Bah, Humbug I: Reps try to outlaw Golden Rule

When I woke this morning I was sour as a lemon. Like Scrooge. Then I read a small piece in the Post, which changed my mood to vinegar. It sounds as if the Republicans think that the Golden Rule applies only in the profane version: "he who has the most gold rules" and not the Biblical:

"When Tim Holt spotted Maria Rabanales of El Salvador lying still in the Arizona desert this summer, he believed he had a God-given duty to save her.

He forced water through the woman's swollen jaws and poured ice down her shirt. Border Patrol agents later took Rabanales to a hospital, where she was revived.

Holt was praised by Humane Borders, sponsored by First Christian Church of Tucson, where he is a volunteer. But his actions that June day might soon be considered a crime, punishable by up to five years in prison or property forfeiture, if a Republican-sponsored bill that passed the House along partisan lines on Friday becomes law."

(The law makes it a crime to aid illegal immigrants.)

Stripes and Golden Fleece

This week came reports of the death of Sen. William Proxmire, whose fame is tied to his Golden Fleece awards, rather than his pushing of the Genocide convention. (See what's-her-face's book on genocide.) The Golden Fleece was given monthly for a [supposed] instance of bureaucratic waste of money. Sometimes bureaucrats need embarassment, sometimes not. His award seemed to me to be an example of someone searching for uniqueness.

Proxmire often ridiculed various research projects funded by NSF or whoever. Had he remained in the Senate he might well have awarded the Fleece to a project researching why the striped stickleback fish had their stripes (almost sounds like a Rudyard Kipling Just-so story: how the stickleback got their stripes). But also announced this week was a surprising outcome of that research: an explanation for whiteness. Turns out the scientists identified a gene in sticklebacks that controls melanin, giving them their stripes. They then found the same gene in humans, but the gene in caucasians has mutated, leading to white skin in Europeans. (Apparently Asians have a different mutation.)

Of course one butterfly does not make a summer and one instance of research that provides unexpected results does not justify all scientific projects. But it is a reminder that we don't know a lot and mockery assumes we do.

New Computer/DSL

Bringing up a new PC and a DSL connection yesterday and today. Temporary interruption in blogging.

Torture and Knowledge

Michael Kinsley is almost always good. His piece, Torture for Dummies - Exploding the "ticking bomb" argument, is no exception.

He discusses the torture justification used by Charles Krauthammer--if there's a ticking bomb and you have captured someone who knows its location but won't talk, you must torture.

He mentions the idea, which Kevin Drum has also used--you can justify a law against torture because in such extreme circumstances the law will be violated. I like it. We have laws against speeding without written exceptions for speeding accident victims or pregnant women to hospitals. Recently an officer was acquitted of murder in a case where he killed an Iraqi, rationale was that the Iraqi was mortally wounded and it was a mercy killing. Kinsley doesn't like it, and IMO dismisses it too quickly.

But the gist of his argument is this:

"But college dorm what-ifs like this one share a flaw: They posit certainty (about what you know and what will happen if you do this or that). And uncertainty is not only much more common in real life: It is the generally unspoken assumption behind civil liberties, rules of criminal procedure, and much else that conservatives find sentimental and irritating."

In other words, in the real world there's much we don't know, including as Rummy says, what we don't know we don't know. See Cromwell to the Scottish Parliament. Laws and rules must be made for uncertainty, not certainty.

"Over-Imitation"

This article in today's NYTimes has an interesting article on "over-imitation", which is a psychologist's term for what happens when someone imitates an inefficient process. It's like playing "follow the leader" around the sides of a city square rather than cutting across the diagonal. Apparently chimps mostly don't over-imitate, but children do. It's the result of a series of lab experiments where food was enclosed in a clear plastic box and the experimenter demonstrated to the subject (chimp or child) how to open the box, except he threw in a couple extra steps. Chimps would bypass the steps, children wouldn't.

Here's an excerpt:

Children Learn by Monkey See, Monkey Do. Chimps Don't. - New York Times: "If they rush through opening a puzzle, they don't skip the extra steps. They just do them all faster. What makes the results even more intriguing is that the children understand the laws of physics well enough to solve the puzzles on their own. Charlotte's box ripping is proof of that.

Mr. Lyons sees his results as evidence that humans are hard-wired to learn by imitation, even when that is clearly not the best way to learn. If he is right, this represents a big evolutionary change from our ape ancestors. Other primates are bad at imitation. When they watch another primate doing something, they seem to focus on what its goals are and ignore its actions.

As human ancestors began to make complicated tools, figuring out goals might not have been good enough anymore. Hominids needed a way to register automatically what other hominids did, even if they didn't understand the intentions behind them. They needed to imitate."

It seems a commonsense adaptation, like developing a general-purpose computer rather than a specialized one. The psychologist was, after all, considerably simplifying real life when he set up the problem of the food in the box. In real life, you have to identify the problem for yourself and see whether anyone has a solution. That takes time and effort. So it's easier to apply the general rule of "follow the leader" if the leader seems to be halfway competent. The burden on evolution then turns to deciphering people to know what leaders to follow. (Is that why Bush is President--maybe evolution needs to do some more work?)

Stereotypes, Evenly Distributed?

Reading the Post sports pages today, enjoying the Skins victory which I didn't see all of because we went off to see the ABT Nutcracker and all the little girls dressed up in holiday finery. An interview with some rapper, maybe "chamillionaire"?

THECHAT: "You're against the dress code, then?

I don't see a real reason for it. The only people it affects are the people in the urban world. I don't think it's a bad influence on the NBA for people to wear what they grew up wearing. No chains, and no do-rags? That's my culture. I feel like it's discrimination against people like us. I dress the same way. I wear a chain, I got jewelry on, I got a do-rag, but that don't mean I can't come to the job and conduct myself right. I think people always have those stereotypes [emphasis added]. I think what they did in the NBA is just another form of that. I mean [the code] is not even when they're on the job. When they're on the court, if you want to make them tuck in their jersey, fine. If they want to say your pants can't be sagging below your booty, fine. That I can see."

Obviously Mr Rapper is referring to "people" not like "us", i.e. whites who didn't grow up in the ghetto. At first I agreed. I have "those stereotypes" of rappers and kids who wear their pants around their knees, listen to vulgar rap songs, etc. But a question for all social scientists--are stereotypes evenly distributed? I assume we'd all agree that people have stereotypes, but is "people" just WASP's and upper class types? Or is it everyone except you and me? (A related question is whether there's any difference in harm: are ghetto blacks more harmed by the stereotypes WASP's hold of them, or by those they hold of WASP's?)

I could argue, not having any facts, either way: either everyone, disregarding differences of personality and so forth, has stereotypes to get them through their life; or, the more life people have experienced (i.e., the older, the more widely traveled, the more exposure through reading, etc) the fewer stereotypes; or, the older the more set in their ways and the more stereotypes.

I don't know the answer.

When Is Anti-War Speech Harmful to the War Effort:

Eugene Volokh at the Volokh Conspiracy site has had several discussions on anti-war speech and its impact and morality. See The Volokh Conspiracy - When Is Anti-War Speech Harmful to the War Effort:: among others.

I've a number of thoughts. I started to post a comment there, but decided not to cast my pearls before swine but to hide them here. (Actually, I'm too slow a writer to compose comments on this complex a subject, I need the time.)

His recent conceptualization of the issue, as stated here, seems to me to be an example of "tunnel vision".

"I'd like to focus a bit on the broader question of when speech during wartime is harmful to the war effort -- not necessarily when it's immoral, but only when it harms the war effort. To do this, let's first shift the discussion from the war on Iraq to World War II.

What speech (if any) by Americans during World War II do you think would have been harmful to the war effort, even if it weren't deliberately aimed at helping the Nazis win?"

How do I justify my "tunnel" description? The post narrows the issues to helping or hurting the war effort, ignoring (for the sake of discussion) the other benefits and costs of speech in relation to other goals. Implicitly the discussion is devoted to effects on us and our military and our enemy and its combatants, and to the course of the war, not to the longer history of our nation and the world

But societies, as individuals, should be judged not only by what they achieve, but by how they achieve it. The test of morality is not only what you achieve, but how you achieve it. I seem to remember that Athenian democracy was overthrown in the Peloponnesian wars but the founding fathers remembered Athens more than Sparta.

It's an old chestnut, but true: adversity builds character. So too for societies. Taking the easy course would be, as Nixon so often said, wrong. In the 50's there was much argument over the virtues of totalitarian societies versus democracies. Many, such as Whittaker Chambers, believed that a totalitarian society was more efficient and effective than a democracy. Another example--the way we fought WWII was important. Putting Japanese-Americans in camps and dropping the A-bomb might have been important to the war effort, but they were lasting stains on our honor. We may have jailed Copperheads during the Civil War and Eugene Debs in WWI, but we've learned better. The short term gain in cohesion was outweighed by the betrayal of our ideals.

By giving priority to the war effort, one can justify X, where X may be limitation of free speech or war crimes. For example, in the battle of Fallujah, once the military had cordoned off the city and urged all civilians to leave, we could have saved many casualties by using gas. We, the world, have made the judgment that use of gas, even tear gas, in such situations is abhorrent. But when you take a longer and wider perspective you decide that the end does not justify the means.


Writing of "the war effort" implies that there is one effort by one actor--the nation. In another post Volokh talks of "the enemy". But that reification is misleading. We are individuals, as are our enemies. Based on my experience in Vietnam (noncombat), I'd guess this rule is pretty valid: the impact of anti-war speech on DOD employees is inversely proportional to their danger. In other words, as I've said elsewhere, Rep. Murtha didn't have much effect on a Marine rifleman, but he came close to ruining Rumsfeld's day. If you're in danger, your mind is focused on getting through the days. If you're up in the chain of command, you start worrying.

I suspect the same rule applies to the "enemy". The big bosses pay attention to what is going on within the opposite camp, but the peons don't. Didn't Hector know that Achilles was sulking in his tent? But the peons do know what concerns them--is the enemy treating captives well or poorly. Remember in the Civil War that the Confederacy threatened to execute captive black soldiers, leading Lincoln to promise reprisals.

All this may have changed some--given electronic media the ranks of our military and the enemy are more porous and open to new information than before. The spread of these media further empowers the onlookers--those in the Moslem world not actively engaged in insurgency, those in the non-Moslem world who have their own dealings with America and want to know what sort of polity it is, and those who have been friendly in the past who want to know whether we've changed. But that makes it even more important to adhere to our ideals, and to recognize that we define our ideals by the way we act under duress. (Also see Dan Drezner on this issue, as I cited here.)

Of course as always an underlying assumption, not raised in the discussions, is key: just how serious is the insurgency/Iraq unrest/war on terrorism? The pro-Bush conservatives agree with him that it's of life and death importance to the US. I disagree, believing that if you define a continuum between communism in the 1950's vis a vis the US and the IRA in the 1960's vis a vis the Protestants, Moslem terrorism is much closer to the second than the first. The real test of my principles would be whether, if I were the Brits in 1940, would I throw Oswald Moseley into jail?

Big brain means small testes

This article is depressing.

New Scientist Breaking News - Big brain means small testes, finds bat study: "The brainier male bats are, the smaller their testicles, according to a new study. Researchers suggest the correlation exists because both organs require a lot of energy to grow and maintain, leading individual species to find the optimum balance."

It's another reminder that you can't have it all. Or, as the great science fiction writer Heinlein said, there's no such thing as a free lunch.

In Berlin, Every Cheer Casts an Eerie Echo - New York Times

The Times has an interesting article on the renovation/reconstruction of Berlin's Olympic stadium, the one in which Jesse Owens won his medals and Hitler posed. But am I the only one struck by this statement from the architect in charge?

"'What we had to do was to change a people's stadium into a class stadium,' Marg said. 'During Nazi times, there was only one V.I.P. Today, there are several classes of V.I.P.'s.'"

Pearl Harbor Day--American Victory?

I'm too young to remember it, but I do remember writing a college paper on it. I took the view that it was an American victory (an early example of my contrarian nature, if not my idiocy).

To sketch the argument as I recall:

• on the tactical level, while the Japanese achieved surprise, they attacked old battleships that never contributed to the war anyhow, while missing the carriers and the oil tank farms that were critical to American success
• on the strategic level, they (with Hitler's help, as he declared war on us when we declared war on Japan) solved FDR's dilemma of how to bring a reasonably united U.S. into the war on Britain's side. (Churchill said he rejoiced at the attack and slept soundly that night comfortable that he was now on the winning side.)
  

Pearl Harbor was thus a key step in the eventual conquest of the Axis and therefore a victory.

I still think my logic holds up. And I'd say it's a caution against the easy talk of "winning" and "losing" wars. You can never be sure how history is going to work out.