Henry

Kevin Drum takes a break from politics-blogging to opine on the new series of _Survivor_. It’s shaping up to be more fun than last season, because there are new – and unpredictable – rules; Kevin suggests that the show’s designers ought to make the rules more unpredictable still.

bq. The appeal of the show is in the human interaction. How do you keep from being voted off? How do you make and break alliances? Who gets betrayed this week? That’s where they need to throw in a few curveballs. The contestants need to learn that the standard way of forming alliances and screwing competitors is subject to change.

He’s probably right – although one of the fun things about _Survivor_ is that there has usually been a high level of unpredictability, even under stable rules. Last season’s show was the very dull exception that proved the rule – the producers threw together tribes in such a way as to generate stable, gender-based cooperation for most of the game. They later made a rather desperate _post-hoc_ attempt to mix things up and weaken alliances, but it didn’t work very well. This season, they’ve deliberately generated tribes in a way that mixes up the sexes.

Anyway, I talked about some of these issues at greater length in a long post on my old blog about the applicability of sociology and game theory to _Survivor_ a couple of years ago. I reproduce it below the fold, if anyone’s interested.

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I don’t know if we have any readers who don’t also read Fafblog; if there are any out there, they should check out his intervention in the recent blogospheric debate on treason.

bq. Treason isn’t just providin aid an comfort to the enemy. It’s providin not-aid an discomfort to America. Treason is hurting America’s feelings.

bq. Now you may think “oh well Fafnir America’s a big country it can take care a itself” but in fact it is very sensitive. When you say its mom’s ugly or criticize its foreign policy or kick sand on its face at the beach it is just as hurt as if you’d sold its state secrets. Like every emotional young superpower America needs love and care from its citizens. We’ve put together a brief guide to treason so you can understand it a little better.

bq. Q: Which of the following is treason?
1. Not wishing the President a happy birthday even when he is clearly wearing a party hat and a “Kiss The Birthday Boy” shirt
2. Questioning the progress, purpose, or justification of the Iraq war
3. Providing material aid to a hostile enemy of the United States
4. Telling America “Hey America yo mama’s so fat by the time she bends over it’s Daylight Savings Time.”

bq. Answer: All of them are treason but number four is the worst treason of all on account of America is real sensitive about the fatness of its mama.

Some interesting news just in from Ireland. Observers of Northern Ireland politics may remember the massive bank raid last December, where the thieves netted UKP 26.5 million. The dogs in the street knew that the IRA were responsible, but when the UK and Irish governments, as well as the body charged with monitoring the ceasefire said as much, they were met with vociferous and indignant denials from both the IRA itself, and from Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political wing. Now, Irish police have arrested seven men who appear to have been in possession of large quantities of Northern Ireland banknotes; it appears that those arrested include two Sinn Fein members, one of whom is a former elected representative. As the leader of the Irish Labour party, Pat Rabbitte has noted in a statement:

bq. even at an early stage, it appeared that today’s events were particularly significant in the context of the Northern Bank robbery and subsequent denials by IRA and Sinn Féin.

At this stage, one hesitates to make any definitive pronouncements – the possibility exists that these jokers had a perfectly legitimate reason to be carting around UKP 2.3 million in Northern Ireland and British banknotes. But if it does indeed turn out that this is some of the missing cash, it puts Sinn Fein in an extremely awkward position. Everybody knows quite well that they’ve been lying through their teeth about IRA involvement in the bank raid – but there hasn’t been any smoking gun evidence that would put the lie to them. It’s clear to even a casual observer that the IRA and Sinn Fein are organically linked, and there’s very strong reason to suspect that Sinn Fein’s electoral successes in the Republic have been bankrolled in part by the proceeds of crime in the North. This has been having an extremely damaging effect on democratic politics in the Republic. It’s long past time for Sinn Fein to decide whether it’s a normal political party in a democratic system or the political wing of a particularly nasty private army that even during its supposed ceasefire has consistently demonstrated its keenness to maim and cripple innocents.

If the US government is willing, it has a very easy means of signalling how drastically Sinn Fein/IRA’s political options have narrowed. The annual St. Patrick’s Day parties at the White House have been an integral part of the peace process. When Sinn Fein leaders started getting invites as well as democratic politicians, it signalled the US government’s willingness to underwrite Sinn Fein’s role in the negotiations, and any subsequent political arrangements. The gossip around Washington has been that the entire occasion is going to be cancelled this year because the US government doesn’t want to meet and greet terrorists – but also doesn’t want to single them out for disfavor for fear of offending Sinn Fein’s friends on Capitol Hill. If the government wants to send out the right signals it should go ahead and hold the function – but invite only representatives of those political parties that are committed exclusively to democratic politics. This may sound like diplomatic niceties – but it would send a quite powerful signal, and, I suspect, have a substantial chastening effect on a group of people who are in sore need of chastening.

The _Boston Review_ has a fascinating debate on the future of American foreign policy, with a long lead essay by Stephen Walt, and responses from Richard Falk, Joseph Nye, Ivo Daalder, Mary Kaldor and Ann-Marie Slaughter among others. The Walt piece is on-line; the others are only available in the print edition at the moment (but if you enjoy CT, you should subscribe to the _Review_; you’ll almost certainly like it, and it’s a cheap read). I suspect that he’s going to get most flak for his bald statement that it is not in the national interest of the US to offer unconditional support to Israel, but the most interesting bit of the essay, to my mind, was his discussion of non-proliferation policy. Walt is a realist – perhaps one of the three or four most prominent IR realists out there – and he’s calling for the US to give up most of its nuclear weapons in order better to encourage other states to sign up to a revamped version of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

bq. If the United States is serious about reducing the dangers of nuclear terrorism (and it should be), then it must offer the rest of the world a “grand bargain.” In exchange for a more reliable nonproliferation regime (accompanied by an aggressive effort to secure existing stockpiles of loose nuclear materials) and the verifiable abandonment of nuclear ambitions by countries like Iran and North Korea, the United States would simultaneously agree to 1) abandon current plans to build a new generation of nuclear weapons, 2) significantly reduce its own nuclear arsenal (while retaining a few hundred warheads as a deterrent against direct attacks on the United States), and 3) take concrete steps to reduce the threat that it presents to so-called rogue states, including a willingness to sign some sort of nonaggression agreement with them.

This seems to me to be a thoroughly sensible set of arguments – but I’m rather surprised to find a realist advocating them. I’m even more surprised to find that I agree more with Walt’s essay than with the replies of some of his more ‘liberal’ critics such as Slaughter and Daalder (but then Walt, unlike Slaughter and Daalder, got it right on Iraq). Anyway, it’s a fascinating essay – anyone who’s interested in these debates should definitely give it a read.

NB – as per my usual policy, comments relating to Israel or Palestine will be expunged, to prevent the comment section degenerating into a flame-fest.

I’ve just seen that we’re through to the final stages of the “Best Group Blog” category of the Koufax awards. As Dan observed at an earlier stage of this process, CT has a sorry enough history in these awards.

bq. Oh god, it’s the same every year. We get nominated as “Best Group Blog”, which means “Maybe about Ninth Or Tenth Best Blog On A Good Day, But There’s A Group Blog Category So We’ll Nominate Them In That”. And then we lose.

If you want to show Dan that he’s talking smack for once, exercise your democratic rights, and head over there and vote for us (while you’re at it, consider giving the nod to Belle’s classic and a pony , which is up for the best humorous post). If any further reason is needed, we’ve already gotten endorsements from Fafnir and the Medium Lobster (although Giblets has apparently decided in a fit of pique to vote for Obsidian Wings instead).

Update: Looks like the awards site is down (I suspect due to bandwidth limits) – will update this again when it reappears.

Update 2: Site back up.

Whenever anyone raises the possibility that resource shortages may have serious social consequences in public, they’re almost certain to run into flak from someone citing Julian Simon’s bet with Paul Ehrlich on metal prices. Thus, Jim Henley, in response to my previous post on Gregg Easterbrook and Jared Diamond says:

bq. Right-leaning technophiles adopt this posture because, in our experience, scientific (or scientistic) pessimism has proven itself repeatedly, embarassingly wrong, from Malthus to Paul Ehrlich to the Club of Rome. We saw Julian Simon win the Great Dispute of the 1970s, and are inclined to think the Julian Simons of today and tomorrow will win their own disputes.

But what I suspect Jim doesn’t know (and what I didn’t know until I read it yesterday in Jared Diamond’s Collapse), is why Simon was quite so confident that metal shortages weren’t a problem. Over to Diamond:

bq. There is an abundance of errors of the latter sort (anti-environmentalist predictions that have proved wrong): e.g. overly optimistic predictions that the Green Revolution would already have solved the world’s hunger problems; the prediction of the economist Julian Simon that we could feed the world’s population as it continues to grow for the next 7 billion years; and Simon’s prediction “Copper can be made from other elements” and thus there is no risk of a copper shortage.

Now Diamond himself exaggerates a little when he says one page later that copper cannot be made from other elements by definition, because it itself is an element. More precisely, we could make industrial quantities of copper from other elements if we had the power and the inclination to whizz around the universe creating supernovas. Quite why we would want to create more copper if we had these superpowers is a question that I’ll leave to our readers’ ingenuity and imagination.

Simon’s prediction is far and away the most impressive example that I’ve ever seen of lunatic technological optimism in support of a transparent political agenda. I don’t think that even the boyos over at Flack Central Station would have the chutzpah to make this claim; Easterbrook’s belief that we don’t have to worry about material shortages because we can spread across the galaxy is strictly minor league stuff in comparison. More seriously, Diamond makes a strong case that a qualified scientific pessimism (along with a qualified optimism about the ability of human beings to respond to environmental problems and resource limits) is the appropriate attitude to take. Otherwise, we face a very serious risk of environmental collapse – not the end of humanity, but some very serious problems all the same. Jim should read Diamond’s book (we live quite near each other; I’m happy to lend him my copy) – while I doubt that it would convert him, I do think that it would give him some serious food for thought.

Carl Zimmer has a nice piece on the voracity of star-nosed moles in the NYT today. But am I the only one to think they look like escapees from the Cthulhu mythos? If I found one poking its snout up through my lawn, I’d be distinctly unnerved …

Update: by popular demand, I’ve moved the disturbing cthonic entity beneath the fold. Here’s an old kitten photo instead (Aoife is now 2 years older and 7 pounds tubbier than she was then).

!http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~farrell/aoife.jpg!

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Via Cliopatria, Thomas Brown, an assistant professor of sociology at Lamar University, has posted an essay that accuses Ward Churchill of having committed fraud in his research. I know nothing about the historical issues at stake, so can’t comment on the truth of the allegations – however, if the accusations have merit, they transform the case from one of free speech and academic freedom, to one of whether or not Churchill has lived up to the minimal standards required of a tenured academic.

Also, see this Timothy Burke essay which responds gracefully to my (and apparently others’) criticism of his lumping Glenn Reynolds and Ward Churchill in together.

Update: Inside Higher Ed has a follow-up story, with some interesting quotes from people on both sides of this issue.

Alex Tabarrok protests too much in response to John Q.’s post on the Lomborg ranking exercise.

bq. Thus, believe it or not, the new theory of how Lomborg rigged the climate change study is that he chose someone to write the global climate change chapter who was too strong an proponent of its importance! Give me a break.

Alex may sneer, but this is exactly what at least one, and possibly two of the members of the Lomborg panel suggest, according to the Economist

bq. Thomas Schelling of the University of Maryland, who voted on the final choices, thinks that presenting climate change at the bottom of the list as “bad” is misleading. He says he and the other gurus did not like Kyoto or the aggressive proposals made by Dr Cline, whom he sees as the “most alarmist of the serious climate policy experts”, but Dr Schelling says he would have ranked modest climate proposals higher on the list, because he sees climate as a real problem. Robert Mendelsohn, a conservative Yale economist who was an official “critic” of the climate paper in this process, goes further: because Dr Cline’s positions are “well out of the mainstream”, he had no choice but to reject them. He worries that “climate change was set up to fail.”

This is strong language for academics – Mendelsohn is saying that Lomborg may have tried to predetermine the outcome by ensuring that the climate change choice was unpalatable to all the panelists. Nor does this invalidate John’s previous argument that the panelists as well as the choices on offer were selected in order to conduct towards this outcome – a different group of economists might well have preferred even the more radical climate change option that was on offer. I’m not sure what the point is to Tabarrok’s surly and ungracious post. If he doesn’t believe that choices between several options can be fixed so that individuals go for the one rather than the other, he only needs to find out a little more about the gentle art of push-polling. If he’d like a slightly more rigorous discussion, I refer him to William Riker’s work on heresthetics. If he doesn’t believe that there’s some serious reason to suspect that this is what happened here, he should re-read Schelling’s and Mendelsohn’s descriptions of the process, as quoted in the Economist. There’s nothing here that’s exactly difficult to get.

David Brooks has another op-ed expressing the emerging right-wing wisdom that Dean’s chairmanship of the DNC shows that the lunatics have taken over the asylum of the Democratic party. In Brooks’ account:

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Ernst Mayr has died. The NYT has an obit describing him as a giant of the field, but also strongly hinting that he was a bit of a controversialist (I’m not a biologist, so I don’t feel competent to judge the truth or untruth of that assessment).

Stephen Bainbridge steps in for the right, and says that basic principles of free speech and academic freedom mean that Ward Churchill shouldn’t lose his job. I think he’s right; but I also think that there is something to Timothy Burke's argument that Churchill shouldn’t have been invited to speak at Hamilton in the first place (the two positions are of course not contradictory). Not because of his extreme opinions – but because he seems to be neither a good nor thoughtful academic.

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Are leftwing academics really responsible for the events of September 11? My post below on Robert Conquest attracted two outraged responses from ‘Armed Liberal’ at the popular pro-war blog, Winds of Change suggesting that indeed they are. In his more recent post, AL seems to be retreating rapidly from his forthright factual assertion of yesterday that

bq. The 9/11 hijackers found their ideological center in European universities, and took up a philosophy rooted in Western leftist thought there.

while leaving in his wake a rapidly-expanding ink-cloud of “equally interesting to note”s, “wonder if”s, “worthwhile effort to discuss and explore”s and “may have something to do with it”s. Still, even now, AL is trying to insinuate that anti-Western Nihilist academics in European universities somehow turned Arab students into terrorists, without providing either facts or testable arguments to support his case. Which is probably a good thing for him, as the facts indicate that he’s completely wrong. Marc Sageman, who has actually done some real research on this topic, has the goods. In his network analysis of 400 terrorist biographies, he found that:

bq. Al Qaeda’s members are not the Palestinian fourteen-year- olds we see on the news, but join the jihad at the average age of 26. Three-quarters were professionals or semi- professionals. They are engineers, architects, and civil engineers, mostly scientists. Very few humanities are represented, and quite surprisingly very few had any background in religion. The natural sciences predominate. Bin Laden himself is a civil engineer, Zawahiri is a physician, Mohammed Atta was, of course, an architect; and a few members are military, such as Mohammed Ibrahim Makawi, who is supposedly the head of the military committee.

This is exactly the opposite of what you would expect to find if exposure to leftists in the humanities and social sciences caused people to become terrorists. Unless AL wants to make the case that those notorious humanist Nihilists at engineering schools, computer science departments and urban planning institutes have been indoctrinating their students with Romantic anti-Western ideas, he’s plumb out of luck. Sageman, who unlike AL has some idea of what he’s talking about, puts forward a rather more plausible explanation of how Arabs studying in the West drifted into terrorism.

bq. When they became homesick, they did what anyone would and tried to congregate with people like themselves, whom they would find at mosques. So they drifted towards the mosque, not because they were religious, but because they were seeking friends. They moved in together in apartments, in order to share the rent and also to eat together – they were mostly halal, those who observed the Muslim dietary laws, similar in some respects to the kosher laws of Judaism. Some argue that such laws help to bind a group together since observing them is something very difficult and more easily done in a group. A micro-culture develops that strengthens and absorbs the participants as a unit. This is a halal theory of terrorism, if you like.

(I’m grateful to a commenter at Unfogged for the Sageman link).

Update: description of WoC changed in response to comments below.

Direct him or her to Scott McLemee's speculations about where Rand got her ideas (Scott doesn’t do permalinks – so if this link decays rapidly, don’t blame me).