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.