I’ve found most of the “debates” on gay marriage annoying because most of the debaters seem eager to show off their ignorance of what their opponents believe. But Maggie Gallagher recently attempted to change this, and managed to provoke an excellent response from Reason’s Julian Sanchez which directly targets the marriage-for-procreation ideal, showing that in addition to lacking strong arguments in its favor, that traditionalists are wrong to claim that was once the sole motive for having such an institution.
Politics
More evidence that people strongly overestimate the need for government.
The latest issue of Reason magazine has a nice report (based on this report in Motoring) that Ukraine fired all of the country’s traffic cops, and preliminary evidence indicates that the predictions of increased traffic accidents were false.
Why did many people decide not to leave New Orleans in advance of Katrina? Part of the problem may have been that they relied on storytellers rather than weather experts.
NBC’s Brian Williams reports on his blog NBC’s reaction to this weather alert:
URGENT – WEATHER MESSAGE
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE NEW ORLEANS LA
1011 AM CDT SUN AUG 28 2005
…DEVASTATING DAMAGE EXPECTED…
HURRICANE KATRINA…A MOST POWERFUL HURRICANE WITH UNPRECEDENTED
STRENGTH…RIVALING THE INTENSITY OF HURRICANE CAMILLE OF 1969.
MOST OF THE AREA WILL BE UNINHABITABLE FOR WEEKS…PERHAPS LONGER.
AT LEAST HALF OF WELL CONSTRUCTED HOMES WILL HAVE ROOF AND WALL
FAILURE. ALL GABLED ROOFS WILL FAIL…ALL WOOD FRAMED LOW RISING
APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL BE DESTROYED. … WATER SHORTAGES WILL MAKE
HUMAN SUFFERING INCREDIBLE BY MODERN STANDARDS.
Williams says “The wording and contents were so incendiary that our folks were concerned that it wasn’t real”, and implies that he and others at NBC translated this into something less scary for their viewers.
My most memorable experience with hurricane forecasts was with hurricane Gloria in 1985 when I was in Block Island (off Rhode Island). I recall a TV weather forecast that winds might reach 135 to 175 mph, and marine weather radio forecasts of 50 to 70 knot sustained winds with gusts to 90 knots (i.e. less than 105 mph). The marine radio forecasts seem to be more direct relays of what the weather service puts out, and it was fairly simple for me to determine that the TV forecast was bogus (the marine radio forecasts proved pretty accurate).
So it’s easy to imagine that people are aware that TV forecasts have a habit of overstating the threat from storms, and thought they could infer expert forecasts from TV forecasts by assuming a simple pattern of exaggeration, when it may be that the storytellers have a more complex model of how viewers’ behavior should be manipulated by biasing their reports. Do people actually rely on TV reports rather than more direct and reliable sources of expert opinion when accurate forecasts are important? If so, is it because they use weather forecasts mainly as entertainment or a catalyst for smalltalk at parties, and don’t want to be aware of the flaws?
And of course there was the problem of key government leaders failing to believe the expert forecast: (from The Agitator) [then] FEMA Director Brown:
Saturday and Sunday, we thought it was a typical hurricane
situation — not to say it wasn’t going to be bad, but that the
water would drain away fairly quickly. Then the levees broke and
(we had) this lawlessness. That almost stopped our
efforts…Katrina was much larger than we expected.
The reports in the news media of people shooting at rescuers have been puzzling, and it has been obvious that the storytellers didn’t know much about it. Now thanks to Andrew Sullivan, I’ve seen some reports from apparently informed people, especially this first hand account that includes repeated instances of government agents creating enough problems that reasonable people started treating those agents as threats. Also this report and this quote:
3:32 P.M. [Monday] Ben Morris, Slidell mayor: We are still hampered by some of the most stupid, idiotic regulations by FEMA. They have turned away generators, we’ve heard that they’ve gone around seizing equipment from our contractors. If they do so, they’d better be armed because I’ll be damned if I’m going to let them deprive our citizens.
Add to this Louisiana’s refusal to let the Red Cross into the disaster area, and it becomes understandable that residents have been treating some government agents in a less friendly fashion than Gaza settlers have been treating their government.
Preliminary evidence suggests that many local, state, and federal officials ought to lose their jobs over this, but we should be patient about judging individual people until more people who were on the scene are able to make detailed reports.
And let’s not forget the government employees that did something right. The weather service didn’t screw up. There are reports of National Guard and LA Fish and Wildlife employees doing good jobs.
I was recently surprised to discover that California has price controls which are designed to encourage hoarding in emergencies and to discourage stockpiling in preparation for emergencies. The law in question is called an anti-gouging law, and temporarily limits price increases to 10 percent in some emergencies. I’ve seen conflicting reports about whether Bush’s declaration of emergency triggers the price controls, or whether it requires a state declaration of emergency. The governator has indicated that he has no plans to join the Bush/Lockyer exploitation of Katrina, but my limited observations suggest that gas stations in the bay area have limited their gas prices increases to 10 percent, and a few of them ran out of gas over the weekend.
It looks like the gas supply problems will ease soon enough that the price controls won’t have done much harm this time (diversions of gas shipments that were intended for other parts of the world will any week now spread the supply reduction over large enough regions that a fairly small price premium over what would have prevailed without Katrina should keep supply and demand in balance).
On a related note, Alex Tabarrok made a claim that suspending gas taxes won’t help consumers. I’m suspicious of his belief that a temporary suspension will have little effect on supply. I expect that oil companies will have an important incentive to draw down their inventory more than they otherwise would, especially just before the taxes are reinstated (since their profit margins will decline when taxes resume). I expect this effect to reduce prices to consumers by a modest fraction of the amount of tax relief. This will come at the cost of increased vulnerability to new supply disruptions. I doubt that the voters who have caused politicians to suspend gas taxes have given much thought to the wisdom of this tradeoff.
Randal O’Toole has a provocative claim that New Orleans residents had trouble evacuating because fewer of them own cars than in typical cities (urban planners accomplished their goals).
This is clearly not the main reason for the unusual death toll from Katrina (the death toll in Mississippi seems to be an order of magnitude higher than I would have expected based on results of recent storms with similar winds and the long-term trend of declining storm deaths), but it deserves more discussion.
Two years ago a DARPA project was canceled after some demagogues attacked a straw man which bore a superficial resemblance to the actual project. Now Robin Hanson (who had some involvement with the project) has written a defense of the straw man, i.e. an argument that futures markets might be of some value a predicting specific features of terrorist attacks (although not nearly as valuable as more natural uses of futures markets such as predicting the effects of changes in Homeland Security budgets on the harm done by terrorism).
He has a somewhat plausible argument that there is useful information out there that might be elicited by markets, particularly concerning the terrorist choice of method and targets. An important part of his argument is that in order to be useful, the markets might only need to distinguish one-in-a-thousand risks from one-in-a-million risks. One weakness in this argument is that it makes mildly optimistic assumptions about how reasonably people will respond to the information. There is clear evidence much spending that is advertised as defense against terrorism is spent on pork instead. Markets that provide a few bits of information about which targets need defending will raise the cost of that pork-barrel spending, but I can’t tell whether the effect will be enough to meet whatever threshold is needed to have some effect.
The section on moral hazard seems to contain a rather strange assumption about the default level of trader anonymity. The “reduced” level he talks about seems to be about as much as the U.S. government would allow. It isn’t clear to me whether any anonymity helps make the prices more informative (does anyone know of empirical tests of this?). The optimal level of anonymity might vary from issue to issue according to what kind of trader has the best information.
The proposal to hide some prices is more difficult than it sounds (not to mention that it’s far from clear that the problems it would solve are real). Not only would the exchange need to delay notifying traders of the relevant trades, but it would need to delay notifying them of how the trades affected the traders’ cash/credit available for trading other futures. Which would often deter traders from trying to trade when prices are hidden (it’s also unclear whether the trades that would be deterred would add useful information). In addition, I expect many of the futures that would be traded would be about targets and/or methods covering some broad range of time; it’s unclear how to apply a condition about “attacks to occur within the next week” to those.
The proposals to deal with decision selection bias sound politically difficult to implement (unless maybe Futarchy has been substantially implemented). But there isn’t much risk to experimenting with them, and elected officials probably don’t have the attention span to understand the problem, so there probably isn’t much reason to worry about this.
Liberty Magazine has an interesting article on Dubai called Freedom Blossoms in the Arabian Desert about the remarkable prosperity and freedom in that city.
A quick internet search shows reports such as this Report on International Religious Freedom and this report on Sunshine and censorship: Press freedom in UAE suggest the Liberty article exaggerates how free it is, suggesting it’s more like another Singapore than a Hong Kong. But even with that caveat, there’s still plenty of room to hope that it’s providing an opportunity for the Muslim world to escape the political systems that have kept it primitive.
Book Review: The Blank Slate : The Denial of Human Nature and Modern Intellectual Life by Steven Pinker
Pinker makes a good case that there’s a widespread bias toward a blank-slate world-view. But when dealing with serious scientific literature, his attempts to find clearcut enemies seem mistaken.
Pinker’s claim that “The second scientific defense of the Blank Slate comes from connectionism” is pretty puzzling. This “defense” consists of modeling the mind as “a general-purpose learning device”. But the books that Pinker references (Rethinking Innateness, and Parallel Distributed Processing), are both careful to point out why their models are completely consistent with the kind of genetic influences on behavior that evolutionary psychologists are talking about. Their disagreements with Pinker seem to be at most about how those influences are implemented, and even there I can’t find anything in Pinker’s arguments that clearly rejects what the connectionists believe.
Pinker’s attacks on Gould’s quasi-defense of the blank slate mainly convinced me that Gould didn’t want to think clearly about the subject, probably because he considered that any mechanistic explanation of the mind (genetic or environmental) was demeaning.
Pinker’s arguments that it’s silly to believe in the tabula rasa and noble savage world-views are eloquent and compelling, but his response to the “it’s demeaning” attitudes will convince fewer people, because he ignores the very real benefits of holding an unrealistically high opinion of one’s self (overestimating one’s abilities seems to be an effective means of advertising one’s strengths). To those who want to portray themselves as angelic or as wiser than software of the future, an accurate model of the mind is genuinely demeaning.
Pinker seems somewhat inconsistent about how important it is to know whether the mind is a blank slate.
On pages x – xi he says “the conviction that humanity could be reshaped by massive social engineering projects led to some of the greatest atrocities in history.” But in the chapter on fear of inequality, he claims (more convincingly), while defending his views from the charge they will encourage Nazism, that the differences between Nazi beliefs in genetic superiority and the blank slate viewpoints of Stalin and the Khmer Rouge didn’t have much effect on whether those tyrannies engaged in genocide – it was the greater tendency to divide people into in-groups and out-groups that best distinguishes the worst of the genocidal tyrants.
Pinker exaggerates the importance of finding the correct answer to the nature-nurture debate in other ways as well (I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that an author overestimates the importance of what he’s selling).
He gives examples such as forcing people to live in drab cement boxes (as if their taste for a more natural surrounding could be reversed by social engineers), or releasing psychopaths (because societal problems caused their insanity).
But a genetic component to these behaviors doesn’t prove that they can’t be altered (I have genes for brown hair – does that mean I can’t dye my hair blue?). It only gives hints as to why they might be difficult to alter.
It sure looks like careful scientific studies of whether we knew how to alter these behaviors would be a more reliable way of debunking the faulty conclusions.
In the past few weeks two different studies showing the shortcomings of democracy have been getting a modest amount of publicity, but they deserve more.
One reports evidence that voters reward politicians for manipulating the economy so that personal income is maximized in the two quarters before an election.
That short-sightedness isn’t good, but it leaves plenty of room for defenders of democracy to claim it’s unclear that the effect is harmful on balance. The most recent report claims to demonstrate that the outcomes of about 70 percent of recent U.S. Senate races are predicted by a measure of how babyfaced each candidate is. The bad part about this is that this effect is negatively correlated with measures of competence such as intelligence, education, and ability to win military medals.
I guess I should think harder about what I can do to create something like Futarchy.