On the summary execution of murderous tyrants and the good of a timely accounting.
Despite my dislike of capital punishment I find it hard to object to the summary execution of murderous tyrants such as Gaddafi. A short period of terror followed by a swift ignominious death is much less than they deserve. What they deserve are the torments of hell. Nor is the absence of a trial an injustice done them—what doubt have we of their guilt? If they are a focus for forces intent on reviving their tyranny, and those forces will dissipate or fail without them, killing them may also be a benefit and even a necessity. So if there is anything wrong in their summary execution it must be found elsewhere and must outweigh the risks of keeping them alive. It seems to me there is something to be said on this other side and it is to be found in the good of a timely accounting.
Buying authenticity: plagiarism checking and counter-checking
Alex Tabarrok on Marginal Revolution posted about how the software company Turnitin is not just helping schools detect student plagiarism, but also providing WriteCheck, a tool for checking that a paper is non-infringing. Are they providing a useful service for conscientious students to avoid unconscious infringement, or just playing both sides of the fence, profiting from an arms race where they sell all the arms?
Evidence on Evidence Based Policy
You were no doubt as surprised as I was when the Blair government announced it was henceforth doing evidence based policy. It was just like when the medical profession said it was going to do evidence based medicine. You mean—they weren’t already? Still, even though the promised reform doesn’t really sweeten the bitter truth, it is a move in the right direction. Or at least, it is a promise to take a move in the right direction. But was the move taken? When it comes to the, perhaps minor, example of speed cameras, we have clear evidence whether the policy was evidence based. And the evidence says, No!
Banks: Liberty or Regulation
Gordon Brown has just said that he made a big mistake about financial regulation. His remarks are in line with many politicians on the financial crisis: regulation failed therefore we need more regulation. But do we?
Frideswide Square is a notorious traffic junction in Oxford, and it’s a nightmare. It has about 20 sets of traffic lights and small problems here lead to long tailbacks in many directions, tripling journey times for many otherwise short trips. So you can imagine how awful it was when the traffic lights all broke down recently.
Except it wasn’t. Continue reading
Intolerance we ought to encourage?
by Anders Sandberg
Government Chief Scientific Adviser John Beddington goes to war against bad science: Selective use of science ‘as bad as racism or homophobia’. He argued: ‘We are grossly intolerant, and properly so, of racism. We are grossly intolerant, and properly so, of people who [are] anti-homosexuality…We are not—and I genuinely think we should think about how we do this—grossly intolerant of pseudo-science, the building up of what purports to be science by the cherry-picking of the facts and the failure to use scientific evidence and the failure to use scientific method’. Is he right that we should be intolerant of bad science?
Ad usum Delphini: should we Bowdlerize children’s books?
The Ture Sventon books are a series of Swedish children’s detective stories written by Åke Holmberg 1948-1973. They are locally well-known and appreciated, but henceforth Ture Sventon i Paris (1953) will likely not be republished. The reason is that the publisher Rabén & Sjögren wanted to remove the word “neger” in the book, and the Swedish Writers’ Union (who owns the copyright to the books) refused this change, since it would change the character of the book. They acknowledged that it was a word with a racist resonance but also a part of cultural history, and hence it could not be removed or replaced with “colored” or “black”. They suggested adding an explanatory introduction instead. The publisher choose not to reissue the book.
In English-speaking countries another recent controversy is about the new edition of Huckleberry Finn that replaces use of the word “nigger” with “slave” and “injun” to “Indian”. Again, literature experts complains that this fundamentally changes the novel (which after all is an anti-racist book) and might have deeply upset the author, yet others think that this will allow it to be read more in schools or public. Are we seeing examples of well-intentioned acts of “cultural vandalism and obscurantism that constricts rather than expands the life of the mind”, or just attempts to reduce impediments for the public to read the works?
Penzions and Politicians
Aren’t you glad you’ve got a state pension! I know I am. It’s just great to know the government cares about us and will look after us in our old age. Kind of like having parents, only better because it’s even bigger and even stronger, and not selfish like parents are. (Also, more likely to be around at that point.) And it works so well too. You just pay money in and later you get more out. I know this because I can see pensioners getting their money out now. Obviously the money is properly invested and gives an excellent return. So I simply cannot understand why the party poopers are maundering on about dangerous pension liabilities leading to unsustainable government deficits and debts. Don’t they believe what the prime ministers and presidents tell us?
Look, here is what President Obama is saying, and if he doesn’t know what he’s talking about then I just don’t know who does:
Beauty, brains, and the halo effect
by Alexandre Erler
Satoshi Kanazawa is currently in the news – see e.g. these articles in the Daily Mail, The Australian and Psychology Today. An evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, Kanazawa has just published a new article in the journal Intelligence (Kanazawa 2011) in which he argues, in continuity with his previous research, that beautiful people tend to be more intelligent than plainer ones (especially if they are men). Only now he is arguing that this correlation may be much stronger than we previously thought. His conclusion is based on data from two studies, conducted respectively in the UK and the US, which tested the intelligence of children and young teenagers but also rated their level of physical attractiveness. In the British study, attractive respondents had a mean IQ about 13 points higher than unattractive ones, and the beauty-intelligence correlation turned out to be of a similar magnitude to that between intelligence and education.
Wikileaks Rights and Wrongs
Would it be a good thing if, far from crushing Wikileaks, governments were required to post their entire correspondence on Wikileaks? In principle, this would appear to be highly desirable. A legitimate ruler over us it might justifiably keep secrets from us—but there is no such thing, neither leviathan nor the general will nor the people. Government is merely a mechanism we employ to protect our rights and resolve certain coordination problems. The government is therefore our agent and agents have no ground for withholding information from principals. The enormous power accumulated by the state should not be wielded in secrecy. Furthermore, when we give up democratic and political romanticism the attractions of openness only increase: we realise that anyone putting themselves forward to have power over us (always for our own good, of course) thereby raises a doubt over whether they should have it, and that politicians are not and never will be especially wise or good and will do what they think is required to hang onto power.
(update: see also my discussion of Wikileaks on Guardian Comment is Free)
If you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve got nothing to fear: Wikileaks and RIPA
Governments around the world have condemned Wikileaks recent release of US diplomatic cables, often while simultaneously denying they matter; the reactions are tellingly similar to the previous reactions from the US military simultaneously claiming the leaks were highly illegal, dangerous and irrelevant. At the same time many have defended the release as helping transparency. As David Waldock twittered: "Dear government: as you keep telling us, if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to fear".
Is this correct?
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