Another challenge: botanical edition

A while back I mentioned Andrew Carroll, an 18 year old kid who is really fucking brave.  He stood in the middle of his town holding some pieces of a plant, knowing what the result would be.  

Men with guns came, put chains on him, and forced him into a cage.  

Soon he'll face a "trial" in a "court" that is supposed to deliver "justice."  He'll make strong moral arguments, which will be ignored in favor of immoral laws that say he is guilty.  The state will punish him.  Because he possessed a plant.  

Challenge: justify this.

(Reminder:  your taxes pay for this kind of thing.)

If you aren't up to the challenge, Andrew has made his point.

on condescension

As a followup to the previous post, on a personal level, I want to say that I think Brice Lord is a good guy and I don't mean to pick on him specifically.  The views he has expressed are very common.  

Statism, especially in America, is basically a religion into which people are raised.  And just as I don't think people are stupid or evil just because they're religious, I don't think that about those who believe in the state or in the exceptionalism of America.  But I do think their beliefs are dangerous and can lead to actions that are stupid or evil, and as such I try to challenge bad arguments defending those beliefs.  

The most hopeful outcome of such a process is to convince people to give up their religions and evaluate the world around them without the blinders of faith.  Perhaps a more realistic hope is that by speaking up we make it easier for others to do the same and to unite, gradually adding cohesiveness and force to a previously-marginalized viewpoint.

Just like when I've spoken out against religion, I suspect a reaction to what I've said here will be that I'm terribly condescending.  But all I've done here is say that I disagree with someone (or lots of people).  Implicit in disagreement is the thought that the other person is wrong. Disagreements happen all the time without accusations of condescension, so clearly there's more to condescension that simply telling someone they're wrong.  

If it is the suggestion that a perspective is based on faith, not reason, that seems condescending, I would argue that if anything that is a nicer way of telling someone they're wrong.  Personally, I'd feel better if my failure to understand reality could be attributable to complex effects of the way loved ones have influenced my emotional development and trusted authorities have deceived me.  That seems like the nicest possible way to tell someone they're wrong.  

I think this feeling that someone is being condescending is an unconscious way of insulating ourselves from challenges to deeply held beliefs, a point I've made before when I talk about "poor form".  Rather than confront the ideas, it enables us to simply dismiss the challenger.  After all, even if I am being condescending, that doesn't mean I'm wrong.

reply to Brice Lord

I've been meaning to go back and address a point raised by Brice Lord in the comments to this post. I said that the government steals your money, calling it "taxation," to pay for its crimes, to which he replies:

First, who says it's my money anyway? Most of the money I make wouldn't be available to be made were it not for the facilitation of the government by redistribution of resources.

Perhaps this is a defensible reply to a narrow understanding of the specific comment that preceded his remark, but it doesn't meaningfully address the challenge I posed, though it may seem that way if you've deeply embraced the state structure, as most people have. To note that redistribution of resources is only necessary because of the state's essential role in maintaining massive inequality of resource distribution is to note that Brice Lord's answer begs the question: the state controls everyone's lives so of course the state should control our money!

To (hopefully) make this a little easier...

An easy way to dismiss Brice Lord's complaint is to imagine a farmer who earns a living by selling food that he grows to his neighbors, making little or no use of government infrastructure. He just works the land that his family has worked for generations, and sells his harvests to people nearby. He is taxed by the government, and if he refuses to pay, men with guns will throw him in a cage and/or take his property. I think this scenario goes most of the way to addressing Brice Lord's point.

As for the rest of us, how many people actually even have the option of making a living in a way that can't be seen as directly or indirectly reliant on government? Whether your career aspirations are about pure altruism, pure self-advancement, or anything in between, it is almost impossible to find a path that isn't state-managed. (If the privileged people that come from where Brice Lord and I come from have that option, they don't seem to exercise it very often. Our former classmates and mutual friends are lawyers, doctors, academics, federal law enforcement officers, Wall Street financiers, teachers, government policy advisors.) So pretty much the only way to make money, by which I mean the only way to gain access to general resources by the means of our personal specialized productivity, is by aligning yourself with the state. And it is this all-encompassing strangehold that the state has on our lives that Brice Lord offers as a defense of the state's all-encompassing stranglehold on the gains from our personal productivity. Obviously I find his argument unpersuasive.

As for Brice Lord's arguments in his other comments, I think he's committed several other errors. First he seems to think that because two-thirds of the annual federal budget (I'll just take his figure for granted here) goes to what are called "social programs," that means most of your tax money supports the "social safety net." He then acknowledges that such programs might be poorly managed, which immediately undermines his argument because poor management means that a significant percentage of that goes to waste. While some are content to politely call this inefficiency, there are thriving industries getting rich off this waste and investing a portion of their proceeds in lobbying to make sure the "poor management" continues. This is corporate welfare, redistributing resources in the opposite direction from what Brice Lord thinks the government is doing.

But you can even put that aside, because even if 100% of this money was devoted to the stated goals of these "social programs," many of them actually make things worse, not better. In order to adequately support this argument, I think we'd have to go through these programs on a case-by-case basis and examine their net effects, which is beyond the scope of this post. (As for the debate at hand, if Brice Lord can simply assert that these programs do good, I can refute him by simply asserting they don't, so at worst I've forced a draw on this specific point.)

Second, he seems to think that a meaningful version of democracy obtains in the US. It doesn't, and never has.

Third, he has only acknowledged negative actions funded by our tax dollars that take place in foreign countries. This might be because he thinks (perhaps fairly) that I've mostly focussed on those (though I did note a domestic issue in the original post). Following from the first point, I'd argue that the vast majority of all government action has negative consequences. An example that I must have mentioned before and that should be uncontroversial is the "war on drugs," which has devastating domestic effects and costs untold billions of tax dollars. Same with our agriculture policies and subsidies. Same with most federal "education" programs.

Fourth, to put all of it together, he seems to be saying that if a government elected by a plurality of a population engages in aggressive foreign wars resulting in millions of ruined lives, that it is defensible for everyone living in the area controlled by that government to be coerced into supporting the atrocities, as long as that government confiscates additional and more numerous funds that are used for good causes. Aside from the already mentioned cheapening-to-the-point-of-meaninglessness of "democracy," this makes a mockery of any notion of government by consent of the governed.

And that the defense of this is that there is no "practical" alternative is shockingly cynical, which is ironic in that Brice Lord's view here is quite common, and my political thoughts are often dismissed as too cynical. But I've never argued that the only way that 300 million people in a given geographic region could possibly live together in relative safety and do a fairly decent job of taking care of each other is by surrendering control of their lives to an institution that sociopathically will do whatever it can get away with to gain the slightest advantage for those who control it, up to and including the mass slaughter of millions of human beings. I might be insane or naive, but I do still believe that there are practical alternatives to such an arrangement.

update: slight edit to the wording of the 2nd to last paragraph.

on the role of intellectuals

I don't know if I have special access to Science articles because I'm on campus, so I'll just copy the whole thing below. The basic story is that some academics have developed mathematical techniques to analyze the shape of Congressional districts and provide some measure of how goofy the shapes are, which you could infer is a measure of how gerrymandered they are.

The last paragraph amused me. The discussion is entirely about whether these sophisticated mathematical tools will lead to people feeling like the process is fair. Note that the discussion is not about whether these tools will lead to a process that is fair. Apparently the latter issue cannot be addressed because of "contradictions out the wazoo" since "one person's equality is another person's gerrymander." Clearly it is beyond the capacity of academia's preeminent publications to attempt to referee such muddled debates! I'm sure they couldn't possibly find any patterns as to which kinds of people think shapes like Maryland's 3rd district represent equality, or do any kind of analysis as to who benefits from those kinds of shapes. Far too many contradictions indeed. More than can be contained in a single wazoo.

Instead what is important is that the outcome be "respected." Smoke and mirrors. As Chomsky has said many times, the role of intellectuals is to support power systems and justify their atrocities. At least they sometimes acknowledge it.



JOINT MATHEMATICS MEETINGS:
Can Mathematics Map the Way Toward Less-Bizarre Elections?
Barry Cipra

JOINT MATHEMATICS MEETINGS, 5-8 JANUARY 2009, WASHINGTON, D.C.
With the 2010 census looming, U.S. politicians and their legal teams are gearing up for another round of wrangling over the spoils of redistricting: the process of deciding which voters get to reelect which members of the House of Representatives and other legislative bodies. Parties in power like to carve up voters to their own advantage, a practice known as gerrymandering. Some reformers, however, hope to limit the mischief--and are turning to mathematics for tools to do so. In a marathon 6-hour session at the Joint Meetings, speakers discussed ideas ranging from pie-in-the-sky theoretical to crust-on-the-ground practical.

The term "gerrymandering" dates back to 1812, when Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry signed into law a tortuous districting map that favored his Democratic- Republican Party over the rival Federalists. But given the fine-grain demographic detail of modern political databases, "the problem is much worse than it used to be," says Richard Pildes, an expert on election law at the New York University School of Law in New York City. Gerrymandering "gives people the sense that they're not really in control of their democracy," Pildes says. "It's part of what contributes to an alienation and cynicism about democracy."

The mathematics of redistricting starts with arithmetic and geometry. Ideally, every district in a state would have an equal population and would be, in some sense, both "contiguous" and "compact." Socioeconomic, political, and racial demographics also come into play. "You can have equipopulous districts and still have whoppingly biased gerrymanders," notes Sam Hirsch, a lawyer at Jenner & Block in Washington, D.C., who specializes in election law and voting rights.

To a mathematician, contiguous means connected--i.e., you can travel from any point in it to any other without leaving the region. Compactness is trickier. Various definitions have been proposed, including one presented at the session by Alan Miller, a graduate student in social science at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, California.

Miller's method, developed with Caltech economist Christopher Chambers, quantifies the "bizarreness" of geometric shapes. (The word "bizarre" traces to a 1993 ruling in which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down several oddly shaped congressional districts. Politicians' attempts to handpick their constituents invariably create convolutions in district lines.) In essence, bizarreness is the probability that the most direct path between two randomly chosen voters within a district crosses district lines. The higher the probability, the more bizarre the district is. (The path is required to stay within the state, to avoid penalizing districts that sit on ragged state boundaries.)

Using block data from the 2000 census, Miller and Chambers have computed bizarreness for the congressional districts of Connecticut, Maryland, and New Hampshire. Most compact was Connecticut's 4th District, with bizarreness 0.023; most oddly shaped: Maryland's 3rd district, at 0.860 (see figure).

Bizarreness could be used as a threshold criterion in producing redistricting maps or comparing alternatives, Miller says. "You can use it to reject districts that are badly shaped."

In his own proposal, Hirsch took the idea of thresholds and added a dose of high-octane competition. Rival factions--or anyone else interested in entering the fray--would be able to counter one another's maps, as long as each new submission improved on at least one of three criteria and matched the other two. The goals of the three criteria are to minimize the number of counties cut up by district lines, equalize as much as possible the number of districts leaning toward each of the two major parties, and maximize the number of "competitive" districts, in which neither major-party candidate in a recent statewide contest would have won by more than 7% of the vote.

Hirsch's proposal "is a great idea," says Charles Hampton, a mathematician at the College of Wooster in Ohio, who has been involved in redistricting since the early 1980s. (He drew maps in 1991 for the governor of California's Independent Redistricting Panel.) "We quibble on some of the details," Hampton says, but "I think [it] has some real prospect of producing a much better situation."

No one expects mathematics to solve the problem to everyone's satisfaction. "It's ultimately a political problem," Hirsch says. Kimball Brace, head of Election Data Services in Manassas, Virginia, and a member of the 2010 Census Advisory Committee, agrees. "Redistricting is contradictions out the wazoo," Brace says. "One person's equality is another person's gerrymander." Nonetheless, a growing group of practitioners believe mathematics can play a key role. Says Pildes, "Math can give you tools for creating processes that are likely to lead people to feel that the process is fair and that the outcome is therefore something to be respected."

my job this semester

The class I TAed last semester was amazing. I wish I had taken something like it as an undergrad.

This semester I'm TAing a behavioral ecology course:

Behavioural Ecology is a field devoted to understanding animal behaviour in terms of evolution and ecology. In this course, we will study the behaviour of animals, why such behaviour evolves and how behaviour may enable animals to adapt to their environments. As a field, behavioural ecology emerged from a synthesis of many scientific disciplines including ethology, evolutionary biology, psychology, anthropology, zoology and population genetics. Note, this course is NOT centrally concerned with Homo sapiens, and will take a comparative approach to the study of
animal behaviour.

I would have loved this course as an undergrad too, but I stayed away from biology because I hated dissecting things. I haven't taken a biology course since my freshman year of high school, 1994-1995. I don't remember evolution being covered in that course, and there certainly wasn't any cool analysis of behavior. The stuff worth learning managed to elude me for a long time, but I found it eventually.

Repeat

Chris Floyd:

How many times do you have to see it? How many times must it be shoved in your face, crammed down your throat, brought down on your head like a ton of bricks, before you get the picture? When it comes to the lineaments and methods of empire -- war, murder, torture, extortion, and deceit -- there is no difference, none whatsoever, between the hip, cool "progressives" in Team Obama and the gaggle of militarist goons who preceded them.

Go read the rest!

dream a little dream

Sometimes you hear a philosophical examination of consciousness or something that argues that maybe you're just dreaming this right now and don't realize it. So how to do you know it is really real? That kind of thing.

Here's what I realized. I'm pretty sure that any time I've ever stopped and thought about whether something I'm experiencing is real, I've gotten the right answer. I've been in dreams and not thought about whether it was real, but whenever I actually stop and think about it, I realize I'm dreaming. (Then I get to start controlling the dream, which is awesome.) And any time in real life I wonder if I'm dreaming, I know I'm not. So I don't get what all the fuss is about.

Maybe I need to do more drugs though. I suppose that could trip me up.

this is refreshing

I'm not watching the Superbowl.  No desire, and I got other stuff to do.  I like it.