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ATTN NYC Reasonoids: Help Free Kareem

jsanchez@reason.com (Julian Sanchez) — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 10:44:00 EST

There's a protest scheduled this afternoon in support of imprisoned Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer, who has been held since November as a threat to "national security" for publishing unpopular opinions:

Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer's trial is scheduled for this Thursday. An informal group of New York City residents are joining together in solidarity for a peaceful protest of the government of Egypt's treatment of Kareem, and to plead for all charges against him to be dropped. The protest has been organized for this Wednesday, January 31 at 3:30pm, in front of the Egyptian Consulate in New York.
Kareem has been imprisoned in Alexandria, Egypt, since November, after posting to his website statements calling for equal rights for women and protection of free speech, as well as other statements critical of the Egyptian government. He has been denied bail and faces a long prison sentence if convicted of the charges held against him. The New York group is trying to mobilize the national news media in hopes that increased visibility of Kareem's circumstances will pressure the Egyptian government to act responsibly.
The Egyptian Consulate in New York is located at 1110 2nd Avenue, between E. 58th and E. 59th.

Come out if you can; sign the petition if you can't.

Have You Seen The Size of That Taint?

jsanchez@reason.com (Julian Sanchez) — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 13:16:00 EST

Sigh. I'm sorry, I can't help it; if Jesse is going to use headlines like "The Federal Taint," I've got to repost this:

Conservative Soulcraft Redux

jsanchez@reason.com (Julian Sanchez) — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 18:36:00 EST

Blog ping pong may not be the ideal way to hash out the fundamental differences between conservative and libertarian approaches to tradition and fallibilism, so let me just restrict myself to a couple quick comments on Jonah Goldberg's response to my post of last Friday . (Jonah's original review is now online, by the way.)

First, Jonah notes (correctly enough) that however much I celebrate the relentless internal scrutiny of science, I'm still "certain" that "science is better than voodoo" and that liberal pluralism is preferable to totalitarian theocracy. But that was precisely my point. Jonah thinks that attending to our own fallibility, emphasizing the need for humility and doubt, will leave us too timorous to defend our own values. But a robust confidence in the meta-structures of scientific inquiry, on the one hand, and liberal democracy, on the other, is not just compatible with such a skeptical attitude, it depends upon it. Jonah's own argument is actually of the same form: He's essentially giving process-based reasons to think longstanding traditions are sound, even though, from our necessarily limited perspective, they will often seem prima facie irrational.

Second, I'll allow that describing Jonah's view as a demand to "freeze" culture is a bit of a caricature—albeit one that the institutional clarion call "stand athwart history yelling stop!" might be thought to invite. The real question, then, is when to defer and when to mutate. Hayek provides some guidance here, suggesting a preference for "immanent" criticism over wholesale rationalist redesign—a paradigm example being Frederick Douglass' "The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro," which argued that America was already implicitly committed to racial equality. I think it's significant (to return to where this all started) that Andrew Sullivan chose conscience, itself an evolved and culturally permeated faculty, as the proper lodestone. And, since Jonah's picked the example of gay marriage, I'll point out that the argument for including gay couples didn't drop out of the blue: It proceeds from familiar and deeply rooted liberal principles of equality under the law, and a shared understanding of the importance (for many people, anyway) of marriage to a fullfilled human life, combined with the relatively recent recognition that homosexuality is not, in fact, a species of mental illness. It is not obviously more dramatic than various other institutional adaptations marriage has undergone over the last few centuries—arguably less so, since the change involves only a small fraction of the population. My goal here is not to kick off yet another debate over gay marriage, about which I've written plenty already, but to point out that the theoretical framework Jonah's appealing to doesn't justify just a general deference to tradition per se, but rather a wariness toward projects of wholesale, ground up reconstruction—replacing marriage societywide with Na-style sibling clusters, say.

Finally, under the headline "Julian, Me and Justin Makes Three," Jonah links to a post in which "Justin Katz tries to get between me and Julian Sanchez." Jonah, I'm flattered, even a little curious, but you're a married man. Still, let me just address one qualm about the analogy between skeptical science and liberal societies. Katz doubts it will go through because while scientists have the shared goal of improving science (let this rather rosy view of actual scientists' motivations pass for the moment), the diverse members of a liberal society are trying improve their own lives. So let me make explicit what I was implicitly gesturing at in the original post: See Mill for the full argument there. With Mill and Nozick, I very much doubt there will be a One Best Way of Life if "Way" is understood to involve much detail, but also expect that people's self-interested "experiments in living" provide publicly benificial information without that being anyone's explicit intention.

Update: Well, I'd hoped I could get away with just outsourcing the meat of the argument here to Mill, as it's both familiar and unlikely to benefit tremendously from my paraphrase. But since Katz's follow-up post concludes I must not have understood his original objection, I suppose a bit of elaboration's in order. Nothing about the picture I'm painting here requires (as we do expect in science) convergence on some one or few models. This is possible, but I find it highly unlikely, and I imagine the optimal mix will change as conditions and populations do. All that's required is that people be similar enough that exposure to a variety of other people's "experiments in living" provides data to people trying to shape their own lives, whether or not they draw the same lessons from that data. If the result of this were, as Katz proposes, large numbers of people embracing Catholic sexual ethics over time, while I doubt I'd find this particularly congenial personally, I don't think it'd affect my attitude toward the general process, the point of which is not to produce the aggregate scenario I personally find most congenial.

Jonah Goldberg Searches His Conservative Soul

jsanchez@reason.com (Julian Sanchez) — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 19:10:00 EST

Jonah Goldberg reviews Andrew Sullivan's The Conservative Soul in the most recent National Review, and I had a few chuckles at this line:

Once a voice of restraint and reason, Sullivan now specializes in shrill panic: mercurial ranting full of operatic arguments, steeped in bad faith, aimed at people he once praised (including yours truly). Agreement with Sullivan bespeaks courageous enlightenment, disagreement advertises that you are a knave or ideological lickspittle.

Live by the shrill, die by the shrill, Jonah. I like Sullivan, and his writing has many virtues, but as I'm scarcely the first to note, the sense of doubt and fallibilism he's now advocating as central to conservatism has not always been one of them. When he was a booster for this administration and the Iraq war, Andrew was (in print, if not in person) at least as willing to suppose that people who disagreed were moral dunces at best, a threat to civilization itself at worst. He hasn't changed styles; he's changed sides.

As for the main argument of the book, Goldberg has two main beefs. The first is that "evil is rarely defeated by people who are unsure they are right," which Goldberg takes to mean that a "conservatism of doubt" will be too anemic to combat the enemies of liberal modernity: He mocks the idea of a "serious political movement" founded on the slogan "We're not sure!" But I think this misapprehends one paradoxical aspect of the relationship between doubt and confidence. I know, for example, that science proceeds haltingly, that its conclusions are always open to revision, and indeed, that many of the scientific beliefs of the past have been either rejected or developed to accommodate new facts. And this is precisely why I can be so confident in the scientific enterprise in the aggregate: Because I know there are scores of intelligent and skeptical researchers constantly testing and refining its conclusions. I can be fanatical in my defense of liberal societies, not because (like Islamists) I'm sure they have discovered the One Best Way of Life, but because they embody a process that allows fallible people to seek continual improvement.

Second, Jonah takes issue with Andrew's "divinization of conscience," which he casts as an arrogant rejection of tradition. And this brings us back to what I regard as the misreading of Hayek that keeps Jonah in the conservative camp—a point that Nick Gillespie tried to make when they debated a few months back, but I don't think Jonah fully grokked. First, to say we should "rely on tradition" doesn't actually relieve us of the responsibility for making our own moral judgments, for much the same reason the argument that the argument that we need religious texts as a guide to morality doesn't go through. There are multiple traditions to choose from, and multiple strains within each tradition, so an apparent "deference to tradition" always still involves the exercise of one's own judgment. (In the same way that you may outsource your health decisions to a doctor, but you're still responsible for finding a wise doctor.) Moreover, recall that Hayek's argument is meant to show why tradition's evolved rules are likely to produce better results than a wholesale constructivist rationalism. But this argument actually depends on people making use of critical reason, which is quite different. In effect, Jonah wants to say: Look what cultural evolution has produced—great, freeze it! But evolution works because of mutation, variation, and selection, and it's still going on. A tradition that can't accommodate that kind of variation is unlikely to stay adaptive for long.

Evergreen State Lapdances Safe for Now

jsanchez@reason.com (Julian Sanchez) — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 04:56:00 EST

Amy Phillips at iLiberty.org has a handy dandy roundup of various paternalistic initiatives on the ballots this week, and how they fared, from winking at dope-smokers to milking cigarette smokers. Read it, for your own good—and for the children.

The Coming Libertarian Majority?

jsanchez@reason.com (Julian Sanchez) — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 04:34:00 EST

I'd really love to believe the GOP-lost-but-conservatism-won meme that's circulating, especially the version that stresses Republicans' apostasy from the '94 gospel of small government and fiscal responsibility, or the one that points to the power of libertarian spoiler candidates. Hell, I hope it sticks if it'll dissuade a few of the remnants from tacking left—or even just make Ryan Sager a few extra bucks in royalties. But I also think primary reason people are trying to push the notion mostly out of a combination of wishful thinking and that same desire to preempt a GOP shift centerwards.

Alas, Ramesh Ponnuru's cover story in the most recent National Review probably hits a good deal closer to the mark. Iraq and corruption are looking like the core factors right now, and I'd wager that for every principled fiscal conservative voter grumbling about the bank-breaking prescription drug benefit, there are two whose beef is that it was too stingy. The complaints about out-of-control spending seem to be a lot more likely to come from ideological pundits—and I think the libertarian-dissent narrative is to some extent appealing to that set because, while neither side's intellectuals are "libertarian" by a stretch, they tend to be more libertarian than the bases they represent (i.e. urban conservative writers are socially liberal as conservatives go; mainstream Dem pundits are constrained by at least a passing acquaintance with economics)

Admittedly, I'm not offering any actual "evidence" or "data" in support of this intuition. As The Wire's Proposition Joe might say, things happen at the polls; proof is hard to come by. But two things kept running through my head as I read the recent Cato study, optimistically pegging libertarians (pretty broadly defined) at 13 percent of the electorate: (1) That's a nice chunk of votes, but still a small enough proportion that you'd gain net votes by appealing to them at the expense of other groups, and (2) People are a lot more prepared to decry "big government" in general than any particular program. The Cato survey question is (necessarily) general, but legislative elections tend to be particular.

A lot of the empirical case for the "covert victory" thesis seems to involve pointing to people like Heath Shuler and Bob Casey (social rather than economic conservatives). But I don't know how far this stretches. We're getting a House swing in the vicinity of 30 seats, which after the Republican Revolution in ’94 is the biggest net shift in a midterm in 20 years. So of course when you finally get flips in districts that have gone Republican for many terms, anyone who’s going to win in these places is going to be pretty conservative. North Carolina is just not going to elect a Barbara Boxer or a Russ Feingold. Other things equal, the median elected official of either party is going to be closer to the center when they’re in the majority than in the minority, when they’re down to their hardcore base. That's just the upshot of the fact that growth happens at the margin.

It's OK, Voters Don't Matter!

jsanchez@reason.com (Julian Sanchez) — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 21:27:00 EST

Riffing off Bryan Caplan's excellent Cato Unbound piece on voter ignorance, Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias both suggest that this is not a terribly big problem, since policy is determined by elites anyway. In other words, political "slack"—one of Caplan's proposed solution—is already ample, a situation which has plenty of its own drawbacks.

There's something to this, of course: Immigration and trade are two issues where agreement among people who do know some economics has kept policy more liberal than would be chosen by voters who, mostly, don't.

On the other hand, the elites who are relevant to politics are political elites, not policy experts. That means a lot of people who do, as you may recall, get chosen by voters. And this time around, they've chosen a bunch of people like Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). (It also means lobbyists, of course, who have their own consensus driven by interests, not expertise.) We don't get a pure exercise of the general will, but if voters are receptive to misguided populist messages, no number of harrumphing editorials in East Coast newspapers will stop misguided populist candidates from getting elected.

Slightly tangentially, Ezra adds:

Bryan singles out religion as a place "where irrationality seems especially pronounced." This gets said occasionally, and it's poppycock. It might be factually wrong to believe in God, but it's certainly not irrational (using rational here in the economic sense, as an action that maximizes your utility). Studies universally find that religious belief and participation offer positive returns for individual health, happiness, finances, personal satisfaction, etc.

First, believing in God doesn't require holding a lot of other ancillary beliefs which might or might not make sense—that the world is 6,000 years old, say. So that stuff is at best neutral in terms of economic rationality and less than compelling in terms of epistemic rationality. But secondly, "rationality" characterizes processes, not outcomes, even when the processes are outcome-oriented. If I believe a stock I own will rise because a psychic told me so, my belief may be true but it will not therefore be justified, even if I know other facts which (had I thought about them) could have more justifiably led me to the same belief. By the same token, you can at least make a case that it's rational to somehow make yourself believe in religion for the health benefits. But if that's not your reason for believing—as I expect it isn't for the vast majority of people—then whether or not belief is otherwise rational, those benefits don't enter into assessing the rationality of the belief. If I stab myself in the abdomen for no good reason, the act does not become more rational if it just happens that I've lanced a swollen appendix that (unbeknownst to me) was on the verge of bursting.

Gridlock or Logrolling?

jsanchez@reason.com (Julian Sanchez) — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 17:43:00 EST

So, like lots of people who favor limited government, I'm generally glad to see divided government and a near-even split in the Senate, even if the ideal would probably be Dem executive and GOP Congress rather than the reverse. But it's worth bearing in mind that a healthy bit of gridlock isn't the only option. That's the likely result of a relatively polar split; a legislature heavier on moderates and pragmatists, on the other hand, could, perversely, produce the opposite result, with heavy-vote trading that hands lots of goodies to the minority party in order to secure their acquescence in the things that the majority wants.

One way to think of it is to see divided government as a Prisoner's dilemma, except that if you don't want government to grow, you have to hope the parties don't manage to arrange a cooperative outcome. Should Rep. Mike Pence (R-IL) win his bid for minority leader, I'll be more sanguine about the prospects for gridlock; less so if it goes to Ohio's John Boehner.

Your Tears Are So Yummy and Sweet

jsanchez@reason.com (Julian Sanchez) — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 14:44:00 EST

Man, I haven't taken this much pleasure in the suffering of a small child in days. Image via Bureaucrash.

Update: Oy. For the benefit of commenters who don't share my sense of humor, I'm not "going after" Santorum's daughter, who I'm about as sure as one can be will never, ever read this post and have her feelings hurt. Just making a joke about how good it is to be rid of this guy.

What's the Solution? Blue Revolution.

jsanchez@reason.com (Julian Sanchez) — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 00:25:00 EST

Now that we know the Virginia Senate race will remain in doubt for at least days to come, and the Dem House majority will be sufficiently dramatic that Nancy Pelosi will be capping one of her own freshman reps execution style just to prove she can, America can move on to the day's real top story: the Britney/K-Fed split.

I'sa Sho 'Nuff Like Me Some Weekly Standard

jsanchez@reason.com (Julian Sanchez) — Sat, 04 Nov 2006 14:11:00 EST

Readers of The Weekly Standard will be familiar with its back-of-the-book "Parody" page (always prominently so labeled so you know it's meant to be funny), which in their October 30 issue consisted of "Kids' Letters to Barack Obama." My eyes bulged ever so slightly at this knee-slapper:

Dear Senator Obama,
I'm a student here at Harvard and my mama tells me there ain't no way a person of color be treated fair in Amerika even if they go to Harvard and [stuff]. You cool with that?
Franklin
Cambridge, Massachusetts

FYI to Bill Kristol: Affirmative action notwithstanding, my sense is that very few Harvard students of any race speak and write like minstrel-show extras.

Just One Problem With That Theory...

jsanchez@reason.com (Julian Sanchez) — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 15:49:49 EDT

Ben Adler at TAPped writes:

I've long been of the opinion, in all seriousness, that Republicans have it in for the disabled. First there is their positioning regarding discrimination against people with disabiilties in the workplace (President Bush, for instance, has repeatedly appointed judges who are extraordinarily hostile to discrimination claims). Then there is their desire to eviscerate social insurance programs that support people with disabilities, like Social Security, and recently there has been their opposition to funding for potentially life-improving stem cell research.

My suspicions have now been confirmed, at least in the case of one Congresswoman, Rep. Barbara Cubin (R-WY). As pointed out yesterday on Midterm Madness, Cubin's Libertarian challenger, Thomas Rankin, says she approached him after a campaign debate on Sunday and said, "If you weren't sitting in that chair, I'd slap you across the face." What chair she was referring to? The electric wheelchair that Rankin, who has multiple sclerosis, gets around in, when he isn't working from home in a hospital bed.

The thing is, while I don't know the details of Rankin's views on these topics—his platform doesn't directly address them—he sounds like a pretty straight-up, across-the-board libertarian. Which means, presumably, that he also opposes workplace discrimination laws as interference with private rights of association, opposes Social Security, and opposes government funding for medical research, though his plank objection to political interference with FDA decisions suggests that (like me) he's probably of the view that if we're going to have such funding, it should be disbursed in as neutral a way as possible, not constrained or skewed by sectarian theological taboos.

So, in the likely event that Rankin does hold these views... are we supposed to infer that he "has it in for" himself?

Update: Ben Adler responds that he actually did the journalist-y thing here and picked up the phone to check on Rankin's views. As it turns out, he's in favor of anti-discrimination laws. It's less clear exactly what his position on government-funded medical research and Social Security is: He apparently thinks government shouldn't be involved in either ideally, but given that both are entrenched doesn't want to do away with either anytime soon. (I should probably note that these are perfectly coherent sorts of positions for a libertarian to have, in my view: There are various things I don't think government ought to be doing, and that I'd like to phase out at some point, but would be wary of just abolishing overnight in light of the disruption it would cause in many cases.)

But if he did have some more extreme version of the positions I imagined, Adler says he certainly would "have it in for" himself, because "belonging to a group does not mean that you get some sort of free pass for taking actions that are hostile to its needs." But I'm not sure this is to the point, which I took to be about motivation. That is to say, it just seems silly to describe opposition to some program intended to benefit group X as "having it in for" group X. There are plenty of reasons to be against laws or programs that benefit specific groups which just have nothing to do with one's attitude toward that group.

I suppose Ben could always borrow a page from the hawks who tarred their opponents in the run up to the Iraq war as "objectively pro-Saddam" and argue that libertarians are "objectively anti-disabled" even if "subjectively" they like disabled people just fine. But it doesn't seem like a terribly useful way to frame things.

It's Part of the SPECIAL Constitution in My Head!

jsanchez@reason.com (Julian Sanchez) — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 15:06:07 EDT

Reed Hundt at TPMCafe offers a rather odd complaint about gerrymandering:

Here's another idea: you could discuss the outrage that the Supreme Court has endorsed gerrymandering that denies the principle of one person-one vote. Amazing fact: a Democratic margin of more than 10% in the House elections on an aggregate basis isn't sure to change even 15 seats. It's obvious that the Constitution is being flouted.

I'm in full agreement that it's sleazy and wrong when incumbents tweak their districts to guarantee their own jobs, but it's going to be an uphill battle to convince me that "one person one vote" is some kind of cornerstone principle of the document that established the Electoral College and a bicameral legislature in which California and Rhode Island get the same number of senators. Of course, the House is supposed to be the more democratic half of the legislature, but even there, it's always been the case that if opinion in a bunch of districts goes from 55 percent pro-Dem to 80 percent pro-Dem, then ceteris paribus this shifts no seats. So "amazing facts" about how aggregate gains might or might not cash out in terms of representation just don't seem particularly significant in themselves. You can certainly argue that a system of, say, proportional representation might be preferable to the current scheme on any number of dimensions—but it's weird to argue as though we already have such a system.

Save Me From Myself: Poor Little Yachtsman Edition

jsanchez@reason.com (Julian Sanchez) — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 15:43:36 EDT

After one too many mornings where I failed to get my ass up to turn off the alarm, Kerry finally just unplugged my clock radio, so I haven't caught Marketplace Morning Report in a while. But Don Boudreaux was listening today and caught a doozy of an argument for higher Social Security taxes:

But my total social security tax for four decades was only $63,000. I didn't even miss it. And in 16 of those years my income hit the government ceiling. I wish they'd taken more. But what if Social Security hadn't existed? Would I have set aside hundreds of thousands to provide for myself?

Not likely. I proved that 10 years ago when I cashed an annuity and bought a sailboat. I sailed to Spain and had lots of fun. But as an investment it was worse than Enron.

So this idea of privatizing, of letting me own my retirement, would have been another Katrina.

Parentalism anyone? As Boudreaux points out, maybe buying a boat was the best use of this guy's money at the time. But there's probably a vicious feedback loop here, where if the government acts on the assumption that people aren't competent to take responsibility for their own lives for long enough, you get citizens who really aren't—because they don't have to. I have plenty of sympathy for people who were dealt a bad hand in life and never earn enough to save up money for old age. I can't seem to muster much for folk who just decided it would be more fun to buy a sailboat with the extra cash they had lying around.

I also note, by the by, that the commentator wants government to invest payroll tax revenue in order to "stop passing the buck to our kids." But he also suggests that the money could be invested in T-Bills. Where does he think the money to pay off the interest on T-Bills comes from? The Treasury Fairy? [cross-posted @ NftL.]

Because Habeas Corpus Is Sooooo 1215

jsanchez@reason.com (Julian Sanchez) — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 14:07:58 EDT

Well, its nice to see the current administration can act quickly and efficiently to something: The Military Commissions Act President Bush signed on Wednesday led almost immediately to a notification being sent to the U.S. District Court that it lacks jurisdiction to consider habeas petitions from Gitmo detainees. Critiques of the act are online from the ACLU and Center for Constitutional Rights.

There's Just Two Kinds of People: Those Who Draw Simplistic Dichotomies, and Those Who Don't

jsanchez@reason.com (Julian Sanchez) — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 15:38:39 EDT

Over in the L.A. Times, Jonah Goldberg gets around to conceding that the Iraq war was a mistake, and goes on to make a sound point, with an illustration that underscores his point nicely—but not in the way he intended:

In the dumbed-down debate we're having, there are only two sides: Pro-war and antiwar. This is silly. First, very few folks who favored the Iraq invasion are abstractly pro-war. Second, the antiwar types aren't really pacifists. They favor military intervention when it comes to stopping genocide in Darfur or starvation in Somalia or doing whatever that was President Clinton did in Haiti. In other words, their objection isn't to war per se. It's to wars that advance U.S. interests (or, allegedly, President Bush's or Israel's or ExxonMobil's interests). I must confess that one of the things that made me reluctant to conclude that the Iraq war was a mistake was my general distaste for the shabbiness of the arguments on the antiwar side.

He is, of course, right that it's silly to speak of "pro-war" and "antiwar" folks as undifferentiated blobs. Which makes it curious that he's so eager to generalize in sweeping ways about what sorts of interventions "antiwar types" support, and what kinds of arguments they make.

Of course, this is in large part a function of an unfortunate institutional fact about opposition to war: It's groups like the execrable ANSWER who have the infrastructure in place to take the lead organizing protests and rallies. So the antiwar position gets associated with—and for once I can use the word without hyperbole—Stalinist positions that I suspect are not shared by the large chunk of the American public that opposed the war even back in 2003. This is part of the reason that, as I argued two years ago, protests are so often counterproductive, pushing the few people they do influence away from the position of the protesters. I've no doubt that at least a few folks who were "liberal hawks" in the run-up to the war were more eager to dissociate themselves from the "all-a-Halliburton-conspiracy" wing of war opposition than they were actually enthusiastic about the prospects for creating a happy little liberal democracy in Mesopotamia.

Still, it's a while since the giant papier-mâché puppets were put away, and there's little enough excuse at this point for pretending to believe—let alone actually believing—that this contingent is representative of the majority of Americans who could now be described as "antiwar." There were plenty of war critics who were making perfectly reasonable arguments back in 2003 and have now been proved largely correct—and I say "largely" only because it now seems that even some of the critics were too sanguine about the war. Making fun of the craziest possible subset of people on the other side of a binary divide is fun—I do it all the time. But Goldberg seems to have offered an inadvertent case study in the dangers of confusing your own entertainment with serious thinking about an issue. [Cross-posted @ NftL]

Why Can't Johnny Take a Derivative?

jsanchez@reason.com (Julian Sanchez) — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 13:38:29 EDT

John Hood at The Corner cites a recent Brookings report in support of the familiar conclusion that American students are far more confident in their math abilities than students in other countries who do better on average. Indeed, across countries, there seems to be an inverse correlation between average confidence in math ability and average scores. One read on that data is that focusing on boosting student self-esteem has created a nation of Lake Woebegone classrooms, full of mostly mediocre kids convinced they're all above average. But that seems like a hasty inference for a couple reasons.

First, as Brookings notes, though confidence and achievement are inversely correlated between countries, they're positively related within each country. This is not, pace Brookings, a paradox, because when you think about it, there's no reason at all to expect confidence to track achievement across countries. To paraphrase Robert Nozick, very few of us sit around thinking: "Hey, I've got two opposable thumbs and I've mastered a natural language—I'm pretty good for a primate!" When we want to know how successful we are at something, we compare ourselves to our own social groups, not to all other Americans, and certainly not to all human beings. So even in the absence of any kind of unusual national egotism, you'd expect average national confidence to track, not average national score, but the distribution of scores.

Imagine two countries. One has a familiar bell curve distribution of math scores, with a steep drop-off from the median around which most students are clustered. Most kids are going to look around and conclude they're about average. The second has a double-peaked or bimodal distribution, with lots of kids clustered at the bottom, a dip toward the median, and another big cluster a bit above average. You'll see something like half the kids in that country concluding they're better than average. Note that I haven't said anything about the average scores between countries here; the average in the first country could be much higher, and nothing changes. The effect could be magnified if you've got, say, clusters of crappy schools in which nobody's very good at math, but someone's got to be valedictorian—at least, for certain ways of breaking the math-talent distribution out into discrete schools.

One additional factor is that some of the lowest levels of math confidence come out of high-scoring Asian countries where, at the risk of overgeneralizing, there tend to be norms against seeming boastful. The low reported levels of confidence there might very well just be a sign of higher rigor and more stringent expectations in schools there. But it might also reflect the desire of kids who are good at math (even by local standards) and know it to avoid seeming arrogant.

The Lake Woebegone explanation is actually plausible enough on face: Kids who're made to think they're very good at something, unless they have a special passion for the subject, probably won't feel much pressure to improve. But it'd be interesting to see someone check the alternative hypothesis by looking at a breakdown of the score distributions within each country.

Curse of the Pink Purger

jsanchez@reason.com (Julian Sanchez) — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 00:28:39 EDT

It's things like this L.A. Times article on social conservatives clamoring for a "pink purge" of gay Republican staffers that make me wary of political outings that folk like John Aravosis seem so keen on, quite apart from my general feeling that people's private lives shouldn't be dragged into the public eye just to score political points.

Sure, it might be that, in the very short term, you can get some mileage out of the bigotry you expose by provoking the social cons into this sort of reaction. But look beyond the midterms and you've got a much less appealing setup: A party with an extremist wing that will be watching closely, itching to go Taliban on any new legislative aide with a hint of a lisp, and a moderate wing unlikely to be ready to die on this particular hill once the issue's out of the limelight. In other words, a dynamic with the potential to create a much less tolerant, more uniformly homophobic GOP presence on the Hill. You might bet that in the still-longer term, this will be an albatross around their necks, but it sure seems like a dangerous game to play.

(Hat tip: Via Mother Jones; Cross-posted @ NftL.)

The "You've Got to Be $@*!ing Me" Files: No Tagbacks Edition

jsanchez@reason.com (Julian Sanchez) — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 17:07:38 EDT

Via Slashdot, it seems an elementary school near Boston is only the most recent to ban tag and other "contact" games. Money quote:

Another Willett parent, Celeste D'Elia, said her son feels safer because of the rule. "I've witnessed enough near collisions," she said.

Near. Collisions. I couldn't have made that one up. Our fearless leader, Freedom's Fonz, wrote about the quest to child-proof the world way back in nineteen-dickety-seven, while I considered the potential political fallout of being raised millennial in 'aught-three.

Op-Ed Paint by Numbers

jsanchez@reason.com (Julian Sanchez) — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 13:44:54 EDT

Thank the gods for the "Times Select" firewall for once; it will prevent your eyeballs from being seared by the full text of this David Brooks column—proof that the 800-words-twice-a-week format can't possibly be healthy for anyone. (Unless, dear reader, you're Arthur Sulzberger. In which case: Only fooling, feel free to drop a line.) Pitching a "moral philosophy for middle-class America," Brooks manages to dredge up three time-tested op-ed idea balls from the depths of his manatee tank:

The Goldilocks Frame: Begin by introducing a cartoonish tripartite typology, consisting of those wacky extremists "religious conservatives" and "social libertarians," and a reasonable middle-ground, "social traditionalists," which just happens to be your own position. Gloss over how the "social libertarian" view that "government should be neutral on values issues" used to just be called "liberal" (in the broad, political theory sense). Instead, caricature this as the view that "individuals come up with solutions to moral questions alone," like little Robinson Crusoes.
The Gee-Whiz: Toss in a dubiously relevant reference to a pop science book you've just read. Extra points if you can get away with using a fact—like the phenomenally intricate way norms are shaped and transmitted by subconscious emotional cues—that actually cuts against your broader argument that social policy is a sound tool for forming people's characters.
That Other Adam Smith Book: Shock and fascinate the four or five of your readers who have been living under a fucking rock for several years—during which time every other scribe with pretensions to "public intellectual" status wrote this same column—by observing that free-market patriarch Adam Smith had a big book other than The Wealth of Nations: The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Conscript Smith to support your position, offering it as the lone alternative to "absolutism" on the one hand and "nihilism" on the other.

Voila! Slap it on some newsprint and you're done. [Cross-posted @ NftL]

Boyz-2-Men

jsanchez@reason.com (Julian Sanchez) — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 19:08:49 EDT

The Mark Foley scandal has afforded an opportunity for social conservatives to revive the old canard that gay men are unusually likely to be pedophiles, with the Family Research Council touting an old study by Timothy Dailey "Ph.D." (in theology) purporting to show just this. Andrew Sullivan links a sound scholarly response which gives the Dailey study a good thrashing. The key point here is that child molesters are overwhelmingly male, and the rate at which their victims are also male is higher than the rate of homosexuality in the general population. If you don't know anything about the psychology of sexuality, it's apparently intuitive to call these men "homosexuals" and conclude that there's a disproportionate amount of homosexual pedophilia. Of course, to recycle an analogy I've used earlier, this is a little like asking men who have sex with goats whether they're boy goats or girl goats and drawing inferences about the goatfucker's sexual orientation. Men who molest prepubescent children are almost never "homosexual" in the sense of "being attracted to men in general."

Dailey is aware of this, and goes to some really spectacularly dishonest lengths to get around it. The debunking linked above covers a lot of this ground, but I ended up doing some further research when I was writing my piece on gay adoption. I could've done a whole separate article on Dailey's mendacity, but much of that had to get cut, since it ran too far afield of the central topic. So now's an opportunity to give a little taste of that.

Dailey tries to undermine the consensus that male-male pedophilia isn't related to homosexuality in the broader sense by establishing that the general male homosexual population is attracted to younger partners than the male heterosexual population. (That's in itself a suspicious move: Why resort to a proxy measure like this when there's already ample data on the sexual orientation of child molesters?) He's forced to be fairly selective in the research he cites in order to arrive at his desired conclusion. In several papers, for instance, he concedes that one of his main sources, the late sex researcher Kurt Freund, denies a general preference among gay men for younger partners. Dailey suggests relying instead on a study by Zebulon Silverthorne and Vernon Quinsey showing a preference among gay men for younger partners, "some as young as 15," as Dailey stresses.

The problem is, I called Quinsey to see what he thought of Dailey's interpretation of his findings. And Quinsey emphasized that his study made use of groups of photographs representing ranges of ages to test attraction, that the mean age for their youngest category was 18, and that "the only statistically valid conclusions that could be drawn concern these average ages." Moreover, he noted that "we wondered in the paper whether the heterosexual men's very high ratings of the 25-year female faces were an artifact of unusually attractive pictures in that category (there were some very pretty models) on the similar grounds that...data from a better controlled study show age preference gradients for homosexual males viewing men and heterosexual males viewing women." That's significant because Dailey's avowed reason for preferring the Silverthorne-Quinsey study is his concern that selection bias had provided Freund with an unrepresentative sample skewed toward gay men with older age preferences. But what distinguishes the Quinsey-Silverthorne study and accounts for the age-preference gap it finds, Quinsey told me, is the unexpected (and, he suspects, perhaps idiosyncratic) "spike" in attraction to older women among heterosexual men. In other words, Dailey is trying to base his conclusion that homosexual preferences tend unusually young by relying on a study where there's an unusual difference—but the difference is accounted for by how uncommonly old the women picked by heterosexuals were.

Keep in mind, that's just one of the studies Dailey uses. It's stunningly mendacious, but the study as a whole is so packed with footnotes that it's likely to seem impressive to a casual reader who's not going to dig into the research Dailey draws on.

Does the Left Hand Know What the Right Hand's Doing?

jsanchez@reason.com (Julian Sanchez) — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 13:18:28 EDT

Ampersand of Alas, a Blog has been catching serious flak from his large feminist audience for cutting a deal with pr0n websites to boost their Google rankings via links from his own highly-linked site.
Brandon Berg at Catallarchy explains why, even if you think pornography is teh evil!!!, the rage is misplaced:

Search-engine optimization is a negative-sum game. By increasing his search engine rankings, one pornographer can take business away from other pornographers, but total revenues for the pornography industry as a whole remain the same. The net effect on the pornography industry is negative--their costs go up due to rent-seeking, but their revenues stay the same--so even though Ampersand is helping some pornographers, that benefit is more than offset by the harm he's doing to others. In effect, he's taking money out of the pockets of pornographers and using it to publish feminist propaganda!

What's the Secret of HumTIMING!

jsanchez@reason.com (Julian Sanchez) — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 11:09:42 EDT

I've got a longer post about this back at chez moi, but James Wolcott' flensing of Dinesh D'Souza's repellent-sounding new book The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11 (yes, really) is worth a gander. Not just for the amusing savagery of the prose, but for the deft (and, as Wolcott notes, rather unusual) stroke of launching the attack in response to a galley copy, over three months before the book appears in stores. A week before release, getting slagged by a Vanity Fair columnist might help move a few copies. Now, the controversy burns itself out well before anyone's in a position to buy the thing, opening the possibility that the book will be rendered passé before it's even published. If that was Wolcott's intention, it's laudably devious.

Have You Stopped Beating the Poor Yet?

jsanchez@reason.com (Julian Sanchez) — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 14:52:33 EDT

An article in the New York Times Magazine this weekend considered a proposal to pay poor folks for "good behavior"—things like staying in school and on the right side of the law. I'll confess, I couldn't get one line from a certain (distinctively non-worksafe) Chris Rock routine out of my head: "What do you want, a cookie? You're not supposed to go to jail!" I'm normally all in favor of taking advantage of market incentives, but things like this can backfire too. I recall reading a study about a nursery school that started fining parents for picking up their kids late. This actually led to more late pickups, because arriving late stopped being seen as discourteous to the people running the school, and instead was seen as a luxury parents could buy.

What I actually wanted to call attention to, though, was a little graph that appeared in the print edition showing people's responses to one question from the Pew Center's "political typology" test. The question is which of these rather loaded statements you agree more with. Option one:

Poor people today have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.

Option two:

Poor people have hard lives because government benefits don't go far enough to help them live decently.

Apparently, and a bit surprisingly to me, a significant majority used to agree with the first one more, while now more agree with the second. And I suppose that's an interesting datum, but damn what a terrible question. "Are you in favor of more government social benefits, or do you think being poor is awesome?" Can we get a checkbox for those of us who think poor people have hard lives, and also that having the government cut bigger checks is a bad response to that fact?

RAW Deal

jsanchez@reason.com (Julian Sanchez) — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 14:14:09 EDT

Like a lot of libertarians, I have a soft spot for Illuminatus! scribe Robert Anton Wilson, who among other things was fond of speculating (before Ray Kurzweil made it cool) about how cumulative advances in bioengineering and nanotechnology might soon make us effectively immortal. Sadly, via Boing Boing, it looks like Bob himself will not be around to benefit from the realization of his prediction. And to make matters worse, Doug Rushkoff (who, come to think of it, I first met at a RAW lecture) is reporting that Wilson's illness has left him in dire financial straits.

If you're a fan and want to do something to help, you can make a PayPal contribution to Wilson's email, "olgaceline@gmail.com" or send a check to:

Dennis Berry c/o Futique Trust
P.O. Box 3561
Santa Cruz, CA 95063.

Also, one fan is printing some nifty T-shirts, proceeds from the sale of which will go to RAW.