on invoking the right to remain silent

From Language Log:

In the recent case of Berghuis v. Thompkins the U.S. Supreme Court ruled five to four that persons being interviewed by the police are required to articulate their answers to the Miranda warning that they have the right to remain silent. 

This is certainly contrary to my intuition. If someone tells me I have the right to remain silent, I would assume that remaining silent is enough.

Justice Kennedy, writing for the majority, opined that Thompkins' mere silence in the face of questioning was not a clear and unambiguous invocation of his right to remain silent.

From the point of view of the questioning officer, requiring an explicit invocation of a right removes ambiguity. But how should suspects be informed that this is the case?

For the record,

Justice Sotomayer wrote the dissenting opinion, saying (1) that it is counterintuitive for defendants to speak after they are told they have the right to remain silent, (2) that in such cases detectives should presume that the suspects have invoked their rights to silence when they remain silent for almost three hours of questioning [as in this specific case], and (3), citing Miranda: "…the fact that an individual eventually made a statement is consistent with the conclusion that the compelling influence of the interrogation finally forced him to do so. It is inconsistent with any notion of a voluntary relinquishment of the privilege."

Talk about a single-payer system

From Marginal Revolution:

The UK's tax collection agency is putting forth a proposal that all employers send employee paychecks to the government, after which the government would deduct what it deems as the appropriate tax and pay the employees by bank transfer.

More here.

That's... efficient.

A case for meat eating

Simon Fairlie argues, contra vegans, that eating meat isn't bad in itself. It's current farming models that deserve our ire, not their product. From the Guardian (via Kottke):

But idiocies [like feeding human-edible grain to cows], Fairlie shows, are not arguments against all meat eating, but arguments against the current farming model. He demonstrates that we've been using the wrong comparison to judge the efficiency of meat production. Instead of citing a simple conversion rate of feed into meat, we should be comparing the amount of land required to grow meat with the land needed to grow plant products of the same nutritional value to humans. The results are radically different. 

Efficiency is the ratio of useful work performed by a process as compared with the total energy expended. What we slot into those boxes says everything about our values. What vegans (the ones worried about efficiency) are up in arms about is that large tracts of arable land are being used to feed cows instead of people. Fairlie is saying that needn't be the case, and it would be best to compare the overall amount of land dedicated to growing food for humans in each case.

If pigs are fed on residues and waste, and cattle on straw, stovers and grass from fallows and rangelands -- food for which humans don't compete -- meat becomes a very efficient means of food production. Even though it is tilted by the profligate use of grain in rich countries, the global average conversion ratio of useful plant food to useful meat is not the 5:1 or 10:1 cited by almost everyone, but less than 2:1. If we stopped feeding edible grain to animals, we could still produce around half the current global meat supply with no loss to human nutrition: in fact it's a significant net gain.

It seems like there's a problem here. Vegans say that if we stop feeding human-edible grain to cattle, then we reclaim all of that land for growing human food. Fairlie is saying that we can do that -- and have our cattle too. We'll just have the cattle eat something else, something humans don't eat, like grass. But that land was doing something else before -- it's not as though there's an infinite amount of arable land just waiting for cattle to be put on it. We've gone from a system in which X acres feed humans directly and Y acres feed the cows that feed humans to a system in which X+Y acres feed humans directly, and Z acres feed the cows that feed humans. That's a net increase in acres, but whether there is a proportional increase in food for humans is complicated even in a simplified grain-and-cows model.

Part of what Fairlie is suggesting is that better (meaning more robust, sustainable, and efficient by some measure) agricultural practices would by their nature produce an opportunity to feed cattle: instead of dumping nitrogen onto the same fields year after year, we would actually rotate crops, and at least some of the crops in rotation would be food for cattle and not for people. But these better practices (and I agree that they are better) require more land to produce the same yield.

More than likely, Fairlie discusses much of this in the book (I haven't read it), so I don't mean to impugn him. I simply want to point out that this is a hard problem, and one whose solution depends on a fair bit of empirical work.

For most people who worry about such things and want to do something about it, the only plausible choice is to stop eating meat.

economies of scale

This might come as news to war hawks. Or stimulus hawks.

Peter Schiff puts things in perspective (Via Marginal Revolution).

But to repeat the impact of World War II today would require a truly massive effort. Replicating the six-fold increase in the federal budget that was seen in the early 1940s would result in a nearly $20 trillion budget today. That equates to $67,000 for every man, woman, and child in the country. Surely, the tremendous GDP growth created by such spending would make short work of the so-called Great Recession. 

To a degree that will surprise many, the US funded its World War II effort largely by raising taxes and tapping into Americans' personal savings. Both of those avenues are nowhere near as promising today as they were in 1941 Current tax burdens are now much higher than they were before the War, so raising taxes today would be much more difficult. The "Victory Tax" of 1942 sharply raised income tax rates and allowed, for the first time in our nation's history, taxes to be withheld directly from paychecks. The hikes were originally intended to be temporary but have, of course, far outlasted their purpose. It would be unlikely that Americans would accept higher taxes today to fund a real war, let alone a pretend one.

That leaves savings, which was the War's primary source of funding. During the War, Americans purchased approximately $186 billion worth of war bonds, accounting for nearly three quarters of total federal spending from 1941-1945. Today, we don't have the savings to pay for our current spending, let alone any significant expansions. Even if we could convince the Chinese to loan us a large chunk of the $20 trillion (on top of the $1 trillion we already owe them), how could we ever pay them back?

Sentences to ponder

A nice observation from Ezra Klein via Marginal Revolution:

Campaigns are built to fool us into thinking that we're voting for individuals. We learn about the candidate's family, her job, her background -- even her dog. But we're primarily voting for parties. The parties have just learned we're more likely to vote for them if they disguise themselves as individuals. And American politics would work better if we understood that.

links for the week

TIME is VERY bullish on stimulus.

How to stop illegal advertising.

Sun may affect radioactive decay rates.

On mosques and the World Trade Center

Irony abounds.

Via Alex Tabarrok (MR): The architect of the World Trade Center designed its plaza as "a mecca, a great relief from the narrow streets and sidewalks of the surrounding Wall Street area."

Yamasaki replicated the plan of Mecca's courtyard by creating a vast delineated square, isolated from the city's bustle by low colonnaded structures and capped by two enormous, perfectly square towers—minarets, really. Yamasaki's courtyard mimicked Mecca's assemblage of holy sites—the Qa'ba (a cube) containing the sacred stone, what some believe is the burial site of Hagar and Ishmael, and the holy spring—by including several sculptural features, including a fountain, and he anchored the composition in a radial circular pattern, similar to Mecca's.

There is much more in the original article, all fascinating.

net neutrality

On Google on (Wireless Non-) Net Neutrality

First, the wireless market is more competitive than the wireline market, given that consumers typically have more than just two providers to choose from. Second, because wireless networks employ airwaves, rather than wires, and share constrained capacity among many users, these carriers need to manage their networks more actively. Third, network and device openness is now beginning to take off as a significant business model in this space. In our proposal, we agreed that the best first step is for wireless providers to be fully transparent with users about how network traffic is managed to avoid congestion, or prioritized for certain applications and content.

 Step one of "don't be evil": don't put yourself in a situation where evil is an easy choice.

regulating freedom

For risks I can assess myself, I don't want regulations that prevent me from doing as I please. ... For risks I can't assess myself, I do want regulations that give me the confidence to do as I please. ... One kind of regulation makes me less free. The other kind makes me freer.

From, via.

It isn't easy being green.

Scott Adams recounts some of the difficulties of building a green home.

Heating and cooling are the biggest energy thieves. And roofs and windows matter the most for heat transfer. Focus your research and budget there. Most of the information you find will come from manufacturers who have a financial interest in misleading you, and also of course from cartoonists who write opinion pieces after being misled by those same manufacturers. Good luck with your research.

It isn't just that manufacturers are misleading or that experts disagree. According to the New York Times, it's also that our intuitions aren't very good:

The top five behaviors listed by respondents as having a direct impact on energy savings (turning off the lights, riding a bike or using public transportation, changing the thermostat, “changing my lifestyle/not having children” and unplugging appliances or using them less) yield savings that are far outweighed by actions cited far less often, like driving a more fuel-efficient car.

The study is here.

In digest form: We focus on changing the way we move through the infrastructure of our lives, but we should focus on changing the infrastructure itself. Reducing our reliance on energy is good, replacing inefficient items with more efficient ones is better -- and you only have to do it once! But good luck figuring out the most effective changes to make.

Who renders judgment?

Brian Leiter  doesn't like the "epistemic egalitarianism" of Wikipedia. Here he quotes Larry Sanger:

There was this attitude that experts should be disqualified [from participating] by the very fact that they had published on the subject—that because they had published, they were therefore biased.

The worry about epistemic egalitarianism is that true expertise is being missed or even suppressed. Leiter points to cases in which Wikipedians have overruled experts, and it is easy to equate this kind of egalitarianism with "teach the controversy," science-bashing movements, and other perversions.

Sanger gives a bit of context for where this attitude comes from:

There's a whole worldview that's shared by many programmers—although not all of them, of course—and by many young intellectuals that I characterize as "epistemic egalitarianism." They're greatly offended by the idea that anyone might be regarded as more reliable on a given topic than everyone else. They feel that for everything to be as fair as possible and equal as possible, the only thing that ought to matter is the content [of a claim] itself, not its source.

Having been a programmer, I can attest to the prevalence of this attitude, and add that it is usually coupled with a naive sense of entitlement to render judgment -- and that both the attitude and the habit are hard to overcome. A contractarian might view the recognition of expertise as a voluntary ceding of autonomy to an authority. Programmers usually have radical views about intellectual property, so it should be no surprise that they have radical views about authority generally. (I suppose that, like programmers, philosophers tend toward epistemic egalitarianism (modulo a general discomfort with Heidegger).)

But nowhere in either the attitude of epistemic egalitarianism or the habit of rendering judgment is any support for the kind of anti-expertise Leiter is worried about. We can dismiss arguments that rely on claims to authority without dismissing arguments made by authorities.

Eric Schleisser defends epistemic egalitarianism (toward science-as-expert) for its public policy implications:

1. Scientific authority can get willfully abused (Nazi medicine, eugenics, etc). But let's leave this aside.
2. A. Scientific expertise is fairly narrow and it can easily be misapplied in public policy domains. B. Few scientific experts are trained in neighboring fields as to judge the interactions among their expertise and other experts.
3. scientific expertise gets selected for by interested parties, including (alas) self-selection.
4. scientific experts are normal rent-seeking agents. 
5. When scientific experts get it wrong in matters of policy they do not tend to run the costs of their errors.

Note that none of these (2-4) points mean we should not seek expert advice or base policy on scientific knowledge. (The fifth one may incline us to be very cautious about scientific experts.) But points 2-4 do encourage transparency of the sort that EE insist on in order to let (skeptical) non-experts weigh in on and scrutinize expert authority in decision-making processes.

Scientists aren't (and shouldn't be) disinterested in the social or political implications of their studies. My own interests -- in the way things work, in money, in electronics -- led me to become an engineer. Changing interests -- in how we come to know things, in dialog, in scientific practice -- led me to switch tracks and become a philosopher. To pretend otherwise would be foolish. But the fact that I have held these and other interests does nothing to diminish (or inflate) whatever small contribution I have made (or will make) to those respective fields.

A key challenge for social epistemology (of science) is in determining what sort of group (of scientists) is entitled to make knowledge claims. Some typical criteria are publication, peer-review, consensus, and diversity. The first three recognize some basic institutions of science, while "diversity" defends against accusations of bias: the more diverse the group of individuals who assent to some claim, the more likely it will be that any possible objection will have been considered. I gather that this is supposed to follow from the diversity of interests that connect to their decision to join the group in question.

This diversity effect has always left me a bit uneasy. While I concede that a person's stance likely blinds them to alternatives, it need not do so. Biases can be overcome. One way to help overcome a particular bias in a group is to add people without said bias to the group. Another way is simply to point out the bias. That won't always work, but I wouldn't want to rule out the possibility.

Childrearing

Oh, McSweeney's! (via Uncertain Principles, I think)

When little Aiden toddled up our daughter Johanna and asked to play with her Elmo ball, he was, admittedly, very sweet and polite. I think his exact words were, "Have a ball, peas [sic]?" 

And I'm sure you were very proud of him for using his manners. 

To be sure, I was equally proud when Johanna yelled, "No! Looter!" right in his looter face, and then only marginally less proud when she sort of shoved him. 

The thing is, in this family we take the philosophies of Ayn Rand seriously.

It is probably best that philosophers are so often ignored by society at large.

Going Galt

Why have libertarians never built a utopia? Here.

... Libertopia would yield its residents a greatly reduced standard of living, compared to what they could get from a government. Of course, the ideal would be a nearby government jurisdiction that would provide the large-scale industry needed for a ready source of consumer goods, a home for contracted-in service providers, support for losers and so on, but would not be able to tax the Libertopians.

But once you think that you realise that a partial approach to this outcome already exists, and has millions of inhabitants across the US. They’re called suburban Republicans. The suburbs benefit from urban centers, but resist paying for them, mostly successfully. It’s not exactly Libertopia, but it’s obviously close enough to be more appealing than going Galt.

maintenance

Charles Stross asks:

What is the minimum number of people you need in order to maintain (not necessarily to extend) our current level of technological civilization?

Stross expects the answer to fall between 100 million and 1 billion. A few commenters question his upper limit, which is based on the population of industrialized nations, because those nations exploit the rest of the world for its labor and natural resources. But most commenters question his lower limit, some expecting that even 1 million individuals (with the first generation properly selected) might be enough to be technologically self-sustaining.


I think a more interesting question is: what is the minimum number of people you need in order to maintain our current way of life?


I don't think a technological civilization can exist without, you know, civilization. And civilization means much more than technology. It also means janitors, politicians, beat cops, caretakers, librarians, athletes, judges, rock stars, journalists, and maybe even bloggers.

extinction of the labour class

Philip Greenspun wonders:

The U.S. has 15 million officially unemployed workers and additional tens of millions who aren’t working and aren’t looking for a job. Could these folks be the draft horses of the 21st century?

Here's the gist: worries about disappearing labor markets can probably be ignored; such worries are typical in times of technological change, but the reality is that in many cases demand for labor increases. But the nature of labor changes, and there are losers. Internal combustion engines eventually replaced draft horses in the early 20th century because the cost to operate engines dropped below the cost of feeding horses. Perhaps labor has now changed so that certain individuals simply haven't the capabilities to make it in the present market.

I have a fondness for outlandish comparisons, but even so, the comparison seems particularly crass. People aren't horses. There's an implication that these people don't deserve jobs because they don't have salable skills.

Let's take a closer look at the basic claim: there is a gap in the labor market large enough to swallow 5% of the population of the US. That is, these individuals are not qualified for the jobs that provide the level of compensation they desire. Furthermore, they are unwilling to take jobs that don't provide that level of compensation.

Now things seem more reasonable. If I lost my (hypothetical) $30,000/year job, I would be leery of replacing it with a (hypothetical) $15,000/year minimum wage job -- I wouldn't be able to pay my (hypothetical) bills. I'd keep looking.

on being left-handed

10% of the general population are left-handed. Ford, Reagan, the elder Bush, Clinton, Gore, and now Obama and McCain are all left-handed [via MR].

Does my being left-handed increase my chances of becoming President of the United States?

informed consent, social contracts, and the veil of ignorance

(I've scheduled a few posts to magically appear here while I'm away over the next few weeks. What follows is one.)

Massimo Pigliucci concisely describes the basics of ethical theory: there's contractualism, where

no contractualist really maintains that there ever was a non-social state of nature for human beings (if they did, they would be contradicted by evolutionary biologists), nor that the so-called social contract was an historical event (historians would go crazy with that one), nor that it is actually entered into voluntarily by most people (you are usually born into a society with a given contract, meaning a set of laws and customs

and there's the Rawls variation, which introduces a device he calls the "veil of ignorance," where you

assume that you arrive at the bargaining table with no knowledge whatsoever of your social status, economic power, ethnicity, religion or gender. Then, asks Rawls, what kind of society would you want to set up? The answer, he argued, is a society that would guarantee maximum liberty equally distributed among its members, as well as an equal distribution of wealth and power.

Contemporary America does nothing of the sort (that position is far to the left of any Democrat in office; Libertarians and Republicans need not apply).

There's a funny sort of dichotomy at work here: in the original contractualism, we are all bonded against our will to contracts that no one ever explicitly approved (but which we all purportedly would approve if we were in an imaginary situation disarmingly called a state of "nature"). In Rawls' version, we are asked what contract we would set up if we didn't know anything about our own particular qualities and abilities (his answer is a meritocracy).

One of the great principles of fairness under the rule of law is informed consent. We insist on seeing all the available information (certified by experts!) before making a medical, legal, or financial decision. Why, then, are ethics to be based on ignorance?

Is it truly impossible to reach similar ethical conclusions from a more realistic starting point--a situation in which some ethical system is in place and individuals have partial knowledge of their own status?

two wrongs don't make a right

Leif Wenar says it is "patronizing theft to buy natural resources." Tyler Cowan says "he proposes suing Exxon to create a chain reaction."

The only thing more patronizing than paying a pittance to the worlds poor for the natural resources we need for lip gloss and shave cream is suing on behalf of those poor people.

That said, Wenar is right that there's a problem. Here are my priorities:

1. Wherever possible, we should use renewable resources.
2. If renewable resources won't do it, we should do our best to keep the resources we've already "harvested" in the supply loop, preferably through reuse, but through recycling when the materials need to be reprocessed.
3. Whenever renewable resources are harvested, it should be in sustainable volumes, and prices should reflect replacement cost.
4. When non-renewable resources are harvested, the price should be high. I don't know how high.
   

I doubt a lawsuit is the way to settle the issue.

applying the broken windows policy to terrorism

Often the most fascinating part of learning about science is the conclusions scientists (and others) draw from the evidence. Aaron Clauset, who has spent three years at the Santa Fe Institute modeling statistics of terrorism, has found that size and frequency of attack follow a power law.

the statistical distribution fits severe events like 9/11 to the same curve as more common but less severe ones that kill a dozen or so people. the pattern suggests that such rare and large events are not outliers, as was previously thought, but are somehow interconnected with the smaller attacks. the authors claim that if an underlying connection exists, then taking measures to discourage small-scale attacks might also prevent severe ones.

Hat tip 3QD

As I've said before, power laws can emerge automatically from random connections between nodes; an explanation involving a power law is often a claim that no explanation is required--that the behavior is to be expected, like an equilibrium condition. It is divergence from power laws (in situations where we might expect them) that would require explanation. But of course the point of power laws is that they indicate a systematic regularity in phenomena that might otherwise be assumed to be unrelated--for example, large and small terrorist attacks. The final sentence in the above quote is the fascinating one: that not only is there a relationship between small and large attacks, it is a strong enough one that decreasing the number of small attacks should also decrease the number of large attacks.

A professor of mine once noted that there is a strong inverse correlation between the number of mules (per capita) and professorial pay within the region (that is, if one area has more mules, we would expect professors there to be paid less). Yet there is no reason to think that one causes the other--that is, killing mules will not increase professorial pay. In fact, a common cause is responsible for both: the more agricultural a state, the more mules there will be, and the lower professorial pay will be. The more urban a region, the fewer mules and the higher the pay.

It certainly seems right that large-scale terrorism should be more closely related to small-scale terrorism than are mules to payscales, but mere similarity is no guarantee.

The idea that large terrorist attacks can be prevented by dealing sharply with small terrorist attacks is an intriguing one, and it has strong similarities to a crime-reduction policy that has become popular in major US cities in recent years. The Broken Windows policy begins from the premise that most crimes are crimes of opportunity, and opportunities are more apparent in "bad neighborhoods"--those with broken windows. To reduce subway crime, then-Mayor Giuliani of New York instituted the policy of cleaning graffiti from trains on a daily basis. No train left the yard with graffiti on it. Indeed, the policy worked: graffiti on trains dropped dramatically. As did littering and turnstile jumping (although the latter probably had more to do with the complementary policy of daisy-chaining jumpers together and processing their tickets en masse with a roving paddy-wagon).

But in the larger scheme, Broken Windows has had some unfortunate side effects: many more people are incarcerated for small crimes, increasing the number of three-strikes convictions, straining the penal system, and inadvertently (one hopes) targeting the homeless and mentally ill (whose crimes are usually of the nuisance variety).

Could fighting Broken Windows Terrorism have similar unexpected consequences?

the shape of politics to come - UPDATE

Back in February, I noted that font experts selected Obama and McCain as the winners in the race for President. Although they were selecting winning font choices, it's worth following up now that McCain is the presumptive nominee for the Republicans. The NYTimes has a piece on the McCain camp's selection of Optima as their font of choice. Optima, the article notes, is the font Maya Lin selected for the Vietnam Memorial (photo by Sarah, I think). This fits well with McCain's war hero status, whether he had anything to do with the selection or not.

As Rudy VanderLans puts it,

What does Optima say about Senator McCain? Nothing. It probably says more about the designer than anything else. Who, except designers, would judge a candidate by the typeface?

Not exactly McCain's base. But Matthew Carter has the most interesting tid-bit:

The moment of typographic truth will come when Senator McCain picks a vice presidential running mate and two names have to be combined on banners and bumper stickers. By choosing Optima, a rather distinctive typeface, he may have seriously limited his options.

I set the possible names in a bold weight of Optima caps and certain things became clear. HUCKABEE looks awkward in Optima, and ROMNEY is afflicted with the same difficult ‘EY’ combination that has plagued the current vice presidency. Perhaps because Optima is a German typeface, the word SCHWARZENEGGER looks predictably good.

Although it’s German, Optima took its inspiration from Quattrocento inscriptional lettering in the cathedrals of Florence and Siena, which may explain why GIULIANI looks so simpatico. In the end, however, my research suggests that the optimal running mate — so long as you don’t have to typeset her first name — is RICE.

Good choice.