Uncommon Priors

She’s keeping it anonymous, so I won’t say who (nobody who has been mentioned here before), but she’s smart and interesting and cool and so you should add Never Accidental to your RSS feeds right now.

Tyler Cowen has had, for a few weeks now, a campaign on his blog to increase the prices of parking.

Yeah, I get it, decreasing traffic, or something. (And I do mean “or something.” Because it’s not clear what the other benefits might be. I mean, rationing spaces? Why is rationing spaces by ability to pay better than rationing spaces by who gets there first?)

But really, there’s a res ipsa thing going on here. He wants to raise your parking prices. Talk about the dismal science.

h/t Mike, idiot named “war machine” goes to prison for bar fight, but judge shits on first amendment by imprisoning him for bitching on twitter about the courts.

Deputy District Attorney Michael Runyon filed a document Thursday containing several expletive-laden “tweets” posted on War Machine’s Twitter page in which he apparently rails against the court system, minimizes his role in the bar fights and laments having to serve a jail term.

One of the tweets reads, in part, that it “doesn’t pay to win in a street fight … it doesn’t even pay to defend yourself our county has gone soft. We need a civil war!”

Danielsen acknowledged a defense attorney’s contention that War Machine was asserting his free speech rights online, but the judge noted that speech — much like one’s actions — can come with consequences. As the judge continued, he seemed to focus less on the tweets than on War Machine’s statements to a probation officer, whose report won’t become public until after the sentencing.

“I think his words and his actions show a certain disrespect to anybody other than himself,” the judge said, adding that War Machine often chooses to “fight” his way out of tough situations rather than “think” his way out.

The judge is an even bigger idiot: the whole POINT of the notion of free speech is that speech — particularly political speech — does not come with legal consequences unless that speech is “I accept this contract” or “send the money or the puppy gets it.” The idea that criminal defendants get steeper sentences for bitching about the court system is profoundly inconsistent with a free society.

This little screed will have two preliminary sections, drawing two distinctions. It then will have a final section (which probably won’t be more than a few sentences) applying those distinctions to take potshots at an argument I dislike. If I were a responsible screed-writer, there’d be some kind of an introductory paragraph explaining what I’m actually going to argue here. But bugger that for a game of soldiers. You’ll just have to trust me (but not take it on faith!) that I’m about to say something worth reading. (It’s also written in one draft without actually proofreading or anything, so apologies in advance for any glitches, it’s late at night now and I have to get up early tomorrow, so maybe I’ll go over and clean up in about 20 hours.)

I will say that this is meant to be a refutation of the proposition, made on behalf of defenders of religious faith, that we take things on faith all the time. A possible part II will be a discussion of William James’s “The Will to Believe.” I’m about halfway through reading it, and think what I’ve read so far can mostly be answered based on the stuff in here (working title for part II: “Why William James was Wrong, Wrong, Wrong, Wrong, Wrong, Wrong, Wrong, and why I do not Make That Assertion on Faith.”), but, who knows, maybe he’ll convince me in the second half.

Action Without Belief
Suppose I’m playing blackjack, and I’ve drawn four cards — a 3, a 5, a 6, and a 2. I’m counting cards, and based on this counting, my subjective probability in the next card being five or less is above .5. I stand to double my money if I win. In this circumstance, it’s rational, assuming I’m risk averse (and assuming I have the right idea about how the rules of betting in blackjack work — I’m not actually sure how card counting works either — but you get the point) to hit.

In such a situation, we wouldn’t say that I believe that the next card is going to be five or less. I don’t believe the next card is going to be five or less. I believe it’s more likely than not that the next card will be five or less, but I know that the next card could be five or less, or it could be more than five. I could bust. I recognize the possibility that I could bust — I don’t have any belief that excludes my busting on the next draw. Such as, for example, the belief that the next card is going to be five or less.

Nonetheless, I act as if I believe the next card will be five or less. Because I have to make a decision — hit or stand — and hitting is the decision I must make if I believe the next card will to be five or less, standing if I believe it will be at least six. I know that the next card will either be five or less, or at least six, and being forced to choose between the actions appropriate for each of those disjoint and exhaustive probability masses, I choose the one that I think is most likely, without thereby committing to the belief it’s true.

Now suppose I’m not counting cards. Suppose, furthermore, that I don’t even know how to count frequencies, so I’m in a state of radical uncertainty as to what the next card will be. I decide whether to hit or stand by flipping a coin. Not because I think flipping a coin gives me access to any information about the state of the deck, but simply because I must make a practical (not a theoretical) decision — to hit or stand? — and have no other means by which to do so. In this situation, I don’t even believe that it’s more likely than not that the next card will be five or less. We can say that my decision in this circumstance, whatever it is, is defensible: I must either hit or stand (or, I suppose, run screaming out of the casino, but then I leave my money on the table!), and under uncertainty each option is no more defensible than the other, therefore both are defensible. Yet we can also say that I don’t hold any beliefs at all about the next card. Nonetheless, I’m able to take action — rationally defensible action! — without forming any beliefs whatsoever about the facts underlying the choice of which action to take.

Fallibilism Without Faith

Here’s another way of making essentially the same distinction. Suppose I’m forced to decide to which proposition to commit among several mutually exclusive and exhaustive propositions. Not actions. Propositions. Suppose, for example, that I’m called to make a prediction about which party willl win the 2012 presidential election. And suppose, for some reason, that the answer “I don’t know” is inadmissible. (Perhaps I have an extraordinarily obnoxious interlocutor who will keep on nagging me and nagging me, calling me in the middle of the night [or worse, at about 6:30 am each morning], until I give some kind of definitive answer.) But I have grotesquely inadequate information on which to base this decision. Eventually, I make my best guess: “no matter how much Obama screws up, he won’t do anything bad enough to make the American people want four more years of Republicans.” I have some information on which to base this propositional commitment — I’ve read press reports about Obama’s positions, I’ve talked to people (my fellow liberal academic Californians) about their general political beliefs. But I don’t have very good information.

We can say, if we must, that I believe that the democrats will win in 2012. But I won’t say that my credence in that belief (which we can express either as a subjective probability judgment like good little bayesians, or, equivalently, as a claim about the strength of evidence it would get me to change my position) is very strong. I’m not very committed to that belief. I can recognize that someone might reasonably believe differently — might do so even with the same evidence available to me, if they evaluate it differently. I also can recognize that someone might reasonably believe differently even if they evaluate evidence the same way, if they have slightly different evidence (perhaps all their friends are bible-thumping midwesterners). Call this credence level A. As I get more information (perhaps I see the results of a good nationwide opinion poll) my credence in that belief grows stronger. Call my state of belief after seeing a whole crapload of opinion polls, all of which agree with my preexisting belief, credence level B. Even at credence level B, my belief that the democrats will win in 2012 is still defeasible. There’s still evidence that can cause me to change it. Indeed, it might still be changeable with a change in my knowledge of even one additional relevant fact, so long as I evaluate that additional relevant’s fact’s being different as low-enough (subjective) probability. For example, if I wake up one morning and the headline of the New York Times is “Obama Caught Snorting Blow With Osama bin Laden off Naked Body of Three Underage Hookers Paid for by Goldman Sachs in Exchange for Having CEO of Goldman Competitor Tortured in Abu Ghraib” then I will immediately find myself with at least credence level B in a Republican victory — it just so happens that until such a time, I assign exceedingly low subjective probability to the appearance of that headline.*

The key claim I now want to make here is that neither credence level A nor credence level B counts as faith. The easy way to tell this is that (a) my credence level, and, ultimately, the truth-value I ascribe to the proposition under consideration varies with the strength of the evidence available to me (ideally, I’ll have some idea in advance of the sort of evidence that will change my credence level), and (b) I won’t describe myself as certain.** Let us say that “faith” is any kind of belief that fails either (a) or (b). We can imagine kinds of belief that fail either (or both) (a) or (b). Suppose, for example, that I assign credence level B to the proposition “my spouse isn’t cheating on me.” Then I get a bunch of new evidence — there’s unfamiliar underwear of the wrong gender in the laundry, the telephone rings at odd hours and the caller hangs up when I answer, I suddenly can’t reach my spouse late at night, etc. Yet I still assign credence level B to the no-cheating proposition. I fail (a) in that situation. Or suppose I insist that I know, absolutely and completely, that my spouse isn’t cheating on me. Then I fail (b).

If song be past, and hope undone,
And pulse, and head, and heart, are flame;
It is thy work, thou faithless one!
But, no!—I will not name thy name!***

How did I get away with the last paragraph in the previous section? Why, that is, can’t someone just say that beliefs that meet (a) and (b) are faith too, just different sorts of faith?

Well, you could. You can use words any way you want. You can say that both beliefs that meet (a) and (b) and beliefs that don’t are called faith, or schmaith, or PRETTYSHINYKITTENWANTWANTWANT!! But that claim — that it’s all faith — is usually made on behalf of a certain sort of defense of religious belief. Let me try and replicate the dialectic here.

Hard-line Atheist: “The religious believe in god on faith alone, and it’s irrational to believe things on faith alone!”

Believer or Sympathetic/More Tolerant Non-Believer: “You’re actually committed to the opposite. You believe all kinds of things on faith — including even the nonexistence of god.”

HA: “What do you mean by believing on faith?”

BS: “Believing without sufficient evidence. You believe all kinds of things without sufficient evidence — you have moral beliefs, you believe your actions/life are/is meaningful enough to motivate you to get out of bed in the morning, you believe your friends aren’t going to screw you over.”****

Here’s the problem with the last BS argument. These kinds of beliefs are different from the kinds of beliefs religious people hold. Even if we believe that our friends won’t screw us over without sufficient evidence — or even without any evidence at all, simply because the world is such that we’re forced to come to some kind of belief about those topics without sufficient evidence, we recognize that we don’t have sufficient evidence, and adjust the credence we assign to that belief accordingly. And sometimes (like in the second blackjack example) we don’t hold any beliefs at all — we just act as if we held a belief, because it’s the best we can do in the situation.

By contrast, the religious believer doesn’t just believe it’s more likely than not that god is real. The religious believer is certain that God is real. And the believer isn’t amenable to evidence otherwise — in fact, many professions of religious faith specifically exclude the possibility of evidence against the proposition (or for it) that their god exists, etc. Here’s an example from the Catholics:

(a) The twofold order of knowledge. — “The Catholic Church”, says the Vatican Council, III, iv, “has always held that there is a twofold order of knowledge, and that these two orders are distinguished from one another not only in their principle but in their object; in one we know by natural reason, in the other by Divine faith; the object of the one is truth attainable by natural reason, the object of the other is mysteries hidden in God, but which we have to believe and which can only be known to us by Divine revelation.”

* * *

(d) That such Divine faith is necessary, follows from the fact of Divine revelation. For revelation means that the Supreme Truth has spoken to man and revealed to him truths which are not in themselves evident to the human mind. We must, then, either reject revelation altogether, or accept it by faith; that is, we must submit our intellect to truths which we cannot understand, but which come to us on Divine authority.

* * *

The foregoing analyses will enable us to define an act of Divine supernatural faith as “the act of the intellect assenting to a Divine truth owing to the movement of the will, which is itself moved by the grace of God” (St. Thomas, II-II, Q. iv, a. 2). And just as the light of faith is a gift supernaturally bestowed upon the understanding, so also this Divine grace moving the will is, as its name implies, an equally supernatural and an absolutely gratuitous gift. Neither gift is due to previous study neither of them can be acquired by human efforts, but “Ask and ye shall receive.”

So, fine, if you want to call these other kinds of belief — like that my friends won’t screw me over (what I’d call “trust”) “faith,” then call them “faith.” Then sure, I don’t object to faith. But I object to the kind of belief that religious believers have, which we can call superfaith. The point is, the religious believe that god exists in a much stronger way than I believe that my friends won’t stab me in the back.

(Incidentally, here’s a good example of an atheist demonstrating that her atheism is not a matter of faith by stating evidence that would convince her that god is real.)

One final objection is worth considering: it’s possible that religious believers could have a more humble kind of belief: they could believe the evidence is such that it’s more likely true than not that god exists, but they’re not certain and they’re open to evidence to the contrary. Some believers who work with the argument from design claim to hold their belief that way — with something less than faith. To them, I’d say “great, now let’s talk about how you’re evaluating the evidence wrong,” and then see if they can actually be convinced to change their credence level. Any bets?

* It would totally be worth four years of Republicans to see a headline like that.

** I was going to make an exception here for tautologies, axiomatic systems, etc., but, actually, I’m not even going to go that far. For I wouldn’t say I’m certain that, say, 2+2=4. It’s always possible that I could have grotesquely misunderstood arithmetic. Just very, very, very low subjective probability. Likewise, I could have misunderstood the laws of logic such that something I think is a contradiction actually isn’t, etc. etc. (Or the laws of logic that I correctly understood could be wrong. Consider the occasional talk about dumping the law of excluded middle.) We should distinguish what we might call ontological certainty — the fact that some true propositions express conceptual or logical claims s.t. if they’re true, which they are, they’re true in all possible worlds — with epistemic certainty, i.e., with the proposition that I ascribe certainty to my belief in those propositions. You can have one without the other.

*** Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Sappho’s Song.

**** These examples borrowed from my friend Aysha. This post comes out of a facebook argument with her on this very subject. Other notes on those examples: I don’t think we have to believe our actions/lives are meaningful in order to motivate action (see the argument against the claim that our actions are taken “under the guise of the good” in Kieran Setiya, Reasons Without Rationalism, Princeton University Press 2007 for more on this), and it can be perfectly rational to trust a friend as a heuristic given the low likely cost of getting screwed over and large benefit from having friends, see also evolutionary reasons for behaviors in accord with both of these. And if our moral beliefs are completely voluntary, we’re kinda screwed for criticizing wicked ones.

I keep my notes for writing in Evernote, which is super-useful, all web2.0ey, free, and synched across devices in like a million ways — it’s a great brain-dump tool.

I’ve also started reading some academic books on kindle.

Now, you could take notes about those books the boring way. you could, e.g., type them directly into evernote.

OR. So the kindle has this service, I think it’s in beta, in which you can take a note on the device and share it to twitter.

So I created a private twitter account, and linked it to the kindle. This you can only do FROM the kindle, not from a computer — just create a note and tell it to save and share.

Or, allegedly, you can do it from kindle settings: quoth amazon:

1. Navigate to Kindle’s Home screen and press the Menu button.
2. Select “Settings” from the Home screen menu.
3. Select the “manage” option next to Social Networks on the Settings page.

Then when you make a note on the kindle you can tell it to shoot it straight to the private twitter. (Note, however, that these notes don’t include the “location number” from Kindle, so you should manually enter it.)

Then you can get those notes straight into evernote following these instructions (it works for protected tweets too).

After setting it all up, basically, add the location number and @myEN into a kindle note, click save and share, and voila… at least, I think. I’ve tested all steps up to actually doing that.

The loss of her computer was depressing but not disastrous. Salander had had an excellent relationship with it during the year she had owned it. She had backed up all her documents, and she had an older desktop Mac G3 at home, as well as a five-year-old Toshiba PC laptop that she could use. But she needed a fast, modern machine.

Unsurprisingly she set her sights on the best available alternative: the new Apple powerBook G4/1.0Ghz in an aluminum case with a PowerPc 7451 processor with an AltiVec Velocity Engine, 960 MB RAM and a 60 GB hard drive. It had BlueTooth and built-in CD and DVD burners.

Best of all, it had the first 17-inch screen in the laptop world with NVIDIA graphics and a resolution of 1440 x 900 pixels, which shook the PC advocates and outranked everything else on the market.

From The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Why are so many people buying this book again? Seriously? If you’re going to do product placements, you should at least get paid for it.

I’m about halfway though the damn thing, and it mostly appears to be about how every character wants revenge against every other character, oh, and, yeah, there’s an old murder to solve too. Sort of like Agatha Christie crossed with Shakespeare minus the usurped thrones, ghosts, bloody daggers/hands, bastards, talent &c.

#2 — we’re in trouble! The greenpeace guy has found us! Now he’s talking about “toxic electronics.” Apparently all these old iphones we’re going to get rid of are going to be shipped to other countries to leach poisons into the water. “Producer responsibility” is the word of the day. Damn good thing to tell people in this line. But they’re still not getting my money today, for game theoretic reasons: if I demonstrate my willingness to donate in this kind of captive situation to one group, well…

#3 a guy who managed to get a preorder through and got it early comes to tease us. And refused to be videoed (though I sneakily grabbed a shot of him). Fucker.

This chap in McSweeney’s nails it (for once):

Despite being equipped with some—some—knowledge, I shared the quintessential trait of all young attorneys: unrelenting, paralyzing fear. It overwhelms everything we do and contaminates the first two to three years of our law jobs. The thought process goes something like this: “I know nothing. How the hell did I get this degree? How the hell did I pass the bar? Law school didn’t teach me anything. Do my employers know I’m incompetent? How long can I fake this before they figure it out? Are my peers like this? How come everyone else knows what they’re doing? What if I never learn? What happens if I get fired or fail? Will I get disbarred? I bet I’ll get disbarred! Damn, I’m getting disbarred! Please, God, don’t let me get disbarred.”

It’s much worse if you’re a public interest lawyer and you actually care about what happens to the victims of your incompetence, as opposed to just worrying about your income, employment, and bar status…

One wonders why this level of writing talent isn’t put to better uses.

1. nimrod 410 up, 145 down

buy nimrod mugs, tshirts and magnets
1. A mighty hunter. Now chiefly used in this sense outside the United States. 2. A slow-witted person. Nimrod was the Biblical founder of Babylon, also considered a mighty hunter. Contrary to the uneducated twits on here, Nimrod did NOT build the tower of Babel (at least the Bible does not claim this, only that the “men of Babylon” tried to build it), and the Bible does NOT claim he tried to kill God. The Bible ONLY mentions that Nimrod was a son of Cush, the founder of Babylon, and a mighty hunter. Curiously enough, Dictionary.com attests definition 2 to have derived from a Looney Toons episode, wherein Bugs Bunny mocks his adversary, the hunter Elmer Fudd, calling him a “poor little Nimrod”. Warner Brothers’ Looney Toons cartoons were not written for children, but for literate adults, and often contained literary references children would not understand. Younger generations, mostly illiterate, and having little or no Bible knowledge not gleaned from their moronic parents and half-wit talk radio hosts, probably misunderstood the comment as being a general insult describing the slow-witted Fudd.
Probably from the phrase “poor little Nimrod,” used by the cartoon character Bugs Bunny to mock the hapless hunter Elmer Fudd.
hunter dittohead bible babylon looney toon
by Rev. Dr. Mycopheles Mar 20, 2006 share this

(In case you haven’t noticed, guys, I’m resurrecting the blog.)

My dear friend Nina, a.k.a. the Slackmistress, has the following to say about why she doesn’t get writer’s block:

If someone held a gun to your head and said start typing, bub, you’d start to type. Would it be good? Good god, no. But you’d be able to say something. Because when the options are write or death, writing isn’t all that difficult a choice.

If you’re being paid, you can’t turn to your Executive Producer and say, gee, guys, I can’t come up with anything. What you mean is I can’t come up with anything good.

My guess is most writer’s block is: I can’t come up with anything good.

That’s not writer’s block.

Working in TV, you have to produce the next episode. It doesn’t matter if inspiration has struck or not. And to be honest inspiration rarely strikes when you’re mid-season and you’ve been working long days and writing and re-writing and oh, dear god are they OUT OF JUMBO RED VINES?! and you’re sitting in a room or in front of an EP who’s waiting for the next brilliant idea. This is where you learn how to pitch. Your idea may be crap, but you sell the hell out of it and figure out how to make it good later.

Because that’s what 99% of writing is: figuring out how to make it good later.

It seems to me that this is a big insight for academic writing too.

First, it explains why when faced with deadlines on academic work (whether as a student in courses, or as a grownup in conferences and such) it’s surprisingly less difficult to turn out something at the last minute, even though we were struggling with it beforehand. Because we were suffering from a delusion at the “struggling” stages. The delusion was that we didn’t have anything to say, when, as Nina wisely points above, we just don’t have anything good to say. Which also explains why these last minute papers, especially from undergrads who are less practiced at saying good things faster even though they might have an equally high baseline level of intelligence, turn out so bad. So we can all probably turn out better deadline-oriented work by forcing ourselves to the realization that we can actually write something before the deadline drags us bodily to the computer, it’s just that it won’t be good.

Second, it explains why turning out actually good work requires so many damn rewrites. Because when we actually produce something, it’s less because we’ve solved the problem, than because the pressure (whether external, from deadlines, or internal, from guilt) finally pushes us to put any old crap down on paper — and hence requires copious revision, a.k.a. “making it good later.”