And Now For Something That Isn't The Constitutional Crisis

In my latest effort to avoid having to actually do my goddamn Procedure reading, I read this article about the problem with Malcolm Gladwell. It's very interesting stuff and I think I basically agree with its broad point, though I don't have any independence expertise with which to judge it. I do have one thought to add, though: Gladwell apparently claims that many dyslexic people become very successful (incontrovertibly true) and that, in fact, these people may become successful because of their dyslexia. The obvious rejoinder to the former claim is that it omits any discussion of, you know, proportionality: are "successful" people, whatever that means, more or less dyslexic than people in general? If, say, 3% of the population and 1% of "successful" people are dyslexic, then yes, dyslexia is not a total bar to "success," but it seems to be making it a lot harder. (No comment offered on whether this is because dyslexic people genuinely lack the capacity to be "successful" or because society unjustly places additional burdens in their way should they attempt to "succeed.") But that's not my point, because I think there's an even stronger response to be made to the second part of the claim.

Of course any dyslexic people who become successful will have become successful because of their dyslexia. Or, slightly more precisely, of course the path any successful dyslexic took to achieve their success will have been influenced by their disorder. If I put a roadblock up on your way to some destination, and you are thereby forced to take an alternate route but nonetheless reach your destination, then you took a successful path and I forced you to take it. Or, to use a perhaps more accurate metaphor, if you're wandering around in the fog and the dark with no idea of where you're trying to go, and I put a big ol' wall in front of you, maybe even a wall of infinite length that forecloses an entire portion of the world to you, and your further wanderings deposit you somewhere that's a very good place to be, it is entirely true that you reached that good destination because I obstructed you. So if there are extremely successful people who are dyslexic, then with every single one of them you will be able to tell a story of how their dyslexia shaped their lives in a way that led them to their successes. Tautologically. And because it's a tautology, it's uninteresting except as a matter of biography, in which context it could well be fascinating, or, perhaps, in the therapeutic context, i.e. in trying to help a further individual dyslexic person work on having a "successful" life despite their troubles. The societally interesting questions then become, okay, how does dyslexia affect the odds of becoming "successful," if you want to, and sure, is there some social value in having some people be successful in the different way that successful dyslexic people are successful?

Those are interesting questions and I might have more to say about this topic, but it's 1:06 a.m. and I have 30 pages of reading for a class that starts in all of seven hours, fourteen minutes, so I should stop writing and go do that. Yeah...

Golf is a Zero-Sum Competition, Guys

Phil Mickelson just (i.e. several hours ago, but they just showed it on a tape delay) missed a par putt at the Wells Fargo Championship at the Quail Hollow Club. One of the announcers commented that that was not the visual that Nick Watney, Phil's playing partner and up-until-then co-leader, wanted to see before stroking his own par putt. Watney, of course, sank his putt, and is now ahead of Phil and, in fact, the outright leader. The announcer's comment is a common genre, most frequently heard on the intensely watery par-3 holes like the 12th at Augusta or the 17th at TPC Sawgrass. If the first two players in a group, say, have hit the green, or have gone in the water, the announcers will say something about how that gives the third player a good/bad visual. Now, on a Thursday or a Friday or something, where the pairings are pretty much random and the odds that two players in the same group will be in direct competition come Sunday are pretty small, I can sort of see that. But on Sunday? In one of the late groups, among people vying for the tournament? They're in a cut-throat, zero-sum competition for millions of dollars. Every stroke your competitor throws away is money in your pocket. If I were in contention at the Masters on Sunday, say in the final group or something, and my playing partner hit in the water ahead of me, I'd be ecstatic. I wouldn't feel like that meant I was going to do the same thing, or something: I'd feel like it meant I had an opening to make up some serious ground on one of my chief rivals just by hitting a non-disastrous shot. Now, at the same time, I never have been in that situation, so I could be wrong. Maybe the PGA Tour professionals, the guys who, after all, are playing the game for a living and are supposed to have good competitive mindsets, really do get rattled when things happen that, on paper, ought to be pretty directly beneficial to them. But it would kind of surprise me.

Tiger Didn't Will the Ball Into the Hole, He Was Just a Great Putter

While Tiger Woods played the 17th hole at TPC Sawgrass this morning, which he birdied, the announcers on the Live@ coverage of the 17th hole (that's what it's called!) talked about his recent lack of ass-whupping. They had a pretty general consensus that his swing looks good right now, but his mental confidence and the way that relates to his putting are what's holding him back. Now, I agree that confidence is a big part of it, but I think that's at least as important for the full swing as for putting. But they were discussing, as people are so wont to do, the impression that in his heyday Tiger would just make every clutch putt and could "will the ball into the hole," and that this ability has subsequently escaped him. But there's another explanation for his recent putting woes: especially because of his recovery from several injuries, he's been having to work incredibly hard on his full swing. And he's said on several occasions that this has prevented him from doing as much work as he would like to on his short game and putting. And putting is a skill! You can be good at it, you can be bad at it, you get better at it when you work on it and worse when you don't. Perhaps the reason why Tiger made so many clutch putts in his glory years is that he also made a hell of a lot of putts in less spotlit situations as well. He was just a good putter, and that came from solid technique maintained by the same countless hours of practice he spent on his full swing. What he needs to get his old form back, if this theory is correct, isn't just to suddenly start believing in himself again or whatever, but to have an extended period when his swing feels comfortable and he doesn't have to work on it so damn hard. Then he'll be able to get into a normal routine of practicing the long game, the short game, and putting in a balanced way, and hopefully be able to get every aspect of his game firing at once more often and thus resume his dominant winning ways.

Bring Back 30-Day Sentences!

I'm sitting in my Law & Society class learning that, when people are considering the possibility of sanctions in considering whether to commit a crime, the certainty of a punishment matters a whole lot more than the severity. So, in other words, if Sanction A is a 50% chance of a 1-year jail sentence and Sanction B is a 25% chance of a 2-year jail sentence, both of which give an Expected Value punishment of six months, most people will be more scared of Sanction A than Sanction B. This is interesting for the death penalty debate, since trying to impose the death penalty makes it much harder to get the punishment imposed. But I think it's also interesting because over the past many decades we've moved away from giving people a 30-day sentence for run-of-the-mill offenses. This is probably a mistake, since it's probably easier to give people 30-day sentences than five-year ones. It's also vastly less destructive of social well-being. At the very least we wouldn't suffer much of a reduction in deterrence, and we'd move away from our 'throw everyone in jail forever' society.

Maybe Plane Crashes Are Scary

In this same paper on political psychology, in describing the quirks of human judgment, they mention how vastly many more people die from heart disease than in plane crashes, and yet people will avoid flying because they're scared but don't change their American lifestyles. But I wonder, is this irrational? Death of heart disease takes a mighty long time, and to avoid it you have to radically alter the way you eat and your general habits. A plane crash snuffs out the rest of your life in an instant, and can be avoided by the fairly modest practice of just not flying. After all, no one flew until pretty recently, and you can get from anywhere on earth to anywhere else on earth, more or less, without going in airplanes. So yeah, "plane crash" would be a much less common response from the Machine of Death than "heart disease," but that doesn't necessarily mean it's irrational to try to avoid one and not the other.

(Full disclosure: I've never flown, and I've always been a little scared of it.)

The Overton Window, Political Psychology, and Stare Decisis

I found this paragraph in my recent reading about political psychology very interesting:

"For example, Tversky demonstrated that most people possess a natural aversion to extreme options or situations. Thus, just by creating one more extreme option, a manipulative adviser can encourage a decision maker to choose the middle option that would have previously appeared unacceptable without the contrast effect of the even more extreme additional option."

This is, of course, exactly what the Republicans have been doing for the last few decades. You start out with a world with the Democratic option and the Republican option. Now the political consensus does not accept either option in its pure form. But the Republicans are smart, they get psychology. So they change their position, make it more extreme. Now their old position isn't extreme anymore, and thus becomes more acceptable.

I feel like there's a kind of political stare decisis. Political issues are raised, and debated, and then society comes up with an answer. Then we treat that answer as settled, and move on to the next issue, and by and large we don't reopen settled issues. In the 1930s, for instance, we had a big huge discussion about, basically, socialism. And we decided that government pensions and disability/unemployment insurance, some assistance for the poor, and public works programs, were okay. Later we also decided to annex medical care to those provisions for the elderly and poor. But anything beyond that, any kind of proper social democracy the way the European countries do it, is off-limits. Now, there are many of us who dislike that conclusion. Maybe it's a third of the populace; maybe a bit less. But we understand, at the organized political level anyway, that it's a settled question. We're not going to get that verdict overturned, so we stay quiet about the whole thing. Quieter than we'd like to.

The main thing Republicans have done over the past few years, I think, is stop respecting that consensus of stare decisis. They're advocating that we overturn essentially every political decision this country's made against them for the last hundred-and-thirty years. And so many people, scared at the extremity of the vision Republicans are currently advocating, try to appease them by offering what they used to want. Sure private retirement accounts, deregulation, and tax cuts seemed extreme ten short years ago, but if we can avoid banning contraception and abolishing the welfare state altogether it's a small price to pay, right? I don't know if it's cynically intentional, but one way or another the Republicans have been masters of advocating for more than their original position so they get their original position. Democrats are too nice to fight back. We won't say, en masse, "let's nationalize industry!" so that people will accept a simple public option for health care. We just accept the consensus, and refuse to exploit a quirk of human psychology. Asymmetrical politics.

You Can Make a Utility Function for Literally Anything

The idea behind the "rational choice" theory of decision-making, and its applications in numerous fields including both economics and international relations (the latter of which I'm currently taking a course on), is that individual people are rational actors who behave so as to maximize the attainment of their goals, to maximize their "utility." Now, since economists came up with this theory (and have been using it for centuries!), there's also a tendency within the field to assume that individual preferences are extremely standard. People want food, shelter, to continue living. They want money. They might want a few other things, too, like a decent romantic relationship (or, as my professor cynically boiled that notion down, they want sex), but for examining economics or international relations you don't need to worry about that stuff. And of course, people are all quite similar in their wanting of these basic things, so we can treat people as more-or-less interchangeable.

Now, of course, this leads to a picture of the world that's radically inaccurate. Human beings are wildly complex. Their desires are myriad and mysterious, often even to themselves. They behave in weird and unpredictable (or at least, damn hard to predict) ways. And they're all spectacularly different from each other, even when they're quite similar. The psychology of the individual, or in the words of Bertie Wooster, "what they're like," matters quite a lot. So of course the people who believe, rightly, in the psychology of the individual as an important sort of thing form various sorts of movements, like behavioral economics and political psychology, that rebel against the extreme modelling of rational-choice. And they're certainly right to do so, given how the phrase "rational-choice" has played out historically.

But consider the following passage from the article on political psychology I'm currently reading:

"Most rational choice approaches argue that people will seek to maximize their utility; they may not get the outcome they prefer for a whole host of external reasons, but they do not neglect actions designed to maximize their self-interest. From this perspective, it is difficult to explain why rational actors would engage in self-destructive behavior, such as drug addiction, without perverting the notion of self-interest."

That last sentence is only true if we assume that our rational choice theorist is also a paternalist, i.e. someone who assumes he knows what another human being's utility function is. In this particular case, our paternalist is insisting that the drug addict cannot possibly have a utility function which prefers addiction to sobriety. There's no particular reason, from a theoretical standpoint, to assume this. (When making public policy we might decide to be paternalistic in a case such as this, and decide that this person's utility function should prefer that they get clean, but that's a different story.) You can make a utility function for literally any set of preferences. Suicide can easily be explained within a rational-choice approach by simply asserting/assuming that, at the time of suicide, the person in question preferred to die. In my Law & Society class we're about to contrast rational-choice with "normative" theories of decision-making, in which people are motivated by an internal sense of morality. There's no conflict here! Just say that people, or some people anyway, derive utility from behaving consistently with their internal sense of morality. Now a rational-choice approach will show you a world in which people are motivated by their internal sense of morality. However in the entire world you want to explain people's decision-making processes, whatever preferences or desires or animal instincts you ascribe to people, you can just make a utility function incorporating those features. It's really that easy.*