Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham follow-up thoughts.

I have to admit after watching the debate, I now agree with Richard Dawkins that we shouldn't debate with creationists at all. Nye did well, but imho it wasn't an event he could "win". Ken Ham peddles young earth nonsense for a living--and he's very good at what he does. He's not bound by what science actually says or does and is at liberty to use virtually rhetorical device no matter how fallacious or at odds with reality. He's extremely sophisticated. His arguments and claims are carefully constructed to possess a surface of validity for viewers with a basic, high-school level science education--just enough to give the illusion of scientific credibility to the untrained eye. The end result, I fear, was that a large number of viewers were left with the impression that there really is a scientific debate about whether or not the Earth is 6000 years old. This is a terrible loss because it not only gives radical creationists intellectual cover for their mission to inject religion into science classes, but may find traction among those who were uncertain and/or motivated to believe it. This, I think, is not a trivial fraction of America.

A Partial Explanation for the Shutdown and Thoughts on Outcomes.

Texas congressional districts around Austin

Hello, I know I haven't been keeping up with my blog lately, but sometimes thoughts are a little hard to get together on Facebook post. Many of you are struggling to understand why this current crisis of competent governance is taking place. We're all struggling, including us in the political science world, because the reasons are numerous and difficult to disentangle from one another. In this post I'm just going to describe something which I believe is a key factor. This is a quick and dirty analysis and my political scientists will probably skewer me for not going into district level statistics, but this is for normal people.

Look carefully at the map above. That's a congressional district map of the city and surrounding areas of my current residence Austin, TX. It's tree lined streets are home to a diverse and relatively urbane population famously regarded as 'weird' by other Texans and 'normal' by the inhabits of the populous coastal cities like New York and the San Fransisco Bay Area. While I think this can be overstated, the presence of the massive University of Texas with some 50,000 undergraduates alone and a thriving high-tech sector does give this city-sized town a unique character.

So this morning I decided, "Hey, I don't really think this is going to do anything, but I'm going to call my congressmen and give him a piece of my mind". I got online, punched in my zip code was surprised to find that my representative in this little hipster hamlet part of north Austin I find myself in these days is represented by a Republican. Well now that's surprising, right? Not really, because in 2003 the Republican controlled Texas legislature (lower house) passed a controversial redistricting law designed to ensure Republican majorities. In 2004, the Texas delegation to the US House of Representative went from 17-15 in favor of Democrats to 21-11 in favor of Republicans, a ratio of about 2:1. The ratio of people voting Republican to Democrat was about 61:38, or about 3:2. In a perfect world you'd still expect to see a Republican majority, but not to this extreme. Despite a reapportionment based on the 2010 census that added 4 more districts, the breakdown is still 24-12 (2:1) in favor of Republicans. So what explains the difference? This is why gerrymandering is a big deal.

Let's look at this simple example from Wikipedia:

Gerrymandering example

Okay, examine these squares with the circles in them. Now imagine that 16 of those circles represents the number of people who are supposed to be represented with their own district, and their colors correspond to their party identification, say, Tweedledees (green) and the Tweedledums (pink). Now Senate districts, or states, are always the same. They don't change. But congressional districts must be drawn. In this little example, there are enough people to place them in 4 full districts. How do you draw the lines? Well most people would say something like the box on the left. It has a nice symmetry, right? It's easy for people to know what district they're in, they're nice and concentrated in one geographic area, and they contain about equal proportions of Tweedledees and Tweedledums. Democracy feels good, bro. Each party should have a roughly equal chance to win the district and will have to their best to gain the winning vote with, I don't know, meritorious arguments perhaps. Unfortunately, that is rarely how things happen. Districting is typically done by legislatures, which already have a partisan composition. So they're going to draw with a purpose: to win as many districts as you can.

Examining the box on the left, we still count exactly four districts drawn over the exact same population. Keep in mind that in "single-member districts", if you lose a district it doesn't matter by how much. It's "winner-take-all". So what if the Tweedledums, who happened to be in power and doing the redistricting sayd, "Hey, why don't we totally draw all the Tweedledees into a single district. They'll win by a landslide, but then there won't be enough of them to beat us in any of the other districts! That way, instead of the usual 2-2 breakdown, we can have a 3-1 advantage like forever and ever!" Now if you count out the votes in each of these districts, you'll find there are more pinks in all districts except 1. Same population, same beliefs, different electoral outcomes.

This is exactly what happened in Austin and many other cities around the Texas and the nation. Of all those 7 districts intersecting this liberal bastion deep in the heart of Texas, 2 are Democrat. Over the past couple of decades, Republicans have been on a redistricting rampage. Despite solid Democratic majorities in the Senate and two Democratic presidential victories, the House remains safely Republican and probably will for the foreseeable future regardless of even moderate-sized changes in how people feel about them.

Well, sadly for the Republicans there have been some Unintended Consequences of their redistricting successes, which are partially to blame for our present crisis. You see, many Republican districts are so unshakably Republican now that there is virtually no chance a Democrat could ever win. The only sense that theses seats can be described as "contestable" is not during the general election, but during the primary. The primary is when parties vote to choose who their candidate for the seat is going to be, not who the seat will go to. In other words, Republicans are only vulnerable to other Republicans.

Now do you recall that "single-member district" and "winner-take-all" stuff I was talking about earlier? Well, the explanation is a bit more technical than I want to go into here, but there is this thing called "Duverger's Law" which is like one of the closest things we have to a scientific "Law" in political science. Duverger's Law says that single-member district, winner-take-all electoral systems inevitably lead to a two-party system. (Sidenote: this is why we have two major parties in the US, not three or some other number as they do in other countries). In many Republican districts, the Democrats are effectively non-existent. Well, one thing Republicans can't seem to grasp these days is that A LAW IS A LAW.

Per Duverger's Law, these Republican districts are essentially splitting into their own two-party systems, where the Republicans are now with duking it out with an insurgent Tea Party. Though still nominally a "faction" within the Republican Party, the vacuum of Democrats has created space for the Tea Party to break off on it's own and challenge traditional Republicans in the primary elections for the right to run against a straw Democrat for the House seat.

This is what Boehner, as a leader of what remains of the traditional Republicans, is so afraid of. His party--or what is now more aptly described as his faction of the party--is getting eaten alive from within as a result of over-gerrymandering. The 100 or so of his remaining backers aren't facing serious Democratic challengers who will force them toward the center, who will compel them to have a bit of Obama tolerance, or at least not punish them for any semblance of willingness to negotiate with him. On the contrary, Boehner's Republicans are scarred out of their wits of extremely well-financed (that's another story) Tea Party challengers who will pounce on any perceived willingness to negotiate with Obama and trounce them among the Obama-hating hardliners voting in the primaries.

As a result, we now have this bizarre situation where the Tea Party has tactically put their boot over Boehner's throat by sticking a "defund Obamacare" rider on the ordinarily routine continuing resolution, or CR, that allows the government to spend money and stay open. If Boehner blinks, "his" party (and his job) are done in 2014. If he holds fast, all the "non-essential" activities such as the EPA, NASA, Department of Education, and the FDA that Tea Partiers hate will remain closed. Either way, the Tea Party wins.

The only way the Tea Party could win even more is if Obama and the Senate Democrats agree to pass one of these "mini-CRs" that only piecemeal fund the government programs conservatives like, such as veteran's benefits. If the Democrats allow that to happen, the Tea Party will pretty much have the government they want and will never agree to anything again. Tea Party wins.

How do we get out of this? Well, Obama, the Dems, and the old school Republican Party of Reagan, Dole, and Boehner don't seem to have any good plays. For Obama, he's just going to go on television and ask very nicely and sincerely that Boehner call the vote (watch video here. Watch it. Srsly.). But between the two of them I think they're just going to let the clock run down on the "Debt Ceiling".

In 8 days the government doesn't just run out of the authority to spend money--it runs out of money. That means the government not only stops functioning, it stops paying its bills. From an economic standpoint, this is far, far worse. This means that the US defaults on its debts and loses credit worthiness. Ask any economist and they will scream at you how (literally) even suggesting the US should default could cause lasting damage to not only the US economy, but the world economy. Again, the explanation here is pretty technical, but anecdotally if the US doesn't pay its debts, then its word is worth nothing, and all the things backed by its word (i.e., the US dollar) are similarly worth nothing. The US Dollar is by far the most dominant "reserve currency" in world. This means that US dollars are what most of the world's governments store their wealth in. It means that the US dollar is a base unit facilitating the exchange of goods and services across borders. I'm not going to go into it further, but suffice it to say that the impact would likely be seismic, and categorically unlike anything any of us have ever experienced. There would be no precedent, as the US has not defaulted on its debt once in it's 237 year history.

This is a figurative "nuclear bomb", in the words of Warren Buffet, and it is set to go off in 8 days. Boehner has his finger over the cancel button, and he's going to see just how long he can let his finger hang there before either Obama or the Tea Party blinks. While the Tea Party may hate the US government, you would assume they don't hate the US (or maybe they do and that's why they've been packing all that gear). If neither of them do, then we'll have to see if he blinks.

The media is not your friend.

“If anything good can come out of such a horrible event as today, maybe it will be a wake-up call that we have enemies that are out to destroy us...They never let up and in many ways they are more treacherous than they were before September 11th because they’ve metastasized, they’ve morphed and many of them are under the radar screen, and that’s why we have to be so aggressive.” -- Peter King on Fox News

Terrorists pose a vastly greater threat to your civil liberties than your person, but in this they work through intermediaries.

On Stupid Questions

Was thinking about all the things we don't know. This has got to be one of the hardest things to do because it's a lot. In fact, just how much is difficult to appreciate because it feels like we know so much. As a practical matter, if we've gone 200 thousand years without a single one if us knowing something, we probably have some really strong assumptions about it. We would feel these as the most obvious things in the universe, so patently true that we wouldn't even think it required explanation. I'm talking bedrock assumptions here, guys. Do you know what this means? It means that some of the stupidest questions could contain the greatest discoveries. Is the Earth flat? Were the animals always like that? What is air made of? Think about this the next time you hear a stupid question. Give it a moment before you blow it off and dismiss it to someone's ignorance, and check your assumptions. Maybe there is a discovery behind one.

Wedding sermon for Josh and April

[I gave this sermon as officiant of Josh and April's wedding, July 20^th 2012.]

Marriage, as an institution, predates any reliable recorded human history. Despite its impenetrably obscure origins, societies around the world still find meaning in believing something about where it came from. It is incontestably one of the most important features of our lives. It is far greater than any event, as it's not merely an event it's a stage of life—a condition of life, the means by which our species ensure our security and rear our young.

Obviously, this is something we worry over a lot. We must get this right! Over time, our cultures evolve mores and beliefs about the proper marriage, to help us along a well-tread, tried and true path. Therefore, it doesn't matter so much where the institution of marriage came from, so much as where we think it came from. Is it nature? Is it divinity? Where we place the cornerstone can dramatically alter the course of our marriages. Lives are long, and we agree that marriages should last for the rest of them. Our beliefs about what it is we are doing here today, right now, will shape how you go about resolving the various challenges to a successful marriage and embrace its opportunities.

We naturalists like to point out that nature selects only for the fittest, the greatest opportunist in the face of change. And change is the only constant in life. Some religious scholars contend that if we forget marriage is part of God's plan, then we become soft, and buffet along with the whims of life's ups and downs, temptations from outside, boredom, the sickness, and old age. A society that forgets this, they argue, is doomed to unravel in a libidinous tempest of sin. Oh, but we cannot forget what we have learned. Such stories may have been a persuasive, and even healthy, influence on peoples of the past. But what do we, children of the Enlightenment, we whose universes have been illuminated by the light reason and science, who have not discovered under the light any evidence of God, or a plan? It's just us, a thin film of organic, self-reflecting life clinging to a ball of rock hurling through space. Some may disparage, and either cling with fierce and unforgiving dogmatism to the old ways, while others remain lost, libertine lives, slaves to their desires and alone in the end.

But I say do not disparage. The French philosopher and historian, Michel Foucault, was once faced with the question, "what can we do in the face of this existential crisis?" To which he replied with exuberant optimism, "we may create ourselves, like art, every day." The creation of art is the creation of meaning in our lives. I say, remember these words. Make your marriage like art, every day. Every day! As I give you my closing words, I harken the first words. Marriage is not an event, it is a stage of life. In the same way, 'love' is not just an event defined by a momentary feeling, that is 'falling in love'. 'Love' is a verb. It's something you do, actively. You may 'choose' to love your partner, even when you don't particularly feel like it at that very moment. Love is not a thing, which episodically sweeps us off our feet in a fit, but the product of 'free will!". So, I say, do not forget this. Remember this, as the cornerstone of the institution you are building. Love each other, every day.

Josh, are you prepared to make this commitment? Will you vow it? April, are you prepared to make this commitment? Will you vow it?

[Congratulations, you two. And thank you for allowing me the honor of officiating this important event in your lives].

Dangerous political science

Empirical political science is an inherently status quo oriented practice. This is an inevitable consequence of attempting to treat political and social phenomena as if they were ontologically akin to the objects of the physical sciences, like chemistry or physics. A status quo orientation is a normative disposition. Rigorous application of the scientific method in the physical sciences does not result in a status quo orientation because it they have no direct political or social implication. However, this is not the case for the set of disciplines focusing on the political, social, and historical arenas. For these disciplines, to ignore the inherently status quo oriented nature of empirical research is not just bad science, it is dangerous.

People are not neurons, compounds, or particles. Unlike these things, people are cognitive beings that perceive their environment, imagine the consequences of their interaction with it, and behave flexibly. Human behavior cannot be so elegantly expressed as a maxim, as can chemical reactions or the conversion of energies. Accordingly, it is incorrect practice to merely describe social systems in terms of their elements and states, treat these observations as natural facts, and draw inferences from their covariances.

This is what empirical political science does, and has learned to do very well. This is, however, insufficient. The social sciences are not the 'soft sciences', rather a more appropriate heading is the 'gelatinous sciences'. This is because humans, unlike atoms, are equipped with cognitive faculties to flexibly respond, adapt to, and ultimately change the rules of the system within which it is embedded. Atoms are powerless to subvert the absolutist regime of the Standard Model; its laws are immutable and unbreakable, and it rules its domain with an iron fist. Humans, on the other hand, are perpetually evolving the rules of the systems to which they are a part by interacting with them. Thus, the whims of human motivations, ideas, and values, which political science as sought to extirpate or export to more disciplines more traditionally preoccupied with normative judgment, are intrinsic elements of social systems; they are not chaotic elements resulting in benign, stochastic error variance, but work to change the dynamical properties of the system itself. Consequently, whatever 'laws' underlying patterns of covariance are inherently unstable and fluctuate over time. Any inferences made from them may, at best, only be considered valid for the particular place and time data was collected. This is a known statistical problem, which can be rendered visible with the addition of a time dimension. Over time, one variable might be observed as mean-stationary and another might be a random-walk. If a variable is fully a random walk, or unit root, what more then can truly be known about it? Any contemporaneous correlation between a unit root and a covariate are meaningless statistical artifacts unique to a system at a place and time; while the correlation may yield some predictive power in the short-term, we do not learn anything about the essential nature of the element. For this reason, divorcing empirical research from normative judgment is bad science.

But it is also dangerous. To recapitulate, what we want and how we want it matters not only in terms of our comprehensive, scientific understanding of what is the case, the realm normative judgment is a social mechanism by which human societies change the rules of the system to which they are apart. Societies necessarily adapt to their environments when they no longer provide social benefits to their constituent members. In this regard, there must be someone to take our rigorously organized descriptions of the political and social world, look at them thoughtfully and declare: "This is not how it is supposed to be! These particular discrepancies, contradictions, or other states of affairs are bad, and should not be the case! On the contrary, some alternative state of affairs should be the case!" With such normative concerns in mind, human societies intelligently alter the rules governing the dynamical system to which they are themselves a part. If something impedes or inhibits this process, it is inevitable that societies will become ill-fit to their environments and ultimately succumb to chaos and strife.

By ignoring the normative implications of our empirical findings, we treat 'how things are' with 'how things work'. When we create policies based on these conceptions, we risk deepening the particular chain of structures, or relationships, in society that are the responsible for 'things being the way they are'. This is why pure, empirical science is inherently status quo oriented. To put it simply, it inhibits questioning of a particular politico-economic order by conferring upon its various ramifications and structures the permanence of the Standard Model of the atom, and disposing us to look for all solutions to our problem within that framework.

 

On providence and karma

The promise of divine providence is, for the faithful, a guarantee that there is purpose in lives and for the events that befall us. However inscrutable their purpose, we are assured they are according to a plan for us and the universe. We each individually have purpose, insofar as our capacity for action—to act upon the world and others—gives us a vital role to play in the fulfillment of providence. Many find this reassuring, and I argue a great deal easier to accept than the cold, nauseating implications of the alternative. The alternative to providence is a chaotic universe in which God does not exist, or at least does not intervene. In such a world, we may find no solace that some greater purpose justifies tragedy, nor may we relish with pride our small victories as affirmations of our virtue.

Rather, the universe is indifferent to our mortal, vain preoccupations. Without pomp or prelation, the events of our lives are merely haphazard draws from a cosmic hat of possible events, some good and some bad. To quell our hankering spirits, we are only permitted to ask whether there is inherent, systematic bias of the world—i.e., whether the distribution of possible events is, on average even, meaning that good or bad things are equally likely to befall. Perhaps, in this question we might take more than a consolation, but find the opportunity to create purpose for ourselves. Does is not stand to reason that if our societies are just and our relationships harmonious that the distribution of events will be skewed in the direction of Goodness? Alternatively, would not injustice and discord foster resentment and ultimately push the distribution toward Badness?

Therefore, to those among us having deep internal struggles to find the solace of purpose in a world without providence, take heed that our actions, deliberate and otherwise, are necessarily reflected to us. For to the degree our actions promote a general beneficence, we push the distribution of events positively, and increase the likelihood of good things in return. At the same time, when our actions decrease the general welfare we contribute to a preponderance of bad events and so render ourselves more likely to experience them. We may call this karma.