Uncommon Priors

I’m still officially on blog hiatus, and will be for another week, probably. Things are too busy to devote time to a sideline like this.

Nonetheless, I have to speak out on one thing. Put briefly, as noted above, I won’t be voting for Obama this November. I obviously won’t be voting for McCain, so I’ll be staying home.

It was bad enough when Obama gave away the moral high ground in the campaign by declining to take public funding. But the nomination of Biden for the second slot on the ticket is, to put it simply, an utterly unprincipled choice of an utterly unprincipled miserable excuse for a human being. I can’t stomach the idea of casting a vote for Biden for any position whatsoever, and certainly not for the number two slot in the executive branch. Biden isn’t fit to be the dogcatcher of Spread Eagle, Wisconsin, morally or intellectually.

Here’s the bill of particulars.

1. The Bankruptcy “Reform” Act

For years and years, Congressional Republicans had been trying to pass a bill to seriously curtail bankruptcy rights. When he was president, Bill Clinton vetoed it — twice, I think. During the Bush administration, the Republicans finally got it through, in 2005, over a Democratic filibuster plan. The cloture vote that was thus needed passed only with the help of several turncoat democrats, Joseph Biden among them.

I’ve said what I think about the bankruptcy bill before (please ignore the glaring misplaced comma in paragraph 8: it was an editorial error, it should be after, not before, the word “risk”). Everything I said in that op-ed still holds, as I noted in an “I told you so” blog post a few years on. (Here’s another helpful breakdown, from someone else.)

Biden was one of the leaders in support of this horrible, horrible bill — this piece of class warfare in reverse. But it gets worse. MBNA bought members of Congress like crazy for this bill — my favorite case is that of Representative Jim “The Shameless Bribe-Taker” Moran (D-VA — representing places like Alexandria and Arlington), who switched from opposing to supporting an earlier version of the bill after MBNA gave him a huge, unsecured, personal loan to get him out of massive hot water, a loan for which he was in no way qualified.

But what does that have to do with Biden, you might ask? Well, there’s a miasma of corruption in Biden’s case too. Guess who has a lobbyist son who was a paid consultant for MBNA at the time of the vote? Yep. Biden.

What might someone say in Biden’s defense? Perhaps the bankruptcy bill at least closed some corporate bankruptcy loopholes? Nope. In fact, a Republican tried to tighten some corporate bankruptcy loopholes, making the bill slightly less grotesquely aimed at lower-middle-class individuals. Guess who killed those amendments? Yep. Biden.

For his disgraceful, corrupt, malicious behavior in the bankruptcy bill mess alone, Biden ought to be driven out of politics in infamy, not rewarded with a seat in the White House.

2. Iraq

Biden initially supported the war, and did a lot of the scut work to pave the way for it to happen. (Details here.) He also voted to continue funding the war, more recently.

More recently, now that everyone in the world knows the war is a disastrous failure, Biden’s spoken out strongly against the Bush administration plan to continue it. What’s his solution? Ethnic and religious partition. What? Is he going for Bosnia south? The Iraqis don’t like it any better than the sane Americans.

3. Plagiarism and Deception

How about Biden’s personal morals and judgment? Perhaps they’re better than his political morals and judgment?

Nope. I can’t describe the plagiarism mess any better than Jack Schafer did, in Slate. I won’t even try. Suffice it to say that he blatantly plagiarized work in law school, then turned around and did it again in politics — and in a bizarre way, too, ripping off personal details from a British politician that didn’t even apply to him! Joseph Biden actually gave speeches reciting (plagiarized) details of his personal background and history that weren’t even true — of Biden, though they were true of the guy who originally wrote the speech.

I mean, what the fuck? That’s doesn’t just demonstrate dishonesty, it also demonstrates rank stupidity. How on earth do you think you’re not going to get caught stealing someone else’s background, when you’re a national politician? I think it also demonstrates a touch of insanity. I mean, isn’t that just a really disturbed thing to do? Rip off someone else’s life? And it’s not the worst of it. While we’re in the appalling lies about personal history department, Biden made inconsistent statements and downright misled those who heard his speeches about his alleged (nonexistent) civil rights activism in the 60’s.

That article also reports that Biden apparently got shitty grades in college and law school, incidentally. Not surprisingly, he lied about his academic record, too. Among other lies, while berating a heckler, he falsely claimed that he graduated in the top half of his law school class, etc. etc.

Three strikes should be enough, but one more seals the deal:

4. “Articulate”.

Do I even need to say anything about that?

This whole thing is really sad for me. I was looking forward to voting for Obama — for a candidate who at least represents the center (if not the left, at least better than the right like most of that lot) of the Democratic party, who is unquestionably intelligent and accomplished (pretty much the polar opposite of Bush in every way), a man who might actually seek out and listen to competent advice and make informed decisions about national policy. Not to mention being able to vote for America’s first black president. But I simply cannot vote for a ticket containing that wretched creature from Delaware, or for anyone unprincipled enough to choose him as a running mate.

As is obvious, I’m not posting for a few days: I’m in the process of moving. See y’all monday-ish, when I have 5 or 6 posts I’ve been meaning to write.

But for now, a brief moment of amusement. You know that site everything2 that constantly comes up on google searches for no good reason, the mysterious one where people write random, sometimes downright insane, essays on whatever string of words the page title happens to consist in?

It also has a tutorial on “How to talk like Jacques Derrida.”

Brian Weatherson has posted a brain-boggling problem for strategic theory, that he calls “a cross between the Newcomb puzzle and the centipede game.”

I don’t have any thoughts on the solution for the poor causal decision theorist yet… will comment in more detail soon… I suspect my thoughts are going to hinge on questions about the demon’s knowledge and its stability in various counterfactual circumstances, but, well… thinking…

Ann Bartow, in comments to prawfs (h/t Dave, Amber):

Posting somebody’s personally identifiable comment from another blog without giving them notice and opportunity to respond is viewed by me and many acquaintances as a form of bullying, and I’m glad you aren’t engaging in it here.
* * *
Dave, if you took a comment I made here, where I know I made the comment and can watch the conversation and continue to participate in it as I choose, and put it up at another law prof blog as the lynch pin for an entire post, without giving me any notice, I would consider that bullying. And I’m confident that many people share this view (although there may be somewhat of a gender divide) because it’s been the topic of fairly extensive discussions I’ve participated in.

Bartow claims there’s an argument for this, but all she posted was a bunch of undifferentiated links on bullying in general (which I agree is a big problem), and then refused to continue the discussion in a flurry of accusations of deliberate misreadings, implications of censorship in comment moderation, etc. So let’s probe our intuitions here. Did I, merely by quoting her comments, “bully” her just now? (By somehow intimidating her with the fury of all five of my regular readers, perhaps?)

I don’t want to send this claim down in a hailstorm of mockery. Well, no, that’s not quite true. I do want to send the claim down in a hailstorm of mockery, because it strikes me as, frankly, ridiculous. But I recognize that this desire is a little inappropriate, and so I can’t reflectively endorse it. Like a good little Kantian, I’m calling on reason to kick in and handle matters. I’m hoping someone else actually has an idea what the argument might be for this claim, and can post it.

The closest thing to an argument anyone’s offered for it yet is Susan Kuo’s comment on con-op (Dave’s post linked above). Which comes out roughly as follows: It’s bullying when a) there’s malign intent, or b) someone feels bullied, which is fairly likely to happen when negative remarks are made about someone’s comment without notice. That doesn’t seem right. For one thing, one might feel bullied when someone disagrees with one even with notice. (In fact, one might feel more if one gets e-mails saying things like “hey, I just took apart your silly comment on Daily Kos here.” — Sarah aptly points this out.) The principle Kuo endorses —

After reading the earlier discussion, I think that the sticking point was not so much the definition of bullying, but rather, from whose viewpoint should we define bullying – that of the “bully” or the “bullied.” I think that both viewpoints are valid. Sometimes, the viewpoints coincide. But when they do not and someone is feeling bullied, I’m not inclined to gainsay those feelings.

– seems to be subject to way too many counterexamples like that. I might, for example, feel bullied if the criticism I receive is too good — if the arguments are too devastating. But surely we wouldn’t want to condemn that as bullying.

Instead, I suggest we ought to determine whether “bullying” has occurred, in any context, from a third-person perspective.

Chris Bertram suggests that the democratic peace (pretty much the strongest empirical regularity in political science) is in at least a little danger, “since both Russia and Georgia rate as 7, “fully democratic” on the Polity index.”

Paul Gowder suggests that that’s one of the more amusing things he’s heard recently.

For those of you who are (blessedly) innocent of international relations datasets, Polity classifies, based on a variety of factors, states on a scale from authoritarian to democratic, as well as various other things. It’s not very accurate or very capable of fine distinctions, to say the least. There are several IR data sets that have similar levels of, uh, uselessness. My very favorite is the MIDS data set, which supposedly provides data on military conflict between states (scaled to various levels of intensity), but actually, or so I’m told, classified fishing boat seizures on the same level as border skirmishes.

This is not to cast aspersions on IR: there’s a reason these data sets are hard, namely, it’s really difficult to get the data on all these things, judge what goes where, manage the huge amounts of information, etc., etc. Polity and MIDS and the like are actually major services to knowledge.

But it’s a little loopy to say that Russia is democratic because it happens to have gotten a high score on Polity. I mean, this is the country that poisons people who disagree with Putin (that is, accuse him of arranging yet another murder, of a journalist critical of the regime, Anna Politkovskaya). That has its very own reincarnation of the Hitler Youth. That provoked respected election observers to stomp out in a huff. (Of course, the elections are rigged.) The country that was ranked 144/169 in Reporters Sans Frontieres 2007 world press freedom index, just below, Sudan, Singapore, Afghanistan and Yemen (Here’s why.). The country that disappears people in Chechnya.

In short, Russia is a democracy like I’m a WWII flying ace.

is not actually from Kafka, Borges, or Byron. I suspect, knowing my tastes, that this will actually turn out to be the Tuesday Kafka/Borges/Byron/Wilde/Thompson/Parker/Mencken/Anouilh/Reed/Camus/Wodehouse/Kierkegaard, but, well, consistency… bah. (Perhaps I should. add Emerson to that list? Oh my.)

Today, Anouilh, in the voice of Maxime (in Poor Bitos) explains democracy to us in a way that feels surprisingly insightful…

Don’t worry, those fellows were great talkers. The problem was holding the floor for as long as you could. The least interruption was fatal. When they cut into your speeches they cut off your head as well. That was made very clear on the 9th Thermidor. How do you suppose they got Robispierre? By making enough noise to drown his voice. The second he couldn’t talk any more, he was dead. Long live democracy, which gives us the spoken word.

Indeed.

This is weird (and, alas, in political science):

A University of Iowa professor was arrested Friday afternoon for allegedly asking female students to let him fondle their breasts in return for an “A” grade for the class.

Arthur Herbert Miller, 66, of 1700 N. Dubuque Road, faces four counts of bribery, a class C felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

What could the legal theory be here? (Perhaps something to do with its being a state university?)

… on further investigation …

The relevant statute appears to be Iowa general law ch. 722

I gather he’s being charged with *accepting a bribe* (the class C felony, whereas giving the bribe is a class D felony), contra the news report (big surprise, the media screws it up), the relevant section for which says:

A person who is serving or has been elected, selected, appointed, employed, or otherwise engaged to serve in a public capacity, including a public officer or employee, a referee, juror, or jury panel member, or a witness in a judicial or arbitration hearing or any official inquiry, or a member of a board of arbitration who solicits or knowingly accepts or receives a promise or anything of value or a benefit given pursuant to an understanding or arrangement that the promise or thing of value or benefit will influence the act, vote, opinion, judgment, decision, or exercise of discretion of the person with respect to the person’s services in that capacity commits a class “C” felony. In addition, a person convicted under this section is disqualified from holding public office under the laws of this state.

This is a really interesting legal theory, to say the least… I can’t imagine the legislature meant for this to be what the bribery statute was used for, but it does seem to fit within the text. This might be a model for future prosecutions — in which case, we need to ask ourselves:
- should this kind of sexual harassment be criminalized?
- should private harassers get the same kind of punishment as public harassers?

I’m pleasantly surprised: when Rick Hills isn’t releasing stunningly tendentious and uncharitable attacks and classic examples of the use of the hermeneutics of suspicion as an offensive weapon on everyone who disagrees with him, he actually manages to spark interesting and revealing discussion. Example: his latest post, asking if law students are lazy, relative to grad students in regular academic disciplines, because they’re (allegedly) unwilling to read more than 50 pages a week.

Some thoughts on the discussion over there. First, it seems definitely true that law students are less willing to do lots of reading. As I recall from law school, reading more than a handful of cases in any given week led to moans and groans from everyone, myself included. Also, quite a lot of law students (as in, almost all) regularly shirk on the reading. By contrast, the reading list for the first-year core courses in my department regularly goes to the many-hundreds of pages per week. In the American Politics subfield, for example, I recall several weeks when reading for a single course was one full book (200-300 pages or so), plus several 30 page articles. In my main field (political theory) the reading-per-week tends to be somewhat lighter, but much denser (e.g. 100 pages of Rawls for one course). I also get the sense that the compliance rate is much higher here (people actually do the reading).

In the comments on Prawfs, various people give reasons for this difference. The ones I find convincing are generally those that say things like “law students are just there to get a job, they’re not interested in the subject,” and “law students aren’t used to a lot of reading.” I want to highlight the unconvincing ones, however, because they suggest just a bizarrely different experience from what I remember of law school and what I’ve experienced in grad school.

1. Dan Markel says that reading cases is a lot harder than reading other materials, particularly things like narrative history or Calhoun’s disquisition. But that just doesn’t seem true. Perhaps it’s true for 1Ls, who are still struggling to get a grasp on the, ahem, unique (terrible) writing style of lawyers and judges. But by the time one is taking the advanced seminars that Hills’s post was about, one ought to be able to breeze through cases. At this point, after practicing for a while before going to grad school, I can read a case, and get all relevant information out of it, much faster than I can seriously read a work of narrative history (which can’t be read like a novel — it requires thinking about things like sourcing, etc.).*
2. Josh S. says something really stunning, that I want to reproduce at length:
   

   Arts & Sciences graduate students, as far as I can tell, are not required to read with the depth that law students are. In a law class, perhaps not a seminar, you not only have to read the material but you have to digest and to prepare it so that when a professor calls on you for a recitation or feedback, you will not be thumbing through your book hoping to find the correct page with that miniscule fact on it. In other graduate schools they merely want to encourage discussion of the topic in the classroom, which means that they don’t have to know every detail off the top of their head. Since the expectation is merely to participate in a rolling class discussion, you can breeze through an entire book and participate sufficiently. Whereas, if a law student were to be asked to prepare a book, they would need to take copious notes that will lead them to the information in the source book they need.

   If you would like to assign a book a week, I would recommend telling your class that they aren’t required to know the material with any particular depth. Of course, in doing that you are also not likely to get the kind of deep analysis one might expect from a law class.

   Uh… what? First of all, at least in the top law schools, most classes aren’t as fanatically Socratic as tradition, and Josh’s comment, would suggest. Second, very few law students beyond the 1L paranoia actually do insane things like brief cases or create pre-class notes on the reading. Third, my experience in advanced discussion-type seminars in law school was that they actually required less “deep” reading than in grad school — at least, judging from the fact that in those seminars in law school, I always manged to say the “right” thing without much work, while in grad school, it takes more work to often say the “wrong” thing (reflecting an inadequate understanding of the material). Josh S.’s experience is just the complete opposite of mine. (Perhaps I was smarter back in law school?)

3. Dave says: “With no disrespect to history or poly sci grad students, many of their readings simply aren’t as dense as legal reading.” Paul says: that’s just not true. Even leaving aside the Rawls, compare a case to a serious empirical piece in poli sci, with a methods section to get through, tables filled with data analysis flying all over the place, possibly even a game theoretic model… I defy you to read an Acemoglu and Robinson article, say, faster than you’d read just about any case with the same number of pages.
4. Similar claims, with similar answers, are made by Joseph Slater, Bama 1L, etc. I think a lot of the disagreement I have with many of these comes from a failure (on the part of the others) to separate the scary never-read-a-case-before 1L experience from the more skilled 2L and 3L experience. Reading cases just ain’t that hard once you get past 1L year. That’s probably the problem I have with Bama’s comment. Slater’s is harder, because he has actual experience in both worlds, and his impression is the opposite of mine. I suspect, however, that Slater, because he got his J.D. in 1986, was in a lot more socratic world than exists today. So when he says this:
   

   Law students might reasonably expect to be called on and quizzed about some seemingly not-terribly-significant detail in the facts, or about any part of the analysis or legal rule. Grad students typically aren’t quizzed about names and dates in class; they talk about the book’s thesis and argument, its use of sources, and its place in the relevant historiography. Sure, students also discuss facts they learned, but the teacher typically doesn’t quiz them comprehensively on the facts.

   I say that the expectation he identifies has little-to-no resemblance to my law school experience.

So perhaps the difference is in those law schools where the socratic method is still used on a regular basis, and those where it is not. In the latter case, and after the 1L year, everything I’ve experienced suggests that yes, law students are, in fact, lazy… relative to insanely dedicated and overworked grad students in other disciplines — not, perhaps, relative to normal, sane people.

—-
* Which is another thing: don’t dis history, Dan. As I’m learning from my Ireland project, historical research is hard, and the works that are out there require serious, sustained attention.

Every so often, I post on Overcoming Bias, usually to scold the people there for jumping into deep waters without a life jacket and ignoring some concept or distinction that I think is important. The below post will appear there on Saturday, so consider this a sneak preview of something in that broad genre. (Hence the slight shallowness.)

The Problem at the Heart of Pascal’s Wager

“It is a most painful position to a conscientious and cultivated mind to be drawn in contrary directions by the two noblest of all objects of pursuit — truth and the general good. Such a conflict must inevitably produce a growing indifference to one or other of these objects, most probably to both.”
- John Stuart Mill, from Utility of Religion

Much electronic ink has been spilled on this blog about Pascal’s wager. Yet, I don’t think that the central issue, and one that relates directly to the mission of this blog, has been covered. That issue is this: there’s a difference between the requirements for good (rational, justified) belief and the requirements for good (rational, prudent — not necessarily moral) action.

Presented most directly: good belief is supposed to be truth and evidence-tracking. It is not supposed to be consequence-tracking. We call a belief rational to the extent it is (appropriately) influenced by the evidence available to the believer, and thus maximizes our shot at getting the truth. We call a belief less rational to the extent it is influenced by other factors, including the consequences of holding that belief. Thus, an atheist who changed his beliefs in response to the threat of torture from the Spanish Inquisition cannot be said to have followed a correct belief-formation process.

On the other hand, good action is supposed (modulo deontological moral theories) to be consequence-tracking. The atheist who professes changed beliefs in response to the threat of torture from the Spanish Inquisition can be said to be acting prudently by making such a profession.

A modern gloss on Pascal’s wager might be understood less as an argument for the belief in God than as a challenge to that separation. If, Modern-Pascal might say, we’re in an epistemic situation such that our evidence is in equipoise (always keeping in mind Daniel Griffin’s apt point that this is the situation presumed by Pascal’s argument), then we ought to take consequences into account in choosing our beliefs.

There seem to be arguments for and against that position…

In its favor we can imagine situations where it’s not the nastiness of an all-knowing deity that makes our beliefs consequential, but something about our own psychologies. Imagine Allen. He’s an alcoholic. He makes an all-things-considered judgment that it would be best for him to stop drinking. He also holds the belief that the only way for someone with his psychological characteristics to stop drinking is to join Alcoholics Anonymous. Allen is also an atheist. However, he believes that if he joins Alcoholics Anonymous, his psychological characteristics are such that he will be induced by social pressure to believe in God. Because he’s an atheist, he believes that if that belief change happens, it’ll be because his reasoning process will be warped by social pressure, and his new beliefs will be false and (more importantly) unwarranted by the evidence.

Let’s assume that all of Allen’s present beliefs are warranted by the evidence — that they’re rational by the standards of belief that epistemically competent agents hold. Allen is, in effect, choosing to cause himself to adopt a belief that would be false and irrational by his current lights, in order to bring about better personal consequences. But it’s hard to call Allen’s decision wrong.

If we think that the belief in God is what causes AA to work — if we think it’s the belief itself that’s operative in bringing about the good consequence, then the AA question is structurally indistinguishable from the problem at the heart of Pascal’s wager: the problem of making our beliefs dependent on consequences, rather than just the evidence.

So it seems like the AA example gives us some reason to swallow Pascal’s wager, modulo the other objections (like a multiplicity of religions). But there are arguments on the other side. For one thing, again, remember that Pascal’s original argument suggests that the evidence is in equipoise. It’s somewhat plausible to think of consequences as a “tiebreaker” between beliefs that are uncertain in that way. But it’s less plausible to think that we can sensibly use consequences where evidence is not in equipoise. One major reason for this is that it’s totally unclear how we might relate consequences and evidence in one unified process of belief formation. For example, suppose that I think there’s a 70% change that P is true, but that my believing P is true will cause one puppy to die. Is the death of the puppy worth 20% + epsilon chance of truth, so that I should change my beliefs? How about two puppies? What if someone offers me one dollar? How about a million dollars? What’s the function to convert badness or goodness of consequence into weight of evidence?

This is a problem that’s very difficult, and I don’t purport to offer a solution. But we should think of it as a serious line of objection to the Pascal’s wager type of argument: if consequences are simply inadmissible in belief-formation processes, Pascal’s argument fails on the spot.

(This is a revised version of a post that I originally wrote a couple of weeks ago, which appears in its original form as a lengthy excursus on doxastic voluntarism on my personal blog, Uncommon Priors. If you’re interested, you might check that out, though it’s less sound, I think, than the current presentation.)