On the opinion side of the fence, however, readers [of the Boston Globe] have a chronic complaint: The number of pro-gay marriage letters routinely outnumbers anti-gay marriage letters.
"Your editorial page is printing letters in a ratio of seven-to-one in favor of gay marriage according to my sampling," complained a local college professor. "Surely this is not a fair reflection of your readers' letters?"
Actually, the ratio of incoming letters is even more lopsided -- more like 40 to 1 in favor of gay marriage -- according to the two editors, Glenda Buell and Peter Accardi, who compile the daily letters for publication.
Impossible, you say? Well, I haven't eyeballed every letter myself, but my quick review convinces me that -- surprising as it is -- the Globe indeed gets many more letters supporting gay marriage than opposing it. And that leaves editors scrambling to find suitable "anti" letters to run along with the "pro" ones reflecting the Globe's editorial stance on the issue.
One of the favorite complaints of the blogosphere* is that the media substitutes a "balance" format -- in which both sides of an issue are given equal say -- for real objectivity. I agree that this is a problem. But it's important to remember that the source of the problem is not just lazy journalism. It's reinforced by the pressure that papers are under from their readers. Readers assume (in part from the example of past media coverage) that every issue has two sides with a roughly equal right to be heard. Thus, when they read a story emphasizing one point of view, they assume it must be because of bias. In most cases, a newspaper's credibility depends on being percieved to be neutral and objective in its news coverage. So the media has to placate its readers with a bit of viewpoint affirmative action, giving as much space to the climate change skeptic as to the hundreds of climatologists who disagree with him, in order to convince their readers that they aren't biased.
*I notice it more among liberals, but maybe I just don't read enough conservative blogs.
Stentor Danielson, 20:35,
We Have Charts
It's often assumed that environmentalism and support for labor are both central elements of modern liberalism. Certainly the far left, after the heated "red-green" battles of the later 20th century and the rise of the environmental justice movement, has more or less agreed that the two go together (if for no other reason than that "exploitation of workers" and "exploitation of nature" together provide more ammunition to use against capitalism). But in mainstream politics, you often see a more conflictual story, with environmentalism seen as a luxury of the well-off liberals. Al Gore wrestled with the issue in the 2000 race. I took notice of it again as the Democratic primary wound down, as John Edwards framed himself as being the champion of the classic labor agenda in contrast to John Kerry, who happened to be the most environmentalist of the candidates with a serious shot at winning. With Kerry's plan for raising fuel efficiency taking heat from auto workers, I thought it would be interesting to see how connected labor and environmental issues were in today's political climate.
I fired up Excel and grabbed rankings of U.S. Senators from last year. I used the optimal classification list as a measure of partisanship -- how close individuals stuck to the party line (the optimal classification procedure sorts Senators by their votes without any consideration of the content of the bills, just on who votes together). The League of Conservation Voters scorecard gave me a measure of how environmentally-friendly each Senator has been in practice. And I took the AFL-CIO rankings (pdf) as a measure of support for a classically pro-labor agenda.
The LCV scores correlate in a general way with partisanship, with clusters of Senators who are strong Democrats and strong environmentalists, and who are strong Republicans and poor environmentalists. In between, however, there is a fair amount of variation, with a noticeable number of people like Robert Byrd and John McCain who are very partisan but buck the party on environmental issues.
Support for labor, on the other hand, shows an extremely strong correlation with party loyalty.
Now let's put them together: I found this chart striking. There's almost no correlation between environmentalism and support for labor. It seems the conflict between the two is alive and well in the U.S. Senate.
Stentor Danielson, 20:11,
4.4.04
The Echo Chamber Is Beyond The Pale
Kos's callous comments on the deaths in Fallujah have spawned the predictable wave of outrage and guilt by association, and the predictable meta-commentary on how stupid the outrage cycle is. It got me thinking about whether this oft-noted phenomenon is behind the also oft-noted blogosphere echo chamber effect.
The more the focus is on "gotcha" beyond-the-pale quotes, the less you're able to read people with differing viewpoints. Part of it is a side effect of the outrage cycle -- to properly express outrage, you have to dramatically de-link the blogger in question and promise never to read him or her again. Part of it is social pressure -- you wouldn't want the Kerry campaign (link via Pandagon) or anyone else to think that, by linking and reading a certain blog, you endorse everything it says. And part of it is personal. If you focus on how outrageous and unacceptable the other side's comments are, you're less likely to see reading them as worthwhile. And if you do read them, you go into it with an intention of proving what horrible people they are rather than of engaging with their view (either to give it consideration or to disprove it). The echo chamber, in turn, makes you less sympathetic to others by separating you from them, increasing the chances that you'll say something that can be taken as beyond the pale.
Some Hegemonic Truth-Claims About The Popularity Of Relativism
Kevin Drum responds to a reader who asks why liberals get so worked up bashing the religious right, when the religious right is pretty peripheral. Drum's answer, which I broadly agree with, is that the religious right actually does wield quite a bit of power -- though I think we do tend to over-focus on the real wingnuts like Jerry Falwell and Rev. Phelps, thus hurting our ability to address the larger group of reasonable religious conservatives.
Drum's post brought up a parallel question in my mind -- why do conservatives spend so much time bashing postmodern relativism? From my perspective, relativists aren't much of a voting bloc. Even people who claim to be relativists often turn out to be realists in their practical political views. While Bush appointed Leon Kass to chair the bioethics council, I can't imagine John Kerry asking Michael Dear for input on urban planning.
My suspicion is that 1) the disproportionate number of relativists in academia, an environment familiar to people who write social/political criticism, skews people's perceptions of how many relativists are out there*, and 2) it's easier to argue against relativistic rationales for leftist political programs that can be and are supported on realist grounds.
*This availability bias probably also explains why so many liberal bloggers spend so much time criticizing libertarians -- libertarianism (as distinct from small-government conservatism, which has similar outcomes with a different philosophical grounding) may not be big in the real world, but there are loads of libertarian bloggers.
Stentor Danielson, 13:58,
Evolving A Belief In Evolution
Joe Carter has a coupleposts up recapping an argument by Alvin Plantinga (though anticipated, in a moment of self-doubt, by Darwin) that basically says that if our brains had evolved by purely natural processes, we couldn't trust them to tell us the truth about evolution. (I'm posting this now based just on Carter's explanation because if I wait to read Plantinga's full argument, I'll never get around to it.) The outline of the argument is:
1. If (naturalistic) evolution is true, then our cognitive faculties will have resulted from blind mechanisms like natural selection, working on sources of genetic variation such as random genetic mutation. 2. Assuming the truth of #1, we find that the ultimate purpose or function of our cognitive faculties, if they even have a purpose or function, will be survival - of individual, species, gene, or genotype. 3. If #1 and #2 are true then it is unlikely that our cognitive faculties have the production of true beliefs as a function. 4. If production of true beliefs is not a function of our cognitive faculties, we have no reason to trust that we can form true beliefs. 5. Therefore, we cannot claim that any belief, including a belief in the theory of macroevolution, is true.
The obvious response (interestingly similar to the defense of pragmatism as a philosophical methodology, given that pragmatism's heyday was a time when evolutionary biology was the model science) is that true beliefs have a survival value. Carter uses a story about Zed, the first Homo sapiens, to show how beliefs can have survival value without being true:
In order to survive, Zed needs to act in certain ways in order to survive. For example, he needs to avoid the saber tooth tiger taking a bite out of his big brain. We’ll call this behavior B for “tiger avoidance behavior.” Now B could be produced by Zed’s desire not to get eaten plus the true belief that B will increase his chances of not having his brain eaten.
The problem is that B could be produced by false beliefs as well. Perhaps Zed likes the idea of being eaten and wants to run toward the tiger. But Zed always confuses running toward with running away from tigers. His false belief actually aids his survival. Therefore it is possible that beliefs could have a survival advantage and yet be false.
The problem here is that we're dealing with specific individual beliefs. In such a case, it's easy to think of alternate beliefs that could produce action just as beneficial. However, that's not how the human brain works. What we have evolved is not beliefs but a belief-producing apparatus. When considering belief-producing apparatuses, it becomes less likely that they can consistently produce beneficial outcomes by a mechanism other than determining the truth about the situation. Our apparatus isn't perfect -- see Kahneman and Tversky's work on biases and heuristics -- but it's hardly surprising that evolution would be a work in progress. But it is well-developed enough that we can turn it back on itself, testing and refining our use of it so that we can get better results.
Stentor Danielson, 01:28,
A report released by a House committee on Thursday describes how the Bush administration worked with the United States chemical industry to undermine a European plan that would require all manufacturers to test industrial chemicals for their effect on public health before they were sold in Europe.
The administration had said publicly that the proposal last year would threaten the $20 billion in chemicals that the United States exports to Europe each year because the cost of testing would be prohibitive. Five years in the making, the proposal, which was revised and is still under consideration, would shift the burden to prove the safety of chemicals onto manufacturers instead of governments.
The lobbying efforts of the United States appear to have succeeded. The European Union revised the proposal, known as Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals, or Reach.
Shifting the burden indeed. While I'm skeptical of demands for total proof of safety (often you can't know all the details of how a product works without trying it out in the real world), I'm a bit dismayed that chemical companies operating in Europe have been getting what amounts to a huge subsidy by being able to push the public health costs and risks of their products onto the public. Take this as yet more proof that the Bush administration (as well as European governments) don't believe in the free market, since they're so intent on letting companies profit from externalities.
And speaking of the Bush administration trying to cut special deals for companies, it looks like some steps are being made in upholding the Montreal Protocol's methyl bromide ban (in the same sense that driving from Worcester to Springfield is a step in going to San Fransisco):
The United States and 10 other nations agreed yesterday to reduce their requests for exemptions to a ban on methyl bromide, one of the last remaining ozone-destroying compounds being produced and used extensively in wealthy countries.
... The Bush administration had sought exemptions that would have increased use in 2005 to nearly 40 percent of 1991 levels. They agreed to a limit of 35 percent, with any amount above 30 percent coming from existing stockpiles and not new production.
This is what happens when I forget to read my Google News Alerts for a few days. Three more stories of fire-related interest:
We have the first really major fire of what looks to be a bad fire season in the western US.
An interesting story about local fire planning bringing landowners' values in.
And in an article written with a clear slant, it seems a popular fire retardant (though not used on wildfires so far as I know) could be this generation's PCBs.
Stentor Danielson, 16:54,
So Up My Dissertation Alley It's Not Even Funny
It looks like landscaping for fire safety was vindicated in last year's California fires:
... according to the [Los Angeles] Times analysis — which covered homes destroyed by the deadliest of the blazes, San Diego County's Cedar fire — houses built since 1990 were far less likely to burn than those constructed in any previous decade. Houses built during the 1990s were damaged or destroyed at less than half the rate of houses built earlier. Houses constructed during the current decade were even less likely to have been harmed.
... Vegetation was the largest single factor in whether a house burned. Almost nine of 10 houses destroyed outside San Diego city limits had flammable vegetation within 30 feet, and two-thirds had flammable vegetation within 10 feet, according to county field inspections of houses where the vegetation line before the fire could be determined. (City inspectors did not note the presence of vegetation.)
... Trying to make rebuilding as easy as possible, the county has waived permit fees and expedited reviews. Officials have also let older houses be rebuilt with smaller property-line setbacks than would be required under current zoning codes.
"It met standards in the 1950s, and just because there was a fire, it didn't seem fair to hold them to today's standards," said Scott Gilmore, San Diego County planning department permit process coordinator.
It's encouraging that land management decisions like tile roofs and clearing defensible space can make such an impact on fire. But at the same time, it's clear that the possibility of little actions like this doesn't alter the fact that fire management is still a collective action problem, as the boundaries of a house's defensible space can overreach property boundaries.
I have trouble sympathizing with the people who resist fireproof landscaping because it doesn't give them the kind of rustic beauty they wanted. There's an air of privilege to it -- with my millions of dollars, I should be able to have exactly the landscaping I want. On a tough-love policy level, if certain choices become off the table, it could create a disincentive for the kind of sprawl that creates these intermix fire problems in the first place (since that rustic beauty is what draws many people to build here in the first place).
I also have trouble accepting Gilmore's grandfather clause idea. If the standards are necessary for fire protection, then it makes no sense to allow people to put themselves and others back in danger. Indeed, disaster relief aid should be deliberately aimed at pushing people to meet the standards, and helping those who can't afford the best construction to get there, rather than relaxing things. It's surprising how quickly alertness and concern can evaporate after the fire is out.
Stentor Danielson, 16:51,
Resentment of Indian success, and particularly of the wealth generated by a few tribal casinos, has fueled the rise of a number of grass-roots anti-sovereignty groups across the country. But so far none of these groups, from Washington state to Oklahoma to Upstate New York and Connecticut, has achieved much success at the ballot box.
... In New York state, the Upstate Citizens for Equality in the Oneida and Seneca-Cayuga territories has protested land claims by Nations of the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) Confederacy, and has picketed a chain of gas stations and convenience stores owned by the Oneida Indian Nation. A candidate backed by the group gave a scare to incumbent U.S. Rep. Sherwood L. Boehlert, R-23rd District, in the 2000 Republican primary, but his independent campaign fizzled in the general election. In 2002, another candidate sympathetic to the group withdrew before the voting for lack of support, and Boehlert was re-elected with 74 percent of the vote.
... In the analysis of Oklahoma’s [Republican congressman Tom] Cole, however, voters have been more impressed by the jobs and economic growth produced by tribal governments, a prosperity, he emphasizes, that coincided with their exercise of their sovereign powers.
"These jobs aren’t going to be exported to China," he said. "These profits aren’t going to be sent out of the area. This is where our headquarters are."
The article comes from a sympathetic source, but it's an interesting bit of information. It's easy to fixate on the conflict between Native Americans and their non-Native neighbors (particularly when the neighbors are poor and feel vulnerable, or employ racial or nationalist rhetoric -- it's interesting that some of the groups share the name "One Nation" with the right-wing Australian party). But it seems that most non-Natives aren't so upset, and may in fact feel solidarity with the Natives on economic grounds.
Stentor Danielson, 16:39,
You Learn Something New Every Day
Apparently, for environmental impact reasons, they sometimes resort to helicopter logging. There's a better picture here, although according to the first site, the helicopter on the second site isn't doing it right -- they should have the logs strung end-to-end so that they don't have to lift them all at once.
Stentor Danielson, 16:15,
Diminishing Returns Or Aggravation?
One of the basic assumptions made in utilitarian theory is diminishing returns -- the plausible idea that the more you have, the more you need to get to increase your wellbeing by the same amount, often stated as "getting a dollar increases my happiness by more than the same dollar would increase Bill Gates's happiness." The appeal of this idea is that it justifies egalitarian wealth distribution without adding any sort of exogenous equity criterion to the basic utility maximization rule.
I wonder if it would make sense to say that there's a similar principle of diminishing returns for burdens as well. The thought came up in the context of siting noxious facilities. If I'm already exposed to the risk from a nuclear waste facility, would it hurt me less to have a second waste facility installed than it would hurt you to have the first waste facility built in your pristine environment? The same principle that encourages equity in distributing benefits would then encourage concentration in burdens.
One might argue that burdens do not necessarily experience diminishing returns. They may in fact aggravate each other, so that the effect of living next to two hazardous facilities is more than double that of living next to one. This effect may be created in part by thresholds. Consider having a certain amount of cutting done to your wrist. I'd rather have a hundred papercuts spaced out over time than one giant gash. The papercuts are individually small enough that they heal -- the system takes a small burden and turns it into a zero burden. On the other hand, the gash may very well overload the healing system and kill me. In this sort of case, if you can distribute the burdens widely, you can effectively decrease the total.
The same might also be said of benefits, though. Say the only use I have for money is to buy a $1 hamburger. If you give me a penny, you might as well have not given me anything -- indeed, the same goes for any amount up to $.99. So if you have a dollar to distribute among 100 such people, it makes utilitarian sense to do some triage and give it all to one person so that they can get a hamburger, rather than distribute it equally and have nobody get anything.
Stentor Danielson, 13:41,
1.4.04
We've Got Cartoon
For some reason I really liked the idea of drawing Kerry popping out from behind a gas pump. On another note, I took some artistic license to emphasize the polluting nature of the automobile. If her/his car is running while she fills the tank, (s)he's probably got more immediate things to worry about than global warming.
You can also read my commentary, "This Article Is Beyond The Pale," and look at its comic. I didn't think it was that great, but I got complimented on it today by a former classmate.
Stentor Danielson, 16:59,
Sacre Bleu!
Speaking of things that annoy me (I'm on a pet peeve kick this week): I hear all the time about how one of the Republican slams on Kerry is that he looks French. Perhaps I've just chosen to read conservative blogs that are too smart, but I have yet to see a Republican bring up the French thing. Can anyone point me to an example? Or is this just some sort of urban legend arising out of liberals' insecurity over their own perceptions of Kerry's Frenchness?
Stentor Danielson, 00:46,
31.3.04
A Typology Of Rationales
For my dissertation, I'm interested in how collective action to manage the environment is coordinated. Thinking about it, it seems that there are three major rationales for action (within the range of possible choices of action) -- incentives, authority, and understanding -- each of which has two sub-types. Each type suggests different means for coordinating action among people.
Incentives are situations that make it in a person's interest (given their not-necessarily-selfish goals and desires) to do a certain thing. They come in two varieties -- sanctions (such as legal punishments) and rewards (such as economic incentives). By altering another person's incentives, one can bring that person's conduct in line with one's plan. This can be done by one scheming mastermind, or by a central authority. In certain cases the central authority can (using a second-order set of incentives, or authority or understanding) set ground rules under which individual actors wind up producing a collectively beneficial pattern of incentives -- as in the classical view of the market.
Authority is the case of a course of action being accepted by a person on the say-so of another. This other can gain legitimacy either procedurally (as in the case of a democratically elected leader) or through competence (as in the case of a trusted expert). The source of collective coordination here is simple -- if a large group considers the same person's pronouncements to be authoritative, their actions in response will be consonant.
Understanding is when a person accepts a course of action as rationally justified -- in a sense, accepting it on one's own authority. Understanding can be arrived at individually, or collectively through discussion and argumentation with others. For purely individual understanding to create coordinated action, the individual methodologies of inquiry of the people involved must be the same, a condition often promoted through second-order uses of the other types of action coordination (e.g., through instilling the same moral system or the same concept of the scientific method in all members of the group). Collective understanding by its nature creates coordinated action, because achieving collective understanding means coming to an agreement about what should be done.
Stentor Danielson, 17:23,
Comedy Of The Commons
It's generally assumed that, in an open-access resource situation (i.e., nonprivate property and no coordination among users), the profit motive will lead to unsustainable overexploitation (the Tragedy of the Commons). But Murphy's Law dictates that when you want to encourage unsustainable overexploitation, people will manage the resource sustainably (we could call this the Comedy of the Commons). As an example I offer the case of rabbits in Australia: apparently the bounty placed on rabbits (in order to encourage people to hunt them into extinction because they'd become such a pest) led to people leaving a few animals alive in each warren, so that they'd breed and produce more rabbits which could be killed and sold to the government. The Commedy of the Commons works in this case, I imagine, because 1) you only need to leave a few rabbits behind -- since they breed like you-know-what, and thus conservation isn't expensive, and 2) there are economies of scale to rabbit hunting -- it's more cost-effective to go after big warrens than to mop up the few rabbits left behind by someone else.
Stentor Danielson, 00:33,
30.3.04
Glowing Capitol
This article on the corrupt mercury standards being prepared by the EPA doesn't say much that's new, but it does have a really ominous picture.
Stentor Danielson, 23:01,
Make The Bed, Take Out The Garbage, Get Married
It's amazing to me how the defenders of the "marriage is for procreation" line disparage marriage. Take this quote, from Shelby Steele (cited in Andrew Sullivan's rebuttal of Steele's argument):
Across time and cultures, marriage has been a heterosexual institution grounded in the procreative function and the responsibilities of parenthood--this more than in either love or adult fulfillment. Marriage is simply the arrangement by which humans perpetuate the species, whether or not they find fulfillment in it.
By Steele's account, marriage is a joyless chore that fertile heterosexuals undertake in order to perpetuate the species. If that's so, no wonder people are less and less inclined to get married.
Then again, there is something very traditional in this account of marriage. For centuries marriages were economic and political institutions, arranged on the basis of securing a livelihood and the aid of a set of in-laws. Procreation is past ages' Social Security. These factors didn't leave a lot of room for chosing based on who you would enjoy spending your life with.
Stentor Danielson, 20:58,
debitage 
Bias Vs. Balance
