shocking

Most surprising point in Isaacson's bio of Einstein. In 1938, a poll was conducted of Princeton students. They ranked as the greatest living person, in first place, Adolf Hitler. Number two? Albert Einstein. Just shows the level of anti-Semitism that existed here in America at that time.

3 questions for Condi

In case I ever bump into her on campus...

1) What consequences would have persuaded you that the decision to invade Iraq was misguided?

2) If you cannot answer the first question, does that mean you are unwilling to admit that a decision was mistaken?

3) If you can answer the first question, why are the deaths of 100,000 Iraqis and over 4,000 Americans not sufficient?

the public option boogeyman

It's amazing to me how controversial this public option has become. There are so many services government already provides: social security, Medicare, Medicaid. Why do people think that a government-run insurance program is going to take over health care, given that it would be subject to a lot of the same cost constraints (i.e., no subsidies) that private insurers face. Anyway, right now only 55% of Americans get their health insurance from a private firm (according to This Week). So the private market is certainly not serving everyone.

I think a good model to use as an example that of public universities. There are lots of successful private universities in this country. And there are also a lot of successful public universities. The healthy competition among them is good for consumers.

In one of the town hall meetings, a college kid challenged Obama to a debate over the issue. Guess where the college kid went to school? CU-Boulder. That's right: a public school.

I don't see any reason why the public system needs to be federally managed. States could certainly run these programs on their own. Also, I do agree with the point made by several Republicans, that we should lift regulations that prevent insurance companies from crossing state lines. That's stupid, plain and simple.

But I also don't see any reason to be afraid of a government-run insurance plan. If you don't like it, you won't have to take it.

sibling rivalry

The Times has a great profile of the Bryan twins, one of the greatest tennis doubles pairs of all time. One of the interesting points is that when they were growing up playing singles, whenever they met each other, their dad (a former pro tennis player himself) wouldn't let them play each other. Instead, they would alternate forfeiting. That wouldn't have necessarily occurred to me, but it strikes me as the right thing to do, at least while the kids are young. The junior circuit is so competitive, that having two brothers--in this case, twins--play each other would generate a lot of ill will around the house. Better to just avoid the sibling rivalry, and focus on all the other matches.

never, never, never give up

I think David Brooks makes a good point about Ted Kennedy's career: that after a lot of personal trauma and failures, Kennedy kept slogging it out in the Senate. After losing all three of his older brothers--two to assasinations--, after running from the scene in Chappaquiddick, and getting caught boozing around in Palm Beach, a natural thing to do would have been to step out of public life, retire to live on his own. Whether it was the thirst for limelight or a commitment to public service (probably both), something compelled him to keep doing the hard work of passing legislation that furthered his ideals. And most commentators say that his best work has been done since the '91 Palm Beach fiasco, i.e., after he was 59 years old. I think the broader lesson here is that to do good work in any field, it takes a long time--you've got to slog it out for awhile and stay persistent. Substantial achievements take time and sustained effort.

address to the students

Obama's live speech to the nation's students next Tue is attracting a lot of fire from conservatives who claim that it's indoctrination. But it strikes me as a politically brilliant move. Of course his speech will be apolitical: it's easy enough to focus on staying in school, studying hard, working toward your goals, all that jazz. The genius of the move is that either you let kids watch it and they get inspired (thanks to Obama's hipness), or you don't let the kids watch it, and you look like you don't believe in a positive message of encouragement for our youth.

Apart from the cold political calculus, I think it's the sort of thing that every president ought to do--it's a great way to get kids interested in government and provide them with role models.

duh!

Quote of the day:

"Today, no one--or at least no one sensible--thinks that general relativity is anything but a low energy approximation to a fundamental theory, in other words another effective field theory."

--Steven Weinberg, lecture at 2004 KITP Future of Physics Symposium, (16:30)

processing speed

My cousin Drausin has a post on his fantastic blog (which you should add to your Google Reader right now) about a neuroscience study that finds the human brain processing rate for lexical tasks of 60 bits per second.

But I think the really key point comes from the arXiv blog: "Of course, this is not the information-processing capacity of the entire brain but one measure of the input/output capacity during a specific task."

The brain isn't optimized for lexical tasks like sorting out letters into words or doing mathematical computations. How about something the brain is really good at, like facial recognition? I bet in one second you could look at a photograph of a bunch of colleagues and memorize the names of 5-10 of them who are in the picture. How much processing power does that take? Hard to estimate, but certainly many orders of magnitude greater than 60 bps.

As an aside, the bandwidth from the retina, according to a study cited on wikipedia's retina page, is 8.75 megabits per second. Actually, that's pretty low given that a lot of digital cameras take photos of over 8.75 megabits. The trick of the brain is to make us think our entire field of vision has high resolution when really we're only getting good resolution in the focus of the eye.

fair and balanced

To get an op-ed in the Times, you'd better not pick one side or the other in the science-v-religion debate.

Robert Wright argues that not only Creationists, but also atheists are guilty of "underestimation of natural selection’s creative power":

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/opinion/23wright.html?pagewanted=print

It makes for a nice column, to say that both sides are at fault here. But that's intellectually dishonest. Pick a side, then make your case. Don't try to get along with everyone.

only 3 generations

Cottingham and Greenwood give a good presentation of the argument for why there are only 3 generations of neutrinos. The argument comes from the predicted rate of decays of Z to invisible (i.e., neutrinos), compared with the experimentally measured rate. The plot on p. 128 is pretty striking. It makes you think that there really shouldn't be another neutrino beyond the 3 we know of.

health care

The only political news item these days seems to be the health care debate. Pundits like to focus on sensational things, like gun-wielding protesters at town hall meetings or death panels. But it seems to me that in the end some reform bill will ultimately pass, probably not exactly as Obama would have wanted it (the public option is likely to go), but with some substantial changes that increase coverage and lower costs. Obama gets criticized a lot for not sticking his neck out more and delivering a detailed bill to the Congress, but it seems to me wise on an issue of this importance to allow a vigorous national debate so that ideas can get hashed out. That's democracy at its best. Maybe ugly sometimes, but at least out in the open for scrutiny.

why it sucked to be royalty

Your bathroom smelled like shit (no running water). If you got cold, you might up and die (James V). You barely ever took baths because water was thought to be unhealthy. King Charles took one every 6 months; James V reportedly never had one. You hardly ever went swimming; certainly not if you were a lady. You got imprisoned and executed if you had the wrong religion (Mary, Queen of Scots, to name just one). You couldn't drink plain water (too unhealthy), so you had to drink beer. Okay, maybe that's a bonus.

why science rocks

I'm halfway through Isaacson's biography of Einstein. He just described Arthur Eddington's observation of the 1919 solar eclipse, from Brazil and the island of Principe off the coast of Africa. The results confirmed Einstein's prediction based on the general theory of relativity. And it really launched Einstein's fame to a global level.

I think it's a great example of why science is so great. Isaacson points out that it was quite "an audacious idea that a team of English scientists should prove the theory of a German, even as the two nations were at war." Scientists tend to look beyond provincial boundaries and see the value of international collaboration, regardless of whatever short-term (even militaristic) political conflicts. Those are the kind of people you want to surround yourself with.

conferences

First day of the Scottish summer school here (SUSSP 65) in rainy-sunny-rainy-sunny-rainy St. Andrews, Kingdom of Fife.

The structure of the workshop is really good: everyone stays in the same dorm, eats meals together, goes to lectures together. It's very conducive for lots of interaction. Much better than say APS, where there are thousands of people and you have to fend for yourself in a big city.

My one complaint is that the ratio of working problems to listening to lectures is to low (in fact, it's 0 so far). Too often smart people spend all their time talking instead of allowing their audience do some of the work. But with 80 students, I recognize it's a hard format for group work.

Justice Lectures 7 and 8: Locke and the state of nature

Justice Lectures 7 and 8: Locke and the State of Nature
Locke’s idea that we choose to leave the state of nature by signing a social contract to submit to a majoritarian government is a powerful one, albeit ultimately flawed. There is no law in the state of nature. And there is no choice that you get to make about ruled by a government. You’re stuck with it.

As to the first point, the state of nature shows us that life is cruel, brutish, and short. Most organisms die without ever having offspring. Many organisms are killed directly by another organism. We, like all other living creatures, are in a struggle to survive. There is no law or morality or source of ethics in nature. Replicators, i.e., genes, are trying to propagate themselves, and will choose strategies that maximize their success.

Hopefully life in a governed society that provides for collective security and protection of private property and persecution of criminals is much more preferable than living in the state of nature where anyone can kill you or steal from you. This is a low threshold to require a government to meet. However, even if a person wishes he could be back in the state of nature—free from any government control—he can’t get there. He’s stuck. That’s just how it goes. There are some places where you can effectively rejoin the state of nature: Canada’s Northern Territories, Siberia, Somalia, to name a few. But those tend to be places you probably wouldn’t want to visit for very long.

The central question
This leads me to a deeper question, one that I would argue is the central question of political and ethical philosophy. On an issue-by-issue basis, political philosophy is trying to answer the question:

Is X justified? (1)

X may be many things: progressive taxation, military conscription, a ban on abortion laws, or an environmental protection law.

Note that (1) is a much harder question than some other related questions:

Does X occur in the real world? (2)
Is X something that you want? (3)

We would not want to use (2) or (3) to answer the question of (1).

As to (2), lots of terrible things occur in the real world. Dictators slaughter millions; people rape, steal, pillage; civilizations go extinct. Certainly we don’t want to use that as a criterion for our morality.

As to (3), this is also a question that will not suffice to answer question (1). There are lots of things that I want—more money for myself, or a high-speed train from my house to my work, or a grocery store right next to where I live—that are not generally justifiable.

Questions (2) and (3) can be answered with little disagreement. All we need is to look at the historical record, or ask a person what she wants to answer these. By contrast, we know that different people are going to disagree about the answer to (1). Maybe we’ll mostly agree how to answer (1) for some issues (slavery, murder, free expression). But there will certainly be others (gay marriage, abortion, rates of taxation) on which we will disagree. So we know that we will disagree on the question of (1).

But what about a deeper question. That is:

What standard do we use to answer question (N)? (A.N)

Question (A) is one level deeper than questions (1-3). Note that (A.2) (=check the historical record) and (A.3) (=ask the person) have already been answered. Also, question (2) need not be limited to political questions, but may also include scientific questions such as “Does time progress slower for a moving body?” or “Does a proton consist of constituent particles?” The standard for answering these questions is also definitive: it is experiment.

By contrast, there are many possible answers to (A.1): utilitarianism, libertarianism, contractualism, religious code, etc. Even if we can’t agree on the answer to (1), maybe we could agree on the answer to question (A.1). For example, maybe we could all agree that utilitarian principles are the prime standard for justification, even if we can’t agree whether gay marriage would satisfy the utilitarian standard.

However, we know that in fact, people disagree on the answer to (A.1). So let’s try to find consensus by going one step deeper:

How do we choose the standard (A.1) for answering questions of justice? (I.A.1)

Here we still fail to find common agreement. There is no conclusive answer to (I.A.1). There is no standard for evaluation in political philosophy the way there is in science (i.e., experiment). We will at times agree about some questions of justice (1), but when we disagree, we will approach them from different perspectives (A.1) and without any common criteria for evaluating those standards. In other words, we will spend a lot of time arguing with each other without any final arbiter like an experiment to answer the question. This all results from the fact that nature on its own is devoid of morality. There is no law in nature; all laws are man-made. Since we invent our own laws, different people will come up with different laws. There is no absolute way to determine which standard for evaluating laws is superior to another.

I still think there is a lot of value in looking at different political philosophies, i.e., answers to (A.1). From my limited study of these different political philosophies, my view is that utility (i.e., the quality of life of sentient beings) is the fundamental quantity that we care about and want to maximize. There are many different ways of doing this (libertarianism, rule-based utilitarianism, contractualism, etc.), all of which hold some good ideas, but rule-based utilitarianism is the one that is most straightforward and persuasive. Although I am pretty firmly committed to this view, there is no way that I can prove that I am right. I can give lots of reasons for my view, but they may not be persuasive to anyone.

Without any gold standard for judgment (like experiment)—i.e., since there is no commonly accepted answer to (I.A.1)—we will never be able to resolve the question of (A.1) (or of (1) for that matter). The central project of political philosophy ultimately leads to a dead end. We can still use different political frameworks to try to argue for one approach or another, but ultimately they may prove to be unsuccessful.

An alternative approach to political philosophy
There is an alternative approach to political philosophy that may be fruitful to explore. That is to answer the following question:

What is the most persuasive way to convince free and reasonable people to change their position on question (1)? (B.1)

[Note that I require “reasonable people” because I want to exclude the possibility of brainwash or any means of coercion. I can make you believe almost anything by putting a gun to your head, or by raising you in a cult from a young age.]

Now, we may disagree about the answers to (B.1), but we will very likely agree on at least some of the answers for the standard for evaluating (B.1):

What standard can evaluate the most persuasive way to convince free and reasonable people to change their position on question (1)? (I.B.1)

One answer to (I.B.1) would be to do focus groups and try several persuasive approaches and see which one changes the most people’s minds. We may imagine other ways of testing various methods of persuasion. The standard for evaluating these methods should be relatively uncontroversial.

So now let us focus on finding the answer to (B.N). Though I have no experimental data to back it up, my hunch is that one of the leading contenders will be Rawls’s original position. It is one of the most powerful ways of stimulating empathy that I know of. Furthermore, it is asymmetric. The original position rarely persuades people to be more closed-minded or intolerant. For example, many free and reasonable people changed their minds with respect to segregated schools and bans on interracial marriage in the course of a few decades. People can be persuaded to be more open-minded and more accepting of differences, but rarely can they be persuaded to go the other way.

So my two hypotheses are that Rawls’s original position would be the most effective technique to change people’s view of an issue, and that it would be more effective in moving them toward the superior view (which out of laziness I define to be my own personal view) than in the other direction. For example, the OP might have convinced some whites in South Africa to advocate an end of apartheid, or some Israeli’s to advocate a two-state solution, or some white Southerners to advocate an end to segregation. However, I don’t think that the OP would convince many of those people to change their views in the opposite direction.

I don’t want to advocate an end to debates over the answer to (A.1), but I just want to highlight that without a firm criterion from (I.A.1), there is no final standard in those debates. That is not to say that all views are equally valid; it’s just that I can only demonstrate that my view is superior once you and I have accepted a common (or at least overlapping) standard for justice, and until we do that then we will argue across each other.

By contrast, the question (B.1) of how to persuade people to change their views is one that can be empirically tested. So that may lead to more productive discussion and debate.

Justice Lectures 5 and 6: Libertarianism

Libertarians are kind of annoying in their purism, but I think it’s a useful political philosophy to use as a thought experiment, at least to highlight the ways in which we are willing to let our liberty be reduced.

The easy argument against strict libertarianism (=no government action except the enforcement of contracts and national defense) is: what will you do when your house catches on fire—or if your neighbors’ house catches on fire. Clearly there are some collective goods that we want government to provide because the market alone will not adequately account for the externalities (positive or negative). That said, we don’t need government to _run_ everything. For example, we think that to ensure equal opportunity, we want every child to have access to a good school. That doesn’t mean the government needs to operate the schools, just that it has to pay for them. Hence the logic of charters. [Aside: I won’t go into the arguments against vouchers here, but I think there are good ones.]

Sandel’s 1st two libertarian requirements: 1) No paternalism, and 2) No moral laws are fairly hard to argue against. Of course, when your actions incur a cost on others, we have a right to restrict them. Heroin addicts tend to steal other people’s property, so we are justified in legislating against heroin use.

The third libertarian requirement, that there be no redistribution of wealth, is a bit tougher. Technically, as soon as you charge one person more in taxes than another person, you are redistributing wealth. Maybe the libertarian would argue for a flat tax instead of progressive tax policy. From a strictly libertarian perspective, it is hard to argue for progressive taxation. But I think once you take a broader look at justice (for example, adopting the veil of ignorance), a progressive tax policy becomes pretty reasonable.

One last point on libertarianism. It basically assumes that every individual is entitled to his own rights to do whatever he wants. However, the reality is that we have only one habitable planet, and we’re all stuck sharing the finite resources we have access to on Earth. The ideal of everybody being able to do whatever they want simply doesn’t work when there are finite resources. So we’re going to have to give up some of our individual rights in order to survive together on this one planet. Surely we can figure out a fair way to do that.

Justice Lecture 4: Higher vs. lower pleasures

This lecture really annoyed me. Sandel describes how Mill distinguishes between higher and lower pleasures. Mill’s argument as I understand it is that higher pleasures trump the lower pleasures in terms of the utilitarian calculus. So, for example, the pleasure that I derive from being able to eat a bowl of rice if I’m starving should trump whatever pleasure you derive from tossing that bowl of rice in the mud. It’s been too long since I’ve read Mill, so maybe I’m not accurately representing his position. But if I were drawing distinctions between the utility gained from different kinds of activities, that’s the sort of distinction I would want to draw: one that can be universally agreed upon. Having a shelter over your head, or food to eat, or medicine to make you healthy are all going to trump pleasure gained from entertainment.

However, Sandel polls the class about whether they prefer the Simpson’s or Shakespeare. To me, this is not a very important distinction in matters of ethics. There are reasons to prefer one or the other, but ultimately not all people are going to agree. But who cares? So what if someone prefers watching mass-produced cartoons than live theater? Lots of people would pay more to see a football game than the symphony, or spend more money on their monthly cable bill than they do buying books. We could have a long debate about promoting culture and education and reasoned thinking, but that debate doesn’t really change our moral code. Individuals get to choose what they enjoy doing, whether that’s watching a ballgame or a lecture.

However, we will draw the line when the pleasures of diversion come into conflict with basic human needs like sustenance, shelter, freedom, or health. Let’s not let the other debate about culture be confused with this distinction.

p.s. Are all values commensurable? If they are, we should be able to translate all values into dollar amounts. I think I'll come down with the economists on this one and say that we can assign dollar amounts to all values. We certainly have to make tradeoff decisions; how else can we make those decisions than by comparing different values.