Speaking of spirituality designed to get one out of going to church, I offer you the following passage from Stephen Potter’s superlative Lifesmanship. This could very well come in handy if you are ever invited to the sort of English country house where everyone is expected to go to church on Sunday. (I know little about such things, but my reading of Wodehouse leads me to additionally suggest that you not get involved in a church fête of any kind, in any capacity.) Potter:

The man who lets it be known that he is religious is in a strong life position. There is one basic rule. It is: go one better. Fenn went too far. This is his method–in his own words:

To take the most ordinary instance, the simple Sunday churchgoer. “Are you coming to church with us?” my host says. It is a little country church, and my host, Moulton, who has some claims to be a local squire, wants me to come, I know, because he is going to read the lesson. He reads it very well. He enjoys reading it. I heard him practising it to himself immediately after breakfast.

“Yes, why don’t you come to church for once, you old sinner?” Mrs. Moulton will say.

Do not mumble in reply to this: “No, I’m afraid…I’m not awfully good at that sort of thing…my letters…catch post.”

On the contrary, deepen and intensify your voice, lay your hand on her shoulder and say, “Elsa” (calling her by her Christian name for perhaps the first time):

“Elsa, when the painted glass is scattered from the windows, and the roof is opened to the sky, and ordinary simple flowers grow in the crevices of pew and transept–then, and not till then will your church, as I believe, be fit for worship.”

Not only does this reply completely silence opponent; but it will be possible to go out and win ten shillings on the golf course, come back very slightly buzzed from Sunday pre-lunch drinks, and suggest, by your direct and untroubled look, before which their glance may actually shift, that your host and hostess, however innocently, have only been playing at religion.

Potter is a genius, and it seems his books are coming back in print! Now millions more can learn those methods of winning without actually cheating so dear to my heart and to those of fellow Yeovil alums.

Robert Irwin “gets tough”:http://www.lrb.co.uk/v20/n17/irwi01_.html with Kahlil Gibran.

bq. As a thinker, Gibran is easy to liken to Madeleine Basset, characterised by Bertie Wooster as ‘one of those soppy girls riddled from head to foot with whimsy. She holds that the stars are God’s daisy chain, that rabbits are gnomes in attendance on the Fairy Queen, and that every time a fairy blows its wee nose a baby is born, which, as we know, is not the case. She’s a drooper.’ I cannot imagine Wooster falling for Gibran either, for he, too, was a drooper. Nowhere in his essays, short stories or dramatised dialogues is there any humour, sex or surprise. His writing conjures up fields of grey ectoplasm inhabited by plaintive souls. If Gibran is right about the universe, then we are all living in a banal and sentimental nightmare.

bq. He seems to be a favourite poet of those who don’t like poetry. Similarly, I suspect that Gibranian spirituality suits those who cannot face the more specific demands that a real religion might make. The only thing you have to do as a follower is read more Gibran, plus, of course, ‘see’ more deeply, ‘listen to the language of the heart’ and so on.

Or more succinctly: “Gibranian spirituality seems to be designed to get one out of going to church on Sundays.” Seems about right to me.

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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Now that, thanks to Kieran and the Medium Lobster, we’ve all had our fun with Richard Posner’s case for pre-emptive war, complete with toy numerical example, it’s time for me to play straight man.

Posner’s starting assumption is consequentialism: that we should evaluate an action based on whether its probable consequences are, on balance, good or bad. I broadly agree with this, so I’ll try to explain why it shouldn’t lead to conclusions like those derived by Posner.

I’ll ignore a range of more complex objections and come straight to the first distinction learned by beginning students of the subject. Should we evaluate the consequences of general rules such as “don’t engage in pre-emptive wars” (rule-consequentialism) or should we evaluate each action on a case by case basis (act-consequentialism)

For perfectly rational decision makers, following the rules of Bayesian decision theory, the answer is easy and, in fact, trivial. It’s best to make the optimal decision on a case by case basis, and an optimal set of rules would be so detailed and precise as to yield the optimal decision in every case. Posner routinely assumes this kind of perfect rationality, which is why he doesn’t see any big problems with toy examples, or with claiming that this kind of reasoning can usefully be applied to improbable catastrophes with incalculable consequences.

There are two objections that can be made here

* Human beings are not perfectly rational and do not follow the rules of Bayesian decision theory

* Since war is a negative sum game, rational decision makers do not fight wars[1]

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There’s been a lot of hubbub, both here and elsewhere in the blogworld, about the Becker-Posner blog. But if it’s intellectual firepower in a group blog you’re after, you should be reading “Left2Right”:http://left2right.typepad.com/. Here’s its “mission statement”:http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/11/why_left2right.html, which should be good for setting off a round of debates.

bq. In the aftermath of the 2004 Presidential election, many of us have come to believe that the Left must learn how to speak more effectively to ears attuned to the Right. How can we better express our values? Can we learn from conservative critiques of those values? Are there conservative values that we should be more forthright about sharing? “Left2Right” will be a discussion of these and related questions.

bq. Although we have chosen the subtitle “How can the Left get through to the Right?”, our view is that the way to get through to people is to listen to them and be willing to learn from them. Many of us identify ourselves with the Left, but others are moderates or independents. What we share is an interest in exploring how American political discourse can get beyond the usual talking points.

The contributors so far include “Elizabeth Anderson”:http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/11/what_hume_can_t.html, “Kwame Appiah”:http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/11/less_contempt.html, “Josh Cohen”:http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/11/the_moral_value.html, “Stephen Darwall”:http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/11/school_resegreg.html, “Gerald Dworkin”:http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/11/less_contempt_m.html, “David Estlund”:http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/12/the_first_data_.html, “Don Herzog”:http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/12/public_private_.html, “Jeff McMahan”:http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/12/supporting_our_.html, “Seana Shiffrin”:http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/11/being_forthrigh.html, and “David Velleman”:http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/12/debunking_a_dea.html. Wowsa. And many other names you may have heard of, from Peter Railton to Richard Rorty, are listed as being part of the team. This should be worth following.

I have no real post to go with this headline, but as a service to the British journalists with the thankless job of covering our Home Secretary’s love life (sample coverage “Mark, the Home Secretary is currently suing his pregnant ex-lover to force her to take a DNA test so that he can prove that her older child, as well as her current unborn child, is in fact illegitimate and fathered by him. Do you think he’s done anything unwise?”), may I pass on a fantastic old quote from JK Galbraith:

“Anyone who says four times that he won’t resign, will”

By my count, Blunkett currently has a Galbraith score of 1. I think he ends up staying, but that quote ought to be good for a couple of paras if you’re hard up against it. You can return the favour some time in the future.

As the American ruler of Iraq, Paul Bremer had the amazing knack of being able to pick the worst possible decision on every occasion[1]. From the dissolution of the Iraqi army to his refusal to hold elections in 2003, when there was some chance they could have worked, he did everything wrong he possibly could. Now he’s gone, and most of his policies have been abandoned, but he’s left one last gift, which may turn out to be the most poisonous of the lot.

When Bremer set up the electoral system for the elections that are supposed to be held in January, he went for a single nationwide electorate, rather than having representatives of provinces or individual constituencies[2].

In any case, what this means is that, to the extent that fighting depresses the turnout in Sunni areas, Sunnis get less seats. Being a minority, they’re bound to lose most of the power they’ve traditionally held in any case, but under Bremer’s rules, they could be excluded almost completely. By contrast, under a constituency system, provided some sort of ballot could be held, Sunni candidates would be elected from Sunni areas.

To address this problem, Juan Cole is suggesting an emergency intervention, setting aside 25 per cent of the seats for Sunni candidates. It’s probably about the best that can be done in the circumstances, but the outlook is not that good.

Meanwhile, the onset of civil war has been announced, not by leftist opponents of the war, but by arch-hawk Charles Krauthammer who complains (haven’t we heard this before) about the unreliability of our native allies

People keep warning about the danger of civil war. This is absurd. There already is a civil war. It is raging before our eyes. Problem is, only one side is fighting it. The other side, the Shiites and the Kurds, are largely watching as their part of the fight is borne primarily by the United States.

I don’t recall Krauthammer mentioning civil war as part of the plan in 2003. But maybe this is one of those four-war things.

fn1. I don’t think this was simple stupidity. His orders were, as far as I can see, to establish a secular free-market democracy that would be a reliable ally of the US and Israel. Any halfway realistic policy would have required him to abandon these objectives, and settle for a moderately theocratic, semi-socialist and imperfectly democratic state, on the “Iran-lite” model, because that’s what a majority of Iraqis want. Instead, he followed the dream.

fn2. My guess is that his motive was to allow votes for Iraqi exiles who could be presumed to be more favorable to the occupation than the people who were actually experiencing it.

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.

A few days ago Henry pointed us to the Becker-Posner blog. I see now that they have posted an introductory entry.

Blogging is a major new social, political, and economic phenomenon. It is a fresh and striking exemplification of Friedrich Hayek’s thesis that knowledge is widely distributed among people and that the challenge to society is to create mechanisms for pooling that knowledge. The powerful mechanism that was the focus of Hayek’s work, as as of economists generally, is the price system (the market). The newest mechanism is the “blogosphere.” There are 4 million blogs. The internet enables the instantaneous pooling (and hence correction, refinement, and amplification) of the ideas and opinions, facts and images, reportage and scholarship, generated by bloggers.

It looks like the blog will have comments, and for now they plan on posting once per week, on Mondays. (According to Technorati the 4 million figure may be a low estimate, the number of blogs tracked is closer to 5 million as of today.)

One issue that keeps coming up regarding academic blogs (that is, blogs by academics) is whether there is any peer review involved. I think the above comment again suggests that there can be valuable post-publication peer review on blogs either through comments or response posts on others’ blogs.

It’s a commonly heard complaint that philosophy and philosophers are too divorced from the real world and practical considerations. I always thought this kind of concern was overblown, but nevertheless I’m glad to see philosophy brought into contact with the real world in new and interesting ways. As in this Friday’s “Philosophy and Wine conference”:http://www.sas.ac.uk/Philosophy/Wine.htm at the University of London. The philosophers who are speaking are quite distinguished – Roger Scruton, Kent Bach and Barry Smith – and there is a wine tasting as part of the conference, so it looks like it should be a lot of fun. Any readers in London with a spare Friday and an interest in, er, philosophy of wine should pop along.

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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I’ve been meaning to post about the blogging software WordPress and a recent announcement from our hosting service Dreamhost now gives me even more reason to do so. WordPress is a great free blogging software that I decided to use for my own blog back in the summer when I was upgrading various parts of my site. It is free both in the sense that you don’t have to pay for a copy and in the sense that you have the freedom to modify its code. It is filled with wonderful features such as no rebuilding when making changes to your template and efficient ways of dealing with comment spam. WordPress is committed to offering cool features of other programs such as MT’s Trackback. It also offers importers for Movable Type, Greymatter, Blogger, b2, and Textpattern with others forthcoming (Nucleus and pMachine). Moreover, it is quite easy to install, definitely much more straight forward than some other programs such as Movable Type. When they say it takes five minutes they aren’t kidding (granted, some more general prior technical knowledge can be very helpful).

But wait! If you don’t have five minutes to spare (and perhaps you’re lacking some of those technical basics) then Dreamhost is the way to go. A few days ago they announced automatic installation of WordPress on Dreamhost accounts. We at CT use Dreamhost for our hosting service as do I for my own sites. I highly recommend them. Their prices are extremely reasonable and the services just keep getting better.[1]

Once you are done with the installation, all sorts of styles are available to alter the default one. For those just a tiny bit more ambitious but without the necessary prior knowledge, it’s possible to pick up the requisite PHP and CSS know-how within an afternoon (okay, based on prior HTML skills and a certain amount of geek determination) to make additional changes to the designs. All-in-all, I’ve been very happy with WordPress having used it for about three months now. And the Dreamhost install option is awesome.[2]

fn1. Full disclosure: if you sign up for their services through the above link, CT will get a referral fee.

fn2. I will be setting up blogs for about thirty students in a month so I welcome any feature that assists the process.

I’ve read lots of pieces on proposals to reform the US Social Security system, both positive and critical. Unfortunately, most of them include claims that are at best half-true and most of the rest assume a high level of knowledge of the issues. Over the fold, I’ve added a lengthy piece trying to explain the issues. Although I’m actively involved in debate on some of them, I’ve done my best to give a neutral presentation, at least until the final assessment of the proposals currently being discussed by the Administration and Congressional Republicans. This is primarily a matter of political judgement and can be summed up fairly quickly.

The Republican proposals involve accounting transfers amounting to trillions of dollars between different government accounts and newly created individual accounts. These transfers will almost certainly be packaged up with substantive changes to the Social Security system. Whether you support them depends on which you think is more likely:

* The transfers will be used to facilitate tough but necessary increases in contributions relative to benefits, eliminating the funding deficit. In doing this, the President and Congress will demonstrate their commitment to promoting the long term interests of the American people, even at the expense of short-term political pain

* The transfers will provide an ideal opportunity for all manner of pork-barrelling, from handouts to existing retirees to cosy deals for Wall Street investment banks, with accounting tricks being used to provide cover for a claim that the system has been restored to solvency

You may be able to guess which of these I think more likely, but you’ll have to read (or scroll) to the end to find out.

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Kieran “mentioned”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002937.html Jonathan Coe’s vicious and funny take-down of Thatcherism, “What a Carve-Up” in passing a couple of days ago. It reminded me of a bit in Coe’s more recent novel, The Rotter’s Club, where he identifies the ‘death of the Socialist dream’ with the extinction of prog-rock.

bq. He giggled like a little maniac, and stared at me for a second or two before running off, and in that time I saw exactly the same thing I’d seen in Stubb’s eyes the day before. The same triumphalism, the same excitement, not because something new was being created, but because something was being destroyed. I thought about Philip and his stupid rock symphony and I swear that my eyes pricked with tears. This ludicrous attempt to squeeze the history of countless millennia into half an hour’s worth of crappy riffs and chord changes suddenly seemed no more Quixotic than all the things my dad and his colleagues had been working towards for so long. A national health service, free to everyone who needed it. Redistribution of wealth through taxation. Equality of opportunity. Beautiful ideas, Dad, noble aspirations, just as there was the kernel of something beautiful in Philip’s musical hodge-podge. But it was never going to happen. If there had ever been a time when it might have happened, that time was slipping away. The moment had passed. Goodbye to all that.

I don’t agree with the sentiment or the identification, but it’s an interesting and clever metaphor. I’m also curious to know from UK/Irish readers whether the sequel to the Rotter’s Club is as good as the first volume – hasn’t been released on this side of the Atlantic yet, I don’t think.