Mike Linksvayer has a fairly good argument that raising X dollars by running ads on Wikipedia won’t create more conflict of interest than raising X dollars some other way.
But the amount of money an organization handles has important effects on its behavior that are somewhat independent of the source of the money, and the purpose of ads seems to be to drastically increase the money that they raise.
I can’t provide a single example that provides compelling evidence in isolation, but I think that looking at a broad range of organizations with $100 million revenues versus a broad range of organizations that are run by volunteers who only raise enough money to pay for hardware costs, I see signs of big differences in the attitudes of the people in charge.
Wealthy organizations tend to attract people who want (or corrupt people into wanting) job security or revenue maximization, whereas low-budget volunteer organizations tend to be run by people motivated by reputation. If reputational motivations have worked rather well for an organization (as I suspect the have for Wikipedia), we should be cautious about replacing those with financial incentives.
It’s possible that the Wikimedia Foundation could spend hundreds of millions of dollars wisely on charity, but the track record of large foundations does not suggest that should be the default expectation.
Politics
Book review: An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It by Al Gore
I read An Inconvenient Truth in book form rather than watching the movie because I’m generally suspicious of attempts to convey serious arguments via film, and expected that the book version would have better references to the sources of his claims. Alas, this is merely a movie copied to paper, and his idea of a technical reference is a label such as “source: science magazine”.
This may be more scholarly than what a typical politician would produce, but it’s poor scholarship compared to what I’d expect from a typical college professor, even allowing for the goal of reaching a wide audience by keeping it simple.
The book is full of exaggerations and misleading impressions (but is usually not explicit enough to be clearly false). It is hard to say whether the book is helping by offsetting myths from the other extreme or whether it is adding to the confusion. Gore does deserve some credit for bringing more attention to a fairly serious problem.
Much of the book is pictures showing examples of climate changes, which don’t by themselves say whether we’ve experienced anything more than normal fluctuations. The movie may have reached people who thought climates were more stable than that, but I doubt the book will.
His main attempt to show evidence that CO2 emissions cause warming is a graph showing CO2 levels and temperature over the last 600,000 years. It sure looks like there’s a strong correlation. But my crude attempts at comparing the timing of the changes suggest that temperature changes precede CO2 changes more often than they follow them. I can imagine ways that the correlation could be caused by temperature changes causing changes in CO2 levels. I don’t see how a non-expert can tell what this correlation implies except by relying on authority (experts seem to think the causation works in both directions).
So that leaves him with only appeals to authority to back up his claims. He’s more credible there. His claim of a scientific consensus is approximately right. He lists the “percentage of articles in doubt as to the cause of global warming: 0%”. The paper he’s apparently referencing is responsible enough to use words such as “likely” rather than claiming an absence of doubt. Peter Norvig‘s analysis of some of those papers concludes at least 4 of those papers expressed doubt. But that difference is probably too subtle to matter to the people this book is targeting.
Gore is quick to blame big oil for the popular press’s false impressions of scientific controversy. The possibility that controversy sells stories appears to be at least as strong an explanation, but blaming the people Gore’s trying to convince would be rather inconvenient.
Pages 183 to 196 appear designed to create fears that sea levels could rise 18 to 20 feet suddenly and unpredictably. He doesn’t say anything about how fast experts think this might happen (which seems to be over many decades). The hints he gives are the mention of an ice shelf than unexpectedly broke up in 35 days, and some maps Greenland which appear to suggest the ice there could vanish in the next decade. The difference between an expected sea level rise over many decades and an unexpected rise over less than a decade makes a big difference in how well people could adapt to it. (The mass migrations in China recently demonstrate the feasibility of adapting to sea level changes in a decade or two). Gore appears to be contributing to fears of changes that are way outside the expert consensus.
Gore underestimates human ability to adapt to climate change (much as those on the other extreme underestimate human ability to invent affordable ways to reduce carbon emissions). For example, he implies that quick efforts to mitigate global warming are the only way to deal with the risks of drinking water shortages. But I see signs that cheaper desalinization is a more promising approach.
His graph on page 276 of “U.S. renewable energy future” is strange. Renewability has a weak connection to global warming solutions, but the possibility that nuclear power might be desirable seems too inconvenient to him. His forecast for biomass looks too optimistic, his forecast for solar after 2020 looks too pessimistic, and his forecast for wind shows strange fluctuations.
Gore repeats the myth that frogs won’t jump out of water that’s slowly brought to a boil, and claims that sometimes people make the same mistake. “Sometimes” is too uninformative to refute, but the most relevant research that I can think of suggests that at least political experts are biased toward sounding alarms too often.
He claims it’s “absolutely indisputable” that global warming is a “planetary emergency”. Yet nothing he says implies that stopping global warming is as urgent as reducing poverty, war, or disease.
Ph.D. economists seem fairly confident that the effects of global warming will be small.
There are substantial disputes among experts about how much of the global warming problem we should try to solve now (see Hal Varian’s comments, Tyler Cowen’s comments and Arnold Kling’s comments). But you won’t find any hint of that controversy in An Inconvenient Truth (in part because it’s hard to describe in ways that laymen can understand).
Gore recommends doing many things to slow down global warming a bit (but may leave many with the impression that his plans would do more than that – if it were an emergency as he says, wouldn’t he recommend more?).
Some of these steps are clearly good even if their effects on the climate are trivial.
For some (recycling and locally grown food) I’ve seen conflicting claims and can’t tell whether objective analyses exist.
Some are misleading. He claims a “fuel-cell vehicle (FCV) that uses pure hydrogen produces no pollutants”, which would be true if we had a convenient source of pure hydrogen. But on this planet, hydrogen requires energy to create, and only acts as a battery, so FCVs cause pollution if energy production causes pollution.
I recommend Ron Baily’s review for additional criticisms.
Disclosure: I own stocks in oil companies and in a company that serves the photovoltaic industry.
I’m wondering why the use of shame and humiliation isn’t used more often as an alternative to jail sentences.
The most plausible objection I’ve found seems to be that there are other alternatives that are better than those two choices. But even if that’s true, there are enough doubts about public acceptance of those possibly better alternatives that it seems odd not to give some encouragement to an alternative to prison that seems to have some political feasibility.
I normally don’t repeat things that are reported on Marginal Revolution since I assume it would be redundant for most readers of my blog, but this story about the relative importance of sports and coups in Fiji is amusing enough that I can’t resist.
Bryan Caplan has a good post arguing democracy produces worse results than rational ignorance among voters would explain.
However, one aspect of his style annoys me – his use of the word irrationality to describe what’s wrong with voter thinking focuses on what is missing from voter thought processes rather than what socially undesirable features are present (many economists tend to use the word irrationality this way). I hope his soon-to-be-published book version of this post devotes more attention to what voters are doing that differs from boundedly rational attempts at choosing the best candidates (some of which I suspect fall into what many of us would call selfishly rational motives even though economists usually classify them as irrational). Some of the motives that I suspect are important are the desire to signal one’s group membership, endowment effects which are one of the many reasons people treat existing jobs as if they were more valuable than new and more productive jobs that can be created, and reputation effects where people stick with whatever position they had in the past because updating their beliefs in response to new evidence would imply that their original positions weren’t as wise as they want to imagine.
Alas, his policy recommendations are not likely to be very effective and are generally not much easier to implement than futarchy (which I consider to be the most promising approach to dealing with the problems of democracy). For example:
Imagine, for example, if the Council of Economic Advisers, in the spirit of the Supreme Court, had the power to invalidate legislation as “uneconomical.”
If I try hard enough, I can imagine this approach working well. But it would take a lot more than Caplan’s skills at persuasion to get voters to go along with this, and it’s not hard to imagine that such an institution would develop an understanding of the concept of “uneconomical” that is much less desirable than Caplan’s or mine.
Book review: Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War by Edward D. Mansfield
This book makes a convincing argument that it’s misleading to assume that democracies are less likely to wage wars. That assumption is true of mature democracies, but unstable nations that are trying to make a transition to democracy are more likely than autocracies to wage war. At least part of the reasons are increased nationalism, competition among politicians to be the most nationalist, and the weakness of stabilizing institutions.
The book offers some hints about how a transition to a democracy might be managed to minimize the risks, but this part of the book is more speculative and less convincing.
In spite of the book’s relevance to current events, it devotes little attention to the present. It covers the time period from the French revolution to the present with the perspective of a historian, and says as much about Iraq in 1948 as it does about the recent experiment with democracy in Iraq. It is somewhat valuable for reminding us how many attempts at democracy failed and have largely faded from collective memories.
The dry, scholarly style of the book is a bit mind-numbing.
Book review: Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? by Philip E. Tetlock
This book is a rather dry description of good research into the forecasting abilities of people who are regarded as political experts. It is unusually fair and unbiased.
His most important finding about what distinguishes the worst from the not-so-bad is that those on the hedgehog end of Isaiah Berlin’s spectrum (who derive predictions from a single grand vision) are wrong more often than those near the fox end (who use many different ideas). He convinced me that that finding is approximately right, but leaves me with questions.
Does the correlation persist at the fox end of the spectrum, or do the most fox-like subjects show some diminished accuracy?
How do we reconcile his evidence that humans with more complex thinking do better than simplistic humans, but simple autoregressive models beat all humans? That seems to suggest there’s something imperfect in using the hedgehog-fox spectrum. Maybe a better spectrum would use evidence on how much data influences their worldviews?
Another interesting finding is that optimists tend to be more accurate than pessimists. I’d like to know how broad a set of domains this applies to. It certainly doesn’t apply to predicting software shipment dates. Does it apply mainly to domains where experts depend on media attention?
To what extent can different ways of selecting experts change the results? Tetlock probably chose subjects that resemble those who most people regard as experts, but there must be ways of selecting experts which produce better forecasts. It seems unlikely they can match prediction markets, but there are situations where we probably can’t avoid relying on experts.
He doesn’t document his results as thoroughly as I would like (even though he’s thorough enough to be tedious in places):
I can’t find his definition of extremists. Is it those who predict the most change from the status quo? Or the farthest from the average forecast?
His description of how he measured the hedgehog-fox spectrum has a good deal of quantitative evidence, but not quite enough for me check where I would be on that spectrum.
How does he produce a numerical timeseries for his autoregressive models? It’s not hard to guess for inflation, but for the end of apartheid I’m rather uncertain.
Here’s one quote that says a lot about his results:
Beyond a stark minimum, subject matter expertise in world politics translates less into forecasting accuracy than it does into overconfidence
Book review: Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People by Joan Roughgarden
This book provides some good descriptions of sexual and gender diversity in nature and in a variety of human cultures, and makes a number of valid criticisms of biases against diversity in the scientific community and in society at large.
Many of her attempts to criticize sexual selection theory are plausible criticisms of beliefs that don’t have much connection to sexual selection theory (e.g. the belief that all sexually reproducing organisms fall into one of two gender stereotypes).
Her more direct attacks on the theory amount to claiming that “almost all diversity is good” and ignoring the arguments of sexual selection theorists who describe traits that appear to indicate reduced evolutionary fitness (see Geoffrey Miller’s book The Mating Mind). She practically defines genetic defects out of existence. She tries to imply that biologists agree on her criteria for a “genetic defect”, but her criteria require that a “trait be deleterious under all conditions” (I suspect most biologists would say “average” instead of “all”), and that it reduce fitness by at least 5 percent.
Her “alternative” theory, social selection, may have some value as a supplement to sexual selection theory, but I see no sign that it explains enough to replace sexual selection theory.
She sometimes talks as if she were trying to explain the evolution of homosexuality, but when doing so she is referring to bisexuality, and doesn’t attempt to explain why an animal would be exclusively homosexual.
Her obsession with discrediting sexual selection comes from an exaggerated fear that the theory implies that most diversity is bad. This misrepresents sexual selection theory (which only says that some diversity represents a mix of traits with different fitnesses). It’s also a symptom of her desire to treat natural as almost a synonym for good (she seems willing to hate diversity if it’s created via genetic engineering).
She tries to imply that a number of traits (e.g. transsexualism) are more common than would be the case if they significantly reduced reproductive fitness, but her reasoning seems to depend on the assumption that those traits can only be caused by one possible mutation. But if there are multiple places in the genome where a mutation could produce the same trait, there’s no obvious limit to how common a low-fitness trait could be.
Her policy recommendations are of very mixed quality. She wants the FDA to regulate surgical and behavioral therapies the way it regulates drugs, and claims that would stop doctors from “curing” nondiseases such as gender dysphoria. But she doesn’t explain why she expects the FDA to be more tolerant of diversity than doctors. Instead, why not let the patient decide as much as possible whether to consider something a disease?
Legislators seem to be less strongly tied to voters’ demands than I expected. This report indicates that a congress person’s proportion of daughters significantly influences his or her votes on reproductive rights issues.
I’ve been wondering for a while whether I should blog about the net neutrality legislation that is being debated. At last, Brad Templeton has come up with a good analysis which covers much of what I wanted to say about why the belief that net neutrality is a good rule is not sufficient to tell us whether we should try to have that written into law.
Lessig’s book The Future of Ideas does a good job of explaining why net neutrality is a desirable rule – a commons can be a good thing, and net neutrality is a rule that’s important to keeping the internet functioning as a commons.
If we’re going to hope that legislation can be useful at protecting commons, then I suspect we need a concept of the commons that contains as much of a standardized bundle of rules as most versions of the concept of property rights contains. That way we could ask legislators to just apply this standardized bundle of rules to each new commons we want it to protect, without giving special interests much of a chance to write the details in such a way as to protect their special situation.
Unfortunately, I can’t think of a good set of rules which would be as intuitive as the rules which apply property rights to physical objects. I suspect that the best we can hope for is a set of rules like those describing what you own when you buy shares of corporate stock. We might even end up with rules as messy as those use for patents, in which case it’s unclear whether it would be worth the effort.