Brian Weatherson wonders why profs may push voting in general but not particular candidates:
My university (Rutgers) is fairly actively encouraging students to register to vote. And I've occasionally done a bit to help, hosting students who do a spiel on voter registration and personally encouraging students to vote. Now I think this is all a good thing. Voting is a good thing, and a healthy democracy requires a decent turnout of voters, so doing our little bit to help democracy is being on the side of the good. ...
But it seems it would be seriously wrong for either Rutgers, or for me, to use our positions of authority to promote voting for Obama. And I think this isn't a particularly controversial position. But it's a little hard to say just exactly why it's OK for Rutgers (and me) to do what we're doing, and not do what we're not doing. ...
It's worth noting that there's a degree of bad faith in all of this. We don't think that we should be advocating Obama's election. But we all know that encouraging more college students to vote will, on net, boost Obama's vote totals. ...
The "strategic" model of terrorism ... posits that people resort to terrorism ... when they believe the political gains of terrorism minus the political costs are greater than if they engaged in some other, more peaceful form of protest. ... Max Abrahms ... argues that ... seven tendencies are seen in terrorist organizations all over the world ... [that] directly contradict the theory that terrorists are political maximizers ... Abrahms has an alternative model to explain all this: People turn to terrorism for social solidarity. He theorizes that people join terrorist organizations worldwide in order to be part of a community, much like the reason inner-city youths join gangs in the United States.
The evidence supports this. Individual terrorists often have no prior involvement with a group's political agenda, and often join multiple terrorist groups with incompatible platforms. Individuals who join terrorist groups are frequently not oppressed in any way, and often can't describe the political goals of their organizations. People who join terrorist groups most often have friends or relatives who are members of the group, and the great majority of terrorist are socially isolated: unmarried young men or widowed women who weren't working prior to joining.
A friend works for a DC-area medical non-profit, and feels political harassment creates a hostile work environment:
I was filing in the hallway while some managers talked about the VP debate. One complained about Palin's wink, and said she would not be a good president. I chimed in saying I only watched the second half but thought the winking was cute and that I like capable women in leadership. One said "You can't vote, right?" I said I was a green card holder. "Oh good, we wouldn't want you to vote." Shortly after, my peers and managers at the weekly work social were told that I am a supporter of Republicans and that they are glad I cannot vote as I would vote for a stupid, uneducated woman because she is cute and winks.
Once upon a time most any work harassment was fair game - if you didn't like it you were supposed to find another job. Then we made rules against harassing people for a few things, like gender, race or religion. But apparently harassing people at work for their politics is still fair game. Compared to the current regime, I can better appreciate either the previous anything-goes regime, or an always-nice regime where no one may be harassed at work for any non-work-related issue. But what is the point allowing some but not other kinds of non-work-related harassment at work?
In 2004 ... die-hards in both parties felt that the choice between George W. Bush and John F. Kerry was much sharper on a host of issues than in any presidential contest going back to 1984. But when political scientist Marc J. Hetherington quizzed moderates, he found to his surprise that he got the opposite answer. ... If anything, moderates in 2004 saw the Republican and Democratic nominees as being more alike than in any election since 1988. The schism between moderates and partisans has intensified in this election ...
Hetherington believes that much of the loyalists' perception of a yawning divide has little to do with issues. Rather, he said, what has happened in recent years is that partisans have come to identify with their parties in much the manner that sports fans identify with their teams. The strong views they feel on many issues do not drive their party affiliation; it is their party affiliation that drives their strong views.
In the spy business a "mole" pretends to work for A, but really works for B. The mole may usually do very little for B, and B may avoid acting visibly on any info the mole passes on. The idea is to move the mole up the A hierarchy, and to wait for rare high leverage situations.
Unfortunately something similar seems to hold for pundits, columnists, etc. Before becoming a pundit someone may spend a long career as a trustworthy academic or journalist, giving careful measured evaluations of the small issues before them. As a pundit they may even usually give thoughtful reasoned commentary on issues of moderate importance.
But every four years, when a major election is at stake, or when a big crisis appears, styles change. In their world folks mutter, "pull out all the stops, this is really important." They may retain the outward appearance of keeping to their previous standards, but in fact they start to say whatever it takes to push "their side."
Just as moles mean we can rely on our spies least when we need them most, pushy election pundits also imply we can rely on our pundits least when we need them most. (This key mole insight came from a talk by Robert Axelrod.)
In the face of life's inconvenient facts - alcoholism, drug addiction, depression and craziness, to name a few - pseudoscientific medical concepts allow us to cast difficult moral problems as simple factual questions, readily soluble in the lab and in the hospital. Gary Greenberg's The Noble Lie is an impressive and fascinating round-up of such pseudoscientific notions and the ways in which they have come to count as genuine illnesses.
For instance, Greenberg explains how alcoholism's transition from vice to disease was a welcome one, especially following Prohibition. It was long viewed as an allergy, though the specific allergen persistently failed to appear. Even today, neither its disease-nature nor any possible cures have manifested themselves. Regardless, people are happy to accept the idea that addiction is a medical illness, perhaps, Greenberg suggests, because of our ambivalence towards the role of pleasure and our uncertainties about free will and self-determination. "With the disease model we have an answer," he writes, "one that has the imprimatur of science; addiction isn't wrong, it's sick."
Food isn't about Nutrition
Clothes aren't about Comfort
Bedrooms aren't about Sleep
Marriage isn't about Romance
Talk isn't about Info
Laughter isn't about Jokes
Charity isn't about Helping
Church isn't about God
Art isn't about Insight
Medicine isn't about Health
Consulting isn't about Advice
School isn't about Learning
Research isn't about Progress
Politics isn't about Policy
The above summarizes much of my contrarian world view. (What else should go on this list?) When I say "X is not about Y," I mean that while Y is the function commonly said to drive most X behavior, in fact some other function Z drives X behavior more. I won't support all these claims here; for today, let's just talk politics.
High school students are easily engaged to elect class presidents, even though they have little idea what if any policies a class president might influence. Instead such elections are usually described as "popularity contests." That is, theses elections are about which school social factions are to have higher social status. If a jock wins, jocks have higher status. If your girlfriend's brother wins, you have higher status, etc. And the fact that you have a vote says that others should take you into account when forming coalitions - you are somebody.
High voter turnout need not be good - not only is voting costly, but ignorant voters can make better candidates less likely to win. Many have noted this last possibility, but I couldn't find any formal models (i.e., of abstention by varying-info-quality voters) - so I made my own. My results depend on how unequally distributed is voter info; highly unequal info means only a handful should vote, while relatively equal info means most everyone should vote (ignoring voting costs):
Let N voters simultaneously choose to abstain or vote for one of two apriori-equal candidates, based only on which action is more likely to elect the "best" candidate. Each voter gets an independent private binary signal with a chance (1+q)/2 of accurately marking the best candidate. Assume that if we rank voters by signal quality q (so the best voter has rank = 1, the next has rank = 2, etc.), we'll find quality and rank are related by a power law, q = q1*rank^-power. (Voter signal qualities q>0 are common knowledge.)
The following table shows how the number who do not abstain varies with info-quality power, for N = 10,000 voters, q1=0.1, and for two important cases. In case 1, everyone can choose freely to vote or abstain. In case 2, each voter chooses if to abstain, assuming no other voter abstains.
Power
2
1.9
1.8
1.7
1.6
1.5
1.4
1.3
1.2
1.1
1
0.95
0.9
0.85
0.8
0.75
0.7
0.65
0.6
0.55
0.5
0.45
Case 1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
2
2
2
3
3
4
5
6
8
13
24
78
10000
10000
Case 2
109
135
171
221
290
389
532
739
1037
1460
2042
2404
2820
3297
3842
4472
5205
6073
7124
8437
10000
10000
The table shows that for powers above one less than 20% should vote, even if everyone else votes. And if everyone does what they should, for powers above 1/2, almost no one votes, while for powers below 1/2 everyone votes. (This last result holds for any N and q1.)
Similar results probably hold for correlated and non-binary signals. I'm not sure how we could measure voter info inequality, but I'd give at least two to one odds the effective power is above 1/2, meaning few should vote. Of course people vote not just to elect the best candidates overall, but to elect folks good for them personally, even when that hurts others. But this isn't something we should celebrate or encourage, and most voters see themselves as instead voting to improve society overall.
Large voter turnouts seem to me better understood as overconfidence leading to disagreement - we each think we just know better than others what is good for society. But too few of us can be right on this for most of us to be (epistemically) rational here. So I celebrate the noble abstainers, those willing to admit by staying home that their vote would probably just make things worse - we could use a lot more such folks.
Added 16Sep: Any model with independent signals must either have large electorates get very certain to make the right choice, or must have voter signals get very weak with high rank. A correlated signals model would be more realistic here.
Caplan says that people tend to be irrational on questions where there are no direct material costs of being wrong. But there are no direct material costs to Caplan of being wrong on most if not all of the questions he addresses in this book.
I take this possibility seriously. In all honesty, my situation is precisely the kind in which I claim that people's attachment to rationality is weakest. ... Rather than making a mostly futile effort to convince you of my own cognitive virtues, I prefer to direct your attention inwards. Do your best to put your feelings and ideological commitments aside, and judge my claims on their own merits. ... When dealing with abstract, "impractical" areas like politics and economics, it is unfair to infer that a viewpoint is wrong just because it is unpopular. The best way to evaluate contrarian arguments, once again, is to put your feelings and ideological commitments aside and actually listen. ...
A final interesting possibility is that I am basically right but fail to temper my judgments with due modesty. ... Pleas for greater modesty should be viewed with suspicion on both strategic and intrinsic grounds. Strategically, the problem with modesty is that we live in a culture of energetic self-promotion. In this environment, humility is the equivalent of unilateral disarmament. ... More fundamentally, though, neither I nor any other economist I know claims to be infallible or anything close. All I claim is that on average, economists' judgments about economic policy are a lot more trustworthy than the public's. ... Remember that limited expertise is better than none at all.
Alas Bryan stumbles twice here. First, if we are, as he says, much more irrational on no-direct-material-cost questions, the reasonable response is to have much lower confidence in our opinions on those topics, relative to other topics. Bryan says he is not claiming to be infallible and that experts are better than amateurs, but those are beside the point. The issue is simple: does Bryan in fact have much lower confidence in his political opinions, vs. his other opinions? If so, he is consistent; if not, not.
Second, Bryan seems to mistakenly conclude that one is more justified in relying on one's own direct evaluation of arguments, relative to the evaluations of others, on topics where people tend to be more irrational. But that irrational tendency will afflict both his evaluation and others' evaluations; it doesn't obviously afflict others' more than his. The reason to weigh the evaluations of others, and not just focus entirely on your own, is that you might make mistakes. That reason surely remains as relevant on topics where most everyone makes big mistakes.
When ... in response to the finding that the teaching of creationism in public schools was unconstitutional, the producers of creation science tried to argue that young earth creationism was consistent with the geological and paleontological evidence, ... their arguments were easily refuted. ... That is a good enough reason not to teach it to schoolchildren. ..
I agree with Philip Kitcher that the response of evolutionists to creation science and intelligent design should not be to rule them out as "not science." He argues that the objection should rather be that they are bad science, or dead science: scientific claims that have been decisively refuted by the evidence. ... However, the claim that ID is bad science or dead science may depend ... on the assumption that divine intervention in the natural order is not a serious possibility. ...
So far as I can see, the only way to make no assumptions of a religious nature would be to admit that the empirical evidence may suggest different conclusions depending on what religious belief one starts with, and that the evidence does not by itself settle which of those beliefs is correct, even though there are other religious beliefs, such as the literal truth of Genesis, that are easily refuted by the evidence. I do not see much hope that such an approach could be adopted, but it would combine intellectual responsibility with respect for the Establishment Clause. ...
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