debitage | ||||||||||||
2003-2004 excavation at the Danielson site, Worcester MA. Yuccacentric
wockerjabby
Changed Priorities Ahead
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3.7.04 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".
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.
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
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.
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'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, My latest post at Open Source Politics.
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. 29.6.04 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.
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:
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,
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, 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. 28.6.04 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. 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. 27.6.04
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, |