’s just a risk people take when citing papers off people’s websites.

There is, as was noted in the comments thread over at Ross’s, a rather tricky scope question when someone leaves such a request. Presumably it is OK to quote/cite the paper in some forums, e.g. on an email to a friend, or while txting. In practice, few people would say that you shouldn’t quote or cite it on a blog. (That’s what blogs do, right, they cite stuff that appears on the internet.) What’s really just being ruled out is citing it in print. But it is a little odd that to think that it’s OK to cite a paper on a high-profile blog, but not in a low-profile journal. Some situations in academic life are just odd, so that’s not a reason to ignore the request. But it does make it even stranger why someone would request this.

One last thought. I didn’t understand the ‘even’ in Ross’s comment about conferences. I’ve always been under the impression that presentations at conferences are in every respect public performances. What you say there can be used to establish priority, and so it certainly should be citable. I thought this wasn’t even controversial actually, but maybe the younger generation are thinking of confernces as being something like blog posts; things that shouldn’t be mentioned in formal company.

Mr McKinnon reckons you can hardly have a reasonable expectation of privacy on a public street when every second person has a video camera or mobile phone and when Google is now using street-level maps with images of real people who have no idea they have been photographed.

I suspect we’ll see FOI campaigners (who are often attorneys for sensationalist media outlets) running this kind of argument more frequently. If that’s right, it suggests there is potentially a deeper problem with street view than just what it immediately does. It isn’t that street view arguably involves borderline privacy violations. It is rather that the existence of street view diminishes our expectations of privacy and hence, given the way privacy law works, turns what would have been clear cases of privacy violation into borderline (or non) cases.

I don’t have any clear thoughts about what the policy consequences of this might be. What I suspect we’ll have to see in the future is a move away from the ‘reasonable expectations of privacy’ standard to a more explicit list of the cases where privacy is legally protected, even though (given modern technology) people don’t expect this legal right to be upheld in practice. That would be a shame in some respects; standards like the reasonable expectations standard that are flexible and sensitive to real-world conditions generally make for better law than lists handed down from on high.

(I should add that I think the FOI campaigners are in the right over the case Moore is discussing. The person claiming to have their privacy rights violated was either involved in or standing around a fight that broke out at a taxi rank outside a nightclub. There’s neither a reasonable expectation of privacy there, nor a public policy that is served by granting privacy rights.)

I’ve been seeing a lot of references to Language Log around the web recently, particularly to their prescriptivist-bashing posts. I particularly liked this attack on the alleged rules for using less and fewer, complete with examples from King Alfred’s Latin translations. It’s an example of how academic blogs can make an impact on public life not by dumbing down their work, or by stretching to find alleged applications, but simply by setting out their work in a clear and accessible way. Or, to bring things back to a favourite theme of mine, of why academics should get credit for successful blogs not necessarily as examples of research, but as examples of service to the community. Now giving people diversions alongside summer blockbusters isn’t quite the same kind of service as solving their medical or social problems, but it is a service, and a praiseworthy one.

• There is an important and unbridgeable gulf between our notions of physical causation and our notions of psychological causation.
• Martian physicists—intelligences vast, cool, and unsympathetic with no notions of human psychology or psychological causation—could not understand why, could not put their finger on physical variables and factors explaining why, the fifty or so of us assemble in the Seaborg Room Monday at lunch time during the spring semester.

I don’t know why Campbell accepts these claims. And I certainly don’t want to accept them. But I do know of one good reason to accept them, one that worries me no end some days. The short version involves the conjunction of the following two claims.

• Understanding a phenomenon involves being able to explain it in relatively broad, but non-disjunctive, terms.
• Just what terms are non-disjunctive might not be knowable to someone who only knows what the Martian physicists know, namely the microphysics of the universe.

The long version is below the fold.

The story starts with some relatively banal observations about explanation and understanding. [1] Imagine that I throw a stone at a window, it strikes the window with momentum m, and the window breaks. Now one way to explain the window’s breaking is to say that it was struck by a stone with momentum m. But while that might be in some sense a complete explanation of the breaking, there are other explanations that promote greater understanding. This explanation doesn’t make explicit the salient fact that the window’s shattering was not particularly dependent on the precise momentum of the projectile, or that the projectile was a stone. Someone who explains the breaking in terms of it being struck with a projectile of momentum between m1 and m2, where these are the rough limits for what is (a) sufficient to shatter the window and (b) plausible given that I threw the projectile, seems to have a better explanation of the shattering, and a greater understanding of why the window shattered.

It’s tempting to conclude at this stage that if one explanation explains an event in terms of some particular being F, and another explains it in terms of that particular being G, where being F entails being G but not vice versa, then the second explanation provides a deeper understanding of what happens. In short, broader explanations (explanations that are made true in more ways) are better. But that principle seems to have clear counterexamples. Imagine a third ‘explanation’ that says the window broke because it was either struck with a projectile of momentum between m1 and m2, or struck by a window-breaking spell. This explanation is even broader than the two previous, since the truth of the explanans is entailed by, but does not entail, the truth of the explanans in the previous cases. But it is, intuitively, a worse explanation than what came before. It certainly doesn’t provide a deeper understanding. Indeed, someone who offers this ‘explanation’ has very little understanding of why the window broke.

Still, it seems a qualified principle might work. Broader explanations are better as long as the terms they use are not disjunctive. The idea that some terms are disjunctive and others aren’t goes back at least to Goodman’s Fact, Fiction and Forecast. Goodman famously defined up a new term grue. Something is grue, I’ll say, iff it is green and observed or blue and unobserved. As Goodman noted, observing lots of emeralds and seeing they are all grue provides us with no reason to think the next emerald we see will be grue. This kind of simple induction doesn’t work when dealing with terms like ‘grue’. Various authors, most importantly David Lewis have argued that the distinction Goodman pointed towards, between disjunctive terms like ‘grue’ and non-disjunctive terms like ‘green’, has many implications for across philosophy. Following tradition, I’ll call the ‘grue’-like terms gruesome, and ‘green’-like terms natural. (And I’ll often suppress the fact that the difference between gruesomeness and naturalness is a matter of degree, as there are a spectrum of cases in the middle.)

So what we want for understanding, I think, are explanations that are as broad as possible but not involving gruesome terms. Or perhaps explanations that strike the best balance between breadth and gruesomeness. I’ve only ‘argued’ for that by a single case, but the principle seems pretty plausible to me. At least it’s plausible enough to be the first half of my reason for believing a position like Campbell’s.

Now the relatively difficult part. It’s easy enough when talking about toy physical explanations to say what are natural and gruesome terms. It is, to say the least, somewhat harder to do the same thing in special sciences. Is the term ‘seasonally adjusted fall in sales’ natural or gruesome? By the standards some philosophers use, it is pretty gruesome because it is explicitly defined relative to calendar dates. (After Goodman’s work it wasn’t too hard to find philosophers saying this was a tell-tale sign of the gruesome.) But there are very good explanations that make use of terms like this. For a simpler case, is ‘weekday’ a natural or gruesome term? Again, it looks pretty gruesome from the perspective of micro-physics. But it is hard to explain/predict/understand traffic patterns without talking about weekdays and weekends. Progress here is not going to be easy.

David Lewis proposed that how gruesome a term is could be a function of the shortest definition of that term in terms of fundamental physics. But that also looks to rule out most special science explanations out of court pre-emptively. We have no idea how to define, say, a rise in demand for widgets in terms of micro-physics, but I bet that any such definition will be immensely complicated. So complicated that if we took Lewis’s idea seriously, we’d say that explanations of anything in terms of rising demand for widgets would be impossibly gruesome. But such explanations can be perfectly good. So Lewis’s idea fails.

The problem is that no one seems to have a better idea. One constraint on an answer is that we can’t use the contents of mental states in the answer, because there is good reason to think that the naturalness of various terms is part of what makes our mental states have the content that they have. (Again, see Lewis for the arguments for this.) The best answer I know of that doesn’t appeal to beliefs, intentions etc of humans is Lewis’s answer in terms of definition length. And that’s a non-starter I think.

So no one really knows how to answer, or even to make much of a start on answering, the following two questions.

• What makes a term natural rather than gruesome?
• How could one know that various terms, from biology, psychology, anthropology, economics, etc, are natural rather than gruesome? (In particular, could one infer the naturalness of various terms from a micro-physical description of the world?)

The two questions might be related. If there is an answer to the first question that relates the naturalness of special sciences to facts about micro-physics in some relatively straightforward (or at least Turing computable) way, then one way to know what’s natural and what’s gruesome would be to find out all the micro-physical facts, and then do the relevant computation. (That is, the answer to the parenthetical question is yes.) But we don’t know whether such a metaphysical story is true.

What we do know is that we didn’t find out that terms such as ‘cell’, ‘belief’, ‘society’ or ‘demand’ are (relatively) natural by their relation to micro-physics. One somewhat troubling (to reductionists like me) prospect is that the only ways to find out the naturalness of these predicates is something like the way we found out that they are natural. (Not that we know what that way is either.) And if that’s right, it’s possible that the Martian physicists can’t tell the natural from the gruesome terms in biology, psychology, anthropology, economics, etc.

If that’s all correct, then I think there’s a pretty good sense in which the Martian physicists won’t understand human behaviour. (Or, for that matter, the behaviour of all sorts of complex systems. The particular kind of way that human brains are complex might not be doing very much work in this argument.) They might know all sorts of counterfactuals saying that if certain objects were different in certain ways, then certain events would not have come about. But knowledge of such counterfactuals only consistitutes understanding if the ways in question are relatively natural. Remember, someone who takes the best explanation of the window’s breaking to be that it was either struck by a projectile with momentum m or a spell doesn’t really understand why the window broke. And that’s the case even though had the window not been struck by a projectile with momentum m or a spell, it wouldn’t have broken.

I think there’s a case to be made that, for all we now know, the Martian physicists will be in an analogous position with respect to understanding/explaining our behaviour. And that’s why I think, or at least worry, that Campbell’s position might be true. And it’s one of several reasons I worry about us lacking any story about what makes special science terms non-natural.

fn1. Banal these may be, but I wouldn’t have learned of them if not for discussions with Michael Strevens. Many of the important points relevant to this post are discussed in this paper (PDF), especially in section 5. Michael has a book on explanation coming out some time in the near future which I very highly recommend.

It’s probably futile to say which of these is the greatest. But I think on the list should be the series that starts in a few hours.

When I was growing up I heard stories about schoolboys listening on small radios in all hours of the night to the exploits of Bradman as he walloped Englishmen on the other side of the world. The technology needed to get a (internet) radio broadcast to upstate New York from half a world a way is a little more complicated, and a laptop computer can’t be placed as snugly by a bed as a crystal set radio can, but the effect might be much the same. There’s some chance we’ll be able to get internet video of the games, but I’m rather sceptical of the quality of the pictures we’ll get. In any case, it’s hard to imagine spending 25 days cramped in front of a computer screen watching the pictures when there’s work to be done. So there’ll be a lot of cricket on the radio for the next few weeks.

This could be the last hurrah for a lot of great Australian cricketers. In terms of team success, probably the greatest of the bunch has been Glenn McGrath. Perhaps it is just because he’s been injured at the ‘right’ time, but he’s managed to avoid playing in many losing causes. More precisely, it’s been 2 years since he was last on a losing Test team (in Chennai in Nov 2004), 5 years since he was last on a team that lost a Test match before the series was decided (in Mumbai in March 2001), and 10 years since he was on a team that lost such a Test match in Australia (the Boxing Day Test in Melbourne against the West Indies in 1996). (I think I checked all the relevant Tests for that last sentence, but I could be mistaken.) Now I’ll be happily surprised if those streaks manage to survive this summer. And of course McGrath was on the team that drew when it needed a win at The Oval last year. But while they last the streaks deserve recognition as quite remarkable stats. How many top level sports figures can say that his team haven’t lost a home game they needed to win (or even potentially needed to win) for 10 years?

This could well be McGrath’s last Test series, and he will be deeply missed. I can’t imagine I’ll ever see again another bowling combination at all like Warne and McGrath. And I hope we get to see McGrath continue to be involved with the game in some way. His intelligence and wit would make a pleasant change from much of what passes for cricket commentary in Australia.

If you read newspapers, blogs, message boards etc about the series, the sense seems to be that Australia is favoured, but it will be a close contest. If you instead pay attention just to the betting markets, no such sense of closeness arises. Australia is a short-priced favourite to win back the Ashes (about $1.20 for a $1 investment), with the most favoured series outcome being a 4-0 demolition.

I suspect I’ll regret this, but my prediction is that the markets are indeed wise in this occasion. Australia were dominant at home long before they were dominant abroad, and I suspect they will stay dominant at home long after they cease being dominant abroad. And with Hussey in the side, and MacGill sure to be included for several games, the Australian team selection looks sounder than it has in a long time. But I think the markets are wrong to price in a draw; there just isn’t enough rain around these days to stop these matches going the distance, and I think both teams right now are better at bowling than batting. So I’ll say 4-1 to Australia.

If there’s one omen that looks good for England, it’s that this series seems to resemble none so much as the 2003-04 India tour. In that case the guests had recently beaten Australia in a close fought, and fantastically played, series abroad. One of Australia’s all time greats, Steve Waugh, was retiring and wanted to go out with a win. But dull pitches and duller bowling, combined with some astounding batting by the visitors led them to get a drawn series. (And if there was to be a winner of that series, it was more likely to be the visitors.) Could the same happen here? Well, in that series Australia had neither McGrath nor Warne. This time they have them both. And as good as the English batsmen are, they don’t exactly conjure up the same fear as a lineup containing Dravid, Laxman, Tendulkar, Ganguly and Sehwag. Here’s hoping that’s enough of a difference.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

The wikipedia page has a link to a high resolution image of the Declaration, in case one wants to verify that the rather odd punctuation around the second sentence is correct.

Here is the question: Which truths is Jefferson saying are self-evident?

Clearly at least two. (Of course, if it were one he would have said ‘this’ not ‘these’.) First, that all men are created equal. Second, that they are endowed with certain rights. But are there any more? That I think is a slightly tricky question.

Put another way, is the next claim Jefferson makes (1) or (2)?

(1) To secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
(2) It is a self-evident truth that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

It might seem that if Jefferson had meant to say (2), then he would have continued the sentence, rather than putting a full stop after ‘Happiness’.

On the other hand, if he had meant to say (1), then it isn’t clear why he would have started the sentence with ‘That’. That’s the kind of start that would be appropriate if Jefferson were continuing a list of propositions that are self-evident truths. The third sentence, where we have clearly left the realm of self-evidence (as noted by the fact that Jefferson starts appealing to something else, prudence) does not start this way, and does not look like the continuation of a list. Possibly the long dash before the sentence is also meant to indicate the continuation of a list, but (as may be obvious) I don’t know enough about 18th Century English to know just what that conventionally indicated.

Back on the first hand, (1) is a somewhat plausible claim, while (2) seems pretty implausible. It is a tricky question just what gives governments their legitimacy. Consent of the governed is one plausible answer, but it is hardly self-evident that it is the only correct answer. Similarly, it is hardly self-evident that there is a right to revolution of just the kind mentioned in the next clause, but if we interpret the sentence as a continuation of a list of self-evident truths, then that’s what we have to attribute to Jefferson. (And I’m ignoring the wild implausibility of the descriptive claim that governments are established to secure these rights. It is very odd to think this could be self-evident.)

If I had to guess, I’d take the last reason to be decisive and say that the only truths Jefferson is asserting to be self-evident are the moral equality principle and the inalienable rights principle. But I’d be interested in knowing whether there is a good reason to think he is claiming something stronger, such as (2).