Neurath's Boat

Changing views

Most people like to think of themselves as flexible and willing to change their minds in response to new evidence.  However, we of course notice that others are very stubborn, and there's some psychological literature suggesting that people in general don't change their minds as much as they'd like to claim to.  On the other hand, there are interesting studies in the other direction, suggesting that people mis-remember their past views as being more similar to their present views than they really are, so that surveys on whether people changed their minds will get misleading results if they rely on comparing remembered views to current views.  So perhaps people are right to think that they change their minds, despite the fact that tricks of their memories leave them without much evidence to back it up.

Anyway, since I tend to have a hard time thinking of examples of changing my mind on demand, I thought I'd write about a significant change in order to increase the chances that I'll continue to remember it when I need an example.  I was originally in favor of the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.  I expected we'd make a mess of it, especially with Bush directing things, but the Taliban were so awful that I thought the mess we'd make would still be a considerable improvement.

I now think we should probably withdraw from Afghanistan.  I do still have some tendency to think that there could be better ways of doing things which would make our intervention helpful, but I can't see any politically realistic path from our current policies to anything which would be significantly more productive.  In particular, I think we'd probably have to give up the goal of suppressing opium cultivation in Afghanistan, and I don't see any chance of that.  I was aware of this issue in the past, but I apparently underestimated other issues and the results of the various problems interacting; I did not imagine that an Afghanistan with a large U.S. military presence would ever end up with the Taliban again controlling most of the country.  Further, the Karzai government is not nearly as much better than the Taliban as I would have hoped; it appears to be quite horribly corrupt, which isn't really a surprise, but it even has some pretty horribly retrogressive policies on women (the big issue where I thought the Taliban were bad enough to make their removal a goal which overrides almost everything else).

Hope for Clinton's campaign

If there turns out to be a set of all sets after all, she may win the nomination, or so says Fafnir. Admittedly, not in so many words (I'm referring to his third scenario, of course).

An idea whose time has come?

Is it time to bring in the robot overlords?  Even the monkeys are suggesting that the answer may be yes.

Diplomatic ambiguity

The issue of what to do about Iran's nuclear program has been much discussed recently; the leftist blogs have extensively discussed the way the top Democratic candidates are going to such lengths to be sure to say that the option of attacking Iran is not "off the table." The diplomatic theory underlying this, of course, is that our negotiating position is stronger if Iran thinks we might actually use military force, so we should never say we would definitely not do that. One problem with this line of thinking, as many have noted, is that constantly reminding Iran that we're willing to attack them is quite likely to make the government of Iran think that they need nuclear weapons to deter such an attack. I'd like to mention another flaw in the reasoning.

We have overwhelming military force. Everybody knows this. Thus, every country in the world knows that, potentially, the United States could use that military force against them. There is no need to say we're going to do that, or make a big deal of our willingness to do things like that, in order to ensure that other countries take this into account in their planning. Paranoia, plus the extreme badness of any outcome which involves us actually attacking, guarantees that countries are always going to take that into account, whatever our public rhetoric. Thus, it is frivolous to engage in saber-rattling in order to prove to our enemies that we're a threat; they know that perfectly well and need no proof.

Instead, the most likely consequence of publicly making threats is to guarantee that any concessions that our enemies make to us appear to the world to be made under duress. Since many of our enemies appear to be as neurotic about "appearing weak" as our own administration, this is only going to make them more reluctant to make any concessions.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Death penalty test cases

Philosoraptor presents one of those kinds of cases which is often used to justify the death penalty, a case where it is very difficult emotionally not to want a death by slow torture for the perpetrators. Certainly that's my reaction, and I'd even add the same for anyone who has an ounce of sympathy for the perpetrators. But I try to recognize that this is not very productive; burning hate does not tend to produce good public policy.*

It's pretty well established what's actually needed to help improve situations like this. Give women more power, and things like this happen less often; giving women more power seems to make just about everything better, based on comparative studies of various communities and societies, but in particular it definitely helps women. So we should be reaching out to women in the communities where these situations occur, doing what we can to increase their educational and economic opportunities and working to fight all of the oppression they are subject to, not just the most horrifying high profile headline-grabbing examples of oppression.

Further, even from the point of view of satisfying our emotions rather than public policy, the form of death penalty under discussion is virtually never that; the form of the death penalty which is under debate is supposed to be painless and humane. I'm not sure why it's more emotionally satisfying to subject someone to a painless death than to subject them to the horrible conditions in prisons. So I don't really see how test cases like this are particularly informative concerning the death penalty debate.

* One respect in which emotions are very bad guides; I'd like to think that I'd be no less horrified by the case if the victim were not an attractive young woman, but I'd be lying to myself. My emotional reactions are not as politically enlightened as my intellectual responses, though over time my intellectual responses do have some tendency to train my emotional responses to be a little less horribly embarrassing.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Thoughts inspired by David Charles Stove

I came across a book written by Stove the other day, and it was utterly horrifying.  I know some of my readers are well enough informed to question why this should be any surprise; surely he only wrote bad books, I can hear them thinking.  Indeed, my very first encounter with Stove was when I examined his attempted refutation of Hume's inductive skepticism.  That attempted refutation is sufficiently awful that I feel a little guilty about shooting fish in a barrel when I wrote a term paper criticizing it.  However, the book I just found was a collection of Stove's attempts at writing more popular essays, and disturbingly they do seem to have been somewhat popular.  It disturbed me enormously that the back cover had a favorable blurb from David Armstrong.  The two were apparently friends, but still, I don't see how anyone with a shred of self-respect could even hint at endorsement of the contents of the book.

I think one of the most revealing essays in the book, at least for philosophers, is Stove's criticism of Nozick.  Nozick was, of course, a well-known right-leaning philosopher, and the usual practice of right-wing nuts is to embrace anyone intellectually respectable who seems to agree with them in part, so it seems on the surface odd that Stove should bother to write an essay against someone who was in any way allied with him, when his enemies were so plentiful.  The explanation, however, is relatively straightforward.

Nozick really believed that coercion was wrong, indeed that it was pretty much the worst thing possible.  His libertarian views were founded on that basic principle, that coercion is just not acceptable, when it is performed by anyone for any reason, and so governments, like all other people and institutions, should be stripped of their coercive power as much as possible.  He was, in other words, clearly not one of the typical internet libertarians with wet dreams about how he'd lord it over everyone else with his arsenal of guns once the government stopped pestering him.

As a result, Stove thought Nozick was a pussy.  Admittedly, Stove didn't put it in (quite) such crude terms, but the terminology perfectly captures his intent; Stove was extremely misogynistic.  One of his essays in Against the Idols argues vigorously for the intellectual inferiority of women, and his prudishness (which also comes up in his criticism of Nozick) is also a common trait of misogynists (for those who think women are only for sex, "women are bad" and "sex is bad" tend to get bundled together).  Stove thought feminists and hippies and various other nefarious characters were corrupting the pure, manly intellectual standards of the academy and of political institutions, and clearly thought Nozick had too many such soft-headed, feminine inclinations.  Sure, Nozick said he liked free markets, but he was unaccountably squeamish about sending tens of thousands of soldiers to die and killing hundreds of thousands of foreigners in a dubious effort to slightly weaken the forces of communism worldwide.  Real anti-communists favored having a huge military and using it often, even if the military was hardly a bastion of free market practices and it was paid for by high, market-distortion-inducing taxes.  Real anti-communists were real men, you see.  Nobody who opposed the Vietnam War, as Nozick did, could have been a real man, and so no such person could be a real anti-communist.

I didn't intend this to be such a long post.  Still, it's clearly more relevant to the blogosphere than most of my writings, so maybe it's OK to ramble on a bit.

A thought on Hillary Clinton as candidate

It is well known that people who don't vote are more likely to be Democrats than Republicans; this is why Democrats try so hard to increase voter turnout, while Republicans try to make it harder to vote to prevent non-voters from getting active.  One of the biggest categories of people who usually support liberal ideas but usually don't vote are single women.  Hillary Clinton has more support among women than men, and I wonder if she could make it easier for the Democrats to reach out to that underused potential base of support.  Obviously, if the Democrats could get more single women out to vote, that wouldn't just help Clinton's chances of becoming president; more people inclined toward Democrats voting could help the Democrats in all the other races in 2008 as well.

Of course, Obama might be able to get more black voters out to the polls, so Clinton isn't the only candidate who might have a desirable appeal to people who usually don't vote.  Offhand, I don't think the number of blacks who don't vote but who could plausibly be reached is as great as the number of single women in that position, but I admit to having no numbers or poll data on that.

Now, Edwards has less entrenched opposition to face than either Clinton or Obama, and it's possible that Clinton's benefits for other Democrats would be offset because she'd also encourage insecure Republican men to vote more, while Obama might similarly bring more racists to the polls.  So I'm still not sure who looks best in all of this.  On policies, they all have strengths and weaknesses, and I really can't decide which I think is stronger.

I guess I'm still in the same place; I'd support any of the three major candidates, and I'm willing to leave it up to the primary to select the best one.  I still wish Gore would run.  But I'd like to see more analysis of strategic issues like these.  Has anybody been working on it?

More on tyrants

Plato thought that it was democracy which lead to tyranny in the classical Greek sense; when the mob grew strong enough to oppose all previous concentrations of power, an ambitious leader would take up the cause of the mob and use them to crush the existing institutions and establish their own unrestricted rule.  While the connection with democracy is not so straightforward as Plato suggests, there is an important element of truth in this.  A tyrant in the classical Greek sense certainly did tap into new sources of power and use them to crush existing institutions, rather than simply making deals with existing institutions and thus facing the constant danger that the established powers would decide to back out of the alliances.

One of the reasons for the remarkable performance of the French army during Napoleon's wars was Napoleon's method of replacing losses in the officer corps.  Enlisted soldiers who displayed conspicuous bravery would be promoted to officer rank.  It was possible for any old commoner who joined the army to rise to any rank by such promotions.  Most of Napoleon's enemies had policies of recruiting only aristocrats as military officers, with rank in the army heavily influenced by aristocratic rank.

There were disadvantages to Napoleon's system; aristocrats tended to be better educated, and those who served in the military generally would have had some training in military science.  However, Napoleon's system had much more important advantages.

First, it contributed greatly to the morale of the French soldiers.  Since their officers were generally conspicuously brave (or else they wouldn't have been promoted to become officers), the officers set a strong example for the troops.  They also understood the troops better, having come from among them.  The possibility of becoming an officer encouraged both loyalty generally, since it increased the potential rewards of military service, and courageous effort, since that was the way to gain those potential rewards.

Second, it meant that Napoleon had no trouble replacing losses in the officer corps (or at least no more difficulty than he had in replacing the common soldiers).  Such losses were by no means infrequent, and Napoleon's enemies seem to have been put at a great disadvantage in replacing losses by the fact that they recruited officers only from the aristocracy, and the most martially inclined aristocrats were already in the army, so they had to recruit less promising candidates and in some cases simply get by with fewer officers when they raised new forces after heavy losses against Napoleon.

Still, quite possibly the most important value of the policy for Napoleon is that it meant his officers tended not to be connected to existing institutions of power, and so were less likely to be troubled by divided loyalties.  This also had the disadvantage of making existing institutions of power more hostile to him, since he was further excluding them from power, but the French revolution had already greatly weakened such institutions, and Napoleon preferred to continue that process in order to further concentrate power in his own hands.  Probably the most successful tyrant in history, Augustus, preferred to employ freed slaves in many top-level administrative positions despite his own patrician background, with similar benefits.

What relevance does this have for the modern world?  Well, relying on alliances with institutions of power makes a tyrant weaker.  So tyrants who depend on foreign support, to take one example, are predictably weaker than those who do not.  Thus, even if a dictator can sometimes produce greater political stability, it's generally a bad idea for outsiders to support a dictator with such a goal in mind; by doing so, they reduce the chances that the one they support will turn out to be one of the successful ones, and so that they really will provide stability.  Sadly, U.S. foreign policy does not ever seem to have noticed this, despite providing plenty of empirical evidence for the thesis in the record of its failures.  Given the length this blog post has already reached, I will leave other lessons as an exercise for the reader.

Conservative reading comprehension

I don't know why anything at Powerline should ever surprise me; there's some idiocy in almost every post.  But for some reason, this one stood out for me.  I looked up Lincoln's speech, to make sure it wasn't merely incompetent quoting on Powerline's part, but no, it's not just their quote that seems to say the opposite of what they intend, the original speech does as well.  In Lincoln's speech, the "tribe of the eagle" refers to the potential tyrants.  So what's with the ending, "may the tribe of the Gathering of Eagles increase?"  There's some massive rhetorical incompetence going on there, using the same metaphors for the tyrants and those who (according to Powerline) are the good guys.  This is, of course, consistent with their general attitude that only tyranny can oppose tyranny, so we should have our own brand of tyranny* which is somehow free in order to oppose enemy bad tyranny.   Rather than, say, just opposing tyranny generally, which is what Lincoln advocates.

* Admittedly, "family of the lion"  and "tribe of the eagle" don't seem appropriate to the chickenhawks, and the "genius" Lincoln attributes to tyrants doesn't seem to fit the shrub quite as well as it might fit a Napoleon or Caesar, but I believe that Powerline is not (or at least not openly) of the opinion that it is cowardice and stupidity which distinguishes good leaders from evil tyrants.

Property rights, intellectual and otherwise

An editorial in the New York Times has been making the rounds, and I felt like weighing in.  Most of those I've read agree with me in thinking perpetual copyrights are a very bad idea, including some I often don't agree with, such as Ilya at Volokh.  Ilya makes important points about the difference between intellectual property and physical property; when somebody else uses my physical property, they are interfering with my ability to use it, while when someone else uses my intellectual property, I continue to be able to use it freely.  If there were a method of duplicating land, we probably would treat the creation of duplicates of already occupied land quite differently than we treat invasion of already occupied land.

I would like to add a point I've made before concerning property rights generally.  Any property right is a a monopoly on the use of a resource, enforced by the state.  It only makes sense that people should be charged for the state's services in this area, as in some kind of wealth tax.  If establishing and maintaining intellectual copyrights were more expensive, with a high minimum fee which increases with time, and a percentage of profits if that exceeds the minimum payment, then allowing long copyright terms, even indefinite ones, would not be as egregious.  For one thing, it would obviously raise state revenues.  Also, it would reduce cases where copyrights would be held by people who were not bothering to make the copyrighted material available in any form; holding on to an unused copyright would be expensive, so such copyrights would usually be allowed to lapse, allowing others to make use of the material.