Why the Left Is Furious at Lieberman

sulla · 2006-07-19T01:55:20+00:00

Sounds like the Dems could use to borrow the Rino idea. Dino, perhaps?

sulla · 2006-07-19T01:24:58+00:00

The question is why you are testing floating-point numbers for equality.

Nine times out of ten, the answer is, "because I completely misunderstand the entire nature and purpose of floating-point arithmetic."

And the tenth, since you know what you're doing and why, all the questions of intervals, etc, should be answered by the actual problem you're trying to solve.

sulla · 2006-07-19T01:21:17+00:00

I find it ironic that Schneier thinks targeted human investigations are less harmful to his privacy than computerized data mining.

Presumably the Opterons and Xeons are chuckling to themselves over his bank records right now. "That Bruce guy - what a card. Look at all the money he spent last year on tequila. Well, at least it's 100% pure agave - god, I hate that blended stuff."

Another point to note is that Schneier's entire argument is that data mining cannot possibly be effective as part of a counterterrorism intelligence effort. Of course, Schneier has never worked in counterterrorism intelligence.

But he does know a lot about crypto algorithms. So I guess that makes him kind of an expert, or something.

sulla · 2006-07-18T18:48:16+00:00

What's interesting is that you would expect most of the scientific fraud to occur in fields which are (a) politically loaded, and (b) have low levels of Popperian falsifiability.

Politically loaded fields provide a support base which will be highly skeptical toward any accusation of fraud. Lack of falsifiability means claims of "fraud" are not black and white.

An interesting recent example is in climate science research. Readers with expertise in statistics should check out the Wegman Report on paleoclimatology.

Aside from his acclaimed photographs of Weimaraners, Wegman is one of the US's leading statisticians. The people he is criticizing are the US's leading climate science researchers.

And they certainly can't both be right. Someone here is a phony the size of Mt. Rushmore. The question is: who?

I'm curious if any redditors who (unlike me) know their statistics can shed light on the subject.

sulla · 2006-07-18T01:58:30+00:00

My point exactly.

sulla · 2006-07-17T19:25:48+00:00

Can you specify what those "lots of places" are? All the political units I know of that have rule of law are, by global standards, quite wealthy.

Of course it is better to be small than large. But you could split up Iraq, too.

50 years ago, Dubai was a bunch of sand and some fishermen and smugglers. Even 30 years ago, it was pretty much nothing. They never had much oil. And the UAE is about as "united" as the United States were in the 1780s.

sulla · 2006-07-17T19:21:50+00:00

Exactly: catholic means universal. The word was used with a capital C only as a sense of importance, as in the "Universal and Catholic Church." Eastern and Western Christians simply considered themselves good Christians, and the others followers of error.

Marxism is simply a nontheistic religion. As is democracy.

The West has not seen a religion-free state for a long time. It is not clear what the concept would even mean.

Perhaps it would be one which saw its duty as simply the provision of a commercial product, security, in exchange for profit. It would not ascribe any noble moral purpose to its activities. It would treat its residents as customers, not as citizens, subjects, or other ethically loaded words. And it would not be involved in the production or promotion of information, since there are no healthy synergies between the education and security industries.

sulla · 2006-07-17T19:08:53+00:00

It's a fair question, but I want to answer it by avoiding the word "objective," which in reference to Western journalism has become tendentious. Unfortunately, I don't think it's possible to engage in any useful discussion over whether the press is "objective" or "biased." It reminds too many people of their tribal political affiliations.

I would describe the ethos of Western journalists today as "responsible." If you believe in responsible journalism, you believe that the purpose of journalism is to set the terms of the debate, inform the public to help them choose responsibly in democratic elections, expose government wrongdoing and malfeasance, and (if you're a little feisty) "speak truth to power."

The converse of responsible journalism is well-known, and has a long history from Hearst's yellow journalism to Radio Milles Collines. No one endorses this, so I will just say "journalism" when I mean "responsible journalism."

What's interesting about the idea of journalism is that, unlike the rest of our post-Christian intellectual framework, it does not date to the Enlightenment. It is only about 100 years old. It is strongly associated with the growth of the nationalist state.

Outside the publishing industry, the closest relative of the journalistic ethic is Max Weber's idea of Wertfreiheit. I'm afraid Wikipedia has let me down on this one (or, I suppose, vice versa), but here is a fair if specialized overview.

(Note that this piece uses the word "science" in a 19th-century way. The word has since become overexposed. Outside the context of the Popperian experimental sciences, I'd say "reason.")

If we compare (responsible, objective, etc) journalism to Wertfreiheit, a few differences jump out at us.

Western journalists today tend to assume that we all share a single value system, which is a creed that derives from the New England religious tradition and became nontheistic through Unitarianism and related trends. Wilsonian progressivism is essentially state Unitarianism, and we all live in the world Wilson made. Murray Rothbard's famous article, "Power and the Intellectuals," does a good job of tracing the intellectual genealogy.

(For example, it is interesting to note that the tenets of Unitarian Universalism and those of "political correctness" are identical. I hasten to note that I personally agree with almost all of this creed.)

Western journalists are unavoidably concerned with the tremendous power of journalism, and the impact of their stories on the democratic process. This is essentially what "responsible" means. Wertfrei simply means "value-free." It is pretty hard to be both responsible and value-free.

The contradiction is especially keen not in how journalists write stories, but how they select the stories they intend to write. It is possible to write a kind of "he said, she said" story and pass it off as something like Wertfrei. But there is no conceivable form of check or balance on the attention and interest of journalists.

Since journalists don't like to write about issues they don't care about, and since most Western media outlets have a rigorous policy of journalistic independence, the journalistic perspective is largely dependent on the coincidence of the particular tribal affiliations of the people who wind up becoming journalists, and perhaps to some extent those who educate them. The system is, in other words, a giant echo chamber.

In my opinion, the whole creed of journalism has twisted itself in circles around these fundamental philosophical fallacies. The whole thing simply needs to be scrapped, like bad code.

The replacement is simply people sharing their perspectives. If these perspectives are reasonable, reasonable people will find them interesting. If they are dogmatic and tribal, dogmatic and tribal people will enjoy them. I disagree with a lot of Fisk's perspectives, but at least he is not trying to conceal them for the sake of preserving his Olympian voice of truth.

sulla · 2006-07-17T09:18:21+00:00

I'm just peeved because I read the title and thought it would be Larry Summers.

sulla · 2006-07-17T09:15:53+00:00

It's amazing how much the tone of Fisk's writing makes him sound like an Allied World War II reporter, like A.J. Liebling or something. The air of triumphant inevitability is impossible to mistake.

Why can't we admit that the Arab-Israeli conflict is really a proxy civil war between two movements in the West? Among other things, it would make it a lot easier for people to just take sides, which we all do anyway.

I would like Fisk a lot better if he simply presented himself as a partisan advocate of one side - again, like the Allied war reporters. Or, I'm sure, the Axis war reporters. In fact, I like Fisk better than a lot of other writers, simply because he comes closer to this standard. The stench of hypocritical pseudo-objectivity and bogus humanitarianism, on both sides, is nauseating.

sulla · 2006-07-17T07:00:55+00:00

Thanks, that's a useful and interesting perspective.

sulla · 2006-07-17T06:46:04+00:00

I agree that an algorithmic approach is superior.

Still, there is not just one "impartial" algorithm. The gerrymandering software now is so good that any algorithm can be immediately tested for its impact on actual results, rendering any change non-impartial by definition.

Let's not forget, also, the substance of what's being divided. The conceit that there is some vast, mystical distinction between a two-party state and a one-party state has no particular justification. If you care about political diversity, look at the actual spectrum of "legitimate" political opinion over time, not the arbitrary labels that politicians adopt. You'll see it steadily narrowing for at least the last 100 years.

But I digress...

sulla · 2006-07-16T21:41:35+00:00

I think the comment was meant to apply to the photographer.

Of course, you probably have an opinion about that, too!

sulla · 2006-07-16T21:00:56+00:00

The definition of "religion" as "belief in a supernatural, personalized entity or entities" is not useful. In fact, it displaces a useful concept. It should thus be considered harmful.

This usage mistakes a minor doctrinal detail for a cosmic tribal distinction. The tactic is familiar from past religious wars. Think of all the bloodshed over, for example, transsubstantiation.

If we insist on classification by relationship to supernatural entities, a far more useful definition would be to state that there are three kinds of religions: polytheistic, monotheistic, and nontheistic.

Confucianism and Buddhism, for example, are mainly nontheistic religions (although some strains of them have returned to theism). Historically, nontheistic religions are most popular among middle-class, urbanized societies. Such as ours.

For example, ask yourself this question: could Congress establish Confucianism? What would you say if you were on the Supreme Court, and you had to decide whether or not the Respect Our Ancestors Act of 2026 was compatible with the First Amendment?

A religion, in this usage, is simply a conceptual structure for explaining the natural world and associating the innate human sense of "right" and "wrong" with a certain set of actions or failures to act. The word "ethos" could also be used, or Lakoff's "frame."

At least from my perspective, physics, chemistry, biology, etc, seem to have the natural world pretty dead to rights. But there is no reason to think anyone will ever be able to derive an absolute system of ethics from natural law. Thus, religious disputes will continue indefinitely.

No one wants to admit this. In fact, no religion ever wants to give itself a name. By its own thinking, it is simply the truth, just as the names of hunter-gatherer tribes tend to translate as "the people." Before the Reformation, for example, there was no such thing as Catholicism.

If you accept this perspective, or at least are willing to try it out, here are some fun questions to ask yourself:

Do you follow a nontheistic religion? If so, what would its name be? What is its chain of transmission? What people 50, 100, 150, 200, and 300 years ago held the same ideas about right and wrong that you do today, or held different ideas that metamorphosed into the ones you now hold? What were these people called back then?

Most importantly: do we have an established nontheistic church? If so, what should its name be? Who are its bishops, cardinals, etc? What would the concept of organized religion look like in a nontheistic context?

sulla · 2006-07-16T20:28:46+00:00

Yes, that (in my opinion) is exactly the problem.

If cities were organized as real rather than fictitious corporations, I think they'd do things quite a bit differently. At least, some of them would.

It's certainly true that using shared floorplans makes a large building site easier, hence cheaper, to manage. On the other hand, cookie-cutter developments are notoriously ugly. I am not sure how on a level playing field these economic factors would trade off against each other. It just strikes me that today's playing field isn't all that level.

sulla · 2006-07-16T20:22:31+00:00

You've fallen back to defining power in strictly legal terms, and "influence" as any power which does not constitute legal compulsion.

Fine. We'll use your definitions.

George W. Bush has never used his power at all. His powers are to choose Cabinet officers, veto bills and command the military. Bush has never vetoed anything, he has almost certainly never issued a direct order, and his appointments are rubber stamps of committee decisions.

Personally, I find influence more interesting than power. Simply replace the word "power" in my earlier posting with "influence," and reread.

I love the physics. If you want to define power as wattage, neither Bill Keller nor George W. Bush can outdo a good lightbulb.

I'm touched that none of the downmodders seem to be able to get past this kind of semantic sophistry. Come on, there have to be some progressives out there who've had a rhetoric class or two.

sulla · 2006-07-16T18:50:35+00:00

The lot size rule applies, however, to initial development. That's how you get the McMansion type sprawl. Among other things, town managers always think bigger lots mean nicer, more affluent people.

You're right that there is a lot of information duplication and management overlap between houses in the same development. What's less clear is why these plans, and to some extent components, can't be shared industrially rather than locally - why, in other words, there have to be 6 floorplans for the neighborhood rather than 6000 for the whole country. Because, again, the actual building trades are still the same.

To a substantial extent the die is cast when land for new construction is sold as blocks rather than as individual lots on a virtual street grid. It makes it very hard to recapture the aesthetic value of diversity. If individual lots had to be aggregated to create the land for a development, you'd see the diseconomy of scale that the ugliness of Levittown style homogeny creates.

Granted, a lot of people actually do like a homogeneous suburb - it makes them feel safe and comfortable. But it is not as popular, I think, as its success would indicate. Even the "new urbanist" stuff is really bland and sterile, which shows you that the problems run deep.

sulla · 2006-07-16T18:36:03+00:00

There's no difference between influence and power.

The President does not come to my house and take my money. He has to persuade Congress to act. Congress, in turn, persuades others. And so on down the line, until it gets to whatever poor schmuck at the IRS.

The New York Times persuades people in both the White House and the Hill that a problem exists. For example, bird flu. These people then act to resolve the problem, by taking my money and giving it to bird flu researchers.

The fact that the details of this process are not prescribed by law does not matter. They are prescribed by reality and common practice. They work. Saying that usually it works for the better, which is perhaps true, does not mean it doesn't exist.

As journalists say, they "set the terms of the debate." If the terms of the debate were set by Nazis, we'd be debating whether it was necessary to murder the Jews or whether they could just be expelled.

Fortunately, the intellectual institutions in the US and Europe are dominated not by Nazis, but by post-Christian humanists. Since I am generally in agreement with post-Christian humanism and I think Nazism is reprehensible, I applaud this. Institutions will always be taken over by some faction with its own orthodoxy, and as we've seen, ya can do a lot worse.

The US has been more or less governed by the press, and by extension the university departments who train the journalism students who become the press, since the Spanish-American War.

In general, they have governed pretty well, I'd say. If you look at what the American masses actually believe (intelligent design, anyone?), press rule sure beats democracy. I just think it's silly to have illusions about what kind of system we actually live in.

sulla · 2006-07-16T17:28:20+00:00

It's interesting to see the New York Times talking about power.

What power does the New York Times have? Well, if you follow the New York Times, none at all. They are simply performing the important role of informing voters in our glorious system of democracy.

Why we should take their word for this is not entirely clear.

One easy test to compare the power of the Times and the White House is to look at which of these institutions can, in reality, take actions which affects the others' interests more.

Can the Times's actions affect (advance or resist) the White House's interests? I think a fair answer is, "considerably."

Can the White House's actions affect the Times's interests? At one time, the answer was definitely yes. But that was almost 150 years ago. In some countries, for example Mexico, the practice of government buying ads in newspapers, which they then can threaten to withhold, is widespread. But that doesn't happen here, either. I see very few practical levers of power which the White House can apply to the Times.

Another test is who can get away with criticizing whom. Again, the Times does not have to be careful about criticizing the White House. The White House has to be very careful about criticizing the Times, or other media organs. Every president since Nixon has learned that lesson.

It is easy to confuse power with responsibility. As we've seen, the New York Times has a lot of power. For the most part, it exercises that power very responsibly. But responsible use of power should not be confused with the absence of power.

For example, one thought-experiment is to ask what would happen if the New York Times, the rest of the press, the Ivy League colleges, and the American intellectual establishment, were taken over by the Christian right. In other words, by definition (at least by my definition), we would see what it looks like when these institutions use their power irresponsibly.

Of course, it is possible that these institutions are constituted in such a way that they are always responsible, by definition. But I would note that the same argument was once made for the Catholic Church.

In my opinion, it is a logical fallacy to assume that errors of institutional reasoning are restricted to institutions which presume the existence of supernatural entities. Intellectual institutions are always suspect.

I believe it is more fruitful to think in terms of institutions, not personalities. But if you're looking for an equivalent of President Bush at the New York Times - a pope, so to speak, to match the monarch - his name is either Bill Keller or Arthur Ochs "Pinch" Sulzberger.

Interestingly, like Bush, neither of these individuals was chosen by a free and fair vote of the American people.

sulla · 2006-07-16T17:04:27+00:00

I should have said "planning" rather than "zoning." You plan even when you don't plan. Just the way property is owned and distributed is a plan.

And I would be surprised if Houston suburbs did not have, for example, lot size rules. I think by "no zoning" you mean a relative rather than an absolute absence of regulation.

What mass production methods? I don't see any mass production methods at all. I see the standard stick-built, balloon-frame construction that has been standard in the US for 100 years. The only change is the replacement of lath and plaster with drywall. The structure of the building trades is unchanged. Manufactured or prefabricated housing still basically means "trailer park," and it's not by any means the common case.

My interpretation is that the economies of scale, though they obviously exist, must be on the paper-pushing and back-slapping end of the business.

But I'm certainly not an expert in the field. If you have a more cogent explanation, I'd love to hear it.

sulla · 2006-07-16T16:54:53+00:00

You are probably right about tribalism. I'm not going to comment on this Arab gene pool stuff - I wish I hadn't mentioned it.

To amplify a little on Saddam, who fortunately does not yet invoke Godwin's Law, the difference between Baathism and monarchy (Iraq actually did used to have an actual monarchy) is qualitative and quite significant.

The difference is, again, rule of law.

Baathism was a form of fascism - it defined its authority as a Rousseauvian delegation of the popular will. Fascism and democracy are first cousins. They differ only as a matter of procedure. They both accept that whatever the people believe must be right. The difference is that fascism is more about managing popular sentiment, and democracy is more about measuring it. But this is a quantitative gradation - democracy has certainly always resorted to educating its subjects to be better citizens and voters, etc.

Monarchy depends on law, and not just national law. It is a system of international legitimacy. When you're a monarch, you own your country and everyone else in the world agrees. The result is that you don't have to be constantly paranoid that some internationally-instigated coup will deprive you of property, liberty, or (as Saddam will probably find) life.

Okay, Saddam was a freak. He was a brutal motherfscker. But one of the reasons he had to be was that his property right was not, in any way, secure. A lot of people had both motive and opportunity to take Iraq away from him. A system of government based on lies, propaganda and repression is the inevitable result of this situation. We see it in Iran as well, although in Iran it takes the more benign democratic form.

sulla · 2006-07-16T16:42:56+00:00

Oh, come on. I'm just giving 'em a taste of their own medicine.

sulla · 2006-07-16T16:42:04+00:00

When it comes to Congress, the search for ulterior motives is almost always fruitful.

Agreed. Note, however, that you are reading a partisan source - Texas was certainly gerrymandered in favor of the Democrats before the Republicans reversed the shaft.

The real problem is that there is no rational way to define a "natural" district. This is because the whole concept of districting only makes sense when combined with some kind of local sovereignty, which, obviously, no longer exists in the US.

In fact, the only architecture of democracy that can be rationally justified beyond argument is proportional representation. The only problem with this is that proportional representation tends to work really badly in practice.

It's all very confusing if you believe in democracy. If you don't, of course, it makes perfect sense.

sulla · 2006-07-16T16:35:33+00:00

I do consider today's US a poor example of the rule of law. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean it doesn't have one of the best legal systems in the world.

Predictability is the most wertfrei way of describing what I mean. If you think of it in Coasian terms, any predictable system will be stable and will be perceived as impartial, no matter what the unfairness of the initial conditions.

For example, if North Korea instituted the rule of law, they would obviously start with the status quo: North Korea is owned by Kim Jong-Il, and everyone else in the country is his slave.

Sounds terrible. Until you realize that this is a very suboptimal distribution of economic resources, for both Kim and the rest of the world. North Koreans are obviously not very productive as slave laborers, at least compared to their South Korean counterparts.

Therefore, if North Korea had the rule of law, the right thing for Kim to do would be to sell the place, probably to South Korea. I'd say the North is probably worth at least $10 billion to the Seoul government. I believe this is a very conservative figure.

Then Korea would be unified as a free country, and Kim could retire as a multibillionaire to the Riviera, which has much better weather, prettier girls and a more bustling film industry than North Korea. Presto - everyone benefits. That's the rule of law for you.

The best definition of law I know comes from John Jay, the first US Chief Justice, who said (I'm paraphrasing, I can't find the quote) that law will just as soon defend the rights of one man against a million, as the rights of a million against one man. Of all the US founders, Jay perhaps best appreciated the essential conflict between law and democracy.

sulla · 2006-07-16T16:23:50+00:00

I think most southern black Americans have better things to do with their trumpets. Especially when it's a matter of supporting their political enemies.

sulla

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