What would happen if someone invented a drug that cured homosexuality? It sounds potentially very profitable. There do exist drugs that make heroin and alcohol use sickening, but they do not cure the desire. Could there be a cure for an inclination?
Professor VOlokh says:
A “conclusory argument,” I pointed out, is an argument that is long on conclusions and short on supporting evidence; “conclusive evidence,” on the other hand, is evidence that points persuasively to a certain conclusion.
That sounds like a useful word, one that deserves to be better known.
From a Fumare commentor:
I had read Arroyo’s book (an outstanding biography of Mother Angelica!) but had forgotten about Harry John.
Mother Angelica’s caution about giving control of her endeavor to Harry John also extended to great concern about giving control to the Catholic Church or the bishops. In the book, there is a thrilling story about the American bishops trying to take over EWTN after Mother had made it successful (which Mother would not stand for, because she knew EWTN’s orthodoxy would be threatened with the bishops in control). If I remember the story correctly, the bishops attempted to gain control of EWTN through Mother: as a religious community in a diocese, Mother and her order were subject to the bishop, and thus, EWTN may have been subject to the bishop. Mother anticipated the bishops’ checkmate and preemptively called an unscheduled emergency EWTN board meeting where she (and her loyal laypeople) passed a new set of bylaws giving all control of the board to lay people and not to any religious or diocesan members, and then Mother immediately resigned from the board, cutting off the conduit between EWTN and the religious community through which the bishops were trying to gain control. A great story of political and church intrigue.
Here’s how the SAT scores of Indiana’s undergraduates generally and business majors in particular compare to other universities with top undergraduate business programs. As you can see, Indiana is one of the few places where the business majors are the university’s elite— and our undergraduates are distinctly worse than our competitors’. That shows we have extremely high value-added.
The placement of Yale Economics PhD’s last year is something I wish people at Indiana’s business school appreciated. Notice how many are going to consulting firms. That is not a bad place for PhDs to end up, for themselves or for the world.
Here’s a comment I made at the Baylyblog
A doctrine like male headship is actually a better test in our day and age than in most, because it is not important so much for itself as because it raises two questions:
1. Do I believe that anybody has authority? If I am unwilling to submit to an elder or a husband, I probably have problems submitting to God too. Traditionally, the question was whether I would submit to God as well as to human authorities; now it is a question of whether I will submit to anybody.
2. Am I willing to put God’s commands over my own? It is the teachings that least appeal to me that are the best test of my faith in God. Anybody will agree with God that murder is evil. When it comes to divorce, obedience, or homosexuality, we modern Americans get less comfortable.
Instapundit points us to yet another example of FBI incompetence,
this time in the area of
network-security.html">securing data in its computers. I was just
reading a bio of Hanssen, the spy. What he did was sneak a look at
lots of secret files he shouldn’t have been allowed to see on the FBI
computers, downloaded them, and gave them to the Russians. It sounds
like they haven’t improved since then.
The reason, I expect, is that in a civil service system nobody ever
gets fired. In our civil service system, I wouldn’t be surprised if
nobody ever gets demoted or even loses their grade’s pay increase
either. That’s a big advantage of academia. We don’t demote
professors, but we do give them tiny salary increases if they are
incompetent (secretaries, etc. are a different matter).
The major purpose of the civil service system– to prevent
experienced workers from being fired and replaced with party hacks–
would be served if we merely protected workers’ current salaries, and
allowed flexible pay and postings otherwise. Then the FBI computer
security man could be put to sweeping floors, though on his current
salary. This would, of course, allow for punishment of civil servants
who don’t do what the President (Attorney General, FBI director, etc.
) wants, but we *do* want that kind of punishment– the voters should
be in charge, not the bureaucracy. And when a new President came in,
he could grant the punished civil servant back pay if he thought it
was deserved.
I was listening to a feeble and apologetic defense of opposition to mandatory seat belt laws by a local libertarian on the radio. It’s amazing how little respect for freedom there is in America. Why didn’t the libertarian just say, “Why should the police be able to stop me and force me to wear a seat belt when I’m driving two blocks down the street in a quiet neighborhood in my own car? What right do other people have to decide for me that seat belts are always, absolutely, necessary for safety? If I’m willing to take the risk, why can’t I?”
Mark Gergen at Balkinization has a good comment on legal formalism: (more…)
Someone just told me that Sharon Brehm has been elected president of the American Psychological Association. This press release tells about it. It has 150,000 members, so I guess it is a professional association more than a scholarly one. I was surprised that she was so prominent in her field, so I used Google Scholar to look at her and Stanley Wasserman, one of the highest-paid psychology profs at Indiana. Her influence seems to come from textbooks and from an importance book co-authored with her ex-husband (guessing?) on an idea he pioneered, plus Intimate Relationships. Then there is a very sharp dropoff. I checked Stanley Wasserman too, and see that he is a logit and networks expert, so maybe I should get to know him. (more…)
There are lots of poems and songs about romantic love. That makes sense; it is a powerful emotion and one commonly experienced. Why aren’t there poems and songs about mother-love? It has drama, power, and commonality too.
I wonder how hospitals and doctors calculate their accounts for bad debts and for charity? If they do it the way I suspect, bad accounting is raising health care costs by discouraging out-of-pocket payment in favor of insurance. Here’s the reason.
Suppose a hospital provides a bypass operation as charity. The accounting question is how this affects income and costs. The way I suspect it is done is that the hospital reports 0 income and reports the list price of the operation as a cost. Thus, if the list price is $100,000, the operation has reduced the hospital’s profit by $100,000.
Slate has an article on state compensation to people wrongfully convicted who have served time in prison.
Only 21 states have compensation laws on the books, which spell out exactly how much you get for a wrongful conviction. Louisiana, for example, ponies up $15,000 for each year of incarceration, plus job training and help with college tuition. Alabama pays at least $50,000 a year, and California pays $100 per day. Meanwhile, the federal government forks over $50,000 for each year of incarceration for federal crimes, plus $50,000 for each year spent on death row.
In Connecticut, which is among the 29 states without compensation statutes, ex-prisoners must lobby the legislature to pass a private bill that grants compensation to a specific person. Here, the dollar amount loosely depends on what payments the state has made in the past. The number should account for the victim’s lost time, lost wages, and physical and mental suffering, as well as the effects on his or her family. Private bills are behind some of the multimillion-dollar rewards that make the headlines, but the payouts don’t always go off without a hitch. Florida, for instance, initially planned to award $1.25 million to Alan Crotzer for serving more than 24 years after being convicted of armed robbery and rape, but ultimately dropped the payment from its budget, instead giving $4.8 million to the parents of a teen who had died in juvie boot camp. (You can keep tabs on awards by reading Justice: Denied, “the magazine for the wrongly convicted.”)
At the law lunch today we discussed reasons for tenure. MA advanced this idea. Suppose that you need to invest X to become expert in research. If you do, you will be able to do research your entire life with probability .9, but with probability .1 you will be able to do it for 10 years and then lose the ability. This means that to get people to make this investment, we need to guarantee them a job even if they lose their ability, not because of risk aversion, but merely to make the investment profitable.
Bonnie Goldstein in Slate on May 15 complains about revisions of a study on election fraud. She selectively quotes from the draft to make it seem as if it said that election fraud wasn’t a problem. Fortunately, she posts the original draft, which says the opposite– that the people they interviewed think there is widespread fraud (mostly absentee voting, vote buying, and illegal registrations) and slack Justice Department investigation.
Amnesty International has long had the dubious policy of equating executing criminals with suppressing human rights. Now it’s added legal abortion as another human right— including partial birth abortion and actually condemns the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision. Recall that criticizing that decision for being too anti-abortion means they actually support the Supreme Court’s policy of allowing viable babies to be aborted– that is, the baby may be killed even if it could survive the birth, so long as its umbilical cord hasn’t been cut yet.
Not only that, but AI has decided to keep this change of policy quiet. It’s announced the new policy only on a members-only website and said that there are to be no public announcements. AI also says it will deny it is pro-abortion– rather, it is only in favor of removing any penalties for abortion.
For details and links on this, see First Things.
May 14 the World Bank posted its latest reports and annexes on the Wolfowitz kerfuffle. They include the report itself, lots of transcripts, and documents that Wolfowitz submitted. They do not include any other documents— the people attacking Wolfowitz rely on their word alone, though Xavier Coll does say he has personal notes that he was unwilling to make public. The documents support Wolfowitz, as always. I’d like to ask Coll why we can’t see his documents, and also ask him what kind of settlement for Shaha Riza he proposed, and why he has no record in writing of his proposal when he says he was taking such careful notes. We could ask much the same question of everyone else who is now criticizing Wolfowitz.
The report itself is audacious. It even criticizes Wolfowitz for responding to his critics, as thereby undermining the World Bank. The bureaucrats’ position now is that when the Ethics Committee told Wolfowitz, in writing, to “instruct” Coll on what to do with Riza, they meant for Wolfowitz to do whatever Coll thought should be done, and that when they told Wolfowitz to compensate Riza for the special hardship of having to leave the Bank’s normal promotion process, he wasn’t suppose to compensate her in any way out of the ordinary routine of promotion and salary increase. What weasels! If Wolfowitz does get fired, he’ll have a good lawsuit against the Bank.
May 18: Wolfowitz has now resigned, but in a compromise where the Board said,
“He assured us that he acted ethically and in good faith in what he believed were the best interests of the institution, and we accept that.” He cannot bring a lawsuit, since he resigned and since the Board has said it does not think he acted unethically– in effect, rejecting the report I discuss above but saying Wolfowitz should leave anyway just to get the fuss over. Too bad.
I forget whose idea this is, but it is a good one. Suppose each of 9 jurors gets a signal of guilty or innocence. They must be unanimous to convict. I get a signal of INNOCENT. We will vote independently, without discussion. What should I do?
I should not vote INNOCENT in equilibrium. Rather, I will mix. That is because if I pick INNOCENT, maybe everybody else has GUILTY, and I will wreck everything and there will be acquittal. Thus, in equilibrium there will be some people with INNOCENT signals who will vote GUILTY anyway.
I don’t think the big issue here is really the ordination of women. I would not find the document appalling if it said, “There would be more talent in the ministry if we ordained women, so I think we ought to change the rules and allow it.” I don’t agree with that myself, but I think it’s an open question, much like that of ordaining people without seminary training. But that’s not the Denver attitude. Here’s an excerpt that illustrates it.
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