Pilgrims in an unholy land

It's official: on April 10th, Marian and I will be headed to Berlin for a week! Ticket wasn't bad--$500 round trip.

If anyone's been there and can tell me what's good to check out--please do!



PS: I tried to find good footage of that awesome dissolve from the Berlin signpost to the Nazi rally, but alas, none seem to exist on the YouTubes.

NYT to add Twitter section alongside Sports, Business, etc.

Another Twitter article! But I take exception to this:

“Basically, for 99.9 percent of people on Twitter, it is about updating friends and colleagues about how the cat rolled over,” he said. “For a tenth of a percent it is a marketing tool.”

What about making jokes?

Sheer excitement

This part of an exchange between Obama and the astronauts in the international space station is, I think, pretty funny:

THE PRESIDENT: ...Can I ask, how exactly do you end up installing these solar panels? What's involved? Somebody want to give us a rundown on how you go about doing it?

MISSION SPECIALIST SWANSON: Yes, sir. First it comes up on a truss segment, about five feet long. We use a robotic arm to attach it to the -- into another truss segment.

I can't help but think that Swanson sounded somewhat defeated as he finished that last sentence. You expect space to be grand and amazing, but in reality you just end up spending an inordinate amount of time dealing with trusses.

Obama having it both ways with tax rates

I just got done watching (the rather dull) Obama news conference, and something caught my attention about Obama's position on the tax deduction for charitable giving:

And what we've said is: Let's go back to the rate that existed under Ronald Reagan. People are still going to be able to make charitable contributions. It just means, if you give $100 and you're in this tax bracket, at a certain point, instead of being able to write off 36 percent or 39 percent, you're writing off 28 percent.

...

And so this provision would affect about 1 percent of the American people. They would still get deductions. It's just that they wouldn't be able to write off 39 percent.

In that sense, what it would do is it would equalize -- when I give $100, I'd get the same amount of deduction as when some -- a bus driver who's making $50,000 a year, or $40,000 a year, gives that same $100. Right now, he gets 28 percent -- he gets to write off 28 percent. I get to write off 39 percent. I don't think that's fair.

So Obama seems to be arguing for tax deductions to be "flat"--for a person making $50,000 a year to receive the same percentage deduction on charitable giving as a person making $500,000. But this is just the converse of the flat tax! The same logic that argues for a progressive tax structure on the disincentive side also argues, conversely, for a regressive tax structure on the incentive side. In other words: if we can tax Bill Gates a higher rate because giving up 39% feels way less painful to him than it does to me, then we must also incentivize Bill Gates at a comesurately higher rate, because his gaining 28% feels way less pleasurable to him than it does to me.

(Related post here.)

Some stretchers about Iceland

Like most people, over the last month or two I've been relaying interesting facts about Iceland that I read about in Vanity Fair, including that in order to get a building permit, you must first verify with the government that there are no elves living on the premises. Well, it turns out that a lot of the more colorful details in the article are probably horseshit:

8. The nation has to deal with “elves — in whom some large number of Icelanders, steeped long and thoroughly in their rich folkloric culture, sincerely believe.” Alcoa, an aluminum-smelting multinational with operations outside of Reykjavík, had to “defer to a government expert to scour the enclosed plant site and certify that no elves were on or under it.”

Right. I’ve heard the elf thing mentioned in tired travel articles (normally wedged between paragraphs on the beauty of waterfalls and tips for eating ram testicles), but I personally know no one on this island who believes in elves. Not one. As for Alcoa, their rep believes Lewis is likely referring to a law regarding environmental-impact assessments. The assessment includes an archaeological survey to ensure no important artifacts or ruins are destroyed, and the site’s history is also surveyed to see if it was ever named in any Icelandic folklore. And yes, some of that folklore involves elves. But if you’re going to introduce the notion that some kind of Ministry of Elf Inspection exists within the ranks of the Icelandic government, you might as well also note that we take the Hogwart’s Express to the office every day.

I suppose it was too silly to be true.

Logo, first draft

So this evening instead of going right home, I decided to screw around with Illustrator trying to make a logo for myself. Here's what I have:



Oh my god. So badass.

Oh, what? It's just some Helvetica with a few blocks of color? Huh? I can't hear you over how awesome this logo is. DavMo OUT. [I do a vaguely gangsta folding of my arms and then inexplicably "beam out", Star Trek style.]

Jester

Something that I've recently decided I'm interested in is the court jester--or fool--of medieval times. It was such an odd role: the jester was an entertainer, and typically not pulled from the ranks of the ruling elite--so he could enjoy a completely loose tongue with impunity, insulting kings and queens and just generally blurting out whatever witticism came into his head. The jester provided a rare instance of fearless criticism of a king, and could sometimes act as an influential adviser. It's all pretty neat.

I was reading about the subject here.

Yes, good friend, I did mean that

Sometimes, the internet is damn good:


Those of you familiar with my Twitter feed are undoubtedly slightly sickened at how much you've been able to glean about the last half hour of my life or so. Or if you're Eric, sickened again.

Putting your money where your mouth is

Kottke says:

This is the peculiar thing about financial markets: if you know something bad is going to happen (you know, like the global collapse of the financial markets), you can either sound the alarm and save a lot of people a lot of grief or you can make a billion dollars.

I would think that betting billions of dollars on the markets collapsing actually is the most convincing way to "sound the alarm" about the markets collapsing.

Not too bad

If you're an AIG executive, you've got to be thinking: it's really not too bad. I mean, think of it: you and your colleagues, as a class, have contributed to the collapse of the world economy, causing trillions of dollars of wealth to evaporate, millions of jobs to disappear, and all the rest of it. And do people want to throw you in jail? Do they want to banish you from the country? Do they want to seize all your assets? No--all they really want is some symbolic gesture of humility that demonstrates that you acknowledge that you're not such hot stuff after all. Apologize in front of a Congressional committee--give back your bonuses. That's all.

The AIG execs should be thanking their lucky stars that they live in a country where even the most pitched populist rage amounts, substantively, to so little.

"Asymmetrical agency" in action

In a recent post I talked about the idea of people in the Israel-Palestine debate employing "asymmetrical agency" to defend their position. Here's an example of what I was talking about, from a pro-Israel Sullivan reader:

You're probably right that Avigdor Lieberman is going to be a major headache. But at least acknowledge one thing regarding the advancement of Lieberman into Israeli politics. The intifadeh and the incessant rocket attacks from Lebanon and Gaza are what laid the groundwork for Lieberman's success and also had the not insignificant result of effectively killed off the liberal peace camp within Israeli society. It wasn't a triumph of Israeli neo-conservatism or innate Jewish racism against Arabs or what have you. It was the fact that the Palestinians, or at least the groups who represent the Palestinians, through their intransigence and the willful malice of characters like Yassir Arafat wiped out the political credibility of anyone in Israel who wanted a final and peaceful settlement for both peoples.

So what the reader does here is admit the badness of Avigdor Lieberman, but turn things around by ascribing agency to the Palestinians only: suddenly, in this discussion of "who is to blame", Sullivan's reader gives us a (naturalistic) causal account of how Lieberman came to power as a consequence of the actions of the Palestinians. The subtle shift in perspective renders Israelis into not fully-formed individuals with free will and moral duties, but sociological subjects to which moral blame is not applicable. Arafat is all-too-human, capable of "willful malice"--but Lieberman is an inhuman empirical fact, a spinning cog in the machine that Arafat decides how to operate.

Of course, Sullivan's reader is not saying anything untrue (I don't think): it's pretty clear that Hamas' various attacks and rhetoric have radicalized Israel and ushered in the current hawkish, right-wing government, elevating certain extreme factions to power. But what does this true causal fact have to do with assessing moral blame? If elevating someone like Lieberman to power is blameworthy, then it is for reasons independent of the moral standing of the Palestinians or the causal chain of events that led to Lieberman's rise. Hamas being evil doesn't justify illiberalism any more than, say, the destruction of the World Trade Center justifies illiberalism.

So Sullivan's reader isn't uttering falsehoods so much as making an argument that never gets off the ground. Sure, Arafat "made" Lieberman; but you could argue back that some Israeli politican or action in the past "made" Arafat. Wherever you choose to pin the first instance of agency is arbitrary and can always be moved one step further back. Neither side can use this method of argument to make any headway in attributing blame to the other side.

So how can we sort out this dialog? There are a couple of different conversations that can be had. The first is a conversation about moral blame, and in this you attribute agency to everyone and judge everyone according to universal moral principles.* The second is a conversation where you try to gain a scientific understanding of the situation, and in this you attribute agency to no one--every actor is treated as the subject of naturalistic enquiry, and normative concepts like moral blame are left out of the picture. The third is a conversation about practical wisdom, where you try to dispense advice to one side as to what actions that side can take to achieve its strategic goals--in this case, you ascribe agency to your audience only (the faction you're advising), properly framing them as moral agents in a naturalistic world that they must carefully navigate in order to survive.


*It is usually in these conversations--about who is to blame--that the dreaded question "Are you pro-Israel or pro-Palestine?" crops up. The correct answer is that no one who embraces modernity is "pro-Israel" or "pro-Palestine", but rather pro-X, where X is some set of universal principles. Now, if I determine that Israel adheres more faithfully to X than Palestine, then I suppose that, as it happens, I am in a sense "pro-Israel"--but it must be understood that this support is contingent on Israel's behavior vis-a-vis X. So one very real possible outcome could be that one is neither "pro-Israel" nor "pro-Palestine", if it happens to be the case that neither side adheres to X. This whole thing of "choosing a side" obscures this "pox on both houses" possibility and turns the attribution of moral blame into a zero sum game--as if somehow if Israel does something wrong, then that means that Palestine has done something right.

Stewart, Colbert

Coates has a quote from formerly bow-tied right-wing pundit Tucker Carlson on the subject of John Stewart:

No, I think Jon Stewart is dishonest. And by the way, I also think he's a sacred cow. There's nobody who has the huevos to attacks Jon Stewart because he's too popular. The press sucks up to him like I've never seen -- it's like Oprah. Jon Stewart, all the kids watch Jon Stewart. He's brilliant. I would like to see somebody have the stones to come out and say, Jon Stewart's kind of a pompous jerk, actually.

Funny thing is, I kind of agree with him, except the part about John Stewart being a pompous jerk (that sentiment can probably be attributed to Tucker's sour grapes). But Stewart does seem oddly untouchable. I think there's a feeling amongst the media and even politicians that there's just no way to win in a tangle with the Daily Show. Stewart can eviscerate you with embarrassing video clips night after night, and anytime you try to attack him he retreats to his "I'm just an ordinary citizen" or "I'm just a comedian" position of low status, so that suddenly you find yourself in a public feud with the court jester. If there's something cynical about Stewart and the Daily Show, it's that he's mastered this low-status/high-visibility combination to devastating effect, all the while pretending to be a humble, ordinary guy just trying to make sense of it all.

Oh, and on a slightly different note: I've never really felt that John Stewart is himself, when it comes right down to it, particularly funny. He's okay. But I think John Stewart's genius isn't as a performer, but as an administrator and institutional leader. If he were a WWII general, he'd be Eisenhower--maybe not the most gifted tactician on the field, but certainly gifted at the political task of commanding the respect of everyone below him and making sure that everyone is doing their part to keep the great juggernaut moving forward (I always liked Eisenhower's quote that the most important weapons in the war were the Jeep and the C-47 cargo plane--war at his level was just one big logistics problem, wasn't it?). In interviews with him about the show I get the impression that after the day's frantic process of writing the bits and putting together all the clips and doing rehearsal, doing the actual show is almost an afterthought. And indeed, when you look at his performances, there's not a lot there: he's kind of the straight man to his own material, expressing outrage at outrageous things and smiling at funny things and generally behaving in a way that is aligned with the audience. It's literally an effortless performance. He's not making us laugh--rather, the material is making us laugh, and John's just kind of emceeing the whole thing.

Colbert, on the other hand, I see as Patton: pure tactical genius. Where Stewart is just kind of amusing in a get-along-go-along sort of way, Colbert is really fucking funny and just absolutely razor sharp at all times--born for battle, so to speak. Where Stewart gently leads his audience, Colbert completely owns his. He's a beast. And his performances--all done completely in character--are amongst the most effortful you see anywhere.

So anyway--yes, I think Tucker is right that no one has the balls to go after Stewart, but I think there's a good reason for that. I wouldn't want to go up against Eisenhower and Patton, either.

Dolphins are fuckers

Apparently all the endless screwing around in the water has finally yielded some results: the dolphins at Sea World have figured out how to blow bubble rings. Look at this fucker:



Fucking dolphins.

The affable stupidity of the internet

I think what makes this post (via Kottke) so great isn't the subject matter, necessarily--which seems to be a fairly run-of-the-mill meme--but how well researched it is. I especially like their tracking of the McGangBang phenomenon through various forums, "sprouting out from the passionate subcultures of video gaming, sneaker-lovers, and car enthusiasts".

On a related note, it never quite struck me before that internet memes often exhibit properties of absurdist exquisite corpse games like telephone: little touches or variations get added in, like the political theme that inexplicably accompanied the McGangBang's presence on MySpace.

I will close by doubling-down on the web-2.0-obnoxious-quotient of this post by citing a relevant tweet from @strutting:

I wanted a site that tracks the latest 4Chan trends so I wouldn't actually have to read 4Chan. Then I realized that site is The Internet.

Okay I'll stop now.

Stewart strikes back

Ok, this is a pretty bad pwn:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

In Cramer We Trust

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Economic Crisis

This kind of reminds me of the time I was on BART and these frattish Arizona State kids tried wise-assing some hardened bike messenger dudes, and the bike messenger guys just totally turned it around on them and belittled them the whole ride. Chris D'Anna (who was visiting) turned to me and said, "I don't think they expected them to defend themselves."

Asymmetrical agency

Following the Israel-Palestine conflict, I've noticed a tendency to sometimes shift agency--and therefore, the implication of moral culpitude--from one faction to the other. For example, consider the following two, undoubtedly true propositions:

(1) Israel's attacks of Gaza had the effect of further radicalizing the Palestinians, diminishing the chances for peace.

(2) Hamas' sporadic attacks of Israel had the effect of provoking them to attack, diminishing the chances for peace.

In (1), we imbue Israel with what I'm calling agency--which is not only the capacity to but the expectation that a person or group will make rational and moral decisions. The Palestinians, on the other hand, are treated as a fact of the naturalistic world--as something that can be scientifically studied, understood, and mastered, and that will react to stimuli in a consistent and reliable way (if you attack them they will be radicalized, just as surely as adding Na+ to Cl- will form salt). In (2), it is just the opposite--we are treating Hamas as the rational, morally accountable decision-maker, and it is the easy-to-provoke Israelis that are the facts of nature.

So what is going on here? I think it's pretty clear that ascribing agency to one side has a very specific use, which is when you are trying to dispense practical wisdom to a particular side. For example, the proper context for (1) would be if I were advising Israel strategically--if I were pointing out the objective effects of Israel's actions. Similarly, the proper context for (2) would be if I were advising Hamas strategically.

In these kinds of strategic contexts, the question of moral culpability is not at issue--however, in normal language a sentence like (1) nevertheless strongly implies the moral culpability of Israel but not Hamas (with the reverse being true for (2)), which can lead to all sorts of confusion, since it sounds like suddenly one side is not being held morally culpable at all.

Specifically, one confusion I saw during the Gaza action would be that bloggers like Ezra Klein or Matt Yglesias would keep making claims similar to (1) in the context of advising Israel on what it should do to accomplish its strategic goals, and right-wing Israel backers would accuse them of disproportionately blaming Israel or failing to acknowledge the immorality of Hamas' actions. But of course, that's just confusing a case of asymmetrical agency with asymmetrical culpability. The other confusion is one that I think subtlely pops up from time to time, which is that someone will try to shirk moral culpability for their side by framing things such that their side does not have agency. For example, if the debate is whether Israel's actions in Gaza were immoral, it would be neither here nor there if the person defending Israel pointed out that Hamas had to expect Israel to respond forcefully to its provokations since that is what any country would do.

Moreover, I think the thing to keep in mind is that when the context is moral culpability, it is a "both and" situation: both Israel and Hamas must be held morally culpable for their actions as judged against a universal set of principles.

Carbon footprint

I decided to "calculate my carbon footprint". The result: I emitted 9.44, or about 10 tons of CO2 over the past year. The US average is 20.4; the industrial average is 11; and the worldwide average is 4 (I imagine that the non-industrial average must be something far below 4).

I have no idea how accurate this site is--indeed, some things tipped me off that it might not be the most accurate tool in the world (the obsession with local food, for example). But assuming it's giving somewhat meaningful results, you can still get a ballpark idea of what the big sources of CO2 are.

Of course, the big differentiator for me was the fact that I don't have a car and that I can bike to work--all of which is a function of living in a dense city. If I were living in LA with my own car, I imagine my mark would be up near 20. Moreover, air travel takes a pretty hefty toll--of my 10 tons/yr, 3 of those are from air travel (which goes to show that the gains from getting a fuel-efficient vehicle can be cancelled out by a jetsetting lifestyle).

Anyway, if anyone knows of a better CO2 footprint calculator, let me know.

Some actual capitalism for a change

Good to see that the EPA will start to require major industries to track and report their CO2 emissions. The important thing to remember is that assessing costs to those who emit greenhouse gases is completely in line with the tenets of capitalism, since emitting greenhouse gases imposes a cost on everyone that is not properly priced in the market (the costs--which are mostly deferred until the ecological shit really hits the fan--end up being socialized as governments bear the burden of cleaning up after the effects of global warming).

Carbon taxes correct a market failure--and you can't tax carbon if you don't know how much is being emitted.

We're all X now

It has become common since the financial crisis hit for bloggers to use the phrase "We're all X now". I'm not sure but I think this originated in a widely read Calculated Risk post back in January 2008 titled "We're all subprime now". Since then there have been many different incarnations as the financial crisis has unfolded: "We're all Swedes now", "We're all bankers now", "We're all socialists now" (I even captioned a photo recently with "We're all welfare queens now"). And sure enough, the phrase has spread to other domains, such as "We're all web workers now", "We're all global warmers now", and "We're all journalists now". So it looks to be a gen-u-ine internet meme.

Did this really start with that Calculated Risk post? Or is it actually some cultural reference that I'm not picking up on? Tellingly, there don't seem to be any occurrences from before the CR post, but then again, maybe the CR post took it from somewhere and just popularized it.

Is Shaq a toxic asset?

I meant to forward this along earlier--an interesting post drawing similarities between Japan's economic collapse and the Suns'.

(Related article: Bill Simmons' column on the NBA's financial woes and why the most sought-after contract in the league belongs to...some guy named Raef LaFrentz.)

All of civilization is riding on a <5% difference in the top marginal tax rate

I guess it's not wise to take these things too seriously, but honestly:

“People are starting to feel like we’re living through the scenario that happened in ‘Atlas Shrugged,’” said Campbell. “The achievers, the people who create all the things that benefit rest of us, are going on strike. I’m seeing, at a small level, a kind of protest from the people who create jobs, the people who create wealth, who are pulling back from their ambitions because they see how they’ll be punished for them.”

In Rand’s novel, creative people (the “Atlases” of the title) are hounded and punished for their labor by an oppressive, socialistic state. In response, they retreat from society to a hidden enclave where they watch civilization’s slow collapse.

Look: Obama isn't seizing haciendas and turning them over to The People. He's increasing the top marginal tax rate from 35% to 39.5%. He's increasing the capital gains tax from 15% to 20-28%. As for the top marginal tax rate, it is still very low by historical standards:

I mean, if this is end-of-the-world socialism, then what do you call 1960, when the top marginal tax rate was 90%?

Drawings done on acid

Extremely interesting.

Via my friend Laura.

Reagan was a long time ago

In the 2008 election, we heard a lot from Republicans about Reagan. But Reagan was first elected 28 years ago. That's a long time. To put it in perspective: when Reagan was first elected in 1980, the President that had been elected 28 years prior was Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Thus, the Republicans running as the party of Reagan in 2008 is roughly equivalent to if they ran as the party of Eisenhower in 1980. Which is all a way of saying that these guys are kind of living in the past at this point.

On the other hand, I'm pretty sure Democrats sold themselves as the party of FDR well up into the Reagan years, so maybe this sort of thing is normal.

Tyranny you can believe in

Greenwald blasts the Obama administration for continuing the Bush tradition of classifying evidence in order to prevent people from taking the government to court for violating the Fourth Amendment:

The brief filed by Obama on Friday afternoon (.pdf) has to be read to believed. It is literally arguing that no court has the power to order that classified documents be used in a judicial proceeding; instead, it is the President -- and the President alone -- who possesses that decision-making power under Article II, and no court order is binding on the President to the extent it purports to direct that such information be made available for use in a judicial proceeding....

...

There is only one branch with the power to decide if these documents can be used in this Article III court proceeding: The Executive. What the President decides is final. His decision is unreviewable. It's beyond the reach of the law. No court has the authority to second-guess it or to direct the President to comply with a disclosure order....

...

In the context in which Obama is now invoking this theory, think about what it means: if, as happened here, the President breaks the law, then he can just label the relevant evidence "classified" and refuse to turn it over to a court which is attempting to rule on the legality of the President's actions. Once the President decrees that a court is barred from reviewing the relevant evidence because the President claims it is "classified," that's the end of that....

According to Obama, only the President has the power to decide what is done with classified information, and neither courts nor Congress have any power at all to do anything but politely request that the President change his mind. Therefore, the President has the unilateral, unchallengeable power to prevent any judicial challenges to his actions by simply declaring that the relevant evidence is a secret and refusing to turn it over to a court, even if ordered to do so. That's the argument which the Obama DOJ is now aggressively advancing -- all in order to block any judicial adjudication of Bush's now-dormant NSA program.

This is completely unacceptable. The best-case scenario I can come up with as to why the Obama administration is taking this position is because they think that unearthing all of this Bush lawbreaking is going to unleash a partisan political shitstorm that will effectively derail Obama's ambitious legislative agenda. But ultimately, even if this is the case, it's not an acceptable excuse, for the simple reason that any administration can always make a rationalization of this sort--there's never a "good time" to unleash an agenda-derailing political shitstorm.

Obama needs to release those documents to the court and give standing to those who wish to sue their government for violating their Constitutional rights. It's just that simple.

Dowd, you disgust me

Why is she mimicking the Republican habit of calling out "pork barrel" items on the basis of how silly they sound, rather than their policy merit? Is she, too, against "something called volcano monitoring"?

I sat out Kosovo

If you want to understand the situation with bank bailouts, I highly, highly recommend the latest TAL. Among other things, I finally learned what the hell liabilities, assets, and capital are on a balance sheet!

Also: truly informative sources, like these finance-related episodes of TAL or, say, Krugman's blog, make you realize just how awful the mainstream press is at actually educating people about the issues of the day. Could you imagine Brian Williams explaining how a bank balance sheet works on the evening news?

How did the world function before the internet? I'm coming around to the conclusion that, pre-internet, everyone was just far, far dumber.

Just how Armegeddony is Financial Armegeddon, anyway?

Incidentally, let me just add that I take issue with finance people framing "Financial Armegeddon" in survivalist terms, as if an economic collapse would suddenly revert society to Hobbesian nasty-brutish-and-shortedness. In reality, when Financial Armegeddon comes, it looks like what we're seeing today: everyone's miserable, and the federal government socializes the losses of the very investors who brought about the Armegeddon. Investers think of themselves as epic Atlases who would break the world if they lost their grip; in reality, they're just a bunch of fucking socialists.

Shooting the moon

AIG is an insurance company, except instead of insuring cars or houses or someone's healthcare, it insures people who lend money. For example, say I want to lend money to Joe. There is a small probability that, for whatever reason, Joe won't be able to pay me back. But I want to eliminate the possibility of a disasterous loss. So, for a modest fee, I buy an insurance policy from AIG that says that I will be reimbursed the full amount of the loan in the unlikely event that Joe defaults on my loan. From AIG's perspective, it has essentially placed a bet that Joe will be able to pay off the loan.

The problem is, AIG placed too many bets: it sold more insurance policies than it could deliver on in the event of widespread defaults. In the same way that a bank is screwed if everyone decides to withdraw their money at the same time, AIG became screwed because everyone came to them with a claim at the same time. There was a "run" on AIG.

Now, predictably (and rightfully), scorn is being heaped on the executives at AIG. But the Opinionator also brings up this interesting point, which is that financial institutions that took out policies from AIG were also acting poorly:

John Carney at Clusterstock... recommends we...“direct a bit of our righteous anger at the customers of A.I.G., those financial institutions who bought insurance from A.I.G.”

Why? “They are truly accomplices of A.I.G. in the scam.”

Many of them were well aware that AIG couldn’t possibly fund the insurance policies it was writing. But they didn’t worry about that because they were operating under the same assumption AIG was: that the policies would never have to be funded on any widespread scale. Defaults on credit products were supposed to be isolated and non-correlated.

What’s more, many assumed that a complete AIG meltdown was what we call a “Financial Armegeddon” bet. The idea was that AIG would never be allowed to default on its obligations — it would be bailed out by the American taxpayers. And if the American taxpayers couldn’t afford to bail out AIG, well then you’d be in such dire straits that your main concern would be food, shelter and ammo and not the performance of your loan portfolio.

By bailing out AIG, and therefore bailing out its counterparties, the US government is rewarding this kind of reckless behavior. And it is punishing responsible credit insurance writing, essentially telling anyone who placed a premium on buying insurance from a solvent insurer that they were suckers. They should have bought the cheap contract from AIG instead.

Well. If a few people make a Financial Armegeddon bet, that's just fine--but if everyone makes that bet, then, well--you get Financial Armegeddon. But of course, for each individual, making this bet was the rational thing to do--so here we are.

How could anyone have argued for deregulation in this area? Isn't this, like, the canonical scenario where everyone agrees that regulation is required?

Science as maximal reliableness

I'm reading a book called Metascience and Politics by one A.J. Gregor (some PoliSci professor at Cal). I'm only in the second chapter, but came across this interesting passage:

Some of the critical issues that seem to divide political science as a discipline into factions turn on what science is understood to be. First, the suggestion that "unscientific" methods are essential to political inquiry requires that we have at least some understanding of what "science" might be--and secondly, the identification of "behavioralists" seems, generally, to turn on the disposition of some political scientists to attempt to employ the methods of science in their work. Science, and the methods of science, should be, therefore, the first objects of analysis if one wishes to assess the cognitive merits of the "behavioralist-non-behavioralist" dispute.

The effort to unpack the concept "science" and to offer a summary account of "the scientific method," is beset, of course, with innumerable difficulties. The term "science" obviously has persuasive force.... It has also enjoyed a long history. Its specific cognitive meaning is, as a result, difficult to isolate, not only because of the persuasive employments of the term, but because the term has had a long and confused philological history....

Once this qualification is made, it can be argued that the term "science" has taken on a relatively (but not undisputed) specific contemporary meaning: it refers to those procedures, which, as a matter of historic fact, have provided a systematically articulated and comprehensive body of maximally reliable knowledge claims that afford men survival and adaptive advantage by affording explanatory and predictive leverage. Such an explication thus includes both a consideration of "science" as process (that is to say, the term refers to methods and procedures invoked to provide for maximally reliable truth ascriptions) and "science" as product (that is to say, the term has as referent that corpus of linguistic entities to which truth can be ascribed with maximal domain variant reliability). The former is commonly spoken of as the "scientific method," and the latter "scientific knowledge." Both are historic products and both are historically relative.

What this implies is that neither specific observational nor experimental procedures, nor methods of generalization, nor specific logicodeductive strategies, nor any collection of procedural assumptions or presuppositions, nor any technique of measurement or instrumentation is absolutely essential to the method of science. Furthermore, no single existential assertion delivered by scientists, nor any conjunction of such assertions, is absolutely essential to the corpus of science. Science is neither a specific collection of procedures nor a specific body of essential truths. Every truth warranting procedure and every truth claim remains, in principle, subject to review--none are specific to science.

...

The one feature we have gradually come to realize as constitutive of science in whatever form it has taken, a feature pervasive of science both as process and product, is its necessary concern with reliability. Without reliability argument and deliberation cannot proceed. Knowing anything becomes impossible.

...

Our preoccupation with reliability is dictated by the generic human concern with adapting to, and controlling, our complex and changing environment. We find it necessary to anticipate futures--and we do that best by exercising the imagal trial-and-error techniques, and their subtending rationale, that we identify as rational behavior....

[pp. 21-23; all emphasis his]

What I think is interesting here is that science is given such a purely procedural definition: science is X, where X is whatever set of methods and procedures that have generated the most reliable set of knowledge claims that help us predict stuff and adapt to our world. There's no a priori constraint on what those methods or knowledge claims could be--indeed, Gregor says elsewhere that "[i]f intuitions, mystic insights, the dialectic, phantasy, or whispered intelligences from God proved to be maximally reliable in permitting men to empirically adapt to and effectively control their environment, they would become, ipso facto, constituent procedures of science." In other words: science is whatever gets results, dammit!

While the definition of science is in this view procedural, it is still the case that all science candidates must output empirically testable results--otherwise, you would have no common measuring stick by which to compare the reliableness of the different candidates. So a possible science in which you ask the High Priest for the correct answers is permissible, so long as the High Priest is giving predictions that can be verified in an uncontroversial way later on.

Now, Gregor is not coming up with all this in a vacuum--he has a specific purpose in mind, which is to show that--because science has no immutable, first-order claims, it therefore cannot be considered an "ideology". Gregor identifies as an essential feature of ideologies that they have one or more first-order claims that one cannot negate while still claiming to be an adherent of that ideology. For example, one cannot negate that some races are superior to others while still claiming to be an adherent to National Socialism--thus, National Socialism is an ideology. Since science only contains a second-order claim (that is, a claim that is not directly about objects in the world, but rather, one which is about claims that are about objects in the world--in this case, the reliability of such claims)--that science is X, where X is the most reliable set of methods etc.--it contains no individual substantive first-order claim that is truly immutable. It is in this sense forever self-correcting and irrigid--and so definitely not an ideology.

But I wonder if Gregor makes a hash of things in this defense of science. Indeed, it seems that by defining a science solely according to its empirical track record, it collapses the distinction between method and theory. Let's say that we have set of scientific methods M that taken together define a science, and that, adhering to M, scientists generate a set of theories T. In the normal course of events, the scientists would conduct empirical tests of all the various theories in T, and the ones that yielded reliable predictions would be kept as "(provisionally) true" and the ones that yielded bad predictions would be scrapped as "false"--and over time more theories (generated in accordance to M) would be added to T and so on. But now if we face the question as to the legitimacy of M--of the methods that generated all these theories--Gregor would have us apply the exact same criterion to M as we did to the theories in T, namely, that M yields reliable predictions.

But this seems confused. In the first place, it's odd to think of "reliability" as a property of M, when in fact M is not itself making a set of predictions about the world that are true or false--M generates theories that make these predictions. So when Gregor defines science as "those procedures, which, as a matter of historic fact, have provided a systematically articulated and comprehensive body of maximally reliable knowledge claims", he is moving too fast and skipping a step: the procedures that define a science do not themselves "provide" "knowledge claims", they provide testable theories; and it is these theories, once tested, that provide the knowledge claims. Perhaps we can infer that Gregor meant that science is the set of procedures that, as a matter of historic fact, has provided the most successful theories. However, this understanding presents a number of difficulties, chief among them being: what is the point of a scientific method, and what work is it doing for us? Certainly we could not, on the basis of the methods it utilized, dismiss a priori any questionable undertaking that called itself science, since any set of methods is fair game: we would have to wait for this set of methods to to churn out theories over a period of time sufficient for it to be deemed a "historic fact" that the set of methods did not yield a "comprehensive body maximally reliable knowledge claims". In other words, a scientific method, on Gregor's view, can only be evaluated a posteriori. But in this, a scientific method becomes functionally equivalent to what Gregor elsewhere describes as a "methodology"--a specific approach within a science that yields a specific kind of data and prediction, and whose value is determined by the quality of the predictions it makes (for example, in sociology there may be different methodologies--some qualitative, some quantitative, whatever--for determining the quality of life of a class of people, but these methodologies are all consistent with the same scientific method).

Indeed, I was under the impression that the whole point of defining a "scientific method" was so that we could impose some a priori constraints on just what kinds of theories were allowable, so that we could a) situate science in general in a broader philosophical/epistemological framework (or, put another way: as a philosopher, I should be able to talk about science such that it is abstracted from any particular claims it makes, in case I want to have a discussion about, say, the general difference between scientific and ethical claims), but more importantly , b) provide a procedural guarantee that the sort of knowledge claims that the science ultimately produces are of a kind consistent with science qua "human concern with adapting to, and controlling, our complex and changing environment". Now, about (a), don't get me wrong: it is not as if Gregor's definition leaves philosophers with nothing to say about science--he still allows it to be defined such that it must be about generating empirical claims, and science is necessarily tied to a general human activity (adapting to the environment, etc.). But it does seem weird that in a discussion about the rules of induction, you could not, by Gregor's lights, claim to necessarily be talking about something that is relevant to science (the "scientific method" could, after all, be nothing more than writing down the predictions of the High Priest). With regards to (b), it may be true that Gregor's conception of "science as maximal reliableness" is sufficient in most cases to convince us that its claims are of a common type--a type of claim that is characterized by its being in some essential way concerned with helping humans to adapt to their environment. However, the problem is that--while in lots of cases the notion of reliability is straightforward because theories are put to work making predictions--in some cases, a theory is put to work to explain something that happened in the past, and direct empirical testing of such theories is difficult or impossible. For example, cosmologists posit theories about how the universe first unfolded, or evolutionary biologists hypothesize about the sequence of events that led to life developing on earth. In these cases, a theory is created to retroactively explain historical evidence--and so any theory consistent with the evidence must be considered as "reliable" as any other, no matter what method that theory was generated in accordance with. So it is precisely in these cases where the idea a scientific method actually does some useful work: it brings unity to predictive knowledge claims and historical ones by bringing them under the same criterion, not of reliability--which isn't really applicable to historical claims--but of the procedural criterion of having been generated by the proper, "scientific" method. And with this in place, we are thus free to rule out historical (as opposed to predictive) theories a priori that otherwise would be impossible to rule out for lack of the ability to test their reliability.

(As a quick addendum, let me just add that, really, this idea of a One True A Priori Scientific Method is required if we are make any sense of science as something that is concerned with the human activity of controlling and adapting to our environment. The crucial distinction to keep in mind is between that of a science and that of a history. A history is just a straightforward record of stuff that happened, and so of course there's no a priori constraint on what a history might contain besides that it's logically consistent--so for example, there is nothing wrong with a history in which God parts an ocean or where the universe is created 4000 years ago. Its just data, which--true or false--is always admissible as data, as a history. But a scientific theory is not a record, and it is not simply a set of data--it is something like a schematized conditional claim of the form "if X occurs under conditions Y, then Z will occur". So when a cosmologist theorizes that the big bang occurred, properly speaking there is the scientific claim that goes something like "when you have a universe that is infinitely dense, then it will rapidly expand outwards", and, distinct from this, a historical claim that goes something like "15 billion years ago, the Big Bang happened". Of course, anyone who believes that it is acceptable for scientific claims to be used as the basis for the actual Historical Record of the World would have no trouble accepting all of what the cosmologist says, but someone who had, say, certain theological commitments could consistently accept the cosmologist's scientific claim while rejecting the cosmologist's historical claim. But, crucially, what our theologian cannot do is reject the cosmologist's scientific claim (except on scientific grounds)--nor can the theologian ever even submit a scientific theory in which a deity causes something to happen. Such a theory would not be admissible. Why? Because the introduction of divine causation breaks the schema in virtue of which scientific claims are tools of human adaption to the environment (you can use a conditional statement to help you successfully do stuff in the world; but you can't use raw data to help you do anything in the world...although you do need it to generate those helpful conditional statements). You cannot posit "if God comes down from the sky when the Israelites are on the run, then He will part the Red Sea", precisely because God doesn't necessarily act in a rule-like way--he acts according to His own divine will! And indeed, isn't it quite appropriate that a supreme deity who has total control over the universe and all of Creation would be ruled out a priori from a system of generating knowledge claims that purports to be an extension of humankind's dominion over its environment? How could God come under the dominion of humankind?)