Like facts, non-facts do not speak for themselves

So, Obama has decided to call the birthers bluff and is issuing the long-form version of his birth certificate because, as the White House communications directors blogged: "it may have been good politics and good TV, but it was bad for the American people and distracting from the many challenges we face as a country." Even the president himself has spoken directly on the issue and chastised those caught up in the birther issue (i.e. the media) by saying, "we don't have time for this silliness."

Early (left-leaning) opinions on the rationale behind the president's move are mixed. Some see this as a sign of the president showing further weakness by legitimizing the stance of birthers such as Trump. By even discussing the issue, he has strengthened the loonies. Indeed, the Donald is crowing right now that he "played a big role" in resolving the issue. For the detractors of Obama's move, the consequences of Obama's decision can be summed thus: "Weak Obama allows Trump to look sane (for asking) and strong (for forcing a decision)."

The alternative opinion is that Obama has cannily placed a wedge into the middle of the right. Instead of ignoring a growing issue (45% of Republicans think he is a foreigner for God's sake), Obama has finally given them what they asked for. By settling the issue, the remaining birthers will be forced back to the fringe of Serious Debate. As a bonus, they may still hold onto their looniness and force Republican candidates to take a position on the issue, and thus alienate independents. For Obama's supporters, the move can be summed up as: "Crafty Obama has suddenly made birtherism look crazy again and the Republican candidates are boxed in by the fact that they have to accept that Obama has given them what they wanted, while still telling the base that the base isn't crazy."

So which interpretation is correct? Has Obama bought into the crazies' narrative and thus made himself look weak and reactive again, or has he settled the issue and, as a result, outmaneuvered the Republicans and forced them to fight among themselves over an issue which will suddenly look bonkers again? Which is the right interpretation?

The answer is we don't know, and that we can't know until after this issue has been discussed. At some point, there will be a consensus agreement that this was a strong or a weak move, and the source of the agreement will come from how successfully Obama makes the case that the pro-Obama interpretation is the "fact" of the matter. And, as I hope to demonstrate, the answer is so uncertain precisely because of the fact that Obama did somewhat legitimize the issue by reacting to it, but also de-legitimized it by rejecting it. In order to win, he needs to keep hammering on the second point. Because his enemies will certainly keep hammering on the first.

The birther issue and the President's response are a really good example of the rhetorical element of politics: how narratives are created and the meaning of political actions established. For decades political science ignored rhetoric and focused on material incentives, power, and ideas (in an abstract sense). In the last few years there has been a growing literature on how these things come together and how the words and symbols political actors deploy can been analyzed as a strategic resource in their own right. Just because someone is strong, does not mean people will accept their power; just because an idea is good or true, does not mean people will update their beliefs. Very often, actors must use words and symbolic acts to broaden their own possibilities for action and by limiting those of their opponent. Simply by getting an opponent to agree that there is a problem in the way that you define it ("climate change is an economic issue, not a security one"; or, "there is too much government spending") you can limit what your opponent can offer as a reasonable and/or authentic response. In short, as Krebs and Jackson note, frames often imply implications.

This is why Obama's strategy is tricky. He has attempted to reject the overall right-wing frame of the issue, but is not offering an alternative frame through which to understand the actions. It is important he do so. Rejecting a frame which is a very challenging act and one that his opponents will not take sitting down. They will either go full-bore and say this certificate doesn't count, Obama took too long etc. (as many already have), or they will re-frame again and say that Obama has accepted their frame by releasing his certificate. Failure by Obama's opponents to choose one of these options will mean that they will end up looking crazy and/or mean-spirited. This is a strong incentive not to just accept Obama's act. In other words, Obama's release of this certificate cannot just end the debate - it can only trigger a new one.

Obama's act does not speak for itself; it needs active cheerleaders who will say, "this is what this means, and why." It will take a concrete strategy of saying that the old frame ("Obama may be an alien") is no longer the frame through which this debate should be understood. However, in order to do this a new frame which can capably collect all of these events (accusations, denials, media reports, the final release of the certificate) into one simple narrative needs to be deployed. Such a frame cannot be anything but antagonistic to his opponents ("these people are either mad or genuinely wicked and this whole process should be understood this way"). By aggressively denouncing his detractors Obama might look strong and truly create a wedge issue ("Obama called me crazy! Do you [generic Republican contender] agree? Yes or no?!"). On the other hand, if he just releases this and then forgets about it (or more typically, hopes the issue will just go away), his opponents will get to frame his actions again, and show that Obama is easily bullied.

In short, the "success" of Obama's move cannot be assessed because the definition of success will be contested itself over the next few weeks and months. Based on the political naivety of the Democrats ("people are rational and just need the facts") and their unwillingness to pick a fight, I suspect that the detractor camp is right: this is a bad move on Obama's part. But only because the Right in this country has understood a truly sophisticated 'fact'.

That facts, or non-facts, do not speak for themselves.

Paragraph Paranoia

One glaring feature of adult life in general is the lack of clearly defined markers for success and mechanisms for the delivery of positive feedback on that success. This is also true of writing a dissertation, or indeed all grad school after the coursework stage. Whereas during classes, you have a paper to write, on which you get a grade, usually delivered promptly a week or so after the end of semester, the dissertationer has nothing. Nothing. Not until the dissertation defence, which may be three or more years in the future. One of the implications of this is that it is crucial to define your own measures of success or progress. Mine has become "the paragraph". One problem with using paragraphs is that value is not monotonically increasing in volume, i.e. at some point writing more doesn't help you. The paragraphs have to be good as well. But you as the dissertation-writer cannot assess the quality of your paragraphs, first because your writing seems tropical-island-lagoon clear to you even if it is mud-bespattered Hegel to everyone else, and second because paragraphs have an emergent quality; a collection of them together can be worth more than the sum of its parts. A day in which two dynamite paras were lovingly chiseled from the Carrara marble of your thoughts might be thought a success. But what if these do not fit into the wider structure of the paper? Or if the paper itself will not be any good? From such paranoia lassitude and despair arise. It seems like a solution is not to worry about how good the paragraphs are, but then you are left in the bizarre situation of writing but not caring about it. Naive and idealistic observers would say that the dissertation committee provides feedback. But this feedback, if it is forthcoming at all, is almost never fine-grained enough to be applicable to individual paragraphs. All that is left is to drift in the leaky rowboat of our intelligence, alone.

Editing Elegy

The process of editing a PhD dissertation:

The grad student stared at the computer screen. The paragraph sat there, too plump and florid, like an overweight tourist wearing a tasteless Hawaiian shirt. The point, the meaning, of the paragraph had to be preserved, for it was vital to the argument being made in the rest of the section. But it had to be made more directly, in fewer words. And, he noted bleakly, there had better not be any clauses in the passive voice or the wrath of numerous committee members would pour down upon him in the form of exhortatory blood-hued margin notes.

He deleted a clarifying sentence. Was that clarification necessary? Would someone reading the previous sentence know, guess, or even not care, that there was a potential ambiguity? The theoretical position should be obvious to anyone familiar with recent debates in "the field". And yet, it was possible that it would be taken as a caricature, a cliched stance, whereas the dissertationer was firmly convinced that his was a more nuanced and subtle appreciation of the issues involved. Maybe it would be better to leave that clarifying sentence in, just so that the sheer sophistication of the analysis not be missed. He hit "undo".

Dissertationer's Lament

In a new series, I wax self-pityingly about my continued frustrations writing my dissertation. The dissertationer is not under the same pressures as other people. Strict work times, manual labor, attentive taskmaster bosses, responsibility for others; all of these are irrelevant to an ABD graduate student. I will be exploring what the stresses unique to this, in some sense pampered, creature are over the next few posts.

Tired metaphors are all that come to mind when trying to represent the problems of trying to write a dissertation. Haunting and badgering the writer at every step are contradictory impulses. Intellectual honesty dictates not only that what we do is right (as it seems to us), but that we are stringent and careful about the claims we make. Qualifications should abound. However, clarity of communication requires simplification and condensation. The shorter you can make your communication of your point, the better. Qualifications get lost, forgotton, or pruned in the quest for clarity.

The vicious demon of self-doubt jolts your typing hands and tries to move your attention away, towards something less challenging to your sense of self and the equilibrium of your composure. "Is it good?", it asks. "Will anyone like it?" Almost as bad as this generalized worry, even if it is good enough for some, maybe it will not be good enough to impress the crucial coalition of interests that will both get it published in a relatively specialized outlet and be appealing enough to a general audience that you will be hired at a department where the majority are barely aware that your subfield exists. Better than confronting the possibility of writing a bad paragraph, says the demon, read another article, or better, a blog post, or watch a youtube video, because each post or video doesn't take so long. Afterwards, you can get back to the serious business of chiselling pixels of wisdom from the glowing white screen. Except that this calculation repeats.

Why tipping is irrational.

Or, the generative effect of the reification of rules of behavior.

1) Tipping after service can be defended on a rational basis if we assume repeated play. That is, if you expect to return to the place and encounter the same service person again, a post-service tip on this occasion could be reasonably expected to induce or maintain good service next time.

2) if it becomes common knowledge that tips are standard behavior, then a post-service tip might become necessary to avoid being the subject of retribution on subsequent visits.

3) But there is more to it than this. People will have an emotional reaction to not leaving a tip, as if they will be shamed or as if they are doing something slightly immoral - physiological signs include nervousness, increased heart rate, etc. Also, others will start to enforce compliance to the standard even when it is irrelevant to their own interests. Claims about tipping are conducted in moral language, using phrases like 's/he deserves it'. Appeals will be made to the potential non-tipper appearing cheap (i.e. not generous) - a status or identity challenge. Worse, these appeals can come from inside the potential non-tipper without needing to be explicit.

4) So, behavior that could have been initially started off on a rational basis is maintained and enforced and perpetuated via completely non-rational mechanisms.

5) In a situation where repeat business is unlikely, tipping is irrational, unless it is done to avoid retribution from one's peers.

Physics Envy?

The social sciences are all supposed to want to be like the natural sciences and especially physics because, variously, they have great data, they can do experiments, they have complicated maths, they can predict with accuracy events in controlled settings, etc. etc. I've read this sort of thing before but here is a quote from a post about Stephen Hawking which brings the emulation of physics into a new light:

"M-theory suffers from the same flaws that string theories did. First is the problem of empirical accessibility. Membranes, like strings, are supposedly very, very tiny—as small compared with a proton as a proton is compared with the solar system. This is the so-called Planck scale, 10^–33 centimeters. Gaining the kind of experimental confirmation of membranes or strings that we have for, say, quarks would require a particle accelerator 1,000 light-years around, scaling up from our current technology. Our entire solar system is only one light-day around, and the Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful accelerator, is 27 kilometers in circumference."

So, basically, they have posited (i.e. made up) a bunch of theoretical entities the existence of which it is completely impossible to determine. And this explains everything. But that's alright because it is logical:

Hawking recognized long ago that a final theory—because it would probably involve particles at the Planck scale—might never be experimentally confirmable. "It is not likely that we shall have accelerators powerful enough" to test a unified theory "within the foreseeable future—or indeed, ever," he said in his 1980 speech at Cambridge. He nonetheless hoped that in lieu of empirical evidence physicists would discover a theory so logically inevitable that it excluded all alternatives.

Maybe rational choice should be driving at more becoming more tautologous rather than less. Then it would be more like physics.

Disinterestedness and Charity in Reviewing,

Or Advice to 1st Year Grad Students.
From an old guardian column:

As the novelist Richard Ford has said, "Writing even a bad book is hard work." Nobody who has struggled in front of a screen or paper for three years deserves a pasting written in half a day by a 23-year-old, though the pasting might be justified in terms of what exists on the page.

Hello checks and balances; it's me: Mr. Grey

Unsurprising but depressing news: U.S. courts now agree that they shouldn't have the ability to review the executive's use of power. Yesterday, in a 6-5 decision, the Court of Appeals for the 9th circuit (one below the Supreme Court) ruled that people kidnapped by the CIA and subsequently tortured could not have their day in court because it is too dangerous for the terrists or somesuch. As Judge Fisher put it:

“This case requires us to address the difficult balance the state secrets doctrine strikes between fundamental principles of our liberty, including justice, transparency, accountability and national security... Although as judges we strive to honor all of these principles, there are times when exceptional circumstances create an irreconcilable conflict between them.”

So what exactly does this "state secrets doctrine" mean? It does not just mean that some intelligence or operational details are too sensitive to be revealed to the public in a open court. Indeed, I'd have to agree that it would be mad that ongoing-operations might be jeopardized as part of hearing. But the ruling is far more sinister than that. The state secrets privilege means argues that some information is too sensitive for a day in court and so cases should be dismissed before they are seen. The logic of the doctrine is that even judges should not be allowed to look at information and thus determine whether or not it can be used in court as evidence. Ergo, the case gets shut down.

In other words, these judges agree with the executive branch that they if the President says some information is "too sensitive" then judges should just believe him. Bear in mind, aside from the various illegal detentions, tortures, and disappearances over the years, the executive recently ordered the assassination of an American citizen for national security reasons. Now the Court of Appeals for the 9th circuit agrees that not only should ordinary people have no way of finding out why, nor should the courts - the ostensible check over executive power.

Em, Court of Star Chamber much?

Also remember, this is Obama's DOJ that's arguing this. Imagine how much worse such abuse could be in the future.

Thomas Jefferson must be whizzing in his grave.

The up-is-downism of American political discourse: Special Mosque of Doom edition

Agh, the "Ground Zero Mosque" (not actually at Ground Zero; and a community centre, not a mosque) issue has had me spouting off with such spittle-inflected bile around the house that I thought that I needed to write this down.

Where to begin?

As usual, I am tempted to once more highlight the complete and utter failure of the American journalistic class. It has, as is par for the course, done a bag-up shite job of: (a) do straight reporting without pushing a meme - only yesterday did AP cotton on and ordered a directive not to call it the "Ground Zero Mosque"; (b) acting as gatekeeper/watchdog of civil discourse by allowing the meme's pusher(!)- the disgusting Pam Geller - on telly to push her flavor of patriot-laden bigotry.

Instead on dwelling on the shititude of the journalistic class, I am much more interested in pointing out how the entire crux of this debate - that, to quote Sarah Palin, "is UNNECESSARY provocation; it stabs hearts. Pls reject it in interest of healing" (bleh) - illustrates how Republican behavior is the very type that they claim to be against.

The Republicans (and now some cowardly Dems) claim that because some people feel "sensitive" about certain issues - in this instance the existence of Muslims,apparently - small-government decisions should be overturned.

Right, so let me get this straight. The Republican party, which claims that the government has no right to interfere with private persons and local government decisions, wants to interfere with private persons and local governemtn decisions. And the reason is that a certain segment of the population wants special and distinct consideration, on the grounds of sensitivity. This is from the party that hates affirmitative action because it privileges one group over others. Have I got this right?

Never mind the fact that the dog on the street, never mind most terrorism experts, will tell you that the best way to shore up support for terrorists is to persecute the group they claim to represent.

Wonderful. So in the up-is-down world that is American political discourse, the party that claims to value private property, small government, equal treatment for all groups regardless of race or creed, and national security wants to jepordize national security in order to persecute private individuals and small government so that the will of a distinct identiy group can be met in order to satisfy their sensitivies.

Once more the emperor has no clothes.

And is acting like a wanker.

Indoctrination through fear of failure

A pithy description of the process by which graduate students are convinced to ignore their instincts to critique and instead buy into the intellectual mainstream:

"New inductees into the profession are taught that if they are to invest their scarce human resources wisely, they should believe that the best of the discipline's scientific knowledge is contained in the current main- stream "scientific" literature, and to read the heterodox literature is a foolish waste of human capital."
(Paul Davidson, 2003. 'Is Mathematical Science an Oxymoron?' Journal of Post-Keynesian Economics, 25:3)

Presumably there is also a process by which the amount of human capital expended in pursuit of, say, learning formal theory and statistics or Derrida/Heideggerian , makes one loath to confront its limitations.

Intellectual integrity anyone? Anyone?

Aha! I knew it!

I am in the depths of trying to finish an endless re-write of a section of my dissertation so I have still been away.

In lieu of a long post that I have been working on (which is now a bit out-of-date anyway) I want to quickly draw attention to this very unsurprising fact.

According to this study, the four major media outlets in the US have radically altered the way they describe water-boarding since 2004. For most of the last 100 years, this practice was unequivocally referred to as torture. However, once the US started doing it, it was called something else - anything else.

I have been back-and-forthing with a friend of mine about the lackluster, obsequious, and power-shielding/power-worshiping nature of political court-stenography journalism in the US, and I feel this little cherry really supports my point.

Hat tip: Glenn Greenwald

'Q and A' sessions and institutional efficiency

I was at a series of presentations last week and every session included some time for questions at the end. Usually, in political science at least, a lot of interesting ground can be covered in the Q&A because so much of the research is left out of the presentation and few people have read the paper the presentation is based on. However, sitting through a Q&A when you have no questions can be frustrating. In fact, sometimes you feel like stabbing your hand with your pen just so that you can receive some cerebral stimulation. In some sessions, every time there is a small pause after the speaker says, "Any questions?", your heart leaps with expectant joy, only to be crushed when another audience member tentatively raises their hand. During one such session, while doodling abstract symbols, I started thinking that this regularized practice is not merely habitual but is governed by a set of social rules. This led me to wonder whether there might be a better system. Then I conceived of a better system. The new system is simple, easy, and better than the current system. Here is my argument in favor of the new system.

The current system is that when the speaker has finished speaking, they ask for any questions and everyone has a choice between staying silent and asking a question. Once everybody who had a question has asked their question, everyone leaves/goes for a break.

Assume that there are two types of agents, P agents and Q agents. The Q agents have a question that they want to ask. The P agents have no questions. Each agent gets utility from leisure time. The Q agents get utility from asking their question and having it answered. However, every question asked involves a penalty that everyone pays - the leisure time lost from having to stay and listen to the question and answer.This system potentially involves the imposition of negative externalities on some audience members, in that if there are any P agents they have to pay the waiting costs and do not get any say in whether the questions are asked. Q agents do pay waiting costs but would rather ask their question. The total utility from the current system is everyone's leisure or breaktime utility minus a utility cost from each question:



Here b stands for breaktime utility indexed across all agents and q stands for question time costs indexed across all agents and a stands for the utility gained from having a question answered indexed across all Q agents.

For Q agents, , so they would rather ask their question and wait, than stay silent and leave earlier. But the P agents pay that cost that they don't want to.

This problem could be solved with a simple institutional innovation. How about, after the speaker has finished speaking, they say, "If anyone has any questions, please stay, otherwise thank you and you can go." Then, each audience member can choose to stay or leave.

The situation is the same as the old system for the Q agents. They would choose to stay. However, as , P agents would choose to leave. Under this new system, the total utility is:



If , then . That is, if there are any people who do not have a question, the new institutional rule is preferable, otherwise it is equivalent. In fact, the new system is pareto-optimal. No one is left worse off under the new system and at least some people are better off.

I intend to suggest this new rule to the people running the seminars at my university. If they don't like it, I will refer them to this proof.

I've been away...

Excuses, excuses...

I stopped blogging ages ago as I couldn't justify it to myself. But my endless lurking around other blogs combined with my internal rants mean I am back.

As I sit around a computer typing a lot more these days, hopefully I'll be able to keep it up.

Just for the record, in the last however-many months and months I have begun on my research and am now obessed with rituals, symbols, honor and other squishy social science issues such as these, so expect a lot on those themes.

Following my dream...

That staple of reality tv shows and Chinese students' English language essays, following one's dream has to be one of modern society's most potent rhetorical commonplaces. It seems to me that in the US the invocation of this idea is often used to justify violating one of the core principles of American public morality - earning money. Why are you doing such a low-paying activity? I'm following my dream. Oh, well that's alright then.

Clearly there is some value to pursuing activities that one finds interesting and even more specifically to trying to find some work or occupation that doesn't make you want to jump off a building. However, the idea of following your dream 1) should be reserved for serious cases, 2) can have deleterious effects on mental health.

1) Just because you happen to either enjoy your job or be relatively content in your everyday life does not entitle you to say that you are following your dream. People following dreams are either people involved in occupations with high barriers to entry and a large ratio of contenders to success where a rational evaluation of one's chances would lead one NOT to try for that success, or they are people who have wanted to be a geologist since they were 5 and now are a geologist having not ever seriously pursued any alternative career path. People following dreams either value the unlikely payoff extremely highly (actors etc.) or value the payoff from performing the activity regardless of the external rewards. Narrowing the definition would exclude most people from qualifying as "following their dream".

2) Surely it is no one's dream to be a middle manager in a regional paper distributor. But that does not mean that you cannot enjoy that job, nor does it mean that you cannot have a successful life if you either do not have a dream or try for a career that you end up not being successful in. The narrative that only people who follow their dreams are happy might mean that people are too rigid in choosing career paths, or that they feel like they have let themselves down if they cannot, for reasons entirely outside their control, pursue their first-choice career. It also has a tendency to overweigh life satisfaction derived from one's job and excluding the possibility of earning money to eat doing one activity (work) and spending one's leisure time doing something fun.

So, my point is that if I end up not getting a tenure-track academic job, everything will be alright (tremble).

On "Relevance"

A common concern of undergraduates, laymen, and policy-oriented graduate students is that one's research be relevant. They rarely specify that to which the research is supposed to be relevant. Occasionally they make vague references to the 'real world'. Given that the vast majority of political science research is engaged in some sort of empirical analysis, and often it is the purely theoretical that is most interesting or useful, it is puzzling that political science is not seen as relevant. In a 1971 paper, Murray Davis provides a plausible explanation for why this is the case.

Anyone who wishes to assert a proposition that will be found interesting by laymen as well as experts must deal with the dilemma of this double dialectic. On the one hand, his proposition will interest experts only if it denies the ground-assumption of their discipline. On the other hand, his proposition will interest laymen only if it denies a ground-assumption of the commonsense world. But since the ground-assumption of experts is already a denial of a ground-assumption of laymen, he will find that any proposition which interests experts (because it denies their ground-assumption) will not interest laymen (because it affirms their ground-assumption), and vice versa. What will be interesting to the one will be obvious to the other. In the academic world, a person usually resolves this dilemma by grasping for one horn while ignoring the other, by restricting the potential audience who will consider his proposition to his fellow experts while not worrying about the opinion of laymen. He will usually publish his proposition in a specialized journal or technical text where it will be scrutinized only by his colleagues who hold the very ground-assumption he wishes to attack. But note that the propositions of these specialized journals and technical texts that are found interesting by their professional readers are actually of the form: ’What everybody, except experts on the subject, think is true is in fact true’.

No one will recognize that the proposition is of this form until the proposition is brought to the attention of non-experts. However, the more a person’s proposition is found interesting by the experts of his field, the more he will be tempted to bring it to the attention of these non-experts. Should he be foolish enough to reveal the proposition which interested his colleagues to his non-professional friends, he will usually find that they are not impressed. Should he be even more foolish enough to disseminate this proposition to a wider public through popularizing it in newspapers and magazines, he will succeed only in convincing more people of the poverty of his discipline.

In sum, the fact that the baseline assumptions of intellectual specialities and the baseline assumptions of the common-sense world are incommensurate is responsible for the fact that propositions, which had had good receptions in the former, usually get poor receptions in the latter. Those who attempt to popularize propositions which experts had found interesting often must resort to jargon in order to obscure the fundamental lack of intertranslatability between the universe of discourse of the intellectual speciality and the universe of discourse of the common-sense world. They are aware, intuitively if not consciously, that the ’interestingness’ of an expert’s proposition, like the ’poetry’ of a foreign author, is what gets lost in translation.

(Murray Davis, 1971. 'That's Interesting!: Towards a Phemonenology of Sociology and a Sociology of Phenomenology', Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 1(2), 309-344.)

Going mediaeval

One strand of the torture debate in the US at the moment is the debate over efficacy. By efficacy I mean the probability that a tortured suspect provides more or better information than a non-tortured suspect. Ex-vice president Dick Cheney recently alluded to the efficacy of torture as a justification for it. Even if we leave aside the fact that torture might be effective in this regard (my murdering the next guy I see on the street is a pretty effective way of getting his wallet), I find it hard to believe that people, the public, regular folks, anyone out there actually holds this position in the face of its obvious implausibility. A simple example of the problems with the efficacy position comes from a book I am currently reading. John Felton, in prison after having murdered the Duke of Buckingham in the summer of 1628, insisted that he had acted alone. The Bishop of London William Laud, anxious to bust a nest of Puritans, threatened him with the rack if he did not reveal his accomplices. Felton's reply is instructive:

he could not tell whom he might nominate in the extremity of torture, and if what he should say then must go for truth, he could not tell whether his Lordship (meaning the Bishop of London) or which of their Lordships he might name, for torture might draw unexpected things from him.

Apparently, "After this there were no more questions for the prisoner".

Dude, where's my data?

At the risk of making it seem like I'm ranting at a dead horse, here is some more on the scientific status of social science, this time from JS Mill (1843, A System of Logic, Book VI, Chapter III).

His intro to the topic:

"1. [There may be sciences which are not exact sciences] It is a common notion, or at least it is implied in many common modes of speech, that the thoughts, feelings, and actions of sentient beings are not a subject of science, in the same strict sense in which this is true of the objects of outward nature. This notion seems to involve some confusion of ideas, which it is necessary to begin by clearing up."

True in 1843, true today.  Then an interesting analogy to the analysis of another complex system:

"Any facts are fitted, in themselves, to be a subject of science, which follow one another according to constant laws; although those laws may not have been discovered, nor even be discoverable by our existing resources. Take, for instance, the most familiar class of meteorological phenomena, those of rain and sunshine. Scientific inquiry has not yet succeeded in ascertaining the order of antecedence and consequence among these phenomena, so as to be able, at least in our regions of the earth, to predict them with certainty, or even with any high degree of probability. Yet no one doubts that the phenomena depend on laws, and that these must be derivative laws resulting from known ultimate laws, those of heat, electricity, vaporization, and elastic fluids. Nor can it be doubted that if we were acquainted with all the antecedent circumstances, we could, even from those more general laws, predict (saving difficulties of calculation) the state of the weather at any future time. Meteorology, therefore, not only has in itself every natural requisite for being, but actually is, a science; though, from the difficulty of observing the facts on which the phenomena depend (a difficulty inherent in the peculiar nature of those phenomena) the science is extremely imperfect; and were it perfect, might probably be of little avail in practice, since the data requisite for applying its principles to particular instances would rarely be procurable."

To conclude:

"Hence, even if our science of human nature were theoretically perfect, that is, if we could calculate any character as we can calculate the orbit of any planet, from given data; still, as the data are never all given, nor ever precisely alike in different cases, we could neither make positive predictions, nor lay down universal propositions."

This claim speaks to my earlier question of 'what is the point?'.  I do not doubt (in line with my commitment to the principles of physicalism and the causal completeness of physics) that there are fundamental laws of human behavior.  But I have no idea at what level these laws obtain.  It is dubious that these laws obtain at the level of aggregate collective phenomena like `democracies don't go to war with each other', especially if we are talking about any impressive level of accuracy.  And this means data collection problems, and so, Mill says, screw it.

Anti-Scientism #1

Friedrich Hayek, not an authority that one might automatically want to venerate, had inter alia this to say in his nobel prize acceptance speech: 

There is as much reason to be apprehensive about the long run dangers created in a much wider field by the uncritical acceptance of assertions which have the appearance of being scientific as there is with regard to the problems I have just discussed. What I mainly wanted to bring out by the topical illustration is that certainly in my field, but I believe also generally in the sciences of man, what looks superficially like the most scientific procedure is often the most unscientific, and, beyond this, that in these fields there are definite limits to what we can expect science to achieve. This means that to entrust to science - or to deliberate control according to scientific principles - more than scientific method can achieve may have deplorable effects. 

The progress of the natural sciences in modern times has of course so much exceeded all expectations that any suggestion that there may be some limits to it is bound to arouse suspicion. Especially all those will resist such an insight who have hoped that our increasing power of prediction and control, generally regarded as the characteristic result of scientific advance, applied to the processes of society, would soon enable us to mould society entirely to our liking. It is indeed true that, in contrast to the exhilaration which the discoveries of the physical sciences tend to produce, the insights which we gain from the study of society more often have a dampening effect on our aspirations; and it is perhaps not surprising that the more impetuous younger members of our profession are not always prepared to accept this. 

Yet the confidence in the unlimited power of science is only too often based on a false belief that the scientific method consists in the application of a ready-made technique, or in imitating the form rather than the substance of scientific procedure, as if one needed only to follow some cooking recipes to solve all social problems. It sometimes almost seems as if the techniques of science were more easily learnt than the thinking that shows us what the problems are and how to approach them.

What's the point of it all?

I have been prompted in the last few days to think about the dreaded question of "What's it all about anyway, when you get right down to it? What's the point?". I'm not talking about the meaning of life (which I have figured out already) but social science, and especially political science. The issues that I have been focusing on are the idea of 'cumulation' and the implications of a constructionist position for the aim of social scientific research. If that sounds ambitious, I am thinking about it in quite basic and unsystematic terms.

Constructionism includes the idea that social phenomena have no existence apart from what they mean to people. So, if everybody stops thinking about and talking about and acting as if a particular university exists, then it does not. Also, if the idea of a university is not part of the total social cluster of ideas, then it is not possible (or rather, highly unlikely) that anyone would start to think, talk, and act as if there was a university. Finally, what it is that a university means, the entirety of the actions and ideas that are associated with a university, is not unitary. By this I mean that you could have a society in which university is something slightly different from another society. This is in fact the case in the world - being at a liberal arts college in Massachusetts is a very different proposition from being at a massive regional normal university in China. So, does it make sense to aim at making general propositions about, say, the effect of having a university degree? Economists do this all the time (I imagine). If by general proposition, I mean a proposition that applies just as much in 11th century Bologna as it does in 21st century Washington DC, then it is clearly preposterous to say that it is a worthwhile enterprise. There is a clear analogy to international political phenomena, as war today involving European powers is different enough from war in mediaeval Africa for us to say that propositions about the causes, consequences, and practice of war must be bounded at least partly by the spatio-temporal context.

If this is so obvious, why would anyone think otherwise? The model of the natural or physical sciences is a powerful lure. One of the things that it is said that the physical sciences have is 'cumulative' knowledge. I am not sure what this means. If it means that later scholars use previous scholars' work in their own work, then anyone has that. If it means that scholars do not challenge earlier scholars' work, then this is patently false as scientific breakthroughs can take the form of discovering that the previous ideas were all wrong. A very convincing account of why there is this high-consensus, rapid-discovery science in the natural sciences is Randall Collins' 1994 article (“Why the social sciences won’t become high-consensus, rapid-discovery science.” Sociological Forum 9, no. 2: 155-177) where he attributes these features of the natural sciences to the appropriation of research technologies. This makes natural science look useful to outsiders (because of spin-off technology, like the internet) and directs attention away from continually revisiting and challenging the work of previous scholars. All of this is unrelated to epistemological validity, i.e. is physics more right than sociology, which I would say is a different question. So, my contention is that cumulation is not a goal that I would sacrifice very much to attain.

But cumulation is not the only thing that 'naturalists' (those wanting social science to be like natural science) want. They also want prediction. Much of the prestige and the justification for believing the natural sciences to have it right comes from being able to say stuff like, "I swing this ball on a rope here at 0.02 millifrutors and the magnesium hydrosulfate will turn green in 3.4 seconds" and then it does, again and again. Social scientists could do this sort of thing as well, like the prediction that 200 or whatever million Americans will get up tomorrow morning and go to work, many of them driving on the right-hand side of the road to get there. For some reason (and I think this reason is actually much more important than other people think it is) this is not impressive to anyone. Polisci also does other types of prediction; see Abramowitz, Alan I. 2008. It’s About Time: Forecasting the 2008 Presidential Election with the Time-for-Change Model. International Journal of Forecasting 24 209-217. This is very limited compared to what the natscis are able to demonstrate in laboratory or experimental settings, but it is not impossible in principle to use social scientific theory to predict human behavior. Again, I'm not sure that this kind of prediction is all that, or even largely what, we as social scientists should be doing.

So, why is constructionism such a threat to naturalism? Partly because many of the phenomena that political scientists study change out of all recognition. The state at all did not exist prior to about the 14th-15th centuries and the 18th century european state is so massively different now that any propositions about the causes or effects of political units of that type are unlikely to apply to anything now or in the future. It is not just acceptable that we can say that there are a set of starting conditions and whenever these starting conditions obtain, their effects also obtain. This happens in natural science, even in cases like geology or evolutionary biology they are working with similar types of evidence as social scientists, but the difference is that there are recurring starting conditions. In social science, if constructionism has any force, sets of starting conditions are only similar within tightly bounded social contexts (which are themselves bounded in space and time). This is why much of social science cannot have the same properties as natural science.

What does this mean for how we use social scientific research? I don't know, but I'm thinking about it.

One of these economists is not like the other.

I feel like I cannot stop walking around muttering "fucking bankers" every fifteen minutes. Despite all the messes they have/are making of the world, they still give the impression that they are masters of the universe. Hindsight is, of course 20/20, and although no-one could know exactly WHEN the world was going to go to hell, it was going to happen, and it was the bankers' and their lobbyists' fault.

Now that we are on the beginning of what may be a very long slide, videos like this really grate.

Smug wankers.

It is nice to see them get their long-overdue kick-to-the-face; at least in terms of how they are being viewed by society, if nothing else. Check out this evisceration conducted by the Daily Show. Bankers and financial gurus (although witch-doctors might be a better description) take note: you must be truly hated for people to be booing on a COMEDY show.