Good decision, bad result. Bad decision, good result.

The aftermath of the Warsaw Uprising was absolutely horrifying. Because the Soviets deliberately decided to not help the Polish resistance (Home Army) in their fight with the Nazis--which, militarily, they were in a position to do--the Home Army has found itself grossly outmatched and alone in its plight. The Uprising went on for 63 days and, on average, each one of these days saw more Polish casualties then the total number of victims of the 9/11 attacks. The Home Army did not have enough resources to protect Warsaw's civilians from Nazi genocide; overall, it is estimated that the Nazis murdered about 200,000 Polish civilians. Most of those murders occurred in mass executions in which people were rounded up, building by building, block by block, and shot by the SS troops. Indiscriminately of anything. Old people were shot, as were young people, men, women, 10-year-olds, infants, pregnant women, disabled people; in hospitals, the sick and wounded were being burned alive on their beds. For example, during the 48 hours between August 4 and August 5 ("Black Saturday") of 1944, the SS murdered 35,000 helpless civilians in indiscriminate street executions (see The Wola Massacre). This was all in accordance with a personal order from Hitler. After the Home Army capitulated, its troops and almost all remaining city residents were sent to concentration camps in Germany. In the Summer of 1939, Warsaw's population was roughly 1,300,000. In the Fall of 1944, after the Uprising was over, 90% of the city's buildings lay in ruins; amongst those ruins there were about 1,000 survivors. That's what Warsaw, before the war a densely populated, modern, affluent, vibrant and culturally sophisticated city, was reduced to in the aftermath of the Uprising. Not only did the Uprising end in apocalyptic destruction, it also did not help Polish people to bargain any type of independence from the Soviets whose plans were to turn Poland into its satellite state. Which they did. Despite fighting the Nazis and bearing unimaginable costs of this fight, Poland was not granted by the Soviets any more independence than Hungary or Bulgaria--countries which not only never fought the Nazis, but were actually allied with them.

In my opinion, the Uprising's end was the worst possible scenario realized. I can't imagine how things could have gone any worse. And of course to this day, the discussion as to whether or not the decision to fight was a mistake, is extremely emotional. For now, I'd like to side step those emotions and concentrate on something admittedly very dry: how are we to decide if the Uprising was a mistake or not. Six years ago, which was the sixtieth anniversary of the Uprising, one of the largest Polish newspapers Rzeczpospolita ("The Republic") ran a series of articles which debated the question of whether the Uprising was a mistake or not. The one quote I remember is from a historian Dr. Dariusz Stol who said

Of course, the decision to launch the Uprising was a mistake; any decision that leads to a catastrophe is by definition a mistake.

This statement will be my non sequitur of the month. It is an example of hindsight bias, that is, a propensity to overestimate the ex-ante probability of occurrence of those events that actually occurred. Dr. Stol's version of hindsight bias is quite extreme; he seems to think that the outcome of the Warsaw Uprising that was actually observed was inevitable (had an ex-ante probability of occurrence equal to 1).

Nothing in life is certain or impossible. Life is a random variable. There is a certain deterministic component to it, sure; but there's a random one as well. And this is why decisions cannot be judged by their one-time consequences, because decisions can only be right or wrong on average. What follows from this is that it's possible to make a right decision that leads to disaster, and conversely, a bad decision that leads to good outcomes. For example, in poker, making large bets to chase an inside straight on the river is a very bad decision. Even if luck is on your side, you do get your straight on the river and win a large pot, you have still made a bad decision. And conversely, betting "all in" when you have a set of aces and you think your opponent only has an inside straight draw is a good decision; and even if he gets that Jack on the river and beats you, you made the right decision, and he has made a wrong one.

I do, actually, believe that the Home Army commanders made a mistake when they started the Warsaw Uprising. I believe they underestimated the probability that Soviets will not help at all. But there remains also the possibility that they were not mistaken at all: they may have estimated the relevant probabilities correctly, then simply gambled, and lost. At any rate, if they did make a mistake, it certainly was not a mistake "by definition." The actual result of the Uprising was not inevitable. The commanders didn't think the Uprising would end the way it did. The Home Army headquarters did not have a death wish: if they knew the Uprising would end the way it actually did, they would not have started it.

Stunning links

Cross-country IQ data.

The world is becoming more and more addictive.

The famous experiment confirming General Relativity was bogus.

Former police chief with a PhD in sociology talks about legalizing pot.

Open letter to new soccer fans: 10 reasons why you should pick Arsenal as your team.

I've just realized

That today, A Stunning Non Sequitur marks its first anniversary. After a year, it still does not follow.

It's easier to write an op-ed than fix healthcare

An op-ed in today's New York Times argues for a public option in healthcare using Haiti as an example:

The sudden availability in Haiti of free high-quality care from foreign doctors put enormous competitive pressure on the private local doctors, who had already been working under difficult conditions. Watching this situation unfold, I found myself wondering if the same would happen to private medical services back in the United States were our government to suddenly provide high-quality, low-cost health care.

The writer does realize that there's a potential problem with this solution: if public healthcare were to charge prices below the market rates, then competition from it would drive private providers out of business. To prevent that, the author proposes a public-private partnership: the government provides good quality, low-cost healthcare and also subsidizes private providers so that they can remain profitable.

This idea has some huge problems. First and foremost, it's too vague to even be a start of a productive discussion. It may work or it may not; the devil is in the details and those are lacking. Second, using Haiti as an example in a discussion about US healthcare is completely ridiculous. It may be fairly easy for the government to "suddenly provide high-quality, low-cost healthcare" in a country of 9 million people with a GDP per capita of $1,300. What on Earth makes you think it would be possible in a country of 300 million people and with the GDP per capita of $47,000? Returns to investment are diminishing with its size, and investments in healthcare in the US are currently gigantic. There is simply no room in the US to lower the cost of healthcare to patients without making it more expensive to providers. Another thing is that Haiti is receiving huge amounts of foreign aid that can be used to pay for healthcare; the US can't really count on those. The funding for healthcare in the US has to be found within its own economy.

But the main problem is that of huge differences in scale; whoever wrote the op-ed seems to believe that returns on investment increase linearly with the investment's size. Take this quote, for example:

It is clear that the American health care system functions at a much higher level than its Haitian counterpart does, but that’s mostly a matter of national wealth.

In other words, while it may be true that the US spends a bit more on healthcare than Haiti does, it's only because the US is a tiny bit richer. So clueless it's actually funny.

Reversing implication: you really can't do that

One of the most common fallacies is that of reversing an implication. An implication is a statement of the form 'If A then B,' where A and B can be any statements whatsoever. Now reversing implication is an incorrect belief that 'If A then B, then if B then A.' Implication is not symmetrical, and it's easy to come up with an example that would make it clear. Suppose we have the following implication: 'If Roger Federer is the best tennis player in the world, then he is the best tennis player in Europe.' Reversing this implication you'd have 'If Roger Federer is the best tennis player in Europe, then he is the best tennis player in the world,' which is clearly not true. You just can't reverse an implication; in fact, the only valid conclusion you can get from 'If A then B' is 'If not-B then not-A' ('If Roger Federer is not the best tennis player in the world, then he is not the best tennis player in Europe').

Nonetheless, reversing implications is pretty much bread and butter of political dispute. Let me give a concrete example. On August 1, 1944, Polish anti-Nazi resistance called the Home Army (Armia Krajowa) started an open battle with Nazi troops stationed in Warsaw; the battle is known as the Warsaw Uprising (Powstanie Warszawskie). I will not get into the details of the Uprising here, as I am planning a whole series of posts on this fascinating topic in the very near future. For now I'll just talk about one fact about it: when Poland succumbed to Soviet rule soon after the war was over, the official line of communist propaganda with respect to the Uprising was that it was an insanely careless endeavor that brought more harm than good. The reason that communists were saying this was purely cynical: they hated the Uprising because it was a last-ditch effort anti-communist population of Warsaw to try to prevent the city from being taken over by the Soviets. Of course, I don't share those motivations; but I do indeed believe that the Warsaw Uprising was a tragic mistake, and that, even in its terrible post-war situation, Poland would probably have been better off if it had not happened.

I cannot count the times when, after sharing this belief of mine in a face-to-face or an online discussion, I have been called a communist for having this opinion. But it should be clear that those of my critics who were using this argument were committing the fallacy of reversing an implication. We have 'If one is a communist, then one believes that Warsaw Uprising was a mistake.' From this, my critics were concluding that 'If one believes that Warsaw Uprising was a mistake, then one is a communist.' Fallacious reasoning, clear as day. And the interesting part is those were all people smart enough that, if they were presented with the Roger Federer example given above, would no doubt understand that reversing implication is invalid reasoning. Yet in this particular context they were completely unable to realize that they were making the same silly mistake.

Pet peeve: abusing the term "logic"

I love formal logic; it's one of the most beautiful things that exist. Thus, I get annoyed when the term is abused, which happens all the time. For one thing, logic is often confused with something else, such as intuition or common sense. For example, many times people will say "That's so illogical!" when they really mean "That's so counterintuitive" or "That's so unexpected." The actual formal logic is very often counterintuitive. Which should not be surprising at all: the very reason it was developed in the first place was because some thinkers noticed that relying on intuition alone leads to errors in reasoning, so they decided a formal machinery was needed to aid the brain in the reasoning process. For another thing, people tend to forget that logic is all form, no substance. Logic analyzes modes of reasoning based on their form alone, abstracting meaning away completely. How many times have you heard something like "If you only used some logic, you'd know that cutting taxes must decrease government revenue" or similar? The truth is, logic has absolutely nothing to do with it. This statement is true because of its substance, not because of its form. Logic can't tell us anything about tax cuts and deficits. Economic theory and/or empirical observation might--but not logic.

Stealing living space

Another example of zero-sum bias: arguing that governments of cities facing a significant homelessness problem ought to legislate maximum square footage of houses/apartments sold and rented out on the market because that would "free up" living space for less affluent people.

I've only heard this argument in personal conversations; I don't know if it's present in the media. I'd be surprised if it weren't though.

What is this concept of which you speak?

I mean the concept of "economic power." I hear it tossed around quite a bit, but I've never encountered even one piece of writing of any sort (be it journalistic, academic, or whatever) that would do both things that are necessary to make a concept useful: 1) define it and 2) operationalize it (i.e. show ways of measuring and/or comparing it). There's a lot of authors who can't even define it; they start off writing about "economic power" but it becomes clear later on that they confuse it with economic prosperity (example here). But most writers don't have problems doing that, which should not be too surprising as the concept is actually fairly easy to define. If power is an ability of one agent to make another agent do something she does not want to do, and/or not do something that she wants to do, then economic power is just that, using economic means.

But, just because it's easy to define doesn't mean it's easy to use. Everything I've ever read that talks about economic power talks about it as though it weren't even necessary to operationalize it because how it works is just obvious. I suspect this is because there is an easy (and false) analogy between economic power and military power. It's pretty straightforward to see how military power works (if you have the ability to keep blowing up lots of stuff for a prolonged period of time, those who own stuff you're blowing up will eventually bend to your will), and equally straightforward to see how much military power a given country has relative to other countries (you just look at the size of the military and the defense budget). I think lots of people believe that economic power is more or less like military power in that respect, so that it's enough to look at, say, a country's GDP or its natural resources endowment to decide how "economically powerful" it is. But that's not how things are, really. How does one country force another to do something through economic means? It's much more complex and nuanced than warfare. You can impose a trade embargo, for example. Whatever economic power is, the US is clearly the most powerful country in the world in this way. It could feasibly impose a trade embargo on, say, Indonesia, if it wanted Indonesia to act a certain way. But it couldn't possibly do it to Canada; Canada consumes 16% of our exports, and we buy 20% of our imports from Canada, so stopping trade with Canada would cause in the US a recession of truly monstrous proportions. It wouldn't be a credible threat. You could conceivably bribe governments to enact policies that you like--but that you can only do in dictatorships (because they're effectively governed by a relatively small number of people; democracies are too expensive to bribe). Or take natural resources. Can Saudi Arabia blackmail us into doing something by threatening to cut us off from their oil? Not really; if we can't buy their oil, they won't be able to sell as much of it. They'll impoverish themselves.

As another illustration of how very much non-straightforward the notion is, think about Poland and The Netherlands. Both countries have almost exactly the same GDP. Which one has more economic power--and why?

To sum up, I'm not saying that economic power is a meaningless concept. It's not; there's definitely such a thing as economic power. But it's meaningless to talk about it without operationalizing it first, and so far I haven't seen anyone do that. Maybe I just haven't seen enough, so if any of my readers has a source to prove me wrong, please share.

The glass will be half full 500 years from now

I'm very lucky not to have been born in the year 1000. That would most likely mean a life of hardship, back-breaking labor, near-starvation, and an early death from some nasty disease that today is only a minor inconvenience. I have no evidence for this, of course, but I'm convinced that if we could survey all of the people who reached adulthood before the Industrial Revolution and ask them if they'd rather never have been born at all, much more than ninety percent of them would have said "yes." Even if I lucked out and were born into the very richest tier of the society, I'd still prefer my life now to that of an 11th century king of England.

The flip side of it is, of course, that I'm very unlucky not to be born 500 years from now. I don't know in what ways, but it's a good bet that life then will be unimaginably better than it is now. There's no reason to expect that income growth will slow down by then, and even if it does, the accumulated wealth should still lead to a quality of life that now we can't even dream possible.

Law can't really deal with mind

Criminal law, both its letter and practice, is incredibly inconsistent in terms of how it deals with guilt and mental disease. I'll give two examples.

The first is Richard Chase, a.k.a. The Sacramento Vampire, a mentally disturbed individual who between December 1977 and January 1978 went on a month-long killing rampage in which he killed (in an unimaginably gruesom and cruel fashion) six people. He was sentenced to death on six counts of first-degree murder, despite the fact that everyone knew that if there ever was an insane person in the history of humanity, it must have been Richard Chase. In cases such as these, law seems to be constructed so as to consider mental health issues and non-premeditated nature of the crimes as mitigating factors... unless the crimes are so horrific that the defendant simply has to die, procedural issues be damned.

My second example is Seung-Hui Cho, the perpetrator of the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre. Now he also killed himself so we don't know what strategy he would've adopted if he were to defend himself in court; but, for the sake of the argument, let's assume he'd plead insanity. He'd have lost, because in the eyes of the law if the crime is premeditated, you're not legally insane. And his shooting rampage was incredibly deliberate, though out and prepared in great detail. He managed to murder 32 people and wound many others. That kind of preparation, intensionality and efficiency would leave him with no chance of defending an insanity plea. And yet, if Seung-Hui Cho wasn't insane, then I don't know who is. (And, before the shooting, the authorities themselves recognized this; he was put into court-ordered mental health therapy, for example.) The notion that crazy people can't be deliberate and premeditated in their actions is just wrong.

Stunning links

An unintended consequence of Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill.

Reconciliation is just more torture.

Judge orders Sheriff to take a class on constitutional law.

Terrorists are stupid. Why are we spending so much money on anti-terrorism?

You can't understand the hard stuff till you've mastered the easy stuff: Comparative advantage.

Rationalizing cruelty

Cruelty is a natural human instinct. Equally natural is our propensity to rationalize cruel instincts as something else. There are entire complex belief systems whose main purpose is to provide excuses for cruel people to act on their cruelty while preserving their self-image as virtuous human beings.

Here's a small, and admittedly completely insignificant example of this instinct at work. I've watched a few seconds of some TV show talking about Lindsay Lohan being in jail, mostly about the fact that she's still allowed to take her prescription medications: Ambien and Adderall. Someone (I have no idea who) had a monologue about how that's a bad idea because "she should be taking this experience with a clear mind." Setting aside minor issues, like the fact that someone who's not a doctor is offering advice about prescription drugs, or the fact that Adderall actually makes your mind clearer than it is otherwise, the main thing about this opinion is that it's basically a rationalization of cruelty. What he said was "She should be taking her jail experience with a clear mind;" what I heard was "As far as I'm concerned, the b*tch isn't suffering enough."

Give me your clean technology!

Here's an example of the zero-sum bias, from Thomas Friedman's column:

If we don’t get a serious energy bill out of this Congress, and Republicans retake the House and Senate, we may not have another shot until the next presidential term or until we get a “perfect storm” — a climate or energy crisis that is awful enough to finally end our debate on these issues but not so awful as to end the world. But, hey, by 2012, China should pretty much own the clean-tech industry and we’ll at least be able to get some good deals on electric cars.

Right. They will own clean-tech industry. Because the amount of clean technology is constant, and whoever lays their hands on it first will own it forever. There will be no clean technology left for anyone else.

Cost-cost analysis

Social programs are often attacked on the grounds that they are wasteful: they may be giving out money to people who don't need it, and/or create perverse incentives. For example, unemployment and welfare benefits are attacked on the grounds that they create a disincentive to work. For another example, few years ago the New York City government stopped issuing rent vouchers to residents of its homeless shelters, arguing that doing so was causing people who didn't really need shelters to use them as a ticket to subsidized rent. Now the most common objection to this line of attack that I hear is a flat out denial that things like that even take place. The defenders of a social program will argue that no perverse incentives are created, ever, and that absolutely everyone who is receiving a government subsidy needs it desperately. In other words, the most commonly encountered policy debate runs a little something like this:

A: This policy has costs, therefore it should be discontinued.

B: You're lying; this policy has no costs whatsoever.

It's hard not to notice that both sides are missing the point rather badly. They're only talking about costs; no one is saying anything about benefits. Policy's worth should be evaluated based on whether its societal benefits outweigh its societal costs, not based on whether or not it has any societal costs. Of course a policy will have costs. Everything does. Of course there are people collecting welfare or unemployment who choose not to work precisely because they are collecting welfare or unemployment. My point is that the question of whether or not those people exist is not relevant at all. The relevant question is how many such people are there, as compared to people who want work but can't find it, and who use welfare or unemployment as a means of survival.

Also online, also free

Is Silvanus P. Thompson's hundred year old calculus textbook, Calculus Made Easy. One of the few, if not the only math textbook that is actually a pleasure to read. It was a supplementary reading in one of the game theory classes I've taken in grad school. In New York, you're exempt from sales tax when purchasing textbooks, as long as you show a valid student ID and a syllabus that has the book you want to buy on it. Whenever I'd buy textbooks, bookstore cashiers would always ask for a student ID but were never very much interested in seeing a syllabus. And for good reason, I suppose; you'd have to be at least slightly insane to be buying, say, "Econometric Analysis" unless you needed it for school. The only time I was asked for a syllabus was while buying "Calculus Made Easy" (it wasn't online yet). "You see this one," the cashier smiled "Some people actually read for fun."

What are you doing with your time?

It's not how much time you have; it's how you use it.

The Mechanical Universe online

I'm sure I'm late to the party, but I've just noticed that Caltech's introduction to physics series, The Mechanical Universe, is available to view online for free. It really is quite an amazing series. If it's at all possible to make a popular science series on these topics, not dumb it down, and still make it fun to watch, this is it.

FIFA and the Vatican again: How to change without changing

I've recently written about the similarities between FIFA and the Vatican in how they deal with being caught red-handed. Now because of their recent PR disasters, both organizations have proposed some rule changes. Those changes are further evidence of their similarity, in that they do not even come close to addressing the heart of the problem.

For FIFA, the problem is the inexplicably stubborn refusal to allow referees to use video replays in their decision-making process. This refusal has drawn new and incredibly strong criticism during the recent World Cup, especially after the Germany-England calamity (FIFA's general secretary admitted that when TV stations all over the world were showing replays of Frank Lampard's goal seen by everyone on the planet except the referee, it was a "very bad day" for the organization). FIFA hints that it will introduce goal-line technology (i.e. electronic sensors that will detect if the ball touches the ground behind the goal-line), as well as possibly two additional side referees whose only job will be to watch the goal-line. Those are all good moves, but until video replays are allowed (and FIFA still refuses to do so), the main problem will remain. Mistakes as to which side of the goal-line the ball touches the ground on are only a small percentage of blatant refereeing mistakes. Until video replays are allowed, nothing will change.

On to the Vatican. The church has recently issued new rules as to how the hierarchy is supposed to deal with allegations of child abuse. The new rules give the pope the power to defrock a priest without full canonical trial, extend the church's own statute of limitations from 10 to 20 years, as well as make possession of child pornography a canonical crime, which it wasn't before. This is laughable. For all the rest of us non-frock-wearing mortals, things like child molestation, possession of child pornography, and aiding and abetting a person suspected of child molestation, are felonies, and ones that carry very, very long prison sentences with them. Until priests suspected of molesting children, possessing child pornography, and/or not informing the authorities of child abuse they know is happening are prosecuted to the full extent of the criminal, not canonical law, nothing will change.

Your brain is not your friend

Our brains have certain intuitions about the world hard-wired into them. Sometimes those intuitions are correct; other times, not so much. Science taught us not to trust our intuitions about the physical world because they are often wrong. We feel, for example, that heavier objects fall faster than light object, and that time as measured on a moving object does not depend on the speed at which the object moves. Both those feelings are flat wrong, as has been shown through theoretical reasoning and controlled experiment. Basically, science taught us that "gut feeling" is a useless tool when it comes to reasoning about the physical world.

But we also have built in intuitions about things other than physics. We have moral intuitions, as well as social and economic ones. And here's the thing: as opposed to physical intuitions, we do not check those against reality. Even though our hard-wired model of the physical world is obviously wrong and we know not to trust it, we don't want to apply the same standards to our model of social interactions. Why?

Before offering a possible answer, I'm going to discuss two examples of moral/social intuitions that are hard-wired, wrong, and seemingly incorrectible. The first one is the conviction we have that a person who acts with good intentions will always bring about good outcomes. Sure, we do have a saying that "The road to hell is paved with good intentions," but we don't really believe it. Evidence? When it comes to candidates for electable offices, we are much more interested in their character, integrity, etc., than in their knowledge of complex issues. We want politicians to show us that they care about us, rather than that they actually know what's good for us. Another ingrained wrong conviction is the zero-sum bias. This bias is essentially the belief that the amount of wealth in a society is fixed, so that the only way one person can get richer is by making someone else poorer.

It isn't hard to see where those beliefs come from. Way back when, when all humans lived in small bands of hunter-gatherers, it really was much better to know your friends' intentions rather than their IQs. When social interactions were much less complex than they are know, you were much more likely to be hurt by someone who was smart but emotionally unattached to you rather than by someone who genuinely cared about you. Also, back in those days, societal wealth actually was constant. Due to extremely small population density and extremely high time demands on subsistence labor, neither condition of wealth aggregation (specialization and trade) was fulfilled. But those things are no longer true. Well-meaning politicians can hurt us, and wealth is being generated every day. Why did we not notice, the way scientists did, that our ingrained beliefs do not correspond to reality? Why, in the words of Robin Hanson, do we see this:

Consider how differently the public treats physics and economics. Physicists can say that this week they think the universe has eleven dimensions, three of which are purple, and two of which are twisted clockwise, and reporters will quote them unskeptically, saying "Isn’t that cool!" But if economists say, as they have for centuries, that a minimum wage raises unemployment, reporters treat them skeptically and feel they need to find a contrary quote to "balance" their story.

The main reason for this, I think, is that in the "social" world the incentives aren't right, the way they are in the "science" world. Scientists are interested in what works. They are rewarded for building theories and conducting experiments that are useful, that "work." In order to get things right, scientific debate needs to weed out errors, no matter how commonsensical they may appear. Couple that with the fact that the feedback from physical reality is very strong, and you'll see why blatant errors cannot persist for too long. Not so in the world of political debate. Here, people are interested not in what works but in winning popularity contests called elections. Because competition for political offices is fierce, no one can win elections by trying to appeal to everyone; they have to choose their target audience. This means that, for every wrong hard-wired belief about social reality there will be someone who panders to that belief, trying to get votes that way. When it comes to issues that are politicized, there is no end to debate. And, contrary to what Hanson says, scientific issues can be politicized too; look at evolution, for example.

Poetry in motion

It was a strange experience to be in a New York City subway car and, in a spot usually reserved for ads of beer and immigration lawyers, suddenly see this. I've always loved this monologue and know it by heart; but seeing those words so unexpectedly and in such a bizarre context somehow made them that much more powerful.

The largest crop in California

May actually become legal this fall. The prediction market Intrade currently estimates the probability of this to be 41%.

Poltergeist bias

The results of this little online poll published by a Polish blogging platform salon24.pl show, I think, two cognitive biases at work all at once. The survey question is: What do you think the state of highway and railway infrastructure in Poland is the result of? Here are answer choices: 1) Inherent inability of Polish people to complete projects; 2) Incompetence of the Polish government; 3) Lack of privatization; 4) Lack of long-term strategic thinking among politicians; 5) Intentional actions aimed at destroying Polish economic potential and 6) Don't know. Of about 500 respondents, 19% think the sorry state of Polish transport infrastructure is due to politicians' lack of long-term thinking, 35% think it's because of general government incompetence, and also 35% think that it's due to malicious actions of some unnamed forces.

I realize this is not a representative sample of the population, and that the questions are poorly designed, but I still consider this anecdotal evidence of how strongly ingrained what I call the "Poltergeist bias" is. Essentially, Poltergeist bias is the belief that there's a malicious agent behind every misfortune. There are no accidents or coincidents; if something goes wrong, it's because some evil mind wanted it this way. Another bias lurking behind these answers is something I'm not sure has a proper name, but essentially amounts to grossly misjudging default probabilities. Highways and railroads don't appear by themselves. The default state of the world is one without roads or train tracks. It is also much harder to build things than to not build them. Thus, it is much more likely that the lack of infrastructure is due to the appropriate agencies not being up to the task rather than to intentional and malignant forces actively preventing building from taking place.

Land of the free

Last week, after being held for a month without charges in jail in a military base in Kuwait, Bradley Manning, the man who leaked video of an American helicopter gunning down innocent people in Afganistan, has been charged by the government with crimes that carry maximum sentences adding up to 52 years in prison.

You might say, well, that's rule of law. Manning did steal classified data. I hope you'll scream rule of law with equal passion the next time a law enforcement agent gets away scott-free with abusing an innocent person.

The naturalistic fallacy, subtle style

Via PZ Myers: An adjunct professor at the University of Illinois Kenneth Howell has written an email to his students in which he defended the Catholic position on homosexuality. Here's an excerpt:

But the more significant problem has to do with the fact that the consent criterion is not related in any way to the NATURE of the act itself. This is where Natural Moral Law (NML) objects. NML says that Morality must be a response to REALITY. In other words, sexual acts are only appropriate for people who are complementary, not the same. How do we know this? By looking at REALITY. Men and women are complementary in their anatomy, physiology, and psychology. Men and women are not interchangeable. So, a moral sexual act has to be between persons that are fitted for that act. Consent is important but there is more than consent needed.

This reasoning is an instance of the naturalistic fallacy, albeit in a somewhat subtler form. In its naive version, the naturalistic fallacy states that what is natural is moral and vice versa. This is grotesquely absurd: rape and murder are natural, for example, so they would have to be adjudicated as moral. Howell doesn't go as far as to say that morality and naturalness are equivalent; he adds consent as another criterion for judging an act to be moral. More precisely he (seems to be) saying that consent is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for an act to be qualified as moral. (IOW, all moral acts are consensual but not all consensual acts are moral.) To fulfill the morality definition, an act must be consensual and natural (as he says, "be a response to REALITY").

But this definition is absurd too. I'm sure any of my readers could come up with an indefinite number of examples of consensual acts that pretty much everyone on the planet agrees are not immoral but which nonetheless are highly unnatural. To give just one example: If he's consistent in his beliefs, Howell must think that flying in an airplane is immoral. It doesn't matter that people do it voluntarily; flying is not appropriate for people. How do we know this? By looking at REALITY. There is nothing in human anatomy or physiology that would suggest humans are meant to fly. So, a moral act of flying has to be left to species that are fitted for that act.

Differences

There are two differences between public debate here in the US and in Poland that, for whatever reason, caught my eye recently. They're both minor and completely unrelated. First: in Polish media one can often hear a statement (usually pronounced with the air of great authority) that in a state governed by the rule of law citizens do not have the right to criticize court rulings. This belief is absent from public discourse here. I have no idea where it comes from and have never heard any attempt at a justification. It seems utterly absurd to me. Second: to many Polish media outlets, including many mainstream ones, the idea that in a democracy minority rights need special protection from possible tyranny of the majority seems preposterous. For whatever reason, the public is just not used to it.

Here's a trading strategy: become a Congress staff member

This via Robin Hanson:

Ordinary folks are banned from "insider trading." For example, someone who noticed a factory fire via an airplane window was convicted of insider trading for trading on this info before it was publicly announced. But (...) the US Congressional representatives, and all their staffers, have long been explicitly exempt from these rules--the SEC is not authorized to regulate Congress, and Congress has not chosen to regulate itself. So Congress-folk regularly profit by trading on inside info they gain from interactions with industry representatives. So much so that their average return on investment is far larger than the public's.

I wonder what rationalizations they have for this blatant injustice.

Policy is there to make you feel good

Roughly two years ago in New York City there was a random act of violence that spurred some policy debate. I do not remember all of the details of this story, but the gist of it should be enough. A therapist who was running her practice out of an office in a residential building has been stabbed to death by a random assailant who simply walked past the doorman and into her office. The murderer has never met his victim before and his crime had no apparent motive.

The incident has spurred a discussion about safety; some lawmakers were talking about banning the practice of receiving customers in offices located in otherwise residential buildings. Fortunately none of the powers that be considered this possibility seriously. Such measure would surely not improve safety by much (I'd be surprised if it did at all) while it's quite clear that it would have an enormous negative economic impact. Still, the very fact that the proposal gained some traction among the public is I think outrageous. I remember arguing with quite a few people who liked that proposal, and asking them what they thought were the odds of this measure preventing a similar tragedy from happening in say, one year's time. The most common response I've received ran something like this: I don't care about odds; I care about knowing that our lawmakers care about our safety. Why is it socially acceptable for people to openly admit that they think policies should be designed not to increase social welfare, but to make them feel good?

More broken windows

Few weeks ago I've written about a particular example of the broken window fallacy; here comes another one. Bozeman, MT has recently suffered a hail storm which damaged many buildings. Of course, the local paper reported this as good news: "Storm Boosts Bozeman Economy"!

It's futile to explain why this type of thinking is outrageously stupid; the broken window fallacy is undead, it will go on forever. I think it is interesting though that the believers in this fallacy apply their belief rather selectively: some disasters boost, others not so much. Why, for example, do we not see anyone trying to tell us how the Gulf economy has been boosted by the oil spill? I mean, think about all the new jobs it has generated.

What is wrong with the local news?

One of the local New York City news stations had a segment about cab drivers using cellphones. Apparently in New York City it is illegal for cab drivers to use phones while driving, even if they're using a headset. The newspeople found that this law is being ignored rather often: cabbies stopped using cellphones without headsets, but still use headsets seemingly just as much as they did before the new law came into effect. The news reporters urged their viewers who witness those violations to call the authorities and insist that the violators be issued tickets.

To me, this is morally despicable advice. There is no evidence that banning headsets increases safety. An average ticket for this sort of offense is about $300; cabbies work for about $100 a day. The news are basically asking viewers to harass the cab drivers without inducing any positive effects on safety. And don't tell me that we live in a country where there's rule of law, so all laws need to be enforced. In New York State it is the law that dancing is forbidden in bars, night clubs and other such places. Do you think it would be reasonable to start calling the authorities about all establishments that ignore this law?

Here's hoping you get arrested

How many times have you heard the line "Only those who have done something wrong have a reason to fear law enforcement?" It's an incredibly irresponsible and dangerous belief. It is dangerous because if it becomes sanctioned as a social norm and/or law, it pretty much gives law enforcement agencies license to get away with murder. After all, if we believe that only those who have done something wrong have any reason to be nervous about law enforcement taking an interest in them, then we also believe that everyone that law enforcement is taking an interest in has done something wrong.

I'm sure everyone has heard of cops doing (and getting away with) things that the rest of us would rightfully be severely punished for. Things like beating up on a person for no reason. Or brutalizing a pregnant woman with a taser. Or shooting two pets of a seven year old child right in front of her. Or shooting a handcuffed man lying on the ground straight in his back and killing him. (Warning: If you're enjoying your day and want it to stay this way, don't watch the video embedded in that last link. Watching it will make you cry with anger. It will make you want to smash things and punch walls. It will make you wish that this cop, and everyone who is trying to excuse his behavior, meets the same agonizing end that his victim did.) Things of this sort happen often, and very few people care. Those acts are a consequence of believing that everyone who the law enforcement is dealing with is by definition a wrongdoer. If you create an environment where cops can get away with beating up on or even killing innocent people, then being a police officer becomes an attractive job for individuals who enjoy beating up on and killing people. Of course, there's violence in our society in general so acts like these will unfortunately happen no matter what. However, when it's police officers doing those things, it is our fault as a society. It happens because, when they use force excessively, we are too lenient, too quick to excuse and rationalize their brutality. This leniency has led to a situation where basically everyone is guilty by default. The cops can arrest whoever they like. There are "catch-all" charges that will basically always stick in court, at least so long as there are no non-police witnesses of the arrest. (Here in New York City, such charge is "disorderly conduct." In Baltimore, Maryland, it is "loitering." Etc.) And the occurrence of situations when non-police witnesses are present is also actively minimized. The state of Illinois has recently made it illegal to photograph or video-record police officers on duty; I'm sure that even in those states where such thing is legal, the police have plenty of informal measures to discourage it.

To everyone who has ever said that only those who have done wrong have anything to fear from law enforcement: whenever police officers mishandle, assault or kill an innocent person, it is your fault. I hope someday you'll get arrested. Maybe that will teach you something.