Motives

I've just finished another terrific book, "The Checklist Manifesto," by Atul Gawande, the surgeon whose book "Complications" I was admiring here several weeks ago.  The book's focus is the usefulness of brief, efficient checklists modeled on those used by aircraft pilots, but a couple of mildly off-point anecdotes caught my eye.

First, Gawande describes the disparate organizational approaches to the Katrina crisis in New Orleans. He concludes that organizations are prone to break down in a crisis unless their management cedes control to the most far-flung workers.  Rigid federal and state authorities froze up, as did many local authorities, but police and firefighters accepted and coordinated the help of hundreds of small boat owners to conduct unorthodox rescues of tens of thousands of residents.  Many private businesses flailed in the complex aftermath of the disastrous storm, but WalMart shone.  Its CEO announced:

This company will respond to the level of this disaster.  A lot of you are going to have to make decisions above your level.  Make the best decision that you can with the information that's available to you at the time, and, above all, do the right thing.

Wal-Mart had to close 126 stores; 20,000 employees and family members were displaced.  But within 48 hours, more than half of the stores were open again and able to consider, "Oh, my God, what can we do to help these people?"  On their own authority, managers began distributing diapers, water, baby formula, and ice to storm victims.  They improvised crude paper-slip credit systems for first responders at a time when FEMA was still paralyzed.  One assistant manager went through her badly damaged store with a bulldozer, salvaging what she could and giving it away in the parking lot.  She also broke into the store's pharmacy in response to a local hospital's call for help.  Senior Wal-Mart officials, rather than micromanaging or second-guessing these efforts, concentrated on coordinating with line employees and state agencies to meet needs as they arose.  What has this got to do with checklists?  I'm not sure.  Gawande is struggling toward an approach to unpredictable complexity that avoids stultifying central control without accepting anarchy as its alternative.  He approves of "a seemingly contradictory mix of freedom and expectation -- expectation to coordinate, for example, and also to measure progress toward common goals."  He thinks this approach can be codified into simple checklists.

The second anecdote concerned a CDC worker in Karachi who tried an inexpensive, low-tech solution to infectious disease outbreaks.  Procter + Gamble wanted to prove the value of a new antibacterial soap.  The CDC worker got a grant to study three groups:  one supplied with ordinary P+G soap, one with the new antibacterial soap, and one left to its own devices for soap.  Test subjects were encouraged to use the soap in six specific situations, such as just before feeding an infant.  After a year, various infectious diseases dropped by between 35% and 52% in both groups using the P+G soap.  The study was a failure in P+G's eyes, because the new antibacterial soap conferred no noticeable advantage, but it showed the CDC how a simple routine could combat persistent public health problems.  The soap, Gawande says, was a "behavior-change delivery vehicle."  It came with instructions for its use in six separate situations.  The households already were using soap at the rate of two bars per week on average, but the study apparently caused them to use it more systematically and, because it was pleasant-smelling and well-lathering, more enthusiastically.  "Global multinational corporations," as the CDC worker noted, "are really focused on having a good consumer experience, which sometimes public health people are not."  What's more, the people enjoyed receiving the soap:  "The public health field-workers were bringing them a gift rather than wagging a finger."

Getting back somewhat more convincingly to the "checklist" theme, Gawande interviewed a successful investor who put his colleagues into six categories according to how they evaluated the entrepreneurs who were seeking their venture capital.  "Art Critics" assess entrepreneurs at a glance on the basis of intuition and long experience.  "Sponges" gather information exhaustively, then go with their gut.  "Prosecutors" challenge entrepreneurs with hard questions about how they would handle hypothetical situations.  "Suitors" woo entrepreneurs rather than evaluate them.  "Terminators" make a superficial initial choice and plan to fire and replace incompetents ruthlessly later.  Finally, "Airline Captains" take a methodical, checklist-driven approach, consciously overriding their intuition.  Gawande reports that the final category outperformed the rest dramatically, though they made up a small minority of the whole, which was dominated by Art Critics and Sponges.  Why were the Air Captains so rare?  Gawande muses that something in us makes checklists seem like buzzkills, like an abandonment of romantic ideals of competence.  When his own experimental surgical checklist project for the World Health Organization showed impressive gains in reducing complications from infection and errors, he nevertheless felt a personal reluctance to implement them for his own surgical team:  "[I]f I told the truth -- did I think the checklist would make much of a difference in my cases?  No.  In my cases?  Please."  It did, though, and it strengthened his conviction that modern humans are engaging in complex cooperative tasks that require a new approach to discipline and focus than comes naturally to us.

I'll bet this isn't what he thought would happen to him

You have to wonder about this guy's karma.  That's just harsh.

That's What 'Too Much' Means

Theodore Dalrymple (via InstaPundit) wonders 'What will happen if I consume too much calcium?'

The answer reminds me of this little bit of British comedy, since Tex was whetting our appetites for that sort of thing.

Ah, Miss Manners

Catching up on Miss Manners after neglecting her since before Christmas:

DEAR MISS MANNERS: How do you deal with a daughter-in-law who tries to take over in your kitchen?  The holidays are here, and I’m dreading her getting in my way. 

GENTLE READER: The most important thing is to refrain from mentioning the problem to relatives who scrupulously avoid getting in your way by settling themselves into comfortable chairs while you clean up.  For that matter, it would be better not to mention it to the offending daughter-in-law, either.  Rather, you should beg her assistance in such out-of-the-kitchen tasks as setting the table, collecting the Christmas wrappings for the trash, and the most important task of all, which Miss Manners’s own dear father described as “Go see what the children are doing and tell them to stop.”

Radical education

Alabama's state legislature pulled off an education-voucher coup this week, variously described as "historic" or "sleazy," depending on one's view of the salutary or oppressive effects of a state monopoly on education during the tender years.  As HotAir notes, if voters disapprove of the parliamentary gambit that caused a fairly radical voucher program to emerge from a conference committee that was considering House and Senate versions of a very different bill, and then to obtain abrupt approval by a conservative majority, they will punish the legislators in the next election.  If by that time concrete improvements have appeared in the educational prospects of students stuck in failing Alabama schools, voters may reward the gambit.

The school voucher controversy is of enduring interest to me.  I abhor shoddy schools and ignorant educators, and revere personal choice and free markets, so much that I tend to embrace nearly any reform measure that takes a crowbar to a state or unionized monopoly.  But as a counterpoint to my anarchic zeal, I try to follow the main arguments against vouchers.  Today I will pass over the usual objections to cherry-picking of the best students or the unfairness to attributing school failure in broken neighborhoods to administrators or educators, and instead note an interesting theme in one of my favorite playing grounds, the comments sections to published reports on school-choice events.  What I see is a visceral distrust and hatred of improperly supervised for-profit private schools, especially those operated on religious (or -- horrors -- even fundamentalist) principles.  Apparently one of the greatest dangers of school voucher programs is the delivery of innocent children into the hands of creationists.

Returning to Sokal's "Fashionable Nonsense," which I wrote about yesterday, I note his warnings about the sad state of science education.  He begins with C.P. Snow's much-quoted "Two Cultures" lecture:

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists.  Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  The response was cold:  it was also negative.  Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of:  Have you read a work of Shakespeare's? 

I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question -- such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration,[*] which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? -- not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language.  So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.

Sokal goes on to diagnose the problem:

A lot of the blame for this state of affairs rests, I think, with the scientists.  The teaching of mathematics and science is often authoritarian; and this is antithetical not only to the principles of radical/democratic pedagogy but to the principles of science itself.  No wonder most Americans can't distinguish between science and pseudoscience:  their science teachers have never given them any rational grounds for doing so.  (Ask an average undergraduate:  Is matter composed of atoms?  Yes.  Why do you think so?  The reader can fill in the response.)  Is it then any surprise that 36% of Americans believe in telepathy, and that 47% believe in the creation account of Genesis?

It is not my purpose to express disrespect for the creation account of Genesis, whether viewed metaphorically or as a supernatural alternative to the ordinary mechanistic explanations of the origin of species.  I merely think it bears examining how we teach our children to rely on the most current scientific thinking.  How do we know that matter is composed of atoms?  I was relieved to find that my first guess -- "something to do with how chemical reactions obey formulas that suggest the interaction of subunits of common molecules in a handful of simple predictable weight ratios" -- was pretty close.  John Dalton made this important deduction in the early 19th century.  Why do we believe in the evolution of man from earlier living forms?  Do most children learn a useful answer to this question, or are they simply shouted at from the progressive and fundamentalist camps, respectively?  I'd be willing to bet money that few primary school teachers, and fewer school board members, could address the question in terms that would hold water for ten minutes.

If I had the responsibility to educate any children, I would want them to learn theories that hold up well to logical examination and experimentation.  But surely there will be time later in their lives to modify any shaky theories they absorb in childhood.  I'd be more concerned to know that they have been trained early in the habit of thinking through why and how they know something to be true.

____________
*As Sokal quotes:  "Recent megalopolitan hyperconcentration (Mexico City, Tokyo . . .) being itself the result of the increased speed of economic exchanges, it seems necessary to reconsider the importance of the notions of acceleration and deceleration (what physicists call positive and negative velocities) . . . (Virilio 1995, p. 24)."

The abuse of thought

I've just finished "Fashionable Nonsense:  Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science," by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont.  What a treat!  And if you're not inspired to order the book, you should be able to get a hoot out of the highlighted reviews, especially the review posted by "Laon" and the many comments attached to it.

Sokal submitted his absurd thesis, "Transgressing the Boundaries:  Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," to a journal called "Social Text" in 1996 and was surprised to find they were prepared to publish it.  Meticulously footnoted with nonsensical but unfaked quotations from postmodernists (heavy on the fawning citations to members of the Social Text editorial board), Sokal's masterpiece begins with this introduction:

[D]eep conceptual shifts within twentieth-century science have undermined this Cartesian-Newtonian metaphysics; revisionist studies in the history and philosophy of science have cast further doubt on its credibility; and, most recently, feminist and poststructuralist critiques have demystified the substantive content of mainstream Western scientific practice, revealing the ideology of domination concealed behind the facade of "objectivity."  It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical "reality," no less than social "reality," is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific "knowledge," far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relationship of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities.  These themes can be traced, despite some differences of emphasis, in Aronowitz's analysis of the culture fabric that produced quantum mechanics; in Ross' discussion of oppositional discourses in post-quantum science; in Irigaray's and Hayles' exegeses of gender encoding in fluid mechanics and in Harding's comprehensive critique of the gender ideology underlying the natural sciences in general and physics in particular

Here my aim is to carry these deep analyses one step further, by taking account of recent developments in quantum gravity:  the emerging branch of physics in which Heisenberg's quantum mechanics and Einstein's general relativity are at once synthesized and superseded.  In quantum gravity, as we shall see, the space-time manifold ceases to exist as an objective physical reality; geometry becomes relational and contextual; and the foundational conceptual categories of prior science -- among them, existence itself -- become problematized and relativized.  This conceptual revolution, I will argue, has profound implications for the content of a future postmodern and liberatory science.

It's hard to see how the editorial board could get past "exegeses of gender encoding in fluid mechanics" with a straight face, but they ate it up with a spoon.  Sokal outed his own hoax in an article published simultaneously in another journal:

Like the genre it is meant to satirize -- myriad exemplars of which can be found in my reference list -- my article is a melange of truths, half-truths, quarter-truths, falsehoods, non sequiturs, and syntactically correct sentences that have no meaning whatsoever. . . .  I also employed some other strategies that are well-established (albeit sometimes inadvertently) in the genre:  appeals to authority in lieu of logic; speculative theories passed off as established science; strained and even absurd analogies; rhetoric that sounds good but whose meaning is ambiguous; and confusion between the technical and everyday senses of English words.

Now, Sokal is no conservative.  He describes himself as an "old Leftist," and decries the weakness of the left in abandoning the whole notion of truth.  He quotes approvingly from Stanislav Andrewski in his 1972 work "Social Sciences as Sorcery":

So long as authority inspires awe, confusion and absurdity enhance conservative tendencies in society.  Firstly, because clear and logical thinking leads to a cumulation of knowledge (of which the progress of the natural sciences provides the best example) and the advance of knowledge sooner or later undermines the traditional order.  Confused thinking, on the other hand, leads nowhere in particular and can be indulged indefinitely without producing any impact upon the world.

I found that I could not sustain any focused attention on lengthy explanations of the writings of such luminaries as psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who wrote:

You can perhaps see that the sphere, that old symbol for totality, is unsuitable.  A torus, a Klein bottle, a cross-cut surface, are able to receive such a cut.  And this diversity is very important as it explains many things about the structure of mental disease.  If one can symbolize the subject by this fundamental cut, in the same way one can show that a cut on a torus corresponds to the neurotic subject, and on a cross-cut surface to another sort of mental disease. . . .  It is not an analogy.  It is really in some part of the realities, this sort of torus.  This torus really exists and it is exactly the structure of the neurotic.  It is not an analogon; it is not even an abstraction, because an abstraction is some sort of diminution of reality, and I think it is reality itself.

Okey dokey.  Here's is Luce Irigaray's discourse on Einstein and sexism:

Is E = Mc2 a sexed equation?  Perhaps it is.  Let us make the hypothesis that it is insofar as it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us.  What seems to me to indicate the possibly sexed nature of the equation is not directly its uses by nuclear weapons, rather it is having privileged what goes the fastest. . . .

You see the difficulty in parodying this sort of thing:  it's hard to go any further over the top.

Sokal and Bricmont make a plea for some ground rules in applying abstruse scientific or mathematical principles to social science.  If they are to be used as metaphors or analogies, for instance, writers should remember that these rhetorical devices normally use the familiar to illustrate the unfamiliar, not vice versa.  The authors also encourage their readers to use common sense in evaluating the more extraordinary claims set forth by masters of other disciplines:

At this point [my critic] may object that I am rigging the power game in my own favor:  how is he, a professor of American Studies, to compete with me, a physicist, in a discussion of quantum mechanics?  (Or even of nuclear power -- a subject on which I have no expertise whatsoever.)  But it is equally true that I would be unlikely to win a debate with a professional historian on the causes of World War I.  Nevertheless, as an intelligent lay person with a modest knowledge of history, I am capable of evaluating the evidence and logic offered by competing historians, and of coming to some sort of reasoned (albeit tentative) judgment.  (Without that ability, how could any thoughtful person justify being politically active?)

Sequester this

For several weeks we've seen horrified reports of the imminent "meat cleaver" effect of an ill-advised sequester approach to spending cuts.  Many commenters agree that spending must be cut, but cannot understand how we could be backed into the corner of a style of cuts that everyone agrees is needlessly damaging.

But this is not some kind of horrendous unintended consequence of a well-intentioned Congressional budget-control action, frozen into place by partisan bitterness.  The sequester is functioning exactly as President Obama designed it to function in 2011.  He did not propose it as a method to rein in spending.  He proposed it as a measure so painful to both parties that it would inevitably be replaced by a compromise -- and a compromise, for him, means tax hikes.  For weeks now, the Republican-controlled House has been crafting alternatives that would achieve the same spending cuts, but without affecting critical government functions.  The White House, and the Democrat-controlled Senate, refuse even to put these alternative measures to a vote.  Why?  Because Republicans, having already agreed to $600 billion in new taxes two months ago, refuse to raise taxes again.  They insist instead on measures that will turn ham-fisted spending cuts into thoughtful ones, without "balancing" this independently helpful action with tax hikes.  Their approach makes sense to me.  Both Republicans and Democrats agree that the same amount of spending could be cut, but with less damage to the country.  By what logic is a bipartisan agreement to avoid that uncontroversial harm something that taxpayers should "pay for" with a tax hike?

But making the spending cuts less harmful is something the President steadfastly refuses to consider.  His position is not as irrational as it sounds.  For him, the whole point of the sequester is leverage to induce tax hikes.  A less painful sequester is almost as useless as no sequester at all.  Nor is the problem that the proposed alternative spending cuts don't match the President's budget priorities; the House offered to give the President discretion in what to cut.  He tossed that hot potato away instantly, threatening a veto.  As his advisors said publicly, why would the President want to be associated even more personally with particular spending cuts than he already is?  Why indeed, unless he genuinely cared about making the spending cuts less painful?  He doesn't care about making them less painful.  He'd make them more painful if he could figure out a way to do it.  He certainly has been hitting the speech circuit to exaggerate their effect to the limits of his rhetorical ability.

Some of the spending cuts will hurt, and that's a shame -- but not enough of a shame to let the President use them as a threat to extract a second round of tax hikes less than two months after the first one.  His behavior is a disgrace.  It's time for "balance" in the form of spending cuts.  Having already approved a large tax hike, House Republicans have made the difficult choice in favor of bad spending cuts that are better than either no spending cuts at all, which is the art of the possible as things now stand in Washington.

Post-feminism

I keep running into posts this week about the sorry state of feminism, especially the "woe is me" or femivictimist man-hating post-modern variety.  At House of Eratosthenes, one such post was combined with a touching tribute to the author's mother, whom he lost 20 years ago.  I am inspired to post a tribute to my own mother, of whom I have no conscious memories, but who left behind an example of feminism that has always been at the center of my life.

Myra Ferguson was born in 1924.  A fine student, she pursued studies that were nearly unheard of for women of her generation.  She met my father, John E. Kilpatrick, when both were studying for advanced degrees in physical chemistry at the University of Kansas.  They went on to study together at Berkeley, where my father, four years the elder, completed his Ph. D.  My mother interrupted her own doctoral work to marry and have three children.  I suppose she thought she would have time to return to her studies later, though as things worked out she did not.

In the meantime, she published research on her own and with my father.  It is an amazing feature of the internet that some of her work is preserved there, like this paper on elastic constants and sound velocities from 1949, based on work for the Condensed Matter and Thermal Physics Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where she and my father still make a ghostly appearance on the list of former consultants and collaborators.  It is touching that, in some later published versions, my father is listed as co-author in the second position -- something that can't have been a common practice in 1949.  They were very devoted to each other.  I have copies of several other papers they published together, but none I can locate on the net.

Myra F. Kilpatrick was diagnosed with cancer shortly after the birth of her third child, myself.  She must have known how unlikely it was that any of the rudimentary treatments of the time would cure her.  Nevertheless, she kept a journal of the doctors' efforts, and considered herself to be contributing to research.  After one treatment, she noted that the doctors had learned something about just how far a patient's white blood cell count could drop without resulting in death.  She died at home in the spring of 1959.

She faced headwinds during her entire short life, and was a feminist in my book, but she would have scorned to paint herself as a victim.

Rights

Bookworm Room has been on a roll with video clips.  This one reminded me of our discussion about the meaning of rights:




But I couldn't post that and not add the inspired take on every British schoolboy's terrifying memories of Latin class:

The muddled middle

How are RINOs like women?  It's hard to tell what they want:

This is the dichotomy established by many moderate Republicans:  shrill, rigid, movement conservatives on one side and open-minded RINOs on the other. 

. . . 

The RINO movement consists of . . . well, people who say they’re RINOs. They’re pro-library-voices and anti-tri-cornered hats and pro-middle-class. Beyond that it’s hard to tell. But the left seems to approve. 

At any rate, let me offer some overtures to the RINOs.  I’ll agree to doff my tri-cornered hat and stop firing musket blanks at my co-workers, several of whom have taken up my epistemic closure with the HR office.  But I’m going to keep demanding smaller government and less spending, and I may occasionally even use an exclamation point. 

We’re staring down tens of trillions in debt.  If the RINOs have a better solution, I’m all ears.

Against Liberty

The government really does know better than you, writes the New York Review of Books, and that overturns the whole philosophical basis for liberty.

[J. S.] Mill offered a number of independent justifications for his famous harm principle, but one of his most important claims is that individuals are in the best position to know what is good for them. In Mill’s view, the problem with outsiders, including government officials, is that they lack the necessary information. Mill insists that the individual “is the person most interested in his own well-being,” and the “ordinary man or woman has means of knowledge immeasurably surpassing those that can be possessed by any one else.” ...

But is it right? That is largely an empirical question... Many believe that behavioral findings are cutting away at some of the foundations of Mill’s harm principle, because they show that people make a lot of mistakes, and that those mistakes can prove extremely damaging.

For example, many of us show “present bias”... Many of us procrastinate and fail to take steps that would impose small short-term costs but produce large long-term gains....

People also have a lot of trouble dealing with probability. In some of the most influential work in the last half-century of social science, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky showed that in assessing probabilities, human beings tend to use mental shortcuts, or “heuristics,” that generally work well, but that can also get us into trouble....

Unreliable cognitive heuristics turn up again! In fact, the article mentions several by name that we have recently discussed. The fallout of these demonstrates that we should not be free.

Even when there is only harm to self, [behavorist Sarah Conly] thinks that government may and indeed must act paternalistically so long as the benefits justify the costs.

Conly is quite aware that her view runs up against widespread intuitions and commitments. For many people, a benefit may consist precisely in their ability to choose freely even if the outcome is disappointing. She responds that autonomy is “not valuable enough to offset what we lose by leaving people to their own autonomous choices.” Conly is aware that people often prefer to choose freely and may be exceedingly frustrated if government overrides their choices. If a paternalistic intervention would cause frustration, it is imposing a cost, and that cost must count in the overall calculus. But Conly insists that people’s frustration is merely one consideration among many. If a paternalistic intervention can prevent long-term harm—for example, by eliminating risks of premature death—it might well be justified even if people are keenly frustrated by it....

At the same time, Conly insists that mandates and bans can be much more effective than mere nudges. If the benefits justify the costs, she is willing to eliminate freedom of choice, not to prevent people from obtaining their own goals but to ensure that they do so.

So there you go. That's where the best and brightest are headed.

It occurs to me that, if they're going to insist on a utilitarian calculus of this sort, those of us who favor liberty can alter the calculus by raising the costs of coercion. If autonomy is not valuable enough to offset the benefits of us being led around by the nose, perhaps we should prepare to enforce some extra costs on anyone who attempts to deny us our traditional freedoms.

Tons of fun

Something I learned from this WSJ article:  there's such a thing as a federal Destructive Device permit, and it costs $200 (or $3,000 if you want to be a Destructive Devices dealer).

Port Lavaca is a small town about an hour up the coast from here.  A 70-year-old resident runs the local bank and likes to drive a Chaffee tank around his parking lot.

Earlier this month, Mr. Bauer, the Texas banker, took his Chaffee out for a spin in his warehouse parking lot.  He had rigged the .50-caliber machine gun on the turret with a propane system that generates the noise and muzzle flash of gunfire, without the bullets.  He fired off several bursts. 

Minutes later, two Port Lavaca police cruisers pulled up.  The first officer rolled down the window and asked dryly:  "You know why we're here, right?" 

Mr. Bauer assured him that no actual rounds had been fired.  Still, the officer said, "we had multiple calls—people get scared." 

The second policeman, Jeremy Marshall, got out of his car and eyeballed Mr. Bauer's tank.  "Awesome," he said.

Police State (part 45)

 I noticed this item today:

LOS ANGELES (AP) — At least six fired police officers want their disciplinary cases reopened after the Los Angeles Police Department began reinvestigating the termination of a former officer who left a trail of violence to avenge his firing.

What, so there was something to Dorner's complaint after all?

A Speech at a Wedding

I don't know this fellow, but it sounds like he's gotten a few things right.

Best wishes, and best of luck, to the young couple.

O fortuna

Only two days left before the apocalypse:

And when the Republicans opened the seventh seal of the sequester, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black and the stars fell unto the Earth; and our nation's ability to forecast severe weather, such as drought events, hurricanes and tornados, was seriously undermined.  Lo, and the children were not vaccinated, and all the beasts starved in the zoos, and the planes were grounded. 

Or so President Obama and his Cabinet prophets have been preaching ahead of the automatic budget cuts due to begin Friday.  The bit about the weather is a real quote from the White House budget director. 

But if any of these cataclysms do come to pass, then they will be mostly Mr. Obama's own creation.  The truth is that the sequester already gives the White House the legal flexibility to avoid doom, if a 5% cut to programs that have increased more than 17% on average over the Obama Presidency counts as doom.

. . . 

Before furloughing park rangers, maybe start with the 10% of the 75,000 Department of the Interior employees who are conserving the wilderness of Washington, D.C.  Before slashing cancer research, stop funding the $130-million-a-year National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine that studies herbs and yoga.  Cut after-school funding only after consolidating the 105 federal programs meant to encourage kids to take math and science classes.

Solidarity

Eighty-six firearms companies have joined Olympic Arms in refusing to sell arms to federal, state, or local agencies in jurisdictions that are infringing their private citizens' right to bear arms.

American Exceptionalism

Or, as the researchers put it, Americans are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic ("WEIRD"), even in comparison with their western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic European cousins.  And yet, because of the fashionable assumption that cognition is hard-wired and somewhat independent of culture, most modern cognitive research unthinkingly relied on American undergraduates as its experimental subjects.

Given the data, they concluded that social scientists could not possibly have picked a worse population from which to draw broad generalizations.  Researchers had been doing the equivalent of studying penguins while believing that they were learning insights applicable to all birds.

In fact, it may not be at all easy to separate the inherent "hard wiring" of our thoughts from either their content or their context:

For some time now, the most widely accepted answer to the question of why humans, among all animals, have so successfully adapted to environments across the globe is that we have big brains with the ability to learn, improvise, and problem-solve. 

Henrich has challenged this “cognitive niche” hypothesis with the “cultural niche” hypothesis.  He notes that the amount of knowledge in any culture is far greater than the capacity of individuals to learn or figure it all out on their own.  He suggests that individuals tap that cultural storehouse of knowledge simply by mimicking (often unconsciously) the behavior and ways of thinking of those around them.  We shape a tool in a certain manner, adhere to a food taboo, or think about fairness in a particular way, not because we individually have figured out that behavior’s adaptive value, but because we instinctively trust our culture to show us the way.

Nor is it only a question of learning rules about concrete physical dangers or building techniques. There are distinct differences across cultures in characteristic solutions to the Prisoner's Dilemma, in the identification of color, in the ability to evaluate differences in size and shape, and in the tendency to defer to group pressure in reaching an abstract judgment. We know less about what is innate in the human mind than one might guess from the way we often talk.

Hagel for SECDEF

Allahpundit writes:

I told you the yays would be closer to 70 than to 60. Final tally: 71-27. You didn’t seriously think these losers would go to the mat to block a nominee just because he’s manifestly unqualified, did you?

Well, no. We crossed that bridge in 2008, when the American people decided that qualification was entirely dispensable in selecting the highest leadership.

You Can Take the Man Out of the South, But...

Right answer, wrong reasoning.

Q. Husband Nicknames: My husband and I have been married six months. All is well and we have no real complaints. But he does have this annoying little trait that I am wondering if I am just being nit-picky or if I actually have ground to stand on. I will accept whatever decision you put forth. My husband is Southern and calls every woman sweetheart or sweetie. This only happened a few times when dating to an occasional waitress, but now I see that he does it with longtime friends, other men's wives, and co-workers. It grates me that he does this and doesn't even give me a different pet name. I ask him to stop but he says that's how he's been his whole life. Is this a marriage compromise that I should just let go?

A: I live in Maryland, the land of Hon, and I enjoy those infrequent occasions when someone calls me that, though it's almost always from other women and in a retail setting. However, I don't care where your husband is from, calling every woman in his path sweetheart is both inappropriate and grating. Believe me, at his office the other women have discussed in the coffee room how uncomfortable his pet name makes them. Since you say he's from the South, but it sounds like he's not in the South, he needs to stop spritzing sweethearts everywhere. Even in the South, I can't imagine a young guy in the office expects to get away with calling his female colleagues sweetheart.

I don't know what part of the South he's from, but where I come from, we call every woman ma'am. I don't see any reason to stop living up to the traditions in which I was raised just because I leave home. Nobody asks the Yankees down here to slow down, or stop cursing every other word as is apparently the custom in the rest of the United States.

The problem isn't that the language he is using is Southern in an environment that is Northern, it is that it is familiar in an environment that is formal. The confusion is understandable. Offices for the last twenty years have tried hard to chuck the idea that they are formal environments. Regular business attire went from a suit, to a shirt with a tie, to "Casual Friday," to casual being the office norm. People stopped using their last names: not, "Good afternoon, I'm Joseph Smith from AT&T," but "Hello! I'm Joe from the phone company."

It is therefore easy to see how a young man could make the mistake of believing that he was in a laid back, informal environment among friends. Nothing could be further from the truth. The office was always a deadly place to drop your guard, but it is far worse now that the threats are masked by the casual air.

Someone should take this boy aside, for his own good, and explain all this to him. The modern office is full of landmines and hidden daggers. Formal manners are the only armor that offers any sort of defense.

Howling

Almost the whole state of Texas, and much of Oklahoma, is a big swirling bowl today, 25-30 mph sustained winds.

Mandarins

Apropos of our recent discussion here (or at Cassandra's place?) about what our schools select for:

[L]ike all elites, they believe that they not only rule because they can, but because they should.  Even many quite left-wing folks do not fundamentally question the idea that the world should be run by highly verbal people who test well and turn their work in on time.   They may think that machine operators should have more power and money in the workplace, and salesmen and accountants should have less.  But if they think there's anything wrong with the balance of power in the system we all live under, it is that clever mandarins do not have enough power to bend that system to their will.  For the good of everyone else, of course.   Not that they spend much time with everyone else, but they have excellent imaginations.

Now that's fun

My memories of the excellent time I had last night are somewhat confused, but I think it was something like this:



Several wineglasses were broken after we repaired downstairs to the firepit for the roasted-oyster segment of the party.  We found a melted wineglass in the ashes this morning, and I am told that I instructed someone to throw it in, because "That's what it's there for."

A good time was had by all.  We followed it up this morning with breakfast on a heroic scale for many stragglers.

H/t Bookworm Room.

Hesitation and Anti-Chivalry

In the comments to the post below, a commenter writes:

Off the topic, has anyone seen the "no more hesitation" targets being supplied to the Government? Like something that would be supplied to the "Einsatzgruppen". They are disturbing on a visceral level. Unlike all other official government products, they are uniquely non-diverse. Just an oversight, surely. Love to hear your comments on them, Grim-they represent a sort of "anti-chivalry".

I have heard of these products, and seen them. You can read about the controversy here and here. Let's look at a few of them, and then I'll give you my thoughts.







These targets are for law-enforcement training, and are called the "No More Hesitation" series. The company confirmed the intention was to train police not to hesitate to shoot these kinds of people. It's also clear why that might be important: hesitating to shoot someone who already has a firearm pointed at you can get you killed. Thus, this series exists to help police practice shooting people with guns pointed at them even if they happen to be pregnant women, children, little girls standing next to their even smaller brothers, and so on.

Training to kill such people must be undertaken with a very serious mind. I can give a case when killing such a person -- without hesitation -- might be appropriate: but it is not a policing case. It is a case from war. If you are operating against the kind of enemy that brainwashes children, or uses pregnant (or apparently-pregnant) women as suicide bombers, you may need this kind of training. In this case an enemy is relying on your humanity to give them a window to conduct a high-casualty attack. Sadly we have seen this in places like Iraq and Israel, so it is a consideration we have to take seriously. If a quick kill is necessary to prevent the detonation of such a weapon, and if such a detonation would injure more innocent people than the child you are killing to stop it, then it might be justifiable.

Killing pregnant women or children even in those circumstances is a serious moral crime. However, in that special case, the crime is not yours. It belongs to the men who bent the weak to their evil will.

However, that special case does not seem to include the intent of these targets. The above article includes a comment from a reader, who points out that most of the series has people inside their own homes -- wearing night-dresses and so forth -- who are pointing guns at the police officer. Now this seems to be exactly the kind of case in which hesitation is most appropriate, as these people have a legitimate right to have a handgun and to be responding with it to an intrusion. De-escalation training is surely what is needed here: to try to find a way to walk the situation away from where shots get fired at all.

If instead you are training to shoot without hesitation, what you are doing is dishonorable. To honor is to sacrifice, of yourself or your possessions, for something or someone you value more. Honor is the quality of a man who does this.

The path of honor in a case like this is to hesitate, to make the sacrifice of taking the risk onto yourself instead of making the child bear it. The purpose of the strong is to protect the weak: it is the reason you were given strength. You should hesitate long before you kill a child to save yourself, or a pregnant woman, or the elderly. Anyone who cannot see that is dishonorable, and unfit to bear arms.

An organization that teaches the strong to protect themselves at the expense of the weak is evil. It should be disbanded, replaced if necessary but with an entirely new organization, with a new corporate culture and no members who were associated with the decision to execute this kind of training.

At this time, of course, we only know that this product line was made available -- we do not know which agencies or forces undertook to train with it.  We should push to find out, and remove anyone who thought this was a good idea from public service.

Those are my thoughts, since you asked.

This Should Go Over Well...

The Georgia General Assembly has decided to consider a bill exempting itself from the gun control laws it imposes on everyone else. You might think they are chiefly interested in being able to carry a firearm to work during days when the Legislature is in session. No, actually, that's the one thing they're omitting. The exception to the law is structured as follows:

Current and former members of the General Assembly who possess a valid weapons carry license issued in this state; provided, however, that no member of the General Assembly shall be authorized to carry a weapon within the chamber of the House of Representatives or the chamber of the Senate.

Special privileges for the government, the law for the little people. Well, we'll see if they have the guts to go through with it. I gather it's getting a pretty hot response from the citizenry.

UPDATE: See the comments for a list of email addresses of the committee members considering the bill. I noted there that we can't be sure how many of them support it, so letter writers should not assume that they are writing to opponents.

UPDATE: Rep. Kevin Cooke, one of the committee members, has gotten back to me to clarify that he personally opposes the bill. He writes to express strong support for a strict-constructionist reading of the 2nd Amendment, and the right to bear arms. So we have at least one friend on the committee!

A modest proposal

Frank Fleming wrestles with the perennial problem of what to do if we ever get a President who isn't perfect.  This problem came up first with George Washington, but the Founding Fathers wisely foresaw that they shouldn't make him emperor even though he'd have been great, because it seemed likely he wouldn't live forever:

[T]ake this power to kill Americans with drones.  No one worries that Obama will abuse such a power — I mean, we’re talking about a man who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize just for existing.  It’s not like he’s ever going to use that power to blow us up (though, according to his lawyers, he legally could . . . and if he did, we’d just have to assume he had really, really good reasons).  But just imagine if that power wound up in the hands of a president like George W. Bush.  He’d probably blow up people with the drone all day, thinking he was playing a video game (“I’m gettin’ me a high score!”).  Or worse yet, think of handing Dick Cheney that power.  He’d most likely declare a unilateral war on kittens and puppies, blowing them up from the sky and then collecting the tears of children for some evil Halliburton project. 

. . . 

The obvious solution is to have Obama be president forever, but that’s not practical.  Eventually Obama will get bored and want to be president of a country he likes better than this one. 

. . . 

So the only option left is to consider curtailing a bit of the power we’re allowing Obama, because someday we might have a president who is completely detached from average Americans, doesn’t care about our problems, and ruins everything he touches — someone completely unlike Obama.  I mean, just imagine all that power Obama has in the hands of someone who completely sucks at being president.  The economy would be ruined, we’d have disastrous situations abroad, and our liberties would be threatened.  It would be a lot like now, but instead of it being Bush’s fault, it would be the fault of the current president.  So to keep that from happening, we’ll have to do the hard thing and put more limitations on Obama’s power. I’m sure he’ll understand and not drone-strike us.

An Exciting Step Forward

It's not every day that one sees a genuinely good idea from the political class. If only this solution could be implemented as widely as it deserves to be!

Postal chic

The U.S. Postal Service financial woes are not news.  Most of us probably have been following them in more or less detail as they struggled with the sort of turgid institutional inertia that makes reform difficult even as an obvious disaster looms.  It was not to be expected that they would think outside the box.

And yet they have:

The Postal Service announced Tuesday that it has partnered with a Cleveland-based apparel company to launch a USPS clothing line, set to hit stores in early 2014. . . .   “This agreement will put the Postal Service on the cutting edge of functional fashion,” said Postal Service Corporate Licensing Manager Steven Mills in [a press] release.

Did someone hire a McKinsey consultant? Is there an edgy marketing revolution brewing in the august halls of this ancient American institution?  Are upper-level management meetings now dominated by discussion of hot trends and cross-marketing?  Will we soon see high-concept TV fashion ads featuring mailmen braving the snow, wind, and sleet?  My mind, I say, wanders in these regions, lost.

Playing catchup

I can't remember how I got there, but I've been enjoying a new site today called "Popehat," especially a piece about Alvin Toffler's successive waves of change in human society.  In the original state of human culture, hunter-gatherers bumped up against a limiting condition of enough food.  Utopia was a place where there was plenty to eat.  Next came agriculture, which increased productivity and the food supply.  "Agriculture allowed us to harvest more calories per hour of labor."  The limiting condition was arable land.  This was followed by industrialization, which increased productivity again. "Industry allowed us to harvest more material wealth per hour of labor."  The limiting condition was capital; in Utopia there would enough machinery for everyone.  Finally, in the post-industrial society, "information technology allows us to harvest more informed decisions per hour of labor."   The limiting condition on prosperity has become scarce mental skills.

The author identifies the problem with many political schemes as "retrograde Utopian solutions."  Land redistribution, or socialist redistribution of the means of factory production, he sees as beside the point.  The current approach to a shortage of genius is to tax the highly creative and successful at extremely high rates.  The commenters try to explore a solution that increases cognitive skills via education, to which the author wryly responds, "What mechanism do you think turns cash into geniuses?"   There follows a spirited discussion of education and intelligence (with a long detour into the usual arguments for and against the minimum wage).

Fake explanations

Or, how not to fool ourselves into thinking we have an explanation before we do.  Sometimes "I don't know" is the only reasonable answer.  If your explanation ( e.g., "phlogiston") would have served equally well to explain any other outcome, it's not an explanation.  It hasn't added to your knowledge.

The site describes fallacies in assessing probabilities and risks, too.  Apparently there is a strong human tendency to overestimate a risk stated in whole numbers rather than percentages, so that a disease sounds more dangerous if it kills 1,000 out of each 100,000 affected than if it kills 2%:  those thousand bodies weigh on the hindbrain.  We also have only a limited inborn talent for distinguishing between the risk and reward of a chancy proposition.  The more convinced we are of the benefits of a course of action, the lower our assessment of its risk, even when the two have nothing at all to do with each other.  These are new skills in the evolutionary sense, for which we haven't yet developed much in the way of gut-level shortcuts.

Handwork

A friend sent me these pictures of the recent works of her hand.

Handcraft is central to my life.  This weekend is our annual Oysterfest.  I have three friends coming to stay with me who are something out of the ordinary in the way of handcraft:  everything from spinning to weaving to chair caning to handmade boats.  They're all fine musicians as well.  It's a weekend I look forward to all year.

Respect My Authoritah

That's actually the title of David Foster's funny piece about Nancy Pelosi's demand to monetize her dignity (who knew she was so into the commercial mindset?  Next she'll be defending profit).  But it seemed also to describe this handwringer from the Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled "How Rude!  Reader Comments May Undermine Scientists’ Authority":

Scientists have a hard enough time getting people to understand what they’re talking about. 

Their thoughts can be complicated.  Their sentences can be laden with jargon.  And their conclusions can offend political or religious sensibilities. 

And now, to make things worse, readers have an immediate forum to talk back.  And when some readers post uncivil comments at the bottom of online articles, that alone can raise doubts about the underlying science, a new study has found.  Or at least reinforce those doubts.

What follows is a summary report of a study showing that readers were less swayed by an argument about the risks of nanotechnology when it was followed by rude comments than when it was followed by polite ones.  The article's author described the experiment as having taken care to ensure that the substance of the comments was the same, and all that was varied was their tone.  Hard to say, since the paper was presented at a conference and hasn't been published yet.  It's due to be published soon in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication ("CMC," for those in the know).  I found something similar, perhaps, in the current issue, "The Impact of Language Variety and Expertise on Perceptions of Online Political Discussions," which contained this delightful early subsection heading:  "Status Cues and Heuristic Processing in CMC."  So right away we get some clues about the balderdash quotient (BD).  (I'm sorry; I'm afraid that was rude.  But I'm working on a peer-reviewed paper establishing universal units for the Cognitively Heuristic BD (CHBD), and the grant money is just pouring in.)

Is this a new thing, all the concern over whether the public is getting heuristically out of hand and needs better cognitive processing so we technocrats can maintain our authoritah?  Or have I just not been paying enough attention to the hilarious stuff that gets published?  (A classic early example is "Transgressing the Boundaries:  Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.")

Rudeness is a problem, certainly.  Among its other drawbacks, it heightens emotions, not usually a helpful means of facilitating the exchange of complex ideas.  It also often wrenches the focus of discussion from the relevant to the irrelevant, especially to the personal characteristics and politics of the authors.

But if the motive for censoring rude remarks is to prevent a loss of the readers' confidence in the authority of the beleaguered scientists, then count me unconvinced.  That's just asking for moderators to censor remarks according to their ostensible ability to undercut the argument in the main post.  Even if the moderator is concerned about the unfair tactic of "rudeness," who among us wouldn't be corrupted by that standard?  It will lead to a censorship standard that's weighted by the content of the argument instead of by its style.  As commenter JD Eveland wrote:

Consider, for example, the following range of possible comments: 

(a) "Fantastic!  Amazing!  I'm putting your name into Nobel consideration right away!" 

(b) "Interesting paper.  However, I do have some concerns with how the statistical analysis was conducted." 

(c) "The results are rendered largely uninterpretable due to the investigators' choice of a repeated measures analysis of variance rather than a regression model, as is currently taught in all reasonably respectable doctoral programs." 

(d) "Obviously, the results in this article were scraped off the bottom of a birdcage after the data had been statistically processed by the bird." 

(e) "You're a poopypants, and your data analyst is a stupid f**k!  You obviously learned all you know about statistics off the back of a bag of birdseed!  I'm coming after you, and your little dog too!" 

We'd all probably agree that result (e) would be considered rude, and most of us would also apply that to (d).  On the other hand, (c) could easily be considered rude by some scientists, although it might not have been intended as such by the respondent, since that's just the way he talks to everyone including his students and his wife.  (b) would probably not be considered rude by anyone offering it, although some scientists are sensitive enough to see it as such; indeed, there are even those insecure enough as to see anything short of (a) to be rude.

What I'm describing here is rampant PC culture.  The last thing scientists need is a less hostile working environment for their tender arguments. Sound ideas can stand some rough and tumble.

Rules of thumb

We were discussing below whether it means anything to talk about the scourge of U.C.H.  I am referring, of course, to the unintentionally humorous criticism by Don Kahan of the "unreliable cognitive heuristics" of the unwashed masses.  We just cannot get them to take our word for stuff any more.  They keep relying on their guts to decide whether we're crying wolf and trying to dazzle them with B.S.  Where's the trust?

What's funny is the idea that your average smart Yalie uses something better than rules of thumb to weigh essentially unquantifiable risks for political purposes.  If you're of a rigorous turn of mind, you can get a pretty good handle on risks in repetitive situations that are susceptible to statistical analysis.  You can't get anything like a rigorous handle on risks from models of the behavior of chaotic systems that have never met the gold standard of predictions confirmed by observations (and no fair back-fitting with previously unidentified critical factors).  The best anyone could ever get out of an emerging science of prediction is a gut feel, an instinct for where to focus future research.

Richard Feynman analyzed the failure of the Challenger shuttle.  He found that people were sharpening their pencils to an absurd degree and fooling themselves into thinking they had pinpointed risk out to a number of decimal points.  In fact, they were piling probability assumption on probability assumption, when no single assumption had a solid empirical basis:

It appears that there are enormous differences of opinion as to the probability of a failure with loss of vehicle and of human life.  The estimates range from roughly 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000.  The higher figures come from the working engineers, and the very low figures from management.  What are the causes and consequences of this lack of agreement?  Since 1 part in 100,000 would imply that one could put a Shuttle up each day for 300 years expecting to lose only one, we could properly ask "What is the cause of management's fantastic faith in the machinery?" . . .  There is nothing much so wrong with this as believing the answer!  Uncertainties appear everywhere. . . . When using a mathematical model careful attention must be given to uncertainties in the model. . . . 

There was no way, without full understanding, that one could have confidence that conditions the next time might not produce erosion three times more severe than the time before.  Nevertheless, officials fooled themselves into thinking they had such understanding and confidence, in spite of the peculiar variations from case to case.  A mathematical model was made to calculate erosion.  This was a model based not on physical understanding but on empirical curve fitting."

He concluded with one of my favorite statements, a truly reliable rule of thumb:  "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."

University of Colorado Guide for Women Under Attack

The debate about whether students should carry arms on campus is going on here in Georgia as well at it is in Colorado. It's worth remembering that this is the underlying debate to the recent comments by Rep. Salazar. The question at issue is whether students -- and not just female students -- shall be permitted to carry guns on campus, or whether they shall not be.

This is the same student body who reliably gets drunk and wrecks the campus after every winning football game, so I take the issue to be a more serious question than I normally accept gun control arguments to be. This is a group of people who are technically adults, but who are permitted to behave a little less like adults than their cohorts who do not have 'college life' as an excuse. I think we should extend the full rights due to adults to those who prove they will resist that temptation and behave like adults, but the institutions have too long permitted tomfoolery for us to simply assume that everyone will be grown up from now on. Some mechanism needs to be in place to ensure that students who want to bear arms on campus are living up to their responsibilities as adults.

So I'm willing to accept that these students ought to prove themselves to be adults before given the full rights of adults. Nevertheless, the college's actual advice to female students is highly insulting.

1. Be realistic about your ability to protect yourself.
2. Your instinct may be to scream, go ahead! It may startle your attacker and give you an opportunity to run away.
3. Kick off your shoes if you have time and can’t run in them.
4. Don’t take time to look back; just get away.
5. If your life is in danger, passive resistance may be your best defense.
6. Tell your attacker that you have a disease or are menstruating.
7. Vomiting or urinating may also convince the attacker to leave you alone.
8. Yelling, hitting or biting may give you a chance to escape, do it!
9. Understand that some actions on your part might lead to more harm.
10. Remember, every emergency situation is different. Only you can decide which action is most appropriate.

Of these all, number seven is the most insulting. Imagine telling a young man of college age, "If someone should attack you, pee on yourself." This is great advice for a puppy who wants to demonstrate submission to an older dog. To a human being, it amounts to "Be prepared to degrade yourself if anyone should attack you."

Most of the rest of the advice amounts to thinking of yourself as a victim, or a prey animal.

Not everyone has it in them to kill their attacker, and that far at least point one is correct. You should look in your heart and decide if you would rather kill, or rather suffer at the mercy of a violent and wicked man. If you would in truth rather suffer, because your moral aversion to violence is so strong, this is a respectable position occupied by Quakers and other religious orders. In this case you are not a victim. You are choosing to accept the suffering that the world sends you for moral reasons of your own. That is honorable, in its way: it is courageous, in its way.

For others, there are other choices. One is to choose companions you trust, on whom you know you can rely. This is the idea, often discussed here at the Hall, of a frith bond: a bond of mutual loyalty, based on an Old English word related to our words "friend" and "free." It is a society of friendship, and it makes you freer than you would be alone. You can travel together in far greater safety, and if attacked, you can help defend each other.

You can learn to fight, and keep yourself ready to do so.

If you are right for it, you can carry arms. A firearm is not the only choice, although it makes particular sense for young women who may be physically weaker than the young men who are most likely to be violent criminals. Learn to use it safely and accurately, and keep it always handy. ("Go not one step out on the road without your weapons of war, for you never know when you may need them." Havamal.)

Under no circumstances degrade yourself. To do so is to invite, rather than to repel, the scornful treatment of the world. To be the sort of person who is prepared to degrade herself to avoid even a serious harm is to be the kind of person the world will not respect. Remember always: Death before dishonor.

The National Interest in Fertility

Hot Air looks at the "fertility panic," which is general in places falling now far below replacement levels.

We talked about this issue recently, thanks to Tex, so I just want to point out a small Obamacare consequence. Health and Human Services has made a move toward mandating free birth control as a part insurance plans. This is supposed to be Constitutional (pending 1st Amendment challenges) on the grounds that it is in the national interest to ensure that women have "access" to this technology, which can only mean that it must be provided to them for free.

So what if a future HHS should decide that it is in the national interest that we should stop using contraception as much as we do? What if they instead altered the picture with a regulation that said that "no one shall" offer any birth control coverage as part of any insurance plan?

The point is that a gate that swings one way can also swing the other. Once anything becomes a matter of public policy, it's no longer a matter that can lay a claim to the privacy of decisions made in the intimate space. But it is just that claim -- that matters of contraception are private, intimate decisions -- that underlies Griswold v. Connecticut.

Obamacare, the Adventure Continues

Finding out what's in the law:  We've been reading lately that companies are avoiding hiring a 50th employee, or cutting hours down to 29 per week, in order to escape Obamacare.  It turns out it's even easier to escape the law, no matter what your size or average hours worked per week:  just self-insure.

It seems Her Dignifiedness, Nancy Pelosi, let the PPACA slip through Congress with a carve-out for self-insured employers.  Some of you may work for self-insured employers without realizing it, because although they serve as their own risk-capital pool for medical claims, they generally use an insurance company to administer the plan, which works much like other group plans at the employee interface.  My old firm did that.  They figured out what kind of reserves they could afford to set aside for the collective medical bills in a reasonably foreseeable year, and used the usual stop-loss insurance company to limit the firm's overall risk in case every single employee came down with cancer in the same year.  As far as I was concerned, it was just Blue Cross until someone told me how it really worked.  In essence, I was relying on the firm's solvency rather than Blue Cross's.

In the past, self-insurance was popular mostly with very large employers, but stop-loss insurers have been snapping up business from smaller and smaller employers for years now.  The Obama administration is riled up, because self-insured employers can price their insurance on the basis of a small, homogeneous, often rather young labor pool.  What's worse, under Obamacare, they don't even have to worry about what will happen to their employees with pre-existing conditions if they have to give the system up, because all those employees will be guaranteed access from now on if and when they leave the self-insured pool.  Another sore point for the administration is that stop-loss insurers aren't subject to the ban on refusing coverage to people with pre-existing conditions.  They can cherry-pick all they like before agreeing to take on a new employer as a client.

So self-insured employers may become the last corner of the health insurance market that responds to price signals.  What it amounts to is traditional major-medical coverage for a group, at a time when the health czars are trying to get rid of major medical and replace it with first-dollar coverage, a/k/a prepaid healthcare.  The employer can set employee-level deductibles wherever it likes, depending on how much compensation it chooses to pay in the form of insurance.  It also sets stop-loss deductibles wherever it likes, depending on the premium it will have to pay to the re-insurer and the amount of risk it can stomach for a bad health year across its entire labor pool.  This is not what our benevolent overloads had in mind for us at all, but unfortunately they don't have the House any more.

Chalk this up as one more piece of Obamacare that's about to bite them in the behind.  Employers who are being threatened with being run out of business by the cost of healthcare are going to have an alternative.  It may not be as easy as these guys thought it would be to crash the system and replace it with single-payer.

Police state (part 44)

As has become depressingly common, another report of ignorant law enforcement "professionals" harrassing innocent citizens.

So now it's ok to pull over cars based on bumper stickers?

I'm getting dizzy

Dan Kahan of the Cultural Cognitive Project at Yale is getting very meta about the proper evidence-based approach to persuading the public that AGW-ist scientists' conclusions are evidence-based:

Scientists and science communicators have appropriately turned to the science of science communication for guidance in overcoming public conflict over climate change.  The value of the knowledge that this science can impart, however, depends on it being used scientifically.  It is a mistake to believe that either social scientists or science communicators can intuit effective communication strategies by simply consulting compendiums of psychological mechanisms.   Social scientists have used empirical methods to identify which of the myriad mechanisms that could plausibly be responsible for public conflict over climate change actually are.  Science communicators should now use valid empirical methods to identify which plausible real-world strategies for counteracting those mechanisms actually work.  Collaboration between social scientists and communicators on evidence-based field experiments is the best means of using and expanding our knowledge of how to communicate climate science.

Whew.  I can't help thinking if they put that much effort into ensuring that the climate science that is reaching the public is evidence-based, there wouldn't be so much public controversy.  In a related paper, although he makes hard work of it, Kahan admits that empirical data do not support the conclusion that conservatives are less cognitively sophisticated than liberals.  Instead, he makes the interesting finding that high cognitive scores are associated with the fervency of ideological beliefs on both sides of the political spectrum:

Seeming public apathy over climate change is often attributed to a deficit in comprehension.  The public knows too little science, it is claimed, to understand the evidence or avoid being misled.  Widespread limits on technical reasoning aggravate the problem by forcing citizens to use unreliable cognitive heuristics to assess risk.  A study conducted by the Cultural Cognition Project and published in the Journal Nature Climate Change found no support for this position.  Members of the public with the highest degrees of science literacy and technical reasoning capacity were not the most concerned about climate change.  Rather, they were the ones among whom cultural polarization was greatest.

Kahan tries hard to figure out how this could possibly mean that AGW makes the most sense, but can't get there.  He fears that ideologues on both sides of the fence are more concerned with fitting in with their tribes than with arriving at truth; he worries about "the tragedy of the risk-taking commons" and the proper "communication" strategies that must be employed by people who know the real score.  He reluctantly concludes that no amount of "clarification" of the AGW position will bring the public around "so long as the climate-change debate continues to feature cultural meanings that divide citizens of opposing worldviews."  He recommends, therefore, that

communicators should endeavor to create a deliberative climate in which accepting the best available science does not threaten any group’s values.  Effective strategies include use of culturally diverse communicators, whose affinity with different communities enhances their credibility, and information-framing techniques that invest policy solutions with resonances congenial to diverse groups.

And from there he's back to the need for a "new science of science communication."

Myself, I hypothesize that AGW science is too weak to win committed converts except among people with a strong social-justice worldview, who are drawn to the most common AGW amelioration schemes, and whose enthusiasm grows the more familiar they are with the schemes.  The suspicion that AGW is junk science in service of a social-justice political agenda, in turn, tends to turn conservatives more rabidly against the AGW hypothesis the more they investigate it.  It's not necessarily a difference in an approach to pure science at all.  The portion of the public paying the most attention, and best equipped to evaluate the evidence, knows that the science is far from definitive, especially when you consider not only the fact that it is based on predictions generated by emerging models, but also the need to assign definitive blame to human activity and to evaluate a cost-benefit analysis of proposed remediation that itself must be based on highly speculative information.  Given that murky picture, why should it be surprising that the most educated part of the public polarizes primarily around its reaction to the proposed solutions?

Sawing off the limb you're sitting on

A new acquaintance uses "The Ishmael Effect" to describe the phenomenon of self-defeating propositions, such as

‘It is (absolutely) true that truth is relative’; ‘we ought to think that there is no such thing as thought’; and ‘the one immorality is to believe in morality" . . . .

It came to mind when I read James Taranto's report today of the dilemma faced by NARAL:

"One of the nation's most prominent abortion rights groups is working to remake its image in response to concern that it may be overtaken by a growing cadre of young anti-abortion activists," Roll Call reports.  "Its message: This is not your mother's NARAL."

That's undoubtedly true.  If you're under 40, NARAL's efforts make it much likelier that your mother didn't even have children.  There's something both poignant and funny about a group devoted to abortion puzzling over its difficulty in finding young people to support it.

The new hockey stick

H/t Zombie.

Yum

This Emeril recipe is one of the best things I've tasted in a while.  It's called "Oysters, Scallops, and Crawfish Bordelaise in Puff Pastry," but an internet search suggests that it's not really a bordelaise sauce, which classically refers to a sauce based on Bordeaux wine and a meat demi-glace.  Also, it seems to me you could use any seafood, as long as you have some dry white wine and some seafood stock.  Whatever, this Emeril take on the traditional sauce is amazing, either in store-bought frozen puff pastry or (if those aren't handy), just on pasta.  We make fish stock from our fish frames or shrimp heads and/or shells, then freeze it for later use.

First you soften garlic and shallots in a pan, then briefly add the seafood, removing and reserving it in a bowl as soon as it's cooked.  Add wine and a little cognac and cook it down to half its volume.  Add fish stock, salt, and pepper and reduce again to half its volume. Stir in some chopped tomato, then butter, then the final herbs, including tarragon. Finally, add the cooked seafood back in.  The concentrated flavors from those two reductions make it unbelievably good.

Evening up the playing field

Here's one way to ensure that the Second Amendment's purpose of equalizing the power between the government and citizens is not undermined:  Olympic Arms is refusing to do any further business with New York government officials.  If you're a private citizen of New York who tried to order a gun from Olympic Arms, they'll refund your purchase price, ship the guns immediately to an out-of-state location for your pickup, or hold them for six months while you make arrangements to move to a saner state.

Fauxcahontas Makes A Good Point

She may lack personal ethics, but that doesn't mean she can't make it uncomfortable for those who lack professional ethics!

Safety first

From Jim Geraghty:  "Finally. A 14-day waiting period for all assault cabinet nominees."

The sky is falling

A meteor blew up yesterday about 25 miles in the air above a small Russian city about 1,000 miles east of Moscow.  The AP article said it was traveling at supersonic speeds.  I'll say!  About 50 times the speed of sound, from the estimates.  It may have been a few meters wide and weighed in the neighborhood of 11 tons.

I always forget how the terms work:  It's a meteoroid if it's a fairly small piece of junk in orbit, a meteor when it's in Earth's atmosphere burning up, and a meteorite if part of it makes it to the surface.  This one may have produced a few fragments on the surface, but mostly the impact took the form of a shock wave that collapsed part of a factory roof.  Five hundred people were injured, 34 of them seriously enough to go to the hospital.  That's a lot for a meteor.

The fear from within

People with damage to the amygdala are strangely unable to feel fear of external threats.  It turns out that they can feel fear generated in another part of brain, in response to internal threats like air hunger.  What's more, they are more prone to panic attacks in that context than people who routinely experience amygdala-mediated fear of external threats.  I wonder if they have less practice mastering fear?

Maybe Matt Ridley was right?

In "The Rational Optimist," Matt Ridley argued that evolutionary pressure operates not only on genes but on cultural innovations; that "ideas have sex."  This article in Nature compares the transmissibility of genes and folktales:

If folk tales simply spread by diffusion, like ink blots in paper, one would expect to see smooth gradients in these variations as a function of distance. Instead, researchers found that language differences between cultures create significant barriers to that diffusion 

These barriers are stronger than those for the exchange of genes — a message that might be crudely expressed as: “I’ll sleep with you, but I prefer my stories to yours.”

PC progress

From Moonbattery:


 

Happy Birthday, Georgia

My beloved homeland came into practical reality 240 years ago today, when Sir James Edward Oglethorpe landed on a high bluff and founded the Province of Georgia and its capital city of Savannah. The charter gave him all the land to the Pacific Ocean, but in practical terms at first it was just Yamacraw Bluff and what he could hold with his comrades. Georgia has since existed as a British province, a free and independent state, a state under the Articles of Confederation, a member of the United States of America, a member of the Confederate States of America, and was again brought back under the union. Nations come and go, but Georgia remains.

Oglethorpe founded the colony in part to defend British possessions from the Spanish in Florida, and so once he had established his city and militia, he sought out Scottish Highlanders to hold his southern frontier. These settled at the Altamaha river, under James MacIntosh Mohr (that is, "James MacIntosh the Great"). They fought the Spanish, and they fought the Indians, and they usually won -- especially at the Battle of Bloody Marsh. During one of Oglethorpe's expeditions home to recruit more Rangers, the '45 rising came up, and he had to turn to the business of fighting the Highlanders instead of recruiting them.

He had the same fate with the Americans, whom he had helped to found. After the Revolution, he was at home in Britain and went to visit John Adams, our first ambassador to the British. It's sad to think that our founder, a man of talent, insight and character, did not finally make his home here. We remember him with honor.

Reading list

Jamie Weinstein of The Daily Caller interviewed Elliott Abrams, former deputy National Security adviser to President George. W. Bush, and asked him what three books most shaped his understanding of the Middle East:

I would note four. Bernard Lewis’s “What Went Wrong,” Michael Oren’s “Power, Faith, and Fantasy,” Natan Sharansky’s “The Case for Democracy,” and a somewhat older one: the Hebrew Bible.

The whole interview is interesting.  He asserts, for instance, that Israel's unilateral strike on the Syrian nuclear plant in 2007 avoided war and spurred negotiations.  Because both the U.S. and Israel declined to crow about (or even acknowledge responsibility for) the strike, Assad was able to save face without responding to it.  Because the strike made Syria fear the U.S. and Israel, it inspired Assad to come to the bargaining table.  Yes, sometimes that happens for reasons other than that we made someone love us.

Abrams believes it's possible a strike on Iran would have the same result.  I wonder, though, if we aren't dealing with an entirely different class of crazy there.  Though when I think about it -- Syria?  Iran?  Maybe I can't make a principled distinction between them.

Be fruitful and multiply

I've always wondered why God found it necessary to tell us this.  Or, if you're not a believer, why did a culture find it necessary to exhort its own members to reproduce?  Don't we have a biological imperative?  How did we get here otherwise; why did our ancestors survive?  It's strange to observe that one of the most basic human drives is so vulnerable to collapse, especially once birth control comes into the picture.

David Goldman argues that cultural death causes and is revealed by a collapse in reproduction.  His thesis, focusing on Islamic societies, is that some religions cannot survive the transition from traditional society to modernity.  The hallmark of their failure is that their fertility rate collapses as soon as their women acquire an education. In 1979, before the Iranian revolution, the fertility rate was 7 children per female.  That rate abruptly dropped to 1.6 children per female, just above the disastrous European rate, and an unprecedented "snapping shut of the national womb."  This giant vote of no confidence in the future of the culture induces a frightening social dynamic:

[A] society that suddenly stops having children suffers from cultural despair.  The same cultural despair that curtains off the future for families afflicts policymakers.  Cultural pessimism is a great motivation for strategic adventures.  A nation that fears that it may have no future may be willing to risk everything on the roll of a dice.  Iran has one last big generation of military age men, the ones who were born in the early 1980s before the great weapons.  Nothing but the use of force would stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, with dreadful consequences.  With Iran on the verge of building a nuclear bomb, we have hit crunch-time.  Will the foreign policy establishment connect the dots in time?

This is a sore subject for me, as you can imagine.  I wonder if we've managed the transition well in our own country to a culture in which no one need be fertile unless he or she chooses.  How are the incentives for childbearing different now?  When the choice whether to reproduce or not becomes unconstrained, what makes fathers willing to support their children and their children's mothers?  What makes mothers willing to raise the children?   You'd think it would be obvious, but the demographics tell us it's anything but.  When people acquire choices for the first time, there can be a scary period in which we find out what new motives will operate, and what we have to offer each other to make it all keep working.

Gloria Steinem famously remarked that she had no children because she didn't mate in captivity.  If educating women causes a large fraction of them to adopt this view, what's wrong with the world they've become educated about?  Why should it be necessary to withhold education in order to get them to buy into continuing the race?  We've lost most of our traditional culture and religion.  What is there to replace them with, as a motive for looking to the future in a spirit of sacrifice?

The thinking man's Snopes

I'm enjoying browsing a site called "Skeptics/Stack Exchange," not only because its members try to get a collective handle on interesting disputes of the day, but because they have a filtering system I've never seen used before.  Although newcomers may register freely to use the site, they have to earn "reputation" points before they're allowed to take certain actions.  Apparently anyone may take a stab at posting a question or answering a posted question, and may earn reputation points if the question or answer is admired.  Anyone may also vote on whether a post was helpful, but only people who have accumulated minimum reputation points may vote to approve an answer, or to leave comments addressing whether the question is appropriately stated or the answer is convincing.  (That's a distinction between "helpful" and "substantively appropriate" that I've never seen before.)  There's an elaborate hierarchy of privileges.  It takes a very large number of reputation points to gain the right to close questions.

The effect of linking a good reputation to the right to speak or to control the discussion is to eliminate most flame-throwing and many logical fallacies.  The discussion on climate change managed to include both believers and skeptics in roughly even numbers, with the two sides actually attending somewhat to each others' arguments.  That's a new one for me.

Utah Sheriffs Self-Identify

Their sacrifice will make them easy to round up when the revolution comes, but it does force the Feds to step back and rethink how much they can rely on state and local support if they push too far. The real question, of course, is whether the Feds have any intention of pushing that far.

Pretty strong language in the letter.