Eric Rasmusen’s Weblog

Would you say that it was a shame that having even two female students in your Informatics class was a high number, and the university ought to do something about that, promoting diversity? I heard that in a meeting this morning. Why does promoting that kind of diversity have any value? Does a uniquely feminine view of Unix need to be taught? Or, to get to what is no doubt the real, but still mysterious, motivation: Why should the professor like seeing people of both sexes in his classes?

What if I had 95% female students in all my classes? It would feel odd at first– not bad, but odd– but I expect I’d get used to it pretty quickly, just as professors teaching at single-sex colleges do. Certainly I have no trouble getting used to classes that are almost all male, or foreign, or Asian.

From Philosophers’ Playground, something relevant to Intelligent Design:

The” grue” of which he speaks comes from Nelson Goodman’s “New Riddle of Induction” in which he argues that the central logical tool in scientific reasoning, induction, is not the language independent thing we think it is. The idea is that if the word “grue” means “green before 1/1/07 and blue thereafter” then all of the evidence we currently have that the grass is green is also evidence that the grass is grue since all observations have come before the year 2007. By using induction from this evidence, speakers of our color language would predict that on New Years’ Day, the grass will still be green, but using the very same logical inference, grue-speakers will be lead by their language to argue that all scientific evidence points to it being what we would call blue. So we have different claims about how the world will be based on the same evidence and the same scientific inference, with the only difference being the language we choose to speak — something that should be innocuous.

Is the statement “Grass is grue” only falsifiable after 1/1/07. In the naive sense, yes, because that is the first point at which there theories make different predictions. But as Duhem, Quine, Kuhn, and Lakatos (amongst many others) point out. No matter what we observe, we haven’t necessarily falsified anything in particular. We can hold onto the grue language and grue-based inductions if we are willing to make adjustments elsewhere in our web of belief.

A company is thinking of building a hotel. If nothing goes wrong, the profit will be 100. The known problem is that after it buys the land, the company will not get zoning permission for a big enough parking lot, and the profit will be -100. After much thought, the company concludes that not getting permission has probability X=.3. But the company knows that something else as yet unidentified might lead to a profit of -100. The company estimates the probability of this to be Y=.1.

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This is a paradox, seemingly about backwards induction, that I come across now and then.

VERSION ONE. On Sunday, a teacher tells his students, “I will give a quiz on or before Friday and surprise you.”

If Friday came, and there had been no quiz, the students would know the quiz would be on Friday, and it wouldn’t be a surprise the day they came in. So the quiz can’t be on Friday.

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From T.S. Eliot’s translation of Pascal’s Thoughts, number 259: TS ELiot translation.
259:

Ordinary people have the power of not thinking of that about which they do not wish to think. “Do not meditate on the passages about the Messiah,” said the Jew to his son. Thus our people often act. Thus are false religions preserved, and even the true one, in regard to many persons.

Mark Newman has a good cartogram page, and lets people download his software. Here is a world population cartogram. India and China are about a third.

I also like his GDP map.

From Tyler Cowen, I think (but I can’t find the link), I noted down this article on the Judge Rotenberg center, which uses electric shocks to teach students how to behave. (more…)

From Jurisdynamics,

As the Harvard philosopher WVO Quine wrote, “for my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer’s gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind.” He wrote this because Homeric gods were not supposed to be taken to exist on faith, but rather as explanations of phenomena like Volcanic eruptions and lightning strikes.

The idea of risk aversion is that people like to keep their consumption at a steady level rather than up and down. They prefer to consume $50,000 per year rather than $10,000 one year and $90,000 the next.

The conventional way to represent this is with a strictly concave utility function, such as

(A) U = log(C)

If the utility function is concave like this, then from any starting point a loss of $1 hurts more than a gain of $1 helps.

For decades it has troubled many economists that this theory doesn’t perfectly fit the facts of people’s behavior. No other theory of risk aversion has proven useful enough to be remembered, though, despite the hundreds of articles written on how to improve the theory. (more…)

I’ve had several comments to the effect that Transubstantiation being formally defined relatively late in the history of the Roman Catholic church (i.e., not in the first millenium) is no more important than the Trinity not being explained early. I don’t buy that argument. (more…)

I’m learning new things about Communion. The real dichotomy is perhaps not between

1. Those who think the bread is the flesh of Jesus,

and

2. Those who think the bread is physically just bread,

but between

1. Those who think that the bread is special only when consumed by someone who knows it is Communion wafer,

and

2. Those who think that the bread is special even when consumed by someone who doesn’t know it is supposed to be special, or by a mouse.

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In The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins gives a theoretical support
for slow-
increment evolution (against creationism, intelligent design,
punctuationism, Lamarck, and all comers). At one point, he makes fun of
an English bishop who uses what Dawkins calls the weak Argument from
Personal Incredulity. “It seems implausible to me…. I cannot believe
that… Could it possibly happen that…” Dawkins does a good job of
making fun of it.

My first thought was that the Argument is nonetheless okay. What we
often do is to describe a situation and then say, “I don’t think that’s
plausible.” It, of course, can’t really be just an argument from
Personal incredulity. Rather, we are trying to share our doubts. And
this is a rational argument, that can be refuted. The opposing view can
try to present explanations or evidence that will overcome the
doubts.

My second thought, though, was that Dawkins relies on a very similar
argument, but one that sounds even worse. What he relies on is the
Argument from Personal Credulity. His answer to the bishop is “It seems
plausible to me, … I believe that,… It could easily happen that… ”
And, of course, that is an equally legitimate argument. It can be
refuted by evidence or explanation that undermines Dawkins’s beliefs.

I had a couple of comments on my post about the idolatry of worshipping bread as God. I got distracted in reading up on what the Church Fathers had to say about Communion, so I’ll have to come back to this, because it opens up lots of topics, i.e.

1. The Real Presence. Does something supernatural happen during Communion? Is God present then in a way He is not always present? (See Calvin’s Institutes.)

2. Transubstantiation. Is the bread literally the flesh of Jesus, turned into such by the priest and independent of anything the person taking the Communion thinks? (See Calvin’s Institutes.)

3. The Communion Sacrifice. Is Communion a propitiatory sacrifice of Jesus for our sins, or a thank-offering of bread and selves, or neither of these? (See Three Hierarchies on this.)

4. The infallibility of the Church. Can the Church, appropriately defined, be wrong on doctrine? (requiring discussion of degrees of importance of doctrines, definition of the Church, and the length of time the Church is in error)

5. The usefulness of Tradition. If we find that Christians of the 2nd and 3rd centuries believed something, is that useful to determining whether a belief is correct? Is it useful as mere evidence of what Jesus taught, or would it be relevant even if it were not taught by Jesus, but was thought up (carefully and sincerely) by the early believers? (See Calvin’s Institutes and Philip Schaff’s history, section 69, William Webster (Protestant), The Catholic Encyclopedia, the Real Presence Association, (Roman Catholic) and Sola Scriptura, which argues that the apostolic fathers argued for transubstantion from the Bible, not from oral tradition. ) (more…)

The WSJ Best of the Web quotes a news story about a Prime Minister’s interview in which he says that violence won’t achieve Israel’s objectives immediately after saying that violence had achieved Israel’s objective:

The Lebanese PM also told the newspaper he does not expect Hizbullah to drag Lebanon into a war again.

“I don’t believe it can happen again,” he said. “I don’t think Hizbullah is in the same position where it was before the war, and won’t be able to repeat what it did. It learned the lesson from what happened.”

Turning his attention to Israel, Siniora said he hoped a peace deal between the two countries can be reached.

“I think that Israel learned from the war that violence isn’t the way to ensure its wellbeing,” he said. “The only way to achieve peace is through negotiations. The belligerent statements made by the Israeli government, even if they’re meant to quiet internal criticism, do not assist the negotiation track.”

Dubner and Levitt’s Freakonomics was on my Dozen Best list for 2005, but I also enjoy the caustic rough translation of Ariel Rubinstein’s review of it, a review similar in style to Ed Leamer’s review of Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat. Both reviews make fun of the books, while also noting their good points, and both reviews have penetrating main ideas that I was embarassed not to have thought of myself. (That, by the way, is a good test for a brilliant idea. George Stigler was a master at that— at the short, simple, seminar question which totally derailed the paper being presented.) Leamer’s idea is “Friedman’s metaphor of the flat world is not wrong, but simply meaningless,” and Rubinstein’s idea is “Most of Levitt’s Freakonomics isn’t economics at all, just smart thinking.” (more…)

Here’s more from Ross Douthat’s article “Theocracy, Theocracy, Theocracy”,Ross Douthat, First Things 165: 23-30 (August/September 2006) that I’ve been blogging on:

1. Douthat on some writer who talks as if conservatives want to have a religious state:

What he has instead are the Christian Reconstructionists—the acolytes of the late R.J. Rushdoony—who are genuine theocrats, of a sort, and who also rank somewhere between the Free Mumia movement and the Spartacist Youth League on the totem pole of political influence in America. Yet this doesn’t prevent them from figuring prominently in nearly all the anti-theocrat anthropologies, playing the same role that international communism played for right-wing paranoiacs in the 1950s: the puppet master working from the shadows and the hidden hand behind every secular setback.

Apt, but Douthat isn’t quite right here. It is true that Rushdoony plays the role of Lenin. But Lenin had more than a handful of disciples. He had half the world’s population, and a good many American intellectuals in his corner. Even the Free Mumia movement has far more people in positions of influence than Rushdoony’s Reconstructionists. But Communism wasn’t just the Free Mumia and Spartacist Youth League. Weren’t the Spartacists the *minority* group of Communists, the Trotskyites whom nobody much worried about compared to the real Communist Party, the Party of the spies and intellectuals?

2: Douthat on a certain Mr. Goldberg’s approach, which is perhaps rhetorical, but very likely the way these people really think:

Goldberg’s approach, like that of all the anti-theocrat authors, is to assume that the most extreme manifestation of religious conservatism must, by definition, be its most authentic expression.

3. A wonderful irony:

Why did George W. Bush go to war in Iraq? The answers are all in the Book of Revelation…

But what Douthat means is that for *these liberal writers* the answers are all in the Book of Revelation. They think that the war is motivated by religious zeal, which is motivated by interpretation of the Book of Revelation. Thus, the Book of Revelation *is* the key to world history, because it is the key to the evangelical conspiracy which determines world history…

It’s curious that the Roman Catholic church has been quite successful in America in getting intelligent evangelical converts, but very bad at keeping its own serious-minded people or at getting the unchurched. (The number of priests, monks, and nuns is way down; see
http://cara.georgetown.edu/bulletin/RelStatistics.html).

I wonder if the reason isn’t evangelical despair at always wondering about theology. The Authority of the Church seems to be the central attraction– the idea that if a doctrine is old, it’s got to be right, and that papal infallibility, unlike inerrancy, can quiet one’s uneasy doubts by giving a right answer to everything.

July 16: I cited the wrong table. Above is for monks and nuns. More generally, see http://cara.georgetown.edu/bulletin/.

Professor Harbaugh passed this along to me:

One can only give an unbiased opinion about things that do not interest one, which is no doubt the reason an unbiased opinion is always valueless.

The man who sees both sides of a question is a man who sees absolutely
nothing.

Oscar Wilde (1856-1900)

A profound thought, worth thinking about. I’ll pair it with this one, equally profound:

It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!

Friedrich Nietzsche

Please excuse my lack of original sources.

From Pascal’s Thoughts, T.S. Eliot translation, entry 229, I find this item which is quotable for my Concealment Argument paper:

This is what I see and what troubles me. I look on all sides, and I see only darkness everywhere. Nature presents to me nothing which is not matter of doubt and concern. If I saw nothing there which revealed a Divinity, I would come to a negative conclusion; if I saw everywhere the signs of a Creator, I would remain peacefully in faith. But, seeing too much to deny and too little to be sure, I am in a state to be pitied; wherefore I have a hundred time wished that if a God maintains nature, she should testify to Him unequivocally, and that, if the signs she gives are deceptive, she should suppress them altogether ; that she should say everything or nothing, that I might see which cause I ought to follow. Whereas in my present state, ignorant of what I am or of what I ought to do, I know neither my condition nor my duty. My heart inclines wholly to know where is the true good, in order to follow it; nothing would be too dear to me for eternity.

I envy those whom I see living in the faith with such carelessness, and who make such a bad use of a gift of which it seems to me I would make such a different use.

From Pascal’s Thoughts, T.S. Eliot translation, entry 259, I find this sentence which is quotable for my game theory and theology project:

Ordinary people have the power of not thinking of that about which they do not wish to think. “Do not meditate on the passages about the Messiah,” said the Jew to his son. Thus our people often act. Thus are false religions preserved, and even the true one, in regard to many persons.

But there are some who have not the power of thus preventing thought, and who think so much the more as they are forbidden. These undo false religions, and even the true one, if they do not find solid arguments.