As “Daniel”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/03/12/us-election-horse-race/ notes, we don’t normally do horse race stuff here. And this is week old horse race stuff. But I thought there was some interesting stuff in the SurveyUSA 50 state polls on “Clinton vs McCain”:http://www.surveyusa.com/index.php/2008/03/06/electoral-math-as-of-030608-clinton-276-mccain-262/ and “Obama vs McCain”:http://www.surveyusa.com/index.php/2008/03/06/electoral-math-as-of-030608-obama-280-mccain-258/. The biggest thing was that they show up an interesting fallacy about probabilistic reasoning that, although pretty obvious when stated baldly, is also pretty hard to avoid in practice.

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”:http://hominidviews.com/?p=1370 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.)
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My previous post has attracted some comments about the academic publishing model, why it is that academics submit to commercial journals that make (in many cases very substantial) profits from publishing their pieces and so on. This broad set of issues has been debated here and on other sites over the last few years. I’d like to throw out a more focused question, aimed primarily at the academics among our readers (although other commenters should feel free to chime in, as always). Starting from the assumption that most of you submit most or all of your work to traditional journals: what would it take for you to switch to publishing through other means (specifically, free-access online paper repositories)???

My own switching requirements (which I imagine are shared by some but not all of you) would be twofold. First – that any alternative means of dissemination provide some sort of credentialling that is acceptable for purposes of internal review. While most of us do our research because we are interested in our topics and think that they are independently worthwhile, we also do it because we would like to keep our jobs (some might also or instead want to find better jobs elsewhere). Second – that the alternative mechanism provide some analogue to the kinds of focused criticism that we get (when we are lucky) from anonymous reviewers. This not only allows for gatekeeping and quality control on the aggregate level, but also typically leads to pretty substantial improvements in individual papers when the reviewers are on target. Obviously, some bad goes along with this system (the implicit incentives of journal publication make academics less likely to take risks and write on out-in-left-field topics than they might in an ideal world), but it’s hard to see how getting rid of it altogether would be a good thing.

If there were a system that provided these two desiderata for social scientists, I’d jump ship in a heartbeat – on every other reasonable criterion I can think of (perhaps there are some that I am missing) open systems are likely to beat closed ones. Obviously there are some very important economic issues too – arXiv, which is the closest analogue to such a system that I can think of, costs a fair bit of money to keep going. But it seems to me that the basic question of what we should want (or, more precisely, what we would absolutely need; wants are potentially infinite) in such a system should be asked before we ask how it should be funded. So what are the benefits and problems of such a system from your perspective, and what would it take to get you to jump over?

One of the more annoying aspects of academic publishing is that articles are usually behind a paywall and thus effectively unavailable to people without an institutional affiliation. I’ve felt this especially keenly with respect to the _Public Choice_ special issue on blogging that Dan Drezner and I co-edited. Unlike most things that I’ve been involved in putting out there, I suspect that there is a decent non-academic audience out there for this kind of work, who will never get to see it because of the largish fees that they would have to pay as non-subscribers. The good news, via my colleague Eric Lawrence, is that Springer Verlag are making _Public Choice_ available for free to everyone via the WWW until the end of April, as a promotional exercise. So if you want to read my or (more likely) the other contributors’ thoughts on blogging, click on “this link”:http://scientific-direct.net/c.asp?697028&db1cd0d730ba926e&44 and click through to the January 2008 issue. For a limited time only, as they say in the business.

We’ve been consciously trying to dial down the amount of horse-race coverage of the US presidential nominations (it will probably inevitably get intolerable during the actual race, but that’s the policy), but I don’t think that no coverage at all is the aim. And one thing looks quite interesting to me at the moment; although the general buzz of the news cycle has Hillary Clinton level-pegging or even regaining “momentum”, the Electronic Markets have her, post a small Texas/Ohio bounce, still way out of the money with Obama looking like the favourite at around 75.

As far as I can tell, the tracking polls are telling more or less the same story at present. As far as I can see, the punditosphere seems to have got rather ahead of the data here; there’s a potential test of whether they have any actual predictive ability.

In yet more sin news, according to Bloomberg (and others), the Vatican has updated its list of mortal sins to include “seven social sins”:

1. “Bioethical” violations such as birth control
2. “Morally dubious” experiments such as stem cell research
3. Drug abuse
4. Polluting the environment
5. Contributing to widening divide between rich and poor
6. Excessive wealth
7. Creating poverty

The Times Online observes that “The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that ‘immediately after death the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into Hell.’” And while acknowledging that “there is no definitive list of mortal sins,” they provide a list of:

The original offences and their punishments

Pride – Broken on the wheel
Envy – Put in freezing water
Gluttony – Forced to eat rats, toads, and snakes
Lust – Smothered in fire and brimstone
Anger – Dismembered alive
Greed – Put in cauldrons of boiling oil
Sloth – Thrown in snake pits

Interesting, in a that-wacky-Pope kind of way. But their source is a little peculiar: The Picture Book of Devils, Demons and Witchcraft, by Ernst and Johanna Lehner. They neglect to mention the subtitle: “244 Illustrations for Artists and Craftspeople.”

And the new list seems to suffer from some … um … padding: 5, 6, and 7 are not the same, but if you avoid excessive wealth and don’t create poverty, it seems you’ve got a pretty good jump on not “contributing to widening divide between rich and poor.” Not to mention that number 2. threatens circularity, while “Drug abuse” seems kind of vague to me. Perhaps not the best thought-out list.

But upon further investigation, it’s not clear that the Vatican intended to produce a new list in the first place. According to the AP: “Vatican officials, however, stressed that Girotti’s comments broke no new ground on what constitutes sin.” As far as I can tell, in an interview Bishop Gianfranco Girotti commented: “If yesterday sin had a rather individualistic dimension, today it has a weight, a resonance, that’s especially social, rather than individual.” And he gave some examples (although I admit to being a little unclear about how they are social in a new way). But it doesn’t seem that he gave seven examples. And, frankly, I can’t even tell if he intended his examples to be of mortal sins. My advice: avoid anything that is “morally dubious” until the situation is clarified.

No. Nothing to do with Spitzer. I’ve been reading some of the works of 18th Century right-wing blogger German counter-Enlightenment intellectual Justus Möser. (Wikipedia.) [click to continue…]

Via Lindsey, I read this paper by Simon Blackburn (pdf) which appears, again, in Philosophers without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life edited by Louise Antony, and containing essays by 20 or so atheist philosophers. The collection is well worth reading. Its not as though it can have been difficult to find atheist philosophers who are willing to talk about their views, but netween them the contributors display a nice range of attitudes toward religion, including deep respect, envy, and outright hostility.

Blackburn’s chapter is, for the most part, an argument against versions of respect for religion that hinge on interpreting the claims of religious believers as not being the kinds of claim that can be true or false, and he makes that argument rather well. The point in dispute, though, is whether we can truly respect people who have what we regard to be false beliefs. He thinks not:

We can respect, in the minimal sense of tolerating, those who hold false beliefs. We can pass by on the other side. We need not be concerned to change them, and in a liberal society we do not seek to suppress them or silence them. But once we are convinced that a belief is false, or even just that it is irrational, we cannot respect in any thicker sense those who hold it—not on account of their holding it. We may respect them for all sorts of other qualities, but not that one. We would prefer them to change their minds.

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Apparently, in Montana two people can marry, and presumbly live out an entire marriage, without ever meeting (as long as they are not incarcerated). They can just, like, text each other or something. Facebook should get in on this.

Rebecca Solnit has “an interesting piece”:http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/2845 in Orion Magazine on Elvis, country music, environmentalism, racism, “rednecks”, stereotyping, and one or two other matters.

For those of you who keep track of Satoshi Kanazawa — evolutionary psychologist, co-author of Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters, and the Fenimore Cooper of Sociobiology — is now blogging at Psychology Today Magazine. Let’s turn the mike over to him:

Both World War I and World War II lasted for four years. We fought vast empires with organized armies and navies with tanks, airplanes, and submarines, yet it took us only four years to defeat them. … World War III, which began on September 11, 2001, has been going on for nearly seven years now, but there is no end in sight. There are no clear signs that we are winning the war, or even leading in the game. … Why isn’t this a slam dunk? It seems to me that there is one resource that our enemies have in abundance but we don’t: hate. We don’t hate our enemies nearly as much as they hate us. They are consumed in pure and intense hatred of us, while we appear to have PC’ed hatred out of our lexicon and emotional repertoire. We are not even allowed to call our enemies for who they are, and must instead use euphemisms like “terrorists.” … Hatred of enemies has always been a proximate emotional motive for war throughout human evolutionary history. Until now.

Here’s a little thought experiment. Imagine that, on September 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers came down, the President of the United States was not George W. Bush, but Ann Coulter. What would have happened then? On September 12, President Coulter would have ordered the US military forces to drop 35 nuclear bombs throughout the Middle East, killing all of our actual and potential enemy combatants, and their wives and children. On September 13, the war would have been over and won, without a single American life lost.

And there you have it.

A year-and-a-half ago, I wrote in anticipation of Eliot Spitzer’s election as governor of New York that I was eager to see how he handled the responsibilities of the position. In the last year, his approval rating tumbled fast, and it appeared that he hadn’t mastered the art of compromise – something that wasn’t as important when he was Attorney General.

Still, I was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. Last week, I drafted (but didn’t post) an argument that perhaps his feud with Senate leader Joe Bruno was part of a deliberate high-stakes strategy to claim the state Senate for the Democrats. And as of last week, it looked like he might win. Bruno would become just another Senator from upstate, and Spitzer might have a much easier time with the reforms he has championed, even with a lower approval rating. Just two days ago, the NY Times editorialized that one-party state rule, while risky, might allow passage of campaign finance reform, independent redistricting, not to mention other badly needed reforms such as a new lobbying law. Alas, it turns out Spitzer was just irresponsible.

It’s still possible that the Democrats will pick up the Senate seat they need. But if Spitzer resigns, Lieutenant Governor David Paterson will take over and the Lieutenant Governor position will remain unfilled until the election in 2010. Next in line … Joe Bruno (who is himself under federal investigation).

It seems that everyone else around here is just too quietly dignified to mention that Crooked Timber has been listed as one of the world’s fifty most powerful blogs by The Guardian.

But not me. So: Woo hoo!

It seems appropriate, then, to follow up Henry’s recent post about bookshelves with a notice that Matt Christie is offering wooden shelves to the public at a reasonable price. (They are much more attractive than some I’ve seen lately.) Matt also turns out chopping blocks.

These item are all made by hand from actual crooked timber. Contact him via pas au-delà for rates.

Anybody who combines woodworking with Blanchot deserves a plug on the 33rd most powerful blog in the world. The precise metrics used to determine that ranking are probably among the Guardian‘s trade secrets, of course.

A Nobel prize-winning scientist once described Basketball to me (in his impeccable Yorkshire accent) as “a dreary game played by physical freaks in which nothing happens till the last minute”. I enjoy regaling my students with this story, and explain that cricket is the only real sport. But, apparently, I’m wrong (about cricket, not basketball). The Boston Review contains a 27-year-old letter from John Rawls explaining why baseball is, in fact, the best of all games. (Hattip Tom Hurka — sorry, Tom, I couldn’t resist)

Some commenters thought that I should have waited before attacking the BBC’s “White” season. After, all, they argued … legitimate topic of inquiry …. watch first, judge later, … blah blah. Martin O’Neill has been watching, and he doesn’t like what he’s seen. Specifically, he has an article in the New Statesman deploring Denys Blakeway’s film about Enoch Powell, which attempts both a partial rehabilitation of the man and manages to suggest (without saying directly) that Powell’s “rivers of blood” claim was vindicated on 7/7 (a product of multiculturalism). Anyway, I’m summarizing Martin, so surf over to his excellent piece.