Kieran Healy

Continuing the “debate”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002956.html about preventive war begun by “Judge Richard Posner”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002956.html (the discussion was begun by him, I mean, not the war) the Medium Lobster “presents a competing analysis”:http://fafblog.blogspot.com/2004_12_05_fafblog_archive.html#110238611093456642:

bq. [T]the probability of an attack from the moon is less than one – indeed, it is miniscule. However, the potential offensive capabilities of a possible moon man invasion could be theoretically staggering. … The Medium Lobster has calculated this probability to be 5×10^-9. … the resulting costs would include the end of civilization, the extinction of the human race, the eradication of all terrestrial life, the physical obliteration of the planet, and the widespread pollution of the solar system with a mass of potentially radioactive space debris. The Medium Lobster conservatively values these costs at 3×10¹², bringing the expected cost of the moon man attack on earth to 1500 (5×10^-9 x 3×10¹²), a truly massive sum. Even after factoring in the cost of exhausting earth’s nuclear stockpile and the ensuing rain of moon wreckage upon the earth (200 and 800, respectively), the numbers simply don’t lie: our one rational course of action is to preventively annihilate the moon.

I’m a bit sorry to break it to the Medium Lobster, but Judge Posner considers scenarios of precisely this kind, and uses pretty much this methodology, in his new book, “Catastrophe: Risk and Response”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691070148/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/. Cases treated include the nanotechnology gray-goo apocalypse, the rise of superintelligent robots, and a strangelet disaster at Brookhaven Labs that would annihilate a substantial chunk of spacetime in the vicinity of our solar system. A “recent review”:http://www.slate.com/id/2109600 of the book raises most of the relevant critical points about the approach Posner takes. In essence, it’s all good geeky fun to apply the methods to cases like these but it’s a stretch to pretend we’re learning anything decisive about what we should do, as opposed to gaining insights on the scope and limits of some techniques for assessing alternatives.

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As Eszter notes, the “Becker/Posner Blog”:http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/ has solved whatever collective action problems it was having earlier in the week and now the first two substantive posts are up, both on the topic of preventive war, one from “Becker”:http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2004/12/preventive_war.html and one from “Posner”:http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2004/12/preventive_warp.html. Right now, my working theory is that the blog is an elaborate hoax. How else to explain stuff like this:

bq. Should imminence be an absolute condition of going to war, and preventive war thus be deemed always and everywhere wrong? Analytically, the answer is no. A rational decision to go to war should be based on a comparison of the costs and benefits (in the largest sense of these terms) to the nation. … Suppose there is a probability of .5 that the adversary will attack at some future time, when he has completed a military build up, that the attack will, if resisted with only the victim’s current strength, inflict a cost on the victim of 100, so that the expected cost of the attack is 50 (100 x .5), but that the expected cost can be reduced to 20 if the victim incurs additional defense costs of 15. Suppose further that at an additional cost of only 5, the victim can by a preventive strike today eliminate all possibility of the future attack. Since 5 is less than 35 (the sum of injury and defensive costs if the future enemy attack is not prevented), the preventive war is cost-justified. A historical example that illustrates this analysis is the Nazi reoccupation of the Rhineland area of Germany in 1936 …

The real Richard Posner is one of the preeminent legal minds of our time, so he can hardly be responsible for this. For one thing, parody of this quality is pretty difficult to write and I don’t think he has the time to devote to the task. Notice how the eminently reasonable introduction by “Posner” (as we shall call him) leads the reader to expect some sort of informed analysis — “a comparison of costs and benefits (in the largest sense of these terms).” But once this hook has been swallowed, within a paragraph we are in a fantasy world — “the expected cost of the attack is 50 (100 x .5), … can be reduced to 20 if the victim incurs additional defense costs of 15. Suppose further …” Suppose further! Quite brilliant stuff. The sudden _non-sequitur_ about the Nazi occupation of the Rhine caps the piece with Godwinesque cheek. After the lead-in sentence, “Posner” is careful not to mention again the war being prosecuted in Iraq. This is a nice move, reminiscent of the best UseNet trolls. When angry bloggers complain that neither the cost-benefit thing nor the analogy to Hitler make any contact with present reality whatsoever, or suggest that the post sounds like it was written in the Autumn of 2002 — or maybe the Winter of 1990 — they’ll have unwittingly set themselves up for a fall: after all, “Posner” was only considering the justifiability of preventive war _sub specie aeternitas_, not the actual costs and benefits of any particular war the U.S. might or might not be engaged in at present.

Speaking of which, “Posner’s” strategy neatly avoids the sticky business of having to work out a real cost-benefit calculation using available numbers — ones like, e.g., the cost of war to date in real dollars, N Combat Fatalities to date, skill-adjusted dollar value of Generic U.S. service person, “QALY”:http://www.evidence-based-medicine.co.uk/ebmfiles/WhatisaQALY.pdf adjustment for each of N Injuries sustained by U.S. service people, Expected Number of Fatalities in an Iraqi-sponsored WMD attack on the U.S. Mainland, productivity losses to an Iraqi WMD attack, probability that Saddam Hussein had WMDs of any sort, likelihood that they could have been delivered to the U.S., etc, etc. Those last two quantities are now known with a high degree of confidence to approximately equal zero, by the way. This might make it easier to calculate the right-hand side of the equation after the fact. (If you worry that having this calculation _before_ the fact would have been more useful, but think it would have been extremely difficult to do in any precise but still sensible way, congratulations on your perspicuity.)

Elsewhere on the blog, the “absurd suck-up comments”:http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2004/12/preventive_warp.html#trackbacks from law students are a further indication that the reader is being gamed. Take this one from “Charles”, for instance:

bq. Dear Justice Posner, I am a 2L at DePaul and I just wanted to say that I think all of your legal decisions are brilliant. I think that you and Dr. Thomas Sowell are the most insightful economic minds in the world today.

Part letter to Santa, part backhanded swipe at Gary Becker — guess you’re the second string econ guy, Gary! — I’m surprised he didn’t mention he’d been a good boy all year and go on to ask for a Train Set and a copy of Public Intellectuals: A Study in Decline. But that might have been painting the lily. All in all, I look forward to future entries, which may provide further clues as to who the deadpan genius behind this blog really is. The “Medium Lobster”:http://fafblog.blogspot.com/ perhaps? The “PoorMan”:http://www.thepoorman.net/ maybe? I await further developments with interest.

Update: Sentence edited for clarity about probabilities.

Over at “Brian Leiter’s blog”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2004/12/the_thread_on_t.html, there’s a debate going on about the role of publications in the hiring process. “Keith DeRose”:http://pantheon.yale.edu/~kd47 is arguing that a graduate student’s publication record should be given a larger role than it often is:

bq. [W]hich graduate school one gets into and what job one initially lands tragically does very much to determine how well one is likely to do, long-term. It often happens for instance, that extremely talented philosophers who deserve to do as well as those landing the great jobs instead end up at some low-prestige job with a heavy teaching load. Every now and then, one of them quite heroically overcomes the odds of having to write while teaching so much and puts out a bunch of excellent papers in really good journals (which at least often they’re able to do largely b/c the journals use blind review!). But, too often, they can’t get the people with the power in the profession (& who know that the candidate works at a low-prestige place) to take their work seriously. They lose out to candidates (the “chosen ones”) who, despite their very cushy teaching loads, publish little in good journals but who have something that all too often proves more valuable on a CV: a high-prestige institutional affiliation.

The data strongly back Keith up on this point, but they also suggest that the probability that things will change is not very high. Studies of academic disciplines show that by far the most important predictor of departmental prestige is the exchange of graduate students within hiring networks. These networks shouldn’t really be called job markets, incidentally, because they lack most of the features normally considered necessary for a market to exist.

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So, there “appear”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_12/005256.php to be _no_ explicit arguments in the “peer-reviewed scientific literature”:http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686 against the consensus position that, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change put it, “Human activities … are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents … that absorb or scatter radiant energy. … [M]ost of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.” The “Tech Central Station”:http://www.google.com/search?q=flack+central+station&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 Op-Eds rebutting this finding must be in the hopper even now. To help them out, I have cobbled together one made up largely of statements in earlier columns by the likes of “Joel Schwartz”:http://www.techcentralstation.com/080404H.html, “James Glassman”:http://www.techcentralstation.com/112000A.html and “Iain Murray”:http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/murray200311030813.asp.

*The Main Source of Hot Air is Plain to See*
Kieran Healy (assisted by Schwartz, Murray and Glassman.)

“As Tech Central Station readers well know, there are reasons to be skeptical of claims of substantial human-caused warming.”:http://www.techcentralstation.com/080404H.html A “recent article”:http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686 in the fringe leftist journal _Science_ discovers a puzzle: none of these reasons is to be found in a survey of 928 peer-reviewed articles published in the past 10 years. Its author concludes that “Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.”

Remarkable, indeed. As you know, a “superb analysis”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002392.html by Ross McKitrick and Steven McIntyre showed that the famous “hockey stick”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3569604.stm finding — on which the consensus rests in part — was completely bogus, assuming you don’t know the difference between “degrees and radians”:http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/blog/2004/08#mckitrick6 and think that “temperature is not a physical quantity”:http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/blog/2004/05#georgia. (Setting “missing temperature values to zero”:http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/blog/2004/05#mckitrick3 helps also, but is an advanced quantitative technique.) This is just the sort of nitpickery by which the notoriously left-wing scientific establishment keeps dissenting views out of the journals. The whole affair bears strong resemblance to the recent Bellesiles controversy. Emory University historian Michael Bellesiles won a Bancroft Prize for his argument that gun ownership in early America was not widespread. It took an amateur historian, Clayton Cramer, to point out that this claim could not be substantiated on the basis of actual gun-ownership records. In an exactly parallel way, it took an incompetent analysis by two non-experts to undermine the hockey-stick finding.

Had he worked for a “hack website”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000853.html, Hayek would surely have been the first to note that the very idea of peer-review, and the free sharing of data and ideas, positively reeks of socialism. The market, and not Lysenkoist scientists, should be allowed to decide the truth about climate change. The present situation is a discouraging spectacle to anyone who expected rational, scientific discussions, but climate change has become an issue teeming with emotion, and uncertainty is not a word the participants in the so-called “scientific community” like to hear. Just like “Dow 36,000”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0609806998/002-1583111-0813632?v=glance is not a word I like to hear. Stop it. I told you, that shit ain’t funny.

Kieran Healy is unqualified to comment on matters of climate change, and is a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute

(Hat tip: “Chris Mooney”:http://www.chriscmooney.com/blog.asp?Id=1432.)

The “news services report”:http://www.freep.com/news/nw/gitmo3e_20041203.htm the latest effort by legal officials of the U.S. Government to get Americans to agree that the use of torture by the military is no big deal:

WASHINGTON — U.S. military panels reviewing the detention of foreigners as enemy combatants are allowed to use evidence gained by torture in deciding whether to keep them imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the government conceded in court Thursday. The acknowledgment by Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General Brian Boyle came during a U.S. District Court hearing on lawsuits brought by some of the 550 foreigners imprisoned at the U.S. naval base in Cuba. The lawsuits challenge their detention without charges for up to three years so far.

Attorneys for the prisoners said some were held solely on evidence gained by torture, which they said violated fundamental fairness and U.S. due-process standards. But Boyle argued in a similar hearing Wednesday that the prisoners “have no constitutional rights enforceable in this court.”

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon asked whether a detention would be illegal if it were based solely on evidence gathered by torture, because “torture is illegal. We all know that.” Boyle replied that if the military’s combatant status-review tribunals “determine that evidence of questionable provenance were reliable, nothing in the due-process clause prohibits them from relying on it.”

I look forward to some analysis of this exchange by a good lawyer. (A good lawyer with some sense about “what issues”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002092.html are “worth their time”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002017.html, I mean.) It seems to me that the government wants to let military tribunals do whatever they like. Boyle’s claim seems to be that in balancing the reliability of any piece of evidence against its “questionable provenance” (i.e., whether it was beaten out of a detainee), the status-review tribunal should not only lean towards reliability but also get to pick and choose how questionable a “provenance” is too questionable.

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Eugene Volokh “complains”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_12_00.shtml#1101930018 that a recent draft of one his papers is missing something:

bq. Verve. “Energy and enthusiasm in the expression of ideas . . . . Vitality; liveliness.” My writing was the usual lawyerese, flabby and clausy. The substance was getting there (though it still needs a lot of work), but it was missing vigor, concreteness, punch. So I’ve been doing Vervification Edits as part of my substantive editing passes.

“Verve” is a good word for the quality he’s after, but I think “brio” is better, if only because its roots are mostly Italian and those people know how to live it up. In Jonathan Coe’s terrific novel, _What a Carve Up_ (published in the United States as The Winshaw Legacy) the narrator phones in a book review. Its chief complaint is that the book’s author “lacks the necessary brio” to carry off the story. Unfortunately something goes wrong in the transcription and the published version claims that the author “lacks the necessary biro,” instead. Just as debilitating to the writing process, to be sure, but as a critical observation of character perhaps not so incisive.

I’m recovering from a bad cold, so I’ve been feeling a little short of brio myself. I have three papers to draft, a review to write and a book manuscript to revise (I sign the contract this week). So if anyone has any strategies for revivifying oneself, let me know in the comments.

Brian Gifford of “Pub Sociology”:http://pubsociology.typepad.com/pub/ has an “Op-Ed piece”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18882-2004Nov28.html in todays _Washington Post_ arguing that the pressure on the U.S. military in Iraq is much greater than simple comparison to casualty rates in previous wars would suggest:

To better understand the difficulty of the fighting in Iraq, consider not just the current body count but the combat intensity of previous wars. During World War II, the United States lost an average of 300 military personnel per day. The daily figure in Vietnam was about 15. Compared with two per day so far in Iraq, the daily grinds of those earlier conflicts were worse than what our forces are currently experiencing.

On the other hand, improved body armor, field medical procedures and medevac capabilities are allowing wounded soldiers to survive injuries that would have killed them in earlier wars. In World War II there were 1.7 wounded for every fatality, and 2.6 in Vietnam; in Iraq the ratio of wounded to killed is 7.6. This means that if our wounded today had the same chances of survival as their fathers did in Vietnam, we would probably now have more than 3,500 deaths in the Iraq war.

Moreover, we fought those wars with much larger militaries than we currently field. The United States had 12 million active-duty personnel at the end of World War II and 3.5 million at the height of the Vietnam War, compared with just 1.4 million today. Adjusted for the size of the armed forces, the average daily number of killed and wounded was 4.8 times as many in World War II than in Iraq, but it was only 0.25 times greater in Vietnam — or one-fourth more.

These figures suggest that our forces in Iraq face a far more serious threat than the public, the media and the political establishment typically acknowledge or understand. Man for man, a soldier or Marine in Iraq faces a mission nearly as difficult as that in Vietnam a generation earlier. This is in spite of the fact that his contemporary enemies do not field heavy armored vehicles or aircraft and do not enjoy the support and patronage of a superpower such as the Soviet Union. …

The focus on how “light” casualties have been so far rather than on what those casualties signify serves to rationalize the continued conduct of the war and prevents us as a nation from confronting the realities of conditions in Iraq. Even more troubling, daily casualties have almost tripled since before the first attack on Fallujah in April. Conditions are getting worse, not improving. To be sure, American forces are winning the body count. That the insurgency is nonetheless growing more effective in the face of heavier losses makes it difficult to imagine an exit strategy that any reasonable person would recognize as a “victory.”

There is a tension in warblogger rhetoric between the wish to emphasize the great sacrifices that soldiers are making in Iraq and the desire to deride those who worry about the casualties. The former leads them to emphasize the hellish nature of battling guerilla forces in urban settings, but the latter demands they argue that fatality rates are trivial compared to Vietnam or other much larger wars. Brian treats the fact that the U.S. military is the best-equipped, best-trained and best-supported ground fighting force in the world as more than just rhetoric. As he argues, this should force us to see the casualty numbers in a new light.

Thanksgiving is one of America’s best ideas. Appropriately it is intimately associated with one of America’s worst inventions, the Pumpkin Pie. I say “appropriately” because such antinomies are common in American life. North and South, Red States and Blue States, expensive gourmet coffee and never a spoonful of real cream to put in it what do you mean you only have the kind that sprays out of a can never mind no that’s fine. On such foundational tensions is America built. I’m sure Alexis de Toqueville has a line about this somewhere in _Democracy in America_. Something about the Pumpkin containing the Seeds of its own Destruction — no wait, that was Marx in Vol. III of _Theorien über den Wurzelgemüse_. For de Tocqueville, pumpkin pie is the fulcrum of the argument developed in “Book II, Chapter 14”:http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/ch2_14.htm of _Democracy in America_, where he shows “How the taste for physical gratifications is united in America to love of freedom and attention to public affairs.” A taste for physical gratification that is fed with pumpkin pie is sure to kindle a strong love of freedom (from the obligation to eat any more) and a concomitant commitment to public affairs (especially the effort to ban the thing once and for all).

I admit this may be a minority reading of de Tocqueville, though surely a wholly plausible one of Marx. But a number of figures in pie scholarship may be against me. Although I have not been “able to trace”:http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&c2coff=1&q=fafblog+pie+blogging&btnG=Search a specific pumpkin-related discussion by the “best-known”:http://fafblog.blogspot.com/ of the world’s two leading pie authorities (the “other one”:http://www.weebl.jolt.co.uk/pie.htm is similarly silent on the matter), there is “some evidence”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2004/06/help_us_fafnir_.html that Fafnir is strongly pro-pumpkin. (“If a pumpkin pie is not a pie, well then I do not want to live in a world with your cold mechanical robot pies!”) This is a worry. The pumpkin pie is generally neglected in the social science literature, in my view rightly so. Milton Friedman “once commented”:http://www.policyofliberty.net/quotes6.php that “Most economic fallacies derive … from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie”, but the pie’s actual substance was left unspecified by him. Neoclassical economics assumed away the pumpkin by fiat, a move that goes back at least as far as Walras. He found that the tatonnement process could not plausibly be completed as long as the “auctioneer”:http://economics.about.com/od/economicsglossary/g/walrasiana.htm was left with a shitload of pumpkin that he couldn’t get off his hands for love or money. It re-entered the philosophical literature in Wittgenstein, who got it from Sraffa, but his solution is unknown — although in 2001 his grave in Cambridge was “found to have a pork pie on top of it”:http://myweb.lsbu.ac.uk/~stafflag/ludwigwittgenstein.html (no, really, it was), and also a “Mr Kipling Cake”:http://www.mrkipling.co.uk/about/ — perhaps evidence of efforts at solution via reduction to problems already solved.

At any rate, my plan is to avoid the pumpkin altogether and make an apple crumble instead. I have a lot of things to be thankful for today, and I hope you do as well — and if one of them is the courage to face up to reality and just eat the nutmeg out of the jar this year instead of using pumpkin puree as a substrate for it, so much the better for you.

“Lynne Cheney Tops National Christmas Tree.”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-4633299,00.html

Via “Patrick Nielsen Hayden”:http://nielsenhayden.com/electrolite/, a cool index of “photographs of cities”:http://www.worldcityphotos.org/. Of the cities in the index, I’ve lived in “Cork”:http://www.worldcityphotos.org/Ireland/IRE-Cork-webshotscheryllynn121.jpg, “Tucson”:http://www.worldcityphotos.org/UnitedStates/USA-AZ-Tucson-luvbride1.jpg and “Canberra”:http://www.worldcityphotos.org/Australia/AUS-Canberra-anueduau1.jpg, in that order. I imagine our cosmopolitan CT crowd can do better than that.

The database isn’t without its errors: “this”:http://www.worldcityphotos.org/Ireland/IRE-Cork-webshotstommy371.jpg claims to be Cork but is in fact “Cobh”:http://www.cork-guide.ie/cobh.htm, a town down the road that was the _Titanic’s_ “last port of call”:http://www.cobhheritage.com/index2.html.

“Kevin Drum writes”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_11/005214.php:

bq. *LAKOFF FRAMING….* it’s finally time for me to get a copy of George Lakoff’s “Don’t Think of an Elephant”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1931498717/qid=1101255135/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-7671099-8551863?v=glance&s=books, which appears to be something of a Bible among despairing liberals who can’t believe that half the country likes George Bush and apparently doesn’t like us. Basically, Lakoff says we need to get our act together and “frame” our arguments in more positive ways …

Although I know (and like) his work on “Metaphor”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226468011/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/, I’ve only seen Lakoff’s stuff on this at one remove or more — snippets on TV shows here and there, and talk in newspapers and blogs. So I don’t know whether he’s pitching the idea of framing as new, or his own bright idea. But it’s worth noting that this concept is pretty old. I don’t mean some equivalent concept, either, I mean the same idea with the same name. Here’s a “very short reading list”:http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~oliver/SOC924/Assignments/Framing.htm#Frames to start you off. It has its prehistory in work in micro-interaction work in linguistics and cognitive psychology (going back to Gregory Bateson). It gets named in the sociological literature by Erving Goffman’s (1974) _Frame Analysis_, but like a lot of Goffman nobody could do anything with it unless they were him. It was developed into a useful tool explicitly oriented to the study of political processes (especially social movements) in “Dave Snow”:http://today.uci.edu/Features/profile_detail.asp?key=112 et al’s “Frame Alignment Processes”:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0003-1224%28198608%2951%3A4%3C464%3AFAPMAM%3E2.0.CO%3B2-2 (American Sociological Review, 1986). That paper spawned a very big literature. Benford and Snow’s “Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment”:http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.soc.26.1.611, (Annual Review of Sociology, 2000) reviews fifteen-or-so years of theory and research in the field, including plenty of stuff on the limits of the concept and its potential for overuse. If Lakoff has managed to get the media to put his name in front of this idea then I guess he’s worth listening to, because he’s clearly very good at framing indeed.

*Update*: Seems like Lakoff gives the history of the idea its due, develops a version of his own in terms of his views about conceptual metaphors, and then applies it to the liberal cause in an accessible way. All to the good. My memory of the conceptual metaphor stuff in _Metaphors We Live By_, though, is that the metaphors that book looked at (“Love is a Battlefield”, etc) can’t really explain how and why political framing is really successful, as it’s not just a cognitive process. Moreoever, the idea that metaphors underpin our concepts is very similar to the idea that the social structure decisively shapes our thinking: immensely suggestive, almost certainly right in some sense, but very difficult to specify in a satisfactory way. I guess I should read the books, though, before saying anything else.

Following on from “last week’s case”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002867.html, which was concerned with the ontological argument, this week’s nutter in “Laurie’s”:http://www.u.arizona.edu/~lapaul Inbox gives us the complete and comprehensive solution to consciousness and morality, two perennial favorites.

*The Essay       (Forward this to all!)*
[Name Redacted to Protect the Innocent]
This universe is filled with atoms, unified into clusters or systems. They make up all things of matter from rocks to humans. All things of matter are either unconscious (a.k.a dead/ non living), semi- conscious (partially conscious), or fully conscious. Intelligence is the ability to be conscious. If one conceives, then one also sees an amount of right and wrong. One always does what one truly conceives is right.  When one does not conceive what is right, then one is blind and may do wrong. Right and wrong will always exist as long as life exists. …

Emphasis in the original, naturally. Onward:

The condition of being unconscious is having no consciousness of all the worlds components, including right and wrong, at any given point in time (not being aware of anything) … The condition of semi-consciousness is defined as not fully conceiving the world at any point in time. … The condition of being fully conscious is being conscious of everything in existence at any point in time, past, present, and future (a.k.a all knowing). … *The more conscious one is, the more likely one would be to make righteous decisions. The less conscious one is, the more likely one would be to make wrongful decisions.* The humans living on Earth, and all other living beings on Earth are not fully conscious.

The following are not rules. They are statements that are *facts* (not mere philosophies) that my semi-conscious mind has conceived. …

You can’t make this stuff up. Apart from the semi-consciousness, I like the insistence on facts. Reminds me of the work of “another philosopher”:http://hitch14.tripod.com/chapter_25.htm: “I am Vroomfondel, and that is not a demand, that is a solid fact! What we demand is solid facts!”

Over at “Brian Leiter’s blog”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/ the Stanley brothers, “Jason”:http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~jasoncs and “Marcus”:http://www.weatherhead.cwru.edu/faculty/faculty.cfm?id=5208 are guest blogging about Philosophy and Economics. Marcus “writes”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2004/11/economics_scien.html:

bq. I wonder if there are some commonalities between the desire to be “technical” or “scientific” that one sees in economics and some of the things Jason is posting about in philosophy.  It seems to me that the internal academic war between “continental” humanism and “Anglo-American” empiricism has impacted a lot of different disciplines …

The internal narratives of Anglo-American philosophy and modern economics see their paradigm emerging at almost the same time. In economics, it’s the “marginal revolution”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoclassical_economics inaugurated by Jevons, Menger and Walras from 1871 or so. In philosophy, it’s the publication of Frege’s “Begriffsschrift”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begriffsschrift in 1879 that ushers in the modern era.

Like the idea of the Industrial Revolution or the Enlightenment, transformative events like these are both immediately appealing (hence their status as canonical moments in the field) and hard to pin down definitively (hence the big literature by historians and sociologists of these disciplines arguing about them). But it’s interesting on its face that they occurred at similar times. These events also immediately show that the notion of an Anglo/Continental Science/Humanism split is a tricky one to defend, seeing as Frege was German and only 1/3 of the Marginal Revolutionaries were English. But the stereotypes are so strong that many people think, for example, that the French really never did much mathematical economics.

Mike Hout and some colleagues at Berkeley have a “working paper”:http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/new_web/VOTE2004/election04_WP.pdf called “The Effect of Electronic Voting Machines on Change in Support for Bush in the 2004 Florida Elections”. A “summary”:http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/new_web/VOTE2004/election04_Sum.pdf is also available as well as the data itself. Hout is a well-respected sociologist, so if he thinks the data for Florida show some anomalies he’s worth listing to. Hout et al try to estimate whether the presence of touch-screen electronic voting made a difference to the number of votes cast for Bush, controlling for various demographic characteristics of the counties as well as the proportion of votes cast for the Republican Presidential candidate in 1996 and 2000. Here’s the punchline:

bq. As baseline support for Bush increases in Florida counties, the change in percent voting for Bush from 2000 to 2004 increases, but at a decreasing rate. Electronic voting has a main, positive effect on the dependent variable. Furthermore, there is an interaction effect between baseline support for Bush and electronic voting, and between baseline support for Bush squared and electronic voting. Support for Dole in 1996, county size, median income, and Hispanic population had no significant effect net of the other effects. Essentially, net of other effects, electronic voting had the greatest positive effect on changin percent voting for Bush from 2000 to 2004 in democratic counties. … Summing these effects for the fifteen counties with electronic voting yields the total estimated excess votes in favor of Bush associated with Electronic Voting; this figure is 130,733.

Hmm. I’m going to go mess around with the data for a while and see what we can see.

*Update*: OK, I’ve looked at the data, and so have others. I think the case is not proven. More below the fold.

*Update 2*: Mike Hout has added a comment below.

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