3.7.04

Uh-Oh

A disturbing update to this post: "don't elect Bush" gets 71 hits, but "don't elect Kerry" gets 181. The web seems to understand the longshot nature of Ralph Nader's campaign, as nobody has bothered to say "don't elect Nader".
Stentor Danielson, 23:28,

Republicans For Nader's Candidacy

Tacitus has a much-lauded post up criticizing Republicans for supporting Ralph Nader's candidacy. His main argument, which has gotten the most attention, is that while it may be useful in the short term to siphon some votes away from Kerry, they risk helping to build up a viable far-left party that would be really inimical to Republican interests. It's an interesting point, especially given Matt Yglesias's example of how a similar strategy backfired on the Russian Czar when he tried to support the Bolsheviks against the Mensheviks, though I'm still a bit skeptical of how likely it is to happen, especially given that Ralph has lost the support of the country's most viable third party, the Greens.

But I was more interested in this passing reference in the post:

Can I fairly assume that no actual Republican had any use for this effort and money you're putting forth? None? Just asking.

Republicans for Nader's Candidacy seem to have been suckered in by the "a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush" idea, making them think a dollar spent on either candidate is just as good. But even if we grant that Nader voters are "naturally" Kerry voters -- that Kerry has a presumptive claim on their vote in the absence of Nader -- a vote for Nader is only half of a vote for Bush. It deprives Kerry of a vote, but it doesn't add to Bush's total in the way that a Kerry-to-Bush switch by a center voter would.

Now, it may turn out to be the case that some money is better spent boosting Nader than boosting Bush. It all depends on the price of a voter. If, say, you can get 100 Kerry voters to switch to Bush with a $1000 ad, and you can get an equal number of them to switch to Nader with an ad of the same price, then obviously you (as a Republican) should invest in the "switch to Bush" ad. But voters in the middle are already the main target of both campaigns. The huge amount of spending in this election cycle may mean you've hit a period of decreasing returns. If your $1000 ad now only convinces 40 people to switch from Kerry to Bush, the Nader ad is a better investment. It seems like the kinds of basic things that Republicans are helping Nader with -- like getting his name on the ballot -- are relatively cost-effective as compared to what the Bush campaign could do with their money.

(Moe Lane-esque disclaimer: Seeing as I'm one of those lefties*, I may be putting a positive spin on the cost-effectiveness of supporting Nader, and expressing skepticism about Tacitus's main argument, in order to trick Republicans into wasting their money on Nader and creating a socialist juggernaut. As always, read advice from the other side at your own risk.)

*Moe Lane-esque footnote: Horse-race and tactical stuff aside, I'm not much of a fan of Nader on the substance of his candidacy. Then again, saying that may be another devious trick ...
Stentor Danielson, 11:05,

1.7.04

Precautionary Principle Again

More Sorry Than Safe ... [Sir Colin Berry] cites the controversial issue of SIDS - Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, aka cot death - about which parents are given lots of often contradictory advice. Berry says that in the 1980s, the favoured precautionary measure to guard against the possibility of your baby falling victim to SIDS was to lay her on her side or front. 'We tended to consider babies and young infants as being rather like the unconscious patient', he says, 'where it is not clear that all the reflexes around the nose and mouth, for breathing and swallowing and so on, are finely tuned. So parents were told to put babies on their side or front, as you would do with an unconscious or stroke-troubled patient. It seemed like a reasonable, precautionary measure to take. Now we know that, in fact, it cost lives.' Berry says that subsequent observations made in Australia and New Zealand, and a case-controlled study in Britain in the 1990s, showed that reversing this policy and putting babies to sleep on their backs instead reduced the death rate from SIDS. In the UK, it fell from about 1,300 to 1,400 a year to about 300 to 400, he says. 'With the best intentions the precautionary measure of putting babies on their sides or fronts caused misery; a great many precious baby lives were lost because of what seemed like a reasonable precaution. It was one of those things that just happened to be wrong. This shows that we need data - that being precautionary, taking safety measures without testing the evidence, is not enough.'

This is pretty much a standard anti-precautionary principle article. The PP debate is generally fairly unproductive, as you get people like Berry bashing the idea of "take no risks at all without 100% certainty" and PP advocates suggesting that the only alternative is a reckless taking of any risk, and nobody able to offer a clear guide to what middle ground they think is appropriate (pieties about the need for "good science" and "empirical evidence," such as those Berry offers, do not suffice).

But it's still possible to see good and bad arguments made. Let's start with the bad one in the bit of the article quoted above, in which Berry suggests that the PP led to SIDS deaths. To me, it sounds like a good example of prudence. Initially, we had uncertainty -- we didn't know what sleeping position was most likely to prevent SIDS. By analogy with stroke patients, it seemed like sleeping on their side would be good. Since that was the best evidence available at the time, it made sense to tentatively recommend side-sleeping. Then, while most parents took the most promising-seeming course of action, a subset did a controlled test to gain more information, testing the initial hunch about side-sleeping. In this particular case, it turned out that the hunch was wrong. Armed with this stronger evidence, we were able to recommend having babies sleep on their backs. Would Berry have recommended recklessly sleeping any which-way from the start, despite some evidence suggesting side-sleeping was better? Now, if the PP had been used to stymie the experiment -- arguing that it's too risky to ask test subjects to sleep on their backs -- then he would have a case, but that doesn't seem to have happened with SIDS.

Unfortunately, this sort of "play it safe, but do some tests" strategy doesn't work in many cases. We only have one global climate system, for example. If there had only been one SIDS-prone baby in the world, it would have made sense to have it sleep on its side, even though with additional information we know that's a bad idea.

He says that those who opted to travel by road rather than rail following the Hatfield train crash of October 2000, which killed four passengers and injured 30, had in fact exposed themselves to an increased risk of injury or death. 'Road accidents kill more people than railway accidents do', he says. 'Yet because there is a perception that rail travel is unacceptably risky, some people opt to go by car instead. But the death rate on the road per billion person miles travelled is about 12 times that of the railways.'

I know it's always fun to point out that driving in a car is more dangerous than whatever other activity people are afraid of, but this doesn't seem to be a case of the PP at all. The PP here would advise travel by train, as that's less risky. The people avoiding the train are miscalculating their risks. Naturally the PP isn't immune to GIGO. It's also possible that, to these commuters, all deaths are not alike -- perhaps they, for whatever reason, fear death in a train wreck more than they fear death in a car wreck. Given that utility function, they may be perfectly rational in deciding to drive.

Later on he gives a somewhat better example:

It has since been discovered that the [cholera] epidemic was, in part, a result of the Peruvian authorities' decision to stop chlorinating drinking water supplies - and that one reason they stopped doing this was because reports issued by the American Environmental Protection Agency had claimed there was a link between drinking chlorinated water and an increased risk of cancer (a link which the EPA has since admitted is not 'scientifically supportable'). 'Chlorinated water would have prevented the outbreak', says Berry. 'The water production and cleaning system had gone wrong before the outbreak, so it wasn't just that they stopped chlorinating water and then, bang, cholera arrived. But in a deteriorating situation, the failure to chlorinate - based on the principles of precaution and bad science - helped to make things a whole lot worse than they might have been.'

It's possible that this is just another story of a time that things would have worked out better if we had taken a risk. The PP doesn't deny that such instances exist -- it argues that such instances are outweighed by the times that taking a risk makes things worse. No amount of anecdotes can tell us whether the precautionary principle or its reverse systematically leads to worse outcomes (I'm sure PP advocates have a load of stories about new chemicals being introduced that wound up killing more people than they saved due to inadequate pre-release testing). Depending on how assertive the EPA document was, it may have been perfectly reasonable, given the information at hand, for the Peruvian authorities to believe that not chlorinating gave the highest expected outcome -- they certainly didn't have time to go back and double-check the EPA's studies to find out that the original claim about cancer was wrong (which fact is the crux of the anti-PP argument -- if chlorination was carcinogenic, the PP could very well have saved lives).

Nevertheless, the cholera example points to an important assumption underlying many strong applications of the PP. It's often taken as a rule that leads to committing sins of omission in order to avoid sins of commission. The Peruvian authorities seemed more concerned with not actively creating new problems (cancer) than they were about alleviating old problems (cholera). Ceteris paribus, we should weigh the two sins equally.
Stentor Danielson, 20:21,

Optimism At All Costs

My latest post at Open Source Politics.
Stentor Danielson, 10:46,

30.6.04

Two Reasons I Should Start Studying Finnish Again

1. I was looking to see what other blogs listed "geography" as an interest in their profile, and there seemed to be an unusually large number of them in Finnish.

2. Juha-Mikko Ahonen cited my post about New Zealand's gay marriage bill. While the post seems to be based on the New Zealand Herald story rather than my comments thereupon, I'm still curious about what it has to say. The site has an English version, but the two versions appear to have different content.

Then again, if the prospect of reading the original Kalevala didn't motivate me to stick with it, I doubt a few blogs will. And there's always the temptation to try out the Indonesian book that Alex left me.
Stentor Danielson, 14:38,

29.6.04

Is Goodrich The New Brown?

This cartoon seems kind of counterproductive. In it, a public school teacher begins a lesson on "modern marriage," at which point most of the class disappears because "Their parents placed them in other schools." Given the popularity of drawing parallels between the gay rights movement and the civil rights movement, it doesn't seem helpful to the cause of traditional marriage (which the cartoonist supports) to threaten that the reaction to changes in marriage will resemble the "white flight" that followed school integration.
Stentor Danielson, 23:02,

Hobbes Vs. Hobbes

Today I learned, much to my chagrin, that there is at least one instance of Bill Watterson being unable to keep his characters' philosophies straight. I ran across thise quote from William Joes:

To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them gratified; and where disappointment is incessant and the struggle unending, this is what men will always do.

The source points out that a similar sentiment was expressed by Hobbes. After Calvin declares that he's going to stop doing his homework because his self-esteem shouldn't depend on accomplishments, the tiger replies "So the secret to good self-esteem is to lower your expectations to the point where they're already met?" (The Days Are Just Packed, p. 23)

I was a little confused, though, because one of my favorite strips involves Hobbes expressing just the opposite idea. In response to Calvin's question, he declares that if he could wish for anything in the world, he'd want a tuna sandwich. Calvin exclaims "A sandwich?!? What kind of stupid wish is that!?! Talk about a failure of imagination! I'd ask for a trillion billion dollars, my own space shuttle, and a private continent!" Then, in the final panel, we see Hobbes smugly eating a sandwich and saying "I got my wish." (There's Treasure Everywhere, p. 44).

Granted, Calvin switches philosophies as well, and far more radically -- in the first strip, Hobbes isn't proposing anything as grandiose as a private continent. But Calvin isn't supposed to have any actual philosophical commitments. As demonstrated in the strips about postmodernism and psychobabbble, Calvin uses philosophy as rationalization.

(UPDATE: Added the cite for the second strip -- I'm embarassed by the laxity of my Calvin and Hobbes recall, as I had clearly imagined that strip as being from before Watterson broke free of the tyranny of standard Sunday panels, which would have put it in one of the books I don't have. I also added a new paragraph about Calvin's inconsistency.)
Stentor Danielson, 17:50,

Healthy, Expensive, Forests

National Forests Fall Victim To Firefighting The proposed auction of new logging rights here [Kaibab National Forest] reflects a shift in the federal government's forest management priorities that disturbs environmentalists, who say it is giving the timber industry access to previously off-limits forests under the guise of reducing the danger of wildfires. And though the timber sales produce revenue for the Treasury, the cost of administering the auctions is forcing the U.S. Forest Service to defer other conservation projects. ... Jim Matson, a southwest-area consultant for the Portland, Ore.-based American Forest Resource Council, said the timber industry "can't afford to subsidize the nation's forests." These timber sales come at a cost: The Forest Service's timber sale program lost $947 million between 1992 and 2001, says the public watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense. Federal officials are scaling back elsewhere: Just this month they decided to postpone a year-long project aimed at protecting the Anderson Mesa in Arizona's Coconino National Forest because they did not have the money. "It's common knowledge a lot of dollars have been reprogrammed to address the fuels-reduction issue," said Carol Holland, the Coconino National Forest's analysis group leader.

The timber industry can't afford to subsidize the nation's forests, but it can afford to be subsidized by the nation's forests.
Stentor Danielson, 15:47,

American Polity

It seems to me that Aristotle would be rather pleased with the sort of government we have in the modern United States. For example, he favored giving the rich a greater voice in politics (so as not to treat unequals as equal), which -- despite the best efforts of John McCain -- is the case in modern America. He believed strongly in the need to have a broad formal franchise, in order to keep the masses from rebelling, but he hoped to set up the system so that only the rich and "good" would have the practical opportunity to get involved. The low level of voting shows that we've managed to create a system where, though everyone technically can vote, only half of us find it worth the bother (and voting in the US is far less of a bother than the forms of participation that Aristotle envisioned). He was full of praise for the middle class, a sentiment appropriate to a country where everyone thinks they're middle class and politicians pander relentlessly to that. And he thought the best states were those dominated by rural people, which parallels both the structural (the electoral college and Senate give Wyoming and Montana outsized influence) and rhetorical (people from the rural heartland are real Americans, unlike those urban elites) features of American politics.

Of course, Aristotle would have some disagreements with our system, notably our lack of slavery and formal gender equality. He'd also find our praise of "hardworking" people baffling, as John Kerry on a skiing trip is more his idea of a good politician than George Bush cutting brush on his ranch.
UPDATE: I forgot a key point. Aristotle favored forcing the best people to hold office whether they like it or not, so he would have found the self-promoting campaigns we have to be unseemly.
Stentor Danielson, 13:13,

28.6.04

Bad Judgement

While I'm posting about Hugo Schwyzer, I should jot myself a note about another topic that he writes about often -- the barriers to emotional intimacy between men. As someone who thinks of himself as getting along better with women than men*, the issue hits close to home. Schwyzer's theory is that the problem is a fear of judgement. Men hold other men accountable in a way that women don't, and so difficulty being intimate with other men is a defense mechanism against being judged.

I think there's some truth to that, but in my case -- and I very much doubt I speak for all men in my situation -- it's a bit more complicated. The reason I feared** being judged by other men is that I objected to the likely criteria of that judgement. It's not that I didn't want to be held responsible, it's that I didn't want to be held to what I saw as the typical male standard of responsibility. To put it in terms of crude stereotypes, the prospect of a mostly-male social circle raises the specter of being expected to leer at girls who meet a socially-defined beauty standard, being expected to demonstrate knowledge of and interest in professional sports, etc. Women, on the other hand, are less likely to enforce this sort of undesirable machismo. They may judge me for being rude or making stupid mistakes, but those are judgements I find legitimate. (Indeed, if I were looking for a tough-love judgement, the person who springs to mind as the best source in my current social circle is a woman.) Similarly, I tended to be more at ease around older men, because I percieved them as having a better, more mature set of criteria (and a positive judgement from, say, a pastor or a scoutmaster could vindicate me from negative judgements by peers). My gut feelings obviously overestimated the degree to which my male peers would judge me by stereotypically macho criteria, but the feeling has been with me.

*Thinking back, though, it turns out that my social circle has only been predominantly female at Clark and on the Brunching Board -- elsewhere it's been even or predominantly male. Then again, I've tended to be more emotionally distant than average from my friends of both genders.

**I speak in the past tense because, despite the fact that my social circle is more female than ever, the feelings I'm describing were strongest back in high school.
Stentor Danielson, 00:37,

Does A Man Need A Man?

In what may be the first post someone else has written entirely in response to me, Hugo Schwyzer elaborates on his frequent contention that men need emotional intimacy with other men. This post is a response, but it's not a rebuttal per se -- it's more a clarification of where I think our perspectives diverge.

The crux of Schwyzer's argument rests on the distinction between sympathy and empathy, and the fact that we often need the latter (though of course the former is useful in its own way). We get a certain special kind of help from sharing our problems with someone who has shared that kind of experience. In principle, then, we agree. The disagreement is over the extent to which gender is decisive in determining the possibility of empathy.

He uses the example of his friend "Craig," who came to Schwyzer for help after cheating on his wife with a stripper. Schwyzer claims that his experience as a heterosexual man means that he can empathize with Craig's situation more than a woman could. In the comments, Lynn Gazis-Sax backs Hugo up by pointing out that, while she can empathize with the temptation to cheat, unlike Schwyzer and Craig she doesn't understand the temptation to cheat with a stripper (as opposed to, say, an old flame).

Total empathy is impossible, because no two people have had exactly the same experience in all details. While Schwyzer can empathize more with Craig than Gazis-Sax can, he can't totally empathize, since unlike Craig he's never followed through on his temptation. But imagine if Craig had a second potential confidante in addition to Schwyzer -- a woman who's never been tempted by a stripper, but who has actually committed adultery and had to repair her marriage afterward in the way that Craig is trying to do. Assuming that for whatever reason Craig can only go to one of them for help, it doesn't seem prima facie obvious to me that "tempted by stripper, but hasn't cheated" is more similar to Craig's situation, and thus more conducive to empathy, than "not tempted by a stripper, but has cheated."

I also wonder how much the experiences of the genders diverge. I'm a man like Craig and Schwyzer, but I find myself better able to empathize with Gazis-Sax's temptation to cheat with an old flame than Craig's temptation to cheat with a stripper. It's hard to make a quantifiable scale of what types of people individuals are tempted by in order to see how uniform men's versus women's experiences are. But I tend to see the diversity within genders as greater, and the boundary as fuzzier, than Schwyzer does (or at least, I focus on the diversity and fuzziness more).

Last but not least, there's the old nature/nurture question. I won't deny that people today may often need the help of someone of their own gender, but my instinct is to see such cases as socially constructed. Our highly gendered society foists certain classes of experience on men but not women (and vice-versa), leaving people with only their own gender as a source of empathy. Obviously there's some small set of empathy topics that are naturally gender-specific (no man will ever be able to empathize with the issues surrounding menstruation, for example). And perhaps a fair number of topics would continue to be roughly correlated with gender in any society. Where Schwyzer and I disagree is on the strength and significance of gender as a determinant of the possibility of empathy, now and in the future.
Stentor Danielson, 00:31,

27.6.04

For Happiness

Against Happiness Researchers found that angry people are more likely to make negative evaluations when judging members of other social groups. That, perhaps, will not come as a great surprise. But the same seems to be true of happy people, the researchers noted. The happier your mood, the more liable you are to make bigoted judgments -- like deciding that someone is guilty of a crime simply because he's a member of a minority group. Why? Nobody's sure. One interesting hypothesis, though, is that happy people have an "everything is fine" attitude that reduces the motivation for analytical thought. So they fall back on stereotypes -- including malicious ones. ... Some have worried that happy people tend to be apathetic and easily manipulated by political leaders -- contented cows, so to speak. In Aldous Huxley's dystopian novel, "Brave New World," the working classes are kept in docile submission by a diet of drugs that render them universally happy. In the real world, however, there is little evidence that happiness creates complacent citizens; in fact, studies show that happy people are more likely than alienated people to get politically involved, not less. There is one bit of the world that happy people do see in an irrationally rosy light: themselves. As the British psychologist Richard P. Bentall has observed, "There is consistent evidence that happy people overestimate their control over environmental events (often to the point of perceiving completely random events as subject to their will), give unrealistically positive evaluations of their own achievements, believe that others share their unrealistic opinions about themselves and show a general lack of evenhandedness when comparing themselves to others." Indeed, Bentall has proposed that happiness be classified as a psychiatric disorder.

I haven't read the studies in question, but it seems to me that reversing the proposed direction of causality in the two anti-happiness findings I quoted (the "prejudice" and "control" findings) would make a good deal of sense. And it would make them consistent with the anti-Brave New World finding.

It seems logical that, if you accept malicious stereotypes about others -- particularly ones that justify the way things are -- you might be happier with the world. Malicious stereotypes pump up their holder. Since stereotypes are widespread, there would also be a positive effect from the easy social acceptance that comes from shared assumptions.

Stereotypes are also a form of control -- they give you simple and comprehensive answers about the world, improving your ability to (think you) get a mental handle on what's going on around you. This brings us to the control finding. The basic premise of the public participation literature that I've been reading is that people like to have control. Involving the public in environmental decisionmaking is good not only for the pragmatic reasons of "two heads are better than one," but also for the procedural reason that people are more satisfied with the same decision if they feel that they were part of making it. So it stands to reason that if people feel in control (whether or not that feeling is justified), they'll be more happy. It could even be a motivation for self-deception as to your level of control.

Coming back to the anti-BNW finding, it seems that being politically involved would make you happier, because it would give you a feeling of control. The inverse would be true of being uninvolved. A belief in stereotypes -- defined broadly as any simple story about how the world works -- could boost political involvement by making the holder feel that there is an easy answer, and thus action is likely to be effective. Malicious stereotypes could be especially useful in this regard, as they pick out a convenient cast of villains.
Stentor Danielson, 14:12,