tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-214952062024-03-13T07:06:43.665-04:00Source-Filternoahpoahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00859749380417518443noreply@blogger.comBlogger45125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21495206.post-60306442606745274202008-05-27T13:45:00.003-04:002008-05-27T13:57:21.634-04:00The only winning move......is to wordpress.com, it turns out. <a href="http://theonlywinningmove.blogspot.com/">Josh</a> launched <a href="http://jwherring.com/main">his own personal website</a> and <a href="http://jwherring.com/TOWM">hosts his blog there</a>, too, which provided for me the impetus to move sourcefilter over to wordpress.com. This is it for sourcefilter.blogspot.com. All the old posts have been imported to wordpress, and that's where I'll be posting for now. Readers, kindly change your links (i.e., Josh, change your link) to keep the blogosphere orderly. The new location is <a href="http://sourcefilter.wordpress.com">sourcefilter.wordpress.com</a>.Noah Motionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00150446498549219747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21495206.post-4751417217548335352008-05-20T20:35:00.002-04:002008-05-20T20:44:58.858-04:00Left-Leaning LibertarianismShort (and derivative) post today, but, hey, short (derivative) posts are better than no posts at all (under the questionable assumption that I am, in fact, a blogger).<br /><br />Anyway, <a href="http://theonlywinningmove.blogspot.com/">Josh</a> <a href="http://theonlywinningmove.blogspot.com/2008/05/barr-hot-item.html">points</a> to <a href="http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OGUyZTllM2IyY2RmZGNhNzc1NTA4ZWQxNzE4Mzc4NTY=">some</a> <a href="http://townhall.com/Columnists/BillSteigerwald/2008/05/19/bob_barr_leaps_in_as_a_libertarian?page=1">hints</a> that Bob Barr will be the Libertarian Party presidential candidate, which reminded me of <a href="http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2008/05/14/is-bob-barr-a-libertarian-certainly-not-on-trade/">a recent Cato-at-liberty post</a> on how non-libertarian Bob Barr was as a representative.Noah Motionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00150446498549219747noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21495206.post-60809952013959754392008-05-16T16:43:00.005-04:002008-05-16T20:00:53.771-04:00I'm back?Okay, so the last post before this is more than a year old. I've been meaning to get back to blogging, but, clearly, haven't done so (until now). Why now? Two reasons:<br /><br />1. <a href="http://theonlywinningmove.blogspot.com/">Josh</a> linked to this blog <a href="http://theonlywinningmove.blogspot.com/2008/05/presidents-questions.html">today</a>, and on the off chance that he has readers that follow that link, I wanted my blog to be less pathetic than a year old post about which serenity character I am most like would suggest it is.<br /><br />2. I've gotten back into the habit of reading <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/">Pharyngula</a>, and there was a silly thing written there <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/05/i_hear_wedding_bells.php">today</a>.<br /><br />Specifically, PZ Myers wrote, in support of a new law in California making gay marriage legal, that "if you want to do something more substantive, promote equal rights legislation in your state, so that all 50 states someday offer this basic privilege to everyone."<br /><br />The silliness resides in the idea that government can (and should) be offering a 'basic privilege' to everyone.<br /><br />Privilege, by <a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=privilege">definition</a>, does not get offered to everyone. This may simply be a semantic nit to pick, but it caught my attention because it is typical of left-leaning gay marriage advocates to discuss gay marriage in terms of rights, not privileges.<br /><br />In any case, the government should only be in the marriage business insofar as marriage is a form of contract and the legal system may be called upon to protect one or another party's property interests. It is clear to me that pairs of gay adults, like pairs of any adults, should be allowed to enter into any contract, as long as they do so by choice.<br /><br />That's all for now. I hope to blog more regularly in the (near) future, though it's almost certain I won't be doing so as prolifically as Josh has been lately.Noah Motionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00150446498549219747noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21495206.post-8571699802980233022007-04-03T21:21:00.000-04:002007-04-03T21:43:23.216-04:00It's been a while, but this is very, very important.I should be working on a presentation I have to give in a week to a potentially very tough crowd, but instead, I'm following <a href="http://theonlywinningmove.blogspot.com/2007/04/which-serenity-character-are-you.html">Josh's lead</a> and taking the '<a href="http://quizfarm.com/test.php?q_id=79387">Which Serenity Character Are You</a>?' quiz (at least, I think it's the same quiz Josh took - his results didn't show up as they should have when I looked, and there was no link, so I had to resort to Google). Anyway, my results are, um, odd (and the bar graphs don't look good in preview, so they probably won't look good in the final post):<br /><br />You scored as The Operative.<br /><br />You are dedicated to your job and very good at what you do. You've done some very bad things, but they had to be done. You don't expect to go to heaven, but that is a sacrifice you've made for a better future for all.<br /><br /><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="300"><tbody><tr><td><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="300"><tbody><tr><td><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;" >The Operative</span></p></td><td><table bgcolor="#dddddd" border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="75"><tbody><tr><td><br /></td></tr></tbody></table></td><td><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;" >75%</span></td></tr><tr><td><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;" >Zoe Alleyne Washburne</span></p></td><td><table bgcolor="#dddddd" border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="63"><tbody><tr><td><br /></td></tr></tbody></table></td><td><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;" >63%</span></td></tr><tr><td><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;" >Hoban 'Wash' Washburne</span></p></td><td><table bgcolor="#dddddd" border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="56"><tbody><tr><td><br /></td></tr></tbody></table></td><td><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;" >56%</span></td></tr><tr><td><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;" >River Tam</span></p></td><td><table bgcolor="#dddddd" border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="50"><tbody><tr><td><br /></td></tr></tbody></table></td><td><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;" >50%</span></td></tr><tr><td><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;" >Simon Tam</span></p></td><td><table bgcolor="#dddddd" border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="50"><tbody><tr><td><br /></td></tr></tbody></table></td><td><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;" >50%</span></td></tr><tr><td><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;" >Capt. Mal Reynolds</span></p></td><td><table bgcolor="#dddddd" border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="44"><tbody><tr><td><br /></td></tr></tbody></table></td><td><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;" >44%</span></td></tr><tr><td><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;" >Kaylee (Kaywinnet Lee) Frye</span></p></td><td><table bgcolor="#dddddd" border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="44"><tbody><tr><td><br /></td></tr></tbody></table></td><td><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;" >44%</span></td></tr><tr><td><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;" >Jayne Cobb</span></p></td><td><table bgcolor="#dddddd" border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="44"><tbody><tr><td><br /></td></tr></tbody></table></td><td><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;" >44%</span></td></tr><tr><td><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;" >Inara Serra</span></p></td><td><table bgcolor="#dddddd" border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="31"><tbody><tr><td><br /></td></tr></tbody></table></td><td><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;" >31%</span></td></tr><tr><td><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;" >Shepherd Derrial Book</span></p></td><td><table bgcolor="#dddddd" border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="31"><tbody><tr><td><br /></td></tr></tbody></table></td><td><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;" >31%</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><a href="http://quizfarm.com/test.php?q_id=79387">Which Serenity character are you?</a><br /><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;" >created with <a href="http://quizfarm.com/">QuizFarm.com</a></span></td></tr></tbody></table><br />All in all, it looks good. Unlike Josh, neither 'A Reaver' nor 'Alliance' appear on my list at all, but then again, I'm apparently most like the completely amoral Operative (with a close second for Zoe!).<br /><br />Good fun, and it's given me a reason to revive my blog (at least in the short term).<br /><br /><b>Update</b>: My wife's results (this says something about our family, I'm sure, but who knows what exactly):<br /><br /><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="300"><tbody><tr><td><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="300"><tbody><tr><td><p><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;">The Operative</span></p></td><td><table bgcolor="#dddddd" border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="75"><tbody><tr><td><br /></td></tr></tbody></table></td><td><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;">75%</span></td></tr><tr><td><p><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;">Capt. Mal Reynolds</span></p></td><td><table bgcolor="#dddddd" border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="63"><tbody><tr><td><br /></td></tr></tbody></table></td><td><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;">63%</span></td></tr><tr><td><p><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;">Simon Tam</span></p></td><td><table bgcolor="#dddddd" border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="63"><tbody><tr><td><br /></td></tr></tbody></table></td><td><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;">63%</span></td></tr><tr><td><p><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;">Kaylee (Kaywinnet Lee) Frye</span></p></td><td><table bgcolor="#dddddd" border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="63"><tbody><tr><td><br /></td></tr></tbody></table></td><td><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;">63%</span></td></tr><tr><td><p><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;">Shepherd Derrial Book</span></p></td><td><table bgcolor="#dddddd" border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="50"><tbody><tr><td><br /></td></tr></tbody></table></td><td><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;">50%</span></td></tr><tr><td><p><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;">Zoe Alleyne Washburne</span></p></td><td><table bgcolor="#dddddd" border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="44"><tbody><tr><td><br /></td></tr></tbody></table></td><td><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;">44%</span></td></tr><tr><td><p><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;">River Tam</span></p></td><td><table bgcolor="#dddddd" border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="44"><tbody><tr><td><br /></td></tr></tbody></table></td><td><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;">44%</span></td></tr><tr><td><p><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;">Hoban 'Wash' Washburne</span></p></td><td><table bgcolor="#dddddd" border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="38"><tbody><tr><td><br /></td></tr></tbody></table></td><td><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;">38%</span></td></tr><tr><td><p><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;">Inara Serra</span></p></td><td><table bgcolor="#dddddd" border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="31"><tbody><tr><td><br /></td></tr></tbody></table></td><td><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;">31%</span></td></tr><tr><td><p><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;">Jayne Cobb</span></p></td><td><table bgcolor="#dddddd" border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="13"><tbody><tr><td><br /></td></tr></tbody></table></td><td><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;">13%</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><a href="http://quizfarm.com/test.php?q_id=79387">Which Serenity character are you?</a><br /><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;">created with <a href="http://quizfarm.com/">QuizFarm.com</a></span></td></tr></tbody></table>noahpoahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00859749380417518443noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21495206.post-57244554678211709352007-01-27T14:18:00.000-05:002007-01-27T14:22:21.591-05:0010 Word Review<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0375912/">Layer Cake</a><br /><br />Expository dialogue and tricky cinematography almost make it a Tarantino.noahpoahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00859749380417518443noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21495206.post-26023364423425202872006-12-14T08:52:00.000-05:002006-12-14T09:27:12.537-05:00Pinochet vs. the Free MarketI haven't been posting much to this blog lately, for <a href="http://sourcefilter.blogspot.com/2006/12/solomon-t-silbert.html">obvious reasons</a>. However, I did involve myself in <a href="http://www.haloscan.com/comments/glenngreenwald/116592443776926490/">a discussion</a> in response to <a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/12/washington-posts-praise-for-augusto.html"><i>another</i> blog's post</a> recently.<br /><br />To make a long(ish) story short(ish), Glenn Greenwald was disturbed to see the Washington Post praising recently deceased Chilean ex-dictator Augusto Pinochet. He drew parallels between US support for Pinochet's foreign lawlessness back then and support for domestic lawlessness today (note that he did not draw explicit parallels between Bush and Pinochet - he's not dumb, and he's not dishonest [Greenwald, not Bush or Pinochet]). I felt that the Post's editorial was less awful than Greenwald felt it was, and I posted a comment to that effect.<br /><br />I argued that, as a historical case study (as opposed to a model on which to base one's own plans), Pinochet's 'free-market' economic policies are distinct from the violent poitical oppression of his regime. I made some facile comparisons between Castro and Pinochet and argued that the relative stability of Chile over the years was due, at least in part, to Pinochet's economic policies.<br /><br />Others shot back that Pinochet's economic policies weren't even that beneficial, that they don't justify the political oppression (which I explicitly agreed with, even before this 'objection' was made to my argument), that welfare states 'just work', that laissez faire capitalism is equivalent to Dicken's London, and that I am a lying Nazi-sympathizer (way to respect the level of discourse that Glenn studiously maintains, 'truth machine'!).<br /><br />I don't actually know that much about Pinochet's economic policies. It may well be the case that they were <span style="font-style: italic;">not</span> good for Chile. It does seem to be the case that Chile has been more economically stable, and more economically healthy, than most other Latin American countries for much longer, but I'm happy to admit that this could be for reasons independent of Pinochet's economics. I remain unconvinced that welfare states 'just work' and that laissez faire capitalism is a bad idea. In addition, I value honesty very highly and, for what it's worth, I'm not a big fan of the Nazis.<br /><br />All that said, it's kind of embarrassing to admit that this morning - a full two days after getting into the discussion at Unclaimed Territory - it occurred to me that Pinochet's economics and politics are not, in fact, separate. I am pro free market primarily because I don't like the idea of someone else making my decisions for me. It seems to me that no government official, whether democratically elected or installed from abroad, has the wisdom to plan an economy better than the mass of humanity participating in a market can. There's certainly no reason to think that any government officials are better suited than individuals are to make day to day decisions about who to associate with, what to buy, what to sell, or how hard to work. I think everyone would be better off, at least in the long run, if they had the opportunities afforded them by free markets.<br /><br />It should have been obvious to me on Tuesday that imprisoning, torturing, and murdering political opponents is 100% antithetical to these values. It is as clear as day (today anyway) that Pinochet's political oppression of Chileans represents an utter lack of respect for private property, a crucial underpinning of any truly free market. After all, if a person's self is not owned by that person, then what is?noahpoahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00859749380417518443noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21495206.post-77854822959584995522006-12-05T18:05:00.000-05:002006-12-05T18:08:46.340-05:00Solomon T SilbertMy son - Solomon T Silbert - was born on Monday, December 4, 2006 at 10 AM.<br /><br />Here is a picture of him when he was about one minute old:<br /><br /><img src="http://static.flickr.com/104/314083983_a6ef6159b2.jpg?v=0" /><br /><br />More <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/30192791@N00/sets/72157594405310691/">here</a>.noahpoahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00859749380417518443noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21495206.post-51119838793032889042006-11-17T09:06:00.000-05:002006-11-17T09:49:07.928-05:00Better Late Than Never?<a href="http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=2660652">Bush goes to Vietnam</a>.noahpoahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00859749380417518443noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21495206.post-1163245433262985872006-11-11T06:25:00.000-05:002006-11-11T07:27:51.860-05:00The Beauty of the Reductio ad Absurdum<a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum">Reductio ad absurdum</a> can be striking, indeed beautiful, in its simplicity. Taking a bad premise to its logical extreme can concisely illustrate just how bad the premise is. Here are my two favorite 'reductios'.<br /><br />The first is in response to epistemological relativism in philosophy of science. The basic claim (i.e., the bad premise) is that truth and knowledge are socially determined; I believe what I do because of my contingent history of social, economic, and cultural experiences.<br /><br />If this assertion is made 'in good faith', it eats itself. If its true, then by necessity, the speaker believes it only by virtue of his social history. On the other hand, if the speaker has non-social reasons to believe the assertion, then the assertion can't be true (at least not in its strongest form).<br /><br />Clearly personal social histories play <span style="font-style: italic;">some</span> role in what and why people believe what they do. Just as clearly, one's social history is not the sole determinant of one's beliefs. If it were, I'd be just as much a socialist, epistemological relativist as the middle-class suburbanites in the typical 'arts and science' department. But I'm not. Personal social histories play a role in the formation of belief systems, but they clearly do not determine them.<br /><br />My second favorite (i.e., the second on my list of favorites, not my slightly-less-favorite) <span style="font-style: italic;">reductio</span> applies to arguments for (raising the) minimum wage. <a href="http://www.democrats.org/">Proponents of raising the minimum wage</a> typically argue that it is necessary in order for poor folks to work their way out of poverty. From the official Democratic platform (p. 30, <a href="http://www.democrats.org/pdfs/2004platform.pdf">pdf here</a>):<br /><blockquote>The dream of the middle class should belong to all Americans willing to work for it. We still have work to do as long as millions of Americans work full-time, fulfill their responsibilities, and continue to live in poverty. We will offer these Americans a ladder to the middle class. That means raising the minimum wage to $7.00,....</blockquote>Why stop at $7.00? If raising the minimum wage to $7.00 will help people ascend to the middle class, won't raising it to $7.50 make the ascension quicker? How about $10.00? $20.00? $1000?<br /><br />The natural, and correct, response to this <span style="font-style: italic;">reductio ad absurdum</span> is to point out that paying someone, say, $1000 per hour when their labor is worth far less than this is ridiculous. But this same logic applies to <span style="font-style: italic;">any</span> stipulated wage floor. If someone wants and is willing to work for $3.00 per hour, why stop them?<br /><br />Granted, it wouldn't be easy to pay rent and buy food working for $3.00 an hour, especially if you have to house and feed more than just yourself, but it would be easier to do so at $3.00 an hour than it would at $0.00 an hour. Legislating a lower limit on what members of the labor pool can accept for their services prices the least experienced out of the job market (<a href="http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa106.html">here's an old Cato article about it</a> that quotes <a href="http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/wew/">Walter Williams</a>' excellent <a href="http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?sts=t&an=williams%2C+walter&y=0&tn=state+against+blacks&x=0"><span style="font-style: italic;">State Against Blacks</span></a> [which I first heard about when I read <a href="http://www.mises.org/story/2266">this article about the minimum wage</a> at <a href="http://www.mises.org/">Mises.org</a>]). It becomes quickly clear that the issue is less that of raising the minimum wage than it is that of having a minimum wage at all.<br /><br />Of course, the <span style="font-style: italic;">reductio ad absurdum</span> isn't the only, or even the most, useful logical tool. The cases against relativism and the minimum wage can be developed a good ways beyond the simple arguments made above. But the <span style="font-style: italic;">reductio</span>'s beauty is in its ability to allow a lousy premise to imply its own demise. It's like logical <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tai_chi">tai-chi</a>.noahpoahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00859749380417518443noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21495206.post-1162483845519877242006-11-02T10:50:00.000-05:002006-11-02T12:38:35.830-05:00John Kerry vs. HumorSo, John Kerry <a href="http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&hs=O3y&amp;amp;amp;amp;lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&ct=title&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=john+kerry+joke&btnG=Search+News">botched a joke</a> on Monday. In a speech to some California college students, he said, "You know education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."<br /><br />Not surprisingly, reaction was swift, loud, negative, and omnipresent. Despite Kerry's claim that the barb was aimed at the President, many were offended on behalf of our noble, selfless troops. Putting aside the commonly accepted absurdity that being in the military implies selflessness and nobility of purpose, the most obvious interpretation of the joke is that 'you' get stuck in Iraq as a grunt, signing up for military duty only because your lousy performance in school reduced the number of careers available to you to just the one.<br /><br />It took me two full days to understand that the 'you' that gets stuck in Iraq is President Bush. He didn't do well in school, see, and now he's stuck in Iraq. That's almost funny.<br /><br />Allow me to make a suggestion regarding how to make the joke <span style="font-style: italic;">actually</span> funny. The problem is that the intended interpretation and the most likely interpretation are different. The most obvious solution, then, would be to include some uniquely presidential clue to the identity of the 'you' that gets stuck in Iraq.<br /><br />For example, Kerry could have said, "You know education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get <span style="font-weight: bold;">your country</span> stuck in Iraq."<br /><br />While this is certainly an improvement on Kerry's weak effort, it is, perhaps, too subtle. A less subtle possibility: "You know education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you <span style="font-weight: bold;">end up President of the United States and </span>get <span style="font-weight: bold;">your country</span> stuck in Iraq."<br /><br />This makes obvious another, even better option, namely to leave Iraq out of it: "You know education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you <span style="font-weight: bold;">end up President of the United States</span>."<br /><br />This version has three important qualities: it's funny (at least, it's funnier than Kerry's joke), its intended referent and the most likely referent to be assumed by the listener are the same (you'd have to be truly dense to fail to get who it's about), and it does what Kerry said he was trying to do in the first place - take a jab at the President.<br /><br />I know Iraq is 'topical', but it's also a very loaded issue to bring up, especially at the end of an election campaign (granted, it's only a midterm). Poking fun at the fact that the President cruised through an Ivy League 'education' never gets old, though.<br /><br />As a final aside, I think I have shown that the old adage that 'a joke always dies on the operating table' is not necessarily true. If you start with a very unfunny joke, ineptly delivered, you may well be able to analyze your way to a something funny. Funn<span style="font-weight: bold;">ier</span>, anyway.noahpoahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00859749380417518443noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21495206.post-1161951808912086572006-10-27T08:22:00.000-04:002006-10-27T17:52:49.306-04:00I don't exist. [updated]<div style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br /><table style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;" bgcolor="#ffffff" border="0" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="0" width="350"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center; font-size: 16px; background-color: rgb(0, 102, 179); color: white;">HowManyOfMe.com</td></tr><tr><td style="border: 1px solid black; text-align: center; font-size: 14px; background-color: white;"><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center; padding-top: 2px; background-color: white;" width="120"><a href="http://howmanyofme.com" style="text-decoration: none;"><img src="http://extimg.howmanyofme.com/extimages/howmany-logo.png" alt="Logo" style="border: 1px none black;" height="100" width="100" /></a></td><td style="text-align: center;font-size:16px;color:white;"><span style="color:black;">There are:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;color:red;" >0</span><br /><span style="color:black;">people with my name<br />in the U.S.A.</span><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><a style="color: rgb(0, 102, 179); font-weight: bold; line-height: 180%; text-decoration: underline;" href="http://howmanyofme.com">How many have your name?</a></td></tr></tbody></table><br /></div><br />More specifically,<br /><br /><b>Noah</b><br /><br />There are 32,997 people in the U.S. with the first name Noah. Statistically the 1003rd most popular first name. (tied with 30 other first names) More than 99.9 percent of people with the first name Noah are male.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Silbert</span><br /><br />There are 510 people in the U.S. with the last name Silbert. Statistically the 48525th most popular last name. (tied with 4686 other last names) <br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Noah Silbert </span><br /><br />There are 0 people in the U.S. named Noah Silbert. While both names you entered were found in our database, neither was common enough to make it likely that someone in the U.S. has that name.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Update:</span> The update should really be a revision of the title to reflect that the more thorough analysis of my name indicates, as <a href="http://theonlywinningmove.blogspot.com/2006/10/how-many-of-me.html">Josh points out</a>, not that I don't exist, but that, as an allegedly attested occurence of a "Noah Silbert", I am merely extremely statistically unlikely.noahpoahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00859749380417518443noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21495206.post-1161864972959495872006-10-26T08:15:00.000-04:002006-10-26T08:16:12.976-04:00Mortality SurveillancePerhaps appropriately, <a href="http://theonlywinningmove.blogspot.com">Josh</a> has <a href="http://theonlywinningmove.blogspot.com/2006/10/death-watch-day-7.html">a death watch</a> on this blog. He also has <a href="http://theartofreadingknuth.blogspot.com/">a second blog</a> dedicated to a recent fit of self-discipline with regard to algorithm analysis. On his first blog, he describes this second blog as "<a href="http://theonlywinningmove.blogspot.com/2006/10/new-blog.html">a daily journal</a>" on his reading of a foundational three volume algorithm analysis book.<br /><br />Well, it has been some time since he posted to this second blog. In fact, it has been nearly as long as it was between my last post and today's unexpected flurry of bloggery here at Source-Filter. It is possible, perhaps plausible, that this delay, like the delays in my own posting schedule, indicates that Josh's secondary blog is terminally ill.<br /><br />Thus, I could, in theory, return the favor to Josh and commence what I might call an 'expiration vigil' for his Knuth blog. I'll have to think about it for a while before making a final decision...noahpoahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00859749380417518443noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21495206.post-1161817458869045222006-10-25T19:01:00.000-04:002006-10-25T21:10:47.183-04:00Medical Research and Signal Detection TheoryOn my way home this afternoon, I heard <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6383404">an interesting story</a> on <a href="http://www.npr.org">NPR</a> about a new medical study concerning a new and exceptionally effective lung cancer screening technique. The story was interesting for two distinct, though related, reasons: it can be used to illustrate the utility of signal detection theory, and it is a rare example of accurate (and precise) media coverage of scientific research.<br /><br />Signal detection theory's utility resides both in its ability to tease sensitivity and decision bias apart and in what it tells us about how they relate. For a given level of sensitivity, making your decision criterion more liberal will increase both the probability of accurately detecting a signal that is, in fact, present (i.e., your 'hit' rate) and your probability of inaccurately 'detecting' a signal that isn't (i.e., your 'false alarm' rate), while making your decision criterion more conservative will have the opposite effect. Conversely, for a given decision criterion (defined in terms of hit rate), increasing sensitivity will lower the false alarm rate while decreasing sensitivity will increase it.<br /><br />How does this relate to the study discussed in the NPR story linked above? The study presents a new, more sensitive test for early cases of lung cancer. This higher level of sensitivity will enable doctors to detect many more cases of lung cancer much earlier than they could before, which has two effects. More lung cancer cases caught early could lead to more lung cancer cases treated successfully <span style="font-style: italic;">and</span> more misdiagnosed false alarms and inappropriate, expensive, and stressful treatment.<br /><br />Now, signal detection theory tells us that, at least in principle, sensitivity and decision bias are independent. In fact, there is a lot of experimental evidence that this is the case. For example, you can systematically shift peoples' decision criteria around by manipulating the relative frequency of occurence of signal presence versus signal absence or the relative value of each type of response. Nonetheless, in a 'real world' situation like this, in which the stakes can be very high, decision bias and sensitivity can interact heavily.<br /><br />The old (i.e., standard) tests are very insensitive to early lung cancer. Extreme insensitivity to the early stages of lung cancer precludes the utility of an adjustable decision criterion. Only relatively conclusive evidence of lung cancer even offers grounds for making a decision to get treatment or not. Now that a rather sensitive test is available, doctors are, in principle, free to set their decision criteria wherever they want. Hence, understanding the relationship between accurately catching and treating early cases and inaccurately mistreating non-cases becomes very important.<br /><br />How does this relate to accurate (and precise) media coverage of a research issue? The NPR report does a good job of reporting these issues, which seems to me to be unusual in science reporting. There are those on the 'pro-hit' side who take this study to indicate that lung cancer is on par with other forms of cancer that have become very treatable, and there are those on the 'anti-false-alarm' side who warn of the danger of, well, false alarms. While I don't believe that balance for balance's sake makes for good reporting, in this case balance is appropriate. The relationship between hits and false alarms makes that clear.<br /><br />The report also does discusses a methodological limitation of the study, namely that the lack of a control group severly limits what this study tells us about the efficacy of early diagnosis and treatment of lung cancer. Again, this attention to detail with regard to research is unusual in the media.<br /><br />Whence 'precision'? All this in less than five minutes of audio.noahpoahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00859749380417518443noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21495206.post-1161223531362722522006-10-18T21:55:00.000-04:002006-10-18T22:58:58.306-04:00The British The Office, The American The OfficePrior to seeing it, I heard mixed reviews of <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/theoffice/">the BBC show The Office</a>. Most of these reviews came from friends who were working, or had worked, in offices. They didn't like it, not one little bit. Someone told me to stick it out, that it would get funny after a few episodes.<br /><br />I don't remember who it was, but they were right. Episode one was painful to watch. I quickly learned to cringe every time <a href="http://www.rickygervais.com/">Ricky Gervais</a>' <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/theoffice/characters/profile_david.shtml">David Brent</a> entered a scene. Episode two was excruciating. It was clear why anyone with real office experience would find the show repugnant, at least initially. By episode three, I loved it. I still cringed, and squirmed, winced, and probably moaned. I watched both regular seasons, and the Christmas special hadn't come out on DVD yet. You may or may not know that the second season ends on a very low note. I had gotten so involved in the emotional lives of the characters, that it was, well, crushing. Thankfully, the Christmas special wraps it all up very nicely without cheapening anything. Before too long, I watched it all again. The (British The) Office is brilliant, in every respect.<br /><br />Now, this was well after The Office had aired for the first time in Britain. In fact, it was just before the American version began its first season. I was wary of a new version, but <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Carell">Steve Carrell</a> is funny as hell, so I gave it a chance, and I watched the first episode.<br /><br />I felt like it followed the first episode of the original series too closely. It was funny, but not as funny as the original. I liked the casting in the original version quite a lot, and felt like some of the differences in the new one were no good.<br /><br />I didn't watch any more episodes until tonight, when I re-watched the first episode. I still felt like it followed the first British episode closely, but not so closely that it felt unoriginal. I noticed nice variations on jokes from the original (the particulars of an early exchange between boss and receptionist) and new American jokes I had missed the first time through. I found it plenty funny enough to watch the second episode.<br /><br />The second episode is brutal. It reminded me of what I liked so much about the other version. It evoked out-loud laughter and uncomfortable shifting in my (office) chair, as The Office should. Steve Carell is, indeed, funny as hell. With the benefit of decaying memory and a couple of years distance, I see clearly now that the American The Office is well worth watching. I will continue to do so.<br /><br />However, I am still a bit wary. One of the best, and most interesting, properties of the British version is its length. Two series of six episodes each, two 45 minute specials. It left me simultaneously wanting more and feeling very satisfied that there was no more to be had. I know that the American version lasts longer. This could be detrimental to the overall package, or it could point to a worthwhile divergence from the original. I'm sure I'll enjoy putting myself through the discomfort of finding out.noahpoahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00859749380417518443noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21495206.post-1160783218586721572006-10-13T19:33:00.000-04:002006-10-13T22:30:47.823-04:00The Death of Solemnity [updated]<a href="http://theonlywinningmove.blogspot.com/">Josh</a> is a good friend. He has started <a href="http://theonlywinningmove.blogspot.com/2006/10/death-watch-on-sourcefilter-officially.html">a death watch</a> on my blog. Well, he can put that death watch right back where it came from. At least until a week or so from today, when I get around to blogging again.<br /><br />Not that this very short post will do much to quell the rising tide of voices crying out in despair as my priorities shift away from blogging (Josh is right about that bit). For now I will merely initiate a moratorium on solemn promises, whether blogging related or not.<br /><br />Anyway, here's what makes me blog tonight: ever since <a href="http://theonlywinningmove.blogspot.com/2006/10/time-to-re-arm-japan.html">the "nuclear" test a few days ago in North Korea</a>, I have been hoping that it turns out to have been a bluff - a great big pile of conventional explosives in a hole. First of all, this is much funnier than North Korea actually having nuclear weapons. Second, it's also much better for pretty much everyone other than Kim Jong-Il and his cronies.<br /><br />The day of the test, there was evidence of either a bluff or simple incompetence on the part of the North Korean nuclear scientists: the explosion was unexpectedly small. Today, <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/asiapcf/10/13/nkorea.test.sample/index.html">CNN reports</a> that there is no radiological evidence for a nuclear explosion.<br /><br />This is also consistent with either a bluff or incompetence. While I hope for the former, one of these two hypotheses is looking more and more likely.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Update:</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">Now</span> the CNN report linked above says they <span style="font-style: italic;">did</span> find radioactive material flying around above Korea. Oh well. I suppose it's still possible that it was a dirty bomb (i.e., still a bluff), but this wouldn't be as funny as a radation-free bluff. It's nice to know that the evidence still points to incompetence, though.noahpoahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00859749380417518443noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21495206.post-1160007945347280802006-10-04T19:02:00.000-04:002006-10-06T15:40:18.526-04:00Political Science [updated 6.10.2006]The <a href="http://www.cato-at-liberty.org">Cato blog</a> has <a href="http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2006/10/04/white-coats-uber-alles/">an irritating new post</a> (by <a href="http://www.cato.org/people/taylor.html">Jerry Taylor</a>) that criticizes what should be,but may well turn out not to be, a worthwhile new political organization with an adequately descriptive name - <a href="http://www.sefora.org/">Scientists and Engineers for America</a>.<br /><br />Taylor is keen to complain about SEA, and the issues he raises are potentially valid, but very little on the SEA website and nothing Taylor presents about the organization provide reason for worry. Taylor quotes SEA, writing that its purpose is<br /><blockquote>to campaign for politicians “who respect evidence and understand the importance of using scientific and engineering advice in making public policy.” While the group professes to be nonpartisan, “the group will discuss the impact the Bush Administration’s science and technology policies have had in their fields and the need for voters to consider the science and technology policies by candidates in this year’s mid-term elections.”</blockquote>While he undoubtedly has reason to be skeptical - many, many academics, scientists included, are, in fact, far left - it is entirely reasonable for a nonpartisan group to pay special attention to the Bush administration's policies. After all, Bush is in the fifth year of his presidency. It would make little sense for such an organization to focus primarily on the policies of former administrations. It is possible that SEA's singling out of the Bush administration is politically motivated, just as it is possible that it is completely reasonable. Taylor continues:<br /><blockquote>I imagine that most people would agree that, in the words of SEFA [<span style="font-style: italic;">sic</span>], “Scientists and engineers have a right, indeed an obligation, to enter the political debate when the nation’s leaders systematically ignore scientific evidence and analysis, put ideological interests ahead of scientific truths, suppress valid scientific evidence and harass and threaten scientists for speaking honestly about their research.” But there’s more than a whiff of the sentiment here that Americans should just shut up and let the guys in the white coats run the country.<br /></blockquote>Again, while he may well have reason for concern, nothing in either of these quotes from SEA is disagreeable, at least not to me. In any case, whiffs don't make for coherent counter-arguments.<br /><br />Case in point: Taylor points out two obvious truths about science - "...there is disagreement among scientists about many of the issues they are concerned about..." and "...scientific truth is not determined by.... majority votes within politicized professional bodies." - and makes a truly annoying move, linking to an outdated book by Thomas Kuhn as 'support' for the half-redundant, half-irrelevant assertion that "[v]irtually every single thing that the scientific "consensus" believes today <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226458083/ref=pd_cp_b_title/002-7172047-2932034?ie=UTF8" target="_blank">was once a fringe minority perspective</a>." (link in original).<br /><br />I will see Taylor's "virtually every single thing" and raise him an unqualified "every single thing." New theories have to start somewhere, but no one with an ounce of sense believes they occur simultaneously to even a sizable plurality, much less a majority, of scientists. Instead, theories start small, conceived typically by one person, perhaps on occasion by a small integer larger than one people. This fact is utterly banal, and it is irrelevant to Taylor's complaints. I would even argue that for his first two assertions to bear much weight, they must be situated in a broad view of how science works in general, which, at the very least, accounts for non-miraculous theory generation.*<br /><br />I followed Taylor's link to the SEA homepage and read <a href="http://www.sefora.org/index.php">the introduction page</a>, the '<a href="http://www.sefora.org/pages.php?submitted=1&id=97">scientific bill of rights</a>', and the '<a href="http://www.sefora.org/issues.php">issues</a>' page, though I haven't followed all of the links on the issues page. Almost everything I read, I liked. The 'bill of rights' even deals mostly in negatives (i.e., 'thou shalt nots'), which <a href="http://theonlywinningmove.blogspot.com">Josh</a> rightly <a href="http://theonlywinningmove.blogspot.com/2006/09/source-of-rights.html">points out</a> is precisely how rights are best defined. I also have a nitpick with 'right six':<br /><blockquote>6. Appointments to federal scientific advisory committees shall be based on the candidate’s scientific qualifications, not political affiliation or ideology.</blockquote>It should read "Appointments to federal scientific advisory committees shall be based on the candidate’s scientific qualifications." Full stop. It's no good listing all of the things that <span style="font-style: italic;">shouldn't</span> serve as criteria.<br /><br />The one part of SEA's site that gave me more serious pause was the 'Environment' paragraph on the issues page:<br /><b><a href="http://www.sefora.org/issues.php?id=81&submitted=1"></a></b><blockquote><b><a href="http://www.sefora.org/issues.php?id=81&submitted=1">Environment:</a></b> We need to push beyond our first generation of environmental laws and regulations and move to more modern environmental policies that spur continued technological innovation. Government-industry covenants could allow businesses, in consultation with regulators and the public, to craft the most effective and efficient strategies to meet broad national environmental goals through market-based limits and incentives that don't harm our economy.</blockquote>This is incredibly vague, and where it's not vague, it's incoherent. It's even more vague than the rest of the site, which is plenty vague in its own right. Perhaps not surprisingly, the vagueness is part of what makes it agreeable. Most of what they say on the site is compatible with a variety of political agendas, including libertarianism. This seems entirely appropriate.<br /><br />Taylor also links to two Cato papers that look to be pretty interesting (I haven't read them), so his 'argument' isn't completely limited to the silliness above. As far as I can tell, one paper is about the methodological underpinnigs of environmental policy (<a href="http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv26n3/v26n3-9.pdf">pdf</a>), and the other is about politics and science more generally (<a href="http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv29n1/v29n1-4.pdf">pdf</a>). I imagine that these provide some support for Taylor's general position(s) on science and policy, but I can't imagine they have much to say about SEA directly.<br /><br />I <span style="font-style: italic;">hope</span> that SEA turns out to be a worthwhile organization. Although I am not as pessimistic about its chances as Taylor is, I do have enough reservations to withhold my 'signature' for now. My '<a href="http://sourcefilter.blogspot.com/2006/09/importance-of-property-rights-updated.html">conversion</a>' to classical liberalism is based largely on mistrust of political organizations (the government chief among them). I'll keep an eye on SEA, and I encourage you, my vast army of loyal, thoughtful readers, to read what they have to say instead of simply taking Jerry Taylor's word for it (I know you all use that Cato blog link at the top of this page on a regular basis).<br /><br />* A further illustration of the pointlessness of Taylor's Kuhn reference (and an implication of its necessity) is that the fact that every single theory that scientists <span style="font-style: italic;">don't</span> currently believe started out as a "fringe minority perspective." Failure to recognize the irrelevance of the size-of-source of scientific ideas lends undeserved credence to hacks who point out the obvious truth that, as their theories are now ridiculed, so were Newton's. Taylor doesn't do this here, but some of what he did do is related to this, and it bugs me, so I wanted to address it.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Update:</span> <a href="http://theonlywinningmove.blogspot.com">Josh</a> brings up <a href="http://theonlywinningmove.blogspot.com/2006/10/science-shakedown-operation.html">some damning material that I missed</a> on <a href="http://www.sefora.org/serendipity/index.php?/archives/2-Announcing-Scientists-and-Engineers-for-America.html">the SEA site</a>, and makes some good points about a number of other potential problems with the organization. It looks like Taylor's reaction to the organization was not as knee-jerk as I thought, although seeing Josh find such clear evidence of exactly what Taylor was complaining about makes it something of a mystery why Taylor chose the much less incriminating quotes that he used in his post.noahpoahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00859749380417518443noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21495206.post-1159638719168273712006-09-30T13:45:00.000-04:002006-09-30T13:53:23.606-04:00Belated Birthday NoticeYesterday was the 125th birthday of <a href="http://www.mises.org/content/mises.asp">Ludwig von Mises</a>. <a href="http://theonlywinningmove.blogspot.com">Josh</a> has <a href="http://theonlywinningmove.blogspot.com/2006/09/alles-gute-zum-geburtstag.html">a post about it</a>, which includes a link to <a href="http://georgereisman.com/blog/2006/09/ludwig-von-mises-defender-of_29.html">an excellent post</a> by <a href="http://www.georgereisman.com/blog/">George Reisman</a> about the importance of Mises' work. I wanted to add that the Mises Institute also has <a href="http://www.mises.org/story/2339">a nice biographical piece</a> in honor of his birthday.noahpoahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00859749380417518443noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21495206.post-1159486312853256382006-09-28T18:55:00.000-04:002006-09-28T21:27:16.416-04:00The Media Sucks. No. The Media Suck.Listening to <a href="http://www.npr.org">NPR</a> this evening, I heard a good example of one of the most irritating and, frankly, damaging behaviors of the media - parroting assertions made by politicians with no accompanying evidence for, or against, the assertion.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6161830">The story</a> that got me thinking was about the <a href="http://news.google.com/news?q=detainee+interrogation+bill&hl=en&hs=sd4&lr=&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&sa=X&oi=news&ct=title">detainee interrogation bill</a> that recently passed both houses of Congress. The parroting that got me irritated was the following quote:<br /><blockquote>"Our most important responsibility is to protect the American people from further attack," the president said. "And we cannot be able to tell the American people we're doing our full job unless we have the tools necessary to do so."</blockquote>Perhaps its the <a href="http://sourcefilter.blogspot.com/2006/09/importance-of-property-rights-updated.html">political reading I've been doing lately</a> that makes me feel this way, but I think that this quote is utterly, and obviously, ridiculous. First, there is no single <span style="font-weight: bold;">most important responsibility</span> of <span style="font-style: italic;">any</span> branch of government, unless you're dealing in extremely (and appropriately) vague obligations like 'upholding the constitution'. Second, even if there were a single <span style="font-weight: bold;">most important responsibility</span> of, say, the executive branch, it would not be at all straightforward to decide what it is. Third, even if the appropriate calculations have, somehow and in some trustworthy way, been done, no one in the Bush administration, the House, Senate, court system, or any state government has provided an ounce of evidence or argument that protecting the American people from attack is, in fact, the single <span style="font-weight: bold;">most important responsibility</span>. As stated in the <a href="http://www.cato.org/view_ddispatch.php?viewdate=20060921#3">Cato dispatch</a>:<br /><blockquote>In "<a href="http://www.cato.org/research/articles/levy-021124.html" target="_self">Assaults on Liberty</a>," Robert A. Levy, senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute, argues: "In the post-9/11 environment, no rational person believes that civil liberties are inviolable. After all, government's primary obligation is to secure the lives of American citizens. But when government begins to chip away at our liberties, we must insist that it jump through a couple of hoops. First, government must offer compelling evidence that its new and intrusive programs will make us safer. Second, government must convince us that there is no less invasive means of attaining the same ends. In too many instances, those dual burdens have not been met."</blockquote> At first glance, it appears that even the Cato fellows (this one, anyway) are buying the assertion that so bothers me, but if you read carefully, it's clear that Levy's assertion is much broader than Bush's. Saying that "government's primary obligation is to secure the lives of American citizens" is vague, likely intentionally so. The case can easily be made that "securing the lives of American citizens" is not coextensive with <a href="http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6678">waging a war on terror</a>. For example, it also involves providing and maintaining a legal system - courts, police, and the like - to protect private property rights. It seems to me that this kind of security is every bit as important as, if not more important than, fighting a 'war' against a tactic, engaging, at extremely high cost, an enemy that is <a href="http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6656">nowhere near as powerful</a> as those prosecuting the 'war' would have us believe.<br /><br />Bush's assertions - and the willingness of pretty much every media outlet to repeat them without critical commentary - are all the more galling given that our invasion and occupation of Iraq is <a href="http://www.cato.org/view_ddispatch.php?viewdate=20060925#1">making the threat of terrorism worse</a>. Worse still, the Bush administration is not only <span style="font-style: italic;">not </span>willing to put the security of basic constitutional rights on par with their favored narrow construal of security as pertaining only to the threat of terrorism, they are willing, even eager, to cause injury to these basic rights. From <a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/09/legalization-of-torture-an_115945829460324274.html">Unclaimed Territory</a>:<br /><blockquote>...as Law Professors <a href="http://balkin.blogspot.com/2006/09/imagine-giving-donald-rumsfeld.html">Marty Lederman</a> and <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-ackerman28sep28,0,619852.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail">Bruce Ackerman</a> each point out, many of the extraordinary powers vested in the President by this bill also apply to U.S. citizens, on U.S. soil.<br /><br />As Ackerman put it: "The compromise legislation... authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States. And once thrown into military prison, they cannot expect a trial by their peers or any other of the normal protections of the Bill of Rights." Similarly, Lederman explains: "this [subsection (ii) of the definition of 'unlawful enemy combatant'] means that if the Pentagon says you're an unlawful enemy combatant -- using whatever criteria they wish -- then as far as Congress, and U.S. law, is concerned, you <strong>are</strong> one, whether or not you have had any connection to 'hostilities' at all."<br /><br />This last point means that even if there were a habeas corpus right inserted back into the legislation (which is unlikely at this point anyway), it wouldn't matter much, if at all, because the law would authorize your detention simply based on the DoD's decree that you are an enemy combatant, regardless of whether it was accurate. This is basically the legalization of the Jose Padilla treatment -- empowering the President to throw people into black holes with little or no recourse, based solely on his say-so.</blockquote>The silver lining? The related <a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/09/will-congressional-calender-preserve.html">warrantless eavesdropping bill likely will not be passed before recess</a>. Let's hope we can get some good old-fashioned gridlock in place this November to keep this travesty from becoming law. And lets hope that, somehow, court challenges to the detainee bill start repairing the damage soon.<br /><br />I would like to think that, agree with the point of view or not, if we had more of <a href="http://www.crooksandliars.com/2006/09/25/olbermanns-special-comment-are-yours-the-actions-of-a-true-american/">this kind of behavior in the media</a>, we'd have less of the kind of behavior described above in the goverment. That's probably wishful thinking, but it bothers me greatly that the media, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_the_press">whose freedoms are ensured precisely so that they can be adversarial with respect to the government</a>, are typically all too willing to abstain from critical thought.noahpoahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00859749380417518443noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21495206.post-1159272537657055522006-09-26T08:05:00.000-04:002006-09-27T08:18:46.383-04:00The importance of property rights [updated]As I wrote in <a href="http://sourcefilter.blogspot.com/2006/08/regular-writing-political-regulation.html">one of my first posts</a>, I plan on using this blog in part to document my "slide into the netherworld of <a href="http://www.mises.org/">classical liberalism</a>," or libertarianism. Because it is difficult, if not impossible, to overstate the importance of private property rights in libertarian philosophy, if I am to execute this slide effectively, I will have to read up on the subject. I am currently reading Timothy Sandefur's <a href="http://www.catostore.org/index.asp?fa=ProductDetails&method=cats&scid=33&pid=1441317"><span style="font-style: italic;">Cornerstone of liberty: Property rights in 21st-century America</span></a>, which seems to be as good a place as any to begin.<br /><br />As the title of this post suggest, though, I do have a nit to pick with an early portion of the book. The first proper chapter - 2, 'Why Property Rights Are Important' - is intended to lay the groundwork for the rest of the book. Unfortunately, Sandefur leads off with a pretty weak argument: the first subsection of the chapter is called 'Property Is Natural'. The gist of this section is that non-human animals and humans 'naturally' seek out private property, property is universal in human society, and depriving people of property has all sorts of negative effects. So, the nit I wish to pick is this: only the last of these has any hope of justifying (the importance of) property rights.<br /><br />It is ironic that Sandefur attempts, initially, to justify property rights by way of a simple appeal to 'nature', as this is a fine example of <a href="http://www.cuyamaca.edu/bruce.thompson/Fallacies/naturalistic.asp">the naturalistic fallacy</a>. Even if we accept that private property is naturally sought out and universal among human societies, and I see no reason to believe otherwise, it does not follow that private property <span style="font-style: italic;">should be</span> sought out or universal. It may turn out to be the case that private property should be sought out and that it should be universal (and I believe that this is, in fact, the case), but this conclusion must be arrived at via some other logical path.<br /><br />I am optimistic that the book will be worth reading, though, for a couple of reasons. First, the next two subsections in chapter two have titles indicative of promising alternate logical paths: 'Property Is Good For Individuals' and 'Property Is Good For Society'. Second, despite my objections to the naturalistic fallacy, the 'Property is natural' subsection has some value. As stated above, this section discusses the negative effects of depriving people of their property. Insofar as these are well documented effects, their avoidance <span style="font-style: italic;">can</span> serve as a justification for private property.<br /><br />Sandefur quotes <a href="http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/%7Eddennett.htm">Dan Dennett</a>, one of the more interesting philosophers of cognitive science, in a discussion of how humans use artefacts to establish their 'selves' as distinct from the world around them. The Dennett quote concerns the difficulties commonly encountered by elderly folks removed from familiar home environments to nursing 'homes'. Part of living in your own home is creating a familiar and useful environment. When removed from this, the elderly (and some young folks, to be sure) can have severe difficulty with basic daily activities. Our home environments come to mesh very closely with cognitive systems governing memory and perception.<br /><br />On reading this, I was reminded of discussions in Philosophical Foundations of Cognitive Science (one of the two <a href="http://search.blogger.com/?q=philosophical+foundations+blogurl%3Atheonlywinningmove.blogspot.com&btnG=Search+Blogs&amp;amp;amp;hl=en&ie=UTF-8&x=0&y=0&ui=blg">most blog-post inducing classes</a> [with <a href="http://search.blogger.com/?q=friedman+blogurl%3Atheonlywinningmove.blogspot.com&btnG=Search+Blogs&amp;amp;hl=en&ie=UTF-8&x=0&y=0&ui=blg">Friedman's class</a>] that <a href="http://theonlywinningmove.blogspot.com/">Josh</a> is taking now) about the blurriness of the division between our 'selves' and our environments. Here's an example: when doing long division or multiplication by hand, most people use pencil (or pen) and paper to keep track of 'big picture' information while they perform simple calculations on subsets of the numbers (the digit in the 'ones' place, in the 'tens' place, in the 'hundreds' place, etc...). In a very real sense, then, that person's cognitive system straddles the skin, the most obvious and intuitive boundary between a person and his environment, to encompass the mind and part of the environment.<br /><br />Although this particular situation only applies to people who have a (perceived) need to carry out long division and multiplication (and can't do it in their heads), the point is valid more generally, and it ties in with some of Sandefur's arguments about the personal value of 'home'. In addition to the cognitive value of 'home', Sandefur discusses its 'sentimental' value (and argues that all value is 'sentimental' insofar as it is subjective).<br /><br />If we accept that our 'selves' - specifically our cognitive systems - extend into our environments, then the fact that there are negative effects of depriving someone of private property is clear. I can't imagine a justification for depriving an autonomous agent of his memory or perceptual facilities.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Update:</span> <a href="http://theonlywinningmove.blogspot.com/">Josh</a> makes <a href="http://theonlywinningmove.blogspot.com/2006/09/where-property-rights-come-from.html">a good point</a> that, if I'm remembering correctly, Sandefur does not (at least not explicitly), which is this: the onus is on those who would intervene in nature to provide evidence that such intervention is better than leaving it alone. This is, I think in retrospect, the point of Sandefur's discussion of the elderly in nursing homes, the problems faced by adults who were raised in property-free kibbutzim, and Soviet policy. The 'Property Is Natural' subsection would be improved a good bit if this line of reasoning were made explicit, as Josh has done.<br /><br />This point of view brings up some interesting ethical questions that I will mention but not delve into at the moment. Any claim of 'better than' carries with it an implicit measure of 'good', about which reasonable people can potentially disagree. The end result is that property rights are put on a firmer foundation than the naturalistic fallacy can provide, although it is, perhaps, not as firm as we might want it to be.noahpoahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00859749380417518443noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21495206.post-1159028861087529782006-09-23T12:25:00.000-04:002006-09-23T12:55:01.436-04:00One last time with celebrinerdWhen I wrote about using links (<a href="http://sourcefilter.blogspot.com/2006/09/links-lots-of-links-will-bring.html">lots of links</a>) to get celebrinerd into popular usage, I wasn't thinking very carefully about where those links led to. I had forgotten about <a href="http://www.google.com/search?hs=UE&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=failure&btnG=Search">google bombing</a>, described with specific reference to ken-jennings.com <a href="http://www.anonymouscoworker.com/2006/09/20/ken-jennings-celebrinerd-google-bomb/">here</a>.<br /><br />So: <a href="http://ken-jennings.com/">celebrinerd</a>, <a href="http://www.ken-jennings.com/messageboards/viewtopic.php?t=393">celebrinerd</a>, <a href="http://ken-jennings.com/blog/?p=170">celebrinerd</a>.noahpoahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00859749380417518443noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21495206.post-1158965255019523842006-09-22T18:38:00.000-04:002006-09-22T18:47:35.030-04:00Promises, promises... (pt. 2)I <a href="http://sourcefilter.blogspot.com/2006/09/promises-promises.html">promised a while back</a> to post something new on this blog every day. <a href="http://sourcefilter.blogspot.com/2006/09/i-cant-stop-me-that-easily.html">Technically</a>, I have fulfilled this promise.<br /><br />With this post, I am solemnly backing out of this promise. I will still <span style="font-style: italic;">write</span> (for the blog) every day, but I might not <span style="font-style: italic;">post</span> what I write every day.<br /><br />As stated in my <a href="http://sourcefilter.blogspot.com/2006/01/initial-post-including-inspiration.html">first post</a>, I was inspired to blog primarily to communicate about the research that I read about and conduct. Thus far, I have found that posts about my research (and related topics) take a long time to write, if they're to be written well. Since I would like my posts to be written well, I have decided to relax my posting frequency requirements.<br /><br />Note that, prior to making a promise to post every day, I wrote "[n]o promises regarding frequency (or quality) of posts" in my first post. Today, this gives me a nice 'out' with regard to posting frequency. Perhaps in the future it will give me a nice 'out' with regard to posting quality, but let's hope not.noahpoahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00859749380417518443noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21495206.post-1158887221008516792006-09-21T20:36:00.000-04:002006-09-21T22:00:30.493-04:00Programming, perception, and a priori postulatesI'm in the middle of working on my third, and final, qualifying 'exam'. I took a sit-down exam (no scare quotes) a little over a year ago, and I designed and carried out a study of speaker focus and fricative production during the Spring and Summer of this year. The final 'exam' will be much like the second one - I will design and conduct a research project from the ground up.<br /><br />This afternoon, I was writing a Matlab script to do some corpus analysis. The general plan with this study is to investigate a couple of different kinds of frequency effects in speech perception. In terms of word recognition, there are a number of well documented frequency effects - on average, frequent words are more accurately recognized in noise identification tasks and responded to more quickly in lexical decision tasks than are infrequent words. Lower level (i.e., sub-word) frequency effects are, as far as I know, less well documented.<br /><br />With regard to the qual, I am primarily interested in what I have been calling (phonological) contrast frequency. Phonologists call two words with distinct meanings and forms that are identical aside from a single feature difference at a single location a <span style="font-style: italic;">minimal pair</span>. For example, the words 'sue' and 'zoo' - [su] and [zu] - mean two very different things, and the only difference in form is that, at the beginning of the word, the former has a voiceless fricative whereas the latter has a voiced fricative.<br /><br />In its simplest form, the contrast frequency for a given pair of speech sounds is the number of minimal pairs involving these sounds. You can very likely come up with other minimal pairs involving 's' and 'z', but it would be very hard for you to come up with many minimal pairs for, say, the sounds at the beginning of 'this' and 'think'.<br /><br />My third qual will address at least one possible psychophysical effect of differences in contrast frequency. Of course, I first have to establish that there are suitable differences in contrast frequency for me to employ in a perception experiment. I was working on this today, using the <a href="http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=hoosier+mental+lexicon&hl=en&amp;lr=&btnG=Search">Hoosier Mental Lexicon</a>, a 20,000 word dictionary that includes machine readable phonemic transcriptions and word usage frequencies, among other informations. It has a good track record, having been put to good use in, for example, word recognition work documenting the effects of lexical neighborhoods (I'll likely post about this at a later date).<br /><br />I want to use the HML to tally some contrast frequencies so that I can use the best possible pairs of sounds (i.e., those that will maximize the effect I am looking for) to carry out a psychophysical experiment. It turns out to be less than entirely straightforward to tally contrast frequency, mostly because you have to make a number of potentially unwarranted assumptions about the organization of speech sounds (and words) in the mental lexicon.<br /><br />In general, the idea of contrast frequency <span style="font-style: italic;">seems </span>straightforward - simply count the number of minimal pairs for a given sound. Getting a machine to count the number of minimal pairs is reasonably easy. But what about pairs of words that are nearly minimal pairs (e.g., 'this' and 'think')? It seems to me that, if I'm interested in the relationship between 's' and 'z', I should take into account the relationship between every pair of words with one member containing an 's' and the other a 'z' - 'sue' vs. 'zoo', 'sing' vs. 'zing', sure, but 'ask' vs. 'as' and 'safe' vs. 'zap', and all the rest, too. But if I'm going to take all the occurences of these sounds into account, I have to devise a measure of how similar these two words are (i.e., how important the differences are), and how the location of the 's' and the 'z' in their respective words affects this.<br /><br />So far, I've written code that will find all the occurences of any given pair of sounds. It then takes each occurence of one of them and, for each occurence of the other, compares their environments - the sounds that come before and after the pair of interest. I've been thinking of various ways to weight the value of a difference in environment according to how far from the pair of interest the difference occur, as it seems reasonable to assume that the immediate environment plays a more important role in contrast frequency. If two sounds in a non-minimal pair are in completely different environments, they will hardly seem contrastive at all. If these sounds are in a minimal pair, they are the very definition of contrastive. In between these two extremes, I assume there is some in-between level of 'contrastiveness', so it seems like a good idea to take these cases into account along with the true minimal pairs.<br /><br />I've also thought how nice it would be if the transcriptions in the HML included syllable affiliation information for each consonant. It seems reasonable to assume that two sounds in a non-minimal pair would be 'more contrastive' in some sense if they were both in the 'same' syllable position in their respective words. Unless I code this into the HML myself, though, it isn't going to play a role in this project.<br /><br />By writing code to get a computer to carry these functions out, I have forced myself to make explicit a number of assumptions about how speech sounds are organized in the mind. These assumptions inform a number of potentially important decisions I have to make. To name three, I have to decide how to weight segmental distances when tallying environment differences (should I weight with an exponential decrease or the reciprocal of the number of segments?), how to deal with word edges (if, after aligning occurences of two sounds, the word edges do not line up, how many difference-tallies do the misaligned edges count for?), and how (or whether) to factor in usage frequencies and morphosyntactic properties (do I incorporate raw usage frequencies, the logarithm of raw usage frequencies, and/or the relative proportion of content vs. function words when tallying a pair's contrast frequency?).<br /><br />The next step is to fix a silly indexing mistake I made (I had to leave promptly at 4:30 to go eat <a href="http://sourcefilter.blogspot.com/2006/09/prefiero-carnitas.html">carnitas</a>, and so could not finish the code today), see what the numbers look like for some potentially interesting pairs of sounds, then check the literature on 'functional load', a notion that is likely closely related to my 'contrast frequency'.noahpoahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00859749380417518443noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21495206.post-1158808713576118232006-09-20T22:36:00.000-04:002006-09-20T23:18:33.596-04:00Tortured legal reasoningThe <a href="http://www.cato-at-liberty.org">cato blog</a> has <a href="http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2006/09/19/the-presidents-prerogative-to-torture/">an excellent (and short) post</a> on Bush's <a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/09/serious-problems-for-white-house-in.html">apparently imperiled</a> pet legislation regarding torture.<br /><br />It's frustrating to me that the vast majority of media outlets fail to discuss issues like this with the clarity and simplicity of this cato post. The basic issue is a straightforward bit of legal philosophy.<br /><br />Most people would agree that, generally speaking, torture is immoral. However, we can all imagine extreme circumstances in which we might be willing to sanction torture, cases in which the alternative is much worse. We've been hearing a lot about the 'ticking time bomb' scenario lately precisely because this is the kind of extreme circumstance that would cause most of us to reconsider an otherwise reasonable aversion to inhumane treatment of a prisoner who may well be innocent.<br /><br />So, is it better to have a law that prohibits or authorizes the immoral act? The severity of prohibition would be alleviated greatly by the fact that, in the truly extreme case, it is likely that punishment would be minimal, while authorization for the sake of the rare extreme case opens a pandora's toolbox for the everyday interrogator.<br /><br />It all revolves around due process. In the case prohibition, due process (e.g., the protections granted by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution">the 6th amendment</a>) would help to ensure that extreme circumstances can be presented and explained in an attempt to justify a possible violation of a different bit of due process (e.g., <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eighth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution">the 8th amendment</a>). In the latter case, this violation of due process would be codified.noahpoahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00859749380417518443noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21495206.post-1158790838574413032006-09-20T18:17:00.000-04:002006-09-20T18:32:41.060-04:00Once more with the celebrinerd...<a href="http://ken-jennings.com/blog/?p=173">Jennings has posted on celebrinerd fever again</a>, and his post contains links to no less than three other blogs that are fighting the good fight.<br /><br />I have also <a href="http://ken-jennings.com/messageboards/viewtopic.php?p=5439#5439">announced our efforts</a> around these parts on his message boards.noahpoahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00859749380417518443noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21495206.post-1158787446200768352006-09-20T17:16:00.000-04:002006-09-20T17:31:06.846-04:00Links! Lots of links will bring 'celebrinerd' to the masses!<a href="http://sourcefilter.blogspot.com/2006/09/doing-my-part.html">My post about 'celebrinerd'</a> has been linked in both <a href="http://www.blogger.com/profile/28792460">editor-Amy-from-Ohio</a>'s <a href="http://having-no-blog-is-your-blog.blogspot.com/2006/09/celebrinerd-vs-nerdcessory_20.html">post about 'celebrinerd'</a> and <a href="http://theonlywinningmove.blogspot.com/2006/09/we-are-now-knights-who-say-celebrinerd.html">Josh's post about 'celebrinerd'</a>. I'm in the (very small and obscure corner of the) big time now!<br /><br />Editor-Amy-from-Ohio also mentions that Cathy suggests creating <a href="http://wikipedia.org/">wikipedia</a> and <a href="http://www.urbandictionary.com/">urban dictionary</a> entries for celebrinerd. This is a fine idea, as it gives celebrinerd a larger number of distinct URLs, and it would give us all a new place to which to link the word 'celebrinerd'.<br /><br />It turns out that someone(s) went ahead and took Cathy's suggestion: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebrinerd">celebrinerd</a>! <a href="http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=celebrinerd">celebrinerd</a>!<br /><br />To make Mr. Jennings task a bit easier, that's eight occurences of 'celebrinerd' in this post alone (nine now), five of which link to distinct URLs.noahpoahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00859749380417518443noreply@blogger.com0