Kieran Healy

Since my “earlier post about it”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/10/18/same-sex-marriage/, Maggie Gallagher’s guest appearance at the Volokh Conspiracy has taken a “rapid”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_10_16-2005_10_22.shtml#1129776523 “turn”:http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?rank=&url=http%3a%2f%2fvolokh.com%2farchives%2farchive_2005_10_16%2d2005_10_22.shtml%231129775642 for the “worse”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_10_16-2005_10_22.shtml#1129756529. She keeps putting up scattershot posts that resolutely fail to engage with any of the reasonable questions and criticisms an increasingly exasperated group of commenters have repeatedly offered her. It irritates the commenters no end that she begins posts with phrases like “Let me clarify” and then doesn’t clear anything up. Gallagher now seems reduced to presenting quotes from sociologists allegedly intent on destroying civilization — surely the last refuge of a desperate conservative.

Over at Volokh, Maggie Gallagher is visiting for a bit and arguing against the legalization of same-sex marriage. At least, soon she will begin arguing against it. Right now, “she is”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_10_16-2005_10_22.shtml#1129658399 “clearing”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_10_16-2005_10_22.shtml#1129586609 “some”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_10_16-2005_10_22.shtml#1129571505 “ground”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_10_16-2005_10_22.shtml#1129565640 to prepare for her main case. It looks like she wants to make some broad sociological generalizations about the place of the institution of marriage in society and the likely effect of a legalization of same-sex marriage on that institution. Essentially, she thinks that the main _public_ purpose of marriage is procreation — this is the reason why it enjoys the legal status it does. In “this post”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_10_16-2005_10_22.shtml#1129586609, she asserts that marriage (or some functional equivalent) is a cultural universal — the “cultural” qualifier is important because she also thinks marriage is a functional solution to the apparently biological problem of fathers buggering off and abandoning their children:

bq. The argument I am making is this: every society needs to come up with some solution to the fact that the default position for male-female sexual attraction (that is unregulated by law or society) is many children in fatherless homes. The second human reality societies must face is that procreation is not optional, it is necessary. Individuals don’t have to do it but societies do. The word for the social institution that addresses these problems, in this and every known human society is marriage. Sex makes babies, Society needs babies, babies need mothers and fathers.

Some quick responses to the sociological angle below the fold.

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I was listening to the radio and heard the following observation. It was attributed to Dr William Temple (speaking at a school prize-giving in 1938) and apparently is quoted by Eric Partridge in _Usage and Abusage_:

Spelling is one of the decencies of life, like the proper use of knives and forks. But intellectually, spelling — English spelling — does not matter. Intellectually, _stops_ matter a great deal. If you’re getting your commas, semi-colons and full-stops wrong, it means you’re not getting your thoughts right and your mind is muddled.

This would probably be “Matthew Yglesias’s”:http://yglesias.tpmcafe.com position, and it nicely splits the difference between prescriptivists and descriptivists. It seems like a useful distinction for everyday use, and the link between syntax and punctuation is much tighter than that between semantics and spelling. I suppose if I had to choose between always having my sentences parse correctly and always spelling every word properly, I’d choose the former.

Tom Schelling and Robert Aumann have been awarded this year’s Bank of Sweden Memorial Prize. Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution provides some information about both of them (“Schelling”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2005/10/schelling_and_a_1.html, “Aumann”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2005/10/robert_aumann_n.html). Schelling’s work is probably the better known of the two outside of economics, because in addition to being excellent it’s very readable. I use a chunk of his classic “Micromotives and Macrobehavior”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393090094/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/ in my undergraduate social theory class, for instance. We read a bit of _The Wealth of Nations_ and then we read some Schelling, partly in order to get across the idea that co-ordination can be disaggregated and bottom-up process, and partly to see that markets are also a special case of a bigger class of co-ordination problems.

From an outsider’s perspective, and speculating a bit on the politics of it all, the result seems like an interestingly balanced way to mark the rise of game theory in economics. While Schelling’s work is analytically acute (and the man himself is famously sharp in discussion), it is not presented in a technical mode. You can sit down and read the essays. Aumann, on the other hand, represents a much more mathematized wing of the field, proving theorems and developing new conceptual tools with precise formal properties. So, for instance, while Schelling can write essays like “Strategic Relationships in Dying” and “The Mind as a Consuming Organ”, Aumann’s papers have titles like “The Bargaining Set for Cooperative Games” and “Subjectivity and Correlation in Randomized Strategies.” The prize committee has seemed to make these kind of balanced choices on other dimensions before, sometimes in consecutive years (Merton and Scholes followed by Sen) sometimes in the same year (Kahneman and Vern Smith).

On a side note, I’m not surprised to “learn from Tyler”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2005/10/schelling_and_a_1.html that Schelling was his mentor. You can see it in the way he thinks about problems.

Dan Drezner reports that he’s been “denied tenure”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/002353.html at Chicago. I’m sorry to hear that, and a bit surprised. (It seems as though Dan was, too, which makes it worse for him.) My feeling is that Dan will quickly find another good job: it’s actually not uncommon in cases like this for the national market to disagree with the local decision. Best of luck for the future, Dan.

The DARPA grand challenge is a 175-mile race for autonomous vehicles — cars or trucks that drive themselves. It’s currently underway out in the Mojave desert in Nevada. The teams in charge of the vehicles were told the route early this morning, and the vehicles set off a few hours later. The course is tough, with obstacles and sections (like tunnels) where it’s impossible to use GPS devices. Last year, the challenge was a bit of a disaster, with no team managing more than a few miles, and many vehicles failing completely. This year only a few have dropped out and three have already covered almost 100 miles of the course. The “DARPA Challenge Homepage”:http://www.grandchallenge.org/ has live updates of all the vehicles. There are three main contenders: “H1ghlander”:http://redteamracing.org/index.cfm?method=page.display&page=technology.h1ghlander (a Hummer H1, you see) and “Sandstorm”:http://redteamracing.org/index.cfm?method=page.display&page=technology.sandstorm are both run by “Red Team Racing”:http://redteamracing.org, based at Carnegie Mellon and sponsored in part by some big defense contractors like Boeing and Harris. The other challenger (currently running H1ghlander a close second) is “Stanley”:http://cs.stanford.edu/group/roadrunner/presskit.html, a modified Volkswagen Touareg run by a team from Stanford. Confirming an observation Dave Barry makes somewhere (about how men are able to sit down in front of a TV showing a tennis match between two anonymous Eastern Europeans from the 1980s and instantly begin supporting one of them), it took about 30 seconds for me to become a strong Stanleyite.

Of course, DARPA is kind of a hit-and-miss agency: sometimes it helps invent the Internet, sometimes suitcase nukes or “microwave-based riot-control/torture devices”:http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18725095.600. So the Grand Challenge can be seen either as the precursor of safe autopilot for cars or the embryo form of “one of these”:http://www.sputnik.com.mx/images/upload/terminator.jpg. The technology behind the vehicles is pretty cool. It reminds me (as the film _Apollo 13_ reminded me) of an old _Punch_ cartoon of two hairy, flea-bitten cavemen standing in front of the gorgeous cave paintings of Lascaux. “Art, art, art,” says one to the other. “When are we going to get some engineers?”

This is great. Even if there are a few “infelicities”:http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/noitulove/. I’m just hoping for the day when American bartenders evolve to the stage where they understand how to pull a pint of stout. Out here in Tucson it’s hard to find pubs where such people exist, though there is one place that has Beamish on tap.

Last week “I said”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/10/03/harriet-the-justice/ I didn’t know anything about Harriet Miers, but figured that while she would certainly be a staunch Bush loyalist, she would likely not be incompetent or a pushover. I think now I was being a bit optimistic, or at least not precise enough. I still think Miers isn’t an incompetent pushover, in the narrow sense that she’s probably pretty good at the job she currently occupies. It’s just that she has no real qualifications at all for a position on the Supreme Court, and there’s no getting around that. “Mark Schmitt”:http://markschmitt.typepad.com/decembrist/2005/10/souter_or_kerik.html gets it right here, by noting the curious parallel to the previous round of nominations to the Appeals Court:

The one and only thing to remember about Miers is that she is totally unqualified to sit on the Supreme Court. … there’s nothing there. Take away the George W. Bush-loyal-staffer aspect of her resume, and there’s absolutely nothing except some modest corporate law-firm and bar-association management, skills that are of no relevance to the Court. …

The reason this is so important to say goes back to the fight over the Nuclear Option and the nominations of Janice Rogers Brown and Priscilla Owen last spring. One of the big underlying questions then was whether a judicial nominee’s ideology, even way-out-of-the-mainstream ideology, could be a factor in confirmation. A number of us warned at the time that any deal that let an Objectivist crackpot like Brown go through would set the bar for extremist ideology so low that in effect, ideology could never be a factor.

… And that’s why it’s so important to be frank about Miers’s qualifications. Miers is to qualifications exactly what Brown and Owen were to ideology. She sets the bar so low that if she’s considered qualified, then who — other than, say, Jack Abramoff — is not qualified? If Miers is confirmed, it effectively establishes that neither qualifications nor ideology should be a factor in confirmation.

In the meantime, at least it’s been fun to watch the pseudo-libertarian lawyers suddenly shocked — schocked! — as they realize what everyone else already knows about the Bush administration and its appeasement of the hard right. They cheerfully helped feed the crocodile for the past few years in the hope of being granted a few seats on the bench. (Civil liberties? No problem! Torture? Too unpleasant to discuss publicly!). Now find that they’re the ones who have been tossed into its mouth.

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“President Bush”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/04/politics/politicsspecial1/04cnd-bush.html?ex=1286078400&en=711421a7ed5d1c4d&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss today:

bq. Mr. Bush also sent a clear signal that he would resist, on grounds of executive privilege, providing senators documents related to Ms. Miers’s work in the White House. … “I just can’t tell you how important it is for us to guard executive privilege in order for there to be crisp decision-making in the White House,” Mr. Bush said.

Just can’t. Because of what I said about crisp decision-making, you see.

I know absolutely nothing about “Harriet Miers”:http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/10/03/scotus.miers/index.html, the new nominee to the Supreme Court, beyond the fact that she’s from Texas and is White House Counsel. But I think those two facts suggest we can be fairly confident in the following: (1) She’ll be a strong Bush loyalist. That follows just from the way this administration works in everything it does. (2) However, the fact that she’s a woman leads me to think that, unlike the likes of Michael Brown, she’s also competent and probably a pretty tough person. It’s hard to get to this point in U.S. politics without having those qualities if you’re a woman. I don’t expect to like many of her legal views, and I’m sure there are better candidates. But I’d be surprised if her confirmation hearings showed her to be clueless or a pushover.

As the “Left vs Right”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/09/28/left-vs-right-pt-cclxi/ infighting continues, I wanted to mention that “my department”:http://fp.arizona.edu/soc/ is hiring this year, and also point out that Arizona is the ideal location for all your Left vs Right needs. We got “libertarian cowboys”:http://www.azarms.com/ and new age “crystal-and-vortex”:http://www.arizonahealingtours.com/vortex/vortex.html types, cranky Michigan republicans and Minnesota democrats (also cranky) down for the winter, “patio men”:http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/001/531wlvng.asp and “mountain bike people”:http://sambabike.org/, “property developers”:http://www.tucsonweekly.com/gbase/currents/Content?oid=oid:66291 and “mariachi bands”:http://www.gigmasters.com/Mariachi/Mariachi_Tucson_AZ.asp, “chollas”:http://helios.bto.ed.ac.uk/bto/deserts/cholla.htm and “chilis”:http://www.chili-pepper-plants.com/, “religion”:http://www.arizona-leisure.com/san-xavier-del-bac-mission.html and “science”:http://www.noao.edu/kpno/, “warthogs”:http://www.dm.af.mil/ and “javelinas”:http://helios.bto.ed.ac.uk/bto/desbiome/javelina.htm. Also great views. (See left. More on “my homepage”:http://www.u.arizona.edu/~kjhealy/.) And even some “skiing”:http://www.go-arizona.com/Mount-Lemmon-Ski-Valley. Enough to keep everyone happy.

Via “Volokh”:http://www.volokh.com/posts/1127939808.shtml we come across the latest in a “long”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/000426.html “line”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/000404.html#000404 of nonsense about whether the left or the right has a monopoly on virtue _x_ or vice _y_. (Surely that should be vice _x_. Never mind.) This time it’s “Ann Althouse”:http://althouse.blogspot.com/2005/09/so-what-exactly-did-scorsese-do.html#112792822975605103 chancing her arm:

bq. To be a great artist is inherently right wing. A great artist like Dylan or Picasso may have some superficial, naive, lefty things to say, but underneath, where it counts, there is a strong individual, taking responsibility for his place in the world and focusing on that.

To which one can only say, piffle. In point of fact, _exactly the opposite_ is the case. It’s obvious that to be a great artist is inherently _left_ wing. And why? Because although a great artist like Mozart or Pollock may have some superficial right-wing things to say about their purely individual genius and how they want to forge in the smithy of their soul the uncreated conscience of their race, underneath, where it counts, there is a goddamn parasite constantly sponging off of friends with real jobs and looking for handouts from the Emperor Joseph II, Peggy Guggenheim, the local Arts Council or what have you. QED.

Let’s say you’ve already read Tim Burke’s “Should I Go to Grad School?” and pushed on past the short answer. (“No.”) Then it’s time to read Fontana Labs’ “Twelve-Step Guide”:http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2005_09_25.html#004083 to life while you’re there. Your experience of a graduate program will depend in part on each of (1) The field you’re in, (2) The quality of the program, (3) Your own attributes, (4) The strategy you pursue. Once you go down the chute and find yourself in a particular setting, (1) and (2) are exogenous in the short run, and at the beginning you have no real sense of the social structure of the field anyway. So FL’s advice sensibly emphasizes the difference between undergraduate and graduate education and what that should mean for your approach to it. To boil it down to a one-line characterization: in academic environments, expectations are high and monitoring is low (but decisive when it happens). Many grad-student pathologies spring from a failure to deal with this problem.

My brother was traveling through Toronto airport last week, and was running a little late. But he was also hungry, so he stopped to get a sandwich. The guy in front of him in the queue took a very long time to order. He began counting out his change very slowly. He asked things like “Is this a quarter?” My brother, increasingly impatient and not in a charitable mood, thought maybe it’s the guy’s first time in Canada, or maybe he’s just an idiot. The guy had an odd bag at his feet that was a mixture of leather panels and silver-lined parachute material. He wore an Irish flat-peaked farmer’s cap of the sort which, when seen on someone under the age of sixty, is guaranteed to annoy Irish people everywhere. These facts lent support to the second theory. Finally, the guy finished counting out his money, slowly gathered his food and his silly bag and turned around to leave.

It was Michael Stipe. My brother said hello. Stipe said hello. Off he went. My brother said the only other thing that it occurred to him to say at the time was “Hey, how’s Thom Yorke? When’s the next _Radiohead_ album coming out?” But he felt this might not have been an appropriate question.