Chris Bertram

Some sort of mad puritanism seems to be afflicting parts of the blogosphere. Oliver Kamm (in “comments to Harry Hatchet”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2003/10/08/life_liberty_and_the_pursuit_of_.php , then “Natalie Solent”:http://nataliesolent.blogspot.com/2003_10_05_nataliesolent_archive.html#106560737553616022 and “Stephen Pollard”:http://www.stephenpollard.net/001203.html have been dogmatically asserting that government should limit itself to the provision of public goods, the assurance of basic rights and to treating citizens justly (though they disagree on what that means). Compassion, according to them, is a virtue (if it is a virtue) that should be exercised by individuals in a private capacity and not by government. But that just looks far too austere.

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Poor IDS. The Tory party conference (like “the Women’s World Cup”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000637.html ) has been entirely overshadowed in the British media by the ongoing slimefest that is the English Premier League. Following a mass brawl at the end of a recent Arsenal-Manchester United game, we’ve now been treated to two separate sexual assault allegations (one a gang rape involving players from at least two clubs), various petty acts of violence and verbal abuse, and finally, a leading club allowing one of its players to “forget” to take the drug test he was selected for shortly before. The refusal of the Football Association to select the player for England with investigations pending has led to England players (led by the player’s mates from the same team) to threaten to refuse to play against Turkey. Meanwhile, there have been hints that the England manager has abused his position to tout for a club owned by a Russian oligarch.

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No, it can’t be! I thought … and it wasn’t. “Some other bloke”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3172538.stm .

From the “Guardian’s profile”:http://politics.guardian.co.uk/conservatives/story/0,9061,1057511,00.html today of Tory Shadow Home Secretary Oliver Letwin:

bq. On his extensive office bookshelves there are enough volumes of Socrates … to suggest he is someone who thinks about politics using rare quantities of abstract nouns.

Shome mishtake surely? (Thanks to John Kozak in comments to an item below for the heads-up.)

Suppose there are two possible states of the world, S1 and S2, and we don’t know which of the two states the world is in. An event E occurs which is consistent with the world being in either S1 or S2, but is more likely in S1 than it is in S2. We should surely say that, given E, the world is more likely to be in S1 than in S2, and that _to that extent_ E (though consistent with both possible states) is evidence for the world’s being in S1.

Such evidence isn’t, of course, conclusive. After all, by hypothesis, E is _consistent_ with both possible states. But evidence doesn’t need to be conclusive evidence to count as evidence.

That sensible view of what evidence is “doesn’t appear to be shared by new enviroblogger Professor Philip Stott”:http://greenspin.blogspot.com/2003_10_01_greenspin_archive.html#106545283636725804 , whom I welcome to the blogosphere in the traditional way – by arguing with him.

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Since so much of the blogospherical comment on media coverage of the Iraq war has focused on the BBC (sometimes justifiably, sometimes not), I was interested to read “this Asia Times report”:http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EJ04Ak01.html (via “Brian Leiter”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/bleiter/ ) which tells us that there is a strong correlation between getting your news from Rupert Murdoch’s Fox and having false beliefs about the war. That doesn’t show, of course, that people got their false beliefs from watching Fox, another possibility is that having a lots of false beliefs just predisposes people to tune into that channel. Here’s the end of the article:

bq. The study also debunked the notion that misperceptions were due mainly to the lack of exposure to news.

bq. Among Bush supporters, those who said they follow the news “very closely”, were found more likely to hold misperceptions. Those Bush supporters, on the other hand, who say they follow the news “somewhat closely” or “not closely at all” held fewer misperceptions.

bq. Conversely, those Democratic supporters who said they did not follow the news very closely were found to be twice as likely to hold misperceptions as those who said they did, according to PIPA.

I tuned into the BBC’s Panorama last night, which consisted of an investigation into Camp Delta at Guantanamo and also the conditions under which detainees are held in Afghanistan itself. Whilst Panorama can be a sensationalist programme with a definite agenda, the specific allegations made can’t easily be wished away or dismissed as biased or malicious. Many of these are familiar to people, but I was sufficiently engaged by the broadcast to want to rehearse them here. I’m going from my memory of the programme, so I may have missed some details. The points raised included:

bq. That numbers of people have been detained in Guantanamo after being denounced by their enemies and business rivals as a means of settling petty scores. (When the baselessness of the charges against them became clear, they were simply dumped back in Afghanistan to pick up their lives as best they could.)

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Via the British philosophers listserv comes notice of a “Capitalism and Philosophy Lab” on the theme of “Libidinal Economics”. The programme is as follows:

bq. Mark Fisher will discuss Baudrillard’s “Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign”.
Nick Midgely will discuss Klossowski’s “Living Currency”
Luciana Parisi will discuss abstract sex and viral trading.

Commenters are invited to speculate (or even to write authoritatively) on the possible content of the third paper.

A Guardian “profile of Al Franken”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1054951,00.html , comedian author of “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0525947647/junius-20 has this

bq. “Well, probably the people taken most seriously down the ages have not been satirists,” Franken concedes. “Marx – there wasn’t much funny in Marx, I don’t think. John Stuart Mill? Not a laugh. Hobbes? Humourless.

False, false, false, I’d say. (Actually, come to think of it false, true, false – though if anyone _can_ find an intentionally funny passage in Mill, I’ll take that back.) Marx’s humour is mainly of the dry and sarcastic kind. His wit and erudition saturates just about every page of Capital – A good example would be the end of vol. 1, ch. 6 on “The sale and purchase of labour power” (but as Glenn Reynolds likes to say say — “read the whole thing”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140445684/junius-20 ). As for Hobbes, I’d recommend the side-splitting final pages of “Leviathan”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140431950/junius-20 ch. XLVII, “Of the BENEFIT that proceedeth from such Darknesse, and to whom it accreweth” where Hobbes compares the church of Rome to the Kingdome of Fairies.

Hysterical use of language alert: “Rachel Cooper in the Spectator”:http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php3?table=old&section=current&issue=2003-10-04&id=3575 , reacting to the suggestion that British universities admit student from rough state schools with lower A-level scores than their peers from expensive private schools:

bq. Professor Schwartz is happily preparing the ground for a pogrom of the privileged children whose successful grades are the product not only of their hard work and ability, but also the school they attended.

Those pogroms aren’t what they used to be you know.

“Glenn Reynolds deplores”:http://www.instapundit.com/archives/011754.php :

bq. the excessive gleefulness and point-scoring of the anti-Bush bloggers in general on this topic, [which] only serves to make this matter look more political, and less serious, than it perhaps is.

I’d just like to endorse that sentiment, and look forward to the bright future of Instapundit, freed from all that excessive gleefulness and point-scoring on serious matters.

There’s “an interesting communication on Brian Leiter’s site about the price of the notoriously expensive philosophy journal Synthese”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/000311.html#000311 . The incapacity of academics for any kind of concerted collective action has long been demonstrated by the failure of university libraries to organized a boycott of Kluwer (publishers of Synthese and a number of other overpriced journals). [Update: See also “Brian Weatherson’s site”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/tar/Archives/002184.html and Leiter’s comment there.] But I wanted to comment on this paragraph in order to report something I heard in Belgium last year:

bq. With respect to the institutional pricing, things aren’t quite as simple or as bad as the raw number implies. The way things stand now, the number of paper subscriptions from institutions is slowly decreasing. However, the number of libraries buying electronic subscriptions to a bundle of journals (including Synthese) now outnumbers those subscribing to the paper copy. As libraries stop renewing their paper copy, they have tended to shift to the online version as part of an arrangement where they subscribe to all or a selection of the Kluwer journals. Consequently, the price that libraries pay for the e-version of Synthese is considerably less than €/$1652. I can’t give you a precise figure because the price varies depending on the arrangement that libraries or consortia of libraries make with Kluwer. Chances are, if your library now carries the print version of Synthese, they will soon within the next few years and will adopt it in electronic form as part of an electronic bundle of journals instead.

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One of the claims that features in the “Legrain piece I mention below”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000586.html is that US-European comparative growth rates give a misleading picture of the relative health of the two economic zones because US population is growing fast (more mouths to feed from that greater output) whereas European population is static. Of course the low population growth in Europe can be looked at the other way: as evidence of Eurosclerosis and the harbinger of a massive pensions-and-health crisis. Now I’ve always been a bit puzzled by the differential demographics. After all, the career pressures are perhaps greater in the US, there’s probably less in the way of subsidized childcare, and access to birth control is similar in both areas. So having children is pretty much elective in both zones and the individual cost-benefit calcultation is probably more favourable to having children in Europe than the US. So I’d predict, if I were just coming at things _a priori_ , a lower birthrate in America than in Europe.

Obviously that’s not what’s happening. So why not? And who is having the kids? After all, the dynamic America/sclerotic Europe claims are usually made by looking at the aggregate statistics. But if middle-class, educated Europeans and middle-class, educated Americans are behaving similarly to one another, but the “excess” children in the US are all being born to impoverished single parents in trailer parks, the aggregate figures may be less favourable to the US. So how do the figures actually break down, by income group, immigrant/non-immigrant, and so on? I’ve no idea what the answer is, and my googling skills haven’t helped here: but maybe someone else does.

Via the “very interesting blog of Dr Anthony Cox”:http://www.blacktriangle.org/ , I see that Gerd Gigerenzer has “a paper on risk”:http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/327/7417/741 in the British Medical Journal. Doctors, it seems, are alarmingly ignorant about statistics:

bq. The science fiction writer H G Wells predicted that in modern technological societies statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write. How far have we got, a hundred or so years later? A glance at the literature shows a shocking lack of statistical understanding of the outcomes of modern technologies, from standard screening tests for HIV infection to DNA evidence. For instance, doctors with an average of 14 years of professional experience were asked to imagine using the Haemoccult test to screen for colorectal cancer. The prevalence of cancer was 0.3%, the sensitivity of the test was 50%, and the false positive rate was 3%. The doctors were asked: what is the probability that someone who tests positive actually has colorectal cancer? The correct answer is about 5%. However, the doctors’ answers ranged from 1% to 99%, with about half of them estimating the probability as 50% (the sensitivity) or 47% (sensitivity minus false positive rate). If patients knew about this degree of variability and statistical innumeracy they would be justly alarmed.